Cocaine cruise pensioners’ 16 drug smuggling trips to Norway
A COUPLE in their 70s arrested on a cruise liner last week and accused of smuggling cocaine had previously been on at least 16 drug-smuggling trips to Norway in a battered old car.
The Mail on Sunday can reveal that former lorry driver Roger Clarke, 72, and his wife Sue, 70, were couriers for an ‘organised criminal group’ and imported cannabis worth £1 million over 15 months.
According to court documents seen by this newspaper, they gave the ‘impression of being an elderly couple on a road trip’.
After their arrest in Oslo in 2004 they skipped bail and returned to England, where they changed their names and moved into sheltered housing.
Their life on the run ended when Mr Clarke became chairman of a residents’ association and his picture appeared in a local newspaper. It led to the couple’s arrest and extradition to Norway, where they were jailed in 2011.
Court papers reveal they were recruited by a Costa Blanca-based British criminal in 2003 and paid a total of £33,000 to drive across Europe with the cannabis hidden in a secret compartment in a passenger door of their Nissan.
Eleven of the trips were made from Spain, where they were living at the time. The other five were from the Netherlands. Mr Clarke usually collected the drugs from ‘a supermarket near Alicante’.
The couple then headed for the German port of Kiel before making the 20-hour crossing to Oslo by ferry, where they handed over the cannabis to Norwegian members of the gang. In all, they smuggled about 573lb.
They were caught in Oslo on September 13, 2004. When a sniffer dog detected drugs in the secret compartment of their Nissan, Mrs Clarke burst into tears and her husband confessed, believing he would receive a ‘greatly reduced punishment, possibly no penalty at all’.
Mrs Clarke was unaware of the true nature of her husband’s first drugs run, on May 17, 2003. Despite her reluctance to get involved after her husband told her the truth, she ‘nevertheless made a choice by joining all the next trips’.
Mr Clarke, whose real name is Roger Button, was eventually jailed for nearly five years and his wife for three years nine months. They had already spent more than a year in custody in Britain fighting extradition, during which time Mrs Clarke attended her mother’s funeral in handcuffs.
After Mr and Mrs Clarke’s release from prison in Norway, they told friends in Alicante that they had been convicted of tobacco smuggling. They also started taking up to six cruises a year.
Last week the couple were arrested when their Caribbean cruise ship the Marco Polo docked in Lisbon, Portugal. They are accused of smuggling 20 lb of high-grade cocaine hidden under false bottoms in their suitcases.
Fellow passengers said that during the trip, Mr Clarke went ashore at the island of St Lucia and returned with four new cases. He is said to have boasted of paying £160, compared with the £1,500 they would have cost in Harrods.
During the couple’s cannabis smuggling days, they lived in an apartment block just outside Torrevieja, near Alicante. A neighbour recalled that among many cars used by Mr Clarke was ‘a beaten-up old Nissan and a Honda’. Another said: ‘Susan always seemed like a nice woman, but he was not a nice man.’