Boxer From the Balkans Charged With Record US Coke Bust

A former heavyweight boxer from Montenegro in southern Europe has been charged in connection with the biggest cocaine bust in US history.

Goran Gogic, 43, is accused of managing a massive cocaine smuggling operation that shipped drugs through American ports from South America on the way to European markets.

Gogic was arrested in Miami Sunday night, while attempting to board a flight to Zurich. He was charged with facilitating three shipments discovered in US ports in 2019 that totalled more than 20 metric tons of cocaine. 

The largest interception of nearly 18 metric tons in June, 2019 on the MSC Gayane, a container ship docked at the port of Philadelphia, is believed to be the largest single cocaine seizure on record in the US, said prosecutors from the Eastern District of New York, who announced the arrest.

It is no coincidence that the largest cocaine bust in US history was for a shipment headed to Europe’s growing market.

“Welcome to the globalised economy,” a Belgian customs official told VICE World News. He said investigations to determine the destination of intercepted cocaine had been underway for some time. “There are links to Belgium and Holland but these need to be properly investigated to determine the extent,” said the official, who lacks permission from the government to openly speak to the media.

The indictment accuses Gogic, who had a mildly successful professional boxing career in the early 2000s, of coordinating logistics to swap tons of cocaine from containers arriving in the US from South America to containers headed for European ports to evade customs scrutiny. 

It alleges Gogic coordinated shipments by bringing huge amounts of cocaine to US ports, where the shipments were broken down into smaller packages and distributed through a network of corrupt ship crews and dock workers that ended in Europe. Prosecutors describe Gogic’s team swapping out “clean” containers already approved by customs for cloned containers with counterfeit paperwork and seals holding cocaine as well as the use of cranes and speedboats to transfer cargo offshore and out of sight of customs officials.

Eight sailors from the MSC Gayane pleaded guilty at arrest and face sentences for cocaine trafficking in the 2019 bust as low-level foot soldiers in what prosecutors described as a massive and complex operation involving criminals from Colombia to the US to a network of European based cartels.

“The arrest and indictment of Gogic, a former boxer allegedly responsible for trafficking a staggering amount of cocaine, more than 20 tons, which he attempted to move through US ports, is a resounding victory for law enforcement,” stated United States Attorney Breon Peace. “The meticulous planning by the defendant and his co-conspirators failed to take into account the federal agents whose hard work resulted in this body blow to the organisation and individuals responsible for distributing massive quantities of cocaine.”

Prosecutors claimed the overall busts had a street value of $1 billion, although a drug trafficking expert said the value would be half that if it was sold wholesale. 

Gogic is believed to work for a network of Serbian and Albanian organised crime groups as a logistics coordinator and liaison between Colombian cocaine producers and the Balkan cartels to facilitate shipments, according to a Balkan law enforcement official, who asked not to be named for security reasons. 

“Gogic is an expert on ports and shipping willing to work deals with many different groups,” said the official. “It’s unclear to us if this is the work of one group or his work for multiple groups, we need more information and further investigation.”

Europe is said to have surpassed the United States as the single largest cocaine market, according to the UN, and the over the past five years, law enforcement officials and Europol have warned that cartels dominated by the Moroccan Mafia based in Holland and Belgium, Serbian and Albanian cartels and the Italian Ndrangheta have come to dominate the trade and are flooding the EU with cocaine. 

In 2021, the port of Antwerp seized a record 83 metric tons of cocaine, while the neighbouring port of Rotterdam impounded more than 60 tons, both European records that officials in both ports say could be broken in 2022 as busts have continued at about the same pace as last year. 

The massive influx of cocaine through the Netherlands and Belgium in the past decade has sparked a decade-long war inside the Moroccan mafia for control of the ports that left dozens dead across Europe. The violence has raised serious concerns about the economic and legal stability of both countries, say European officials, that only became clear as law enforcement successfully hacked a series of encrypted phone systems used by cartels in 2020.

“It was like a light went on in a room,” said a Europol analyst of the phone hack,  speaking on condition of anonymity. “We had been feeling our way around a dark room and suddenly we could briefly see the entire house. And what we found was that cartels of Serbs and Albanians from the Western Balkans were much larger, powerful and sophisticated than we had realised,” said the official.