Indian narcotics sleuths crack major drug case after year of painstaking effort

Had it succeeded, it would have been the stuff of a Hollywood crime thriller, replete with mid-ocean air drops, high speed boats and clandestine flights in and out of high mountain valleys. As it turned out, the Derrick hashish case became the proudest feather in the cap of India's narcotics sleuths who cracked it open after a year of painstaking effort, bagging more than one tonne of hashish and four of the suspected 10 drug runners involved.Surveillance photo of Derrick and Gray (with cap) and (right) the DC3 aircraft: A stranger-than-fiction storyThough the case isn't exactly recent - it was unravelled between mid-1976 and May 1977 - its stranger-than-fiction story has till today remained buried between the well-thumbed dust covers of intelligence files. It remains a sparkling example of international cooperation and detection work of a high calibre.It all began, as international narcotics cases frequently do, with a tip off. In the summer of 1976, western intelligence agencies passed word to India's Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI) that an international narcotics syndicate led by Canadian citizen Donald Mervyn Derrick was planning a major drug shipment from Nepal to Canada. Word also came that Derrick had dreamed up an audacious scheme to pull off his coup: squatting on a tarmac in Singapore was a souped up DC3 Dakota, the old work horse of most of the world's air forces, which Derrick had bought and equipped with modern avionics. Sailing across the Pacific at that precise time was the light weight ocean going Thrasher which carried on board a crew of four, electronic equipment to match the DC3's, and a modern motorised dinghy. The idea, investigations later showed, was for Derrick to fly the plane to Nepal, pick up hashish loaded in water-tight milk-can sized containers, and drop it to the Thrasher at a secret Bay of Bengal rendezvous. The boat would then sail directly to Canada. The scheme was simple: the hashish would touch no other country between its source, Nepal, and its destination, minimising the risks of interception.Objectives: The Thrasher set sail from Canada in March 1976, commanded by a Canadian, Andrew Warner. Months later, after the bountiful monsoon of that year, Derrick was found to be making frequent trips from Singapore to Nepal. He had two objectives: One was to buy the hashish valued at the time at Rs 10 lakh in the Indian market and the other to look for a remote airfield from which his US registered DC3, serial number 13816, could operate. Derrick had hired, according to sources, one of the best pilots in the smuggling business.Weeks of search finally convinced the smugglers of two things: that airfields weren't going a begging in Nepal, and that the DC3 wouldn't be able to make the long haul from Singapore to Nepal and back via the Thrasher without a refuelling stop in Calcutta. Since that was potentially a fatal stop-over, Derrick decided to change his plans.The Thrasher: Audacious schemeForeign narcotics agencies had managed to get a toehold into Derrick's operations through a Singapore restaurant owner, but there was no way to gain a conviction without catching the syndicate red handed. Accordingly, apart from passing word of the change of plans to DRI, the gang was kept under surveillance - but, left pretty much alone. The DRI also learned that the plane had now been replaced by a coach.Indian narcotics officers made their first contact when the Thrasher left Singapore on December 12, 1976 and arrived in Bombay on January 11, 1977. Virtually the same day, Derrick was tracked from Kathmandu to Delhi and then on to Bombay, where he made directly for the boat rather than a hotel. If confirmation was needed, that was enough to convince DRI that they had their quarry in sight. Derrick then left India, but after that the Thrasher was never far out of their sight. The boat left Bombay on January 28, and turned up in Colombo where final plans were drawn up. Then, as if to confirm DRI suspicions, Warner filed a plan with the Colombo port authorities to sail for Mombassa but the Thrasher turned up at Paradip on March 15.Under Surveillance: Thereafter, the Thrasher's behaviour only confirmed its dubious role. On March 19 it sailed away to return without prior clearance from the harbour-master - two days later. Then, it again left on April 2, to turn up at Visakhapatnam on April 7 with engine trouble. It was here, that Indian narcotics agents had their big breakthrough.Because the Thrasher was crippled, Warner and his crew were allowed to stay in a hotel in town. Agents keeping an eye on them found that they were very friendly with an Englishman, Paul Gray, who, it just so happened, was with a group of five travelling around in a fine air-conditioned 47-seater coach, the British registered QM 9137. The bits and pieces were at last beginning to fall into place: the coach was immediately put under surveillance, DRI officers rushed to Attari on the Pakistan border to discover it had entered India as long ago as November 15, 1976. Radio messages went out to all land border posts and Sanauli near Gorakhpur responded with the news that QM 9137 had 42 of its seats unoccupied and had indeed entered Nepal on January 21, 1977, and returned the same way some weeks later.Detectives also tracked down a young Canadian, Lewis Anthony Wiggins, who had been flown in to try and fix the Thrasher's engine. In the meantime, however, Gray and his men decided to take their coach to the more salubrious surroundings of Bhubaneswar, and leave it there while the Thrasher was being fixed. Unfortunately for the DRI, they also decided to take a holiday from India for a while.Hashish Recovered: In fact, the move to Bhubaneswar had other, more important compulsions. As the evidence later showed, Gray and Warner were trying desperately to find a safe landing place on the coast where the Thrasher could take over Gray's cargo of hashish. One attempt from Paradeep the Thrasher's first mysterious two-day voyage - failed because the coach and boat failed to make contact. The concealed chamber in the coach (left) and some of the canisters containing hashish: High-calibre detective workThe second - at a village near the Sun Temple at Konark - was abandoned when gale force winds whipped up the sea, making it impossible for theThrasher'sdinghy to sail. Villagers later recalled the boat giving out distress signals; it was at this point that it developed engine trouble. The final rendezvous chosen was in the lee of a hill, visible from the sea close to Bhubaneswar. That rendezvous was never kept.On May 2, the DRI moved. Agents seized the coach as it stood parked at a Bhubaneswar hotel. At first, nothing seemed amiss. Then one official noticed that a clamp and screws in the rear-most seat appeared to be of local manufacture. The screws were undone, and the latch removed. Lifting the seat, the agents found crude cotton padding. Beneath that were wooden boards - and below them a superbly concealed chamber which yielded the jackpot: 1,008 kg of hashish.The Thrasher and its crew were seized the next day. Interrogations showed that Derrick had master-minded two, smaller hashish shipments from India's eastern coast in the past, one of which was in April 1973. The DRI landed its biggest catch ever: but thanks to the country's soft laws, it was the smugglers who had the last laugh. The local Visakhapatnam court fixed bail in August 1977 at Rs 10,000 each. Wiggins decided to jump the bail and vanished. Each of the others were sentenced for six months and fined Rs 200 on each of three counts. But the judge ordered the sentences to run concurrently. The result: the three who served their sentences left India lawfully in mid-1978, a trivial price to pay to risk a profit which would have guaranteed a cushy life for the 10 people involved. After all, the hashish, had it reached Canada, would have netted them $ 1.3 million or Rs 1 crore at 1977 prices. Published By: AtMigration Published On: Feb 28, 2014 11:15 IST--- ENDS ---

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Indian narcotics sleuths crack major drug case after year of painstaking effort

The Derrick hashish case became the proudest feather in the cap of India's narcotics sleuths who cracked it open after a year of painstaking effort, bagging more than one tonne of hashish and four of the suspected 10 drug runners involved.

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