Until recently, the Michelin-starred Al Muntaha restaurant in Dubai could rely on a pair of very particular regulars. Local resident Daniel Kinahan and his wife Caoimhe (pronounced ‘Kweeva’) liked to lunch there most months, she favouring the £220 ‘degustation’ menu, he partial to the lamb, and both occasionally treating themselves to a dash of £500 Beluga caviar.

They are eye-watering prices even for the famously glitzy Emirates – but then the couple could certainly afford them: while on paper 48-year-old Kinahan, from Dublin, is a ‘boxing promoter’, for years international law enforcement has believed him to be the kingpin of a deadly global drug cartel which has amassed his family a rumoured £1billion fortune.

Yet it is safe to say there will be no more cosy, expensive lunch dates for the Kinahans at the restaurant, located inside the world-renowned Burj Al Arab hotel – and not just because it has remained closed since the outbreak of hostilities in the region, when the hotel was damaged by debris from an intercepted drone at the end of February.

For last Friday, Kinahan was arrested on the glittering Palm Jumeirah – the famed man-made island, shaped like a palm, where he, Caoimhe, 44, have owned a seven-bedroom home for a decade – on charges relating to organised crime.

He is currently being held in the emirate’s Al Awir prison, a large complex in the desert known as the ‘Desert Alcatraz’ because of its extreme cold, overcrowding and violence, awaiting extradition to his native Ireland.

Kinahan is said to have been ‘blindsided’ by his change in fortunes, but perhaps not as much as his wife of nine years, an attractive, blonde Dubliner who many have compared to the glamorous matriarchs in popular TV crime dramas such as This City Is Ours and Kin.

Seen as the unofficial ‘queen’ of the cartel molls, her husband’s arrest has turned an unwelcome spotlight on a woman who has long enjoyed the spoils of his empire – from a burgeoning property portfolio to designer clothes and watches – but has done her best to remain studiedly anonymous.

‘Caoimhe’s world was turned upside down in an instant,’ a source told the Mail this week. ‘In truth she’s wanted out of Dubai for some time – while hanging on to as much cash and possessions as possible – but with her husband behind bars her future is now massively uncertain, and she has no idea what to do. She’s also paranoid that she will somehow get drawn in to the legal proceedings.’

For now, the Daily Mail understands Caoimhe remains in the couple’s luxurious property on one of the Jumeirah’s ‘fronds’ with the children – just a stone’s throw from a villa owned by the Beckhams – although she has been linked to several other addresses in Dubai.

With views over the glittering Arabian gulf, it is certainly a very long way from where she grew up. The youngest of five children, Caoimhe Robinson – as she was then – was raised in a council house in Darndale, a north Dublin housing estate that would go on to be ravaged by the drugs trade her future husband would come to dominate. Her father William was a lorry driver. ‘Her parents worked, they were by no means the worst people on the estate,’ a source told the Mail.

Nonetheless, Caoimhe swam in gangland waters from her later teenage years, becoming close friends with the wife of another notorious Dublin criminal who cannot be named for legal reasons. ‘She’s been on the scene a long time – since her teens,’ a police source told the Mail.

By her mid-twenties her position ‘on the scene’ was cemented when she started a relationship with Michael ‘Micka’ Kelly, a notorious Dublin mobster known as ‘The Panda’, who by the age of 30 had already been linked to half a dozen murders, had 38 convictions and had served a total of 12 years in prison for a variety of criminal offences, including serious assault.

The couple are understood to have met in Marbella. ‘She didn’t just get to be Kelly’s girlfriend by meeting him in a bar,’ the source said. ‘There’s a group of them, they all know each other and someone like Robinson, they move up the ranks.’

In August 2011 she gave birth to Kelly’s daughter, but the now 14-year-old was less than a month old when Kelly was gunned down outside Caoimhe’s apartment in the suburb of Clongriffin after visiting his newborn child. The assassin shot him 14 times before reversing over his body.

Exactly two weeks later Robinson registered their daughter’s birth – intriguingly leaving the identity of the father blank, although she bears his surname – and listing her own profession as ‘nurse’s aide’.

If Kelly had left his girlfriend any money, it didn’t show: Caoimhe’s apartment in Clongriffin was nothing fancy. But then, in 2014, she started dating Daniel Kinahan, and her fortunes changed.

The eldest son of Christy ‘Dapper Don’ Kinahan, Daniel was on his way to becoming the de facto leader of the Kinahan Cartel, a multi-billion-dollar global criminal network specialising in drug trafficking and money laundering that had grown exponentially from the Dublin street-level drug operation set up by Christy in the Nineties.

The relationship immediately made her one of the most powerful women in the criminal underworld. ‘Being Kinahan’s moll is probably the biggest prize; she’d be the queen,’ as one source puts it.

‘You can’t judge these people by our standards because they’re not like us. It’s a different set of rules. They’re in love with the lifestyle; they love the danger. They’re absolutely ruthless.’

The couple – who are understood to have two children together – settled in a lavish property on the Costa del Sol, until in 2016 Kinahan gang member David Byrne was shot dead during a boxing weigh-in at Dublin’s Regency Hotel. The real target, the Gardai (the Irish police) believed, was Daniel Kinahan, the result of an escalating feud between the Kinahans and rival criminal gang the Hutches.

A deeply violent gang war followed that would claim 18 lives – but not the senior members of the Kinahan clan: in the wake of the murder, the Dapper Don, Daniel and his brother Christy Jnr all fled to Dubai.

