Pieter Tritton, a former cocaine smuggler, returns for a second interview with Business Insider about his experience trafficking drugs from South America to the United Kingdom. Tritton says he started selling cocaine in the illegal rave scene in the UK in the 2000s. He then established a cartel connection and began importing cocaine to Europe in larger quantities.
Tritton was arrested in Ecuador and served 10 years in prison there, first in Garcia Moreno in Quito, and later in Litoral Penitentiary in Guayaquil, which is one of the world's most violent and corrupt prisons.
He now works as a public speaker on the dangers of drugs, consults with the UK police force, and is writing a follow-up to his 2017 memoir, "El Infierno: Drugs, Gangs, Riots and Murder: My time inside Ecuador's toughest prisons."
The National Crime Agency estimates the UK cocaine market is worth $13.8 billion, or £11 billion, a year. In the year ending March 2023, over 92 metric tons of illegal drugs were seized by police and Border Force, the highest volume since 2003 to 2004.
Tritton was arrested in Ecuador and served 10 years in prison there, first in Garcia Moreno in Quito, and later in Litoral Penitentiary in Guayaquil, which is one of the world's most violent and corrupt prisons.
He now works as a public speaker on the dangers of drugs, consults with the UK police force, and is writing a follow-up to his 2017 memoir, "El Infierno: Drugs, Gangs, Riots and Murder: My time inside Ecuador's toughest prisons."
The National Crime Agency estimates the UK cocaine market is worth $13.8 billion, or £11 billion, a year. In the year ending March 2023, over 92 metric tons of illegal drugs were seized by police and Border Force, the highest volume since 2003 to 2004.
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TechTranscript
00:00:00 Hi, my name's Peter Tritton, aka Posh Pete, and I'm back to tell the whole story
00:00:05 of how I smuggled $5 million worth of cocaine internationally.
00:00:09 And this is how crime works.
00:00:11 I can't say exactly how many operations we conducted.
00:00:18 All that I can say is that the judge, when it came to trial in Britain,
00:00:23 said that they knew that we'd imported at least 85 kilos,
00:00:28 but they knew it was a hell of a lot more.
00:00:30 But they could only prove it was 85 kilos.
00:00:33 They said they'd probably never know exactly how much we brought in,
00:00:37 so I'm not going to give it away now.
00:00:38 I would say that I have fairly extensive knowledge of the quality of cocaine,
00:00:45 having been around it for almost every day.
00:00:49 Certainly whilst I was dealing it, you build up a knowledge of the subject.
00:00:55 After a few years, it became fairly easy to tell where a cocaine had come from
00:01:01 because of its colour, the way it felt between your fingers, how oily it was,
00:01:05 just all of those sort of things, the smell,
00:01:07 because you can smell the certain chemicals, like the ether, the acid.
00:01:10 When I was buying kilos of cocaine here, this is prior to doing our Ecuadorian thing,
00:01:16 say a kilo of cocaine was like a creamy off-white,
00:01:21 I would normally know it was probably going to be from Peru.
00:01:25 That tended to be really good for washing up into crack cocaine.
00:01:29 That tended to be extremely strong for crack cocaine.
00:01:32 Whereas you'd buy a kilo of Bolivian cocaine, which would be pure white, very pearlescent,
00:01:39 very strong to sniff, but when you washed it up into crack cocaine,
00:01:43 it was like smoking fresh air.
00:01:45 It would have very little effect, which was really weird.
00:01:52 Because cocaine has got so many various alkaloids in it,
00:01:55 that's why each one, and also the chemist that's made it,
00:02:00 they each make it to their own secret recipe.
00:02:03 Then you would get the Colombian, which quite often,
00:02:08 back in the day, there used to be what we called diesel.
00:02:12 It used to stink of diesel when you sniffed it, and it was very oily.
00:02:20 That's because it was made with a lot of gasoline, or diesel instead of gasoline,
00:02:25 and poor quality chemicals.
00:02:26 You'd get a lot of that coming out of Colombia, where they were using cheaper base.
00:02:32 I suppose it's a bit like a French vineyard.
00:02:35 They keep the best bottles in the chateau, and they're more expensive,
00:02:41 and you can only buy them there, really.
00:02:45 The trafficking was certainly one of the most difficult parts of the whole operation.
00:02:50 I mean, overcoming the borders that you have to get through, i.e. border control, customs,
00:02:55 things like that, are by nature the hardest parts, to some extent, of cocaine trafficking.
00:03:05 I was in Parkhurst prison at the time.
00:03:08 This is post-9/11 happening, so there was all heightened security at the ports and airports,
00:03:14 and a lot of drug traffickers were getting caught inadvertently in amongst the heightened security.
00:03:19 I'd read an article about the process of impregnating cocaine into plastic or rubber.
00:03:26 So, having read this, I realised that that was really going to be the future of
00:03:31 certainly cocaine trafficking.
00:03:34 That the days of importing blocks of cocaine or bags of powder were really done and dusted
00:03:38 because of the advent of scanners, x-rays, and all the heightened security that was on its way.
00:03:47 This got me thinking and led eventually to me using that method of impregnation
00:03:55 to import the cocaine into not only Britain, but various other European countries.
00:04:02 We would turn the cocaine, well, first put it into a solution, like a solvent,
00:04:08 and then we would mix it with liquid latex, which is used as, I think, artificial skin
00:04:17 in various other applications.
00:04:19 We would then let that set until it dried in very thin panels.
00:04:24 For anybody else's point of view, it would be a piece of rubber.
00:04:29 So, we would then put those into the ground sheets of tents
00:04:33 so that it appeared as part of the fabric of the tent.
00:04:37 And then that would be smuggled cross-border using passengers by air, normally.
00:04:46 Sometimes by sea, but normally by air, then sea, because of the distance involved.
00:04:52 I formed a partnership with a Colombian and a Chilean guy.
00:04:57 The Colombian, obviously, was the conduit for the cocaine, because he was from Cali.
00:05:02 He was a member of the Cali cartel.
00:05:04 So, it was all very much a family thing for them.
00:05:09 He would source the cocaine, have it processed into the rubber latex,
00:05:15 and he would take care of all of that.
00:05:17 We would normally pay him $20,000 to $30,000 for his role, American dollars,
00:05:23 which, obviously, in Colombia is quite a lot of money.
00:05:26 And we're only talking between three and five kilos at a time per tent.
00:05:30 Sometimes we do two at the same time, though.
00:05:33 So, we were partners, and on every shipment, we would normally make between 60,000 to 80,000 pounds,
00:05:41 so about $100,000 each, roughly, and that's after costs.
00:05:46 We would pay a passenger, or a drug mule, as they're called,
00:05:50 to travel out to whichever country we'd be using as the transit country.
00:05:56 And we'd pay them between 10,000 and 12,000 pounds, so about $15,000.
00:06:01 Well, it wasn't dependent upon the quantity of cocaine.
00:06:06 So, it could have been one or five kilos.
00:06:09 We'd still pay them the same.
00:06:10 We'd cover their hotel costs, flights, all that sort of stuff.
00:06:15 So, for the initial one that we did, which was five kilos, it cost us about 30,000 pounds,
00:06:24 so in dollars, probably about $35,000, $40,000.
00:06:28 And that bought us five kilos of cocaine in Colombia,
00:06:33 and paid for it to be transformed into latex or rubber,
00:06:38 and paid for all the work to be done.
00:06:41 And then, obviously, the guy's salary was separate.
00:06:44 Sometimes, if we made a lot more money here in Britain by cutting the cocaine,
00:06:53 we would give them an extra bonus.
00:06:54 So, around the time that we started doing our importation of cocaine,
00:07:02 using this impregnation method,
00:07:04 that method was fairly new on the scene.
00:07:10 By turning it into rubber or plastic or something like that,
00:07:14 it becomes very difficult for the authorities to detect,
00:07:20 because it's not only invisible, it's actually changed its physical state.
00:07:27 It's now something else that it wasn't before.
00:07:30 You imagine how many tons of rubber and plastic come across the border every day into every country,
00:07:36 by air, by sea, by land.
00:07:40 I mean, it's astronomical tonnage.
00:07:43 And for them to be able to capture even a small amount of this,
00:07:48 they'd have to know, really, that it was actually in...
00:07:50 Someone would have to tell them that there's cocaine in that rubber for them to know,
00:07:56 because it was that good a way of trafficking that we didn't lose a single passenger
00:08:03 in the entire time that we were working.
00:08:05 There's a lot of cartels and drug traffickers in general.
00:08:10 They're coming up with new methods and new ways of getting drugs from A to B
00:08:15 to evade the authorities.
00:08:18 I'd heard about people impregnating cocaine into clothing
00:08:22 by having the cocaine in a solution and then soaking the clothing in the cocaine, letting it dry.
00:08:28 But obviously, it's very visible because it crystallizes on the surface,
00:08:32 and you can see the texture of the clothing will change to become quite stiff,
00:08:39 almost like it's overstarched.
00:08:41 And also the dog can detect that.
00:08:44 Whereas with the method that we were using, the dog couldn't detect it.
00:08:48 I mean, we'd heard about the methods of you could impregnate it into paper or cardboard,
00:08:57 again, simply by soaking it into the material.
00:09:00 But the fact that we were changing it into rubber or latex is what I liked the most about it.
00:09:09 And it just seemed like the safest and best method at the time.
00:09:14 The key players in our operation in the cocaine market in Britain,
00:09:19 there were only really the three of us at the top.
