Kinahan cartel forms alliance with feared Traveller crime gang
The Christy Kinahan international crime cartel has linked up with a gang controlled by a millionaire Traveller crime boss.
The Traveller runs a multi-million euro international car theft-ring, the Herald can disclose.
Sources said that the Meath-based Traveller gang had been providing "high-end" stolen cars to the cartel, some of which have ended up on Spain's Costa-Del-Crime.
"These include top-of-the range Audis, BMW's and Range Rovers which have been either shipped out of the country in containers or simply driven out by people paid to do this.
"The Traveller gang are actually doing a lot of business with the Kinahan network in terms of drugs trafficking, so it is an arrangement that seems to be working very well," a source said.
Senior members of the Kinahan mob were in Dublin last week for a major boxing event at the National Stadium.
The Herald revealed that some of the cartel thugs had been travelling around Dublin's south inner city in a convoy which included bodyguards and spotters, but most of them have now returned to Spain.
The Traveller gang which are their new partners in crime are involved in crimes including car theft , drug dealing, armed robberies and cash-in-transit robberies. A notorious Meath-based Traveller criminal who is originally from Finglas has been acting as a "middle man" in the enterprise and is suspected of making tens of thousands of euro each week from the operation.
The Traveller thug is aged in his mid-40s and was previously hit for a massive bill by the Criminal Assets Bureau. He has served a number of jail sentences.
Connected
As well as being connected with foreign and Traveller gangs, he is also a close associate of jailed Finglas gangland figure Alan 'Fatpuss' Bradley.
Earlier this year, the Herald revealed that the Traveller' boss's mob was one of a number of criminal gangs involved in a multi-million euro international car theft-ring in which cars stolen to order in Ireland are being shipped out of the country.
Gardai have established that dozens of high-end cars that have been stolen here over the past year have been moved out of the country hidden in ship containers underneath scrap, tyres and discarded computers and even disguised in bigger vehicles on cargo ships from Dublin Port.
Sources said that a number of 'kingpins' have been identified ,including a Nigerian criminal who moves between Dublin and London and a Lithuanian crimelord based in the Tyrrelstown area of west Dublin.
Their new business partners, who are led by exiled mob boss Christy Kinahan, are estimated to be worth over €500m and have been linked to a number of brutal gangland murders in the past couple of years.
This includes the gun murders of Gerard 'Hatchet' Kavanagh (44) in Spain last September and his younger brother Paul (27) in Drumcondra earlier this year as part of the same cash dispute within the cartel's ranks.