Four times he had returned to the Kingsgrove store yard over several days to check the container, once at 4am, another time around 5am, sometimes with a flashlight, sometimes using the light from his phone. Where was the gear? Where was the 59 kilograms of cocaine with an estimated street value of $20 million that was supposed to be concealed in the containers? Nearly 60 kgs of cocaine was seized after it was discovered concealed in two shipping containers of frozen fish from Peru. Credit:AFP Things had been going from bad to worse for the former mechanic-turned-property developer and scaffolder since he decided to try his hand as a seafood importer last September. But this was supposed to be his pay day.

Mavris was drowning in more than $6 million in debt, owing everyone from the tax office, friends and development financiers charging more than 20 per cent interest on short-term loans. Now the Herald can reveal the extraordinary details around the desperate final weeks of Mavris’ life - from the arrival of the drugs in Sydney in late March to his death in a Sydney jail cell eight weeks later. They include an urgent trip to Colombia to find out what happened to his stash, signing short-term loans for millions of dollars to cover a property development, and the sorry tale of a desperate bid to offload nearly 1000 boxes of worthless spoiled Peruvian fish. Jim Mavris with his wife, Despina 'Debbie' Mavris. What’s more, his family has now dramatically lost control of Mavris’ $10 million property portfolio, after authorities secured an urgent asset freeze just hours before his widow Despina “Debbie” Mavris was due to receive $5 million from a property settlement.

The sudden change in fortunes for the Mavris family stem from the March 23 arrival of two containers of fish which police were watching. They seized the cocaine and let the containers continue to their destination. Within days, Mavris came to collect them. Having realised his stash was missing, Mavris rang a confidante who asked if he had any news. “Nothing good yet, it’s actually extremely bad at the moment,” Mavris said. “My head is numb.” 'They're watching it'

Gina Mavris was worried about her brother. For three days in late March the 48-year-old had been “off the radar”. “What happened on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday? ... You putting out fires?” she asked during a phone call, according to court documents lodged in the NSW Supreme Court by the Australian Federal Police as part of the asset freeze. “You’ve gone downhill ever since last week ... so something’s happened,” Gina said. It was nothing more than a lack of sleep, Mavris replied, but sleep was the least of his worries. The father-of-three had been working desperately to find out what had happened to the millions of dollars of cocaine he had been expecting the previous week, and the pressure - financial and family - was mounting.

“I am just tired, man. I need to sleep and sleep and sleep,” he told his sister. Only days earlier, Gina had pleaded with her brother to reveal what he was “trying to pull off” so she could help him find a solution, telling him his wife was stressed out and considering leaving him. She told him, “[you’ve] borrowed from Peter to give to Paul” which “hasn’t really worked out” and “now you’re in f---ing shit”. Later, Gina expressed worries about his business activities. "My only concern is that … the products you’re importing,” she told her brother. “Yeah,” Mavris, who was born in Cyprus, responded.

Suddenly, Gina switched to Greek, the police facts allege. Marketing material for the Mavris family apartment in Woolloomooloo that has been seized by authorities. Credit:Domain.com.au “Like, vlepoune,” Gina said, using the Greek phrase for “they’re watching it”. “It’s alright, it’s fine,” Mavris assures her. Later in the conversation, Gina switches to Greek again: “Yeah, enoia,” meaning ‘something on my mind’.

Mavris had been working his contacts hard for the best part of a week. Little did he know he was already in the sights of Operation Sawel, a multi-agency investigation, involving the AFP, the Australian Border Force and the Criminal Assets Confiscation Taskforce. The Onyx apartment block in Pyrmont. Credit:Dean Sewell Around 11am on Tuesday, April 3, Mavris headed to the NSW Art Gallery, not far from his Woolloomooloo home. Outside the gallery, federal police officers saw Mavris meet a man he had called several times. The meeting was anything but friendly as Mavris and the other man “engaged in what appeared to be a heated conversation”, police allege. Onlookers began to take an interest. “As they conversed they both appeared conscious of passing pedestrians and wandered between the front of the Art Gallery and a nearby cycle path”.

