A lobster pot of troubles

IT WAS the end of the line for the lobster-pot cocaine plot on June 2nd. Five men were sentenced at Kingston Crown Court to a total of 104 years for attempting to smuggle 255 kg (562 pounds) of high-purity cocaine into Britain. The drugs (pictured) had been dumped into the sea in May 2010 from the MSC Oriane, a container ship which was en route from Brazil to Antwerp.

Britain’s security agencies are cock-a-hoop after stopping £53m ($87m) worth of cocaine from reaching the country. But the size and sophistication of the foiled plot suggests that the authorities should be careful about celebrating their achievement. The Balkan-based organised-crime groups behind it have gone global, and now pose a bigger threat than ever to European law enforcement.

The drugs were dropped into the English Channel from the Oriane. Meanwhile four men sailed out in the fishing boat Galwad-Y-Mor to Freshwater Bay, off the coast of the Isle of Wight, to recover them. Once they had them, according to Britain’s Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA), they tied them in holdalls, “along a rope in a manner closely resembling that of submerged lobster pots, with a buoy and a makeshift anchor tied to either end to aid its later recovery by the gang.”

They then made for Yarmouth. The idea was that that trip would look as though they were laying the lobster pots. The next day they could sail out again as if they were just going to collect their “lobsters”.

In fact they were being tracked by a British Border Agency cutter. They were arrested the same day and the drugs were recovered. One of them was a Montenegrin called Zoran Dresic, who initially gave them a false passport under the name of Veljko Protic. “There is a regional group link,” says a spokesman for SOCA, “and obviously he was the representative.” The authorities have evidence that Mr Dresic was working directly for a Balkan mob. He may well have been the British end of a major gang busted in Brazil last month, in an operation that saw the arrest of 17 members, including Goran Nesic-Ciga, a notorious fugitive and kingpin.

“Serbian and Montenegrin criminals are emerging as a major threat in terms of the world wide trafficking of cocaine,” says Ken Gallagher, SOCA’s head of operations for Europe. The first Balkan crime group to emerge on the global stage was the Saric gang. Its ranks were filled with people known in the trade as “no-necks”—bull-necked, shaven-headed types, many of whom learned discipline and ruthlessness in the Balkan wars of the 1990s. However, as one intelligence source who follows the Balkans closely says, “just because one is a no-neck, does not mean one has no brain.” Unlike its predecessors, who were mostly middlemen, the Saric mob bought the drugs themselves in South America. Among other techniques, they are believed to have used low-paid Montenegrin merchant seamen to ship them across the Atlantic.

Today’s Balkan traffickers hide their cargo in everything from containers to sardine cans, crossing the Atlantic either directly or on circuitous routes via west Africa. Last year 550 kg of cocaine believed to belong to the Nesic gang were found hidden in tins of fruit. And in May three Montenegrin sailors and a Kosovar were arrested and accused of trying to smuggle 42 kg of cocaine on a ship called the Risan, named after a Montenegrin port. It was allegedly owned by a Montenegrin company but flew the flag of Monaco. At one point, oddly, it sailed under a North Korean flag and was registered there in Wonsan, as you can see from this picture taken in Risan.

Albanian and Kosovar criminal groups have also expanded internationally, using their historic and family ties with Turkey, Germany and central Europe. In Britain, according to Mr Gallagher, Albanians are moving away from their longtime roles as brothel keepers and pimps and migrating into drugs. “If the Serbs are Premier League, the Albanians are in the [lower] Championship,” he says. “They are not as well organised, but they have a bigger and wider diaspora.”

As Balkan mobsters have gone international, so have efforts to catch them. The Saric gang was shattered after an operation involving Serbian intelligence, America’s Drug Enforcement Agency, SOCA and police in Uruguay and Argentina, with collaboration from Italy, Slovenia and Brazil. Three members are now on trial in Serbia following the seizure of 2,174 kg of cocaine in Uruguay in 2009. At the end of April police in the Republika Srpska, the Serb part of Bosnia and Herzegovina, arrested Zoran Copic, a businessman alleged to have been a key Saric money launderer.

According to Mr Gallagher, fighting Balkan gangs is a collaborative continent-wide operation, in which “everyone works to their strengths.” In Croatia the French and Italians have better connections than the British do, and the French run a regional organised crime liaison network there. Britain focuses on the Albanians and Serbia. The latter’s security agencies, he says, “have done a substantial amount.” Much of the co-operation western European officials have been securing of late can be attributed to the Balkan governments’ desire to join the EU. However, as this article chronicling changes in the region’s crime scene makes clear, the line between criminal, businessman and politician is often far too blurry for comfort.

(Photo credit: SOCA)