In Dubai’s gold souk two British drug dealers browse the labyrinth of alleyways. The air is humid and the streets are packed with cars and motorbikes beeping at one another to move as private security guards patrol the area. Shop windows display gold necklaces in the shape of olive leaves, gold bracelets with names written in Arabic calligraphy, 24-carat-gold bangles studded with rubies, sapphires and emeralds, and pure gold bars sold by the half-kilogram or kilogram.
This marketplace has existed in the Deira district of Dubai since the early 1900s, but boomed considerably in the 1940s when merchants from Iran and India arrived to set up shop. At any one time it holds about ten tonnes — £600 million worth — of gold, according to local tourist guides.
Wearing smart shirts and designer sunglasses, the two drug dealers enter one of the air-conditioned shops, where a group of men are sitting around striking deals beneath a TV screen showing the day’s gold prices. A large picture of Sheikh Mohammed al-Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai, hangs upon the wall. One of the gold traders, in his early thirties, with thick black hair and an easy smile, appears a little friendlier than the rest. For his safety we have changed his name to Rashid.
“All right, boss, how are you?” Rashid says. He reaches into a safe and shows them a gold bar weighing 0.5kg, smaller than a mobile phone and deceptively heavy, worth about £30,000. Keen to make a sale, he hands over his business card.
A few days later the Brits get back in touch by phone. They have cash to spend, they tell him, but they have a confession to make: the money may have been made from drug dealing in the UK. They are concerned about what checks will be made by authorities in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Rashid considers the offer carefully. He wants the men to bring him the money in local currency, dirhams, rather than sterling. A single transaction, he says, can be for up to 3kg of gold, worth £180,000, without any checks on the source of the money: “Above four to five kilo, then we would require the source of funds. Below that — two kilo to three kilo — there is no problem. I can assure you.”
Compare this to Hatton Garden, London’s jewellery hub, where two gold-trading businesses tell us they accept no more than £10,000 in cash with two forms of ID, and one large gold-trading company says it stopped taking cash entirely last year.
Rashid says he has a workshop that can shape the gold into jewellery, such as a necklace, which can be worn under clothes to take it through customs in the UK. “I have one or two British customers,” he says. “They usually buy a 24-carat chain. They say if you take a gold bar there will be a problem in the airport. So they usually will wear a chain and there is no problem with that.”
How much can be spent on a gold chain, the drug dealers ask. “There is no limit, brother,” Rashid says. All he requires for the transaction is a passport.
A trader at one of many shops, about whom there is no suggestion of wrongdoing
GETTY IMAGES
The two drug dealers are in fact undercover journalists from The Times and The Sunday Times: we are acting on information from the National Crime Agency (NCA) that Britain’s organised criminals are smuggling millions of pounds of drug money through UK airports into Dubai, then laundering it by investing in the gold trade. The NCA has evidence that the smuggled cash is being used by criminals to buy gold bullion either in Dubai’s marketplaces or in Africa, where illegal goldmining operations accept cash with no checks on the source of the money.
Money launderers are attracted to gold not only because the precious metal holds its value over time but because of its malleability — it can be melted down and recast, concealing its true source.
“One thing that everybody knows about gold is it costs a lot of money, and it has historically been shown to be an excellent store of value,” says Sal Melki, the head of illicit finance threat at the NCA. The agency says gold is being stored by criminals, either by smuggling it back to the UK as jewellery under clothing, or by keeping it in a safe in Dubai, where it can be sold or traded later.
This is just one way British criminals are using gold to wash their dirty money — a method the NCA says is used by relatively low-level crooks. As part of a new podcast series by The Times, The Sunday Times and News Corp Australia, called Cocaine Inc, which examines the global drug trade, we have uncovered a network of companies and shell companies that link drug money from the streets of Britain to money launderers in Dubai and whole goldmining operations in Africa. To do so we followed the money trail of the UK’s largest cash-smuggling operation.
High-level drug dealers don’t smuggle cash themselves. Organised crime gangs have been recruiting “cash mules” — airline passengers willing to smuggle cash in suitcases out of UK airports — to move hundreds of millions of pounds out of the country. These mules, who are lured by the promise of business class flights, a free luxury holiday and a cash payment of about £3,000 at the end of the trip, have been found to carry up to half a million pounds in cash in each suitcase.
There are no restrictions on the amount of cash that can be brought into the UAE but any sum above 60,000 dirhams (about £13,000) must be declared at customs. These rules are similar to those in Britain and the EU. The difference, according to British-based law enforcement officials, is the rigour applied in the UAE to determine the source of the cash.