00:09:22 And then below us, obviously, we had drivers, we were using safe houses.
00:09:28 At one point, we had an accountant keeping track of all of the outgoings and incomings,
00:09:36 just so that we made sure that we were making profits and just exactly how much we were making.
00:09:42 You know, we run it as if it was a business.
00:09:46 Obviously, we had a couple of customers that we would deliver the stuff to.
00:09:49 And below them, there was a big pyramid of dealers where the material got broken down
00:09:57 further and further down the chain.
00:09:58 I've got a vague memory of the police saying that when I was arrested,
00:10:03 they estimated that there were somewhere between 300 and 400 people involved
00:10:08 because of all the people below that I had no idea about.
00:10:14 Basically, we tried to keep things as safe as possible by letting as few as
00:10:18 possible people know about what we were doing.
00:10:21 So we narrowed the number of people that we were supplying the cocaine down to,
00:10:27 I think it was like two or three people, key people.
00:10:31 So all of the cocaine would just go to them because we didn't really need loads of people.
00:10:37 We were quite happy just to sell it in bulk, you know,
00:10:40 give it to one or two people and have done with it.
00:10:42 So we thought that would keep it safe as well because these were people that we really trusted.
00:10:47 When it came to finding passengers, it got a bit tricky because obviously,
00:10:52 you could only use a passenger once or twice and then you'd have to find somebody else.
00:10:58 And out of everything, I think that was one of the weakest points,
00:11:03 weakest elements were the passengers because, you know, once they'd done that job
00:11:07 and they'd been paid, it was quite likely that they would maybe talk to somebody,
00:11:13 be it their girlfriend, their friends, you know.
00:11:16 So and then it would have been quite possible for their friends to then tell their friends,
00:11:23 you know, that's how it goes.
00:11:26 We were looking to scale things up and eliminate that risk factor of using passengers
00:11:34 and scale things up and do it by sea using shipping containers
00:11:37 because then there were no passengers involved.
00:11:40 When we set the operation up, we also put in place a certain number of sort of ground rules.
00:11:46 One of the rules particularly was that if anybody was working for us
00:11:53 or during the time that we were working, no one was allowed to use drugs or alcohol
00:11:58 or party in any way, shape or form so that we were thinking straight.
00:12:03 Obviously, another rule was that no one was allowed to know where the laboratory was
00:12:08 when we were extracting the cocaine apart from the people involved,
00:12:13 i.e. the chemist and us three.
00:12:15 Another rule that we put in, I call it a rule,
00:12:20 was that if any of us got arrested, that whoever was left out and not in prison
00:12:26 was sort of duty-bound to look after the families of the others that were in prison
00:12:31 and make sure that their rent was paid, their food was paid, bills, utilities, everything.
00:12:36 I was actually in Cali at the time having a meeting with the guy, our connection there,
00:12:42 when the police raided a laboratory in Crystal Palace back in London
00:12:48 and discovered one of my two business partners in the lab processing the cocaine.
00:12:56 But they'd broken one of our main rules being that nobody, absolutely nobody,
00:13:02 should know where the lab was because that was another really big weak link.
00:13:06 Because if you think about it, having a lab in a static point for more than two or three days
00:13:16 is obviously very easily, or it's very easy to take out.
00:13:23 If the police find out where it is, it's easy to raid because it's not going anywhere.
00:13:27 It's there, the chemicals are there.
00:13:29 So, like I say, I was in Cali at the time and all of the phones in London went off,
00:13:36 certainly my Colombian business partner.
00:13:40 He quite quickly found out that they'd all been arrested
00:13:44 and they had basically been having a party in the lab.
00:13:47 They'd had friends in there, music, parties, going on, drinking, doing cocaine.
00:13:55 You know, when I found out I was extremely angry to be honest because it almost ended the...
00:14:02 Well, it did end the operation initially for a certain amount of time,
00:14:06 but left everything in my hands basically.
00:14:11 So I then carried things on whilst they were still in prison.
00:14:14 The first trip I did myself simply because I wanted to do it,
00:14:20 A, to make sure it got back.
00:14:22 And I thought, well, it's the first one that we're doing,
00:14:24 so it's highly unlikely that I'm going to get arrested
00:14:28 because nobody knows that we're doing it yet.
00:14:30 It's the first one.
00:14:31 And I kind of wanted to experience the whole run of, you know, things.
00:14:40 And I didn't want to start sending passengers or drug mules
00:14:43 to do something that I hadn't already done myself.
00:14:46 So I had done all the tourist sort of stuff.
00:14:50 I'd gone to Cotopexi volcano.
00:14:52 I've done a couple of other touristy type things around Quito, gone to the museums.
00:14:57 And whilst doing that, I'd collected loads of brochures and stuff to back up my story.
00:15:03 And I'd forgotten about the luggage allowance,
00:15:07 you know, the weight allowance that you're allowed to take through the airport.
00:15:11 So when I got back to the airport,
00:15:14 the tent I'd been given on this occasion to carry through weighed about 30 or 40 kilos.
00:15:19 It was huge, 10 pound tent, plus, you know, five kilos of cocaine in it.
00:15:24 So I'd also bought my family things like ceramic plates, leather jackets,
00:15:29 loads of heavy gifts, you know, just completely forgotten.
00:15:34 Get to the airport and I think I was like 100 kilos over my allowance of 30 kilos.
00:15:42 So obviously that's rung an alarm bell straight away with the airline, which was KLM.
00:15:48 So they said, look, why don't you get rid of this tent?
00:15:51 Because they said you either have to get rid of some of the weight
00:15:57 or you've got to pay a huge, what do they call it, like a fine.
00:16:04 Um, to see you onto the plane.
00:16:06 And at the time I just didn't have the money on me to pay the fine.
00:16:10 And I thought, well, I'll just get rid of some of these gifts I've got.
00:16:12 So anyway, they said, why don't you get rid of the tent?
00:16:15 And I said, there's me saying, well, I can't get rid of the tent, obviously.
00:16:20 So that must have looked really weird to them.
00:16:23 So in front of the airline staff at the check-in desk,
00:16:28 I've given away all of these gifts to the people working in the shops at the airport
00:16:34 and the restaurants.
00:16:35 So they all thought it was Christmas, you know,
00:16:37 getting all these brand new leather jackets and ceramic plates.
00:16:40 So the airline staff must have been watching this and thinking,
00:16:44 this guy's obviously up to something.
00:16:45 I'm traveling on my own, single male.
00:16:50 All of the red flags have been ticked and going up.
00:16:56 So anyway, I get on the plane, land at Schiphol Airport.
00:16:59 And sure enough, there's a line of Dutch drug enforcement agents waiting.
00:17:06 And they're, you know, all the passengers are having to file through them.
00:17:14 The airline knew right then and then that I was getting stopped.
00:17:17 So sure enough, I get to the front of the queue and they pull me in.
00:17:21 And they say, right, we need to talk to you.
00:17:22 So they put me in a holding room with about 30 or 40 people.
00:17:27 Only three or four of which were European and all of us South American.
00:17:31 I thought, well, I'm done for here.
00:17:34 Do you know what I mean?
00:17:35 There's no going home.
00:17:36 Eventually, I get called into the office and they say, what have you been doing?
00:17:40 You know, I said, well, you know, I've been to Cotopaxi Volcano.
00:17:43 I was there on tourism.
00:17:44 You know, I was just, I'd always wanted to go to South America.
00:17:48 Just gave them all the spiel about being a tourist.
00:17:52 Lay down all the brochures, said I've been here, there, blah, blah, blah.
00:17:56 And I thought any minute now they're going to plonk this tent down on the desk in front of me
00:17:59 and go, and what's this?
00:18:01 You know, and it didn't happen.
00:18:04 And after about 20 minutes, 20, 30 minutes of questioning,
00:18:07 they said, oh, really sorry to have detained you.
00:18:10 You're free to go.
00:18:11 Catch your connecting flight, which was to Stansted.
00:18:16 So I get on the plane and I'm fully expecting to be arrested when I go back to Britain.
00:18:22 And landed at Stansted airport.
00:18:24 There's the tent going round and round on the carousel.
00:18:27 And I'm thinking, shall I, shan't I, shall I, shan't I?
00:18:30 And in the end, I just thought, oh, to hell with it.
00:18:32 Grabbed it and I thought, as soon as I fully expected that as soon as I touched it,
00:18:38 I'd be just, you know, dozens of police officers would pile on me.
00:18:45 And nothing happened.
00:18:47 And I was shocked.
00:18:48 So I picked up this tent, got it on the trolley,
00:18:51 got the rest of my bags and just walked straight out of Stansted airport and I was home free.
00:18:55 And actually coming back to the rules, that was another rule that I set myself.
00:19:01 I thought, well, there's no need for anybody to know when
00:19:04 the passenger is coming back into the country,
00:19:06 because as long as nobody knows, then really no one can be told.
00:19:13 I.e. the police can't be told unless they found out some other way.
00:19:17 When it came to finding passengers after having done this first trip myself,
00:19:22 we found people that didn't have any, certainly any criminal record for drugs.
00:19:26 Or if it was a record for drugs, only something minor, like a little bit of cannabis,
00:19:33 but preferably people that had a clean record or, like I say, nothing for drugs.
00:19:39 People that were, in our eyes, trustworthy and fairly calm.
00:19:46 People that were presentable.
