March 19, 2024 • 51 mins
An ultra-wealthy British son of a Royal Naval officer partnered with a Danish master of disguise to become major players in the international drug-smuggling scene. And they would've gotten away with it if it weren't for those pesky... Welsh lobstermen and farmers' daughters.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous Crime is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Elizabeth do Thearon Burnette. I love it when you're here, me,
I love it when I'm here too. I've been wandering around.
I got this question in my head, and your only
prison I know who can answer that question is no.
Do you know what's ridiculous? Yes?
Speaker 3 (00:17):
I do know it's ridiculous.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
What is it? Elizabeth? It's here, I'm ridiculous.
Speaker 3 (00:23):
The iconic track suit? What do you love track suits?
You we legitimately you wear Adidas tracksuits all the time.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
All the time. You're wearing half of one.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
Half of one now, okay, just the top half, tolf
nothing underneath.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
I'm not porky normal Okay.
Speaker 3 (00:39):
So you know who else makes an iconic tracksuit? Give
me who else used to the coke sportis.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Juicy Coto? There?
Speaker 3 (00:49):
It is there? It is? They had like the the
lore ones? Right, yes, so they have not really, although
she should.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Be about Ben Affleck Is he doing one?
Speaker 4 (01:02):
Now?
Speaker 3 (01:02):
They have a limited edition set and it's a one
hundred and sixty nine dollars track.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
Suit okay, and it's it's a lot for tracks, a.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
Tomato red color, too red, and it has the Diamante
detailing the custom crystal Dimante, like where it says it
across your your rump, okay, juicy, sure, although this time
it doesn't say juicy.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
That's what I'm paying for, Elizabeth. It says juicy or
oh juicy okay, next level Okay, yeah, rebooted it. I
got it, and you.
Speaker 3 (01:32):
Know it's a mashup. You know it's across is it?
Speaker 2 (01:35):
Did it have to be? Yes? But we just stop here.
It's so good, so far, so good.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
You know who they're working with.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
No, I don't want to Red Robin. No.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
There, it's the Red Robin Juicy couture mashup. You can
only buy them on the Red Robin Instagram shop one
hundred and sixty nine dollars. As I said, No, all
sales are final, no returns or exchanging. You know why,
because you'll never buy another.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
You took it. They're like here, that's it.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
That's the juicier juicy on the caboose and then up
on the breastical area it says red Robin in rhinestone,
and I want all tracking information. I think it also
has that on their hip. They're not very good about
showing like full pictures of these tracks.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
Shore the button the chesticles.
Speaker 3 (02:26):
Yeah, and it says juicier on the back. I think
to whatever. And so anyway, I want a full list
of everyone who purchases this and that's going to be
my special watch list.
Speaker 5 (02:36):
It's your list, but just watching them on these little
Google How did.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
You hear about the newsletter? Do you get read it?
Speaker 3 (02:47):
What do you We have the most amazing network. People
who have dudes who you know, They clew us in,
they let us know. This one came off of Instagram.
I think it us Yeah, and it came from esther faith.
She wanted She wanted to know what our budget was
(03:08):
because she wanted Dave. She said, look, I screencapped this.
What's the budget for Dave to take this one and
get both of them a set? I bet Elizabeth would
say she hates it but actually love it. Yeah, I
told you I love cozy. This is probably cozy. Although
I feel like I like breathable fabrics. I don't really
wear synthetics, and I feel like that would make me
(03:29):
feel like I was gonna choke to death.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
I trade mine for a ride to Stockton.
Speaker 3 (03:36):
I think you get a free ride to Stockton when
you you know that's where they do it for the clubs.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
Of course, you know I'm going to do it for.
Speaker 3 (03:43):
The club Okay, and I'm done.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
Well, that's ridiculous. It's also ridiculous.
Speaker 3 (03:48):
Tell me, it's.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
Gonna take me longer in a second. Yeah, do it, Elizabeth.
This is the story of your people. Oh yeah, special investigators.
Speaker 3 (03:57):
Like that could be a lot of group.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
I left that for you to fill in, Like, what
kind of my people? Okay? It's nineteen eighty three, right,
and one of the most wanted men in Europe was
a thirty five year old millionaire playboy, a Danish actor,
a man known as a master of disguises. They called
him the rubber Faced Man. Yes, my people right. His
(04:21):
criminal co ringleader and mastermind was a wealthy son of
the Royal Navy. Oh yes. And both men were brought
down by your people, a bunch of nosy Welsh lobster
men and farmers wives.
Speaker 6 (04:33):
Oh yes, oh my goodness, yes, enjoy.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
This is This is a ridiculous crime A podcast about
absurd and outrageous capers, heist and cons. It's always ninety
nine percent murder free, ay and ridiculous. Yes, yes it is.
Now this Elizabeth is the story of the drug baron
as I'm calling him and the rubber face man.
Speaker 3 (05:18):
Wait, you're going to tell a story about drug.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
I know, right, I was shocking.
Speaker 3 (05:22):
I never heard such a thing.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
I swear to god. I was not looking for a
drug story. I was looking for a story of like
about like a master of disguise, and I found the
rubber face man and I was so excited. I was like,
what's he doing? They're like drug smuggling.
Speaker 3 (05:34):
I was like, you heard the word and you're like,
oh well.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
It's this one's more than just cocaine. And Pablo Escobar
will make no more appearances after me saying his name
right now, Okay, that's it, Okay, okay. So the co
rigging leaders were two men. Soren berg Arnbach he's the Dane, yeah,
and Robin Boswell, the brit Now Boswell's you might have
you know guessed the Englishman. Okay. So he's from London
and for a living he was quote the master kind
(06:00):
of the drugs ring in London proper. He was known
to be quote ingenious, intelligent and determined. Could you get
a little picture of him?
Speaker 3 (06:07):
Not really?
Speaker 2 (06:08):
Okay? Now Boswell, son of a wealthy English family. As
I told you, his father royal Navy officer. Okay, right,
so he's you know, you would imagine some level of
discipline and upright for right, Yes, exactly.
Speaker 5 (06:21):
A lot of whistles now for school and coats for days.
Nice sharp look, but the callers turned up, popped up
whistle like Dylan Thomas over here. Now you gotta make
a poetic anyway, this cabbing. He attended the ultra exclusive
Marlborough School. You know, it's like one of the private schools.
Speaker 3 (06:40):
Like them roll the cigarette.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
Yeah, they teach him to roll smokes. So after that
he went to university and he was really good at
rolling smoke, so he said, why don't you study biology?
So he did, and then after graduation he went off
to see the world. Because he's rich. He's like, I'm
gonna go and mess about, and so he goes and
you know, he travels widely, extensively. Then he comes back
he's like, oh, that was amazing, world changing. I'm gonna
go settle down buys a place in notting Hill. Wow. No,
(07:06):
but at that time notting Hill was basically London's hate Ashburys,
right nineteen eighty three, Well, this is the seventies. Okay,
this point for late sixties early.
Speaker 3 (07:16):
That's like a cool little place to must be nice
to go and travel the world and come back and
buy a place.
Speaker 2 (07:22):
Buy a place. Yeah, not just that, but one in
a known drug scene. Or you're like, oh, I can
hang out with all my friends. I don't have to
go anywhere. They can come right here, they're down the street.
So basically my point is this is before Julia Roberts
and Hugh Grant, before they made it such a you know,
popular scene with their movie of the same name, so
apparently fake CD right CD drugs. Anyway, Boswell he had
(07:44):
the demeanor of the ultra wealthy in the UK, so
he was like kind of slumming it and sleezing it.
But also he had the worst of that demeanor of
the ultra wealthy in the UK, as in he was haughty,
had no lips, not not not physically stood demeanor Elizabeth
hat He quote, was evidently used to having his own way.
So he was a spoiled brat right. Yeah, he was tall, slim,
(08:08):
rather fine boned. He wasn't a rough and rugged athlete,
so you weren't gonna like catch him winning respect on
the football pitch. This was somebody who was quote an
accomplished yachtsman.
Speaker 4 (08:17):
Right.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
So he was someone of a you know, an outdoorsman,
I guess, and he quote lacked nothing in poise. He
starting to get a little picture of him, maybe.
Speaker 3 (08:25):
Him underpants the Lady diapers.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
What I don't I'm unfamiliar with this product. Is that
a mashup? I don't know this one. But basically this guy,
he's a rich kid from old money. He likes boats,
he likes acting superior to others. He wouldn't be much
in a fight, but he would pay someone to beat
you up, right, Okay, so that's Robin Boswell. Yeah, now
there's co conspirator. Sore In berg Arnbach. He was known
as the rubber face man, right, our Danish master of disguise. Now,
(08:51):
as a young man berg Arnbach he had been an actor,
but by the time he's thirty five, he was like
he's like now, basically a knock about playboy.
Speaker 3 (08:58):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (08:59):
Now, when I say knock about playboy, Elizabeth, I mean
this cat bought himself a castle near the Italian port
city of Genoa. He also owned a palatial villa in Switzerland.
Dude was living clean. Wait what Yeah, he was also
one of Europe's most wanted drug smugglers, so that's how
he was paying for this. It's not like and he'd
been on the run for a decade. That's his nickname,
the Master of Disguise. That was not from his acting days.
Speaker 3 (09:21):
So oh, I thought maybe he was like an early
Jim Carrey rubber faced man.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
No, it was more like he wore rubber face masks
and you had to get on a boat and get
the hell out of it.