A total of 34 money mules have been convicted in Britain in the past five years as part of three separate criminal operations, including Jo-Emma Larvin, 45, a former glamour model who once dated the Welsh boxing champion Joe Calzaghe. Others include beauticians, Instagram influencers, west London-based gangsters and a Czech taxi driver. The 34 were responsible for smuggling £200 million in cash to Dubai. But according to investigators and a former mule who risked her safety to speak to us, they represent only the tip of the iceberg.
The former model Jo-Emma Larvin, convicted last year of smuggling money into Dubai
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Francesca the cash mule
In a hotel in northern England a woman with coiffed hair and painted nails looks nervous. We have been exchanging WhatsApp messages with her for months. She is concerned for her safety and worried about the potential for violent repercussions. For that reason her name has been changed here to Francesca.
A beautician, Francesca acted as a cash mule for the Sunshine and Lollipops gang — the name of a WhatsApp group used to organise their flights and cash runs. This group smuggled up to £110 million out of UK airports into Dubai between November 2019 and October 2020. The operation was masterminded by Abdulla Mohammad Ali Bin Beyat Alfalasi, a UAE national whose wife is from a wealthy Emirati family. Alfalasi, who is currently serving nine years in prison in Britain for his part in the laundering racket, recruited a number of young British women with no criminal records so they wouldn’t raise suspicions at UK airports.
The money-laundering mastermind Abdulla Mohammad Ali Bin Beyat Alfalasi
Francesca, who is in her forties and has a grown-up son, was one of them. In 2019, just before she got involved with the gang, her life was in a good place. “I’d just got out of a horrible relationship, moved into a beautiful home.” She was self-employed and made between £4,000 and £6,000 a month as a beautician. She was single at the time and a law-abiding citizen. “My career was exactly where I wanted it to be. I was massively into my fitness, had a great group of friends and was just very, very happy.”
Then in March 2020 the UK went into lockdown as Covid took hold. “Lockdown completely turned my life upside down,” says Francesca, who makes her living seeing customers face to face. “I was out of work, so all of my money just stopped. I had to go to the Bank of Mum and Dad, and they don’t have a lot of money.” She was £20,000 in debt and falling behind on her rent. “I was thinking, am I going to lose my home?”
Word was going around the beauty industry about the chance to make quick and easy money taking suitcases to Dubai. “I met a friend of a friend and she was in a similar industry to me, so we were kind of exchanging notes and having a bit of a moan. And then she said, ‘Well, actually, I’ve been given this opportunity to work in Dubai … You get flown first class and you make X amount.’ My first question was, ‘Is it drugs?’ Because I just knew I would not smuggle drugs. But it was money.”
Her friend put her in touch with a “recruiter” — a woman who took a role in organising the mules. “I was asked to take suitcases full of money. I wasn’t told the exact amount, but I did know that it was more than was legally allowed.”
An airline passenger must declare cash of £10,000 or more to UK customs when travelling abroad, and Francesca knew she was breaking the law. “I was always told that once we got on the flight it was going to be absolutely fine because Dubai want the money in their country. So we just declare it [there] and there’s no issue.”
Gold can be melted down and recast
GIUSEPPE CACACE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
She says she was not aware at the time that the money came from the sale of drugs. The NCA says that the suitcases contained the street profits from a number of gangs selling drugs in British towns and cities. Those gangs have not yet been identified by the NCA, although recent evidence seen by The Sunday Times suggests that one of the principal beneficiaries was the Kinahan cartel, the international crime gang led by Christy Kinahan, believed to be living in Dubai.
The Dubai cash run
Francesca’s first assignment came in the summer of 2020. The day of the flight she and another woman, her “mentor”, took a train to London together. Francesca had barely slept the night before, every detail of the plan going through her head. They had been told, via WhatsApp, to arrive at a coffee shop in London at a certain time. “From my understanding everybody had to meet at a Starbucks,” she says. “It was just always a different Starbucks.”
They waited for hours. Her mentor told her this was common — the gang would often change plans at the last minute. Eventually a driver arrived. “This very swanky car, blacked out, you know. A proper chauffeur in a people carrier.”
