Crime World
Episode 1356: How €42m of cocaine travelled from Brazil to the Shannon Estuary
21 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What was the cocaine smuggling plot involving the Shannon Estuary?
And I mean, and with the MV Royal guys, including Gary Monks, it was put to the judge with each of the defendants by the different counsel that they pleaded guilty at the earliest moment they could. We're talking about a trial with 114, 120 witnesses, would have gone on for months. So they're making the point, like, you know, this has to be worth something in terms of mitigation.
And it always is rewarded. It's always taken into account.
I'm Nicola Tallent, and this is Crime World, a podcast about criminals, drugs and the sins of the underworld. If you like this podcast and want to learn more about crime, go to our new website, www.crimeworld.com, for stories, extras and podcast subscriber specials.
A plot to import 42 million euro worth of cocaine into Ireland through the Shannon Estuary was undone when Gardaí arrested seven men, but not before the drugs were landed successfully and disappeared into the criminal underworld. Today I'm talking to Eamon Dillon about the daring journey from Brazil's Amazon to Ireland's biggest river and those who were nabbed in the process.
You're listening to Crime World, a podcast from crimeworld.com. So Eamon, we're going to talk today about a very intriguing foiled, well, foiled for some, but the actual cargo managed to make it, a drug plot that started really only coming up to Christmas of last year. And we have seen the seven men that were arrested in connection with it have pleaded and we've
been to their sentence hearings so we've heard their mitigating circumstances and why they got involved. So start with this ship that is
loading up a cargo in brazil to head for limerick so yeah this is the mv royal which is a 200 meter long maltese flagship so it's a it's a bulk carrier it's actually it's quite big um i'd say anyone going out to it would see it from a long way off no doubt um so that was that was important the amazon um and it was taking on something like 40 000 tons of bauxite which is the ore that's used to manufacture aluminium and that was heading to the factory in oganesh in in county limerick
All of that was headed or was the boat going?
That's where the boat was going and presumably it was going to dock there and offload whatever amount, whether it was all of it. I imagine most of it was destined for there. And so they loaded up, basically there was three of the Philippine nationals crew who were on board. Like one of them we know was, his wages was a thousand euro a month.
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Chapter 2: How did the MV Royal facilitate the drug transport from Brazil?
So this is... So basically the boat was going to be following them in darkness, I guess. This is on kind of early morning of January the 12th. So, I mean, it had taken, I suppose, from December 27th to January 12th to get across the Atlantic. So while this is going on, you're getting the crew on board, the MV Royal, they're getting instructions from somebody who's referred to as Immer Boss,
and had a Finnish SIM card and came to be based in Dubai. And then the guys who are now in Ireland awaiting to do the collection, they've been directed by a person called Albert using his Argentinian SIM card. And there's also another person called Daniel Green. Now, it's not a real name that was also involved in directing these guys. On the phones. On the phones, telling them where to be.
Like on January the 9th, There's coordinates of the MV Royal has been sent to one of the landing crews, one of their phones. So, I mean, what happened, I suppose this week we had one of those guys, his sentence hearing was on Monday this week, whereas the others, all the sentence hearing, all the mitigation was heard just before Christmas in December. So he was the last one to go.
So we got to hear a bit about them as well. So Gary Monks, he's 41-year-old. He's a former British Army soldier. He served eight years in the British Army, honorable discharge, and then went on to become a military contractor. So he was working in Iraq and Afghanistan for quite some time, like from 2008 to 2020 or something like that.
So he had a long career there and obviously earning decent money. He had been recruited with a promise of €30,000 for doing this, and it was going to be possibly... you know, there might be more in it if this went well.
And while evidence was given in relation to him, we also heard that he had post-traumatic stress disorder and some psychiatric problems brought on by some of what he saw when he was working in these regions, including at one point there was a car bomb went off in front of him and some of his colleagues were killed along with some local people. And that seemed to affect him greatly.
And it kind of pushed him on this kind of, I suppose, not a slow descent, but it pushed him on a descent where he was abusing drink and drugs as well. From what, 2020 onwards? Yeah, well, he wasn't able to go back to work because it was heard in court that he didn't really realise that he was suffering from this.
I mean, it was actually referred to that he's known in the prison as the man who screams in his sleep at night. So I don't think he's faking it if he's kind of already known in the prison system as suffering from severe PTSD
And his life kind of derails, we're told, in 2020 after working for a long period of time on Good Money in these regions. It wasn't mentioned, but would COVID have had anything to do with that, with his work? Would he have been, you know, out of work?
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Chapter 3: Who were the crew members involved in the drug smuggling operation?
And that was reflected in as well in the seventh guy. I can't really pronounce his name properly, Mihan Koprovica, who is a 46-year-old Serbian living in the UK. He's a married man with two boys, seven and 15, and he also had a clean criminal record as well and a strong work history.
His wife is an accountant, I think, and gets a job in the UK and they become British citizens. Yeah, yeah. They're very settled. No explanation as regards why he needed to make the quick... No, presumably, yeah.
It's all down to the money. And I mean, like we know, we've heard that, you know, the crew members on board that the MV Royal were getting close to 140,000, that Gary Monks was... Euro. Yeah, well, the equivalent of 140,000 euros, Philippine pesos, some that they were promised. I was thinking it was 100... €138,558 is the exact conversion. It's a lot of money. It is, yeah.
One of them had already been paid €80,000 of that and another being paid €7,000 of that. This is all part of the mitigation that we heard.