Speaker 3 (09:32):
But he just would like make a crazy face trying
to get through customs.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
Just try to hold it, like are you part dinosaurs?
Speaker 3 (09:39):
Yeah, they're like oh yeah, like you.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
Know your old man mask. You scare me with the
the full face mask. Imagine that it was done. Well,
that's not horrifying anyway. So the rubber Face Man that's
his nickname, right, doesn't that sound like a nineteen thirties
horror film, like one of the comedy duo, Like like,
what is it a Abbin Costello meet the rubber face Man. Anyway,
back to our Danish arco trafficker, sorenberg Arnbach. He'd personally
(10:03):
seen the dangers of illicit drug use right, this cat
had lost a brother to a heroin.
Speaker 3 (10:08):
Overdose and he goes around selling drugs.
Speaker 2 (10:10):
Didn't stop him at all. He goes smuggling. He's like,
you know, it hurt my family's probably hurt other families.
But I love castles. Yeah, that's why he became a
narco baron Elizabeth. Also, he also loved yachts he happened
to be. And I when I say yachts, I don't
mean like big boats, I mean like I want you
to picture him on a ship, right, a ship that
(10:32):
was quote bigger but otherwise identical version of the Danish
royal yacht with an onboard chef who hosted Denmark's most
popular televised cookery program.
Speaker 3 (10:43):
So he's not like guy Fiery yes on his boat.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
Just poaling around with him like doing blows.
Speaker 3 (10:49):
So like the yeah, the equivalent, the Santa Roso equivalent
is like a tug boat with Guy Fieri behind the grill.
Speaker 2 (10:56):
Be a tug boat of this boat. They are cute.
So Sorenberg he wanted that kind of life, right, So
this typically only comes from crime or great talent. He
did not have great talent, so he went with crime.
Now that's how you afford a castle in Italy. So
the Danage authorities they catch up to this cat because
he's not necessarily good at it. Berg Armbach has to
(11:17):
go on the run. And as I told you, that
lasted for a decade. So it means he also ran
into trouble with the Swiss, because you know, Europe was
pretty much the Interpol kind of like red notice, like
oh like, oh you're in trouble in Italy, you're in
trouble over here too, right, So it means he loses
access to his palatial villa. He had to give up
living in his Italian castle near Genoa. Life of a
wanted Man, Elizabeth, it sucks. He goes fully on the lamb,
(11:39):
stayed outside the law ten years. Where would you go
if you had to give up everything and you have money, right,
so you can pick something? Where would you go?
Speaker 3 (11:48):
Where would I go?
Speaker 2 (11:49):
You got to live with the life on the lamb.
You don't want to get caught.
Speaker 3 (11:51):
I don't want to get caught. If you go to
to a rural of an area, everyone's suspicious of you.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
Well, here, I'll give you, give you some time to think.
Here's my answer. I would go and hide out by
becoming a cop in a small town in Florida, because
who would ever think to look for me amongst a
bunch of cops.
Speaker 3 (12:06):
That's a really really good plan for.
Speaker 2 (12:08):
You, totally brilliant. And I gotta be in Florida's kind
of nice me. I pick a time with good fishing.
Who knows. Okay, what about you? I can I can
surf in the morning, go be a cop in the afternoon.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
I don't know. I guess I have to stick in
the United States so I don't stand out too much.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
That's my problem.
Speaker 3 (12:22):
Yeah, and I have money.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
Mm hmm, I don't know.
Speaker 3 (12:26):
I go somewhere where everyone's really eccentric and wants to
be left alone. Bus in the Yeah, the Marine headlands,
they're notorious for. Like they in Billinas. They take the
signs down, like the way finding signs to tell you,
like Billinas is here.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
This iss and this is the name with the row.
Speaker 3 (12:47):
They take it down, and like it's very rarely do
properties come on the market. And so I, you know,
i'd buy my way in there.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
Doren't you worry that those people might be a little
suspicious of an outsider?
Speaker 3 (12:57):
Not when I have a meeting in town and I
gather them together and I tell them what I'm doing
and why they decided to run them over, and then
they decided to protect Look, I'm on the run. I
walk in with my crew of like wolves and bears
and assorted dogs, and I'm like, look, guys.
Speaker 2 (13:11):
I'll pay all your house all your house taxes for
a year if you guys just let me join the community. Cool.
Cool exactly, by the way, call me Regina so Berg Armback.
He decides I'm going to go live the life of
a divorced dad. He decides to live on a boat.
He's like, yeah, he get not some stinky thirty foot
sailboat in the Marina Elizabeth, though. He lives on an
(13:32):
enormous yacht that's bigger than the Royal Danish yacht right,
So of course he would eventually get caught on that.
So he's like, Okay, this isn't gonna last. I need
to go somewhere deep. I need to take this boat
life onto land. So where does he go? I need
to go somewhere somewhere, Like I said, I'm going to
hide where no one would look. He decided to relocate
to Wales, a fishing village in Wales. It's like, who
(13:53):
would ever look for me, a Danish drug smuggler in
a tiny fishing village in Wales. So he picked a
county in the southwest of Wales, a place called Pembrokeshire.
Maybe he's pronouncing that incorrectly, Pembrokeshire. There you go. Now,
the rubber faced man thought he could hold up there,
and I said, hide out in a rural coastal out
of the way Welsh town. And you know, he just
keep right on drug smuggling, the heroine and the hash
(14:15):
and the bales of marijuana that he'd been moving. That
was also part of his plan. He wasn't going to
give up his business.
Speaker 3 (14:20):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (14:20):
So for a partner he picked Robin Boswell. Smart choice, right, Boswell,
He's a.
Speaker 3 (14:26):
He'll fit right in in a Welsh fishing.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
Vas English Elizabeth. He knows this stuff. He's rich exactly.
But this guy's like, it'll work. What's an Englishman to
a Welshman? They're probably practice. Yeah, he misses the boat
on that one.
Speaker 4 (14:39):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (14:39):
So, according to the book Drug War by Peter Welsh,
no relation to the country, Robin Boswell quote never gave
his name over phone lines used false identities when dealing
with strangers, held at least eight passports. He kept his
possessions under aliases or in the names of friends, and
anyone trying to trace him came up against a bewildering
morass of shell comp and he's accommodation offices, hotels, shops
(15:03):
and not existent addresses. So this guys they call him,
is the nowhere Man. Yeah, that's Robin Boswell, the rich Englishman.
He's a made basically erased himself from record, okay, which
isn't easy when you're rich. But he manages it, you know,
because he's he's dedicated, like I really want to get
into crime. Now he's got his buddy who's on the run,
who's looking to stay out of the sights of the authorities.
He's like, that guy is figuring it out. I'm gonna
(15:23):
go partner with him. Yeah, it seems like, you know,
that's a great choice, right, No, because on the show,
but Boswell he was a man of a particular habit,
and that habit was not getting caught. As I told you,
he had family money to shield his activities. He used
old money tactics like shell companies for a layer of protection. Yeah,
he's keen to invest in massive profits into his real
(15:45):
estate portfolio. Always smart when you're a criminal on the make.
So not only did he buy a place in notting Hill,
he also bought a whole block of apartment buildings. He
also owned a twenty six bedroom building near some place
called Guilford. It's an English town in Surrey. Now, the
last time I spoke on English geography, I made a mistake,
and how I referenced Surrey a right, so maya culper Batania.
All right, so let me get this one all the
(16:07):
way right. Guilford in west Surrey is in English town Elizabeth.
It's roughly twenty seven miles south and west of London.
The name of the town, it's speculated, derives from the
local river way and a crossing of that river. The
river Way Elizabeth continues on to join the River Thames,
which runs through the quaint center of Guildford.
Speaker 5 (16:24):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
Yeah, fun fact, yo, producer, Dave. You're a man Alfred
the Great. He mentioned Guildford in his will. Whoa last Kingdom? Shoutout?
Ughtred son of Utred Robin Boswell owned a stately twenty
six room building in lovely Guildford, yes. The building wasn't
in downtown, it wasn't an apartment building. Nope. It was
set on acres, the kind of acres that feature gardens
(16:45):
and surrounding woods. He probably had like a maze, built
a super tall hedgeho, just like yes, yeah, do you
know how much he paid for that spot? Five dollars
practically back to the drug war the book by Welsh,
Boswell bought the palatial home for and I quote two
hundred and fifty thousand pounds in cash, a yacht, dinghies
(17:06):
and a numerous vehicles. I'm assuming the original owner wasn't
some landed Englishman like the fourth orl of Yardstick upon
Acorns or whatever.
Speaker 3 (17:16):
Well maybe and they hit hard times like yeah, I'll
take a.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
Yeah, I'll take a boat. I want to go over
to France or whatever. It's good point. So the policeman
who eventually chased down the international drug smugglers he described
Boswell quote as an almost unknown quantity on the fringe
of a number of drug smuggling operations, but never in
the net. So this dude he'd brushed up against the
police then their attention in particular a number of times.
(17:41):
And there was this one time, he was suspected of
smuggling in a one million pounds and that's sterling of
hash in from Katmandu and Nepal. Oh they're like, oh,
we think it's him, but they somehow let this one
million pounds worth of hash slip through their fingers. Anyway,
there was Taco Boswell being also quote a client of
Lebanon's in miss Jafar Klan, so he was like in
(18:02):
deep right, apparently in the hash trade. But none of
this talk leads to an investigation or a bust. By
the end of the seventies, the dude draws attention because
he has more than one passport. They find that kind
of suspicious, right, so, plus his banking records also a
little hinky. In nineteen seventy six, dude raised his eyebrows
when he converted a half billion dollars in Canadian dollars
aka loonies and had the bank give him converted him
(18:23):
out in Swiss francs. They're like, why do you want
this in England? He was like, I don't worry about
that now. The real suspicious part is how he went
to a series of different banks and then attempted to
deflect attention you know, he obviously did the opposite. He
caught attention, so no criminal charges came of any of that.
