This is the moment armed police arrested a group of drug dealers after they uncovered £210m of cocaine in banana boxes in Tottenham - the UK’s largest haul of the drugs at the time.
Officers burst into an industrial estate in Tottenham in February 2021 after 41 pallets of bananas were uncovered on a cargo ship from Turbo, Colombia, by Border Force officers at Portsmouth International Port.
Police removed the cocaine and followed the intercepted bananas until they reached their final destination - Agro Food Ltd at the Crispin Industrial Estate.
The site was eventually broken into by police after two covert officers posing as lorry drivers delivered the boxes to a warehouse in north London, having already switched the drugs for more bananas.
Footage from the raid shows armed officers using a circular saw to rip open a door before they burst into the building and arrest three members of the drug smuggling gang.
Crime boss Petko Zhutev, 39, was in charge of the record-breaking drug delivery in February 2021.
Investigators had uncovered that Zhutev, 39, had taken over as the director of the food company in December 2020.
Although it was previously a real business, the dealer had acquired it solely to use as a front.
On Tuesday, he was jailed at the Old Bailey for 27 years alongside four others, after Judge Rebecca Trowler KC said he played a “leading role” in the importation.
Erik Muci, 45, of Haynes Road, Hornchurch, and Olsi Ebeja, 40, of Malta Street, Islington, were found guilty of importation at the conclusion of the retrial and were sentenced to 33 years’ and 17 years’ imprisonment respectively.
Muci, described by a judge as a “key organiser”, was jailed for 26 years for the importation and given a further consecutive sentence of seven years’ imprisonment for the supply of class A drugs, after police recovered 33kg of cocaine from a property on Caledonian Road, north London.
Judge Trowler said Muci, who had worked as a plumber since arriving in the UK as a refugee from Albania, was “organising the buying and selling of cocaine on a commercial scale”.
Judge Trowler said Ebeja, who was born in Kosovo and had worked as a waiter and a minicab driver since arriving in the UK in 1999, carried out an “operational function” in the enterprise, including as a driver.
Bruno Kuci, 32, who was born in Albania and came to the UK in December 2020, and Gjergji Diko, 34, of west Beckton, were arrested with Zhutev.
Kuci, described as a “trusted member of the operation”, was jailed for 21 years and Diko, who also moved to the UK from Albania and had worked as a mechanic, for 18 years.
Sentencing them on Tuesday, Judge Trowler said the importation was “plainly the work of an organised crime group with international elements”, adding the group had Bulgarian and Albanian elements.
Ms Trowler added: “The extremely large quantities of cocaine involved and the organisation required to bring such amounts into the UK from Colombia demonstrated beyond doubt that this enterprise was sophisticated in its planning and well resourced.”
The court had heard how port officials uncovered four pallets containing 2,330 blocks of the class A drug weighing 2.3 tonnes amid a consignment of 41 pallets of bananas from Colombia on Valentine’s Day 2021.
Four days later, two undercover officers posing as lorry drivers delivered the boxes to the Tottenham warehouse.
Zhutev was in charge when two lorries delivered the pallets of bananas, having secured the manpower to unpack, repackage and distribute the drugs hidden among the fruit, it was alleged.
Around two hours after the delivery on February 18, officers entered the warehouse and arrested three of the gang members.
Numbered pallets in which the drugs were transported had been identified and moved to the first floor where the process of searching them had started.
A revolver containing six live cartridges was recovered from a ceiling girder above the boxes.The drugs had been found with different branded stamps on them, which corresponded to particular organised crime groups that were going to sell them on the streets of London and the wider country.
Empty banana boxes had been strewn over the floor of the unit, in an attempt to find the drugs and move them from the site.
The gang had also constructed dozens of cardboard boxes which they had intended to pack the drugs into.
Officers also found nine empty suitcases which were to be used to fill with cash generated from drugs sales.
John Coles, head of specialist operations at the NCA, said the sentences represented the “culmination of a thorough investigation”.
Mr Coles added: “By intercepting this huge haul of cocaine, which was one of the largest ever of its kind in the UK, we stopped it from reaching UK communities and protected the public from the scourge of class A drugs and street violence associated with it.”
Gemma Burns, a senior crown prosecutor at the CPS, said investigators “foiled the gang’s banana box scheme” and stopped “dangerous drugs from reaching our streets”.
Ms Burns added: “A banana import business was used as a front to smuggle well over two thousand kilograms of cocaine into the UK; representing international drug trafficking on an industrial scale.
“The significant sentences given to the gang mean they will be off our streets for a long time.
“These sentences send a clear message to criminals intent on trying to flood the UK with drugs that we will not rest until you are convicted and behind bars.”
The CPS said it will now commence confiscation proceedings in order to reclaim the proceeds of the crimes.
