Four men have been jailed for a combined 71 and a half years after police foiled an audacious plot to smuggle cocaine worth more than £20 million into Britain concealed in frozen fish bound for Billingsgate Market.
Samuel Tokeley, 57, from Alicante, and Nicholas Shilling, 63, from Dubai, were each sentenced to 22 years at Snaresbrook Crown Court on Friday, September 25, after being convicted of conspiracy to import Class A drugs. Scott Richards, 51, from Wickford, was jailed for 14 and a half years, while Scott Unwin, 52, from Dagenham, received 13 years.
The court heard the gang planned to hide nearly 600kg of cocaine among legitimate consignments of frozen fish shipped from South America to a fish trader operating out of the famous east London market.
But the drugs never arrived. Detectives from the Metropolitan Police cracked the gang’s encrypted EncroChat handsets, laying bare the conspiracy before a single shipment reached British shores. Officers codenamed the investigation the “Fish Conspiracy”.
The inquiry also exposed separate schemes to import industrial quantities of ketamine.
The case follows a string of major drugs sentences in the capital, including a county lines dealer jailed for almost 13 years after a public Wi-Fi blunder gave him away.
Detective Chief Inspector Dean Grafton, from the Met’s specialist crime command, said: “This was a highly sophisticated criminal operation involving a level of planning and coordination rarely seen outside of major organised crime networks. The criminals used an encrypted communications platform to try to evade law enforcement, but their efforts were in vain.”
The Met said the probe was carried out with the National Crime Agency and international law enforcement partners.
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