The first arrests took place on the harbour at Yarmouth, the cobbled, picture-book port that lies on the Isle of Wight’s quieter western side. It was a Sunday evening, 30 May 2010, almost a decade ago, but Nicky Green still sees it in Technicolor. She was working in Salty’s, the family’s restaurant just yards from the marina. “It was the bank holiday weekend and we were absolutely stacked,” she says. Her parents were serving behind the bar, her daughter was waiting tables and her younger brother, Jamie, a 42-year-old fisherman, was out on the quay, just back from sea. “I’d called and asked him to bring in some lobsters,” Nicky recalls. “I was expecting him to walk through the door when someone told me he’d been arrested.”

In the moment, she was too busy to follow it up. “I was juggling the food, the crowds, the tables, and I knew Jamie was having an issue with some other fishermen – they were accusing each other of pinching lobster pots, and he was dodging the CID guy trying to deal with it. I thought this was fishermen bickering. I never on this Earth thought it was serious. How would I have ever imagined the gravity?”

But Jamie Green never came back. A year later, on 2 June 2011, Green, his crew of three – Scott Birtwistle, Daniel Payne and Zoran Dresic, as well as Jonathan Beere, a local scaffolder – were found guilty of conspiracy to import class A drugs. Their sentences, a combined total of 104 years, reflected the scale of the haul: a fisherman had found 250kg of cocaine worth an estimated £53m roped together in holdalls and floating in the island’s Freshwater Bay.

Nicky Green, whose brother Jamie was one of the five men found guilty of conspiracy to import class A drugs. Photograph: Peter Flude/The Guardian

The men, now known as the Freshwater Five, were not typical multimillion-pound drug smugglers. They had no previous convictions relating to drugs or dishonesty, no forensic evidence linked them to the cocaine, and a Proceeds of Crime Act inquiry assessed their gains from criminality at zero. They did not lead lavish lifestyles, and how they planned to distribute such a quantity of drugs was not made clear. The case has rocked the island, dividing friends, family and fishermen. While Birtwistle and Payne are out on licence, the remaining three men are nine years into 24-year sentences. Now new evidence means their case is coming back to the appeal court, a chance for all five to clear their names.

***

As a kid, Jamie was fishing mad – that’s all he’s done. He was a rufty-tufty fisherman who didn’t suffer fools gladly’

A couple of miles across the Solent from the UK mainland, the Isle of Wight’s private beaches, secluded inlets and narrow valleys have made it a smuggling base for centuries. It remains strangely isolated, a place where many juggle two or three jobs, since wages, employment and opportunities are all markedly lower than in the rest of the south-east. But for most, smuggling has been relegated to movies and history books. Today, the movement of drugs, firearms and people belongs to organised crime – which is partly why the Freshwater Five case stands out.

Jamie Green, the central figure linking the men, was born and raised on the island; at trial, the prosecution accepted that he was “a legitimate lobster fisherman”. His parents founded Salty’s more than 25 years ago, converting a garage first into a fish shop, then a bar and restaurant, which are now under new ownership. “As a kid, Jamie was fishing mad – that’s all he has ever done,” Nicky says. Green left school at 16, got his first boat at 17, and by 2010 owned the 39ft Galwad-y-Mor, supplying London restaurants and fishmongers, and exporting to mainland Europe.

The family were well known in Yarmouth. Green had convictions for public order offences and drunkenness – and always pleaded guilty. “He was a rufty-tufty fisherman who didn’t suffer fools gladly, and there are a lot of fools round Yarmouth,” Nicky says. At the time of his arrest, Nikki, his wife of 21 years and the mother of their three children, was being treated for breast cancer.

Birtwistle, the Galwad’s only permanent crew member, saw Green as a mentor. Now 29, he has moved back home with his mother on the mainland in Selsey, a seaside town in Sussex. Calm and measured, he’s balancing his wish to speak out with a wariness of not being believed.

The police had intelligence that a drug delivery was arriving on a container ship to be picked up by a smaller boat

Like Green, Birtwistle had always loved fishing. “I loved the freedom. It didn’t even feel like a job,” he says. On leaving school, he placed an ad on findafishingboat.com. Green contacted him in December 2009, and within weeks Birtwistle had moved to the island to live in a caravan on Green’s land and crew the Galwad. “Jamie knew his stuff and taught me so much,” he says. “In Selsey, skippers take control and don’t teach you anything in case you get your own boat and take their business. Jamie was different.”

