The US attorney Eric Montalvo who is pursuing Daniel Kinahan’s cash after securing a $9.7 million order against him in California courts is working to identify which assets can effectively be seized in a timely manner.
Montalvo sued Kinahan and the boxing promotions firm he founded – MTK – on behalf of his client, boxing promoter Moses Heredia. At the centre of the claim, denied by MTK, was the allegation boxer Joseph ‘JoJo’ Diaz was poached from Heredia by enticing him away with money that came from the cartel.
The former marine is now setting about the business of getting the cash from the Dubai-based cartel boss and is now analysing Kinahan’s assets and financial footprint around the world, crucially working to identify those based in a country willing to agree to enforce the US judgment.
“It’s going to be a time-consuming process,” he said.
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Judge John W Holcomb of District Court of California ruled in favour of Heredia, deciding Kinahan must pay $9.7 million in damages. Though the objective of the exercise is now to secure the money, Montalvo’s legal work over the last four years has given him insight into how Daniel Kinahan operated MTK and why he moved into boxing.
MTK Global, the boxing promotions company Kinahan founded in 2012 and says he sold in 2017, stopped operating two years ago when Kinahan – his father, Christy, and brother Christopher jnr – were targeted with financial and travel sanctions by the US authorities.
But while Kinahan was at the helm he became a major player in global boxing. And as late as June 2020, heavyweight champion Tyson Fury boasted how Kinahan had just put in place a two-fight deal for him. Fury effectively revealed Kinahan was a power player at the top of boxing’s food chain.
In a social media post, a delighted Fury described it as the “biggest fight in boxing history”. “Big shout out Dan, he got this done, literally over the line. Two fight deal; Tyson Fury versus Anthony Joshua next year.”
The then Garda assistant commissioner John O’Driscoll, who died suddenly last month, had at that time already been working to bring US law enforcement more centrally into the investigation of the Kinahan cartel’s leadership. And the sheer size of the deal Kinahan had just put in place for Fury saw those efforts ramp up.
There was grave concern that if Kinahan was allowed to remain in such a powerful and lucrative position negotiating global deals, he would become so established he would own a considerable portion of boxing.
“The contracts they were engaged in were zero per cent contracts,” Montalvo told The Irish Times of Kinahan when he ran MTK. “When they contracted the fighters, to be their advisers and whatever they said they were doing, they would do it for no money,” he said, adding very significant signing fees were also paid to the boxer.
The contractual structure of boxing was about promoters and others “teaming up with a fighter”, to raise revenue from contracts and fights. And a percentage of that money would be taken by the promoter as their “taste”, or earnings, for their role.
“But enter in Kinahan and they said ‘We’re going to do it for free’,” he said, adding the fighters were also being paid “obscene” sums after fights.
“And if you go back to [Kinahan as boxing promoter] acquisition strategy, they were scooping up everybody, everybody. They were on a tear. They had run through Barry McGuigan’s fighters, into South America and into the US. So they were on a mission to take over everybody. Where is all that money coming from?
“You have mountains of cash, but what do you do with it? If you put it into the normal stream of commerce, it’s going to get flagged because you’re pushing money into a system that doesn’t have a [legitimate] source. So this was about being able to move money in a way that does not trigger a concern; to convert it into clean money. If it can go into the business, and then come out of the business at some point, it’s clean. Once it’s clean they can spend it however they want to.”
Heredia managed Diaz’s professional boxing career for eight years, beginning in 2012. In February 2017 they signed a five-year agreement.
Court documents state that in August 2020, while still under contract with Heredia and Golden Boy, Diaz signed a “business-advisory agreement with MTK USA, which was facilitated by MTK Global” and which was, in reality, “a boxing-management contract”. Once the deal was signed, Diaz stopped communicating with the Heredia organisation and his fights were organised by MTK.
It was further claimed that “Kinahan and MTK Global engaged in a pattern of racketeering activity by entering into advisory agreements with multiple boxers in the United States for the purpose of laundering money”.
Heredia alleged that MTK USA advanced Diaz $100,000, when signing. He believed this was “generated through criminal activity by Kinahan and the Kinahan Organised Crime Group and laundered through MTK Global”. Kinahan is described in court documents as “the co-founder and operator of MTK Global and MTK USA” at that time while he also “ran the day-to-day operations” of the Kinahan cartel.
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