Speaker 6 (18:39):
Right.
Speaker 2 (18:39):
What saved him is that the drugs he smuggled mostly
went to North America. So the English were like, what
does it matter really, let them meet their souls or whatever.
So one day around nineteen seventy eight or nineteen seventy nine,
he gets involved with Soren berg Arnbach, the rubber face Man.
Now they would go on to make a fabulously wealthy
life together and then ruin each other lives. Yeah, let's
(19:01):
take a little break, Elizabeth, and after some ads, we'll
talk about more about the drug baron and the rubber
faced Man. And we're back high. He's still wearing the
(19:29):
same pants. Well whatever, you remember when I mentioned what'd
you call it? Pembrokeshire. Pembrokeshire, Yeah, okay, in the south
east coast of Wales. Yes, there's a spot called Seal Bay. Okay,
that's where our story takes place. Boswell, the drug baron
and berg Arnbach, the rubber faced Man, the Danish master
of disguise. Right, so they go into business together. They
(19:50):
come up with a scheme to import drugs into the
rough and rugged Welsh coast because that way, you know,
burg Arnbach can continue working. Yeah, so they engineer a
hell of a smuggling hole. They use two beaches in
Seal Bay.
Speaker 7 (20:02):
Right.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
One beach they drop all kinds of time, and they
just plundered and spent money to dig into the earth
just past the high water line, right and they dig
in at the mouth of a cave, and then they
dig straight down and they hollow out this huge cavern.
It's underground chamber. The walls they line with fiberglass. The
chamber was hidden from view by the natural elements, obviously
because it's basically just a cave on the rugged coast.
(20:25):
Who would look there. And it's also it's this coast
is pockmarked with caves. So on the other beach they
hid a small navy of dinghies and inflatable Zodiac style boats.
So this is so they can make runs to faery
drugs from yachts and small ships that come right and
then they take them back to their pirate cave. Now, Elizabeth,
you know I love that show Black Sales. I know
you You'll come into like rc Headquarridors and I'll be
(20:48):
watching another episode and you or one of the interns
gives me that annoyed look when you hear that intro
song piping to Live and you're like, again, huh, Well,
I want you to know I learned a lot from
that show.
Speaker 3 (20:59):
I know you probably have.
Speaker 2 (21:01):
For instance, I know that if you're going to hide
things in a cave, there are inherent risks with that.
I would imagine maybe it work brilliantly. No, don't get
me wrong, it can. Obviously if you plan to bring
boats close to shore, there's gonna be problems with that
part of it, right r under the cover of darkness.
That also adds an element if you're there to offload goods,
another element of danger because you don't want to lose
your goods. But if you got a hardy crew, it
(21:22):
can be done. Pirates did it back in the day.
Speaker 6 (21:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (21:24):
But also you talked about the high water mark. That's
like an average high water mark.
Speaker 2 (21:28):
There you go. Sea is not consistent. No, no, the
sea is a harsh doun forgiving mistresses. Yeah, and she
will turn on you when you least expect it. Never
turned your back on the ocean. In nineteen eighty two,
in the autumn month of November, a ship smuggling bales
of pot came in to offload some some contraband. Right now,
some of the marijuana gets lost in the rough seas.
(21:50):
Forty kilows of pot gets lost. That's about eighty eight
pounds of jazz cabbage just washing onto the coast of Wales.
Oh boy, now you see Elizabeth. As the sea taketh away,
so doth the sea giveth somewhere else down the coast?
Speaker 3 (22:03):
Right, this is like those Garfield phones.
Speaker 2 (22:05):
Yeah, wash totally, the rubber duckies and the Pacific on
the Oregon coast. Yeah, this the pot equally buoyant, and
so like rubber duckies bobs along and the bales wash
ashore in a place called Newport, Okay, right, The locals
confused by this sudden gift of eighty eight pounds of
pot from the sea. So the local authorities are called
to look into this, like, what's going on?
Speaker 4 (22:25):
Is it?
Speaker 7 (22:25):
You know?
Speaker 2 (22:25):
Is it the French? What's going on? So one month later,
Boswell he deposits three quarters of a million pounds sterling
into a bank on the Isle of Man. He just
walks into the bank with two suitcases and inside the
two suitcases is seven hundred and fifty seven thousands, never suspicious, yeah,
in notes in cash right, So boswell, he's been now
(22:46):
making some small mistakes. Yeah yeah, right, he's getting sloppy,
he's losing bales of pot, he's walking in with briefcases
of cash. So it was only a matter of time
until the drug baron and his buddy, the rubber face
man were both doing something that they had not been
doing for a decade, which she's getting caught. Yeah all right.
So it wasn't exactly their fault though when it did
start to go wrong, it was their men. You see.
(23:07):
They had brought their men with them to this small
Welsh fishing village.
Speaker 3 (23:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (23:10):
Well imagine how some hard men who are used to
international drug smuggling are doing down at the pub, right,
and this town has like four thousand people. Oh it's small,
it's small, small, right, yeah, yeah, it has like it's
separated down to the fishing village part and then up
the road, a really steep road is the new modern
section of towns. They have any money, you live on
the hill, and everybody who works in the water and
(23:31):
around the.
Speaker 3 (23:31):
Water, everybody knows everybody exactly.
Speaker 2 (23:34):
Oh my gosh.
Speaker 3 (23:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
So in June nineteen eighty three, local police were alerted
after a bunch of men were described by the locals
as quote a gang, and they kept dropping big bills
in the local pub. And by big bills, I mean
fifty pound notes. They're like, who's got all the money
over there?
Speaker 3 (23:47):
Usually?
Speaker 2 (23:48):
Yeah, exactly. So Sue Warner, that was a young woman
at the time. She lived on the family farm near Newport,
and she recalled how quote, there were guys staying in
Dinah's Cross and spending an awful lot of money paying
for drinks with fifty pound notes, and lots of partying
going on, lots of money and nice big cars. People
just started to put things together. Now, I know that's
not a Welsh accent. I can't do a Welsh accent, right, So, yeah,
(24:10):
I'm not going to Elizabeth. You spent considerable time in Scotland.
I've never been to Scotland, but I have been to
England and I've spent some time in Wales. Yeah, I'm
guessing that based on your time in Scotland, you like me,
aren't surprised that these locals were suspicious of outsiders. Not
in the least, right, I mean, this is like it's
par for the course from what I.
Speaker 3 (24:26):
Spend a small town in the United States, I can
tell you like, yeah, outsiders come in and then radar
goes up.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
What do you think they started doing next? Once the
radar goes.
Speaker 3 (24:35):
Up, i'd keeping track of them. What would you do?
Speaker 2 (24:38):
They start surveiling them, right, So they start snooping on
an Elizabeth style and suite. Back to Sue Warner, our
young local farm girl. So one night my dad decided
to camp up on the cliff top with neighbors. They
found two men sleeping close to the side of where
the gang we're planning on keeping the drugs, and then
things started to unravel. So now the cutting man camping
on the hilltop watching them off low drugs.
Speaker 3 (25:00):
Especially because it's not just like who's this new family,
they're a little weird.
Speaker 2 (25:03):
This is like, yeah, who look rough and yeah they
don't wear like sweaters and we've.
Speaker 3 (25:09):
All seen those kind of like Jason State the movies.
You don't want to shoot out in the main town
with the cars driving over sidewalks and the whatnots.
Speaker 2 (25:16):
Don't need to keep that to yourself. Take that back
to Guilford.
Speaker 3 (25:19):
Yeah, we don't do that here.
Speaker 2 (25:21):
So okay, these land lovers were not the only ones
who were suspicious. The fishermen and the lobstermen who worked
the craggy coastline.
Speaker 3 (25:28):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 2 (25:28):
They started watching these yachts and these boats coming close
to the shore and offload something into smaller dinghies and
then these the zodiac style inflatable boats. Right, so they
get nervous these guys are trying to like poach their catch.
Speaker 6 (25:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (25:40):
They're like, wait, we're got competition, right, is it the French? Anyway,
So they contact the local authorities and they're worried about
these men who are working at night and they think
they're trying to their poachers, right, So they tell the
cops you got to watch these guys. And then some
of the lobstermen handle ourselves. So they go down and
they confront the men on the beaches who are offloading
the bales of pot. Wow, man, what are you doing
(26:00):
in Wales?
Speaker 7 (26:01):
Right?
Speaker 2 (26:01):
And so the drug smugglers they're like, oh, oh, calm down, no,
well we're not from here. They're like, yeah, we know.
What are you doing. They're like, we're filming a documentary,
you know, a nature movie. Everybody loves nature movies, right,
they tell them, Yeah, our movie is about seals and
whales and stuff in the ocean. And we're gon, we're
planning on filming in Greenland, so we're practicing off loading
and loading up equipment for the documentary. We take to
(26:23):
get really good at this because we're gonna be in
a rural place. And the guys were like, uh huh yeah.
So basically the local fishermen, the lobstermen, hey, like they're like,
that's a festering pack of lies. I'm not buying a
single bit of that. Like, trust me, mate, I'm a fisherman.