00:19:49 I think the riskiest part was just trying to hold your nerve,
00:19:52 you know, and not show too many nerves going through the airport.
00:19:55 Because if you start looking really nervous, then they're going to, you know,
00:19:59 they have people trained looking for people that are showing signs of nerves and body language.
00:20:04 So it was a lot to do with picking the right people that had the right demeanour
00:20:11 and had the right sort of body language and mindset to go through this experience.
00:20:17 The normal passenger sits in an airport, is bored, they're reading a newspaper, reading a book,
00:20:22 you know, or getting some food or having a drink.
00:20:26 They're not looking around, looking at the cameras, looking at security, stuff like that.
00:20:32 So it would just be a matter of just treating it as if you were on holiday,
00:20:38 any other normal trip, do as you would on any other day.
00:20:42 We tried not to give away too many of the details to the people that we were prospecting
00:20:48 or interviewing to be possible passengers.
00:20:53 We explained that we had this really good method that was virtually undetectable.
00:20:58 We didn't really tell them too much about how it was done.
00:21:03 We just said it was, you know, that it beat the scanner, it beat the x-ray, it beat the dog.
00:21:08 You know, it beat virtually everything that Customs and Excels had at that time.
00:21:15 So it was almost foolproof.
00:21:18 That would generally encourage them.
00:21:21 Obviously, the fee that we were paying them would help.
00:21:24 We also tried to keep them as far away from us as possible.
00:21:28 So that in the advent that they were arrested,
00:21:32 that there wasn't too much circumstantial evidence connected them to us.
00:21:37 So, you know, we wouldn't be phoning them up and stuff like that.
00:21:40 We'd try and keep them at arm's length.
00:21:42 We would give them a backstory in so far as we would say,
00:21:46 well, we would tell them that if the worst happened and, you know,
00:21:52 they got arrested in South America, we would try and buy them out
00:21:55 because we knew how corrupt it was in South America.
00:21:58 So we would try and pay, we would get them a lawyer and try and bribe them out,
00:22:04 about any which way we could.
00:22:06 If they got caught in Britain, we used to tell them to say the old story that,
00:22:13 oh, somebody asked us to carry this bag through or this tent through.
00:22:17 And then if and when it came to trial,
00:22:21 get your barrister to hold up a piece of rubber or latex in front of the jury
00:22:27 and say to the jury, would any member of the jury know that this is cocaine?
00:22:32 And then every single one is going to say no, because how could you?
00:22:35 So right then and there, that gives an element of doubt for the jury.
00:22:40 That presents an element of doubt.
00:22:42 So in British law, as long as there's enough reasonable doubt in a case,
00:22:47 the defendant normally is found not guilty.
00:22:51 If there wasn't any phone calls connecting us to them
00:22:54 and them to drug trafficking of any sort,
00:22:58 and they were sort of working and quite, to the appearances of the court,
00:23:04 you know, a normal citizen doing the working or, you know, quite straight,
00:23:10 then they stood a good chance of getting off.
00:23:12 You know, we tried to find countries that, A, had fairly relaxed drug laws,
00:23:19 fairly porous border force.
00:23:23 We also started a method of, we would buy a passenger a return ticket, obviously.
00:23:34 So say they left from Heathrow, they'd be returning to Heathrow.
00:23:39 As soon as we got them loaded with the tent in South America,
00:23:42 we would then buy them a new return ticket to a different destination.
00:23:49 So we wouldn't send them back on the original return leg of the journey.
00:23:54 We'd try and get them back on, we would basically get them on the plane
00:23:58 the same day they got the tent or the next day as quick as possible.
00:24:02 And that really worked because the police, the British police,
00:24:06 when they arrested me eventually, they actually told me that that was,
00:24:10 you know, they were actually waiting at the airports for the passengers coming back.
00:24:15 And they weren't turning up and they didn't know what was going on.
00:24:18 They didn't because obviously they didn't know that we were buying a different ticket
00:24:21 to a different destination just one way.
00:24:23 So you have to know the law to break the law, really.
00:24:26 For us, America was a full on no-go.
00:24:31 I mean, there was one occasion actually, when I went through Miami, I wasn't carrying anything.
00:24:36 And it served as a test bed for us, really,
00:24:41 because I was on, I think I was on the way to Venezuela,
00:24:45 and I bought a ticket transiting through Miami.
00:24:49 And I phoned, and it was with American Airlines, and I phoned up American Airlines and I said,
00:24:54 "Look, I think I've recently been released from prison."
00:24:58 Well, this was the story I gave them.
00:25:01 And I said, "I've recently been released from prison,
00:25:06 I've got a criminal record for drug trafficking in Britain.
00:25:12 If I'm just in transit through Miami, is that going to be a problem?"
00:25:16 And they said, "No, it won't be a problem.
00:25:19 Go ahead, buy the ticket, you'll be fine."
00:25:21 And they got that completely wrong.
00:25:24 It was a big problem.
00:25:25 What happened was I missed my flight at Heathrow to Miami.
00:25:30 So they stuck me on the next flight afterwards,
00:25:33 I think which was a British Airways flight.
00:25:35 But by that point, I'd missed my connecting flight to Caracas in Venezuela.
00:25:40 So they said, "We'll put you up in the airport hotel."
00:25:43 So I get to the front of the queue in Miami, present my passport,
00:25:49 and I think there's no way they're going to let me in.
00:25:52 And the guy stamps the passport and says, "Welcome to America."
00:25:56 And I was like, "You've got to be joking, you let me in?"
00:25:59 I couldn't believe it.
00:26:00 So I go into Miami, go to the airport hotel, check in, blah, blah, blah.
00:26:07 And just had to spend three days having to look around Miami.
00:26:10 I got back to the airport to get the plane to Venezuela.
00:26:12 And the security went absolutely ape.
00:26:16 They said, "Where have you been? What have you been doing?"
00:26:20 They had me in a room, they strip searched me, they went through my luggage.
00:26:25 You know, the American Airlines obviously made a mistake.
00:26:29 So after that experience, and we knew America was really hot anyway.
00:26:37 So we just avoided any sort of transit through America whatsoever.
00:26:42 Any flights, anything to do with America.
00:26:46 And we also knew that if we started trafficking drugs into America itself,
00:26:51 that they would just come to you wherever you were, basically.
00:26:54 It didn't matter whether you went to the ends of the, you know, down to the Antarctic
00:26:59 and hid out in the North Pole or South Pole or wherever.
00:27:02 They were going to come and find you eventually, like they do.
00:27:07 So yeah, for us, America was a big like no-go zone.
00:27:12 Yeah.
00:27:14 As far as airlines went, I think definitely the Spanish airlines were a little bit laxer.
00:27:20 Air Iberia tended to be quite relaxed.
00:27:25 Whereas, yeah, American Airlines, you know, you thought that you get on that trip to Venezuela,
00:27:29 you had to fill out all that visa form and it was all, you know, loads of security.
00:27:34 As far as getting onto the plane with these tents, I mean,
00:27:37 they beat the scanners, they beat the x-ray, they beat the dog.
00:27:41 So really, how else are they going to find it unless somebody tells them it's in there?
00:27:49 I think even with the particle wand, you know, the swabs and stuff.
00:27:55 I think that may have been a problem, but
00:27:57 I think that was only just coming into use at the time that we were doing this.
00:28:04 And that would have only shown that traces of cocaine anyway.
00:28:08 And they still wouldn't have, you know, having found traces of cocaine with the wand,
00:28:12 all they would have done is then put it through a scanner or x-ray and it would have shown up
00:28:16 with nothing anyway. So they would have thought, oh, somebody's been using cocaine and they dropped
00:28:21 a bit on the bag or whatever. So, you know, it doesn't really prove a great deal.
00:28:25 I think nowadays, if you were to try and come through an airport with, say, a kilo of cocaine
00:28:32 or say kilos of cocaine, say, strapped to your body or strapped to your legs with tape
00:28:39 or in the lining of a jacket in powder form or block form, it's going to get spotted because
00:28:48 the scanners, the body scanners are that good. Or even if you swallow capsules,
00:28:53 I mean, or pellets as they used to be called, they used to get the 10 or 12-gram pellets,
00:29:00 compressed cocaine or heroin pellets. But they then, because they advanced the technology with
00:29:09 the scanner, so, you know, you've got the external scanner, which is looking for anything
00:29:14 that shouldn't be on your person. But then they have the internal scanner that is looking for
00:29:20 things like pellets of drugs. So they actually came up with liquid pellets. So the drugs were
00:29:28 getting solution and in like some sort of material that didn't break down in the stomach acid,
00:29:36 but was non-detectable by x-ray. So it appeared as if it was liquid in your stomach or food.
00:29:45 The cartels won't, they like to minimize their risks. So they like to minimize their losses,
00:29:53 you know. So they generally try and find people at both ends that they can bribe and they have
00:30:02 means and ways of bribing the border force, the customs and excise, you know, they've got,
00:30:09 or maybe a baggage handler who can get the bag onto the plane or, you know, or on the food
00:30:19 trolleys that the food goes in. You know, there's various points on a plane, if it's coming by
00:30:25 plane that the drugs can be put on. If it's coming by container, then they could be put in the air
00:30:30 conditioning unit from the externally, you know, if it's a freezer container, obviously they've got
00:30:38 those big air conditioning units, you can fit about 30 to 50 kilos inside one of those, and
00:30:43 they can be accessed from outside of the container. So if you've got people in the ports,
00:30:48 they can get into the containers or into the exterior of the container. They can hide drugs
00:30:57 in the fabric of the container itself, in the floor, in the ceiling, in the walls.
