Thirty-five years ago, one drug dealer believed he had a fool proof plan to smuggle uncut Colombian cocaine directly into Scotland.
Recruiting a gang of fellow Scots, Julian Chisholm proposed taking the drugs by ship across the Atlantic to a remote Highland beach, and then by road to central Scotland for distribution.
He successfully pitched his idea to South America’s Cali Cartel, one of the world’s most dangerous crime organisations.
But on a stormy winter’s night in 1990, Chisholm’s criminal enterprise began to spectacularly unravel.
Brought up in Blairgowrie, Perthshire, Chisholm worked as a deep sea diver in the North Sea oil industry in the 1980s before turning to a life of crime.
After quitting his job, he moved to southern Spain and worked his way into the region’s criminal underworld.
He started smuggling cannabis, but had his sights on something more lucrative – cocaine, the drug of choice of the rich and dubbed “white gold”.
“Half a tonne of gold was worth £7m or £8m,” writer Iain F Macleod tells new BBC Alba three-part documentary Cocaine and the Klondykers.
“Half a tonne of cocaine was worth £100m.”
Chisholm formed a plan to get cocaine of high purity directly to Scotland.
He would land it in the Scottish Highlands, a large and sparsely populated region too big for the authorities to watch every way in and out.
His scheme circumnavigated the existing route of drugs to Scotland through continental Europe, over the sea from Holland to England and then north.
There were too many opportunities for police to intercept consignments.
And by the time cocaine reached Scotland it had been cut – mixed – several times with additives such as flour or baking soda to bulk up the supply.
Special forces raid a cartel compound in Cali, Colombia, in the 1990s [Getty Images]
Chisholm sold his plan to the Cali Cartel, a violent Colombian criminal group smuggling cocaine into Europe.
Writer Eugene Costello says: “Setting up a deal like that with the Cali Cartel doesn’t happen overnight.
“I am still intrigued how he did it.”
Despite being based in Spain, Chisholm’s criminal activities were on the radar of UK police and customs, who were aware of a link to the Highlands.
Still, Chisholm successfully smuggled a large quantity of cannabis undetected to convince the cartel he could handle cocaine.
The cannabis was landed on Gruinard Island in Wester Ross.
Nicknamed Anthrax Island, it was closed to the public due to contamination caused by germ warfare tests in World War Two.
‘Cut adrift’
Chisholm had recruited a team of six including diver Chris Howarth and fisherman Noel Hawkins, who were from the Highlands, along with David Forrest, from Dundee, and Ian Rae, of Angus.
Howarth and Chisholm scouted locations where the drugs could be landed from sea.
They settled on Clashnessie, a small beach near the tiny community of Drumbeg on the rugged north west Highland coastline north of Ullapool.
In December 1990 the plan was put into action.
A rusty freighter, with Howarth and Hawkins on board, picked up bales of cocaine dropped from a plane into the ocean off Trinidad – islands off South America’s east coast.
The ship reached the Highlands during a storm.
But Howarth and Hawkins were ordered by the freighter’s Spanish captain, a veteran of running drugs, to get into a rubber dinghy with the cocaine and get it to shore.
Costello says: “It was foolhardy almost to the point of homicidal to cut them adrift in a force 10 storm.”
Packets of cocaine were lost overboard. Days later a fishing boat would pick up a package worth about £1m.
Some believe the original amount of drugs involved was a tonne.
Nearing the shore the dinghy was cut to shreds on a rocky, razor sharp reef.
Howarth and Hawkins eventually got to the safety of the beach and stashed the drugs they had managed to bring with them under rocks.
They then trudged a few miles in wet clothes to Drumbeg and the nearest phone box to let Chisholm know.
A reconstruction of the gang’s orange van on a Highland road [BEEZR TV/BBC ALBA]
The next part of the plan was set in motion.
The Dundee-based distribution team – Forrest and Rae – hired a bright orange van in Forfar and headed north to collect the drugs.
Police and Customs officials monitoring Chisholm were alerted that something might be afoot.
They believed it was another large shipment of cannabis and were determined not to let this one slip under their noses.
Efforts were made to trace Forrest and Rae’s movements.
The pair reached Clashnessie and the cocaine was packed into the back of the van.
Forrest and Rae set off on the long drive back south.
If they were stopped by police, they were to tell officers they were a special delivery crew transferring radioactive material from the Dounreay nuclear power plant, near Thurso, for disposal at another site.
They had fake paperwork to support their lie.
Their hope was officers would keep their distance and let them to carry on their way.
They were unaware the authorities already had an inkling of what they were up to and would see through any such ruse.
Map
A patrolling police sergeant spotted the van parked outside toilets at Corrieshalloch, near Ullapool.
The Highlands were a far quieter place than they are today and the orange vehicle jarred with Mike Maclennan.
He noted the east coast number plate and called it in.
A check confirmed it was a vehicle hired by Rae. The authorities were now firmly on the tail of Chisholm’s gang.
The van was surrounded by police on the A9 near Aviemore.
Customs investigator Graham Dick says: “We were always thinking this was going to be a cannabis importation and when the van was opened we had these black bags.
“The total was half a tonne of cocaine.”
The £100m of “white gold” was the biggest drug seizure made in the UK at that time.
It led to the arrests and jailing of Chisholm’s gang.
He was arrested in Spain but escaped from prison and his whereabouts remain unknown today.
