One of the UK's most wanted men has been jailed for 20 years after masterminding a plot to smuggle nearly a tonne of cocaine from South America to Scotland hidden in a cargo of bananas.
Jamie Stevenson, known as "Iceman", pleaded guilty to directing the importation of the drug, which was seized by Border Force teams at Dover in September 2020.
The shipment from Ecuador - which contained 952 blocks of cocaine within 119 foil packages - was addressed to a Glasgow fruit merchant.
So eight years behind bars unless they can build more prisons in that time. Doesn't seem so disastrous if he managed to squirrel away enough money beyond the reach of proceeds of crime recovery.
Poor showing by Border Force if you ask me, I'd have redirected the shipment to Glasgow Zoo. Iceman gets iced by his friends and we get ourselves one hell of a show at the sloth exhibit.
It's a bit more complicated than that. Hubris has little to do with it. Anybody can get caught smuggling nowadays.
The main international drug shipping routes are under close scrutiny by police forces worldwide, and most cargo gets inspected at its port of entry, especially if it raises some known red flags, the most important one of them being the country of origin. By shipping the cocaine from Ecuador, they obviously tried to obfuscate its real origin which was likely Colombia or Peru, the two main cocaine producing countries in Latin America. But Ecuador is by now well known as a hub, so they'll keep an eye on any cargo coming from there as well.
