The first arrests took place on the harbour at Yarmouth, the cobbled, picture-book port that lies on the Isle of Wight’s quieter western side. It was a Sunday evening, 30 May 2010, almost a decade ago, but Nicky Green still sees it in Technicolor. She was working in Salty’s, the family’s restaurant just yards from the marina. “It was the bank holiday weekend and we were absolutely stacked,” she says. Her parents were serving behind the bar, her daughter was waiting tables and her younger brother, Jamie, a 42-year-old fisherman, was out on the quay, just back from sea. “I’d called and asked him to bring in some lobsters,” Nicky recalls. “I was expecting him to walk through the door when someone told me he’d been arrested.”
In the moment, she was too busy to follow it up. “I was juggling the food, the crowds, the tables, and I knew Jamie was having an issue with some other fishermen – they were accusing each other of pinching lobster pots, and he was dodging the CID guy trying to deal with it. I thought this was fishermen bickering. I never on this Earth thought it was serious. How would I have ever imagined the gravity?”
But Jamie Green never came back. A year later, on 2 June 2011, Green, his crew of three – Scott Birtwistle, Daniel Payne and Zoran Dresic, as well as Jonathan Beere, a local scaffolder – were found guilty of conspiracy to import class A drugs. Their sentences, a combined total of 104 years, reflected the scale of the haul: a fisherman had found 250kg of cocaine worth an estimated £53m roped together in holdalls and floating in the island’s Freshwater Bay.
The men, now known as the Freshwater Five, were not typical multimillion-pound drug smugglers. They had no previous convictions relating to drugs or dishonesty, no forensic evidence linked them to the cocaine, and a Proceeds of
Crime Act inquiry assessed their gains from criminality at zero. They did not lead lavish lifestyles, and how they planned to distribute such a quantity of drugs was not made clear. The case has rocked the island, dividing friends, family and fishermen. While Birtwistle and Payne are out on licence, the remaining three men are nine years into 24-year sentences. Now new evidence means their case is coming back to the appeal court, a chance for all five to clear their names.
