The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
Cocaine haul that sank the smugglers
In Day 3 of our series about fugitive drugs kingpin Julian Chisholm, justice catches up with him and his gang...
With £100 million of cocaine stashed in a cove in a remote part of north-east Scotland, crimelord Julian Chisholm was feeling the pressure.
The former Aberdeen oil diver turned drug smuggler had to shift it before someone spoke to police – and before the London gang he was supplying got tetchy.
That day arrived on January 6 1991.
David Forrest, one of Chisholm’s henchmen from Dundee, rented a van in Forfar then he and fellow gang member Ian Rae, of Glenisla, Angus, drove north to Braemore Junction in the Highlands.
Awaiting them in a layby was Ullapool man Chis Howarth – a third gang member who had risked his life to land the cocaine in a storm a few weeks earlier.
The three then travelled 60 miles north-east to Bonar Bridge, and checked in for the night at the Dunroamin Inn.
Staff would later testify that they struck them as odd. Not only did they sit at the bar studying maps but they checked out at 3.30am.
They were eager to reach Clashnessie Bay where, in the darkness, they loaded 16 cocaine bales – worth £6m each – into the van.
Howarth left on foot for Ullapool, while Rae and Forrest set off in the van towards Inverness – and a game of cat and mouse began.
Graham Dick, the now retired customs boss who led the operation to bring down Chisholm’s gang, said: “We put checkpoints on every road leaving the north-west of Scotland.
“Down the Caledonian Canal, down Loch Ness and even further down south towards Oban. We were confident we were going to find them.
“Then, by complete chance, Ullapool police officer Mike Mclennan spotted the van, and used a 10p piece at a phone box to tip off his colleagues about where it was headed.
“A short time later, the van arrived at Maryburgh Junction and then we started the surveillance.
“When we had enough people to take out the van safely and securely, that’s what we did.”
Customs were able to take a quick look at the cargo – and were baffled.
“What we did expect to find was cannabis, maybe two or three tonnes, thereabouts. We could see immediately it was about half a tonne,” said Mr Dick.
However, they did not know what the substance was – and protocol meant they had to wait a day for forensic analysts to test it.
Then came a phone call that totally changed the way customs saw things.
Mr Dick said: “They told us it was cocaine. We were astonished – but then it started to make sense.
“The fact that Howarth and Hawkins had suntans. It became clear they must have come from a region where they could have picked up half a tonne of cocaine.”
It also explained why surveillance of parts of Europe known as cannabis routes had drawn a blank.
However, customs and police were not overly concerned about how they got the result they wanted. Eugene Costello, author of White Gold, a book about the drug deal, said: “Customs would have been absolutely over the moon about this.
“I daresay a few drinks would have been had because, if you think you’ve spent months trailing a gang trying to find their bounty and it turns out to be half a tonne of pure, uncut Colombian cocaine – it’s like hitting the jackpot.”
Chris Howarth was convicted of drugs offences and jailed for 25 years.
Noel Hawkins and Robbie Burns were also convicted of drugs offences and jailed for 15 years.
Though Burns, an Ullapool man, had never been on the boat that imported the cocaine, the court ruled he played a role in planning the deal.
David Forrest pled guilty to drugs offences and was jailed for 10 years.
Ian Rae also pled guilty to drugs offences and was given seven years.
Customs sources told us Julian Chisholm had spies in the public gallery throughout the hearings.
The last was in May 1991 but there was another twist five months later.
The Royal Mounted Canadian Police seized a broken-down freighter, the Dimar-b, in Halifax port, Nova Scotia.
They linked it to a van they found containing 3.5 tonnes of cannabis and so arrested the boat’s captain – Francisco Torres.
With not enough evidence linking Torres to the cannabis, the Mounties were set to free him. Then the news reached Scotland.
When Graham Dick
heard Torres was in custody he flew to Canada, arrest warrant in hand.
Dick recalled attending a series of extradition hearings where he had to have bodyguards, due to the risk of Torres’s fellow gang members shooting up the court.
A search of the Dimar-b led to the discovery of some incredible evidence.
First there was a map of the water around Clashnessie Bay, where the cocaine was unloaded.
And then there was a note with an Ullapool phone number on it – and another note with the words “Crazy Chris and Super Noel”.
Mr Dick said: “In terms of evidence linking Torres with the Clashnessie Bay job, that was just gold dust.”
Even after Torres was hauled to Scotland to face trial, he denied any links to Chisholm’s gang.
But his story was rubbished by Stonehaven handwriting expert Kathryn Thondycraft-pope.
She said: “Torres had denied he wrote the note.
“So it was our job to compare the note with ‘Crazy Chris’ written on it with a letter he had written shortly before he tried to take his own life in the Halifax Detention Centre. It was a very important case in history. I did notice a lot of the Spanish mafia attending and a lot of dubious-looking people around in court.”
The handwriting matched and Torres was jailed for 30 years after being convicted of drugs offences – the largest drugs sentence in Scottish legal history, though it was cut to 25 years on appeal.
With five of Chisholm’s gang behind bars, there was just one more piece of the jigsaw left.
And that came in May 1992 with his sensational arrest on the Costa Del Sol.
He tried to flee and was rugby-tackled to the ground – the reason for the black eye in his notorious mugshot.
Mr Costello said: “He went to court and he was to be extradited back to Scotland to stand trial. That should have been that.”
But the story was to take one final dramatic twist.