BRITAIN’S first £1 billion drug cartel has been smashed after flooding cities and towns with tonnes of cocaine for a decade.

Jésus Ruiz-Henao and his second-in-command, Mario Tascón, generated so much cash that they employed 20,000 money launderers in Colombia.

They ran the operation in the manner of an international business, smuggling 1½ tonnes of high-purity cocaine into Britain each year. It became so influential that the wholesale price of a kilo of cocaine rose by 50 per cent after the police operation smashed the cartel.

Reporting restrictions were lifted after the last of 34 members of the gang were convicted yesterday at Blackfriars Crown Court in London.

Ruiz-Henao, from Holloway, North London, was jailed for 19 years and Tascón, his 33-year-old brother-in-law from Hendon, North London, was given a 17-year sentence.

After a two-year operation police also seized £2.5 million in cash and 2 tonnes of drugs worth an estimated £100 million in street sales.

Many of the gang pleaded guilty to money laundering or drug charges.

Ruiz-Henao, 45, was the sales distribution manager, running the gang while posing as a pillar of the expatriate Colombian society.

He was even the director of a charity called the London Colombian Appeal Fund set up to help orphans and children addicted to drugs in Colombia. It was used to launder some of the drugs cash.

In 1993 he won £100,000 in a Spot the Ball competition and when police arrested him at his home they found that he still proudly kept a photograph of himself clutching the winning cheque — now representing a fraction of his income — on his wall.

He and his gang thought they were “invisible” but detectives were alerted after investigations into another gang. The National Crime Squad and Scotland Yard’s elite and secretive special projects unit targeted them in parallel investigations using hidden surveillance cameras and bugs.

Tariq Ghaffur, the assistant commissioner in charge of Scotland Yard’s drug investigations, said: “A criminal business saw a market place in London, dipped their toe in and went on from there.”

Detective Superintendent Martin Molloy, who led the NCS team, added: “We are looking at the first £1 billion drug cartel we have ever dealt with.”

Detectives are basing their estimates on the street value of the drugs the gang is thought to have smuggled into the country, which can be £70,000- £100,000 a kilo depending on purity.

He said that the police operation involving 50 officers had rolled up the network from the top to the bottom, including arrests in Colombia.

The wholesale price of a kilo of cocaine in the underworld rapidly rose from £20,000 to £30,000 after the arrests three years ago and has only recently started to fall.

Police say that the gang remained unknown for years, showing few outward signs of the wealth it was generating as members became key players in the wholesale supply of cocaine to Britain’s street gangs.

The gang even set up its own money transfer business linked to a dingy café in North London. Passers-by reported that the café, which purportedly catered to Colombian expatriates, was always closed.

Ruiz-Henao, who came to Britain 25 years ago seeking political asylum, started out driving buses and working as a cleaner. Both he and Tascón now have British passports.

Many members of their organisation were related and came from close-knit communities in Colombian towns and cities. Often they had stayed in Britain when their visitors’ permits expired or were asylum-seekers working in menial jobs such as cleaning.

They lived quiet lives in council houses or rented homes with few signs of luxury. But Ruiz-Henao and Tascón, who both came from Perreira in Colombia’s coffee-producing area, did allow themselves several trips abroad.

Between them they spent £100,000 in one year on travel. Police who trailed Ruiz-Henao watched him check into a luxury penthouse in Madrid.

The drugs were landed in Spain from South America and then smuggled overland by couriers or packed in pallets in the back of lorries and covered in mustard or jam to disguise the smell from dogs trained to sniff out drugs. Cocaine was hidden in fruit as well as dissolved into liquid form and ingrained into clothing or even plastic.

The drugs were split up into parcels and taken to safe houses around Britain, from where they were sent to local distributors and, eventually, to street dealers.

The gang moved cash around London in bin bags, and it was sent back to Colombia in the same lorries in which the drugs had arrived. Couriers also carried it abroad in bags, or even swallowed notes inside condoms.

Other payments were sent through money-exchange businesses run by the gang or transferred using high street banks and several big money-transfer companies.

Police say that each week £40,000 to £200,000 of the cash was broken down into packages of £500, which is the maximum amount that can be transferred to Colombia without question.

The transfers were addressed to thousands of recipients in Colombia, who recieved a few pesos in payment. Police say the money then went to drugs barons there or was used to buy yet more drugs to import into Britain.

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