00:31:01 There's other methods such as the group that I was working with when I was really young,
00:31:06 back when I was at university, they would charter a yacht, sail to the Caribbean,
00:31:12 they'd have like a ton and a half of cocaine loaded onto a private yacht, sail it back,
00:31:18 and then they would do what's called coopering. So they would transfer the cocaine out at sea,
00:31:24 they'd have a fishing boat come out from a local fishing port, and they would transfer the cocaine
00:31:30 from one boat to the other. So the fishing boat appears not to have gone very far, but the yacht
00:31:37 obviously has come back from South America. But you think on the size of a boat, or a ship even,
00:31:43 a ship is even better. They can attach it to the hull of the boat underwater,
00:31:51 in waterproof containers, they can have it welded onto the hull of the ship,
00:31:57 put it into liquid, again, same sort of technique, and then you just extract it.
00:32:05 So a lot of these, recently this has become quite a big thing in Europe, super labs are appearing,
00:32:12 where they are using the same methods we were using back all those years ago,
00:32:17 but on a much larger scale. And then extracting it in these labs, using chemicals and chemists,
00:32:25 and you're ending up with pure cocaine again in Europe. And it's just a hell of a lot safer.
00:32:33 And it means that they're not having to pay off customers in excise.
00:32:36 An average shipment by container, if it's a big one, it would be like five tons.
00:32:42 Average shipment, I would say, is probably like a ton to two tons, so that's 1,000 to 2,000 kilos
00:32:49 at a time. Particularly if it's hidden in the walls or in the floor, because there's only a
00:32:54 certain amount of space in there that you can put it in. I mean, the days of putting it in the boxes
00:33:01 or in amongst the fruit, the scanner is going to pick that up probably. But then again,
00:33:06 you have to bear in mind that also these container ports are so busy, it's generally,
00:33:12 the police won't waste their time unless they know there's something present. Unless they get a tip
00:33:18 off or the dog happens to detect something, generally the drugs will have been seized
00:33:25 because someone has spoken or someone has been caught further down the chain and given up the
00:33:30 operation. And therefore, the police know the drugs are present in a container or something.
00:33:40 The production of the cocaine obviously takes place in semi-jungle areas way out in the
00:33:47 countryside. Obviously, I've met in my time quite a few people that have been involved in the actual
00:33:53 producing of the cocaine, right from the farmers up to the cartel bosses or capos. And the people
00:34:02 at low end make very little money. I mean, they're farmers, they're doing it to support their
00:34:07 families. They grow the coca leaves, the plants, sorry. So they get the coca leaves off, they
00:34:13 stream them up with streamers, cut them up as small as possible, soak it all in kerosene to
00:34:19 get the coca to release into a solution. And then they use potassium permanganate
00:34:30 to purify. There's various stages of purification, ending in sulfuric acid, basically. Sulfuric acid
00:34:42 bath where the cocaine crystallizes, basically. They then fish that out, press out some of the
00:34:56 chemicals, and then you've got your kilo of cocaine. Obviously, I've simplified the steps
00:35:04 somewhat. But yeah, the people involved generally are just people trying to support their families.
00:35:11 Obviously, the value of the coca crop is more than, well, it's generally more than the value
00:35:19 of growing bananas or coffee beans. Say we sold a kilo of cocaine for an average of about £25,000,
00:35:28 $28,000 to $35,000, roughly, something like that. Because I mean, if you think you can buy a kilo
00:35:36 of cocaine in Ecuador for $2,000 pure package ready to be shipped, if you go right out into the
00:35:44 countryside, into the jungle to a lab, you can buy it there for as little as $800, $700, $800 pure
00:35:54 cocaine. And that's after it's been processed, all the chemicals, all the people involved there
00:35:59 have been paid. So out of that, probably the farmer's going to end up or will have been paid
00:36:06 maybe $200 or $300, maybe a bit more, depends on how much of the processing he does as well.
00:36:14 But I mean, they're producing maybe 1,000 kilos a week, 2,000 a week. But I mean,
00:36:22 again, like I say, to make one kilo is an acre of land. So to make 1,000, you need 1,000 acres
00:36:29 of land. And that's quite a lot. So generally, these people producing the cocaine, they're not
00:36:35 just buying the leaves from one farmer. They'll have various farmers. I think generally the
00:36:42 farmers normally have maybe 30 acres, if that, 30 to 40 acres. You can't really have 1,000 acres of
00:36:53 land. It's a big hole in a jungle that's all coca leaf. And it's pretty visible from even from
00:37:01 space, I would imagine. So that's why it has to be done in little bits. And obviously, land costs
00:37:09 money as well. So I guess they buy it. Well, they definitely buy it from various farmers.
00:37:17 So once that had been made, we would have, you know, it gets transported into cities to be sold.
00:37:26 The people that I was involved with were all from Cali, all interconnected with the Cali cartel
00:37:33 and the paramilitaries. They would make it up into the latex or rubber. So they would do all
00:37:41 the processing there, get the tent made up, and then get ready to transport the tent to a third
00:37:49 country who, you know, it was really a transit country like Ecuador, where they don't really
00:37:54 produce so much cocaine in their own right. Whilst I was in Parcos prison, having read this article
00:38:00 about this shipment of cocaine being seized, coming in by a shipping container that was
00:38:08 impregnated in plastic garden furniture. I then spoke to my co-defendants or one of my co-defendants
00:38:15 and I said, look, when I get out of prison, I kind of want to go straight, not be involved in
00:38:23 drug trafficking. But if you get a phone call from me one day, it's going to be because I want you to
00:38:29 try and get us a connection with someone who can get us cocaine in South America, basically, so we
00:38:37 can start importing cocaine direct from South America into Britain and cut out all the middlemen.
00:38:43 You know, someone that can get it impregnated for us, do all of that. Time went by, got released
00:38:50 from prison, went straight for a while and then decided not to go straight. Made the phone call,
00:38:57 phoned up my friend and said, look, can you try and find us a Colombian, a Bolivian, Peruvian,
00:39:04 someone that can get this, source this cocaine in South America and preferably have it made into
00:39:11 rubber or impregnated in some form. So he went away and after about two weeks, phoned me up and
00:39:19 said, look, I've managed to get a hold of a Colombian and a Chilean guy down in South London
00:39:26 in Kennington who are interested in me and you. They're selling cocaine. So initially I didn't
00:39:35 want to just go in there and go, you know, this is my idea. I thought I'd go see what they're like.
00:39:40 So a friend in South Wales gave me the money to go and buy a kilo of coke from them.
00:39:46 So went and bought the first kilo of cocaine from them. They said, okay.
00:39:52 So came back a week later to buy another kilo of cocaine. And at this point I said,
00:39:58 actually, guys, look, the real reason I'm here is because I want to start bringing cocaine
00:40:02 into the country. I can bring to the table investment money so we can upscale things,
00:40:09 you know, bring more in at a time. I can get chemicals, you know, I can just bring a lot to
00:40:15 the table. You've obviously got things going already. And it did turn out, you know,
00:40:23 they were actually already bringing cocaine into the country, impregnated in rubber, in latex.
00:40:29 So to me, it was almost like destiny stepped in and brought about this meeting in mind.
00:40:35 So yeah, it was definitely a pivotal point in my life. Well, that led me to here.
00:40:45 The reason that they trusted me, I think, is because I was introduced to them by my friend
00:40:52 who knew one of their friends and they trusted each other already. He vouched for me, they
00:40:59 were vouched for. There were a couple of occasions where I felt a little bit worried for my safety.
00:41:07 I mean, on that very first trip, when I went out to Quito to pick up that first tent,
00:41:13 I wasn't sure whether there was actually cocaine in the tent or whether I was just being sent out
00:41:19 there to be held and kidnapped and held for ransom. Basically, the guy sent a taxi for me
00:41:25 and the taxi took a really secure, took a route through Quito all over the place, you know,
00:41:33 to make sure I wasn't being followed. And we come to a petrol station, I get out, the guy's there,
00:41:39 the guy from Cali, and he's a big ex-military guy, crew cut, typical looking ex-military.
00:41:46 So he says, "Follow me." So we go to this gated compound, so this big metal gate rolls back.
00:41:52 We walk through, it rolls shut, and I mean, it's about eight foot high, so there's no getting out
00:41:58 there now. So I'm thinking, "Right, well, I'm trapped already." Go up a set of steps,
00:42:04 in through a door, the door closes, I turn around and there's a gun hanging off the back
00:42:09 of the door, like a rifle or a shotgun or something, long barreled. So I thought,
00:42:13 "Well, that's not a good sign." So we go into the flat or apartment,
00:42:18 and I thought, "Well, I'd better check that the cocaine's in this tent because they could just
00:42:23 hand me a tent. I could fly all the way back to London and find there's just a normal tent,
00:42:28 so I don't know there's cocaine in it." And he didn't speak much English and I didn't speak
00:42:34 much Spanish, so I said in the best sign language I could muster, "Is the cocaine in the tent?"
