Jamie Moore and the bullet meant for somebody else

The taxi dropped Jamie Moore at the front gate of a villa in Estepona in the early hours of Sunday 3 August 2014, and a man in a mask was waiting for him.

Moore was thirty-five, a former European champion from Walkden in Salford, and a father of two. He had been at a party along the coast. He was a few steps from the door. Moore said afterwards that he thought at first it was a friend playing a joke. It was not a joke. The gunman fired five times and hit him twice, in the hip and the leg.

Then the gunman walked over to the man on the ground. A senior detective later told a Dublin court what happened next. He "was about to inflict further shots when there appeared to be a realisation that he was not the intended target". The gunman left. Moore lay bleeding outside a house that, it turned out, was the most dangerous address on the Costa del Sol.

Gutted and confused about what happened, but thank God I'm ok

Jamie Moore, from hospital, August 2014

The Spanish police and the Gardaí agreed on one thing almost at once. Jamie Moore had been shot by mistake. They have never said, in public, who the bullets were for. The newspapers have offered three answers, and they are not the same man.

Moore boxed for eleven years as a professional and lost five times. He was a pressure fighter who came forward until the other man ran out of room. He won the British and Commonwealth light-middleweight titles, and he held them twice.

His trilogy with Michael Jones of Liverpool took three years to settle. Moore won the first on points in 2003. He was disqualified in the second for punching on the break. He stopped Jones in the sixth round of the third in 2005, and that was the end of the argument.

In September 2006 he fought Matthew Macklin in Manchester, and knocked him out in the tenth round of a fight people still talk about. In March 2009 he stopped the former world champion Michele Piccirillo in three rounds to win the European title. He lost it to Ryan Rhodes that October. In April 2010 the British Boxing Board of Control's doctors advised him to stop, and he did.

The man he had knocked out became his friend. By 2014 Macklin had a gym in Marbella, and he had set it up with a business partner from Dublin called Daniel Kinahan. That summer Moore flew out to help train Macklin for his next fight. He stayed at a villa in Estepona. It was the villa where Kinahan was staying too.

Both men went to the same social event that Saturday night, and both went home separately. Detective Superintendent David Gallagher of the Garda National Drugs and Organised Crime Bureau gave the details to the Special Criminal Court in January 2023. Kinahan got home first, through a side gate. Moore came later, by taxi, to the front gate. That was where the gunman was.

Moore had an operation and spent the next days in hospital under armed guard. On the Tuesday he thanked the people who had sent messages. "Gutted and confused about what happened, but thank God I'm ok," he wrote. Macklin told his followers that the doctors did not expect any serious or permanent damage. Months later Moore gave an interview in which he said the gunman had been wearing a Halloween mask.

No arrests were made. Nobody has ever been charged. The case could have stayed a strange holiday shooting with no answer, except that over the next two years the men around that villa began to die.

The first answer came within five weeks. On Saturday 6 September 2014 two masked men walked up to Gerard Kavanagh, a 44-year-old former boxer from Crumlin known as "the Hatchet", outside a bar in Marbella at lunchtime. They shot him at least nine times. He was believed to have spent twenty years in the drugs trade. Reporting that month, citing The Irish Times, said Gardaí and the Spanish police believed Moore was an innocent party, and that the gunmen in Estepona had been looking for Kavanagh.

The second answer came a year later. On 24 September 2015 a masked gunman chased Gary Hutch through the Angel de Miraflores apartment complex in Mijas, near Marbella, and shot him dead by the swimming pool. Hutch was 34, from Dublin's north inner city, and the nephew of Gerry Hutch, the man the Irish press called the Monk. He had lived in Spain for eight years. The Irish Times reported the next day that a previous attempt had been made to kill Hutch in August 2014, when the boxer Jamie Moore was wounded instead. "Police in Spain believe Gary Hutch was the intended target of the botched murder attempt," it said. An Irishman, James Quinn, was later convicted in Málaga as the getaway driver and jailed for twenty years.

The third answer is the one that has lasted. Moore had been shot at Daniel Kinahan's front gate, a few minutes after Kinahan himself had walked through his side gate. An Irish Daily Mirror report in 2018 said the bullets had been meant for Kinahan, and that Gary Hutch, once his friend, had organised the attempt. On that version, the Mijas killing was the reply.

At the Regency trial in 2023 the court heard a version of that account from Jonathan Dowdall, a former Dublin councillor who had turned state's witness. He told the court a young member of the Hutch family had been accused of trying to kill Daniel Kinahan in Spain and of shooting "that boxer by mistake". It was hearsay, the man accused of it was never charged with it, and the judges said they had "serious difficulties" with Dowdall's evidence. Three newspapers, three targets, one boxer with a hole in his hip.

On the afternoon of Friday 5 February 2016 the boxing world came to the Regency Hotel in Whitehall, north Dublin, for the weigh-in for a WBO European lightweight title fight. Gunmen came in carrying AK-47 assault rifles and handguns. Witnesses said three of them were dressed as armed gardaí in helmets and tactical vests, and a fourth as a woman in a blonde wig.

David Byrne, a 33-year-old from Crumlin whom Gardaí described as a senior member of the Kinahan gang, was shot dead. Two other men were wounded. Gardaí said they believed the main target was Daniel Kinahan, and that he got out through a window or a back exit with a bodyguard. The fight was cancelled. Three days later Eddie Hutch, Gerry Hutch's brother, was shot dead at his home in Poplar Row in the north inner city. The feud that followed killed eighteen people, and RTÉ and The Irish Times have attributed most of those killings to the Kinahan side.

Gerry Hutch was arrested in Spain in 2021, extradited and charged with David Byrne's murder. He denied it. On 17 April 2023 the Special Criminal Court found him not guilty, and he walked out the same day. Two other men were convicted of lesser charges of helping the gang with cars. Nobody has been convicted of firing the shots.

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The boxing world kept doing business with Daniel Kinahan for years. Then, in April 2022, the US Treasury sanctioned him, his father Christopher and brother Christopher Jnr and four associates, and described the Kinahan Organized Crime Group as a gang involved in drug trafficking, money laundering, firearms trafficking and murder. The US offered rewards of up to $5 million each for information on the three Kinahans, jointly with the Gardaí and Britain's National Crime Agency. Kinahan, the Treasury said, was based in Dubai. MTK Global, the management company that had grown out of the Marbella gym, closed that month. Kinahan has never been convicted of any crime arising from the feud.

Moore went home to Salford on crutches. He became one of the best trainers in Britain. Carl Frampton went to him in 2017, and so in time did Rocky Fielding, Jack Catterall and Chantelle Cameron. Fighters listen differently to a man who has been shot.

He has never been told for certain who the gunman thought he was. Nor has anyone else. The full story, with Moore's own account of that night, is in our film on Gangland.