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A drug smuggler who took part in an audacious attempt to bring almost £1m of ecstasy, cocaine and cannabis into Jersey using a chartered yacht has been found guilty of similar crimes in Australia.
Scott Felix Jones will be sentenced by West Australia’s Supreme Court next month for his role in a bungled attempt to land £42m-worth of cocaine, ecstasy, and crystal meth into the country in September 2019.
He was found guilty, along with a number of accomplices, by a jury in April.
Jones was one of a three-man landing party, tasked with sailing a RIB to meet a yacht called Zero, which had sailed more that 4,000 miles from Madagascar to South Africa and onto the remote Abrolhos Islands, west of Geraldton in WA.
The yacht was carrying 900 kg of illegal drugs, destined for the streets of Australia.
Pictured: The Abrolhos Islands is a chain of more than 100 islands about 50 miles west of Geraldton in Western Australia.
But the attempt was beset by calamity, including an inadvertent pocket dial which recorded a conversation about the drugs, both the RIB and yacht running aground, and a giant seal which blocked an escape route after two of the smugglers had woken it up.
The trial in Perth also revealed the central role of another British man, who also had a key part to play in the Jersey smuggling attempt, which took place less than three months before the Australian one.
John Alexander Roy was arrested by Jersey police and was sentenced to 12 years in prison by the Royal Court in September 2020.
Pictured: John Roy was sentenced to 12 years in prison by the Royal Court in September 2020.
But immediately before his arrest, knowing that the Jersey importation had failed, Roy was coordinating the Australian operation – which similarly involved landing a large quantity of Class A drugs from a chartered yacht.
The Australian trial heard evidence that the two men on the yacht, Frenchman Antoine Dicenta and Brit Graham Palmer, had been involved in a number of text conversations with Roy, a qualified yacht skipper.
In the early hours of 2 September 2019, a day before the yacht arrived of the remote islands, the following text exchange was intercepted:
State prosecutors told the Perth court that ‘girls’ referred to the drugs on board.
As Dicenta and Palmer started to get into difficulty off the Abrolhos Islands, the following exchange was recorded:
Zero ran aground and the pair were forced to abandon the yacht, taking with the drugs with them. In another mishap, the RIB with Jones, American Jason Lassiter and Australian Angus Jackson on board hit a reef on another island.
They remained stuck there until they could be helped by local fishermen the next day.
Earlier in the year, Jones had also had a role in the Jersey smuggling attempt. In April 2019, he had travelled from London to Jersey.
Jersey police and customs officers searched his hotel room while he was out and found £12,000 in cash in a plastic bag in its safe.
Jones also met with one of the leaders of the Jersey attempt, Jon Hughes, who was jailed for 14 years and three months by the Royal Court in September 2020.
Knowing the money was a part of a bigger jigsaw, the Jersey officers left the money in situ and Jones returned to London the next day.
Pictured: John Roy was already in prison in Jersey when Western Australian Police described his as the "kingpin" of the Abrolhos operation.
Jones returned to Jersey in June 2019 and met Hughes again in a restaurant and returned to London the following day.
However, he was not involved with the actual importation attempt, which involved a yacht sailing from the south coast of England to St. Catherine, where it was intercepted by the authorities.
Former Central Market jeweller and election candidate Darius Pearce was also involved and has been jailed for his role in laundering money for the Jersey operation.
Meanwhile, Roy had also travelled to Jersey in April 2019 and police and customs officers searched his hotel room, finding £7,000 in the safe. Like Jones, the money was photographed but not seized.
Roy took the money when he returned to London. That June, he chartered the yacht, Loxley B, from Hamble Point Marina but he did not sail it across the Channel.
Roy was found in England and arrested in connection with the Jersey operation on 4 September 2019, the very day that the bungled Australian attempt 9,000 miles away was reaching its calamitous conclusion.
Australian authorities have described Roy – who is serving his sentence at HMP La Moye – as the ‘kingpin’ of the Abrolhos Islands attempt.
During the case in Jersey, it was revealed that Roy had served seven years of a 14-year sentence given to him in 1998 for his involvement in an attempt to smuggle eight tonnes of cannabis, worth AUS$64m (£35m) into Queensland using a yacht two years earlier.
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