British gang member jailed after £45m worth of drugs hidden in digger sent from Essex to Australia
A 63-year-old man has been jailed for 23 years for his role in an international drug operation that attempted to smuggle £45m worth of MDMA to Australia hidden inside a digger.
William Sartin was sentenced yesterday at Kingston Crown Court after being convicted in September of transporting Class A drugs.
The operation involved concealing 448 kilos of MDMA in the arm of an industrial excavator that was shipped more than 10,000 miles from Essex to Australia.
Sartin was part of a wider organised crime group, whose other members were sentenced in 2022 for their involvement in the sophisticated smuggling scheme.
The gang used an industrial unit in Grays, Essex, which was under Sartin’s control, as their base of operations.
Sartin communicated with his co-conspirators using the Encrochat handles “haplessbadger” and “urbanmallet”.
The group purchased a Doosan DX420 digger for £62,000, which was stored at the Essex unit.
Two gang members, Tony Borg and Philip Lawson, modified the digger, with Lawson designing a hidden compartment in the machine’s arm.
The drugs were sealed behind a lead lining after a welder cut open the digger’s arm, while another member, Murray, was tasked with sourcing and transporting the MDMA.
A haulage firm was paid £1,600 to transport the digger to Southampton Docks, from where it took nearly three months to reach Brisbane.
Australian Border Force officers intercepted the shipment, removing the drugs and resealing the arm before allowing it to continue under surveillance.
The digger was delivered to a site west of Sydney in May 2020, where Brown sent Australian gang members Lawson’s diagram showing how to access the hidden drugs.
Two Australian criminals spent two days trying unsuccessfully to find the drugs, unaware they had been seized.
The failed operation prompted the UK gang, including Sartin, to hold meetings investigating who had “stolen” their shipment.
Sartin’s criminal history includes a 2000 conviction for attempting to smuggle 480kg of cannabis from the Netherlands, concealed in scrap metal.
In 2011, he was also convicted of conspiracy to cheat public revenue through tobacco and tobacco machinery smuggling.
Chris Hill, NCA Branch Commander, said: “Sartin played a vital role in this conspiracy. It was in his industrial unit that the excavator was concealed, cut open, and filled with MDMA.”
“All of these men thought that they were safe on EncroChat, but NCA officers painstakingly combed through every single message they sent to build evidence against them,” Hill added.