A cocaine-lined shipwreck and busting the lucrative drug route in the Pacific | 60 Minutes Australia

Good evening and welcome to 60 Minutes first tonight into the billion-dollar

cocaine

war stretching from South America to Australia over the past three years our federal police have intercepted nearly two tons of

cocaine

on the

lucrative

route

from Pacific. Small yachts are loaded. with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of cocaine off the coast of Ecuador before embarking on the long journey here, innocent-looking yachts cruise our eastern waters undetected before offloading their cargo to local

drug

traffickers in hiding . Below deck smuggling is a trick as old as smuggling. but he has never been so bold or dangerous.

This is where the journey begins on the countless waterways of Ecuador's coast. Cocaine is loaded onto ships that will take it to markets in America, Europe and increasingly to Australia, if not for the police commando units that pursue it.

drug

traffickers their impossible mission is pure no matter how much stuff they capture it seems very pure the flood of cocaine in Australia grows every year and the way it gets here is more and more inventive here we had a yacht that was part of a race yachts these other participants had no idea that what they were bargaining for was a yacht that was full of cocaine all these boats begin their journey in South America they are more than 7,000 nautical miles of open Pacific Ocean on very small yachts always with the threat of rough seas and savage storms and, as Andrew Colvin, Deputy Commissioner of the Australian Federal Police, warns, there is always the threat of capture, a popular and

lucrative

route

for organized crime to try to penetrate, but as lucrative as it is, it is also risky become a high-stakes contest between the world's most powerful criminal syndicates, the most powerful in law enforcement and trapped in mid-Pacific island nations, such as Tonga, that now stopover on this long but highly profitable new route commercial does seem like a paradise for drug traffickers.

Trying to avoid police and Customs and Border patrols pretty much is, except when it goes wrong, as it did for the smugglers on this boat. What happened on board remains a mystery. What we do know is that this yacht set sail from Ecuador bound for Australia. but somehow it ended up here sunk on this remote reef hidden on board $120 million worth of cocaine not so well hidden a rapidly decomposing body oh the corpse was this man, slovakian national milan rinzak, dead at least three weeks before he was found aboard the

shipwreck

The yacht jury still confuses authorities about how he died.

The autopsy has already been performed. There is nothing in that to suggest foul play, but it must be understood that the body had deteriorated considerably from the heat. Granto Fee, Tonga's police chief, is perplexed whether it was foul play. How could he have died? Well, he is as broad as your imagination. I guess you have the potential that, I guess, if you're floating in the Pacific and you're a little bored and you like a little cocaine. and you have 200 kg of that stuff, maybe you've tried a product that we don't know about, so yeah, that's a mystery.

Adding to the intrigue, there were two men on board the yacht when she left Ecuador, where is that missing man? I'm avoiding you. I guess I just don't know that he's somewhere between Ecuador and Thomas. This was the giraffe just a few months before setting sail. A 13-meter luxury yacht was purchased in Panama by an unknown buyer who handed over ninety thousand dollars in cash to the US. The anti-drug agency began tracking it from Ecuador but lost it somewhere in the vast Pacific. Kurt Coulson is a fishing guide in Tonga who knows these waters well. I'm definitely not surprised he ended up on this reef if no one was driving him.

I fish here a myself and this is how my son and I saw it and we actually found out it was a boat full of drugs, so a drug boat with a dead body on it, yeah, kind of creepy, after the alarm was raised , police found 204 kilograms of cocaine carefully sealed. in one kilogram blocks inside hidden compartments, most ships have cavities like this inside, which definitely makes it easier for someone trying to hide something. It is a poor country and an easy target for multibillion-dollar drug cartels seeking a base in the Pacific. You won't talk to me later, but even Toms was shocked when the speaker of parliament, Lord Tui Le kepa, was arrested on charges of conspiring with a Colombian drug cartel to import hundreds of kilos of cocaine into Australia.

Lord Tui lekepa, member of the Tongan royalty. The family ensured Colombian drug trafficker Obil Gómez was granted a visitor visa to Tonga despite never having met him. Do you know the Colombian drug trafficker Gómez? Can you speak to my lawyer please? When police raided Lord Tuilakepa's house, they found a cache of weapons and ammunition. you feel that Tonga is being targeted by these drug cartels, the drug traffickers think, but they make their business decisions, obviously, like anyone else, it's their business. The choice is easier if you have members of parliament who are happy to participate in the drug trade as one.

Yours has been accused of doing it, yes, very good. I imagine that doesn't help. I mean the drug conspiracy charges against Lord Tuila Kappa have now been dropped for lack of evidence. Excuse me, look at the doorman as we approached him in the At his house, this not-so-chivalrous nobleman ran out and let his daughter speak. I would like to talk to you. Is it your father? Yes, do you want to wait outside? So they brought in a local thug. He is not sleeping. I just saw him come in. We finally called the police, we just want to talk to him about the cocaine.

