Even for a career criminal, Christy Kinahan always had a vision for greater pursuits. Nothing deterred his ambition to establish an international drugs empire with the immense wealth that would accompany it.

However, as he nears his later years with a $5 million bounty from the US government on his head, the so-called ‘Dapper Don’ might occasionally question why he aimed so high from the outset.

Kinahan rose from low-level gangsterism in 1980s Dublin to head a global crime syndicate that looked untouchable.

Recent reports indicate that the 68-year-old, along with his inner circle, including his sons Daniel, 48, and Christopher Jr, 44, faces an imminent threat of arrest and legal action.

It comes after key associate Sean McGovern was extradited from the gang’s base in Dubai to face a murder charge in Ireland.

In a related occurrence, dramatic footage released last month reveals one of the cartel’s ‘narco-tankers’ – carrying 2.2 tonnes of cocaine valued at £132 million – being seized in September 2023 during a joint operation between Irish and American authorities.

All of this signifies a remarkable turn of events for the Kinahan Organised Crime Group, as referred to by law enforcement. From their seemingly invincible rank in global criminal networks, they were one of the world’s most feared drug syndicates.

Yet it all began modestly enough when Christopher Kinahan Sr, then aged 22, received his first conviction for attempted car theft in 1979.

Kinahan, who was born in March 1957 and grew up in a respectable family in Dublin, briefly worked as a part-time taxi driver after leaving school.

But he was soon concentrating full-time on criminal activity, mainly cheque fraud, and developing a range of contacts in the underworld. By the mid-1980s, he had moved into drugs and – in 1987 – was jailed for six years after being caught with 130 grammes of heroin at an upmarket flat he was renting in the Irish capital.

One of the officers who arrested him, Michael O’Sullivan, remarked decades later: ‘We wouldn’t have seized that amount of heroin in the State [the Republic] in a year at that time.’

Mr O’Sullivan, who went on to become heads of the Garda drugs squad and eventually served as an assistant commissioner of the force, also recalled that Kinahan cut a more sophisticated figure than the typical villain.

As well as always being immaculately dressed, he could ‘switch from an Irish accent to a British accent’ at will and cultivated the ‘very unusual’ habit of reading books as he was driven to and from court appearances.

Kinahan was also one of the first prisoners in Ireland to have a computer in his cell, but it was his keen interest in foreign languages that pointed to his ultimate ambitions.

At one stage, he turned down early release from jail because he wanted to focus on completing a French degree – and he also used Linguaphone tapes to teach himself Spanish, Dutch, Russian and Arabic. Being able to communicate in multiple tongues would prove very useful indeed as he set about establishing a drugs network that spanned the globe.

Throughout the Nineties, he moved between Holland, Belgium and Dublin – although he also spent considerable periods in Tamworth, Staffordshire, which he used as a base while mixing with criminal contacts in Birmingham. But it was his move to Spain in the early 2000s that saw Kinahan beginning to operate on a major worldwide scale.

He immediately set about sourcing huge shipments of drugs – principally cocaine – from suppliers in Colombia and north Africa to service the Irish, UK and other markets. In 2006, an international investigation called Operation Shovel – involving police from Ireland, Britain and Spain among other jurisdictions – was launched into the Kinahans’ activity from their Costa del Sol domain.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime later reported that the enterprise was ‘perfectly structured, led and controlled by one leader in close collaboration with his two sons’ – adding that it had ‘international branches in more than 20 countries’ including China, the United States and South Africa.

It was the murder of Gary Hutch in September 2015 that really brought the spotlight on the cartel, though. Ex-gang member Hutch, 34, had previously tried to shoot Daniel Kinahan in a row over money and had also faced accusations of passing information to Spanish police. Although a deal had been brokered allowing Hutch to resume living in Spain in safety, he was shot dead near an apartment block in Marbella shortly after his return.

Five months later, six men wearing fake Garda uniforms and armed with AK-47 assault rifles tried to murder Daniel Kinahan at a boxing tournament weigh-in at Dublin’s Regency Hotel. Kinahan escaped without injury, but one of his associates – David Byrne – was killed.

Hutch’s uncle Gerry ‘The Monk’ Hutch – who negotiated the failed deal to protect his nephew and is arguably Ireland’s best-known underworld figure – was charged with murder over the hotel attack, but was acquitted following a six-month trial. At least 15 other people died – two of them in cases of mistaken identity and almost all of the rest linked to the Hutch side – in a bloodbath of revenge shootings following the Regency outrage.

But perhaps the most extraordinary development was still to come. In a surprise move in April 2022, the US treasury department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) announced rewards of $5million (£3.9million) for information leading to the arrest and jailing of Christy Kinahan or his two sons. Four other Irish nationals were also named.

It is believed the sanctions were introduced amid suspicions that the Kinahans – whose cartel has been estimated to be worth €1billion (£835million) – were doing business with the Islamic militant group Hezbollah. A treasury department official said at the time that the U.S. was going after the gang with the same resolve used to target ‘Italy’s Camorra, Mexico’s Los Zetas. Japan’s Yakuza and Russia’s Izmaylovskaya’.

That same year, Thomas ‘Bomber’ Kavanagh, 57 – described by an National Crime Agency investigator as ‘effectively the European CEO’ of the Kinahan gang – was jailed for 21 years at Ipswich Crown Court on drugs and money-laundering charges.

Other developments have also been hugely significant. The huge power wielded by Daniel Kinahan in the boxing world – where he sought to reinvent himself as an ‘adviser’ to top fighters such as Tyson Fury – has been gradually eroded as key figures in the sport turned against him.

Nor has the Kinahans’ move from Spain to Dubai gone quite according to plan. The process of transferring operations to the Middle East was already under way before the Regency attack, but was speeded up immediately afterwards. However, the signing of an extradition agreement between Ireland and the United Arab Emirates last October puts them in a rather more vulnerable position – as Sean McGovern has already found out.

Their best estimates suggests that they have been overtaken by a number of global crime syndicates as the likes of Italy’s ‘Ndrangheta and Colombia’s feared Clan del Golfo strengthen their control of the cocaine trade.

Unsurprisingly, the family patriarch – now using his middle name in an effort to pass himself off as a British aviation consultant called Christopher Vincent – is reportedly hoping to start a new life in Zimbabwe. But he might yet find he became so big that there is nowhere for him to hide.