Crime boss jailed for £100m plot to smuggle cocaine in banana boxes

A Scottish gangster who masterminded a plot to smuggle cocaine worth £100m from South America in boxes of bananas has been jailed for 20 years.

Jamie ‘Iceman’ Stevenson admitted directing the importation of the drug, which was seized by Border Force teams at Dover in September 2020.

The plot was uncovered after an encrypted messaging platform used by criminals was infiltrated by French police.

Stevenson had also planned to flood Scotland with millions of Etizolam tablets, also known as street valium, from a factory in Kent.

The 59-year-old, from Rutherglen in South Lanarkshire, was a leading figure at the top level of organised crime in Scotland.

He was once described as Scotland’s answer to Tony Soprano, the mafia boss portrayed in television series The Sopranos. In 2022, he featured on a list of the UK’s 12 wanted men.

Last month Stevenson admitted his role in producing and supplying Etizolam and smuggling a tonne of cocaine - which police estimated would have been worth £100m on the streets – into the UK.

Five other men - David Bilsland, 68; Paul Bowes, 53; Gerard Carbin, 45; Ryan McPhee, 34; and Lloyd Cross, 32 - also pled guilty to serious organised crime and drug offences.

Lewis Connor, 27, was jailed for three years in July after the investigation found encrypted phone messages which proved he had set fire to properties and vehicles across Central Scotland.

The drugs operation, which spanned the UK, Spain, Ecuador and Abu Dhabi, had been targeted by police in an inquiry which was named Operation Pepperoni.

Officers had been investigating reports that Bilsland, a Glasgow fruit merchant, had links with organised crime. He was then seen meeting Stevenson in a hotel in Spain.

At about the same time, officers had learned that Stevenson was involved in setting up a factory in Kent which was producing millions of Etizolam tablets.

The factory was raided in June 2020 and Stevenson was arrested in Glasgow.

He was taken to England by police before being released on bail. He then fled the UK, spending almost two years on the run before being arrested in the Netherlands.

The National Crime Agency said Stevenson continued to direct the importation of cocaine into the UK from abroad.

Prosecutor Alex Prentice KC earlier told the court that the messages on the encrypted phone network Encrochat showed Stevenson discussing plans to import kilo blocks of cocaine with Cross, as well as the use of Bilsland provide “an appearance of legitimacy”.

A tonne of the drug was seized in a raid by Border Force teams at Dover in September 2020.

They found 119 packages of cocaine concealed in boxes of bananas from Ecuador, which were destined for Glasgow. It took officers three days to recover the drugs from the shipment.

Defence counsel Thomas Ross KC told the court Stevenson had known exactly what he was doing and had made “a series of bad decisions” for which the motivation was obvious.

“He takes ownership of all those decisions and doesn’t seek to cast blame in anybody else’s direction,” he said.