Danny Payne, now 45, had known Green since his teens. Now back on the Isle of Wight, he’s working on building sites, still adjusting to “life outside”. Payne had been a more reluctant crew member on that bank holiday trip. “Do you know Quint, the shark hunter from Jaws?” Payne asks. “Well, that was Jamie. I used to call him Quint. He’d bark and shout if you were doing it wrong, but he sure knows his way around a boat.

“I’d worked for Jamie a lot over the years and used to enjoy it,” he continues. “My dad was a submariner, and I’ve always been around the sea. But by then, I was living with my girlfriend, we had a rescue dog and I didn’t want to go out on the boat for days on end. I was doing more building work for nearly as much money, but I knew Nikki was ill and Jamie was having problems finding crew. It’s ridiculously hard and always dangerous – even in the calmest weather, there’s rope flying, the stink of rotting crab and fish and diesel. Most people only came once.”

Freshwater Bay, Isle Of Wight, where 11 holdalls filled with cocaine worth £53m were found floating in 2010. Photograph: Peter Flude/The Guardian

Zoran Dresic, 36 and from Montenegro, was the third crew member. Married with three children, he’d worked in Austria and Italy before coming to the UK on a false passport just two days before. According to Dresic, he’d been promised work by a friend of a friend. This was not unusual – the whole fishing industry uses foreign crew and the Yarmouth harbourmaster confirmed the Galwad’s high turnover. However, the prosecution’s case was that Dresic, who spoke no English and had little if any fishing experience, had come with the express purpose of overseeing a drug drop, and that the “friends of friends” – two men who’d delivered Dresic to the island before returning to the mainland and disappearing – were coconspirators.

Green set sail with his crew on the afternoon of Saturday 29 May, heading to the shipping lanes where cargo ships head east to Europe or west to the United States. According to Green, the forecast was bad but expected to break around midnight, by which time they’d have reached the five-mile central reservation between the lanes, less heavily fished and rich with spring tides. What he couldn’t have known was that it was also the centre of a massive police operation that weekend, run by the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) and Middle Market Drugs Partnership (both of which have since been disbanded).

The Galwad was searched and partly dismantled. Every inch of the boat was scanned, but no molecule of cocaine was found

Operation Disorient had received intelligence that a drug delivery was arriving on a container ship, to be picked up by a smaller boat and taken ashore. Patrol ships and surveillance planes were looking out, and at some point the Galwad crossed their radar. Mid-channel, where the suspected transfer took place, in the dead of night in a force eight gale, there was nothing much to see. The Galwad’s instruments show that the boat never stopped moving, though at 12.40am, for three and a half minutes, it reduced its speed from 5 knots to .57 of a knot. The prosecution claimed this was sufficient for Green and his crew to recover 11 holdalls of cocaine they believed had been jettisoned by a passing container ship, the MSC Oriane, travelling to Holland from Brazil. (The Oriane continued on; no trace of drugs were found on it. )

How close these two vessels came has been hotly disputed, and at trial, one expert witness said he couldn’t help but be “amused” by the prosecution’s claims. Anyone on the Oriane, travelling at 18 knots, would have risked ripping the holdalls apart if they chucked £53m of cocaine into the sea. And on the Galwad, in the pitch black, in high winds, on rough seas, retrieving even one holdall in three and a half minutes would have been “virtually impossible”.

Green’s 39ft fishing boat, the Galwad-y-Mor. Photograph: Peter Flude/The Guardian

In any case, the Galwad eventually headed back towards the island. That Sunday was clear and bright. The boat stayed out all day – in full view of bank holiday crowds, plus two police officers on Tennyson Down, a grassy chalk cliff with panoramic sea views. Shortly before the Galwad arrived back in Yarmouth, these police officers radioed in an entry: “SU116 (the Galwad’s ID number) is moving westbound, six to seven items overboard at intervals.” Green has claimed that, if these “items overboard” were anything, they were old bait and waste; the crew may have been clearing the boat at the end of the trip, though he doesn’t recall doing so.

On arrival in Yarmouth, baskets of lobster in their arms, they were arrested and the boat seized. Police were so certain drugs were on board that Green’s original charge sheet cited “possession and intent to supply”. The Galwad was searched and partly dismantled. Its tank was pumped, an itemiser – a highly sensitive piece of police equipment – scanned every inch of the boat, but no molecule of cocaine was found.

