Cocaine Smuggler gets 30 years

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International cocaine smuggler jailed for 30 years

Staff and agencies
Tuesday April 3, 2007
Guardian Unlimited

An undated picture of Brian Wright released in 2002 by HM Customs and Excise. Photograph: PA

The drugs baron Brian Wright, who ran the most successful global cocaine trafficking network ever discovered in the UK, was today jailed for 30 years.
As boss of the Wright organisation, he oversaw the shipment by luxury yacht of tonnes of cocaine worth hundreds of millions of pounds from South America. His underground contacts nicknamed him the Milkman, because he always delivered.
Wright, 60, was found guilty at Woolwich crown court yesterday of conspiracy to evade prohibition on the importation of a controlled drug and conspiracy to supply drugs.

Judge Peter Moss said he had taken Wright's age and health into account, and gave him 30 years on each of the two counts, to run concurrently. He told Wright: "You were a master criminal: manipulative, influential and powerful.
"I accept that you will be a very much older man when you are entitled to be released. I accept too ... the possibility that you may not live that long."
The Milkman's sentencing marks the end of an "unprecedented" 11-year British Customs investigation into the drugs gang.

It began in September 1996, when a yacht named the Sea Mist was discovered off course in Cork, Ireland, carrying 599kg of cocaine with an estimated street value of £80m hidden in the dumb waiter. Customs later learned that another yacht, Casita, had sailed from the Caribbean to the UK earlier that summer with a 600kg load of cocaine, also destined for the Wright organisation.

Over the next two years, four more boatloads of the class-A drug were smuggled ashore under the control of Wright's gang, Customs officers said.
In 1997, the organisation imported another load on the yacht Moonstreak. An international arrest warrant has been issued for the captain, Gary Boshoff, who remains at large. In February 1999 officers seized 472kg of cocaine from a lock-up garage in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, and from a farm in Laleham, Surrey.

It is believed the drugs there formed part of consignments brought over in 1998, the year the Wright organisation flooded the south coast of England with cocaine from the Caribbean.