Drug lord dubbed ‘Escobar of Essex’ jailed after bungling £20,000,000 deal

A drug lord nicknamed the ‘Escobar of Essex’ has been jailed for 16 years after bungling a £20,000,000 cocaine deal and sending the narcotics to the wrong country by mistake.

Jonathan Parkhill, 55, was busted after his encrypted messages were cracked by investigators, revealing close links to Colombian cartels.

They revealed the narco baron, originally from Clapham, Essex, had been attempting to salvage a 30kg shipment bound for Germany which arrived in South Africa by mistake. It was later seized in 2020.

Also revealed was a failed plot between Parkhill and his right-hand man Kevin Hanley, 44, to smuggle 500kg of cocaine into Belgium, in a deal estimated to be worth over £19,000,000.

The money from the deal was supposed to be split between Parkhill and a number of ‘Colombian Groups’, the Sun reports, but was foiled when the deal went south and Hanley was beaten up.

Parkhill’s arrest came in 2021 when he was scooped by authorities at Heathrow Airport. He had just returned to the UK after a trip to Colombia- the home of infamous drug lord Pablo Escobar.

Hanley was arrested near his home in Uxbridge, West London, where officers found a sawn-off shotgun on the property.

During an appearance at Isleworth Crown Court, the duo pleaded guilty to conspiracy to import cocaine as well as admitting to a ‘string of other offences’.

Parkhill was sentenced to 16 years in prison. Hanley was handed an 11-and-a-half year prison sentence.

Following their sentencing, a source told the Sun: ‘Parkhill is one of the biggest drug traffickers caught in the UK for a long time.’

Their arrests were among 746 others as part of the National Crime Agency’s Operation Venetic.

Set up in 2020, the NCA’s objective was to ‘take down the encrypted communication platform EncroChat’, which ‘at the time was one of the largest providers of encrypted communication’.

The EncroChat system used modified Android phones and cost £1,500 for just six months of use.

Handsets could only communicate with other identical phones.

They only had the special chat app on them, apart from a currency converter to help calculate profit on deals.

There were thought to be 10,000 users in the UK, with an estimated 60,000 worldwide.

Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.

For more stories like this, check our news page.