Mavris was getting desperate. Court documents show he was under severe financial stress. He had a six-figure debt with the tax office, relating to unpaid luxury car tax on a Bentley. And a Pyrmont apartment development, The Onyx, which police allege Mavris used to launder money via a family company called Mazzco Investments, needed urgent refinancing. Without the pay day of the cocaine shipment, Mavris faced a credit crunch. Two days after the call with his sister, Mavris signed the first of two extraordinary short-term loans. On April 3, Mavris signed a $3.2 million two-month loan with the investment arm of Geelong fruitery business Costa Asset Management. Mavris agreed to terms including 24 per cent annual interest on the loan and a caveat being placed on the apartments. In addition, he agreed to a two-month loan of a further $550,000 from Triumph Commercial, a private investment group, with equally onerous terms - 3.5 per cent interest per month. In total, he would be up for more than $117,000 interest.

What police say he didn’t tell his wife was that he was also increasing the size of the mortgage on their luxury Woolloomooloo apartments by a cool $1.8 million. In discussions with his broker, Mavris said, “she’s freaking out”. Marketing material for the Mavris family apartment in Woolloomooloo that has been seized by authorities. Credit:Domain “I don’t want to lose my house, you know, like, if I lose my house my wife will leave me and my life’s f---ed, it’s already half f---ed,” he said. “I don’t know how I’m gonna afford a $3 million loan here and a $4 million dollar loan there … anyway, I just need to do it slow.” Police allege Mavris arranged for his father-in-law to come and “tell my wife to sign everything”.

Still, the deals bought him two months to come up with the money to pay off his debts. He began making plans for a trip to Colombia, booking airline tickets, cancelling them, then booking them again. But before he could go, there was something else he had to do. He had to sell some fish. 'I’m pretty good at selling' Mavris wasn’t lacking in confidence. A mechanic from Sydney’s inner west, friends tell of a man who had interests in car hire businesses, scaffolding, and was also a qualified real estate agent. But for all the hats he wore, friends have said he was not a terribly good businessman.

They noticed a change in his lifestyle around five or six years ago, upgrading from his Bexley North house to two conjoined apartments with harbour views in Woolloomooloo. His adult son drove a BMW. In fact, police say Mavris had been importing drugs since 2012. Loading Between May 2012 and January 2013 Mavris had used another business, Mavco Investment, to import at least nine shipping containers from Colombia which contained frozen cow hides. The true purpose, police allege, was “ultimately to further his narcotics importation business”. Red flags were raised with authorities when the cow hides arrived and he showed little interest in collecting them, running up nearly $40,000 in storage costs.

In June 2013, the Department of Agriculture, Farming and Fisheries, reported an abandoned consignment of animal hides from Colombia, thought to be “a test or decoy shipment for possible narcotics trafficking”. Police allege there was no coincidence in the fact that Mavris' mortgage in Bexley North was paid off around the same time as the cow hide consignments arrived in Australia. In the space of a few years, the Mavrises had paid off the mortgage in Bexley North and upgraded to the luxury Woolloomooloo apartments, with Jim gifting his wife, who worked in a pharmacy, $820,000 to help finance the purchase. Today the flats are worth a combined $4.2 million. Police allege that the 2013 purchase of the first Woolloomooloo flat was “grossly disproportionate” to their incomes. Mavris’ tax returns for the five years to 2012 showed annual income of just $8717.

But he could only sustain the lifestyle for so long and, faced with his own financial crisis, Mavris had two tasks: go to Colombia to sort out the missing cocaine, and sell a rapidly depreciating asset - $80,000 worth of fish. With no experience in importing frozen seafood, he had arranged nothing - failing to put in place pickup and storage plans. The 960 boxes were left in a Kingsgrove depot yard with no refrigeration for a whole week. The taped packages which were found in the consignments of fish. Credit:AFP Mavris hit the phones, calling around Australia to offload the mackerel and hake. The same day as the Art Gallery meeting, he rang a seafood wholesaler asking if mackerel and hake were types of fish people will buy. How would he go about selling the fish? How could he make money from it, he asked?

Over the next few days, Mavris contacted 26 different cold storage businesses in NSW to find a place to keep the fish. Around midday on April 4, a Queensland fish wholesaler returned a call from Mavris. “Hey, listen who do you know [anyone] that can buy frozen fish?” Mavris asked. Wholesaler: "You’ve got fish to sell?" The wholesaler broke out laughing before asking: “Oh, God … what kind of fish is it?”

Mavris replied: "Just hake … it’s cheap." Loading The wholesaler set him straight: “Who’s going to buy frozen fish off you not knowing what it is? You know, you’re not a fish supplier ... how did you get fish anyway?” “Oh, I’ve got a mate who’s got a mate that said they could get us cheap fish,” Mavris replied, so "I just brought it in. I don’t know. We’ve sold a bit of it to a few of these bait shops. But I’ve got more.” It was all the wholesaler needed to hear.

