Cocaine lord? No... just the innocent fall guy for drug barons
His eyes ablaze with indignation, the British aristocrat accused of a £4.5m drug smuggling operation gives his first talk to the MoS in his Nairobi home and declares...
AS ARMED police poured into his house in a suburb of Nairobi at 2am, Jack Marrian realised with mounting horror the danger he faced.
For years this scion of Scottish aristocracy had lived as a hardworking professional, his existence far removed from the scandal of Kenya’s ‘White Mischief’ set.
But suddenly the 31-year-old faced the prospect of being thrown into jail for life, accused of hiding cocaine worth millions of pounds in a shipment of sugar for the commodities trading company of which he is a director – a charge he vigorously denies in a world exclusive interview with The Mail on Sunday.
Speaking in detail for the first time since his arrest in July, Mr Marrian has described the nightmare of being the fall guy for a global criminal network which hid the drugs in his firm’s shipping containers – an assertion backed up by police sources in Europe and the US.
It is a nightmare in which he was strong-armed by police and taken away in the middle of the night for what he believed was questioning, only to be arrested and charged.
His protestations of innocence have fallen on deaf ears. Instead the Kenyan authorities have kept him in the most brutal conditions, in crowded cells where he has feared for his life, and where he has met prisoners lost for months and years in the justice system awaiting trial.
Now, out on bail before his trial next month, his future is perilous but he is quietly adamant he must be cleared of all charges. ‘Despite the prosecution taking swift action in charging me and taking me into custody, I know there is no question. I am innocent,’ he says. ‘There is no possibility of proving me guilty.’
Educated at Marlborough College and Bristol University, the sugar trader had experienced nothing to prepare him for a crowded concrete jail cell with no windows, where he dreaded the violence that might be dealt out by inmates.
His ordeal began at the end of July when Kenyan police and US Drug Enforcement Agency officers found £4.5million worth of cocaine packaged in dozens of poly thene-wrapped bricks hidden among bags of sugar destined for Mr Marrian’s company, Kenyan importer Mshale Commodities, a subsidiary of London-based ED&F Man for which he has worked for seven years.
The shipment to the port of Mombasa had originally come from Brazil and then docked in Valencia, where Spanish police provided the tip to their counterparts in Africa, which led to the high-profile bust on a Friday night in July.
At the time, Mr Marrian – whose ancestral home is Cawdor Castle in Scotland – was relaxing over dinner with friends when his phone began to ring repeatedly.
He said: ‘I heard the news of the bust. It was obviously something quite serious.’ But he had no cause to suspect he was about to be drawn into the police investigation, especially given that his firm retained a government-supervised inspector to check their shipments.
‘I always had full peace of mind,’ he said. ‘I had full confidence things would turn out all right.’
The next morning he put in calls to the shipping company. He was perplexed because the shipment in which the drugs were hidden had arrived earlier than scheduled.
‘I called to seek some clarity,’ he said. ‘It didn’t make sense. I was expecting sugar from them, but not that day. I didn’t expect those containers until the following week.’ Unknown to Mr Marrian, police believe the early delivery of the shipment is the reason the criminals had failed to unload their drugs in Valencia as they had planned to.
Mr Marrian had little enough concern that in the afternoon he went for a picnic an hour out of town at the edge of the breathtakingly beautiful Rift Valley.
But then just a few hours after he’d gone to bed that night he was woken up by the police.
He came down still in his underwear and found officer banging on the windows. ‘They were shouting, “If you don’t open the door we’ll break in”,’ he said. He asked that
A police cell wasw a horror I’d never even considered
only one officer come in, but suddenly police filled the house.
He said: ‘Everyone came in and milled around, not really searching. One guy grabbed my arm, twisted it and pushed me, running at a car.
‘We drove off with the other guys in hot pursuit.’
He was taken to a police station while frantically calling colleagues, friends and his parents to tell them what had happened.
He said: ‘When I was first taken to the police station, of course it was playing on my mind that I had no idea how things would progress. I worked out my best st plan was to co-operate, despite the fact I’d been ambushed in my home in the middle of the night.
‘So I was friendly and helpful and never imagined what would happen next.’
Mr Marrian’s phone e was taken away and d events took a very dif- ferent, darker turn.
He said: ‘As my law- yer looked on, unable to do anything for me, I was arrested and marched to the cells, a horror I’d never even considered. This is my first brush with the law in my whole life. I have never had so much as a speeding ticket, never been accused of anything, never seen a prison cell.’