00:42:40 So he said, "Yeah," and he's unrolled it, sliced open like a little corner of the ground sheet,
00:42:48 and cut out a little piece of this latex and said, "Chew it." So I chewed it, and it was a bit like
00:42:55 the old advert, the man from Del Monte says, "Yes," but I couldn't say yes because I couldn't
00:43:01 talk because my mouth was so numb. So I knew the cocaine was present, obviously, because of my
00:43:08 mouth had gone so numb. So having rolled up the tent, I went back to the airport and I realized
00:43:14 that I could trust these people. And from that point onwards, there was a good level of trust
00:43:24 between all of us. There was one occasion towards the end after the Colombian had been arrested and
00:43:30 been released, and I had a sort of inkling that he was working for the police. So we've gone off
00:43:36 to inspect what was going to be the 100 kilos of cocaine that we were going to convert into all
00:43:42 these tents. And they had it in a safe house in Buenaventura, which is on the Pacific coast of
00:43:49 Colombia, a very dangerous city. We drive the old trafficking route out of Cali, sort of skirting
00:43:58 the edge of the mountains. And the guy from Cali is showing me all the old thinkers where some of
00:44:06 the Cali cartel used to live, like the big houses out in the countryside. One had a zoo, a bit like
00:44:12 Pablo Escobar had a zoo. You know, all these huge houses with swimming pools, really nice places
00:44:19 just out in the countryside. And we get to the safe house,
00:44:26 go in the safe house, and straight away there's a handgun on the table, a revolver.
00:44:32 And the two guys in the house, so I'm with my contact from Cali, and there's two guys in the
00:44:40 house with the coke. And they get out a couple of kilos, but there's a handgun on the table,
00:44:45 and there starts being a heated conversation between them and the guy that I'm with.
00:44:50 And I keep hearing MI5 police, and I start thinking, do they think I'm MI5 or police?
00:44:58 And I've said, whoa, whoa, whoa. And I had to say it in English. I said, look, I've just come out
00:45:03 of prison, because I'm trying to do sign language as well. I said, have you heard of a prison called
00:45:10 Parkhurst? Because I was in Parkhurst, where one is a renowned prison on the Isle of Wight.
00:45:14 And at this point, one of the guys that's been gabbing away in Spanish and looking like he's
00:45:20 going to shoot me starts suddenly speaking English, hasn't spoken a word of English to this
00:45:26 point. And he says, oh, I was in prison in Britain as well. I was in the Verne. He happened to be in
00:45:33 there at the same time as a friend of mine. Honestly, the coincidences in my life have been
00:45:39 crazy. It's such a small world. So I said, do you remember a guy in there called Simon,
00:45:45 blah, blah, blah. And he said, yeah, yeah, I remember Simon. I've got a photograph with him.
00:45:50 And he goes off and he pulls out his photo. And there's him with my friend. And of course,
00:45:56 after that, they're like, yeah, yeah, this guy's sound. We thought you were police. We thought you
00:46:00 were MI5. We were going to kill you. But now we know you're all good. So we could carry on
00:46:07 negotiating the business. And I was like, that was close. Had I not been in prison at any point
00:46:16 in Britain, you know, and had that story and happened to have had that friend in the Verne
00:46:22 at the same time as he was, I probably wouldn't be here today. But yeah, that was pretty scary.
00:46:31 The end marketplace for our product tended to be South Wales through our connection there,
00:46:38 right across the M4 corridor. And the other would be Edinburgh. After getting the tent back into
00:46:46 Britain or tents, we would have our lab set up, normally ready to go. The chemicals there.
00:46:55 We'd use various alcohols and acids to extract the cocaine. That would take two or three days
00:47:03 to do. We'd then cut it and repress it, repackage it. So say we brought in five kilos,
00:47:10 we'd normally end up with probably like seven to eight kilos of final product.
00:47:15 Maybe we'd send four to South Wales, four or five to South Wales, and the rest up to Scotland.
00:47:23 Or maybe all of it to South Wales, depending on what was happening. That would then be broken
00:47:28 down into, I guess they would probably sell a couple of kilos to people that were buying kilos.
00:47:33 Some of it, you know, just get broken down into kilos, half kilos, nine bars or nine ounces,
00:47:40 four and a halves. And then obviously your ounces would get broken down into grams
00:47:48 and half grams, quarter ounces. So that's where that big pyramid came in. If you think,
00:47:56 you know, eight kilos, that's 8,000 grams. And that's before, because obviously, you know,
00:48:03 that's how we give it to the dealers. They will then probably cut it, cut it in turn,
00:48:08 if I don't know they were. So that 8,000 grams then probably turned into what, 10 or 12,000 grams.
00:48:16 That's quite a lot of grams of cocaine that people are doing. I think it was about 60 or 70 a gram
00:48:24 at that time. Nowadays it's like about 100. The money, I mean, sometimes I would drop the cocaine
00:48:33 off and the person I was dropping it off to, my guy in South Wales, would give me a lump of cash
00:48:38 straight away. And then I'd say, "Look, just ring me when the rest of it's ready,
00:48:43 or I'll come and pick it up in incremental sections or payments." Obviously that would
00:48:51 get divided between the partners. So we'd each get a third. Obviously we'd have to pay off our
00:48:58 expenses, like the passenger, airfares, hotels, all of the costs, which is why we had an accountant
00:49:06 to keep track of it all. To be honest, I remember after the first trip, a lot of it for me wasn't
00:49:12 about the money. It was about the planning and the thought that goes into it and overcoming the
00:49:18 customs and excise and the whole adrenaline and just the whole excitement of it all.
00:49:24 A bit like a big game of chess or poker for high stakes. Very addictive in that sense. In fact,
00:49:35 I coined a phrase, "The selling of drugs is more addictive than the taking of drugs."
00:49:41 Which I think for a lot of people it is, to some extent. And I remember after the first trip,
00:49:50 having a hold all full of cash, like about a quarter of a million, and we were counting it
00:49:57 all, took bloody ages. And we were sat there after, it was really all divided up into piles,
00:50:02 that's yours, that's yours, that's yours. And I was like, "Well, put that away. What's the next
00:50:09 job? What's the... Straight away, the same day, what's the next plan? When can we go again?"
00:50:14 I was active up until towards the end of 2005. I was active for about two and a half, three years,
00:50:23 something like that. I finally got arrested. Things were going along kind of smoothly. Obviously,
00:50:29 there was the bust at Crystal Palace, and that's when things kind of started to unravel.
00:50:36 I was left kind of in charge of everything. And the Colombian partner, my Colombian partner in
00:50:46 London, got flipped by the police, became a police informant, got released after six months on
00:50:53 remand, and obviously then started feeding them information about what we were doing,
00:50:59 or what I was doing. But in the meantime, I'd started at work with the chemist that we'd used
00:51:06 to do the extraction on the first tent. And I started to see the surveillance happening around
00:51:13 me, started to see the same faces over and over again, cars, just obvious police surveillance.
00:51:19 And then what really tipped the hat was I'd been introduced to a Pakistani guy through some
00:51:28 fraudsters from London on a completely different matter, something to do with the big fraud. I mean,
00:51:34 they were massive at the fraud game, doing long firms, tax evasion, stuff like that.
00:51:39 And he said, "Well, I have a practice of getting a background check done by a police officer friend
00:51:50 who's corrupt, who I pay to do a background check on all new people that are introduced to me that
00:51:58 I'm possibly going to do some work with. So I had you checked." And the officer's quite high-ranking
00:52:05 in the Met, or used to be. And he came back and said, "There's this huge operation all around you,
00:52:12 six others, seven people in total, key members." I mean, we were really cautious about surveillance.
00:52:21 Anyway, we would do things like we would change our telephones every two weeks, all of us,
00:52:26 the key members in the group. So we'd call it phone change day or something like that.
00:52:32 And we'd literally all go to a telephone shop, buy a new phone, new chip, new everything,
00:52:40 discard the other one, destroy it, or give it to a homeless person. So if it was being monitored,
00:52:44 it would be let off, listening to some guy talking about whatever. And we would exchange
00:52:53 the new numbers face-to-face. So we'd all meet up at a specific point and hand them over face-to-face.
00:52:59 I'd do this every two weeks for security. And to be honest, on the phones, we'd only ever use them
00:53:07 to arrange a meeting. We wouldn't actually talk about anything pertinent. So we were really
00:53:15 cautious on the phone. We knew of police tactics and surveillance tactics. We wouldn't talk inside
00:53:21 cars. We wouldn't talk inside built-up environments, houses, flats, hotel rooms,
00:53:27 anywhere like that. So if we were going to talk about something important, I'd ring them up and
00:53:34 I'd say, "Meet me at X, Y, or Z." And normally, we'd have already said that on the next meeting,
00:53:40 I'll say a time, but it will be an hour later or an hour earlier. So we'd already know which way
00:53:47 to go. And we'd managed to get two tents in on one occasion. And I'd set up a lab in Edinburgh,
00:53:57 in an apartment up there through a friend. I'd said to the chemist who was coming up to Edinburgh by
00:54:02 train, I was already up there, I said, "Make sure you're not followed. Whatever you do,
00:54:08 make sure that the other Colombian doesn't know where you're going or what you're doing."
00:54:13 And beyond us, the Colombian gets followed up with a friend of his from London to Edinburgh
00:54:20 to the flat. So we started working on the process or processing and extraction of the cocaine.
00:54:29 And I didn't really want to be around the lab too much whilst they were working.
