WIREDGOV

The last member of an organised crime group who plotted to send 448 kilos of MDMA to Australia has been jailed for 23 years following an NCA investigation.

William Sartin, 63, joins co-conspirators Danny Brown, Stefan Baldauf, Peter Murray, Tony Borg, Leon Reilly and Philip Lawson – who were sentenced for their roles in 2022.

The individual at the heart of the plot, Brown, was identified by NCA investigators working on Operation Venetic, the UK-wide response to the infiltration and takedown of encrypted platform EncroChat.

Brown had sent an image of his pet, named "Bob", to co-conspirator Baldauf. The dog's tag had his partner's phone number on it.

The group hid the drugs within the arm of an industrial digger, and organised an online auction to make the excavator's arrival in Australia look legitimate. There, the MDMA would have sold for far more than the UK street price.

The digger, a Doosan DX420, cost 75,000 Euros. It was first stored in an industrial unit in Grays, Essex – having been transported from Leeds by Reilly's company "Mizen Equipment". That industrial unit was under the control of Sartin, who communicated with the others under the Encrochat handles "haplessbadger" and "urbanmallet".

There, it was worked on by Tony Borg and Philip Lawson – the latter of whom designed the hide and arranged for a welder to cut open an arm of the digger and seal the Class A drugs behind a lead lining.

Murray was responsible for sourcing and transporting the drugs.

Mizen Equipment paid a haulage firm £1,600 to move the digger to Southampton Docks. It took almost three months to arrive in Brisbane, Australia.

Australian Border Force officers x-rayed the digger, removed the drugs and sealed the arm before letting it move onto its intended destination – an auction house in Brisbane – under surveillance.

The digger was moved to a small site west of Sydney in May 2020 and Brown forwarded the Australian OCG a diagram, drawn by Lawson, which showed exactly where the drugs were hidden and how the digger should be opened.

On 18 May, two men from the Australian OCG spent two days trying to find the drugs before realising something was wrong.

EncroChat messages show the six UK men launched their own investigation and held meetings to find out who had stolen the drugs. These were attended by Sartin.

The group were arrested by NCA officers between mid-2020 and early 2021.

Sartin had multiple previous convictions. In 2000, he was involved in an attempt to smuggle 480kg of cannabis into the UK from the Netherlands, hidden amongst scrap metal. In 2011, he was convicted of conspiracy to cheat the public revenue, having conspired to smuggle tobacco and tobacco shredding machinery into the UK.

Sartin was convicted in September and sentenced to 23 years imprisonment yesterday (3 December) at Kingston Crown Court.

Chris Hill, NCA Branch Commander, said: "Sartin played a vital role in this conspiracy; it was in his industrial unit that the excavator was concealed, cut open, and filled with MDMA.

"All of these men thought that they were safe on EncroChat, but NCA officers painstakingly combed through every single message they sent to build evidence against them.

"Our work with partners abroad, shown here through our collaboration with the Australian Federal Police, protects the public from the dangers of Class A drugs, which destroy lives and communities here in the UK and across the world."