The Irish Drug Kingpin Daniel Kinahan Is Arrested in Dubai

How Daniel Kinahan’s Cocaine Empire Began to CrumbleAfter living freely in Dubai for a decade, the notorious Irish drug dealer has finally been arrested, and is likely to be sent back to Dublin to stand trial.April 30, 2026Illustration by Ben WisemanAlmost exactly twenty years ago, an Italian police squad burst through the door of a dilapidated farmhouse near the town of Corleone, in Sicily, and arrested Bernardo Provenzano, the capo dei capi of the Sicilian Mafia. Provenzano was seventy-three years old. He had been on the run since the nineteen-sixties. The last known photograph of him was taken in 1959. So elusive had he proved over the preceding decades that some people thought he was already dead. In fact, Provenzano had been living a peasant’s life for many years, subsisting on cheese and chicory, while directing the operations of the Mafia using encrypted notes on pizzini, or tiny scraps of paper. Detectives located him by following the meandering path of laundry, sent to him by his wife, via multiple messengers. When he was arrested, Provenzano told the officers, “You have no idea what you’ve done.” He died in custody ten years later.No such mystery surrounded the whereabouts of Daniel Kinahan,