The murder of The Monk’s nephew 10 years ago this week sparked years of chaos and bloodshed on the capital’s streets.
Her death after illness should have brought only quiet mourning, but instead, the farewell became a display of power. The brothers returned to Dublin like men announcing a new order, cordoning off streets with their own militia and warning photographers to leave. In the midst of it all, someone daubed graffiti on the wall of a nearby Russian Orthodox church : “Gary Hutch, you rat.” It was a stark signal that beneath the choreography of control, old loyalties were already beginning to fray.
That graffiti did not appear out of nowhere. By then a number of “informed theories” were doing the rounds inside and outside the cartel. One line said Gary had been dealing behind the Kinahans’ back with English criminals.
Patrick Hutch Jnr (front,right) and James ‘Mago’ Gately (back,right) carry the coffin of Gary Hutch
Another suggested he had tipped someone off about a drug consignment that had been seized, and there were whispers about a statement he had given to Gardaí in relation to an earlier shooting. Whether any of these claims were true is impossible to prove now, but what mattered in that world was not so much the truth, but how it was perceived. Even a passing rumour could be sharpened into a weapon.
It is at this stage that tensions began to erupt in Spain. Late one night at Daniel Kinahan’s villa in Estepona a gunman stepped out from the bushes and opened fire, not at Daniel, as was likely intended, but at Jamie Moore, a renowned professional boxer and complete innocent who had been staying at the villa.
Moore later described the figure wearing a Halloween-esque rubber mask, “like some kind of demon,” and the first bullet smashing into his right hip. The boxer first thought it was a prank of poor taste, until the pain told him otherwise. The attack was an attempt on Daniel’s life that went disastrously wrong; police investigations and in-house inquiries quickly followed. The Kinahan inner circle concluded it had been ordered by Hutch, though Hutch himself denied being the gunman and later fled to Amsterdam.
From there, the fallout unravelled in episodes of reprisal and narrowly averted killings. Days after the shooting, on August 15th in 2014, a car carrying two men crashed through a barrier at the Mater Hospital in Dublin. A seriously injured passenger was later identified in court by Jonathan Dowdall as the same man believed to have been the masked shooter in Spain. That man was later named during the trial as Patrick Hutch Junior, Gary’s younger brother, who had been going back and forth to Spain.
He survived wounds to both legs, injuries consistent with a punishment shooting that investigators believed had happened elsewhere, then staged to look like an accident in Dublin. The Gardaí found no bullet holes in the car and received no cooperation from those involved, and the official line was that the incident had been a knee-capping or punishment shooting carried out elsewhere then brought to the hospital. Later, during the Regency trial, claims were made that Daniel Kinahan himself had been involved in the shooting.
However, even a carefully staged punishment shooting could not guarantee safety. The Kinahans had punished the shooter, but not the source. The incident at the Mater hospital therefore failed to end the threat to Gary, who was still assumed to have ordered the shooting, and intelligence later picked up that he had been abducted on the street in Amsterdam, bundled into a car by three men and driven at high speed through the city.
The scene of Gary Hutch’s murder in Spain
According to accounts given to Gardaí and aired on the CrimeWorld podcast, Gary somehow forced open the back passenger door and threw himself out, rolling between vehicles and then running for his life. The escape had all the hallmarks of a Bourne movie : a desperate dive from a speeding car, a roll onto tarmac, and a man disappearing into traffic to save his life. This episode convinced the Hutches that an attempt on Gary’s life had been made and that the threat was both immediate and very real.
In the midst of the panic, the family turned to ‘The Monk’. In the strange economy of gangland, where courts and solicitors cannot be trusted to settle scores, a man like Gerry Hutch can become a broker, given his reputation of being a “man of his word.”
Kinahan, it seems, believed Gerry could arrange a face-to-face meeting between himself and Gary, in order to cut a deal. Gerry later described his reluctance, then how he agreed to meet both men and to mediate. “They had a meeting and they came to some arrangement,” he told the CrimeWorld podcast in an interview in 2024.
The Grave of Gary Hutch at Glasnevin
“They came out and spoke to me when they were done. They said they had come to a conclusion, shook hands and decided to go their separate ways moving forward.” Gerry, being a man of his word, remembered the meeting as a bargain sealed by a handshake and hence a promise, possibly with money changing hands.