00:54:33 So I left them to it, went off out to Edinburgh. And after a while, I got a phone call from the
00:54:41 guy and he said, "I think you should come back because I think the place is under surveillance
00:54:45 by the police." I said, "I can get you out, both of you now, but we have to leave, leave everything,
00:54:51 leave all the drugs, leave the chemicals, just leave everything and let's just go right now
00:54:57 and let's get the hell out of here." And they were like, "No, we're not sure. We don't want
00:55:03 to lose the drugs, blah, blah, blah." So I said, "Well, that's up to you, but I'm gone."
00:55:09 I go across the road, get in the taxi, go off to a hotel for the night, ring up the next morning or
00:55:16 start trying to ring them. All the phones are off. The walkie-talkies that we were using in
00:55:21 close proximity, they were all dead. So I was like, "Well, that's not a good sign." So I get
00:55:27 in a taxi, I walk back down to Leith and the big, what had been a big old Georgian
00:55:36 front door, because it was a Georgian flat, had been smashed through. Apparently it took
00:55:42 them half an hour to get through it because it was so solid. And it was really big news in Scotland
00:55:47 because it was one of the first cocaine laboratories that they'd found. So I disappeared
00:55:52 down the stairs as quick as I could, drove out of Scotland, back down south and knew that it would
00:56:00 probably take the forensics, the results to come back maybe three to four weeks, something like
00:56:05 that. Got a Turkish friend who was part of the Turkish mafia to smuggle me out of Britain in the
00:56:10 boot of his Mercedes car, because he was smuggling alcohol and cigarettes in by the container load
00:56:17 as well as possibly people. So I phoned him up and I said, "Look, can you get me out of Britain?"
00:56:23 And he said, "Yeah, just jump in the boot of the Mercedes. I'll put some bags over you and we'll
00:56:28 just get the Holberspeed, which is the quickest thing over from Dover to Calais. You go on your
00:56:36 merry way." So he brought an English car over for me after a week or so, so I could get about.
00:56:43 And I just disappeared down to my dad's house to sort of wait things out. Decided to do one
00:56:51 last job and it was literally going to be the last job. And the plan had been that I was going
00:56:56 to rob this guy, this informant, get him to organise the tent, the bag. Obviously not let on
00:57:04 that I knew what was going on. Get a mule out from England, send the mule bag, but he wasn't going to
00:57:11 get the bag. I was going to send it elsewhere, get one of my friends to extract it, keep the money.
00:57:16 Well, obviously he sent the money to me and I was going to disappear to Thailand for
00:57:21 six months to a year and let the heat die down, hopefully.
00:57:25 So I hadn't seen my girlfriend at this point for months. So I said to her, "Why don't you come out
00:57:33 to Ecuador as well?" Spent two weeks with me. I'm doing some business there. She didn't really know
00:57:37 what. So decided to do this one last job and fly out to Quito with KLM. Flew out to Quito and as I
00:57:49 landed in Quito, it was a set of stairs down to passport control. And at the bottom of those
00:57:57 stairs was a woman with a clipboard. And on that clipboard, she quite obviously had my picture
00:58:02 because she looked at the clipboard, looked at me, did a double take,
00:58:06 disappeared. And when I got to the passport control desk, there she was with a senior officer
00:58:12 saying, "Oh, what are you doing here? Where are you going? Why?" And I hadn't been stopped at all
00:58:23 going in or out of Ecuador on any occasion before that. I just gave them all the normal, "Oh,
00:58:30 my holiday," blah, blah, blah. But really, I should have taken the wall in and as soon as I
00:58:36 got into Ecuador, just disappeared. But I didn't because I thought, "Well, we've done it before.
00:58:42 I'm not carrying the bag back and Mule's carrying it back." And the next day, my girlfriend turns up
00:58:48 from England. So I go and meet her at the airport, get back to the hotel, go out for dinner at the
00:58:54 hotel lobby. We finished dinner, a couple of drinks, and go to the reception. And I'd kind of
00:59:03 befriended one of the receptionists by now. And she said to me, she looked me straight in the eye,
00:59:11 she said, "Have you been to the Galapagos Islands this time?" And I said, "No." And I'd never been
00:59:18 on any trip before. And she said, "Well, you really should go now then." And obviously,
00:59:23 she was trying to warn me that the police were there. And having had a few drinks and whatnot,
00:59:29 I was like, didn't really take it what she was saying. My girlfriend was like, "I don't want
00:59:33 to go to the room." Didn't take on board what she was trying to tell me. Got in the elevator up to
00:59:43 the fifth floor or top floor, wherever it was, down the corridor, key in the door. And as soon
00:59:47 as the key went in the door, all hell broke loose. Ecuadorian police, plain clothes, bulletproof vest
00:59:55 on, machine guns out, handguns out, balaclavas on. We go into the hotel room, they go straight to the
01:00:01 wardrobe, pull out the tent, go, "Oh, look what we found." I immediately tried to bribe them.
01:00:07 So one of them spoke English. So I said, "Look, is there any other way that we could do this?"
01:00:11 I said, "I'll give you 25 or 30,000 euros in cash right now. You could keep the bag. So you've got
01:00:21 a couple of cases of coke in there, whatever. And if you give me a phone, I'll get you another 50
01:00:27 to 100,000 here within the hour. But you just have to let us go and pretend you didn't see us."
01:00:34 And then he said to me, "Oh, what do you think of me? I'll correct you. We're the Ecuadorian police
01:00:38 force." To which I laughed, to be honest. But I guess because of the British police being there,
01:00:45 the background, their hands were tied and they couldn't really do anything.
01:00:49 I got transferred into the men's prison, which was called Garcia Moreno, which was an old-style,
01:00:56 almost like a Victorian English prison. There was a wing, which was mainly for foreigners.
01:01:01 You could get anything you wanted in there. It was almost like a small town
01:01:06 contained within walls. The security was very lax. A lot of guards were very corrupt.
01:01:14 So you had cash in there. You could buy a cell for about $2,000. Ended up buying a cell after
01:01:22 six months going by, because like I said, I wasn't getting out in too much of a hurry.
01:01:28 Have it all rewired, have it retiled. I've got a TV in there, fridge, DVD, brand new beds.
01:01:36 Initially I didn't, because I started bribing the judges, bribing police, trying to get my way out
01:01:41 of there, trying to lower the sentence. Because the British police had asked for the maximum
01:01:46 sentence of 25 years. At that point, it would have meant serving 23 out of 25.
01:01:51 Every other weekend, you could have your girlfriend over to stay the night, if you owned a cell. So
01:01:57 you just kick out your cellmates. They slept in the gym. They got locked in the wing gym.
01:02:03 On that particular weekend, everybody would have a big party. There'd be loads of alcohol,
01:02:07 drugs, mainly cocaine in the prison, and weed. So there'd be a huge party. There were shops in the
01:02:15 prison. There were restaurants. There was a hardware shop. It really was like a small town.
01:02:20 During the daytime, you could go from one wing to the other. So you could go and see your friends
01:02:24 on the wings, if you paid the guard a bribe of a dollar, stuff like that. So very corrupt.
01:02:33 We actually set up a tour of the prison, and it became really popular. We'd have 15 to 20 tourists
01:02:39 come in every visit day, showing them around the prison. Sometimes there were gunfights when the
01:02:45 visitors were in there. So they would all get rushed out of the prison. But yeah, there were
01:02:53 firearms in there, machetes. Everybody had a machete. And when things got bad, they got bad
01:03:01 really quick. Hence the fact that a lot of us were armed with handguns. So after two years of
01:03:11 being in Quito, I can see that my case is sort of just sort of meandering on, not really going
01:03:19 anywhere. And my girlfriend's been released by this point, long gone back to Britain. So I'm
01:03:28 just left out there on my own, basically. Thinking of all these different ways of trying to escape,
01:03:33 so I've become friends with some Colombians. They talked about blowing the wall of the
01:03:38 exercise yard with an RPG, because they were FARC members of FARC. So that was one plan.
01:03:43 Another plan was a helicopter lift off the roof of the prison, but it was a little bit too
01:03:47 expensive. It was like 80 grand, 100 grand, something like that. Third was a tunnel.
01:03:54 Because the prison was so old and so many people have escaped out there using tunnels,
01:04:00 they said it's literally like a rabbit warren underneath this prison. They said if you open
01:04:06 up a hole and start digging a tunnel, you will come across at least two or three other tunnels
01:04:11 in there. Like I say, form friends with these Colombians, members of FARC, and decide to
01:04:19 try and escape, because we could see that the case is just going on and on and on. And
01:04:26 they've had enough of being in prison as well. So we buy the penultimate cell on B wing on the
01:04:35 ground floor on the right, which is virtually next door to the exterior wall to the prison.
01:04:40 I mean, the exterior wall was a joke to that prison. It was like maybe
01:04:45 one, maximum two concrete blocks thick, and that was it. You were free. We buy the penultimate cell,
01:04:51 a stage of fake party with loud music on the way, break the floor. So we smashed a hole in the floor,
01:05:00 dug out the concrete, made a cap, because you could get concrete and cement and stuff in there
01:05:07 if you wanted. So we made a cap to fit the hole and start digging this tunnel out of the prison.
01:05:14 And then Quito. But the guards got wind of the fact that I was planning some sort of fuga masiva,
01:05:20 as they call it in Spanish, massive escape. And after a little while on a visit there,
01:05:28 they basically came and collected me with a piece of 2x4 in their hands, a piece of wood.