And I suppose it kind of speaks to the motivation, but it's also, you know, again, you know, it just shows you as well, like the sheer organizational ability of like this crime group to put together, you know, a plot like this with so many various moving parts across various jurisdictions and to be able to recruit people, you know, to prey on the people with exactly the right weakness, but enough skills to possibly carry it off.
And you did make the point that, you know, You know, it was a drug plot that was foiled, but I'd suggest it wasn't that just because seven of, we don't know how many people were involved, but I'm sure it was probably plus 30 people were involved. So the fact that seven out of that amount for 44 million, possibly more cocaine to get that successfully landed into Ireland and spirited away.
And to the drug gang, totally dispensable workers. it's a complete success. You know, it's a total success. Even if they have to, you know, send, you know, a grand a month to these guys' wives and girlfriends or whatever to keep everyone quiet. And would they if they're honourable?
Because you see, I thought what was interesting was and the evidence given was that There wasn't a sense of having to keep them quiet because they described how they were working in cell structures, the landing cell. Now, one of those landing cells, which included the guys we're just talking about, monks, et cetera, they were caught.
But there was clearly other landing cells and the cells didn't know anything about one another. and the people working within the cells didn't know each other either. So they were kind of strangers put together. So if you do get caught, you only know what you are supposed to have done. I mean, it was a classic.
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Chapter 4: What motivations drove the crew to participate in the cocaine smuggling?
And there's quite a number. Yeah, that was the whole kind of... I suppose they're Bosnian Serbs and they specialized in recruiting mariners because so many of those people had...
gone to work for you know the big cargo ships yeah and so they had an in there and they'd hit up these people when they came home to visit and they more than often get an offer they can't refuse they'd have to get they'd either take the money or face retribution and and in some cases the money was quite good you know you're talking six figure sums a million euro i think was one of them for one of the top guys i mean they had people at a high level on that particular boat
And I've no doubt, like with everything, it's better to have somebody willing than somebody under threat because, you know, when it comes to these arrests and I mean, these people are expected to stay quiet. I don't honestly think any of us could expect really any of these people who have families out there to start identifying higher up members of violent cartels who will carry out
you know, threats or retributions to their families. These people are going to be locked up for a period of time. We'll talk about that in a moment, what the likelihood of their sentencing is going to be. But before we do that, this was the third sort of big shipment. Now, this one got in and we've no idea how many times this same route was practiced before it was blown, essentially.
So these drugs landed somewhere in Ireland, we imagine, and were redistributed. 42 million euro worth of cocaine is probably not just for the Irish market. It's probably, once it's landed, it's broken up and it's transported in as many different ways.
And when it's landed, that's the point that law enforcement are really chasing their tails because they're not going to seize the big cargo products. they're going to have to follow various trucks or Jeeps or whatever it is that's moving them. But this one is a third one of these big shipments that are kind of come to our notice with the Gardaí over a short period of time.
The first one being the MV Matthew, which was a very successful operation by the Gardaí and the Army Ranger Wing. And it was... It was on foot of intelligence coming in from various different countries and presumably Europol or what's the maritime intelligence service. So in that case, the MV Matthew was tracked and the army rangers ultimately, the ship behaved bizarrely.
There was all sorts of things going on with the captain and people were losing their nerve and there was definitely instructions coming from Dubai at that stage as to what to do. And in actual fact, the instructions were, because the Irish Gardaí had copped that this ship was containing cocaine, it was run like hell. Do not give up the cargo. Just get out of Irish waters.
There was wrong instructions given that Irish could only police to a certain, you know, if they could get it offshore. Exactly. So that was the MV Matthew and we've gone over that quite a bit. But there was another one.
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Chapter 5: How did the drug gang organize the operation across multiple jurisdictions?
And obviously they're getting, you know, they're getting well paid. I mean, we know that Gary Monks was being offered 30,000 euro. So, I mean, some of these guys could be being offered more of that or even a percentage of what's landed.
It's a gamble though, isn't it? I mean, if you're caught and obviously these guys have been caught. We talk about sentencing because these will be sentenced towards the end of March. But you look back on other cases like this. I mean, I'm going back a good while when I talk about the lucky day, but it was a similar kind of a plot. In actual fact, 10 times the value of the drugs.
And of course, it was... One of the earlier that we know of plots to go out to meet a boat, a catamaran at sea to transfer the drugs to a RIB and a series of mishaps occurred which ended up, they put the wrong fuel into the engine of the RIB. and the rib with all the cocaine on it essentially sank and the cocaine was floating around Dunlop Bay.
Now, in that case, there was a number of men that were arrested. One of them, a guy called Jared Hagan, pleaded guilty. And of course, the plea of guilty is important because it saves, it's seen as saving the courts the cost of a trial. It's also seen as a sign of essentially admission and somewhat remorse. And Gerard Hagen got 10 years. And I think the others, you might recall some of them.
Yeah, Perry Hoare from Essex. He got 30 years. Joe Daly from Kent got 25. And I remember some of them were appealed and upheld as far as I remember.
And there's the other guy who only got out recently. Martin Wandon?
Martin Wandon, yeah, as well. I mean, they were serious. These guys were pretty serious, our criminal organisation. One of them was an ex... An ex-met officer, yeah.
But they went to trial, so they didn't admit their guilt at all and they went to trial and the evidence was heard, etc. They were found guilty, so they got those very hefty sentences at the time. Yeah. And it was a big, what was it, a ton and a half of cocaine? A huge amount. Ten times what was on this MV Royal.
So now you have each of these individuals has pleaded guilty and they have put forward their circumstances, really, to explain why they, you know, they took up this role. More recent cases similar, you're seeing 8 to 12 years for these sentences.
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