He was raised in an affluent part of Nairobi from the age of four, the son of David Marrian – an internationally renowned painter – and Lady Emma Campbell, also an artist and the daughter of the sixth Earl of Cawdor.
Educated in Africa at a prep school with Tour de France winner Chris Froome before going to Marlborough, he was hardly prepared for the conditions he now faced.
He was put in a tiny, squalid police cell, so crowded with drunks that there was nowhere to lie down on the concrete floor to sleep.
He was then moved from cell to cell, each time in fear of whom he might find among his fellow inmates and whether they were going to be violent.
Many in fact proved to be friendly, and he jokes that the sense of community was ‘like boarding school’.
But still he suffered in his weeks in jail. He said: ‘I felt the loss of autonomy, and the food was wholly inadequate for anyone to survive on. It’s horrible.’
He said waiting to be granted bail – he was in prison for weeks before he was allowed to leave last month on a surety of 70 million Kenyan shillings (£530,000) – was ‘terrifying’ and stressful.
He came across one Englishman from the Lake District who had come to Kenya to join a girlfriend who had subsequently died of diabetes. The man has been held for 18 months without trial on murder charges and was in a ‘bad way.’
Mr Marrian said: ‘While the conditions are some of the worst, the
people you are with, the sense of combined suffering and support, is incredible. Two hours every night prisoners would sing.
‘I was in a cell of 60. There were ten cells in my block.
‘Every night they sang, it would resonate through the whole building. At 4am they would sing again, prayer songs.
‘There were a few Muslims with us, and while they prayed there was complete silence out of respect.’
Rather than counting the hours away, Mr Marrian used the time to help those around him with legal documents and preparations for their trial.
He said: ‘Those who couldn’t read I would help with their statements.’
Now Mr Marrian must prepare for his own trial.
He has explained how an independent agent inspected and sealed the 22 containers on the ship before they left South America. He had no contact or control over four offloaded containers that were subsequently sent ahead to Oman – and in one of which the drugs were found.
The company has no doubt over Mr Marrian. A spokesman for Mr Marrian said: ‘We are confident that Jack will be fully exonerated once the facts are presented.’
His lawyers say Mr Marrian is a ‘fall guy’ and the Kenyan authorities, under pressure to make an arrest, had failed to pursue those who would have had access to the containers during the sea journey.
Police believe the drugs were supposed to have been off-loaded by a gang in Spain that has no connection with Mr Marrian or the man accused alongside him, Roy Mwanthi, a Kenyan clearing agent.
According to the US Drug Enforcement Agency, the drugs were loaded in Brazil without the men’s knowledge, using a smuggling technique called ‘blind hook’ or ‘rip-on, ripoff’, in which smugglers hide their drugs inside other people’s cargo.
DEA spokesman Melvin Patterson said: ‘The Spanish stressed this was a rip-off load and the recipient of the container would have no knowledge it was being used to transport drugs.’
The drugs were supposed to be retrieved by the gang in Valencia when the containers changed ships for the second leg of their journey, but for some reason this did not happen. Mr Marrian said: ‘I had zero understanding of how drugs gangs operate and I still cannot perceive of an internationally organised gang being able to infiltrate and exploit legitimate trade like ours.’
Spanish police tried to search the containers, but four, including the one containing the cocaine, had been loaded on to the next ship.
Spanish police sources said: ‘When we received information that the containers could have drugs in them, the ship bound for Mombasa had already left Valencia Port.
‘We were able to inspect some we had suspicions about, which were still in Valencia Port, but not others. The information we were given was the traffickers had used the “Gancho Ciego” [blind hook] tactic.
‘This involves the use of someone else’s container to transport an illegal cargo which the company transporting it, the firm or people sending it and those due to receive it don’t have any idea of what’s inside.
‘It’s one of the most commonly-used techniques among drugs traffickers smuggling drugs by sea and a tactic that is used in South America as well as across Europe.
‘Traffickers could simulate the use of “Gancho Ciego”, but by its very definition it’s a practice the registered suppliers and receivers of goods are in the dark about.’
Next month Mr Marrian will deny the charges against him in a court in Nairobi. ‘You can’t know anything as vehemently as you know your own innocence,’ he says.
Now he must trust that, despite the vagaries of the judicial system, the authorities will soon release him from his nightmare.
Spanish police stressed he wouldn’t know about the drugs s