What is fueling this headlong rush to Australia by the drug cartels is the demand of a seemingly insatiable market for the white powder that the car tells Australia because of the profits importers are making. of the order of 200 to 250,000 a kilo here in the United States you can get twenty-five thirty thousand dollars a kilo 10 times 10 times more Former deputy commissioner of police of New South Wales, Clive Small, has observed how the infatuation with cocaine extended from the circuit of stockbrokers and parties. scene for the working class and outer suburbs is the quintessential aspirational drug, right? I mean, you haven't made it unless you're snorting cocaine.

I think that's probably the attraction. I don't think cocaine still has the stigma that some of the other drugs have and there's always an abundance of it; In just three years, the number of Australians using cocaine increased from over a hundred thousand people to almost four hundred thousand, if you know where to look, it's everywhere, although The police make a big show of the drugs they have seized The Raj Maud in Vanuatu en route to Australia with 750 kilograms of cocaine on board estimated street value $350 million on Friday Freedom docked in Bundaberg 300 kilograms valued at $78 million Eden chaos reportedly picked up its cargo on another yacht 800 kilometers from the coast of Queensland, half a ton of cocaine worth $160 million was seized, all captured by the Australian federal police.

Deputy Commissioner Andrew Colvin is proud of what percentage do you think he gets? I don't know and I wouldn't want to speculate, are you worried that you don't know? What would worry me is that we were not seizing and I was not sure that we were not, that we were dismantling the union. but we're not yet at a stage where the South American cocaine cowboys are saying, well, Australia is too tough, let's go somewhere else. I don't think the South American cocaine cowboys are saying that about any country in the world. the profits are too big, so is the AFP making any dent in this?

It might seem like we're seizing a lot of drugs, but if you're impacting the market, what you would see if you were successful is periods of supply shortages and rising prices. I don't think we've seen cocaine shortages for a long time on land, it's that pure, It seems that it is very pure in the sea, they are willing to sacrifice lives, people will do it. sail that submarine and in the air fighting the billion dollar drug war in South America, we are on the hunt for drug traffickers here in South America where there is no shortage of cocaine and certainly no shortage of ships ready To get it out, how many shipments?

Do you think what happens that you don't know well? In each country, 20 or 30 percent of cocaine is intercepted but much more passes through. General one Carlos Barragán, the police chief in charge of the fight against drugs in Ecuador, says Gerev. The drug trafficking yacht stranded in Tonga was monitored since The moment he got here, there was a meticulous inspection of both the boat internally and its documents and nothing suspicious was found, including drugs, so we had to let him out of the pool and why? the yacht is under suspicion, the people on board never came out, they didn't act like tourists, so you were watching them closely to know that Facebook is a small country.

Marina empty, but the police suspect that she was here, near the coast, where she was loaded with her illegal. load over 200 kilograms of cocaine before setting sail for Australia kill Ecuador is now the departure point for more and more ships due to its perfect location for drug cartels Ecuador has waterways and its closest neighbors Peru and Colombia are, By far the largest cocaine producers in the world, some of the drugs head to northern Mexico for the US market and for that trip the cartels now build their own submarines capable of staying underwater for days thanks to the fact that they are designed to a two man crew was captured just a few months ago tiny I don't know how they would do this for five

minutes

let alone ten days is to get them to Mexico it is no exception in recent years the authorities have captured or sunk dozens of these death traps that are willing to sacrifice lives people who for a handful of dollars will sail in that submarine that, as you saw, is basically a cage ready for people to die in this war that is devastating South America here, for example, a helicopter The police shoot at drug dealers on a main street in Rio and here the dealers shoot with deadly precision killing all the police on board, so it is not surprising that this anti-narcotics police unit in Ecuador treats every mission as if it could be the last one we are patrolling.

Today they are looking for smaller local vessels, such as fishing boats and barges, which police suspect could be carrying the cocaine to larger offshore vessels, such as motorboats and yachts, which they consider mother ships, and those mother ships They can go anywhere in the world, Europe, America, even. Australia and when the patrol points are a suspicious looking ship, they don't linger. All crew members are searched for drugs and weapons. If the boat is carrying cocaine, this could quickly turn into a shootout. Suspicious vessels abroad. Reward seizures like this are almost 400 kilograms of cocaine, each package carefully printed with the cartel's insignia and the tea, each of these blocks is worth a quarter of a million dollars when it hits the streets of Australia and incredibly this is Just the weekly haul of the small fraction of captured cocaine must seem endless to you absolutely every Thursday, we do these burns and it just feels like there are still doors we need to close to stop the flow of drugs, these drugs go up in smoke, but The police officer in charge fears that the traffickers will continue to win if he does not get more cooperation from Western police forces and points out directly to the Australian federal police how good their relationship is with Australian law enforcement authorities when it comes to stopping this trade.

I have been in charge of the fight against drugs in Ecuador for two years and I have never heard of any information exchange with the Australians. For now, the cross-Pacific drug trade remains open as for the jury's missing crew member, well, I'll let you know if he shows up, but don't hold your breath. Hi, I'm Tom Steinfeld. Thanks for seeing it. It's 60 Minutes Australia. Subscribe to our channel now to see new stories and exclusive clips every week and don't miss out. our bonus minute segments and full 60 minute episodes found on 9now.com and the nine Now app