Profile:Brian Brendan Wright propagated an image of himself as a big-time horse gambler to disguise his main source of income - trafficking cocaine. It paid off until this week, when a court sentenced him to 30 years, writes Barry Roche
True to form, Brian Brendan Wright was gambling to the end. When he was finally arrested in Spain's Marbella on March 14th, 2005, the Irish-born cocaine trafficker and race fixer held up a £1 coin and challenged police officers: "A million to one, I don't get done." This week, 60-year-old Wright was given plenty of time to reflect on that ill-advised bet. Thirty years to be precise: he was handed down one of the longest sentences ever meted out by a British court for running the largest cocaine smuggling operation ever uncovered in the UK.
Estimates vary as to how much Wright was worth as a result of his drug smuggling. In 2004, the BBC named him Britain's richest drug baron, worth more than £100 million (€147 million) but some sources estimate the value of his cocaine dealings in the 1990s at more than £600 million.
Not bad going for a man who never opened a bank account or had property records in his own name in the UK. But then, Wright preferred to carry cash, or, as one jockey friend once quipped, "he always carried a roll of notes with him that would choke a donkey".
Wright had fled England by the time he was named by the BBC in 2004, but he had enjoyed some two decades of flash living, hobnobbing with celebrities at his box at Royal Ascot or at his string of luxury properties from Chelsea and Surrey to Spain, Johannesburg and Jamaica.
Wright was born in Dublin on May 13th, 1946, but details of his early childhood are scant. What is known is that he was one of nine children and the family moved to Kilburn in northwest London when he was 12, and soon after he gave up on schooling.
He began working in the local markets in Kilburn and Cricklewood, where he acted as a runner for illegal betting operations among the Irish community. It was only a matter of time before he fell foul of the law and he duly found himself on the way to borstal.
On leaving borstal, he found work as a croupier at the Chez Nous casino, beginning a lifelong love of gambling that saw him take charge of the casino's horse race betting before becoming a professional gambler and unlicensed on-course bookie.
Wright, who married at 19 and has two children, claims his first serious win came at the age of 17, when he collected £5,000 on the 1964 St Leger winner Indiana, graduating to winning close to £1 million on a series of bets after Musical Bliss won the 1,000 Guineas in 1989.
By the 1990s, his knowledge of the track and his contacts with jockeys and others in the racing world were such that he was collecting at least £400,000 a year in winnings and was so successful that numerous bookmakers were closing his accounts with them, he claimed.
However, the Jockey Club was already becoming concerned at Wright's activities, and former Jockey Club head of security Roger Buffham told a BBC Panorama investigation in 2002 that "a whole generation of jockeys were corrupted" by Wright.
According to the Racing Post, Wright was a regular at Newmarket, where he rarely missed a meeting and lavished his largesse on jockeys he befriended, hosting extravagant parties at West End nightclubs and restaurants, where champagne and girls would be supplied.
Among his guests at his Royal Ascot box were Charlie Wilson, who took part in the Great Train Robbery, London gangster Roy Adkins, and comedian Jim Davidson, who was later to memorably declare that the suggestion that Wright was involved in drug trafficking was "laughable". Among the jockeys Wright befriended was Cheltenham Gold Cup winner Graham Bradley, who was later banned by the Jockey Club for eight years for bringing racing into disrepute but who paid glowing tribute to Wright in his 2000 biography, The Wayward Lad. "After a couple of beers in Brian's box, I just knew he was my kind of person. After I had known him for a while, I asked him what he did for a living. He looked at me with a smile and replied in his curt west London accent: 'This an' that'. I never bothered to ask him again."
Both Bradley and another jockey, Barrie Wright (no relation), admitted supplying Wright with information on horses, while former amateur champion rider Dermot Browne claimed he coordinated the doping of 23 horses for Wright in August and September 1990. Police raided Wright's luxury Chelsea home in 1998 and arrested him as part of a Scotland Yard probe into the dopings of Avanti Express and Lively Knight in 1997, and although he was never charged, the Jockey Club decided to bar him from racecourses for 20 years.
By now, British customs were also on Wright's trail for drug smuggling. Nicknamed "The Milkman" - "because he always delivers" - he used gambling at races where he placed bets of up to £20,000 on a horse as a front for laundering the huge profits he was making from drugs.
