Jamie “Iceman” Stevenson, a notorious Scottish gangster, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for orchestrating a drug trafficking operation that smuggled £100 million worth of cocaine into the UK.

The drugs, hidden in boxes of bananas from Ecuador, were seized by Border Force at Dover in September 2020. Stevenson, who was linked to organised crime in Scotland, also planned to flood the country with millions of Etizolam tablets from a factory in Kent. 

The plot was uncovered through encrypted messages on a criminal messaging platform infiltrated by French police. 

Stevenson was arrested after fleeing the UK, spending two years on the run before being captured in the Netherlands. 

He and five co-conspirators, including fruit merchant David Bilsland, were jailed for a total of 63 years for their roles in the operation, which spanned multiple countries including the UK, Spain, Ecuador, and Abu Dhabi.