Bumbling ship's crew loses $100-million cocaine shipment

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Bumbling narcos screwed up their sailing mission so badly it was inevitable they would fail — caught red handed on the high seas, with tons of cocaine aboard their cargo ship. Let me tell you about it.
The Mob Reporter here with the story of the Turkish captain of a cargo ship named RAS who plotted his course across the Mediterranean, down the coast of Africa, and then back towards Europe, in such a bizarre and suspicious way, he might as well have shot up flares that spelled NARCO in the night sky.
It seemed inevitable his careless voyage would end like this, intercepted on the ocean by patrol ships, even though somebody went to a lot of trouble to secretly haul the load aboard in a mid-ocean rendezvous using gangland “ghost ships.”
On Oct. 4, 2024, officials in Spain and France announced an impressive seizure, four tonnes of cocaine, they said, was found hidden on board a cargo ship off the coast of West Africa. That’s 4,000 kilos. But I can tell you they over-estimated it by the better part of a tonne. There were actually only 3,281 kilos on board.
The RAS left Zeytinburnu, a port in Istanbul, back in the summer — on July 28, 2024. She meandered the length of the Mediterranean Sea, through the narrow gap at Gibraltar, and into the Atlantic Ocean. She made an overnight stop in Casablanca, Morocco, on Aug. 9, and then meandered south over 12 days and anchored off Freetown, Sierra Leone, where she sat stationary for 20 days. On Sept. 11, the RAS set finally sail again, heading north off the coast of Guinea-Bissau, arriving two days later, where it then waited for permission to enter the port of Bissau. It stayed in the port only 21 hours, but apparently neither loaded nor unloaded cargo.
It then set sail again on Sept. 21, heading north. But it still wasn’t in a hurry. Off the African coast, the RAS performed a series of low-speed manoeuvres over two days, only making it to the coastal waters off Mauritania by Sept. 26 and then cut its speed again, dawdling in the ocean for a few more days. During one, or perhaps both offshore dawdles, it seems it was visited by ghost ships. Ghost ships in the real-life underworld are clandestine vessels that ignore international mandates for an active Automatic Identification System, or AIS, which are beacons to keep ships from colliding.
When the RAS was loaded, it finally got serious about sailing, and headed north on Sept. 29. Its new destination was listed as the port of Alexandria, in Egypt, which is not all that far from Turkey, where it started, making for a very lengthy and expensive and seemingly meaningless round trip. Every nautical mile of this ship’s journey had been tracked by a multinational maritime intelligence agency based in Lisbon, Portugal.
The Maritime Analysis and Operations Centre for Drug Trafficking is designed to spot ships like the RAS, always watching for suspicious routing, unexpected stops, unnecessary detours of ships big and small. Two patrol ships, one Spanish, one French, moved to intercept.
The RAS was stopped 130 nautical miles from the island of Lanzarote, that’s an island in the Atlantic off the northwest coast of Africa. All 10 members of the crew were arrested. Seven, including the captain, are Turkish. Two are Azerbaijani and one is Dutch.
CREDITS:
Music is Beyond the Lows by The Whole Other // Echoes of Emir by Patrick Patrikios // Mirage Melody by Patrick Patrikios;
The short excerpt illustrating a famous mythical ghost ship is from Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (2007) directed by Gore Verbinski;
Animated maps created with Google Earth Studio; Animated narco flares created in PixVerse; Radar animation from Vecteezy;
Cargo ship at sunset video by Marc K, Cargo ship by Alexander Bobrov, Freetown Sierra Leone video by Kelly, Istanbul cargo ship video by Julien Goettelmann, Sailing from Istanbul video by Bekir Garip, all at Pexels; Atlantic Ocean video by Videvo from Videvo.
Supplementary Ras photos by babiskouremetis from Vesseltracker and ntonino and Vesselfinder.
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Please watch: "Genius jewel heist wrecked by sloppy mistakes": https://youtu.be/KkEk0k0d_7Y
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