It was sloppy mistakes that tipped police in Australia to the latest wild tale of logistics gone awry.
Sloppiness and — dare I say — incompetence. Recent cartel shenanigans moving product across oceans to one of its
hottest markets reveals an evolution in the global movement of bulk cocaine, as well as the high seas
drama from cops trying to stop it. It turns out, demand for blow in the land down under is so great
cartels no longer need bother lining up orders before shipping it out by the ton. They are now,
according to Australian cops, just yeeting it around the world and dumping it in the ocean for buyers
to come and retrieve it once it's there. It's an underworld twist on 'If you build it they will come.'
The Mob Reporter here with dramatic news from the front lines of the cat
and mouse drug war, featuring cops on two continents versus clumsy
narcos, lousy sailors, and sellers with an endless supply. Let me tell you about it.
Police in Australia say their case began in May with an intelligence tip that a bulk cargo
carrier from South America was heading to the West Australian coast smuggling a large load of cocaine.
This has become a major way to move coke in bulk to markets in Europe and Australia; thousands of
kilos in waterproof wrapping, held aloft by flotation buoys and life vests, are slipped
into the sea where it bob's about until a buyer is told where the coke float is. They then collect it
on their own in small yachts and fishing boats. Now as Australian police were monitoring incoming
marine traffic looking for suspect cargo ships there happened to be an emergency rescue call from
a small boat in distress — a 10-meter long cabin cruiser named No Fixed Address. With three men on
board it was floundering 13 miles off Australia's West Coast, near Rottnest Island. This was on May 24,
2023. When police learned the three men had bought the boat with cash just hours before setting out
to sea, with only themselves as the makeshift inexperienced crew, it was a substantial red flag.
Police suspect they were trying to connect with the expected incoming cargo ship, so officers
frantically looked for likely ships in the area at the same time the cabin cruiser set sail. One stood
out: the St. Pinot. It left South America a month before from Argentina; from the San Lorenzo port, in
fact, a large Inland anchorage on the Paraná River. That's a large waterway that cuts through Brazil,
Paraguay, and Argentina, second only to the mighty Amazon in terms of length on the continent. Half
of the country's soybean products are shipped from San Lorenzo. The port, however, is also notorious as
an outlet for Colombian drug cartels, from where they sneak their own product to go along for the
ride on the cargo ships. The day after the rescue of the three men on the cabin cruiser, Australian
Border Force officers intercepted the St. Pinot, while she was still at sea. They boarded her for
a search and to interview her crew. The ship was forced to dock at the Port of Freemantle
and later moved south to Kwinana, where there is a naval base. While a berth there, a Royal
Australian Navy dive team retrieved 28 packages wrapped in blue plastic that had been submerged in
a water-filled ballast tank on the Pinot. When it was drained, the tank coughed up one more. Each bale,
police said, contained multiple one kilo bricks of white powder that tested positive for cocaine. Its
weight was estimated to be 800 kilos. After that find, the three men who had earlier been rescued
from sea were suddenly once again in hot water. Two were arrested in Perth on May 31st, and the
third was arrested at Sydney airport as he tried to board a flight out of Australia. The guy at the
airport was a 21-year-old Lithuanian who arrived in Australia the week before. Police say the trio
bought the boat in cash and almost immediately set out to sea, allegedly to collect cocaine from the
Pinot. They had no idea what to do with the boat, police said, and ran into trouble on the ocean
Police are still investigating the cargo ship and members of the crew and they're still searching
the ship. Investigators, though, revealed something fascinating about this case. Until recently, South
American and Mexican cartels typically waited for specific orders from customers before arranging
shipment. Now, police said, demand is so strong and supply so plentiful, large loads are shipped to key
regions of demand on spec. It's then just dropped into the ocean and when buyers inevitably appear,
they are given coordinates where they can go and find it. It's like a food truck showing
up in a neighborhood at lunchtime and tweeting its location for hungry office workers to come
running. And run they do. That could explain a lot, including spectacular discoveries recently
of cocaine islands: large fields of floating bales and oceans and seas near major market countries.
The buyers of the fated boat No Fixed Address were apparently not frightened off by startling
revelations of a large international caper that had played out recently in the same waters. It was
kept secret for months until revealed in March. It involved nearly a billion dollars worth of coke —
that's Australian dollars, at retail prices. 2.4 tons of coke was seized by U.S authorities off
the coast of South America in November. Officials say it was from a Mexican cartel and en route to
Australia. That's enough to feed Australia's total cocaine consumption for half a year.
Despite the impressive find, nobody breathed a word of it. The U.S. DEA realized buyers in
Australia would have no idea the load had been nabbed. Working together, the DEA, U.S. Homeland
Security Investigations, and Western Australia police made intricate replicas of the illicit
load using plaster of Paris in place of cocaine inside identical packaging. As nine men gathered
in Western Australia, including one arriving from the United States, half the look-alike
load was secretly dropped by police into the Indian Ocean, at night, that's what you see here.
It was pushed overboard about 40 nautical miles off the coast of Perth in December, held afloat
by red flotation bouys. This was the centerpiece of an elaborate police sting. Police secretly watched
the coke float from above using drones, waiting to see who came to fetch it. Officers saw two boats
shuttling back and forth through rough seas over three days, and then, once finding it, hauling the
fake drugs aboard. The smaller boat, called Cool Runnings, developed steering trouble and washed
aground near Moore River, north of Perth, with the replica loot on board. You can see tactical
officers rushing along the beach towards the grounded boat, where two men were arrested.
That's these two here.
Not knowing any better, the crew of the second boat, a larger one
called the Catalina, went to rescue the Cool Runnings, towing it back out to sea,
where they did a ship-to-ship transfer of the cargo before the smaller boat sank.
It's not known when they realized they'd been set up, but nine men were arrested in
a series of raids on hotels and a marina in and around Perth on New Year's Eve.
Meanwhile, other narcos in Australia still believed the second half of the replica load — another 1.2
tons — was still available on the market. It was delivered to a warehouse where a man from New
South Wales arrived and carted off 200 kilos of it. He was arrested after he left, on January 9.
Four days later, two more were arrested after a highway traffic stop, a man and a woman. They were
found with more than two million dollars in cash in their vehicle linked to the syndicate, police
said. The American, 39, was arrested in a hotel room in Perth and has already pleaded guilty. So has the
27-year-old Sydney man who picked up the 200 kilos in the warehouse. The operation was revealed just
before these court appearances, so there's quite a story still left to be told. Please share a link to
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