01:05:35 I said, right, you're getting moved to Guayaquil, which is the big port city in the south of
01:05:41 Ecuador, very dangerous. I mean, this place was gigantic. I'd seen all sorts of terrible things
01:05:48 on the news about the prison in Guayaquil. At the time, it was either the fourth or the fifth
01:05:53 most dangerous prison in the whole of South America. The murder rate there was between five
01:05:58 and six a week, 80,000 prisoners split half and half between two gangs who were ward each other.
01:06:06 I ended up in the end with the Cubanos. The other end at the time, Los Rusos.
01:06:13 Everyday gang fights, I mean, gunfights, they had spotters on inmates on the roof of the prison,
01:06:22 on the wings, one on each corner of each wing. There, they had control of all the telephones.
01:06:28 You weren't allowed a mobile telephone in your possession. You had to use their mobile telephones.
01:06:33 So you had to pay them like a dollar a minute to phone abroad or 30 cents locally, I think it was.
01:06:41 They had like, again, a pyramid sort of organization where there were three brothers
01:06:47 at the top called the Los Cubanos, the Cubanos. And below that, on each wing, they had a boss on
01:06:54 each wing who collected like a tax off every inmate once a week on a Sunday of life between
01:07:04 five and ten dollars, which was paid back to the main bosses, or some of it was. And then they paid
01:07:12 the bribes to the guards, to the director of the prison, to let them carry on doing what they were
01:07:17 doing. Any foreigners that came into there were extorted for as much as they could get from you.
01:07:23 They would put a gun to your head, get you in a cell room or in a room and just say,
01:07:31 "Phone your family and get some money sent over to this person or that person by a Western Union
01:07:37 or MoneyGram." So a lot of families were going through a lot of hell, a lot of foreigners as well.
01:07:43 Into this mix of these two gangs at war with each other comes a third gang called the Choneros.
01:07:53 Who are now one of Ecuador's biggest gangs. And they end up on the wing that I'm on,
01:07:59 about 10 to 15 of them, including Jose Luis Zambrano, who was like the head of the,
01:08:05 he was the boss of the Choneros at the time. And I actually got on quite well with this bunch,
01:08:11 the Choneros, because they were better educated. They were nicer people, even though they're
01:08:16 contract killers, they were generally nicer people. It's just easier to get on with. At one
01:08:23 point they put me in charge of selling their cocaine on the wing for them. So I'm now the boss
01:08:31 of the cocaine on that wing, as well as having a boss on each wing. They had a boss for each drug
01:08:36 on each wing. So there was a boss of the cocaine, boss of the marijuana or weed, and a boss of the
01:08:42 crack or polvo, which is what they smoked. You could wander from wing to wing, but they would
01:08:49 lock you on your wing. You had to be back on your wing by 5pm. So they would lock you on your wing
01:08:54 at 5pm. Now, with this third gang, the Choneros coming into the prison, it destabilised the whole
01:09:01 dynamics of the prison and the power structure. So this gang, the Cubanos, didn't really like
01:09:10 the fact that there was this new boys on the block sort of thing. And they started to become
01:09:17 very powerful very quickly, the Choneros, because they were already an up-and-coming,
01:09:22 very powerful gang anyway. This gang, the Choneros, they were kind of used by politicians and people
01:09:28 to clean up other gangs and shoot opposition politician members. They were sort of hired
01:09:35 guns assassins. And at the time, Rafael Correa had just been elected, so things were getting
01:09:42 so dangerous in the prisons anyway, he had a whole new prison estate built. There was a massive
01:09:47 shootout one night in which I nearly got killed. A two-hour-long gun battle between the Choneros
01:09:54 and the Cubanos on the wing that I was on. At that time, the Sinaloa cartel was starting to
01:10:00 make inroads into Ecuador. They were already trafficking with some of the gangs, particularly
01:10:07 the Choneros. Zambrano manages to get all the gangs kind of working together, working with the
01:10:13 Sinaloa cartel. It's all going quite well. He then gets released. He's out six months, gets killed by
01:10:19 a Colombian hitman, shot dead in a cafe. Fito took over, started running the gang in the prison,
01:10:27 the Choneros. Now, in the meantime, as well as the Sinaloa cartel, you start getting the
01:10:32 new generation Julesco cartel start making inroads. So there's now a power struggle between
01:10:41 the Sinaloa and the new generation Julesco cartel over who controls the trafficking routes out of
01:10:49 Ecuador, particularly that port city Guayaquil. There's a lot of big mega labs producing tons and
01:10:58 tons of cocaine along the borders of both Colombia and Ecuador and Peru and Ecuador and, you know,
01:11:04 in the Amazon. And it's just huge business, but it's also led to huge instability in Ecuador and
01:11:12 mass killings. At the tail end of last year, there was some really bad prison massacres,
01:11:19 you know, in the fight between these gangs. I mean, just the most horrific, barbaric medieval
01:11:25 warfare you can believe. Just absolutely horrific, horrific stuff. The Cuban is kind of got wiped out.
01:11:34 Glad I wasn't there when it happened because I'd probably be dead by now.
01:11:40 So that all happened. And the authorities managed to get control of the situation again.
01:11:50 But in the meantime, there's been a new president elect called Daniel Loboa, listening to his
01:11:57 accent is educated in America because he sounds kind of Americanized, has declared war on the
01:12:02 gangs in Ecuador. And it's basically said that they're in a state of internal warfare. And
01:12:09 if you remember what happened in the Philippines when Duarte just basically declared war on the
01:12:16 drug gangs there, or drug users as well, and killed something like nearly 20,000 people,
01:12:21 I think it was. So I think that's kind of the way Ecuador is about to go. And that's going to lead
01:12:29 to a hell of a lot more deaths. The cocaine trade has been around for a hell of a long time. I mean,
01:12:35 the Dutch were some of the first to make it really popular. And it was legally sold, wasn't it? But
01:12:41 that was in what, the mid 1800s or something. It was going into drinks like Coca-Cola, hence the
01:12:47 name Coca-Cola. And obviously, it's become used for a multitude of anesthetics like Lidocaine,
01:12:57 Novocaine, Benzocaine. Anything that ended in cane has come from cocaine, basically,
01:13:04 pretty much. I think it was sort of semi-legal at that point, wasn't it? You could buy cocaine
01:13:08 from the pharmacist. You know, obviously, then it becomes prohibited. The cartels really came
01:13:14 to power when cocaine became super popular in America, really, was the beginning of it, I think.
01:13:22 The early 70s, I mean, you've got the Italian mafia starting to bring in cocaine into America.
01:13:28 I think through the 70s, really, mainly, with the Medellin and the Carly cartel being the two main
01:13:36 ones kicking it off, going up to Miami, boatloads going in. I mean, everybody's seen Scarface.
01:13:43 I mean, it's not that far from the truth. I think cocaine was certainly viewed as a glamorous drug,
01:13:51 particularly in the 70s and 80s and 90s, you know, pop stars and models and
01:13:56 people with a lot of money used cocaine because it was quite expensive back then
01:14:02 in a lot of places. As the market has become more and more saturated with greater and greater
01:14:08 volumes of cocaine being produced, the price has dropped. I mean, it goes up and down like
01:14:17 the stock market, but it depended on how much is available and what's happening.
01:14:22 You've got the internet, which is obviously quite a big base that can be used for selling drugs.
01:14:30 Postal services are a lot faster, courier services. All the mechanisms
01:14:36 involved with the cocaine trade are all getting faster and bigger.
01:14:44 So it's just ever expanding, really. In my opinion, the cocaine trade is bigger than it ever
01:14:50 was. From the days when I was trafficking cocaine, the cocaine in the way it was made using ether
01:14:58 and certain chemicals that are now very much prohibited, it was definitely of a higher quality
01:15:04 back then and a lot stronger. I think nowadays they're cutting it at source. I think overall,
01:15:13 the quality of cocaine has diminished. The volumes of cocaine have increased.
01:15:20 So I think it's either been cut... Well, it's partly to do with the chemicals
01:15:25 needed to manufacture it being harder to source. The volumes of chemicals you need are huge.
01:15:32 A lot of the chemicals in South America that were being previously used to make cocaine that were
01:15:39 the ideal chemicals to make it with became highly controlled. They're more controlled,
01:15:46 maybe less produced. But they got around that by finding similar chemicals of a similar nature
01:15:57 and just using something that was as close as. But of course, the end product is not the same.
01:16:06 It's slightly different with every different chemical that you change.
01:16:10 So I would say that overall, the quality of cocaine has gone down over the years. It's
01:16:18 definitely not as strong as it was. When you're talking about making tons of cocaine,
01:16:22 you're talking about if you're using ether for one kilo, I think it's between five and seven
01:16:28 liters of ether just to make one kilo of cocaine, let alone the sulfuric acid, the hydrochloric
01:16:36 acids you need, potassium permanganate, all the rest of the chemicals involved
01:16:40 that are becoming harder to get acetone. In countries where they're producing cocaine,
01:16:46 even being stopped with some of those chemicals will land you in prison because they know what
01:16:53 they're for or what they're likely to be for if you're being caught with them. So yeah, street
01:17:00 level, I would say that as cocaine has become more readily available, there's certainly more people
01:17:07 are using it. It's easier to get. The Albanians have had a massive influence in the cocaine market
01:17:15 in Britain. They now control a lot of the trade. They've become very efficient at the way they
01:17:20 deliver it. I mean, you can pick up the phone and then it's like getting it. In fact, you can get
01:17:26 cocaine quicker than you can get a pizza delivered. I think there's still quite a big cash business,
01:17:32 for sure, definitely. I think it always will be, obviously, illegal, but there's definitely
01:17:37 Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies have definitely become involved to a certain degree.
