Cocaine suspect: I was an informant in £17m drugs in pineapples shipment
Tony Brown, the former head of security at Lord Derby’s Knowsley estate, and his brother Adrian, a retired police officer, are accused of setting up a fruit importation company as a smokescreen to ship in 107kg of the Class A drug from South America.
Bundles of cocaine were uncovered among pallets of fruit ordered in by the Browns’ Knowsley-based company, Oska Catering Liverpool Ltd, in January, 2011. Tony Brown told Ipswich Crown Court that he knew criminals wanted to use the company as a front to smuggle the high- purity drug. He claimed to a jury that he believed he was being treated as an informant by Merseyside Police and thereby be immune from prosecution.
Brown told the jurors he had been an informant for Merseyside Police since 1994 and had provided information on murders and drugs offences on a “continuous” basis. He agreed that he associated with “significant villains . . . engaged in serious drugs, gangsterism, serious shootings and sometimes killings”.
He was arrested with his brother after 205 five-hundred gram packs of 62% purity cocaine were found in the pineapple shipment. Leon Mitchell, 44, from London, and Paul Lovelock, 52, from Woking, were convicted in December last year of their roles in the plot. Stellica “Steven” Caslaganu, 45, a Romanian “fixer” based in Costa Rica, had earlier pleaded guilty to the conspiracy.
Source: liverpoolecho.co.uk
