THREE ENGLISHMEN will be sentenced today for their part in €440 million drugs smuggling operation off the west Cork coast after they were convicted yesterday at the end of the biggest drugs trial in the history of the State.
Martin Wanden (45), Perry Wharrie (48) and Joe Daly (41) will be sentenced at 11.30am by Judge Seán Ó Donnabháin, following their conviction yesterday afternoon by a jury of nine men and two women at Cork Circuit Criminal Court.
The jury, which began its deliberations on Monday morning, spent about 7½ hours considering the evidence before returning yesterday at 3.12pm with unanimous verdicts, finding each of the three accused guilty of three charges.
The men were charged after they were caught following a bungled drugs smuggling operation which saw some 62 bales of cocaine end up in the sea on July 2nd, 2007, when a rigid inflatable boat (Rib) that the gang was using stalled after someone put diesel in its petrol engines.
The gang had collected the drugs from a catamaran, the Lucky Day, which had crossed the Atlantic from Barbados. They had intended bringing the drugs ashore at Dunmanus Bay but after the engines cut out, they ended up in Dunlough Bay instead.
There, in Force 5 winds and three-metre swells, the Rib capsized throwing Gerard Hagan and Martin Wanden into the sea along with the drugs.
Hagan made it ashore to raise the alarm, and Wanden was lucky to be plucked alive from the sea by Castletownbere Lifeboat.
Two others, Perry Wharrie and Joe Daly, were spotted on the cliffs at Dunlough Bay but fled on foot when coastguard personnel arrived.
They were arrested two days later, exhausted and dishevelled near Schull following a major Garda search.
The discovery and recovery of the drugs - totalling some 1,550 kilograms - by the customs and gardaí set in train a major international investigation with detectives travelling to the United Kingdom, Spain and South Africa as they began piecing together the details of the smuggling operation.
Gardaí believe that up to 10 people travelled from the UK to west Cork, some of them months in advance of the incident, to set up the logistical support for the drugs drop and, although only three were caught in west Cork, two others have since been caught in the UK.
These include Joe Daly's older brother Michael, a former detective sergeant in the drugs squad of the London Metropolitan Police. Yesterday Det Chief Supt Tony Quilter of the National Drugs Unit predicted others would also be brought before the courts in connection with the seizure.
"Gardaí working in association with our law-enforcement partners here and abroad are intent on pursuing this vigorously and bringing all parties to justice. It is our aim that they are going to be brought to justice either here or in other jurisdictions," he said.