Cops will snare mob boss Daniel Kinahan — thanks to an Italian mafia supergrass who was once one of his best friends, an organised crime expert says today.
“At some point they will apprehend Kinahan,” Mafia expert Professor Anna Sergi tells the Irish Mirror – even though Kinahan has been on the run from an international crackdown for more than a year.
And Prof Sergi also tells us that Kinahan’s Italian Mafia pal Raffaele Imperiale will turn on him – and give evidence against the cartel king.
Read More: Kinahan cartel mobster Liam Byrne set to fight extradition
Imperiale and Kinahan, 45, were once co-leaders of a so-called super-cartel that sent hundreds of millions of euro worth of cocaine and the Italian even attended the Dubliner’s megabucks wedding in his Dubai bolthole in 2017.
But he is languishing in an Italian jail after Dubai kicked him out last year – and he has now turned into a supergrass.
He has already given evidence against several high-profile Mafia targets – and Prof Sergi, who is an acknowledged expert on Italian organised crime including the ‘Ndrangheta mafia, says she has no doubt Imperiale, 48, will now do the same against Kinahan.
Asked by crime podcast Shattered Lives if she believed Imperiale would implicate Kinahan, she replied: “He will. He will give evidence to the Americans, to the Irish, to whoever else wants him – the British, I guess. The Spanish.
“Now the Irish want to talk to him, like everyone else.”
Prof Sergi said Imperiale rose to major prominence in worldwide crime after he set up his own huge drugs smuggling operation.
She said: “He was a broker for many different groups and he moved a lot of drugs for a lot of people.
“He really created a different beast. And in that beast obviously he managed to coordinate with a number of groups, including the Kinahans.”
Prof Sergi said she believed Imperiale would help investigators establish that messages sent by Kinahan on supposedly secure phone systems that have both been cracked by law enforcement.
One was called Sky ECC and the other was known as Encrochat – and the cracking of that system led to Kinahan associate Liam Byrne’s arrest on Mallorca last week.
The British National Crime Agency asked Spanish cops to arrest Byrne, 42, on foot of their extradition request – to charge him with firearms offences.
The information for those charges came from data given to the British when French and Dutch cops cracked Encrochat in 2019 and sources say Kinahan was also using the same system.
It’s understood gardai have evidence he allegedly used Encrochat to order at least one murder hit.
The phone systems were anonymous and users chose nicknames to hide their real identities – and Prof Sergi says Imperiale will tell cops what aliases Kinahan had on Encrochat and Sky ECC.
The professor told us: “The one thing that Imperiale already did in Italy is to help prosecutors identify people behind the nicknames. One of the big issues of having a lot of messages is that no-one signs Daniel Kinahan123 – they obviously have different nicknames.
“To be beyond reasonable doubt that that nickname belongs to that person is the core problem.
“That is what he did already for the Italian side.
“There was already a big Italian investigation based on Imperiale’s testimony which involved a number of people in Italy, a really important network of drug importers involving ‘Ndrangheta, involving people in the north, involving Albanian groups, involving everyone. I would imagine that his contribution to the Irish would be to put into context the messages that he knows are from the Kinahans, whoever from the Kinahans he was talking with, including Daniel.”
Imperiale and Kinahan ran the super-cartel with a Bosnian called Edin Gacanin and Holland-based gangster Ridouan Taghi – that was at one stage among the top 50 in the world.
But now only Kinahan and Gacanin are free with Taghi in custody in Holland and Imperiale locked up in Italy and Prof Sergi believes time is now running out for the Dubliner.
And she compared Kinahan to the case to the hunt for Italian mobster Matteo Messina Denaro – arrested a few months ago after being on the run for 30 years.
She said: “They apprehended Imperiale, they apprehended Taghi, why wouldn’t they apprehend Daniel Kinahan? It just makes it a little bit more interesting, I guess, for many people.
“But if Italians caught Matteo Messina Denaro…I am sorry for Daniel Kinahan.
“I would think that it is not going that well for Kinahan at this stage either.”
“It seems like he is already walking on thin ice.”
She also said authorities have a real problem — if and when Kinahan was caught — in trying to establish if the cartel he leads would dissolve — or if someone else would take the helm.
“You can take one guy out but that does not take the network out.
“As always with organised crime, after a moment of quiescence, things will go back to how they were for the simple reason that you cannot stop organised crime, really.”
The Star’s latest Shattered Lives podcast episode is available from today.
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