Great profile piece about Fahie.. the most recent poster boy for a cocaine downfall.
Fahie’s defense attorney claimed the British overseas territory leader was ‘acting like the fictitious CIA agent Jason Bourne’
A former premier of the British Virgin Islands has been convicted on drug trafficking charges in the US, highlighting the territory’s status as a “formidable cocaine trafficking hub”.
Andrew Fahie, who led BVI from 2019 to 2022, was arrested in April 2022 after a US “sting operation” involving a confidential informant known as “Roberto Quintero”, who posed as a trafficker of the notorious Mexican Sinaloa cartel, reported Insight Crime.
Fahie was found guilty of money laundering and conspiring to import cocaine through the tiny British overseas territory into the US by a Florida jury in February. The 53-year old faces a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years up to life in prison, and is due to be sentenced on 29 April in Miami.
‘Role-playing as Jason Bourne’
Fahie was charged with planning to shield “cocaine-filled boats while docked in the Caribbean islands’ ports and bribing a government official”, said Reuters, “in a plot intended to run thousands of kilograms of the drug through the territory.”
He agreed a $700,000 (£560,000) payment to allow traffickers to use BVI ports with an undercover informant, charges filed in the US said.
Fahie’s defense attorney claimed the then-premier was “acting like the fictitious CIA agent Jason Bourne” when he was approached by the man acting as a cartel member, reported the Miami Herald.
Fahie then “took role-playing as Bourne even further when he agreed to accept millions in bribes” from the supposed trafficker, so that he could uncover whether “the smuggler was out to destroy him on behalf of the British government”, his lawyer said.
Fahie was “concerned that the British didn’t like him”, his attorney told jurors in closing remarks. Jurors, however, “didn’t buy the Bourne defense”, said The Miami Herald and unanimously found him guilty.
Plenty more at
https://theweek.com/crime/andrew-fahie-drug-trafficking-plot