I know when something is fiscally unsound. Now you thought
I would say fishy, didn't you know, Elizabeth. Fisherman know
how to be fiscally sound. They have to be if
(26:44):
they're gonna make it. And a documentary crew practicing for
months to offload equipment is hinky and not fiscally sound.
So anyway, the locals they go to their dified powe's
maybe pronouncing that incorrectly, apologies Welsh, but it's d y
fowys okay, that place their police department, and reported what
(27:05):
all they'd seen, right, and what the men on the
beaches and the boats in the yachts were actually doing
was to prepare the pirate code for a major load
that was coming in on a consignment sale. It wasn't
even their dope a huge day. They're gonna like, oh,
we got this thick, great thing running in Wales. Just
give us your big load and we'll offload it for you.
And the connect. Yeah, high stakes deal entered DCI Don
(27:26):
Evans of Diffid Poe's Police. Now. DCI Evans led the investigation,
which was dubbed Operation Seal Bay. Really imaginative, took title
right anyway, the cops they get to work. And he
wasn't alone, Elizabeth. You see, he didn't call in some
crack team of investigators. He didn't establish some war room
to catch these drug smugglers. Nope, not him. Instead, he
(27:47):
knew he had all the local amateur talent he needed. Yeah,
your people, Norsey busy bodies who say things like I
just want to take a look and see what they're
doing over there. Yes, right, your people. So DC I
haven't seen knew with my special army of special investigators,
I can get this task done. So we went out
and he spoke with them and DCI Don Evans. He
(28:08):
told the press, quote, these villains totally underestimated the local
people and how observant they were, and all we took
five hundred and forty statements from people living in the area.
There's like thirty eight hundred people, so I'm pretty much
every seventh person's like, oh my got something. So many
people are children, so obviously you discount the children to
people who are like house bound, they don't leave, they
(28:28):
don't have Almost every adult had something to say anyway.
So the police they follow the clues from the five
hundred and forty witness statements, they determine a zone of
interest to investigate. They're like, oh, pretty much centered around
these two beaches. Then the cops go out and they
walk the coastline, searching through the sand the pebbles for
signs to drug smugglers. They also have like people with them,
But you were like, no, right over here, look right there, right,
(28:49):
there's this one farmer. He leads a pair of officers
over to the mouth of a cave and he wanted
to show them what he'd found. He's like, no, no, but
you got to see what I found. It's very importantright
he drags him over there. He picks up a stone
and tosses into the cave. They're like, what are you doing,
old man? And all of a sudden, it doesn't make
the expected sound. Anybody would think that a stone going
into a cave would make. Instead, you hear this really large,
(29:09):
hollow sounding metal tung kind of like yeah. They're like,
wait a minute. And even the police are curious, so
they investigate the ground. They part's pushing around, They push
back sand, they move pebbles and everything out of their way. Boom,
they find something. What if they find Elizabeth a hatch
like a submarine kind of hatch, right, the cops they
twist the handle and they open the hatch. They can't
see the bottom. Farmer grabs another stone. He's like, gosh,
(29:31):
this chucks it in there. Boom once again. It takes
a while to hit the bottom of When it does,
their rings, they're like wait a minute. They go down,
they climb in. It's an enormous subterranean chamber. The police
climb in and find all sorts of stuff in this
hidden drug smuggling bunker. DCI don Evan said quote, it
had obviously been a long time to build it was
(29:52):
held up with timber and totally lined with fiberglass. Resin
would have taken ages to dig out the sand and
rock and build, and they would have had brought all
the materials in by boat.
Speaker 3 (30:02):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (30:02):
So yeah, like you're building.
Speaker 3 (30:04):
When you were talking about fiberglass earlier, I was like,
did they just like bring a camper shell and like
shove it in a cave and.
Speaker 2 (30:10):
Force it into the earth. Now? No, they dug a
huge cave hole for themselves under a cave and then wow,
plastered it all in. Essentially. Now that the police they go,
they find all the equipment that you would need for
a modern professional drug smuggling operation.
Speaker 7 (30:25):
Right.
Speaker 2 (30:26):
For instance, the cops discovered quote a gargantuan inflatable that
could carry twenty four men and six tons of equipment,
powered by a two hundred and thirty five horsepower outboard motor.
Speaker 3 (30:35):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (30:36):
The chamber was large enough that an average sized man
could stand up at full extension comfortably. Yeah. And since
this is nineteen eighty three, the local Welsh police did
not immediately assume this was international drug smuggling. Instead, they're like, IRA, right,
this is IRA, this is a weapons cash right, So
they assumed with all these you know, this would be
a brilliant place to launch an attack on the English
coast side, so no one would see it coming from
(30:58):
whales anyway. They did notice though, some cops like, wait,
what remember the eighty eight pounds of pot that washed
up down the shorty thing? They might be related. And
somebody's like, that's a good point. Wait to go, dcibob
now all the reports of offloading of larger boats and
yachts and so forth. It filters in and they go, okay,
bounce that against the IRA gun running. Okay, probably drugs,
(31:18):
and they give up on the IRA gun running right,
and the police investigate. And then as they're investigating that
big load that I told you before that they were
planning for, it comes in and uh the one when
it arrives. It arrives on a seventy five foot fishing
trawler named Minnow Okay and Elizabeth. On that night, the
seas were stormy and pitched the ocean angry like an
(31:38):
irishman who's been mistaken for an Englishman. Now in those
dangerous and storm rexes came this fishing trawler. No fisherman
in his right mind would be out there in those
waters at night, right, So that alone makes it suspicious.
Speaker 7 (31:51):
Right.
Speaker 2 (31:51):
Then they get close to the rocky stars that like,
are they an idiot or is this like a criminal
And they're like, it's definitely criminals because they also I
forgot to mention Hurricane four winds. Oh god, yeah, like
this pushing the boat around like a child's toy. Right,
So the drug smugglers are fighting against the sea, fighting
against the winds, trying to deliver their load to shore.
They've got eighty bales of pot loaded onto two zodiac
(32:12):
style boats. That's what they meant. That's the progress they
managed before things go afoul. The ropes tying the boats
to the fishing trawler they give way in the storm.
The sea's iron froth takes the boats, flips them. The
heavily overloaded with pot, right, so it's easy to flip,
yea flip. Now they've got eighty bales of pot sprinkle
into the ocean. Oh that's just it's like rubber duckies,
(32:33):
just imagine. Anyway, So along with all this snoop spinach,
the spugglers also watched a couple of them overseas, right,
So now we got people in the water so the
police are like, oh, crime, I need do we need
to save them, but we're under cover. We can't go
and save them. It'll blow our cover, right, So they're
trying to decide what they should do. They decide, we
got to reveal our investigations. So the cops watching this beach,
(32:54):
they rush out. They decide to do the right thing.
Dci Ron Davies, he was on a twelve hour shift
out there in the cold and the wet and the
dark of that night. He remembers the decision that they
tried to make about should we save the drug smugglers
or not? And I quote when the Dinghies broke free,
we had to break cover and rescue the gang members
that were in the sea. When rescued, both were in
(33:15):
a poor condition and there's no doubt in my mind
that they were left to drown. The crew of the
boat made no attempt whatsoever to rescue them. They were
regarded as being expendable. Yeah, so the police were like,
we can't have that, all right, let's go save the underlings.
Who wants to grab some henchmen? So they go out
there and then a couple other beachcombing cops they grab
a couple of guys who get washed ashore. All in all,
(33:36):
the cops now they also try to run and gun
and grab the actual boat. Maybe we can catch the minnow.
Speaker 7 (33:41):
Right.
Speaker 2 (33:42):
Also, they go racing off to London because they've been
told by the guys they capture some names. So the
cops just start scattering trying to take these leads and
do whatever they can.
Speaker 6 (33:51):
Right.
Speaker 2 (33:51):
So, as I told you, the minnow is starting to
get away as the cops are headed to London to
grab people who are in homes who don't know what's
gonna happen. Because they don't have cell phones, they can't
be warned. Right. They also have to call to the RAF.
They're like, launch a helicopter. Yeah. The refs like, oh blimey,
let's do it, right, So they send out helicopter to
chase this fishing trawler, the minnow.
Speaker 3 (34:10):
The minnow wasn't that the Gilligan's Island?
Speaker 2 (34:12):
Yes, this is a French one because it ends in
a year, Yes, exactly. They launch a sea king helicopter.
It's a big helicopter, doesn't matter, and so yeah, imagine a.
Speaker 3 (34:25):
Big long day in the visual.
Speaker 2 (34:28):
So it's given chase, right, The fishing trawler. Imagine like
a big seventy five foot like a boat you t
off the coast of Alaska, right, okay, okay, So that
thing's just hauland as fast as it can, but it
can't go that fast. But it manages to slip away
in the night because it's that foggy and dark the
helicopter cannot. Finally, weather's absolutely terrible. It does manage to
get spotted the next day at Cork Harbor in Ireland,
(34:49):
so power over, it went that way, okay, exactly. So
the same night though, Robin Boswell doesn't know any of
this is going down, and so he gets arrested when
he when he does see cops coming for him, he
tries to make a run for it, or so it seems,
because two young boys and their mother spotted him and
they phoned the police. So he's like out in the town,
like walking along. The cops a catch up to him easily.
Speaker 3 (35:12):
See. I'm like a mind where everyone should just mind
their own business, except for you know, their times when
under discretion you realize, no, I can't mind my own business.