The driver took them to the West End and pulled up outside a large townhouse. Francesca watched two people walk out with seven black hard-shell suitcases — “I thought, shit, that’s a lot of money” — and put them in the boot of the car. They were given a letter from a registered business based in Dubai called Omnivest Gold Trading, owned by Alfalasi. These letters provided the mules with an explanation for the cash in the suitcases that would satisfy UAE customs officials: it was, the letter said, the proceeds of international gold sales being transferred from London to Dubai. The letters were signed by Alfalasi.
The driver dropped Francesca and her mentor at Heathrow with little time to check in. “That’s for a reason, because they [the airline and airport staff] rush you through as you’ve not got a lot of time to get on to the flight.” Francesca had been told to “dress up” and look “a bit suave”. As the women loaded the suitcases on to the conveyor belt at Emirates’ check-in, Francesca’s mind and heart were racing. “The first time it was a million thoughts like, shit, what if they open the case? But then equally just smiling and playing this role of this fancy lady… When you’re in business class, they treat you like absolute royalty and they don’t really ask questions.”
It worked. Within an hour the women were walking on to the plane and being offered champagne by a flight attendant. But Francesca couldn’t relax. She imagined herself “sat down on the plane, a little bit smug, thinking you’ve done it, and then you look up and there’s security, police, dragging you out of your seat with everybody else looking”. It didn’t happen. “Once the flight left the tarmac, and you were up in the air and you’ve got that glass of champagne in your hand, the sense of relief — I cannot explain to you.”
Seven hours later the plane landed in Dubai, the city of gold. Upon arrival the two women were sent a WhatsApp message with number codes to open the locks on their suitcases. Francesca walked into Dubai International Airport’s customs office — a small room with opaque glass and a number of border officers inside. She opened the cases to reveal millions of pounds. She couldn’t believe her eyes. “The first time I saw the money I felt like I was in a film or it wasn’t real. I couldn’t believe how much it was. I didn’t really think it was going to be in the millions. And I thought, what the f*** have I got myself into?”
The women showed the officials the Omnivest cover letter. “They don’t bat an eyelid,” she says. She received a cash declaration form, needed by banks in Dubai to make a deposit. After customs waved her through, Francesca’s final stop was the arrivals hall, where a man was waiting to meet the women and escort them to two luxury cars. “And then they basically just said, ‘Thank you,’ ” Francesca says.
One car took the suitcases full of cash, the other took the two women to a five-star hotel, where they stayed for three days, sunning themselves by the pool.
A payment of £3,000 cash was delivered to their hotel on the final day of the trip, but only the mentor received the money. On this trip Francesca was classed as the “buddy” in training for a solo cash-mule run in the future. They also received the seven empty suitcases to fly back with and use again. Francesca carried out the trip three times in 2019 and 2020. She made £6,000, paid off some of her debt, and as far as she was concerned it was job done.
The Emirati mastermind
In October 2020, in an office by Heathrow airport, Ian Truby, a senior investigating officer for the NCA, was about to get a telephone call alerting him to the arrest of Tara Hanlon, a 30-year-old former recruitment consultant who had tried to check in for a flight to Dubai with £1.9 million in cash in her luggage. The money was vacuum packed and covered with coffee, in an apparent attempt to put off sniffer dogs.
Hanlon, who has been said to bear a likeness to the reality TV star and influencer Kim Kardashian, had five suitcases with her for a weekend trip, which raised the suspicions of a sharp-eyed border official.
“She had no criminal record,” Truby says. “By her own account she was out of work due to Covid. Nothing to suggest she was linked to crime in any way, shape or form. Just a person who appears to have had a fairly clean life… up until she somehow got herself involved in this.”
Like Francesca, Hanlon had a copy of a letter from Omnivest Gold Trading. The signatory was Alfalasi. This gave Truby a crucial lead. His team began investigating and established that Alfalasi was an Emirati national who spent his time between Dubai and the UK. His wife’s family owned a flat in Belgravia, London. In December 2021 NCA officers arrested him at that flat. They seized his mobile phone before he could dispose of it, revealing the modus operandi, extent and scope of his smuggling operation.
Cash totalling £1.9m found in Tara Hanlon’s luggage led to a prison sentence of almost three years for the former recruitment consultant in 2021
CENTRAL NEWS
They found a treasure trove of hundreds of WhatsApp threads, showing Alfalasi booking travel tickets, receiving images of cash mules’ passports, providing details of the flights, who they were, who they travelled with, what luggage they had taken. “It was a bit of an oh-my-God moment,” Truby says. “There is so much data on this phone… I think he just got away with it for a long time and probably got complacent.”
