In mid-June, German drug investigators made a historic seizure of 35.5 tons of cocaine worth €2.6 billion, thanks to crucial tips and meticulous investigations, marking the largest cocaine find in the country to date.
It is the largest known drug seizure in Germany: In mid-June, customs and criminal police investigators reported having seized and destroyed 35.5 tons of cocaine worth €2.6 billion under heavy police protection. The drugs had been intercepted the previous year.
End of May, early June this year: Investigators from the Customs and State Criminal Police Office of Baden-Württemberg searched premises in seven federal states and arrested seven suspects: a truck driver, a port logistics worker, a Hamburg freight forwarder, and an inconspicuous German businessman from North Rhine-Westphalia.
“The accused is said to have founded numerous shell companies for the purpose of importing cocaine,” says Julius Sterzel from the investigating public prosecutor’s office in Düsseldorf. The 43-year-old family man Simon F. is now in pre-trial detention.
The native of Leipzig began his career with an apprenticeship at the Chamber of Commerce and Industry in his hometown. At various companies in western Germany, he learned the intricacies of a very specific market: the trade in shelf companies. He founded nameless companies with no business purpose and sold these empty shells to founders who wanted to quickly become economically operational without dealing with bureaucratic hurdles.
This is why his name appears hundreds of times in the commercial register. Was this abundance of entries a perfect cover for illegal activities? In the spring of 2023, Simon F. began founding companies on his own account in addition to his regular employment, but now with sometimes flowery names and business purposes such as “import and export as well as wholesale and retail trade in textiles, food, and building materials.”
Football and trucks
According to investigative documents obtained by SWR, the businessman had already been in contact with another suspect at this time: Ümit D. from the Cologne area. Born in Germany, he grew up in a Turkish family well-known in the area: pictures show him at the local football club, and a friend mentions regular mosque visits. His Facebook profile hints at his professional life: it shows overseas containers and photos of trucks from the freight forwarding company his family founded in 2017.
But this image of Ümit D. apparently has a dark side: A longtime acquaintance, who wishes to remain anonymous, told SWR about Ümit D.’s dealings with fast cars and prostitutes. The police reportedly confiscated a Lamborghini, a Ferrari, and other expensive cars from him. “He didn’t play football – he extorted!” says the man about Ümit D. The 39-year-old is now in pre-trial detention, and his company has filed for bankruptcy.
The phone at the company of the third alleged main perpetrator, Mustafa E. from Hamburg, has also been unanswered for days. However, an insolvency application has not yet been found in the official register. Perhaps because this suspect is also currently in pre-trial detention. According to investigative documents, Mustafa E. is said to have retrieved containers with goods from South America from the Port of Hamburg and unloaded the cargo.
Drug-sniffing dog finds cocaine
The division of labor among the three was set up as if it were only for legal business, according to investigations: Simon F. founded companies that appeared to be import firms for food and building materials. Ümit D. created websites for these companies and ordered goods from South America. Mustafa E. retrieved the containers from the port. To cover up the cocaine smuggling, many containers with legal goods and no cocaine were first ordered through these companies.
For instance, a trade portal recorded eleven shipments from Ecuador for the company B. S. One of these shipments contained cocaine, which a drug-sniffing dog detected at the port of Guayaquil on the Ecuadorian coast. The Ecuadorian National Police posted a video of it on Twitter. It was also a major find for them: nearly three tons of cocaine were hidden in bags of banana flour. This happened in early May 2023. The investigative documents obtained by SWR show that in the preceding months, around €140,000 had flowed from a company in Turkey to the accounts of the three suspects in Germany. Mustafa E. reportedly forwarded about €8,000 of this amount to a large shipping company.
Perhaps to pay for the then-busted banana flour shipment. The Ecuadorian police opened an investigation and immediately notified the Federal Criminal Police Office and the Customs Criminal Office. It remains unclear whether German investigators pursued this lead, which would have directly led to Simon F. and his network of shell companies via the company B.S. The perpetrators were undeterred by the seizure in Guayaquil and continued to send more containers with large quantities of cocaine to Europe every few weeks in the summer of 2023, according to investigators.
Anonymous and official tips
Another very specific tip came in to investigators: On the afternoon of June 8, 2023, a man called Hamburg Customs and provided the license plate number of a container. It contained a large quantity of cocaine. The container was addressed to Ümit D.’s freight forwarding company. But the tip came too late; the container had already left the port. It may have contained the only cocaine shipment that actually reached the alleged trio of perpetrators.
The later investigative success was ultimately due to a “risk profile” from the Colombian anti-drug agency Diran, as the General Customs Directorate confirmed to SWR by email: “The background is a conspicuous export clearance of two containers of bar soap from Colombia with the final destination of Hamburg.” Importing bar soap from Colombia to Germany seemed so illogical to Colombian investigators that they informed the German customs liaison officer – even though they found no cocaine in the two suspicious containers. The recipient of the bar soap was supposed to be a company in Mannheim. However, this company existed only on paper. And it belonged to Simon F.
Search for clues in Turkey
Despite the seizure in Ecuador, more cocaine shipments arrived in Europe in the summer of 2023. Eight tons were seized in Rotterdam, twelve tons in Hamburg. Investigators had expected this shipment, according to investigative documents, because they were now monitoring the network. They intercepted a total of nine containers with cocaine. The arrests in Germany marked the end of the first phase of the operation, said the spokesperson for the Düsseldorf public prosecutor’s office, Julius Sterzel, in an SWR interview. “We are in communication with various law enforcement agencies abroad, particularly in Latin America.” And: “During the investigations, evidence emerged suggesting that the alleged masterminds could be operating from Turkey.”
When customs and police acted against the three main suspects and some accomplices in early June, they didn’t have to search long for Ümit D.: he was already in pre-trial detention. He is accused of having obtained a BMW and a Rolex at gunpoint and will soon be tried for aggravated robbery.
