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Two alleged ringleaders of a British crime group have been handed decades-long prison terms for plotting to smuggle multi-tonne shipments of cocaine and cannabis into the country, the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA) announced.
The NCA alleged that ringleaders Lee McClenaghan, 57, and Lea Talbot, 55, spent two years planning to traffic 600 kilograms of cocaine from South America aboard a yacht competing in a 2020 transatlantic sailing race. When the race was canceled due to the pandemic, the group shifted to other methods, hiding cocaine in container loads of fruit and vegetables and arranging large-scale cannabis imports from Morocco. Authorities uncovered the conspiracy in May 2022, when investigators seized 408 kilograms of cannabis hidden inside a lathe machine.
McClenaghan was sentenced to 30 years in prison, while Talbot received 23 years. Other members of the network were given terms ranging from six to 22 years, all after pleading guilty.
Had the cocaine plan succeeded, it would have been “incredibly lucrative,” said Detective Inspector Richard Smith of the Organised Crime Partnership. Their failure, he added, “deprived organized criminals of the profits this large amount of cocaine would have generated, and prevented communities suffering the violence and exploitation associated with it.”
The case comes as Europe confronts a booming drug trade. The EU drug market is estimated to have a minimum retail value of €31 billion ($36.38 billion), according to Alexander Söderholm, Scientific Analyst for Drug Markets and Crime at the European Union Drugs Agency (EUDA).
“High availability across major drug types, stable retail prices alongside high purity and a widening range of consumer products all point to strong demand being met by increasingly efficient drug supply chains,” Söderholm told OCCRP.
He said Europe “occupies a central position” in global trafficking, serving both as a key market and a hub of large-scale production. Cocaine shipments are increasingly routed through European ports, while new synthetic drugs and substances continue to emerge.
The EUDA warned in June 2025 that the surge in trafficking through major ports reflects not only rising volumes but also growing vulnerabilities, pointing to a “worrying scale of criminal activity.” Authorities seized more than 1,826 tonnes of illicit drugs within or en route to EU ports between January 2019 and June 2024.
“These interlinked markets—and the violence and corruption they generate—reinforce the need for system-level measures across the illicit drug supply chain,” Söderholm said.