The following morning, Monday 31 May, a lobster fisherman found 11 holdalls, each stacked with cocaine, strung together on a rope attached to a weighted buoy in Freshwater Bay. (It was an area too shallow for the Galwad to have reached, but the prosecution claimed the holdalls may have drifted.)

The police told me I didn’t have to be in prison, I could have a new identity – but I told them I didn’t know anything

This is where the investigation gets contentious. The court heard that on the Monday morning, in a police operation debrief, substantial amendments were made to the police log – so many that they became longer than the log itself. (In court, the log keeper claimed her radio had stopped working during the operation, which meant much had been missed.) The most critical amendment, and the only direct evidence linking the men to the drugs, was made by the two police officers from Tennyson Down. Contrary to strict protocol, they didn’t attend the debrief, but made this amendment when they met the surveillance commander in a car park. It read: “The items appeared to be dark in colour and approximately the size of a large holdall. They were tied together on a line and were dispatched from the boat one after another, totalling 10-12. The last item was a red floating buoy.”

Had Green really deposited this enormous haul of cocaine when it was clear and sunny, in a bay where the shore and cliffs were heaving with people? Would an experienced fisherman leave the bags floating and drifting instead of carefully anchored and submerged? And having witnessed such a suspicious deposit, would police leave these items in the sea all night without even taking a photograph or noting the GPS? (In court, one of the police officers claimed they didn’t have a camera.)

No more evidence emerged. There were satellite calls made on the Galwad at sea that Saturday night – but their content is unknown. Although the cocaine was damp, suggesting leakage, no traces were found on the boat. And though a guilty plea would have substantially reduced their sentences, all five insisted they were innocent. Before the trial, police visited Payne in Parkhurst prison, offering freedom in exchange for information, but Payne insisted he had nothing to give. “My girlfriend had split up with me. They knew I was struggling,” he says. “They told me I didn’t have to be there, I could go wherever I wanted, I could have a new identity – but I told them I didn’t know anything. That fishing trip was your normal bloody nightmare like every other fishing trip.”

Perhaps the figure most tenuously linked to all this was the fifth man, Jon Beere, who was arrested eight months later, then tried and convicted alongside the Galwad crew. Beere was 42, married for 18 years to Sue, a special needs support worker, and father of Elle, Maisie and Flynn. He ran a scaffolding business and though, according to Sue, Beere and Green weren’t close, they’d known each other for years “as everyone on the island is connected”.

Sue Beere, the wife of Jonathan Beere, one of the convicted men, with Maisie and Flynn, two of their three children. Photograph: Peter Flude/The Guardian

For nine years, Sue has raised their children without Beere. “When it happened, Jon had a scaffolding job on the harbourmaster’s building in Yarmouth, right by Jamie’s boat,” she says. The case against Beere is that, on Friday 28 May, the day before the fishing trip, he’d taken his distinctive pick-up on the hovercraft to Portsmouth, where he met Dresic, and delivered him, along with two associates who were helping him as they spoke English, to Green. The defence claimed that Green had been at sea, unable to collect this potential crew member, so he’d called Beere from his boat and asked him to do it as a favour. This was the extent of the case against the scaffolder.

“The biggest joke is that for doing that, he was the land-based criminal mastermind, the ‘organiser’,” Sue says. The prosecution failed to produce any phone records, emails, texts or other lines of communication between Beere and whoever was supplying the drugs from abroad, or any other network, other than these two men. “Jon’s the most disorganised person I know,” Sue continues. “His filing system is Tesco bags tied with a knot, or telephone numbers scribbled on scraps of paper. He used to drive his poor secretary round the twist. Jon was very much part of the community – he’d do anything for anyone. He wouldn’t just give you a lift, he’d lend you his car. He was a decent bloke. I talk like he’s dead! But it’s so hard, because every aspect of life hasn’t been the same since.”

***

The Freshwater Five’s trial took place in Kingston upon Thames, Soca’s home turf, though the defence team had pushed for it to be held locally, or somewhere jurors might understand conditions at sea. “Despite that, we still went into it believing it would all be resolved, that in a minute someone would see sense,” Nicky Green says. “You’re in this arena, you don’t know the rules, and you don’t see the steam train coming at you.” Although the judge’s final summary appeared to pour doubt on much of the evidence – referring to the “large number of additions and alterations” to the police log and the “extraordinary” account from Tennyson Down – the jury reached a guilty verdict with a majority of 11 to one.

