Meet Jonathan Parkhill, the 55-year-old dubbed the ‘Escobar of Essex’ after his bungled £20 million cocaine operation landed him a 16-year jail sentence. Things went awry when Parkhill mistakenly sent 30 kg of cocaine meant for Germany to South Africa instead. This crucial slip-up ultimately led to his downfall as investigators were able to track him down through his encrypted digital messages while he attempted to rectify his blunder.

Parkhill’s criminal antics also include a partnership with Kevin Hanley, his 44-year-old right-hand man. The duo smuggled around £16 million worth of cocaine, approximately 500 kg, to Belgium in 2020. The job’s profits were meant to be divided between Parkhill and ‘Colombian groups’, but things took a turn for the worse, and his co-smuggler ended up being beaten up.

Upon his return to the UK from Colombia in 2021, Parkhill was arrested at Heathrow Airport. Colombia was home to the infamous drug lord, Pablo Escobar, the leader of the Medellín Cartel. Parkhill has been described by an insider source as “one of the biggest drugs traffickers caught in the UK for a long time.”

Hanley was arrested near his residence in Uxbridge, West London, where a sawn-off shotgun was also discovered. Both Parkhill and Hanley confessed to the conspiracy to import cocaine and admitted to numerous other offences. Hanley received an 11-and-a-half year prison sentence.

Their arrests are part of the National Crime Agency’s Operation Venetic, an ongoing mission established in 2020. The operation’s main goal is to dismantle the encrypted communication platform, EncroChat. EncroChat utilized modified Android phones, costing £1,500 for just six months of usage. At the time, the platform had around 10,000 users in the UK and an estimated 60,000 users worldwide.