Speaker 2 (35:20):
Well you just you keep saying it your own business.
This town is their business business. There you go. So
they're minding their own anyway, DCI Evans. He recalled how, quote,
Robin Boswell was arrested, a man who gave us seventeen
false names and addresses. He was a mystery man and
clearly not up to any good. It transpired after arresting
Boswell that he wasn't going to tell us anything. So
(35:42):
these poor cops, they're up against her, right. So, of course,
to a veteran cop like DCI Evans, this is no
real big surprise. But he was kind of hoping maybe
they'd be you know, forthright.
Speaker 3 (35:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (35:51):
However, as he put it later on, but what was
unique he was wearing walking boots with specs of fiberglass resin.
So now boom, they've connected ron CSI Yeah, exactly. Oops,
the fibers gave me away. As d c I Evans
puts it, quote, we thought that's what we needed to
link him to the bunker at the cave. Right, So
now they've got d c I Evans. Now, however, he
(36:12):
was still denying Boswell, still denying that he was the
man they were looking for, so instead he insisted he
was an innocent property developer who happened to be out
on a walk looking for new investments on a rainy, stormy.
Speaker 3 (36:23):
Night, because you want to see it under its worst
condition exactly.
Speaker 2 (36:28):
I want to see if there's any rain damage that's
happening right now. So the cops were like, that's a
cute story. You have any others. So his co conspirator, Elizabeth,
the rubber face man, what's up with him? He's still
on the run right soon, Well, let's take a little
break and after that I'll tell you about sorenberg on
bach Ak, our master of disguise, Elizabeth. Yes, Saren, we're back. Hi.
(37:07):
I promised you a manhunt. Yes you did. Yeah, you're
ready to get stupid? Where? Yes? Where is the rubber
face man? Okay, are you really really ready? Ready?
Speaker 3 (37:17):
I'm ready ready.
Speaker 2 (37:18):
No, if you're that ready, I'd like you to close
your up a clue. I'd like you to picture it. Ike, Elizabeth,
you are a body an English copper Johnny Law and
the Land of Lords and Ladies. You're a member of
the Flying Squad. Oh my god, ess DC I Dutton
to investigate as part of a multi agency task forse
(37:39):
the Flying Squad send out their best, which is you.
At the moment, you're near the Welsh coastal town of Fishguard.
It's a brisk night, A stiff wind chops at the
waves and blows a cold, wet breeze on shore. A
storm is a bruin. You can tell you're a good
detective now. In Welsh the town is called Abergwan, which
means the mouth of the River Gwan. It's a tiny hamlet,
a fishing village situation in a deep v in the
(38:01):
hills that runs down to the coast. There's not much
to this town. Their main business district is called High Street.
There's a parish church and that's about it. There are
thirty two hundred souls that call Fishguard home. You've learned
from the locals that there was a nineteen fifty five
film version of Moby Dick' darring Gregory Peck that was
shot in Fishguard. Huh right, the lo cow. It's idyllic
if you want to imitate New England or you know,
(38:22):
show the reality of the rough and royal coast of Wales. Anyway,
a manhunt is under way. You are a crack member
of the Flying Squad, sent out here, as I told you,
from London, and you always find you're a man You're
like Tommy Lee Jones and the Fugitive, only you have
an English accent, and unlike mister Tommy Lee Jones, you
do care. Your police radio crackles and sounds. A pair
of bobbies has spotted a man with a rocksack heading
(38:43):
out of town. You huff it. You run, your feet
slap at cobblestones as you race against the wind, which
is now growing quite lusty. Then you see something, or
rather someone, walking along a fence. You spy the stranger
with the rocksack. You call out to them. You there stop.
The stranger is the rubber face man, Sorenberg on a bach.
He looks back, takes one good eye full of you,
(39:04):
and then turns and sprints in the other direction. Berg
Armbach is in good shape for a middle aged drug smuggler.
He tosses his rucksack, hops a low fence and sprints
across the fields. You radio in his position and his
direction of escape. Then you hop the low fence, splash
down in a mess of fresh mud. You regain your
footing and chase after the rubber face man. He's running
(39:25):
at full speed. He approaches the edge of the farmer's field.
There's a line of hedges. Standing low and squat like
a thick leafy fence. The rubber face man heads for
the hedges. When he draws closer, he spies the barbed
wire fence that runs along the hedges. At full stride,
the rubber face Man leaps up and over the hedgerow
and the barbed wire fence. You are also at full pace,
(39:47):
charging after him. The rubber face Man disappears over the hedges.
You lose sight of him in a moment. You're at
the hedges. You pull up, though uncertain if you want
to go leaping into the unknown. You look over the
hedges and thank god you did. You spy on the
other side a sheer drop seventy feet straight down into
a quarry.
Speaker 3 (40:04):
Oh.
Speaker 2 (40:05):
Then you hear some dirt and soil ship pebbles come loose.
That's followed but grunts and the sound of a man
desperate not to die hill. He shouts. You look over,
and you spy the rubber face man hanging there off
the side of the cliff, clutching at a thick exposed
tree root. The cliff face runs below him. You tell
them to stay calm and you'll radio back to the
other coppers and the man hunt. You tell them where
(40:27):
you are and who you've got trap Hanging above the quarry.
The tree root is strong, but not strong enough. As
you direct the cops to the bottom of the quarry,
you hear the snap. Your head spins fast, and you
catch sight of the rubber face Man as he falls
and plummets into the quarry. Luckily for him, he hits
the sloping cliff face and he bounces and rolls harmlessly
(40:47):
down the quarry wall until he comes to a rest
at the bottom of the old quarry. Waiting officers rush
over and arrest him. Nice work, DCI Dutt't hey, once again,
you got your man. DCI Pickles would be so proud. Yes,
now this arrest ends sorenberg Arnbox eleven year run as
a wanted man.
Speaker 3 (41:05):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (41:06):
After the cops, yeah, nabbed old rubber face Man. They
search his backpack, or as the British press would call it,
a rucksack, and they I have to admit, that's a
much more fun word, rucksack. I'm like, I want to
call it. I don't want to be pretentious. Americans were like,
who are you trying to be? Burnette feel like I'm
being me. It's rucksack like the Germans taught it to me.
Is that cooler anyway? So the cops they go tearing
(41:28):
through dude's rucksack and they open up and they find
a short band radio. The cops were like, oh, this
looks like fun. You want to see if it works.
Come on, Nigel, and they go on up and they
climb to the highest hill in the area and they
set up the short band radio. They flip it on,
they listen, nothing, They listen some more more nothing. They
keep listening though, because they're British, and finally, after a
(41:49):
few hours of plucky determination, the radio does indeed crackle
to life. Back to DCI Evans, the radio equipment came
to life in the words mother, mother, I want to
come in and to get the dirt off my hands
were heard. That communication was enough. We knew there was
a vessel out in the bay wanting to come in
and to get rid of the drugs that were on board.
So now the cops they searched the horizon of the seat.
(42:10):
There's a boat out there. Yeah, So they're like they're
scanning it like like someone walking the Widow's walk.
Speaker 3 (42:14):
Right, Well, if you're like, I'm sorry, but if you're
the if you're going to come up with code, the
kid is like, mother, but like no, like you're not
going to listen to a radio and hear that. You
have to say something like, you know, I got like,
however much fish, all this mackerel whatever, fresh load of
(42:35):
Oh yeah, you know, speak the language of the people.
Speaker 2 (42:38):
Mother. I want to come in, get the dirt off
my hands.
Speaker 3 (42:42):
Oh yeah, that's what kids radio their moms all the time,
Crackley radio. She's all come in over like a.
Speaker 2 (42:50):
Whiskey soak voice to come in. So dark and stormy
and foggy as that night was and where they were,
they could not see the boat on the horizon right now,
Quincy deadly. Not long after this one thousand pounds of
primo Lebanese hash washed up on the sandy beaches of Scandinavia.
Speaker 3 (43:10):
Oh that's so interesting, all the currents that would take
right Yeah, I.
Speaker 2 (43:13):
Thought you'd dig that. So the cops assumed that the
smugglers must have just dumped their load of a gold
hash at sea. Now that they had their two masterminds
and their mini underlings and associates the local police, they
follow the threads of this network, right, they go, this
has got to go lots of places. The connection they
spanned from this tiny Welsh like fishing village, they connect
to London, then over to France, to Denmark, to Spain.
(43:35):
They start going around the international real quick, right. As
one local detective put it, it was a coup for
the smallest police force in the country to take on
the biggest drug gang at the time.
Speaker 3 (43:44):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (43:45):
So Operation Seal Bay phenomenal success. Waiting go guys, good
for them. Now, as the cops chase leads, they also
followed the money trail, right, and this led them back
to the Isle of Man And I remember how I
told you Boswell walked into that bank with the two suitcases. Correct,
Remember how memorable that was? Yes, it was for the
p at the bank too, imagine. So they went to
the bank staff and DCI Evans is like, hey, yeah,
so you guys have anything strange you want to tell
(44:06):
us about. We've been following bank records and they all
lead to your bank. And as he put it, quote,
we asked the bank manager why he didn't think of
reporting it to the authorities, and his face reddened and
he said, mister Evans, it's not unusual for people to
come in carrying a shopping bag with fifty pounds in cash.
Speaker 3 (44:21):
Oh, then i'm the cops. I'm like, well, I'm gonna
set up shop out here, right, it's happening.