The following year, Daniel and Caoimhe formalised their union in a lavish ceremony at the Burj Al Arab’s ballroom – the bride and groom installed on matching thrones under the room’s vast chandelier – which doubled as a summit for Europe’s leading narco-criminals, the 250 guests a veritable ‘Who’s Who’ of the international cocaine trade.

Among them were Edin Gacanin, leader of the notorious Bosnia-based Tito and Dino cartel; Ricardo Riquelme Vega, a major Chilean drug importer known as ‘El Rico’; and Raffaele Imperiale, a debonair Italian linked to the feared Camorra. Shortly before the wedding, Italian police found two stolen Van Goghs at the home of Imperiale’s parents near Naples. Also present was 6ft 9in world heavyweight champion boxer Tyson Fury.

There is little question Caoimhe made the most of life in the near year-round sun: after settling on the Palm Jumeirah, she became a regular fixture at the Burj’s luxurious Sal Beach Club and Spa (where joint membership comes in at around £12,000 a year), as well as the city’s most expensive restaurants.

She also became something of a force in the lucrative Dubai property market, owning and selling several high-end properties in some of the Emirate’s swankiest addresses: leaked records from the Dubai Land Department appear to show at least six properties passing through the couple’s hands, most in Robinson’s name. Among them were a six-bedroom villa in the high end residential community Parkway Vistas, bought in 2018 for £3.7million, a four-bedroom penthouse apartment in a central skyscraper and a 2,238 sq m mansion in Emirates Hills, a hyper-exclusive gated enclave whose residents have included former Pakistan prime minister Benazir Bhutto, the ex-president of South Africa Jacob Zuma and, more recently, the controversial internet influencer Andrew Tate, who faces trial in Romania on rape and human trafficking charges.

Of late, however, it seems Robinson has been divesting herself of much of her portfolio. The Parkway Vistas mansion was sold for £4.5million in 2022, the Emirates Hills property was offloaded in 2024, and in February last year the penthouse was sold for £750,000.

Another property, a 1,900 square metre £1.5million villa in an upscale section of Dubai that was still under construction when purchased now lies boarded up and covered in graffiti.

Perhaps it is merely coincidence that these sales took place in the aftermath of sweeping US sanctions, announced with some fanfare in April 2022, targeting the senior leadership of the Kinahan gang and anyone conducting business with them.

The public attention from the sanctions – as well as a $15million (£11million) reward for information leading to the conviction of three senior leaders – certainly made it far more difficult for the gang to run their narcotics and weapons smuggling business from Dubai.

‘There’s no doubt the Kinahans started to feel the pressure,’ a source told the Mail.

Even prior to this, however, sources suggest Caoimhe was restless. She was said to be heartbroken at being unable to attend the 2020 funeral of her mother Hilary, who died in July that year, back in Ireland,

‘She was desperate to go back, but Daniel begged her not to, saying it was too risky,’ a source said. ‘Quite aside from the ongoing risk of reprisals from the 2016 feud, even prior to the sanctions any known associate of Kinahan would be nervous about setting foot back in Ireland.’ Another source who knows the couple told the Mail that her husband’s decision to convert to Islam several years ago – supposedly to secure protection in his adopted country – had also caused tensions in the marriage. ‘Caoimhe had no interest in joining him,’ the source says.

Nonetheless, Caoimhe had resigned herself to sticking it out in Dubai – that is, until earlier this year, when the US and Israel launched military strikes against Iran, and turned the Middle East into a tinderbox.

‘Caoimhe’s terrified of Iranian missiles and drones, like any wife and mother would be,’ the source reveals. ‘From the start she was desperate to get out and move back to Spain, but Daniel continually insisted that even with the conflict Dubai was the safest place for them to be, as Spain would put him within easy reach of the Gardaí and the Americans. It caused some friction between them.’

Kinahan had other good reasons to want to remain in Dubai: this week a senior security source told the Mail he had invested ‘big money’ into contacts throughout the region, believing this would ensure he would be ‘tipped off’ about any legal or judicial moves being made against him.

It was an insurance policy he believed was unwarranted: convinced that what he called ‘noise’ from Dublin about arresting him was purely political, Kinahan remained convinced that he was untouchable.

As we have seen, he was wrong on both counts: last week, as the couple went about their business, 5,000 miles away, legal wheels were in motion to secure an arrest warrant, mirrored by prosecutors in Dubai.

An elite plain-clothes surveillance team was dispatched from Dublin and, over two days, they watched the couple going about their day-to-day lives before specialist officers from Dubai Police swooped in to make their dramatic arrest mid-morning last Friday.

Witnesses described how a ‘stunned’ Kinahan simply stood still and surrendered.

He has now swapped his luxury home for the unprepossessing surroundings of the Al Awir Central Prison, renowned for violent attacks and substandard conditions and where prisoners reportedly have to fight for bunk beds in overcrowded cells.

It is not yet known whether he plans to appeal against extradition to Ireland, although whatever he does, it is likely to be several months before he sets foot back on Irish soil.

When he does, he is expected to go on trial at the Special Criminal Court in Dublin on a single charge of directing a criminal gang, an offence for which if convicted he could receive up to 30 years in prison.

Where that leaves his wife is anyone’s guess – but it is clear that whatever his fate, Caoimhe Kinahan’s reign as queen of the molls has come to a humbling end.

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