Cocaine Cowboys by Nicola Tallant

Author:Nicola Tallant
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bonnier Publishing Fiction

Months before Katy French died, a 58-year-old bricklayer was found floating off the West Cork coast next to 65 bales of cocaine worth €440 million. Englishman Martin Wanden, who had an address in South Africa, where he had worked in construction, was picked up by a lifeboat crew after they were alerted to a rigid inflatable boat (RIB) which had got into trouble. The case would become one of the most infamous catastrophes for a drug gang in history when it emerged that the RIB had been loaded with 1.5 tonnes of cocaine from a catamaran named Lucky Day 30 miles off the Cork coast, but when one of its petrol engines was mistakenly filled with diesel, the RIB had floundered and sunk in unseasonably rough July waters. Wanden would later tell a court he had been left to die in the Atlantic by others he had tried to save. It was a farmer who had first raised the alarm when he found an exhausted man in wet clothes at his door begging him not to call the police. The man was later identified as Gerard Hagan.

Out on Dunlough Bay the farmer could see another man on a RIB in heavy seas. Among those picked up by police were Michael Daly, an ex-drugs squad officer and his brother Joe, who insisted he was only in West Cork on a summer holiday and had nothing to do with the drugs; his brother Michael blamed him for getting them mixed up in the plot, saying he had only arrived to deliver a powerboat. Police killer Perry Wharrie, who was 58 years old and out on licence from jail, claimed that he had nothing to do with the drugs and was in West Cork on an arts holiday in the weeks before the cocaine was due to be landed on the coastline. The product had come directly from the Medellín area of Colombia, had a 75 per cent purity, and had been picked up off the Venezuelan coast on the Lucky Day and then sailed across the Atlantic from Barbados.

The incident proved that drug barons hadn’t abandoned Ireland’s coast as a route into Europe, and a year later, an even bigger haul bound for the UK came undone when it hit rough seas off Cork. A Costa criminal, 61-year-old John Brooks, who’d previously escaped jail on a jet ski, was the brains behind the Dances with Wolves plot to deliver one and a half tonnes of coke from South America to Liverpool. Police had been tracking the yacht as it made its way across the Atlantic before moving in when it got into difficulty 200 kilometres off the Irish coast in early 2008. Brooks, who’d lived a luxury life in Marbella, went into hiding while the crew, Philip Doo, 53, Christopher Wiggins, 42, and David Mufford, 44, were picked up and brought before the Irish courts. Each would later admit to possession with intent to supply, and all three were jailed for 10

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