A luxury cruise liner’s bar steward attempted to smuggle more than £2m worth of cocaine into Britain after a Caribbean voyage was abandoned during the pandemic.
Serbian Milos Bigovic, 22, collected 28kg of cocaine during a previous stop-off in Columbia and stashed it in his cabin aboard the Marella Discovery 2.
But he was snared attempting to pass it overboard to two members of a British organised crime group who had pulled up alongside the ocean-going liner in a rubber dinghy.
Bigovic was working behind the bar during the Caribbean excursion when the sailing was abandoned in March 2020 and passengers had to disembark in Jamaica and fly home.
The cruise ship returned to UK waters empty except for her crew and the hidden drugs – which originally should have been dropped off in Europe.
In the early hours of 25 April 2020, whilst moored off the Isle of Wight, Bigovic dragged the huge holdall from his cabin to a portside deck, attached a rope to it and lowered the bag down.
The drugs were so heavy the rope completely burned the skin from Bigovic’s hand as he passed it to waiting Benn Bath, 36, and Joshua Paige, 31.
Bath, of Staplehurst, Kent, and Paige, of High Halstow, Kent, had sailed Bath’s own boat, the Chatham Albatross, from the River Medway in Kent into the English Channel, towing a dinghy.
But as the cocaine transfer happened a National Crime Agency operation involving Border Force officers pounced – prompting the gangsters to drop their drugs haul into the sea.
Bigovic, of Pozarevac, which is about 50 miles east of Belgrade, was arrested and admitted importing cocaine. He was jailed for 11 years in 2021.
But on Thursday at Winchester Crown Court, British home-grown crooks Bath and Paige were convicted of the same charge alongside fellow gangsters Christopher Mealey, 47, of Liverpool, and Paul Farrel, 44, of Bolton.
Though Bigovic, Bath and Paige were arrested straight after the drugs transfer, Mealey and Farrell were only arrested after a breakthrough in Operation Venetic – the NCA-led, UK response to the takedown of encrypted messaging platform EncroChat.
On 12 June 2020 EncroChat administrators alerted all users that they believed the crime-riddled platform had been compromised and users should power off their devices and throw them away.
The following morning Mealey was arrested at Folkestone as he tried to flee through the Channel Tunnel.
Farrell was arrested two days later.
Detectives who cracked their messages exposed their entire plan.
Mealey, Farrell and Bath were also convicted of conspiring to import 90kgs of cocaine in March 2020 smuggled inside a barge boat brought from Holland.
Farrell was jailed for 23 years, Mealey 22 years, Bath 18 years whilst Paige received eight years prison and West 14 years.
NCA operations manager Jules Harriman said: “The Venetic evidence in this case was a game changer and showed the extent of these men’s offences.
“This OCG clearly had international connections and was able to orchestrate crimes with accomplices abroad that damaged the UK.”