They built up a picture of Alfalasi’s lifestyle. Expensive watches, a plush London apartment, Mercedes cars. He had no criminal record and was not known to law enforcement anywhere in the world. He had the front of a successful, legitimate businessman, largely based in the UAE. Alfalasi was considered the ringleader of the gang and admitted money laundering in June 2022. Aged 47, he was sentenced to nine years and seven months in prison.
Truby’s investigation was significant. It taught the UK authorities that criminal gangs are working together to move large amounts of cash to the UAE. The money is gathered into a “counting house”, which acts like a bank for criminals, bundling it up, keeping a record of the deposits and using mules to transport the cash to Dubai. One by one, Truby’s team arrested the smugglers, each of their phones yielding yet more evidence. It was only a matter of time before they came knocking at Francesca’s door.
Justice comes calling
In autumn 2020 Francesca read in the newspapers that Hanlon had been caught at Heathrow. She didn’t know Hanlon but realised that her story was strikingly similar to her own. “That was it then,” Francesca says. “The nail in the coffin. I thought, I’m so out of this.”
She believes the group ultimately got caught because of complacency. “Because they were doing it so frequently, they were, like, ‘Oh, this is a piece of piss.’ And they did get a little bit cocky with it.”
But the months went by after Hanlon’s arrest and nothing happened. “So in my head I’d sort of buried it — I’ve got away with it. It’s a part of my life that is done and buried and I’m just getting on with my life.”
One day at 6am she heard loud banging at her door. “I was on my own in bed. I just had a bra on. I thought it was a postman. I was effing and jeffing, walking down the stairs.” She opened the door and 12 NCA officers forced their way in. Francesca got dressed with a female officer in her bedroom. They seized her phone, tablet and laptop. “They basically read me my rights and said I was arrested for money laundering and being involved in an international crime gang — I was just, like, ‘What?’ I burst out crying and remember one of the officers being really nice and consoling me because I was in such a state.”
Francesca, who was only two weeks into a new relationship, was taken to a police station and put in a cell. “I thought, how the hell am I going to tell him about this? He’s going to wonder who the hell I am.”
She was later convicted for her part in the smuggling operation. To maintain her anonymity we cannot reveal the details of her sentence. But she describes the experience as “awful”, leaving her with serious anxiety. “It made me really poorly, really ill. I saw a video of myself from this time last year and I just look like I’ve got the weight of the world on my shoulders. I look like a completely different person.”
The Africa connection
In March this year Alfalasi was hit with a confiscation order of £3.4 million. He faces an extra ten years in jail should he fail to pay. Among his seized assets were savings and investments in Emirati banks, his share of UAE properties, cryptocurrency funds in a Binance account, vehicles including a Mercedes G 63, Ford pick-up truck and Toyota Yaris, three Rolex watches and a Patek Philippe watch. But what is the true extent of Alfalasi’s criminal empire?
In 2018 a United Nations report found large amounts of gold mined in Africa were being smuggled to Dubai. The NCA has evidence that Alfalasi was investing in African gold. One of his alleged gang members was arrested carrying gold in Tanzania. It is suspected the gang would smuggle the metal into Dubai, where the bars could be melted down and rebranded, making it untraceable. The gold can then be kept in a safe or sold for “clean money” to use on investments such as property.
At the heart of Dubai’s financial district stands Prime Tower, a 36-storey glass skyscraper filled with cameras and security guards. According to documents obtained by this newspaper and The News Movement, a news and investigations outlet, Prime Tower was the registered address of Omnivest Gold Trading. They show that Alfalasi was both managing director and general manager of Omnivest, which was liquidated in November 2021, days before his arrest. When we visit there is no sign on the door of its former office high up in the building. A woman comes out and denies being part of Omnivest. “I’m not sure,” she says. “We’re completely different.”
The reporter David Collins in front of Prime Tower, Dubai, the former registered address of Alfalasi’s company Omnivest Gold Trading
UAE company records show that, as well as Omnivest, Alfalasi has owned a wide range of businesses, including construction companies, an estate agent, a building materials firm, a yacht rental company, a doors and windows manufacturer, a flower business, a secretarial services firm, a marble and ceramic trading company and a metal trading firm. But Alfalasi’s reach went far beyond the UAE, stretching into Ghana, West Africa, where he was an executive director of Atlantic Holdings, a large parent company that owned steel manufacturing, mining and gold-trading firms. According to the Atlantic Holdings website, which is no longer present online, Omnivest was just one part of its operation. “Omnivest Gold Trading LLC is our trading arm in Dubai specialising in gold and rough diamonds trading,” the website reads. “We import raw gold, refine and sell to financial institutions within the UAE.”
