A MAN and woman from Dudley have been jailed for trying to smuggle cocaine with a street value of £1.75 million in holdalls into the UK via Heathrow Airport.
Michael Williams, aged 37, and Jessica Waldron, aged 36, both from Holly Hall, planned to hand over the 22kg haul during a rendezvous near Terminal 2 after arriving from Colombia on December 14, 2019.
Unbeknown to them, Colombian authorities had intercepted the drugs, replaced them with wooden blocks before the plane took off and alerted the UK's National Crime Agency.
The pair were arrested after being seen entering the airport toilets with two bags and leaving without them after stepping off their flight from Bogota, Isleworth Crown Court heard.
Parts of the planned handover had been organised through the encrypted messaging platform EncroChat, on which they were instructed to dress in specific clothing and pose as a couple by holding hands on arrival for identification purposes.
Phones belonging to Waldron were seized after she was detained, with one containing a message from November 9 reading: "Hey Jess, it's D, got something real nice for you and Mike."
She replied: "Ok."
Waldron and Williams both admitted being concerned in the fraudulent evasion of a prohibition on the importation of a class A drug two days after their arrest.
Prosecutor John Ojakovoh said: "The defendants were two couriers who were recruited into and played their part in a criminal enterprise to import 22kg of cocaine into the United Kingdom from Colombia.
"That would have had a street value of about £1.75 million."
Detailing the attempted handover, he said the pair followed a third person, having deviated from the natural route for arrivals,and they were seen going in with holdalls containing the blocks before leaving without the holdalls.
The prosecutor said Waldron acted as "lead" courier, liaising with the Colombian side of the operation and others in the chain of command.
"Jessica Waldron and Michael Williams had arrived in a prepared way wearing clothes they had been photographed in for identification purposes and held hands as if they were a couple - as they were instructed to do via an EncroChat message they received as they arrived," Mr Ojakovoh said.
Tom Blackburn, defending, said they had a smaller role in the wider enterprise and were "following orders" from more senior players.
"It is my submission that the defendants - both of them - were acting under the direction of others, who would only have told them as much as they needed to know to carry out their specific role, because to give them any further information would have effectively been redundant," he said.
Mr Blackburn said Waldron and Williams were class A drug users at the time of the offence and motivated in part by a desire to fund their addictions.
They have since kicked their habits and made efforts to reform themselves while in prison, he said.
Sentencing them to six years and eight months' imprisonment each, Recorder Christopher Stone said he had taken into account the "significant quantity of drugs" concerned but he added that both defendants appear to have "changed for the better" while behind bars.
He said: "You must have had some awareness and understanding of the scale of the operation you were involved in.
"You did this with the expectation of financial advantage."
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