Cocaine trafficking: how sailors claim to have been trapped by a British

For Daniel Guerra, an aspiring Brazilian sailor eager to travel the world, the job offer was a dream come true.

A British yacht owner was looking for two deckhands to help him take his boat across the Atlantic from Brazil, one of the largest ocean crossings.

There would be no salary, but all expenses would be paid and, most importantly, Mr. Guerra would gain some of the sailing experience he needs to become a ship captain.

“My dream was to become a captain and go to work in Europe,” recalls this 43-year-old man, who saw the ad on the website of an online recruitment agency.

“So I was very happy to know that my dream was starting to come true.

Things got even better when Mr Guerra and his colleague, Rodrigo Dantas, met their new British employer.

They had feared he was a snobbish yachtie or poseur Instagramer, who would make sure they knew who was boss.

But no. George Saul was a smiling and friendly character, who did not insist on formalities. According to him, sailors could even call him by his nickname, “Fox”.

“I used to work on some boats and the owners were old, very demanding, very rude and talked down to me,” adds Mr. Dantas, 32. “He was very cool, very friendly.

The Fox even passed the approval test of Mr. Dantas’s parents, who were concerned about their son taking such a long trip on a yacht owned by a complete stranger, and who asked to meet him themselves.

To use an old sailor’s expression, they liked the cut of her jib. They learned that Fox had brought the Rich Harvest to Brazil to renovate her and wanted a competent crew to take her back to Europe on his behalf.

Besides the newbies, Mr. Dantas and Mr. Guerra, there would be two other people, including a qualified captain.

I said, ‘Look, take care of my son,'” recalls João, Mr. Dantas’s father. He replied: “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of Rodrigo.”

Rodrigo Dantas’ parents weren’t the only ones who wanted to make sure everything was okay aboard the Rich Harvest.

Before leaving Brazil, local police spent around six hours searching the yacht for drugs, with the help of a sniffer dog.

They didn’t find what they were looking for, and the sailors thought it was just a routine check.

They had heard stories about cocaine on the boats and now knew they had nothing to fear.

“When you travel through an airport, your bags go through the X-ray machine,” Dantas explains. “So I figured it was an international trip and they were going to come and inspect the boat.

These concerns were far from their minds when they finally embarked on their epic journey on August 4, 2017, the Brazilian coast slowly receding behind them.

They were accompanied by an additional crew member, Daniel Dantas (no relation to Rodrigo Dantas), and the yacht’s new captain, Frenchman Olivier Thomas, 56, who replaced a previous British captain whose skills in navigation had not proven up to the task.

Fox, meanwhile, flew back to Europe two days earlier.

“It was a beautiful day, perfect weather, sunshine,” recalled Mr. Guerra, who posted a thank you message to Fox on his Facebook page.

The message reads: “I am truly grateful, Fox, for this chance to learn and for our bond that has made me stronger. Thanks mate.”

After two weeks of sailing, the sailboat experienced engine problems which forced it to stop in Cape Verde, an archipelago located off the coast of West Africa.

Once again, MM. Guerra and Dantas found reasons to look on the bright side. The islands are a paradise for tourists and Fox said he will send them money so they can have fun while repairs are made at a local marina.

When other police came to search the boat, Mr. Guerra was not worried.

“They didn’t find anything in Brazil,” he said to himself. “They won’t find anything in Cape Verde either.”

Cape Verdean police were even more thorough than their Brazilian counterparts, using specialized cutting equipment to cut open the yacht’s innards.

Hidden under false floorboards, they discovered almost 1.2 tonnes of cocaine, worth an estimated £100 million ($134 million) if sold on the streets of Europe.

“I felt like all my freedom was gone,” Mr. Guerra said. “I was furious, I couldn’t accept what was happening. I had really been fooled. »

In March 2018, the crew went on trial in Cape Verde, protesting their innocence.

They had never heard of Rich Harvest or its owner before responding to the job posting, they insisted.

They were, however, sentenced to 10 years in prison each, in what was hailed as one of the island’s biggest busts.

But if the loot is impressive, the man whom the Brazilian police considered to be the biggest catch has escaped.