01:17:48 Bank to bank transfers, even things like using big multinational companies, say you've got somebody
01:17:57 on the inside, to make a transfer from one country to another. I think it's just still
01:18:03 quite a few of the old ways of money laundering, just setting up a business and cleaning it
01:18:08 through a business, through property, through high value goods, basically, watches, cars,
01:18:18 high value products that can be bought, or, I don't know, just all three correct bank officials
01:18:24 that will accept cash. I mean, there's various ways of cleaning up money.
01:18:29 If it's going in skirting boards, behind skirting boards, false floors.
01:18:36 Some of it, we were putting, we did have meter ways of getting it into,
01:18:44 cleaning it. We were able to buy whole properties with cash, through corrupt property dealers,
01:18:51 we could buy a house with cash. They would give us all the paperwork. Stocks and shares was a
01:18:58 good one I found. Slowly put money into a bank account and then buy a load of shares, and then
01:19:04 we could trade the, use the share certificates as collateral, artwork, antiques, buy them, sell
01:19:15 them again straight away, stuff like that, just to clean the money. As far as the war on drugs goes,
01:19:23 I would say it's unwinnable. And really, the only way to get a grip on things, a hold on things,
01:19:30 is to legalize it, manufacture it under license, tax it heavily, distribute it from controlled
01:19:38 distribution points, offset the ill effects on healthcare through taxation. I'm not sure there's
01:19:49 much that the government can do to stop cocaine being trafficked. I think it will always, I mean,
01:19:55 the legalization question is a tricky one because, I mean, you know, we've seen
01:19:59 certain drugs legalized in America and certain states, Canada. And in some respects it's worked,
01:20:08 in others it hasn't. The problem is that there are always going to be people that abuse drugs,
01:20:13 that don't just use drugs. The same as people abuse or use alcohol, or any drug,
01:20:24 you know, you could even say chocolate. You know, there's always got to be a problem element
01:20:30 with drugs. It's just having the best control over it that you can, and just trying to offset
01:20:37 and main, and keep a grip on the ill effects of it as much as you can. In a previous interview,
01:20:45 I mentioned that to some extent it's almost better for governments if drugs are illegal,
01:20:53 because it maintains, if you think about the amount of money that goes into the judiciary,
01:21:00 i.e. the police force, catching drug dealers, prosecuting them. You've got the prison service,
01:21:06 and you know, all the ancillary services that service prisons, like food, utilities,
01:21:14 just everything. I mean, it's huge business. Prison officers, jobs. I mean, you know, when you
01:21:21 start looking into how much it costs to keep people in prison per year, per prisoner, it's a
01:21:27 lot of money. It's just, it is big business here being illegal. It would be interesting to do the
01:21:35 maths and see how it would work out if it was legal and taxed, which would be more or less
01:21:46 profitable. And I bet you it would be less profitable if it was legal. I bet you any money.
01:21:53 So I was four years old, and I accidentally got fed a lump of hash cake by my mum, who,
01:22:00 unbeknownst to her, that they were at a party. My dad used to smoke hash. He was a builder,
01:22:06 so there was always hash around the house. Obviously, being a kid, I didn't realise what
01:22:10 was going on, didn't appreciate what was happening, but he was smoking it daily.
01:22:17 And we were at this particular party, and my mum fed me a lump of what I thought was
01:22:22 chocolate cake, and it was actually laced with a lot of hash. I got really stoned.
01:22:27 But then real involvement came after my parents got divorced when I was about 10.
01:22:32 My mum got together with one of my dad's friends who had two older sons, the oldest of which was
01:22:39 a well-known local DJ, and they were organising a lot of illegal raves at the time. This is early
01:22:46 90s. So obviously, I want to start going along, start tagging along. See, it's really easy to
01:22:54 sell drugs in these parties because the police aren't getting involved whatsoever. So I feel
01:22:59 quite safe, quite easy to do. Most of the people I'm selling to I know anyway. So it was an easy
01:23:05 way to generate money. So that was all the party stuff. And then the cocaine came a bit later when
01:23:11 I was at uni. So I met local dealers around Cardiff. They then started asking for much larger
01:23:17 amounts. The local dealer I'd been introduced to in my hometown didn't want to get involved,
01:23:23 so he introduced me to the next guy, the lad who was the key link to Brendan Ryan Wright,
01:23:31 who was bringing the coke in. I did pack it in, and I got out, started a painting and decorating
01:23:36 business because my dad was a builder. And he said, "Look, you can have all the painting and
01:23:42 decorating contracts on the back of the building work that I do, as long as the client agrees."
01:23:47 It was just hard work, which I wasn't used to. I was used to making 10, 20 grand in an hour,
01:23:55 flipping a few kilos of coke, and trying to adjust to earning, what, 600, 700 quid a week.
01:24:04 It was pretty difficult. I started dabbling with cocaine again at the weekends. I think that's
01:24:12 what it was, partly. A lot of friends kept bringing me up, saying, "Oh, do you want to
01:24:17 be involved in this? Can you get us that?" I kept getting hassled to become involved again,
01:24:22 and in the end, just gave up. Yeah, I mean, not playing my own trumpet, but I am reasonably
01:24:27 intelligent. I like politics and news quite a lot, so I follow trends. I follow the news. I've
01:24:34 always followed the stock market a little bit, particularly pharmaceuticals. I've always been
01:24:41 interested in that sort of side of life. I suppose growing up with it all around me,
01:24:48 it always interested me, all the sort of side of mysticism. I've loved history and archaeology, so
01:24:55 people have been taking mind-altering drugs ever since we were created, particularly on the
01:25:03 Ecuador thing. I always try to maintain control and not take too many of the drugs that we were
01:25:11 selling or I was selling, because, I mean, if you start getting out of control, things start going
01:25:18 wrong and you don't know what you're doing, you take too many risks. So, yeah, I tended to sort of
01:25:24 keep it fairly straight-ish. So, I was finally released in 2015 in Britain out of Wandsworth.
01:25:37 After being captured in Ecuador, I spent nine years and three months there, I think.
01:25:44 I did ten years, ten days in total, so, on that sentence. Already done about three, well,
01:25:52 I did, what, two and a half on the previous one. So, that's quite a big chunk of life.
01:25:58 If I could rewind time, I would probably not do it again. You know, if there'd been more money
01:26:09 around when I was a kid, I wouldn't have been inclined to become involved with drugs.
01:26:13 If I hadn't have been brought up around parents that were using drugs, I'd probably have been
01:26:20 less inclined to become involved with drugs, you know, if the whole illegal rape scene hadn't
01:26:26 happened. Just, there were just so many things in my life that led me to this point. I mean,
01:26:31 I wouldn't say I was very influential, I mean, three to five kilos of coke, to me, is not that
01:26:36 influential. I mean, I know underneath, when the police explain how many people were involved,
01:26:42 you know, how many people were taking those drugs we were bringing in,
01:26:45 that sort of made me sit back and think, a bit, and think, God, yeah, you know, we were
01:26:52 influencing quite a lot of people's lives. I mean, in my eyes, I'd never thought of myself
01:27:00 as being a gangster or a kingpin. You know, I see those as being people that are involved in
01:27:08 bringing in tons at a time, and, you know, in the overall picture, I was a minnow in a great big
01:27:16 ocean. Yeah, I don't know. Any kids thinking about getting involved, don't, because it will ruin your
01:27:25 life. It might seem appealing at the time, it might seem like a good idea, and an easy way to generate
01:27:33 money, but trust me, it's not an easy way to generate money. It's really difficult, and it's
01:27:38 really dangerous, and it will have life-changing consequences eventually. You'll either end up
01:27:46 dead in prison, or just ****. Sorry to use my French, but, yeah. My reflect back on my time
01:27:55 as a trafficker has been extremely hard work, stressful, caused a lot of trouble, not just for
01:28:04 me, but for a lot of people around me and my family. So, obviously, I learned to paint and
01:28:09 decorate when I was in prison at Gloucester, which was useful because it gave me a trade,
01:28:14 and I think they should do that a lot more in prisons these days. I know they've cut a lot of
01:28:19 those sorts of training courses, but I think a lot of people in prison in Britain today could do with
01:28:26 more of that, and that's what I do now. I'm painting and decorating. I hand-paint extremely
01:28:33 expensive hand-fitted kitchens, so if anybody needs one repainted, you can always look me up.
01:28:39 Yeah, I paint houses as well, paint anything, basically. I'm still trying to write the
01:28:49 prequel to the first book, Ellen Fiona, which is published by Ibrie Penguin.
01:28:53 I'm about a third to a halfway through that, but it's finding the time to do it.
01:28:59 The prequel is basically going to run from when I was arrested around the time I went into the
01:29:06 prison in Gloucester up until I get arrested in Ecuador, because there's some crazy stories that
01:29:14 I could tell you during that period living in Bristol and just getting up to all sorts of stuff,
01:29:20 car chases, gunfights, something quite funny, something like lock, stock and two smoking
01:29:26 barrels, if you can imagine that in Bristol. Banksy was just coming out when I was living
01:29:33 there. He was just starting off. I remember seeing some of his artwork sprayed up on derelict
01:29:39 buildings and people saying, "Oh, there's this new graffiti artist around. I wish I kept some
01:29:44 of his work. It'd be worth millions now." We could have avoided selling any drugs and just sold
01:29:51 Banksy's.
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