Western Daily Press (Saturday)
Kingpin in drugs trafficking world jailed for 24 years
AMAJOR national cocaine kingpin was sentenced at Gloucester Crown Court following an investigation by Gloucestershire Police and the National Crime Agency into data taken from cracked military-grade encrypted criminal phones.
Helios Nanaj, 37, of Smugglers Way in London, was sentenced to 24 years in prison after the biggest drug bust in the county’s history.
Nanaj, nicknamed “Baldy”, was found guilty of four counts of conspiracy to supply Class A drugs and one count of conspiracy to import drugs in a complex case that exposed a major part of the UK cocaine trafficking network that saw hundreds of kilos of cocaine brought into the country.
Images taken from his phone show the Albanian-born man flaunting wads of cash and expensive designer goods from a device that he thought was completely secure.
It all came crashing down around the kingpin when the encrypted messaging service used by him and other criminals, Encrochat, was cracked by Europol in May 2020, revealing vast amounts of information about drug supply networks across the continent.
That same month, police arrested one of Nanaj’s runners in Gloucester with around £60,000 in cash from the sale of two kilos of cocaine.
The runner, Dhimitri Gjini, was found with an Encrochat encrypted phone, which Gloucestershire’s Serious
and Organised Crime Unit was able to access alongside the National Crime Agency to identify his supplier, London-based Nanaj.
Due to the cracked Encrochat logs, police were able to see that a man with the alias “Boboku” and “Lilacmind” was moving large amounts of Class A drugs around the country, including to Gloucestershire.
Logs reveal that immediately following Gijni’s arrest, “Lilacmind” asked Encrochat administrators to “burn this fone please bro” and wipe the incriminating evidence left on his runner’s encrypted mobile.
This was when he adopted the name “Boboku”, which he would tell his criminal associates, and by extension the police, that this was the name of his son.
These conversations tipped off investigators to the man’s identity, not only for using his son’s nickname as his display name but also at one point wishing his wholesale drug supplier’s grandma a happy 69th birthday, from “the Nanaj family.”
Using geolocation data from the £1,500 encrypted device and ANPR cameras, detectives were able to tie the 37-year-old cocaine kingpin to the phone where he had plied his trade.
On that device they found selfies of the drug kingpin wearing designer sunglasses, showing off Valentino shoes and endless wads of cash, despite his explanation that he earned his money as a labourer on building sites.
In fact, his chat logs revealed that he was not only responsible for around 500kg of imported cocaine, but also that he had been earning so much money that, during the pandemic, he was complaining that he had no way to store £1.6 million in cash.
The investigation uncovered a system of drug couriers and safe houses that would be used to take the drugs all over the UK.
Crown Prosecutor Ann Hampshire said in court that Nanaj was “the head of an extensive organised crime group which used a highly sophisticated network to import and distribute in the UK hundreds of kilograms of highly dangerous drugs”.
Handing down the sentence, Judge Lowe said: “Turning to organised crime in your adopted country was a foolish and dangerous way to provide for you and your family, besides being morally wrong.
“You put your family at risk of losing you - it is your doing that they’ve lost you for so long.”