On this afternoon, the boxers were all taking part in a weigh-in at the hotel. It was a joint promotion between Kinahan’s MGM and Frank Warren, one of the biggest names in British boxing. His boxing management company, MGM, was hosting a big tournament - the Clash of the Clans - on Saturday. Leslie and Alan Sherry, a reporter colleague from Ireland’s Sunday World newspaper, thought there was a fair chance Kinahan would be about. He was looking for signs of Daniel Kinahan, a man he knew as the alleged boss of a powerful drugs cartel.
Newspaper photographer Ernie Leslie was scanning the outside of the Regency Hotel in north Dublin. It was a little after two o’clock on Friday 5 February, 2016. And all of them were afraid of Daniel Kinahan, Tyson Fury’s main man. All of them had been around a few tough nuts in their time. All united on one point, Daniel Kinahan was a disaster for the fight game. “But please,” they all said, “don’t mention my name.” It was as if there was a secret association at the heart of professional boxing. We followed his lead and got another name. This was at the start of a very unusual road trip that had begun with a conversation with a long-retired boxing fanatic in Belfast. My colleague Stephen Dempster and I had spent weeks trying to find people in boxing who would speak to us about Kinahan. How could he argue that boxing protected them from drugs, from gangs, from violence, when a man like Daniel Kinahan was at the top of the sport? The man I was meeting wanted to know why he should be trying to convince kids that boxing offered them a safe haven.
Kids all around on drugs.”Īlthough Daniel Kinahan has never been convicted, this man is all too aware of the Irishman’s reputation and that he has been named in court as the head of a drug cartel.
“There’s teenage girls turning to prostitution to pay for their drug habit. Months had passed and nothing had changed. Everyone knows now.”īut this day, he was totally disillusioned. “They will have to get rid of him from boxing. “I thought, ‘Finally they will have to deal with Daniel Kinahan,’” he says. I asked him what he thought of Tyson Fury’s news when he first heard it. This man has worn a few hats in his time - most significantly as a part-time guardian to a number of young folk. Social scientists would describe the neighbourhood as suffering from long-term economic decline. Three months later and I was talking to a former boxer outside the gym he runs in a major British city, for a BBC Panorama documentary.
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