A FISHING boat supposedly heading out for a shark-fishing trip was, in reality, smuggling more than a ton of high-purity cocaine worth £100 million into the UK. The Lily Lola, intercepted by Border Force officers off the coast of Cornwall, had been used to retrieve drug parcels from the sea in a sophisticated smuggling operation.
Two men from west Wales, Jon Williams and Patrick Godfrey, were arrested after the vessel was boarded last September. Williams, who had purchased the boat just two months earlier for £140,000, was at the helm, while Godfrey was found sleeping on deck. The boat had sailed from Newquay to a designated drop-off point near the Isles of Scilly, where packages were floating in the water, believed to have been left by a South American cartel.
Law enforcement agencies had been tracking the Lily Lola for some time. Covert surveillance included listening devices and GPS trackers, allowing officers to monitor the crew’s movements and conversations. When the boat was seized and taken to Plymouth Royal Dockyard, officers discovered 49 bales of cocaine, though messages retrieved from the vessel’s Garmin device suggested they had failed to collect 19 additional parcels.
Investigators also found damning evidence on Godfrey’s phone, including a message instructing someone to “delete everything u see and not show anybody” and an internet search for “how long does it take a ship to leave Peru to UK.”
Both Williams, aged 46, of Windmill Terrace, Swansea, and Godfrey, 31, of Danygraig Road, Swansea, denied conspiring to smuggle cocaine but were convicted at Truro Crown Court following a trial. Two other men onboard, Michael John Paul Kelly, 45, from Manchester, and Jake Marchant, 27, of no fixed address, had already pleaded guilty to the offence. All four are due to be sentenced on May 8.
Following the convictions, NCA branch commander Derek Evans said: “This seizure has prevented a massive quantity of cocaine from flooding the streets of the UK and Europe. Organised criminals would have made vast profits from this smuggling operation, but thanks to the work of the NCA and Border Force, we have dismantled a key supply chain.”
The case highlights the lengths criminal gangs will go to in order to smuggle drugs into the country, with law enforcement agencies remaining vigilant against increasingly sophisticated trafficking methods.
