WRITING in the Irish Times recently, Johnny Watterson deftly opined that “Boxing has always been the wild west of sport. Its dark underbelly, the guaranteed blood and the questionable morality has always been a bestseller.”

Another way of putting this is that boxing is the primus inter pares – first among equals – of sports when it comes to existing in a moral vacuum, impervious to the norms of conventional society, its cultural taboos and even at times its laws.

And though, normally, much like a 15-year-old masturbating under the duvet, boxing’s less-than-savoury aspects are concealed from public view, they do on occasion emerge into the open, shocking the more naive while confirming what the more cynical either suspected or already knew. 

Thus we have the controversy that’s been swirling around since the recent announcement of the two-fight deal that’s been agreed between Anthony Joshua and Tyson Fury. 

Assuming both get through their next fights successfully — against Kubrat Pulev and Deontay Wilder respectively — all of the focus concerning this announcement would usually be on how we can now look forward to one of the most eagerly anticipated fights in the sport’s history, pitting the two current heavyweight world champions against one another for the honour of being recognised as No 1 in boxing’s most storied division.

But here’s where a gentleman by the name of Daniel Kinahan steps into the picture.

Based in Dubai, Mr Kinahan is either the head of the international drugs cartel and Irish version of Murder Inc that the Irish authorities and media claim, or he’s an unjustly maligned boxing impresario whose bona fides have been vouched for by the likes of Bob Arum, Frank Warren, Eddie Hearn and Roy Jones Jnr, and who is a trusted adviser to a roll-call of boxing’s biggest names, among them Tyson Fury and Billy Joe Saunders, both of whom have likewise come out and sung the man’s praises of late.

Kinahan has been a significant player in boxing for some years now, albeit operating with a much lower profile than now. Back in 2012 he founded the MGM boxing management and events company in conjunction with Matthew Macklin, the former British/Irish middleweight. The company was run out of a gym of the same name in Marbella, which soon established itself as a popular warm-weather training base for some of Britain and Ireland’s major boxing talent. 

The gym was raided by the Spanish police in 2016, investigating the 2015 murder of Irish drug dealer Gary Hutch at an apartment complex in Miraflores, close to Marbella. This murder is said to have sparked the feud between the Kinahan Cartel and the Dublin-based gang led by career criminal Gerry Hutch, uncle of the aforementioned Gary.

In 2017 Kinahan formally parted company with MGM, which soon thereafter was rebranded as MTK Global and bought by Scottish businesswoman Sandra Vaughan. Though, according to Vaughan, Daniel Kinahan no longer has any relationship or association with the company, she acknowledges that he still acts as a personal adviser to numerous MTK fighters.

At face value, it’s extraordinary that so many of boxing’s biggest names and operators would place their reputations on the line by not just working with but publicly vouching for a man who’s alleged to have ordered umpteen murders in Ireland and across Europe as part of the aforementioned feud. 

Kinahan was reportedly himself the target of one of the most audacious and high-profile assassination attempts carried out in these islands.

It took place in 2016 when a group of armed men, some dressed in Irish Gardai uniforms and wielding assault weapons, crashed into a boxing weigh-in being held at the Regency Hotel in Dublin at which Kinahan was in attendance. It is said that he only managed to escape by jumping out of a window, while one of his close friends and associates, David Byrne, was not so lucky and was shot dead.

The son of convicted drug trafficker Christy Kinahan Snr, who is also reportedly based in Dubai, it should be pointed out that Kinahan has no criminal convictions to his name, has no pending charges against him, and that nobody named in this article from the world of boxing is involved in or has colluded in any criminal activity.

On a deeper level, meanwhile, the biblical injunction that the son should not pay for the sins of his father has long been accepted as a moral and ethical principal in most polities.

With that being said, the sins Kinahan is accused of by the Irish authorities couldn’t be more serious.

Certainly, you would imagine that the last thing Tyson Fury envisaged was that after publicly thanking Kinahan for his role in brokering this two-fight deal against Joshua he would find himself being named in the Irish Parliament in the same breath as a man who has been described in an Irish High Court affidavit as a senior figure in organised crime on a global scale.

Outgoing Irish Taioseach Leo Varadker revealed in the same parliamentary session that the country’s Department of Foreign Affairs had been in contact with its counterparts in the United Arab Emirates to share its concerns about Daniel Kinahan, and that potential television broadcasters and sponsors of the Fury v Joshua double-header are also being contacted by the Irish authorities on the same basis. 

Further still, it’s been reported that Dublin has decided to approach the Drug Enforcement Agency and the FBI in the US to seek help in bringing down the alleged Kinahan cartel.

On the other side of this unfolding drama, Kinahan’s friends, associates and supporters, both within and without boxing, have been engaged in what has all the makings of a concerted campaign to refute the allegations made against him in Ireland, claiming that he’s the victim of a state-directed persecution and smear campaign in the Irish media.

Bob Arum has gone even further, stating in a recent exclusive interview with the Irish Sun newspaper that “everybody is laughing at the Irish government” and that the allegations made against Kinahan are “total bullshit.”

Arum, don’t forget, is the one-time promoter of Muhammad Ali and heads up one of the longest-standing and most influential boxing promotion companies in the sport, Top Rank. In other words, he is no inconsequential voice spouting verbiage in the sure knowledge that he’s got nothing to lose.

In no other sport could you imagine this kind of controversy breaking out.

This is precisely because boxing has always existed on a different moral and ethical plane than other sports. In many respects, boxing is a mirror revealing who we really are, shorn of the embroidery of cultural refinement and development, posing thereby more than a few uncomfortable questions. 

There’s also the salient point that organised crime and the sport of boxing understand one another like an old and wizened married couple.

The vast majority of fighters and gangsters hail from the same mean streets. They share the same motive of embarking on their chosen paths as an attempt to rise out of those streets to enjoy the fruits of whatever an ever-shrinking capitalist pie has to offer, striving to attain the kind of financial rewards and material comforts we are conditioned to believe validate our existence. 

And in both the worlds of organised crime and boxing, morals are considered a luxury of those who’ve never had to worry about where the next £5 note’s coming from.

In this respect at least, the world of organised crime and the sport of boxing can’t be accused of the same hypocrisy as the beneficiaries of a system which in the last analysis is sustained by the most brutal form of violence there is — poverty. 

This, though, is not in any way to ascribe justification to those whose business is murder. A five-minute conversation with the families of the victims would disabuse anyone of any romantic notions where that’s concerned.

It is, however, to make the point that as with boxing, if politicians were really serious about abolishing crime, a good place to start would be with the abolition of poverty.

If Daniel Kinahan is what the Irish authorities and media allege, then it amounts to a stain on a sport that is currently enjoying a remarkable renaissance, generating huge and unparalleled revenues and much in the way of thrills and spills. If he is not then it’s a stain on the Irish criminal-justice system and media. 

Nobody, though, should be foolish enough to think that your average boxing fan will care one way or the other. In this hyper-masculine world of controlled violence, the right not to give a shit is dearly held.