“Oh, bait shops. So it must be pretty crap. It must be cheap stuff,” he said, laughing. “Sell it to the bait shops!” After his arrest, police would ask Mavris about his fish importing experience. They pointed out that had he sold the fish at the price he was quoting he would have lost more than $57,000. So why did he think he could do it? “I’m pretty good at selling,” he said. 'Emergency' dash to Colombia Selling the fish was a sideshow. With short-term loans secured on the Pyrmont properties, Mavris was on the next flight out of Sydney to Colombia. Police say he had “significant criminal associations in Australia and internationally”.

Unexplained is why he was allowed to leave the country in May despite being under direct police surveillance since at least March 30 when he first inspected the container. The AFP declined to comment. On May 13, Mavris checked into the NH Collection Bogota Andino Royal Hotel, a four-star hotel in the heart of Bogota’s Chico neighbourhood, offering spectacular views of the city. Police believe Mavris had travelled to Colombia for an “emergency”, a euphemism for meeting people involved in the importation of cocaine. When he did not arrive back in Sydney as scheduled five days later, his wife and sister peppered his travel agent with questions about his travel arrangements. They learned he never checked out of his hotel and he had missed his scheduled flight home.

It’s at this point two vastly different accounts emerge of what happenned next. Jim Mavris photographed in Colombia after his 'kidnap'. Local media reports told the tale of an Australian man kidnapped by armed rebels in Pereira, a western city of Colombia, and rescued by local El Valle Police from an abandoned house in the rural area of Campo Hermoso, Buenaventura, one of Colombia's most notorious drug-trafficking hubs. Mavris was photographed, smiling and wearing a police bulletproof vest after he was located. He told local police after resurfacing on May 17 that he had travelled to Colombia for “one week of holidays, because my job is very busy”. He went to Pereira for a coffee tour he had “seen on the internet,” he said, and took a walk in strong rain through Bogota's Bolivar Square, all before he was supposedly kidnapped during a taxi ride to see a popular local bridge.

Two men he didn’t know, armed with firearms, drove him five hours to a small country house. “They locked me in [a] room, then they brought food and fruits … I was always in the room until the [police] came and rescued me.” Where Jim Mavris was located in Colombia. Credit:Fairfax Media Court documents in Australia tell a different story, contradicting the kidnapping story that he told Colombian and Australian police. Mavris was in fact arrested in Colombia for conspiracy to commit a crime, while in possession of a firearm, according to a criminal notice lodged by the Attorney-General’s Office of Colombia.

AFP investigators now believe he attended the abandoned house voluntarily to meet with people regarding the missing cocaine from the March shipping consignment. They also allege his wife “was aware that Mr Mavris had travelled ... for a purpose other than a holiday.” Police allege that the same day he was picked up by Colombian police, Mavris and his wife “discussed Mr Mavris transferring ‘some of this stuff’, which was assets, either in the form of funds or property, to [his sister] Gina Mavris and Mrs Mavris before he departed Colombia”. The AFP declined comment on any co-operation with Colombian authorities concerning Mavris. With the so-called kidnapping ordeal behind him, Mavris headed for the airport. He had taken his last steps on solid ground as a free man.

As he arrived at Sydney Airport shortly after 5pm on May 23, Mavris was apprehended by federal police. Within hours of his arrest authorities visited his wife at their Woolloomooloo apartment, seizing a number of items and interviewing her. In police custody, Mavris was shown the extent of the police brief against him, including video footage of him inspecting the containers of fish. He was charged with importing a commercial quantity of cocaine and faced life in prison. Mavris declined to answer questions about the drugs found in the containers but described his time in Colombia, including the “kidnap”, drawing locations for the officers of well-known drug locales, including Medellin, Cali (or Santiago de Cali) and Pereira. He admitted to having paid $US40,000 to import each container of fish, but denied any knowledge of the cocaine that had been inside.

Shortly after 8.30pm, Mavris told officers he would like to ring his wife. It’s the last reference in the court file of the couple speaking with each other. The police interview resumed 15 minutes later. Mavris was remanded in custody ahead of a scheduled bail application in court a week later. But he would be dead in his cell within 48 hours, on Friday, May 25, with police suspecting he took his own life. Included in the police file are details of a conversation Mavris had with a financier, in which he expressed concern about not being able to afford a $3 million loan and the impact on his wife. “I’d rather die than have her struggling, you know?”