From window seller to drug smuggler – via an ostrich farm
Jason Evans looks a how a businessman from the Swansea Valley became one of the most wanted British fugitives
ALIFE can take many turns and lead in unexpected ways, but perhaps none more so than that of Martin Evans.
From running a successful double-glazing business he ended up as a “Mr Big” of the drugs world, running a gang of cocaine smugglers while living the high life in a luxury apartment in Marbella – via an audacious ostrich scam which resulted in his victims running around a field near Swansea trying to catch the famously quick birds. Some of those who knew him – and some of those who were taken in by him – describe him as “charming”.
Evans grew up in Pontarddulais, and attended Ysgol Gyfun Ystalyfera in the Swansea Valley.
He was said to have left school with few qualifications.
After dabbling with DJ-ing, he ran a video rental shop, but his first taste of success came when he launched a double-glazing firm in Neath .
Within 18 months the firm was employing 20 people, and in 1987 he scooped the Welsh Young Businessperson of the Year title.
Business was good, and Evans and his wife Esther began to enjoy the trapping of success, including Mercedes cars with personalised number plates. So far, it seemed, so good.
But the double-glazing business eventually folded, and in 1994 Evans was convicted of obtaining property by deception and sentenced to 15 months in prison.
And it appears that was while in HMP Usk in Monmouthshire he dreamt up his his ostrich scam.
In the mid-1990s Britain was in the middle of the BSE or “mad cow disease” scare, and ostrich meat was seen by some as a low-fat and safe alternative to beef and lamb. Evans saw an opportunity. Shortly after his release he launched an ostrich farm in Dunvant near Swansea.
The Ostrich Centre was advertised in national newspapers with the slogan “Ostrich Nest Egg”, and used glossy brochures which traded on Evans’ previous business award though presumably not on his conviction for fraud.
Evans offered investors the chance to buy an ostrich on the farm, promising them huge returns of 70% or more on their investment.
The idea was investors would pay thousands of pounds per bird, then reap dividends from meat sales, and from the makers of ostrich skin handbags when the birds were culled. More than 100 people, many pensioners and retirees, were attracted to the scheme, and in total invested £875,000 in the fledgling company - for some, their investment was their life savings.
That promise of a “nest egg” in a growing business must indeed have seem attractive.
The ostriches themselves were real – and were perhaps the only real thing about the whole scam.
Evans was selling each bird several times over to different investors – and pocketing the cash from the people he duped. As quickly as the cash flowed into the business it left again, being channelled into offshore bank accounts in Jersey and the Bahamas.
Between February and July 1996 investors pumped hundreds of thousands of pounds into the venture, taken in by Evans’ sales patter.
But just six months after being launched, the company was declared insolvent – though not before £329,000 had been stolen.
When the business was revealed as a scam a number of angry investors descended on Bevexe Fawr Farm in Dunvant and seized birds to try to recoup some of their money.
There was nothing in the firm’s bank account - save for a £440 overdraft.
A police investigation was launched, and Evans was subsequently charged with fraud and theft. But just as the trial was about to start in 2000, Martin Evans faxed Swansea Crown Court to say he would not be attending – in fact the 38-year-old had skipped the country and run away to Spain with his mistress.
The money in the offshore accounts had also vanished, meaning investors lost everything – apart from those who had indulged in a spot of unofficial Swansea ostrich wrangling.
As for the on-the-run Evans, after video rentals, double glazing, and ostrich farming fraud, he became involved in a new and highly lucrative kind of business – drug dealing.
From a hideaway in Spain he masterminded a multi-million-pound drugs and money laundering operation, which smuggled huge quantities of cocaine and ecstasy from mainland Europe into Britain.
Evans reaped an estimated £9 million leading a gang of couriers who trafficked the drugs from Holland and Spain – the money was laundered through a bureau de change next door to Harrods in London. Gang members would carry cocaine into Britain in multiples of one kilo packets, with upwards of 100,000 ecstasy tablets also being carried on each trip. It was a lucrative enterprise.
But unbeknown to the gang, police had them under surveillance following a tip-off about the large sums of money they were changing into different currencies.
An undercover operation saw officers following the couriers as they went about the business, and they even managed to bug a car.
In October 2001, officers swooped on the gang during the handover of more than £145,000 in Dutch guilders at a motorway service station near Reading.
In the car police found another £284,000 worth of guilders and Spanish pesetas. Evans, however, slipped through the net and remained at large. But his time as a fugitive would be short-lived.
Later that year border staff New York’s JKF airport became suspicious of a man who arrived in the country with a passport in the name of Paul Kelly – there was heightened security at the time in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Kelly, it turned out, was one of the aliases being used by Evans.
The passport proved to be a fake, Interpol were alerted, Evans was arrested, and he was deported to France – where he would spend the next three years in jail before being extradited to Britain to stand trial.
While he was in prison in Paris, eight other members of his gang were jailed for a total of 70 years at Swansea Crown Court.
When Evans he was sentenced to a total of 24 years in prison for drugs trafficking and the Ostrich farm scam, and hit with a £4.8 million confiscation order to reclaim the money from his ill-gotten gains.
The court heard that as well as properties in Swansea the defendant had a £2 million luxury villa in Marbella and a penthouse in Miami’s South Beach near Trump Towers. He also bank accounts in Latvia, Antigua, Switzerland, Dominica, and the UK.
Simon Flowers, Wales branch commander at the National Crime Agency (NCA), described Evans at the time as a “Mr Big”.
Evans’s 24-year sentence was later reduced to 21 years on appeal. By 2011 Evans was in Erlestoke open prison in Wiltshire, and was being prepared for early release the following year – as part of the arrangements to facilitate his return to the community he was granted “re-settlement visits” back to Swansea. On one of these trips he took the chance to flee the authorities once more, and again skipped the country. The NCA launched a manhunt to find him, and put him on the list of the 11 most-wanted British fugitives.
Attention first focused on Northern Cyprus, but the search operation took in law enforcement agencies across Europe, the Caribbean, and America. It took three years to find the elusive Evans. He was eventually tracked down to South Africa, where local police in Johannesburg put him under surveillance.
In August 2014 armed officers swooped on him at the upmarket gated housing complex in the Midrand area where he was living with his fiance and baby daughter, and arrested him – his life on the run was over.
In October 2014 Evans was extradited back to Britain, and sent to a maximum security prison to serve the rest of his sentence - which was thought at the time to be around four years.
A jail term does not extinguish a confiscation order – and upon release the full amount becomes payable. It will take a considerable nest egg to pay off what Evans owes to investors who lost their savings.
Repaying the debt caused by the miseries of the drugs trade is another matter.