Speaker 2 (44:25):
Well, Nigel, you're staying here. Eventually, the cops they get
all their charges in order. Boswell gets charged with conspiring
to import large quantities of Class B drugs. During his
arrest period, police kept finding heidi holes of cash. While
they were going through all the stuff. They found money
buried under gardens and drugs hidden in smaller underground chambers.
They also seized lots of his cars. They grabbed a
(44:45):
rolls Royce, a ranger over, a Ferrari, his wife's portia,
his cars, his boats for that matter as well. They
often had hidden smuggler compartments. Right, So this was all
brought up during his lengthy trial in nineteen eighty eight,
and Boswell he had a ready answer for him, like,
I know this looks suspicious, guys, but let me explain,
And he said, and I quote, Look, I'm a wealthy Englishman,
(45:07):
so of course I'm also a bit of an eccentric.
The reason why my boats and cars all have smuggler
compartments is I was trying to hide Nazi gold. Wait, what,
that's not a direct quote. I made that up. Oh
that was his plan. He went in and he said,
basically went in doubt, Elizabeth. If you're a certain age
of England, you're like, oh, it's muddy the waters with
some Nazi gold. People will believe it. It's kind of
(45:27):
like we have in the in California, like Spanish gold.
So they have Nazi goldis everywhere on this coast and
everyone's like, oh yeah, I totally get that. Boswell. He
claimed that he'd hired all these men and dug all
these holes and built the secret chamber and had ships
offloading trial runs for when he finally found the gold.
He was searching for unsunk in Nazi U boats from
World War Two, right, and you see old chap. But
(45:49):
the reason I kept to so hush hush it because
the notts a gold player may not have been legal
to scavenge. Come on, obviously, you know it's all been
a terrible misunderstanding drugs. Now, the judge and jury in
the Crown Court, they listened to his side of the story,
and then they unanimously decided to not listen to a
single word he was saying. All right, the judge, mister
Justice Mars Jones, can I pause for a second to say, hot, damn,
(46:11):
that's the name and a half, mister Justice Mars Jones.
Mars Mars like as in the planet mister just me.
He sounds like he's a black man and he's got
like one of those white wigs on, mister Justice Boss Jones. Now, okay,
back to it. Justice Mars Jones ruled in almost record
speed guilty. Then he told Boswell, you also have lots
(46:32):
of money, of which I have no general power to
deprive you. Only wish I could, now, my man, mister
Justice Males Jones, he sentenced the ring leader Boswell to
ten years in prison. Oh he was thirty seven at
the time, gonna miss out on some of the best
years of his life. Now was co ring leader, the
man on the run, the rubber faced man aka sorenberg Arnbach.
He gets jailed to eight years. Okay, yep, finally caught
(46:53):
Boom and now Boswell, of course, being a true old
money britt, what does he do. He appeals the rule,
expecting it to go his way, always gets his way.
Elizabeth of course, after his appeals court trial, the court determined, quote,
the mind boggles at what might have been happening in
that lonely places the months and years rolled by if
this conspiracy had not been uncovered. So they basically has
(47:15):
the original prosecution stated, and I quote, these greedy schemes
were brought to light because of the neighborliness or nosiness
of local people, the interest and curiosity shown by decent people. Yes,
aka your people, Elizabeth, Yes, nosy lobstermen and fishermen and
farmers daughters. Yes, So there you go, Elizabeth. What is
your ridiculous takeaway from this tale?
Speaker 3 (47:36):
My ridiculous takeaway is, if you are going to smuggle
something out of Lebanon, it should be white gold. And
by that I mean tomb.
Speaker 2 (47:45):
Could you imagine garlic spread?
Speaker 3 (47:47):
Yeah, like how much beauty be sharing in the world.
Of course, Lebanese tombs.
Speaker 2 (47:53):
I don't think that's technically illegal, No, but you know,
I don't.
Speaker 3 (47:57):
Really need to smuggle it with all sorts of exercise
taxes and who knows, and you know whatever. That's my
ridiculous takeaways there, And what is your ridiculous Are.
Speaker 2 (48:07):
You feeling all right? Yeah? Okay to give me a second.
It feels really nice. Feel heard if you listened to
hang my ridiculous take away, Elizabeth, the rubber Face man
really disappointed me because he's got this great name. You
think he's gonna do stuff, and all he does is
just nothing. He's like, got I got a plan. I'm
(48:27):
gonna hide out my buddy, and my buddy's gonna rubber face.
Come on, rubber face man, when you try to get away,
you just try to walk out of town.
Speaker 3 (48:35):
Yeah, he's just like he's a disappointment.
Speaker 7 (48:38):
Right.
Speaker 2 (48:38):
I'm a developer. Yeah that's a ticket mother. Okay, So
I got a question for you. Yeah, you have in
the mood for a talk back? Yes, Producer Dave hit it.
Oh my god.
Speaker 5 (48:55):
I w.
Speaker 7 (49:01):
Hi Elizabeth and Zarin. My name is Rachel. I'm from
Fort Worth, Texas. I love your podcast. I think y'all
have such a great report together. You're so funny, Elizabeth.
I found a mash up today while I was walking
in Target. It's Native Times Girl Scout cookies. Do you
order it body wash, shampoo, et cetera? That smells like
(49:23):
Girl Scout cookies? I found it highly ridiculous.
Speaker 6 (49:26):
I love it.
Speaker 3 (49:27):
If you feature it. Bye girl, I'm gonna let you
do it per gross.
Speaker 2 (49:36):
There you go. That's how I feel.
Speaker 3 (49:37):
Every time to be on the receiving.
Speaker 2 (49:41):
You're just like, why is that pile of mess in
my lab?
Speaker 3 (49:43):
I like to be the mischief maker, the mischief taker.
Speaker 2 (49:47):
There you go. Girls just too sweet.
Speaker 3 (49:50):
I don't like sweet scents like that.
Speaker 2 (49:52):
No, I want to smell like butter.
Speaker 3 (49:55):
I want to smell like an angel's sneeze.
Speaker 2 (50:00):
Well you can find us smelling sweet like angel sneeze
is online always a Ridiculous Crime on Twitter, Instagram and
all the other socials. Maybe who knows. Good luck trying
to find us. We have a website though. You can
find us at ridiculous Crime dot com. Go there, hit
it up. We got all sorts of little tricks and
treats for you. Also, as you can tell, we love
your talk back, So please go to the iHeart app
and hit us up there, or you can email us
(50:22):
if you like, at Ridiculous Crime at gmail dot com.
As always, it's dear Elizabeth and then say whatever you want.
Once again, thanks for listening and we'll catch you in
next crime. Ridiculous Crime is hosted by Elizabeth Dutton and
Zaren Burnett, produced and edited by the vegan Leatherface Man
(50:44):
Dave Kuston. Research is by Marissa the Drug Baroness Brown
and Andrea the Pirate Queen of the Smugglers. Song Sharpened
Tear our theme song is by Thomas Shortman Radio Lee
and Travis Cbe Radio Dutton. The host wardrobe provided by
Botany five Hundred. Executive producers are Ben the Welsh Beachcomber
Boldlin and Noel notting Hill is a Good movie.
Speaker 4 (51:06):
Brown, Ridicous Crime, Say It One More Timequeous Crime.
Speaker 1 (51:18):
Ridiculous Crime is a production of iHeartRadio. Four more podcasts
my Heart Radio visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous Crime is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Elizabeth do Thearon Burnette. I love it when you're here, me,
I love it when I'm here too. I've been wandering around.
I got this question in my head, and your only
prison I know who can answer that question is no.
Do you know what's ridiculous? Yes?
Speaker 3 (00:17):
I do know it's ridiculous.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
What is it? Elizabeth? It's here, I'm ridiculous.
Speaker 3 (00:23):
The iconic track suit? What do you love track suits?
You we legitimately you wear Adidas tracksuits all the time.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
All the time. You're wearing half of one.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
Half of one now, okay, just the top half, tolf
nothing underneath.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
I'm not porky normal Okay.
Speaker 3 (00:39):
So you know who else makes an iconic tracksuit? Give
me who else used to the coke sportis.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Juicy Coto? There?
Speaker 3 (00:49):
It is there? It is? They had like the the
lore ones? Right, yes, so they have not really, although
she should.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Be about Ben Affleck Is he doing one?
Speaker 4 (01:02):
Now?
Speaker 3 (01:02):
They have a limited edition set and it's a one
hundred and sixty nine dollars track.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
Suit okay, and it's it's a lot for tracks, a.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
Tomato red color, too red, and it has the Diamante
detailing the custom crystal Dimante, like where it says it
across your your rump, okay, juicy, sure, although this time
it doesn't say juicy.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
That's what I'm paying for, Elizabeth. It says juicy or
oh juicy okay, next level Okay, yeah, rebooted it. I
got it, and you.
Speaker 3 (01:32):
Know it's a mashup. You know it's across is it?
Speaker 2 (01:35):
Did it have to be? Yes? But we just stop here.
It's so good, so far, so good.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
You know who they're working with.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
No, I don't want to Red Robin. No.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
There, it's the Red Robin Juicy couture mashup. You can
only buy them on the Red Robin Instagram shop one
hundred and sixty nine dollars. As I said, No, all
sales are final, no returns or exchanging. You know why,
because you'll never buy another.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
You took it. They're like here, that's it.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
That's the juicier juicy on the caboose and then up
on the breastical area it says red Robin in rhinestone,
and I want all tracking information. I think it also
has that on their hip. They're not very good about
showing like full pictures of these tracks.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
Shore the button the chesticles.