If it was a year in prison, I’d have been devastated, but 24? How could I tell the children? How was I going to cope?

“It was like one of those films where the whole tone changes, like someone has flicked a switch,” Nicky says. “There was this huge rush of emotion. Sue was howling. Nikki was howling. You’re picking up all these broken people around you.”

The sentences followed that same day, the harshest reserved for Green, Beere and Dresic, who were seen as more deeply involved. “I remember hearing ‘24 years’,” Sue says. “It’s such a huge number. If it had been a year, I’d have been devastated, but 24? How was I going to tell the children? How was I going to cope? What about the business? What about the house? What about… us?”

How has she coped? “I don’t know how I’ve got through it, if I’m honest,” she says. “Support, love, family, friends – and believing in Jon. My dad does the ‘blue jobs’ – splitting the wood, fixing the car. My mum has been amazing with the children.

“When Jon was arrested, our eldest was doing her GCSEs and our youngest was still in playschool. He’s missed Elle getting her GCSE results, he’s missed the birth of Willow, his first grandchild. He’s missed two graduations. Maisie’s first communion. Flynn’s first day at primary. His last day at primary. Jon has never seen Flynn play football, and Flynn’s in the top team on the island. He missed his best friend’s funeral last year. Births, marriages, deaths. Everything.”

Jamie Green has also missed family milestones. His children have grown up, begun work, had children. One daughter now runs a local crab business (We’ve Got Crabs) and his son, just 13 when Green was arrested, is now a North Sea skipper. Their mother Nikki died of cancer four years into Green’s sentence. For 18 months, she was too sick to make the journey from Yarmouth to HMP Whitemoor in Cambridgeshire – though Green was allowed to visit her once in a hospice. He also attended her funeral, handcuffed to a guard.

“There were about 700 people there and every one of them tried to hug him,” Nicky says. “Fair play to the prisoner officer – he did his best to get out the way, with arms flying everywhere.” Green also gave the eulogy with the guard crouched behind the podium. Green has said that when his voice started to falter, the guard quietly urged him on, and told him he could do it.

***

The appeal has given some hope to the families. It’s being fought by Emily Bolton, the English lawyer who founded the Innocence Project New Orleans (which has exonerated 36 people to date) and is now director of Appeal. For Bolton, working in the UK has been a shock. “It’s far slower, there’s less access to information, no one picks up the phone, there’s no sense of urgency,” she says. “In the US, we got someone out in one year – I’ve been working on this case for six.”

This has destroyed a big part of my life and I want to rectify that, but even if I clear my name, I’ll have the stigma

One piece of evidence that Bolton had been requesting since 2014 – and that forms the basis of this appeal – finally arrived at the end of 2019. It involves the digital data taken from the onboard computer of the police cutter that was tracking the Galwad that night. The data had reportedly not been disclosed or used at trial, but shows two things. One is that in the shipping lanes around the time of the “handover”, the Oriane was heading south, moving further from the Galwad than had been suggested in court.

More significantly for Bolton, back at Freshwater Bay at the time of the “deposit”, it showed a mystery vessel heading towards the exact location where the drugs were later found, after the Galwad had passed through the area. “That was either the ultimate suspect panicking and dumping the drugs because police were everywhere, or a police boat going to search the area the Galwad had left and finding nothing,” Bolton says. “Either of those should have been disclosed at trial – and if it had been, I’ve no doubt the men would not have been convicted.”

She’s cautiously optimistic. “I think the evidence is strong,” she says. “It’s digital, not something subject to human interference – but that doesn’t mean I don’t wake up at 4am worrying about it. The families have been through so much, the idea that we might lose is absolutely chilling.”

Scott Birtwistle, 29, another crew member who is out on licence. Photograph: Peter Flude/The Guardian

For the men themselves, there’s hope mixed with dread mixed with disbelief. During Sue Beere’s most recent prison visit, her husband said that perhaps, with luck, this would be one of the last times she’d have to make the journey. But Birtwistle and Payne have lower expectations. “This has destroyed a big part of my life and I want to rectify what’s wrong,” Birtwistle says, “but even if I clear my name, I’ll always have the stigma.” Payne abandoned hope years ago. “It was not doing me any good mentally,” he says. “If you continue to think about it, you’d go mad. I’ve got no faith in the system any more, no faith whatsoever – and when I accepted that, it just got easier.”

• This article was amended on 20 April 2020 to add Emily Bolton’s current role as director of Appeal.