A MAN'S conviction has been the final act in a chain of events that began in a workshop in Grays and involved a bid to smuggle £45 million worth of drugs into Australia.

In December 2022, Thurrock Nub News reported on the conviction of several members of the crime gang behind the plot – which was ultimately foiled with the help of a dog called Bob.

And recently the final member of the gang was also put behind bars – for 23 years.

William Sartin, 63, was convicted of transporting a Class A drug and was sentenced at Kingston Crown Court.

Sartin was part of a group who hid MDMA in the arm of an industrial digger and organised an online auction to make the excavator's arrival in Australia look legitimate.

The MDMA had an estimated street value of up to £45m and weighed 448 kilos.

His co-conspirators Danny Brown, Stefan Baldauf, Peter Murray, Tony Borg, Leon Reilly and Philip Lawson were sentenced for their roles, as reported in our earlier story.

William Sartin.

The digger, a Doosan DX420, cost €75,000 and was first stored in an industrial unit in Grays.

The unit was under the control of Sartin, who communicated with the others under the Encrochat handles "haplessbadger" and "urbanmallet".

The digger was worked on by Tony Borg and Philip Lawson with the latter designing the hide and arranged for a welder to cut open an arm of the digger.

They then sealed the Class A drugs behind a lead lining and Murray was responsible for sourcing and transporting the drugs.

Mizen Equipment paid a haulage firm £1,600 to move the digger to Southampton Docks. It took almost three months to arrive in Brisbane, Australia.

Australian Border Force officers x-rayed the digger, removed the drugs and sealed the arm before letting it move onto its intended destination under surveillance.

The digger was moved to a small site west of Sydney in May 2020 and Brown forwarded the Australian OCG a diagram.

The Doosan digger

It had been drawn by Lawson and showed exactly where the drugs were hidden and how the digger should be opened.

On May 18, two men from the Australian OCG spent two days trying to find the drugs before realising something was wrong.

EncroChat messages show the six UK men launched their own investigation and held meetings to find out who had stolen the drugs. These were attended by Sartin.

The group were arrested by NCA officers between mid-2020 and early 2021.

Sartin had multiple previous convictions. In 2000, he was involved in an attempt to smuggle 480kg of cannabis into the UK from the Netherlands, hidden amongst scrap metal.

In 2011, he was convicted of conspiracy to cheat the public revenue, having conspired to smuggle tobacco and tobacco shredding machinery into the UK.

Chris Hill, NCA Branch Commander, said: "Sartin played a vital role in this conspiracy.

"It was in his industrial unit that the excavator was concealed, cut open, and filled with MDMA.

"All of these men thought that they were safe on EncroChat, but NCA officers painstakingly combed through every single message they sent to build evidence against them.

"Our work with partners abroad, shown here through our collaboration with the Australian Federal Police, protects the public from the dangers of Class A drugs, which destroy lives and communities here in the UK and across the world."

The role of Bob the dog, a pet of one of the conspirators was explained by investigators, who broke the encryption on Encrochat.

One of the traffickers sent a photograph of his dog on EncroChat, showing his partner's phone number on the animal's tag.

Danny Brown, 55, operated on EncroChat under the handle 'throwthedice'.

He sent an image of his pet, named 'Bob', to co-conspirator Stefan Baldauf, 62, as they worked on a plot to send 448 kilos of MDMA worth £45m to Australia.

National Crime Agency investigators zoomed in on the phone number and used it – among many other tactics in a painstaking investigation - to prove Brown was part of the conspiracy.