A former drug trafficker claims that he once earned so much money from flogging gear that it took a whole month to count up their ill-gotten gains. Here they are discussing the huge sums of money and drugs that they used to work with.
Obviously, the two drugs salesmen that spoke on LAD TV’s interview are reformed characters nowadays, but they’ve got some stories to tell about their time in the lucrative business.
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Stephen Mee and Andrew Pritchard gave a wide-ranging interview about their former careers, as well as the serious hard cases that they used to deal with in the Americas during those years.
We’re talking cartels here, for the avoidance of doubt. Not exactly people you want to get on the wrong side of.
Anyway, the business is a simple one, even though the risks involved are high.
You head across the Atlantic Ocean, buy up a load of cocaine at a wholesale price, then somehow manage to get it back across into the UK where it can be sold for a hugely marked up price, leaving those who take the risk of getting it into the country counting their cash for weeks on end.
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Of course, this whole thing leaves out the many people who are hurt by the international drugs trade, as well as those who are exploited at every single step of the way.
Anyway, talking about the profits to be made, Pritchard said: “With the cocaine, it became a different thing because it was a question of huge amounts of money and quicker, because we could buy cocaine relatively cheap.
Going through Colombia and places like that you could by paste at $1,000 dollars a [kilogram].
“You could get it very very cheap and then [get a] great mark-up in Panama and places like that.
“We just landed down to Guyana, where it was like £2,000 a kilo, that was loaded, put onto a container and whole-sold here at £25,000 a kilo, so the mark-ups were big, [as well as] the speed of selling it.
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“We could sell cocaine – I remember getting a container dropped here once, you know there was 300 kilos on it and it was sold in 24 hours.
“It was insane.
“The money counting was the biggest problem.
“When you used to go and get yourself tens of millions of pounds in, counting it took bloody well literally a month to count the money, and that’s with multiple counting machines.”
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When asked how much they’d turn around it a day, Mee said: “Some days for me it was millions in cash.
“I remember one occasion we dropped off £5m in the boot of a car to some Colombians on a Friday, they came back on the Monday morning and dropped us some other stuff off in another car, then come back Monday morning and asked us where the money was.
“They’d been driving about Amsterdam all weekend with £5m in the boot and they didn’t even know it was there.”
If you’re interested in reading the whole story about the pair’s drug dealing past, you can watch it on LAD TV below.
Topics: Drugs, Crime, True Crime
Tom Wood