The website claims Omnivest was a member of the UAE Kimberley Process Certification Scheme — an initiative for stemming the trade in conflict diamonds.
Also part of Atlantic Holdings was My Gold, a mining company with land in Brofoyedru, Ashanti Region, Ghana. On its website Alfalasi goes by the name Abdulla Bin Beyat. His picture shows him in Emirati white robes and headdress, looking slightly younger than his police mugshot. It describes him as having “vast experience” in the real estate industry, with an MSc “from the Dubai Police College” and a degree in business administration from the University of York. It states he is a director for Omnivest Gold Trading and Atlantic Investment Holdings Limited in Ghana.
Many of the companies once run by Atlantic Holdings are now run by another umbrella company called Atlantic Trust Holding, which has interests in steel manufacturing, banking, mining and real estate development. We contacted its founder and chairman, Alex Asiedu, about whom there is no suggestion of wrongdoing, who says: “Atlantic Trust Holding has been in existence for close to 20 years now and had no dealings with Atlantic Holdings of Dubai.” He adds: “The website for Atlantic Holdings of Dubai was controlled by Alfalasi and his business partner. We had nothing to do with any of his activities. As a matter of fact, I have had no contact with Abdulla [Alfalasi] for some eight years now. If anything at all, I would be someone to be jubilant because Abdulla used his influence to literally bully people.” He says his company has never been investigated by any law enforcement agency.
At this point the trail goes cold. What happened to the £110 million Alfalasi smuggled out of the UK remains a mystery. Once cash enters the global gold trade, tracking it becomes near impossible.
Open-pit gold mining in Ghana
REUTERS
Last month a study by Swissaid found that about 435 tonnes of undeclared gold worth about $31 billion were exported out of Africa in 2022 — 93 per cent of which was smuggled to the UAE. “This is a big quantity of money leaving Africa connected to money laundering, conflict and human rights issues,” said Marc Ummel, one of the report’s authors, adding that the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the international body that tackles money laundering, should reconsider the removal in February of the UAE from its “grey list” of countries with weak counter measures in place. The FATF was satisfied that the UAE had improved its co-operation in international money-laundering investigations and executed more investigations and prosecutions within its own borders. But the European parliament voted against its proposals, meaning the UAE remains on the EU’s high-risk list.
A UAE official said: “The UAE takes its role in protecting the integrity of the global financial system extremely seriously. In February the FATF praised the UAE’s significant progress. In its continuing pursuit of global criminals, the UAE works closely with international partners to disrupt and deter all forms of illicit finance. The UAE is committed to continuing these efforts and actions more than ever today and over the longer term.”
Tightening the net
Truby, meanwhile, is still investigating the Sunshine and Lollipops gang. Some suspected members are still on the run. He says it is difficult to estimate the number of gangs using cash mules. “I’ve no doubt that there are a number of other groups who have done exactly the same thing and are probably continuing to do the same thing,” he says. Because current scanning technology at UK airports, which all luggage passes through after check-in, is used chiefly for counterterrorism purposes and does not scan for large amounts of cash, criminals are slipping through the net.
“We have an ongoing conversation with various authorities to try to do more around cash-scanning technology and tactics at the UK border,” the NCA’s Melki says. “What people don’t want is to wait hours to get on their planes as a result of enhanced screening.”
Francesca believes the problem is much bigger than the UK authorities realise. “I think it is the tip of the iceberg,” she says. “Most of the people involved in my group have never done anything wrong before. But I think Covid had a lot to do with that. It was the desperation of the time.”
She says she never felt she was doing any harm to anyone. “I do realise that when you’re part of this sort of organised crime that people are affected by it. You know, washing drug money. But I didn’t see it. If I could turn the clock back, I’d have told the person who introduced me to it to do one.”
After we revealed our identity to Rashid, the trader in the gold souk, over the phone, he said his business would actually require evidence of the source of funds for gold purchases of 50,000 dirhams (about £10,600). He said he did not know anything about criminals buying gold in Dubai.
We finish our trip with a visit to the observation platform on Palm Jumeirah, a man-made island in the shape of a palm tree, which gives a perfect view of the city’s skyline of glittering skyscrapers. Beneath that wealthy veneer of business and tourism is a growing gangster’s paradise.
Additional reporting by John Simpson, The News Movement and Sam Chantarasak
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