Customs officers in England claimed today to have wrecked the most successful cocaine smuggling gang ever to target the country, jailing a number of people after an international investigation was triggered by a drug find in Cork.
The operation started in 1996 when nearly 600 kilos of cocaine were discovered on an Irish vessel, the Sea Mist, when it was searched by Irish customs officials in Cobh, Co Cork.
Details of 15 members of the gang, already jailed for a total of more than 200 years, could not be publicised for legal reasons until Hilton John Van Staden, a South African, was jailed for nine years in England today for his part in the smuggling ring.
The gang's reach stretched from Australia to the United States and it had a complex supply network also embracing Brazil, the Caribbean, Colombia, Mexico and Panama.
Gang members used light aircraft to parachute cocaine in drops of up to 600 kilograms at a time to boats, and speedboats made other deliveries at sea.
Ocean-going yachts and other vessels in the Caribbean, Venezuela and South Africa were used to ship the drugs across the Atlantic.
The gang used satellite technology to organise yacht-to-yacht transfers of the shipments off southwest England, meaning the transatlantic vessels, which are generally checked, could dock "clean", while the unchecked domestic boats ferried in the drugs.
Between 1996 and 1998, the enterprise, thought to have started as early as 1992, imported three tonnes of cocaine with a street value conservatively estimated at £300 million sterling (€480 million).
A senior British customs officer, speaking anonymously, said the investigation had been "without parallel in UK drugs law enforcement." He said the group had been "probably the most sophisticated and successful global trafficking organisation ever to target the UK."
However, despite the arrests, the alleged mastermind and financier, Englishman Mr Brian Brendan Wright, escaped.
Mr Wright, 54, is thought to have fled to northern Cyprus, which does not have an extradition treaty with Britain.