In October 2014, the NCA scored a major hit by securing the conviction of the prolific drug trafficker Kevin Hanley. Using a fruit and veg business at New Covent Garden Market as a front, Hanley had smuggled £5 million of Venezuelan cocaine into the UK in watermelons and pomegranates. When officers raided his safehouse in Chelsea, they found £2.5 million of cocaine, £200,000 of amphetamines, £61,000 of skunk, more than £2 million in cash, and two cash-counting machines.



The original raids were carried out by SOCA in 2012, prompting Hanley to go on the run. But when the NCA took over the investigation the following year, its agents tracked the drug baron to Greece and snared him in a sting operation at a pub in Athens. Hanley was described at his trial as the “top, top man” in the drug world – exactly the sort of criminal kingpin the NCA had been set up to bring down – and his conviction was a major coup. So the discovery that the search warrants used to seize the evidence that led to his conviction might be faulty would be nothing short of a calamity if it meant he had to be released.

BuzzFeed News can reveal that the NCA has recently told the Old Bailey judge who convicted Hanley, Wendy Joseph QC, that she jailed him on the basis of warrants that “were or may have been obtained unlawfully”. A hearing on the status of the warrants is scheduled for next month and – if they are found to have been unlawful – Hanley could appeal his conviction.

The admission the NCA had to make to Joseph was particularly stinging because she had previously thrown out another of its cases at the Old Bailey and delivered a scathing judgment criticising the agency for its lack of competence.

The previous case was the result of a major money-laundering investigation codenamed Operation Enderby. Seven defendants stood trial at the end of last year, accused of laundering the proceeds of a £40 million fraud against a string of well-known organisations including Care UK, the brewing giant AB InBev, South Essex College, and – bizarrely – Chester Zoo. But the prosecution disintegrated under the weight of a succession of errors by the NCA.

Joseph was so seriously displeased that when she discharged the jury she told them: “Things have gone terribly wrong in this case ... Everyone accepts that with the state of the evidence as it is, half investigated, material missing, material misleading, it is simply impossible to go on with you. Please don’t leave the building thinking this is how cases are normally conducted.”

Now the NCA had found out that – on top of the other errors that had resulted in the case being thrown out – the warrants and production orders it used in Operation Enderby may also have been unlawful. Worse still, there was a second major money-laundering trial coming up off the back of the same investigation that had also been listed to be heard by Joseph – which meant it would potentially have to admit to the already unimpressed judge that it had put unlawful evidence before her in both cases.

The second Enderby trial had already been delayed for several months due to the NCA’s inability to pull its case together on time. When it finally came before Joseph this spring, the agency was forced to admit that the warrants and production orders it had used to search the suspects’ premises and gain access to their phone and bank records were unlawful. The trial collapsed immediately – becoming the third major prosecution to fall apart.

In a highly unusual move, Joseph responded to a letter from BuzzFeed News asking about the collapsed cases to confirm: “You are right in saying the question of unlawful warrants has been raised before me in connection with three trials.” She wrote: “I am aware that the NCA assert that they take their failings very seriously and that they intend to conduct an internal investigation. As to other outstanding cases where similar problems might be arising – there must, by virtue of the systemic nature of the problem, be other cases.”

In addition to the NCA’s own audit, the CPS confirmed that it had launched an inquiry of its own into the disastrous Operation Enderby prosecutions, led by its head of serious and organised crime. A resulting report made a series of recommendations to the NCA for future prosecutions, none of which has been disclosed publicly.

The NCA said it was proud to have a conviction rate of over 90% and said “the nature of the criminals we investigate requires us to be dynamic and assertive in our approach”. It said it did “not want any prosecution to fail” and was “engaging proactively with the defence and working closely with the CPS” in any cases where problems with its warrants were found as part of its review. It was also making applications under section 59 of the Criminal Justice and Police Act 2001 to be allowed to keep evidence obtained with the warrants.

The NCA spokeswoman said the review hadn’t yet found “anything that leads us to believe there is a need to go back over settled cases”.

But Keir Monteith of Garden Court Chambers, who led the defence teams in both trials arising from Operation Enderby, said the ramifications for all the NCA’s cases past and present could be far-reaching. “In each and every one we must question the safety of any convictions and this sad state of affairs will inevitably be hindering important investigations in the short to medium term,” he said. “The fallout is hard to predict but the number of convictions that could be quashed might reach double figures.”