Drug smugglers get record sentences in Ireland

DUBLIN — A trio of English cocaine smugglers who were caught after putting the wrong fuel into their boat received the longest drug-related prison sentences in Irish history Wednesday.

Martin Wanden, 45, and Perry Wharrie, 48, received 30-year terms, while 41-year-old Joe Daly was given 25 years by Judge Sean O Donnabhain in Cork Circuit Criminal Court in southwestern Ireland.

Police arrested the trio last July after their dinghy sank off the Cork coast, dumping 1.5 tons of cocaine into the ocean. Police retrieved more than 60 bales of the drug with an estimated street value of $700 million, a record seizure in Ireland.

The smugglers' inflatable dinghy sank after a member of the gang accidentally filled the twin Yamaha engines with diesel instead of gasoline, stranding them in unusually rough seas just a few hundred yards from shore.

Police said the cocaine originated in Colombia and had been brought from Barbados aboard a catamaran named "Lucky Day," then transferred to the dinghy. Three brand-new SUVs that were to ferry the cocaine to hiding places in Cork, before moving it to England, were abandoned. "Lucky Day" was later found abandoned at a port in Spain, but its occupants were never arrested.

Rescuers plucked Wanden from the sea surrounded by bobbing cocaine bales. He insisted during his testimony that he was a tourist who swam into the sea to rescue other men whose boat had capsized.

Both Wanden and Wharrie have a long list of previous criminal convictions. Wharrie spent 17 years in prison for murdering a British policeman in 1988 and won parole in 2005. The judge said Daly — whose brother is a former anti-narcotics detective on London's Metropolitan Police — should receive a lesser sentence because he had a less extensive criminal record.

The previous record seizure was in 1998 when 660 pounds of cocaine, valued at $96 million, was found on board a catamaran docked in the fashionable Cork port of Kinsale.

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