Jamie Moore was the last man anyone expected to find in the middle of a gangland shooting. A former European champion from Salford, a family man with no criminal ties, he was one of the most trusted trainers in British boxing. In August 2014 he was shot outside a villa on the Costa del Sol. Spanish detectives quickly concluded it was a case of mistaken identity, and Irish reporters came to believe the bullet had been meant for someone else entirely: the man whose name would soon sit at the centre of the bloodiest gangland war in modern Irish history.
Salford
Moore was raised in Salford, Greater Manchester, and shaped by hard gyms and old-school training. He broke through on the British scene with a pressure style that gave opponents no space to breathe.
His trilogy with Liverpool's Michael Jones brought him the British and Commonwealth titles, a disqualification for punching on the break, and finally a sixth-round stoppage that closed the book.
The rivalry that defined him came against Matthew Macklin, a man he would one day train. Moore edged a savage first fight, and the rematch became a war that left the two men bound by respect. Moore went on to win the European title by stopping the former world champion Michele Piccirillo in the third round, but defeats that followed, including one to Ryan Rhodes, marked the end of his time as a competitive fighter.
Marbella, 2014
Years later, that bond took him to Spain, where Macklin was running a gym that would grow into MTK. In the summer of 2014 Moore travelled out to Marbella as part of the training team for his close friend's upcoming fights, with free accommodation courtesy of Macklin and his business partner, Daniel Kinahan.
For decades the Costa del Sol has been a crossroads for Europe's criminal networks. Moore was nowhere near that world. He was simply in the same place.
Estepona, a Sunday morning
After a relaxed evening with no sign of danger, in the early hours of Sunday morning he stepped out of a taxi outside a villa in Estepona, along the coast from Marbella, seconds from the door.
A masked man moved out of the shadows. Moore says he thought at first someone was messing about, and told him so. "As I started walking towards him, he just shot me in the hip," he says. The gunman held back from a finishing shot and fled into the night.
Moore lay bleeding heavily, his hip shattered. He had to ring for his own ambulance, his phone slick with blood, and waited 25 minutes, in and out of consciousness, knowing that if an artery had been hit he had minutes. He says it was the noise of the ambulance reversing in the road, trying to find him, that woke him. He puts his survival down to what boxing had taught him about injuries.
The wrong man
The villa had been widely reported in Irish and UK media as belonging to the Kinahan family. Operation Shovel, a joint investigation between Spain, Ireland and other European agencies, had been monitoring an alleged Irish organised crime group headed by Daniel and his father, with accusations of money laundering and drug trafficking under scrutiny. In the dark, the two men could easily be mistaken for each other: similar height, build and hair colour.
Moore recalled Spanish police mentioning tensions with Eastern European groups in the area. Dublin reports pointed somewhere else. Journalists claimed the shooting fitted growing friction between Daniel Kinahan and Gary Hutch, two men once described as close, whose relationship was said to have fractured over money from a robbery that Hutch was alleged to have entrusted to Kinahan. On the streets of Dublin, the name whispered as responsible for the attempted hit was Gary Hutch, nephew of Gerry "the Monk" Hutch.
A year later the feud between the Kinahan grouping and the Hutch family exploded, with killings across Dublin and Spain and a revenge attack at a boxing weigh-in in Dublin. Journalists still point back to that driveway in Estepona.
The second career
Moore went home to Salford on crutches, with nerve damage in his lower leg, insomnia and flashbacks. It was also the start of his second career, because fighters listened differently to a man who had been to the edge. Carl Frampton produced some of his best performances under Moore. Rocky Fielding, Jack Catterall and Chantelle Cameron, who went on to become an undisputed champion, all worked with him. In 2018 he was named British Trainer of the Year.
The investigation into his shooting never produced a suspect, a charge or a confirmed motive. As the feud grew, boxing turned its back on Kinahan. The United States sanctioned the Kinahan organisation as a major global crime group and offered multi-million dollar rewards for information. MTK was shut down. Kinahan moved deeper into Dubai.
The Irish state later brought the Regency case to trial. Gerry Hutch was arrested in Spain, extradited and charged with the murder of David Byrne, a charge he denied. In 2023 the Special Criminal Court found him not guilty.
Moore's shooting came before all of it, a year before the first bodies of the feud began to fall. He remained what he always was: a trainer and a father who walked into a moment that belonged to somebody else.