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off Portugal, to offload a massive £25 million cargo of cannabis resin. The navigational skills of the two skippers couldn’t prevent the terrifying clash of metal on metal as they were finally thrown together. The crews were undeterred by the danger, for those in peril on the sea had chosen to be there as part of the world’s biggest cannabis smuggling ring – except two. They were undercover detectives, and probably the bravest men I ever worked with.
    We were involved in one of the most amazing undercover operations of all time, on land and sea, pitted against a drugs gang whose army of traffickers would have required a dozen stickers on a world map, from Britain to Croatia, to Holland, to Canada.Venezuela, France, Spain and beyond. This was Operation Dash, a combined venture by law enforcement agencies triggered off by a South East Regional Crime Squad surveillance on an old-time villain looking to pull off one last big job before he retired.
    It all went wrong for Bobby Mills and his cronies when the entire haul of 6.5 tons of high-grade hash was snatched from under their noses in a combined operation by the police in six countries, Customs, and Royal Navy. It was the first time, in fact, that British Naval vessels had been used to round up drug smugglers on the high seas.
    I was on secondment from SO10 to the SERCS office in Tottenham Court Road in 1993 when we received an underworld tip-off that Bobby Mills was ‘at it’ again. I say again because Mills was already in prison serving ten years for exactly the same crime, smuggling puff in huge quantities into the UK. He’d been a good boy inside and had been transferred towards the end of his sentence to HMP Latchmere House, on Ham Common, near Richmond, Surrey, as part of a resettlement programme. He was allowed out on a daily basis to ‘reintegrate’ into society and get used to returning to the routine of work. Or that was the idea. Mills had managed to get a friend of his, as most of them do, to say that he was going to be offered employment when he left jail. The authorities allowed him out in the morning and back at night. But Bobby Mills was never intending to work. He was busy sorting out a major league cannabis importation that he reckoned would set him up financially for the rest of his life. Mills became our number-one target. He was the key to bigger things. We were discreetly watchinghim as he toddled off daily to his non-existent job.
    We discovered he was working in cahoots with a world-renowned international drug-dealer called Marc Feviet, a Frenchman, and a Sicilian Mafia figure called Locatelli who was known to be involved with Columbian-organised crime gangs. Our surveillance work stretched from weeks into months. The unmistakable message was simple: something really big was on the go. Finally our intelligence network picked up the information we needed; the job was to be the biggest-ever shipment of cannabis into a South of England port. It was to be picked up in the Atlantic from a ‘mother ship’ operated by an international drugs cartel. The 1,000-ton vessel, called Poseidon, was fitted with state-of-the-art navigational systems and satellite communications. In effect, it was a floating warehouse from which the world’s drug-dealers could buy their supplies. That is, if they liked a sea trip and had the bottle to brave the Atlantic ocean at its most unpredictable. Poseidon operated solely in international waters. No cosy handovers in the calm of coastal waters. She returned to port only to re-stock with more drugs, normally in Morocco. The gang were dealing in tons of the stuff on a wholesale basis. Ganja galore; Spliffs ‘R’ Us.
    Our intelligence network gained a major breakthrough when we discovered Mills and his associates were looking to hire a boat, plus crew, to make a trip out to Poseidon to pick up 6.5 tons of hash for distribution to UK dealers. The boat would sail out to meet the Poseidon at a given point off the Portuguese