Speaker 3 (02:26):
Yeah, and it says juicier on the back. I think
to whatever. And so anyway, I want a full list
of everyone who purchases this and that's going to be
my special watch list.
Speaker 5 (02:36):
It's your list, but just watching them on these little
Google How did.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
You hear about the newsletter? Do you get read it?
Speaker 3 (02:47):
What do you We have the most amazing network. People
who have dudes who you know, They clew us in,
they let us know. This one came off of Instagram.
I think it us Yeah, and it came from esther faith.
She wanted She wanted to know what our budget was
(03:08):
because she wanted Dave. She said, look, I screencapped this.
What's the budget for Dave to take this one and
get both of them a set? I bet Elizabeth would
say she hates it but actually love it. Yeah, I
told you I love cozy. This is probably cozy. Although
I feel like I like breathable fabrics. I don't really
wear synthetics, and I feel like that would make me
(03:29):
feel like I was gonna choke to death.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
I trade mine for a ride to Stockton.
Speaker 3 (03:36):
I think you get a free ride to Stockton when
you you know that's where they do it for the clubs.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
Of course, you know I'm going to do it for.
Speaker 3 (03:43):
The club Okay, and I'm done.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
Well, that's ridiculous. It's also ridiculous.
Speaker 3 (03:48):
Tell me, it's.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
Gonna take me longer in a second. Yeah, do it, Elizabeth.
This is the story of your people. Oh yeah, special investigators.
Speaker 3 (03:57):
Like that could be a lot of group.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
I left that for you to fill in, Like, what
kind of my people? Okay? It's nineteen eighty three, right,
and one of the most wanted men in Europe was
a thirty five year old millionaire playboy, a Danish actor,
a man known as a master of disguises. They called
him the rubber Faced Man. Yes, my people right. His
(04:21):
criminal co ringleader and mastermind was a wealthy son of
the Royal Navy. Oh yes. And both men were brought
down by your people, a bunch of nosy Welsh lobster
men and farmers wives.
Speaker 6 (04:33):
Oh yes, oh my goodness, yes, enjoy.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
This is This is a ridiculous crime A podcast about
absurd and outrageous capers, heist and cons. It's always ninety
nine percent murder free, ay and ridiculous. Yes, yes it is.
Now this Elizabeth is the story of the drug baron
as I'm calling him and the rubber face man.
Speaker 3 (05:18):
Wait, you're going to tell a story about drug.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
I know, right, I was shocking.
Speaker 3 (05:22):
I never heard such a thing.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
I swear to god. I was not looking for a
drug story. I was looking for a story of like
about like a master of disguise, and I found the
rubber face man and I was so excited. I was like,
what's he doing? They're like drug smuggling.
Speaker 3 (05:34):
I was like, you heard the word and you're like,
oh well.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
It's this one's more than just cocaine. And Pablo Escobar
will make no more appearances after me saying his name
right now, Okay, that's it, Okay, okay. So the co
rigging leaders were two men. Soren berg Arnbach he's the Dane, yeah,
and Robin Boswell, the brit Now Boswell's you might have
you know guessed the Englishman. Okay. So he's from London
and for a living he was quote the master kind
(06:00):
of the drugs ring in London proper. He was known
to be quote ingenious, intelligent and determined. Could you get
a little picture of him?
Speaker 3 (06:07):
Not really?
Speaker 2 (06:08):
Okay? Now Boswell, son of a wealthy English family. As
I told you, his father royal Navy officer. Okay, right,
so he's you know, you would imagine some level of
discipline and upright for right, Yes, exactly.
Speaker 5 (06:21):
A lot of whistles now for school and coats for days.
Nice sharp look, but the callers turned up, popped up
whistle like Dylan Thomas over here. Now you gotta make
a poetic anyway, this cabbing. He attended the ultra exclusive
Marlborough School. You know, it's like one of the private schools.
Speaker 3 (06:40):
Like them roll the cigarette.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
Yeah, they teach him to roll smokes. So after that
he went to university and he was really good at
rolling smoke, so he said, why don't you study biology?
So he did, and then after graduation he went off
to see the world. Because he's rich. He's like, I'm
gonna go and mess about, and so he goes and
you know, he travels widely, extensively. Then he comes back
he's like, oh, that was amazing, world changing. I'm gonna
go settle down buys a place in notting Hill. Wow. No,
(07:06):
but at that time notting Hill was basically London's hate Ashburys,
right nineteen eighty three, Well, this is the seventies. Okay,
this point for late sixties early.
Speaker 3 (07:16):
That's like a cool little place to must be nice
to go and travel the world and come back and
buy a place.
Speaker 2 (07:22):
Buy a place. Yeah, not just that, but one in
a known drug scene. Or you're like, oh, I can
hang out with all my friends. I don't have to
go anywhere. They can come right here, they're down the street.
So basically my point is this is before Julia Roberts
and Hugh Grant, before they made it such a you know,
popular scene with their movie of the same name, so
apparently fake CD right CD drugs. Anyway, Boswell he had
(07:44):
the demeanor of the ultra wealthy in the UK, so
he was like kind of slumming it and sleezing it.
But also he had the worst of that demeanor of
the ultra wealthy in the UK, as in he was haughty,
had no lips, not not not physically stood demeanor Elizabeth
hat He quote, was evidently used to having his own way.
So he was a spoiled brat right. Yeah, he was tall, slim,
(08:08):
rather fine boned. He wasn't a rough and rugged athlete,
so you weren't gonna like catch him winning respect on
the football pitch. This was somebody who was quote an
accomplished yachtsman.
Speaker 4 (08:17):
Right.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
So he was someone of a you know, an outdoorsman,
I guess, and he quote lacked nothing in poise. He
starting to get a little picture of him, maybe.
Speaker 3 (08:25):
Him underpants the Lady diapers.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
What I don't I'm unfamiliar with this product. Is that
a mashup? I don't know this one. But basically this guy,
he's a rich kid from old money. He likes boats,
he likes acting superior to others. He wouldn't be much
in a fight, but he would pay someone to beat
you up, right, Okay, so that's Robin Boswell. Yeah, now
there's co conspirator. Sore In berg Arnbach. He was known
as the rubber face man, right, our Danish master of disguise. Now,
(08:51):
as a young man berg Arnbach he had been an actor,
but by the time he's thirty five, he was like
he's like now, basically a knock about playboy.
Speaker 3 (08:58):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (08:59):
Now, when I say knock about playboy, Elizabeth, I mean
this cat bought himself a castle near the Italian port
city of Genoa. He also owned a palatial villa in Switzerland.
Dude was living clean. Wait what Yeah, he was also
one of Europe's most wanted drug smugglers, so that's how
he was paying for this. It's not like and he'd
been on the run for a decade. That's his nickname,
the Master of Disguise. That was not from his acting days.
Speaker 3 (09:21):
So oh, I thought maybe he was like an early
Jim Carrey rubber faced man.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
No, it was more like he wore rubber face masks
and you had to get on a boat and get
the hell out of it.
Speaker 3 (09:32):
But he just would like make a crazy face trying
to get through customs.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
Just try to hold it, like are you part dinosaurs?
Speaker 3 (09:39):
Yeah, they're like oh yeah, like you.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
Know your old man mask. You scare me with the
the full face mask. Imagine that it was done. Well,
that's not horrifying anyway. So the rubber Face Man that's
his nickname, right, doesn't that sound like a nineteen thirties
horror film, like one of the comedy duo, Like like,
what is it a Abbin Costello meet the rubber face Man. Anyway,
back to our Danish arco trafficker, sorenberg Arnbach. He'd personally
(10:03):
seen the dangers of illicit drug use right, this cat
had lost a brother to a heroin.
Speaker 3 (10:08):
Overdose and he goes around selling drugs.
Speaker 2 (10:10):
Didn't stop him at all. He goes smuggling. He's like,
you know, it hurt my family's probably hurt other families.
But I love castles. Yeah, that's why he became a
narco baron Elizabeth. Also, he also loved yachts he happened
to be. And I when I say yachts, I don't
mean like big boats, I mean like I want you
to picture him on a ship, right, a ship that
(10:32):
was quote bigger but otherwise identical version of the Danish
royal yacht with an onboard chef who hosted Denmark's most
popular televised cookery program.
Speaker 3 (10:43):
So he's not like guy Fiery yes on his boat.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
Just poaling around with him like doing blows.
Speaker 3 (10:49):
So like the yeah, the equivalent, the Santa Roso equivalent
is like a tug boat with Guy Fieri behind the grill.
Speaker 2 (10:56):
Be a tug boat of this boat. They are cute.
So Sorenberg he wanted that kind of life, right, So
this typically only comes from crime or great talent. He
did not have great talent, so he went with crime.
Now that's how you afford a castle in Italy. So
the Danage authorities they catch up to this cat because
he's not necessarily good at it. Berg Armbach has to
(11:17):
go on the run. And as I told you, that
lasted for a decade. So it means he also ran
into trouble with the Swiss, because you know, Europe was
pretty much the Interpol kind of like red notice, like
oh like, oh you're in trouble in Italy, you're in
trouble over here too, right, So it means he loses
access to his palatial villa. He had to give up
living in his Italian castle near Genoa. Life of a
wanted Man, Elizabeth, it sucks. He goes fully on the lamb,
(11:39):
stayed outside the law ten years. Where would you go
if you had to give up everything and you have money, right,
so you can pick something? Where would you go?
