NCA Operation Venetic jails two for £190m cocaine trafficking, laundering illicit profits through famous ‘Hatton Garden’ gold merchant

The pair used the encrypted communications platform EncroChat to discuss their offending, with Byrne using the handles ‘slickvalley’ and ‘officialcleaner’ and Devlin known as ‘scalpcleaner’. EncroChat messages showed that the pair had attempted to import around five tons of cocaine between March 2020 and June 2020 via a number of ports in Europe including Antwerp, and the UK.  This major operation also uncovered links to a prison break…