After their meeting, Gary, undeterred by the recent attempt on his life, returned to Spain to try and resume business as an independent operator rather than as Daniel Kinahan’s permanent shadow. In the months that followed, incidents continued to occur, each suggesting the truce between the two men had been fragile, despite their “word”.
Today’s News in 90 Seconds – September 27th
A number of incidents occured in Dublin that kept tensions smouldering. Then, on the morning of the 24th of September 2015, Gary was outside an apartment block in Miraflores near Marbella when two men in a car pulled up. CCTV later published in the press shows him emerging and a gunman chasing him across the complex toward a pool.
He was shot multiple times, in his chest and his head, and the killer fled in a BMW. Garry Hutch was dead. Only one shooter was clearly visible in the footage, the second never came to public attention. It was immediately, and unsurprisingly, believed that the attack had been ordered from inside the Kinahan circle.
Nicola Tallant, host of the CrimeWorld podcast, was on the first flight out early the following morning, and recalls the moment at Dublin Airport like a small scene that summed up everything that had changed. Waiting for the flight to Malaga, she had noticed the three only people in the business class queue who “didn’t seem right.” One was a large man, the other a young woman laden in designer gear and the third, Daniel Kinahan. There was his alibi, clearly on display.
Gary Hutch, Paddy Doyle and James ‘Mago’ Gately in Spain in 2008
Onboard, the podcast host watched him settle into the business class cabin, struck not by shock or grief of the death of his former best friend, but by ease. “He was having a great time,” she told the podcast. “Scrolling on his phone, laughing away, he was completely relaxed.”
When they landed, Daniel was greeted by a companion, hugged, joked with, and whisked off the stairs as if arriving at a celebration rather than the aftermath of a murder. According to Nicola, it was classic Kinahan. “It was clearly his alibi. He had been in Ireland when Gary was killed, so he couldn’t be responsible. He was known for setting things up so no one could trace what had happened,” she said.
The funeral in Dublin underlined the stakes. Gary’s body was flown home and laid to rest, and his mother asked the crowds for no retaliation or violence. She pleaded with mourners not to bring their pain to another family. Yet, even as she spoke it was clear grief would find another language.
A pallbearer at the graveside, Jame ‘Mago’ Gately, had grown up alongside the Hutches, and had been friends with the Kinahans too, but would ultimately be counted among those who took the Hutch’s family’s side in the conflict. The fragile public plea for peace did little to deter what was coming, and the cycle of revenge was far from over.
The scene of the Regency Hotel shooting in February 2016
The murder of Gary Hutch changed everything. It was not merely the killing of one man; it was the moment the delicate balance between two powerful networks finally shattered. In the months that followed the rivalry ruptured into open warfare. At the Regency Hotel in February 2016, gunmen stormed the boxing weigh-in linked to Daniel Kinahan, armed with rifles. A Kinahan associate, David Byrne, was killed.
At the trial that followed, those long known to the police and courts framed that moment as the point at which the feud had truly begun. Others argued that the Hutches had fired the first shots and that the violence that followed had been unavoidable. Either way, the violence was sustained and destructive, dragging families, friends and neighbourhoods into a cycle of reprisal that lasted for years.
If there is one thing this three part series has made clear, it is how quickly loyalties and bargains in the underworld can calcify into blood. Gerry Hutch’s attempt to mediate, the handshake in a neutral place and years of brother-like friendship… none of that had proved strong enough to protect Gary when suspicion hardened into decision.
Today, there remain a number of questions. Who pulled the trigger on that morning in Miraflores? Why did Gary choose to return after meeting with Daniel? Which rumours were true and which were manufactured? The answers are tangled between court papers, CCTV frames and the memories of men guided by their own interests.
What is indisputable, and what the podcast traces back with great detail and patience, is that Jean Boylan’s funeral, the graffiti on the church wall, Jamie Moore’s black-masked attacker, the hospitalised Patrick Hutch Jr. and the dramatic escape in Amsterdam were not isolated incidents.
They were nodes on a single line of violence whose next point of rupture was Gary Hutch’s final steps outside that Andalusian apartment. The consequences rippled from Spain back to Dublin, leaving communities scarred and lives altered.