She believes the mastermind of the operation is Fox, whose yacht was first brought to her attention by a tip from the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA).

Brazilian police believe he was the head of the drug smuggling operation.

In August 2018, Fox was arrested in Italy, where Brazilian police initiated extradition proceedings against him. She wanted him sent back to Brazil to answer the allegations against him.

But the documents arrived too late and he was released, much to the frustration of Brazilian police inspector Andre Gonçalves.

He feared that Fox had then gone underground.

“We felt that after all our work we would never get to the bottom of this,” he told the BBC. “It was very, very frustrating.

Mr Gonçalves said his team had kept Fox and the yacht under surveillance in Brazil. They believe the boat’s “renovations” were partly intended to equip it with secret compartments, and that the drugs were loaded onto the boat before the sailors were hired.

Mr. Gonçalves admits that, at first, he assumed that the four sailors were also involved.

“If someone is on a boat full of drugs, you think they have to have something to do with it,” he said.

But when he searched their backgrounds, he found nothing connecting them to the drug world or Fox.

“The further I went, the more I found no connection… but at the same time, it strengthened the evidence we had against Fox.

The sailors’ pleas of innocence also received support from an unlikely source: fellow Briton Robert Delbos, a man believed to have been Fox’s accomplice.

Mr Delbos, 71, is a drug trafficker sentenced to 12 years in prison in 1988 for trying to smuggle 1.5 tonnes of cannabis into the UK.

Before the Rich Harvest left Brazil, Mr. Gonçalves’ team observed Mr. Delbos overseeing the first stages of the yacht’s renovation.

They initially suspected that he was arranging secret compartments and successfully initiated extradition proceedings against him around the same time as those against Fox.

Mr. Delbos spent months in a Brazilian supermax prison awaiting trial, but he too said the drugs were planted without his knowledge.

He was acquitted after the judge ruled that it was not possible to prove that he was aware of the smuggling plan.

In an interview with the BBC, he claimed that even drug traffickers had a code of ethics and that Fox had violated it by using innocent sailors as mules instead of hiring professional couriers.

“This is completely unacceptable. I mean, we don’t do that,” he said.

“He was a stupid and greedy man. Instead of paying the crew properly and equipping himself with a team of professional and bloodthirsty smugglers, he hired four innocent people.”

As doubts about the sailors’ guilt grew, their families launched a campaign on their behalf, which became a cause celebre in Brazil.

In 2019, their conviction in Cape Verde was overturned and they were allowed to return home.

As for Fox, he was never tried and returned to the United Kingdom.

The 41-year-old lives in Norwich, eastern England, where he grew up, attended the local university and was an accomplished amateur sailor, sailing off the neighboring Norfolk coast.

Today he resides in the Norwich suburbs and runs a property company.

He is a member of a local business networking association, and last March he posted photos on his social media of himself with James Wright, then the city’s mayor.

There is no indication that Mr. Wright was aware of the accusations against Mr. Fox.

The BBC caught up with Mr Fox as he arrived at one of his networking association’s weekly business breakfasts, at a hotel in Norwich.

He declined to comment on the Rich Harvest and the ordeals endured by the sailors.

Asked about allegations that he was a drug dealer, he replied: “I’m not.”

An NCA spokesperson said if Brazilian police still wanted to pursue the case, they would have to file an extradition request.

Brazil’s justice ministry said it does not comment on individual cases.

Meanwhile, Rodrigo Dantas and Daniel Guerra try to rebuild their lives in Brazil after their dreams of becoming yacht captains have been abandoned.

Mr Dantas claims he struggled to find work in the sailing industry when he returned home, with some employers assuming he was guilty after all.

Mr. Guerra’s ambitions for sailing around the world remained locked in Cape Verde.

He says he lost his ability to trust people, which is essential to meeting the challenges of a long sailing trip.

Even today, he wonders who Fox really was, this “cool” Brit to whom he felt so grateful, and whose job announcement turned his life upside down.

He says he would “really like to see justice done” but doesn’t want to meet Fox again.

“If I meet him, I won’t be the one talking. It will be another Daniel. All the bad feelings I had in prison will come back up and I won’t be able to be a civilized person.