"He portrayed himself as a wealthy entrepreneur with an avid interest in the gambling and horseracing world but he was, in fact, a professional drugs importer," said one British customs and excise official in a press briefing document.
Wright's cocaine smuggling operation was highly sophisticated. He had supply networks in Mexico, Brazil and Colombia, where he had links with drug lord Victor Mejia-Munera, and drugs were dropped off by plane or speedboat to waiting yachts in the Caribbean for transport to the UK.
These yachts would then rendezvous off the Dorset and Devon coasts, where the drugs were transferred to locally registered yachts - a practice called coopering - as these local boats would arouse far less suspicion when mooring than newcomers from across the Atlantic.
The unravelling of Wright's drugs empire began, ironically, in Ireland, on September 29th, 1996, when one such coopering mission went awry and a converted trawler, the Sea Mist, failed to link up with a yacht from Poole, some 160km west of Brest.
Bad weather forced the Sea Mist into Cork Harbour, where suspicions were aroused and a rummage team of 14 customs officers under customs enforcement officer Paddy O'Sullivan found 599kg of cocaine worth €125 million hidden in a dumb waiter on board.
No less important was the discovery of a mobile phone, which was traced to a financial associate of Wright's called John Gurney, and when Irish customs passed on this information to their UK counterparts, it triggered an 11-year investigation into Wright's organisation. A raid by customs and police in the UK in 1999 uncovered 472kg of cocaine at two locations, while they also uncovered evidence of a total of three tonnes of cocaine being brought in to the UK in six huge shipments between 1996 and 1998.
The investigation also led to a series of arrests, and some 19 people in the UK, the US and Ireland were sentenced to jail terms totalling more than 250 years. Among those sentenced in the UK was Wright's son, Brian Anthony Wright (39), who was jailed for 16 years in 2002.
Wright snr was in Spain in 1999 when he learned that customs had moved to arrest his gang members, so he fled to northern Cyprus - which doesn't have an extradition treaty with the UK - but returned to Spain in 2003 to live near Malaga.
Searching for Wright, the British authorities learned he was in Spain and successfully had him extradited back to the UK in 2005. For the past two years he was on remand at Belmarsh high security prison, before going on trial in February for drug trafficking.
Among those who came to testify on his behalf during the trial were old friends from the racing world, including former England and Southampton striker turned racing trainer Mick Channon, racecourse bookmaker Alan Marcel, and horse owner Leslie Garrett.
This week, following the two-month trial at Woolwich Crown Court, a jury of eight men and four women took 24 hours and 59 minutes to convict Wright of both conspiracy to evade prohibition on the importation of cocaine and conspiracy to supply drugs.
While some members of Wright's family burst into tears at the verdict, Wright himself presented a more stoical figure from behind a protective glass screen. When Judge Peter Moss asked for any mitigating factors, Wright replied: "There is no mitigation, your honour."
Wright's counsel, Jerome Lynch QC, said his client "knows, as does his family, that he will probably die in jail", before Judge Moss adjourned sentencing for a day to allow him to read a health report on Wright, who had heart surgery in 1998 and a pacemaker fitted in 2006.
When the sentence came, it was unrelenting. Judge Moss pointed to the extensive nature of Wright's drug smuggling from the Caribbean to the UK, and the terrible havoc caused to tens of thousands of people who became victims of crime at the hands of those using cocaine.
"You were able to live a lavish lifestyle both here in the UK and in your villa in Spain, disguising the true origin of your wealth behind your apparent success as a gambler," observed Judge Moss as Wright looked on emotionless.
"You were a master criminal, manipulative, influential . . . I accept you will be a very much older man when you will be entitled to release, I accept too . . . the possibility that you may not live that long.
"Nevertheless . . . those who import and distribute call upon themselves lengthy terms of imprisonment. You played for the highest stakes and won, for a number of years, a luxury lifestyle. You well knew the consequences of detection and conviction."
The Wright File
Who is he?One of Britain's biggest ever cocaine smugglers, race fixer and former Kilburn markets boy made bad.
Why is he in the news?He was sentenced to 30 years in jail this week for cocaine trafficking.
Most appealing characteristic:According to his friends, his loyalty.
Least appealing characteristic:His reckless disregard for the thousands of lives he has damaged.
Most likely to say:"I always deliver."
Least likely to say:"I'll meet you at the Gold Cup at Royal Ascot in June."