Speaker 3 (11:48):
Where would I go?
Speaker 2 (11:49):
You got to live with the life on the lamb.
You don't want to get caught.
Speaker 3 (11:51):
I don't want to get caught. If you go to
to a rural of an area, everyone's suspicious of you.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
Well, here, I'll give you, give you some time to think.
Here's my answer. I would go and hide out by
becoming a cop in a small town in Florida, because
who would ever think to look for me amongst a
bunch of cops.
Speaker 3 (12:06):
That's a really really good plan for.
Speaker 2 (12:08):
You, totally brilliant. And I gotta be in Florida's kind
of nice me. I pick a time with good fishing.
Who knows. Okay, what about you? I can I can
surf in the morning, go be a cop in the afternoon.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
I don't know. I guess I have to stick in
the United States so I don't stand out too much.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
That's my problem.
Speaker 3 (12:22):
Yeah, and I have money.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
Mm hmm, I don't know.
Speaker 3 (12:26):
I go somewhere where everyone's really eccentric and wants to
be left alone. Bus in the Yeah, the Marine headlands,
they're notorious for. Like they in Billinas. They take the
signs down, like the way finding signs to tell you,
like Billinas is here.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
This iss and this is the name with the row.
Speaker 3 (12:47):
They take it down, and like it's very rarely do
properties come on the market. And so I, you know,
i'd buy my way in there.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
Doren't you worry that those people might be a little
suspicious of an outsider?
Speaker 3 (12:57):
Not when I have a meeting in town and I
gather them together and I tell them what I'm doing
and why they decided to run them over, and then
they decided to protect Look, I'm on the run. I
walk in with my crew of like wolves and bears
and assorted dogs, and I'm like, look, guys.
Speaker 2 (13:11):
I'll pay all your house all your house taxes for
a year if you guys just let me join the community. Cool.
Cool exactly, by the way, call me Regina so Berg Armback.
He decides I'm going to go live the life of
a divorced dad. He decides to live on a boat.
He's like, yeah, he get not some stinky thirty foot
sailboat in the Marina Elizabeth, though. He lives on an
(13:32):
enormous yacht that's bigger than the Royal Danish yacht right,
So of course he would eventually get caught on that.
So he's like, Okay, this isn't gonna last. I need
to go somewhere deep. I need to take this boat
life onto land. So where does he go? I need
to go somewhere somewhere, Like I said, I'm going to
hide where no one would look. He decided to relocate
to Wales, a fishing village in Wales. It's like, who
(13:53):
would ever look for me, a Danish drug smuggler in
a tiny fishing village in Wales. So he picked a
county in the southwest of Wales, a place called Pembrokeshire.
Maybe he's pronouncing that incorrectly, Pembrokeshire. There you go. Now,
the rubber faced man thought he could hold up there,
and I said, hide out in a rural coastal out
of the way Welsh town. And you know, he just
keep right on drug smuggling, the heroine and the hash
(14:15):
and the bales of marijuana that he'd been moving. That
was also part of his plan. He wasn't going to
give up his business.
Speaker 3 (14:20):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (14:20):
So for a partner he picked Robin Boswell. Smart choice, right, Boswell,
He's a.
Speaker 3 (14:26):
He'll fit right in in a Welsh fishing.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
Vas English Elizabeth. He knows this stuff. He's rich exactly.
But this guy's like, it'll work. What's an Englishman to
a Welshman? They're probably practice. Yeah, he misses the boat
on that one.
Speaker 4 (14:39):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (14:39):
So, according to the book Drug War by Peter Welsh,
no relation to the country, Robin Boswell quote never gave
his name over phone lines used false identities when dealing
with strangers, held at least eight passports. He kept his
possessions under aliases or in the names of friends, and
anyone trying to trace him came up against a bewildering
morass of shell comp and he's accommodation offices, hotels, shops
(15:03):
and not existent addresses. So this guys they call him,
is the nowhere Man. Yeah, that's Robin Boswell, the rich Englishman.
He's a made basically erased himself from record, okay, which
isn't easy when you're rich. But he manages it, you know,
because he's he's dedicated, like I really want to get
into crime. Now he's got his buddy who's on the run,
who's looking to stay out of the sights of the authorities.
He's like, that guy is figuring it out. I'm gonna
(15:23):
go partner with him. Yeah, it seems like, you know,
that's a great choice, right, No, because on the show,
but Boswell he was a man of a particular habit,
and that habit was not getting caught. As I told you,
he had family money to shield his activities. He used
old money tactics like shell companies for a layer of protection. Yeah,
he's keen to invest in massive profits into his real
(15:45):
estate portfolio. Always smart when you're a criminal on the make.
So not only did he buy a place in notting Hill,
he also bought a whole block of apartment buildings. He
also owned a twenty six bedroom building near some place
called Guilford. It's an English town in Surrey. Now, the
last time I spoke on English geography, I made a mistake,
and how I referenced Surrey a right, so maya culper Batania.
All right, so let me get this one all the
(16:07):
way right. Guilford in west Surrey is in English town Elizabeth.
It's roughly twenty seven miles south and west of London.
The name of the town, it's speculated, derives from the
local river way and a crossing of that river. The
river Way Elizabeth continues on to join the River Thames,
which runs through the quaint center of Guildford.
Speaker 5 (16:24):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
Yeah, fun fact, yo, producer, Dave. You're a man Alfred
the Great. He mentioned Guildford in his will. Whoa last Kingdom? Shoutout?
Ughtred son of Utred Robin Boswell owned a stately twenty
six room building in lovely Guildford, yes. The building wasn't
in downtown, it wasn't an apartment building. Nope. It was
set on acres, the kind of acres that feature gardens
(16:45):
and surrounding woods. He probably had like a maze, built
a super tall hedgeho, just like yes, yeah, do you
know how much he paid for that spot? Five dollars
practically back to the drug war the book by Welsh,
Boswell bought the palatial home for and I quote two
hundred and fifty thousand pounds in cash, a yacht, dinghies
(17:06):
and a numerous vehicles. I'm assuming the original owner wasn't
some landed Englishman like the fourth orl of Yardstick upon
Acorns or whatever.
Speaker 3 (17:16):
Well maybe and they hit hard times like yeah, I'll
take a.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
Yeah, I'll take a boat. I want to go over
to France or whatever. It's good point. So the policeman
who eventually chased down the international drug smugglers he described
Boswell quote as an almost unknown quantity on the fringe
of a number of drug smuggling operations, but never in
the net. So this dude he'd brushed up against the
police then their attention in particular a number of times.
(17:41):
And there was this one time, he was suspected of
smuggling in a one million pounds and that's sterling of
hash in from Katmandu and Nepal. Oh they're like, oh,
we think it's him, but they somehow let this one
million pounds worth of hash slip through their fingers. Anyway,
there was Taco Boswell being also quote a client of
Lebanon's in miss Jafar Klan, so he was like in
(18:02):
deep right, apparently in the hash trade. But none of
this talk leads to an investigation or a bust. By
the end of the seventies, the dude draws attention because
he has more than one passport. They find that kind
of suspicious, right, so, plus his banking records also a
little hinky. In nineteen seventy six, dude raised his eyebrows
when he converted a half billion dollars in Canadian dollars
aka loonies and had the bank give him converted him
(18:23):
out in Swiss francs. They're like, why do you want
this in England? He was like, I don't worry about
that now. The real suspicious part is how he went
to a series of different banks and then attempted to
deflect attention you know, he obviously did the opposite. He
caught attention, so no criminal charges came of any of that.
Speaker 6 (18:39):
Right.
Speaker 2 (18:39):
What saved him is that the drugs he smuggled mostly
went to North America. So the English were like, what
does it matter really, let them meet their souls or whatever.
So one day around nineteen seventy eight or nineteen seventy nine,
he gets involved with Soren berg Arnbach, the rubber face Man.
Now they would go on to make a fabulously wealthy
life together and then ruin each other lives. Yeah, let's
(19:01):
take a little break, Elizabeth, and after some ads, we'll
talk about more about the drug baron and the rubber
faced Man. And we're back high. He's still wearing the
(19:29):
same pants. Well whatever, you remember when I mentioned what'd
you call it? Pembrokeshire. Pembrokeshire, Yeah, okay, in the south
east coast of Wales. Yes, there's a spot called Seal Bay. Okay,
that's where our story takes place. Boswell, the drug baron
and berg Arnbach, the rubber faced Man, the Danish master
of disguise. Right, so they go into business together. They
(19:50):
come up with a scheme to import drugs into the
rough and rugged Welsh coast because that way, you know,
burg Arnbach can continue working. Yeah, so they engineer a
hell of a smuggling hole. They use two beaches in
Seal Bay.
Speaker 7 (20:02):
Right.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
One beach they drop all kinds of time, and they
just plundered and spent money to dig into the earth
just past the high water line, right and they dig
in at the mouth of a cave, and then they
dig straight down and they hollow out this huge cavern.
It's underground chamber. The walls they line with fiberglass. The
chamber was hidden from view by the natural elements, obviously
because it's basically just a cave on the rugged coast.
(20:25):
Who would look there. And it's also it's this coast
is pockmarked with caves. So on the other beach they
hid a small navy of dinghies and inflatable Zodiac style boats.
So this is so they can make runs to faery
drugs from yachts and small ships that come right and
then they take them back to their pirate cave. Now, Elizabeth,
you know I love that show Black Sales. I know
you You'll come into like rc Headquarridors and I'll be
(20:48):
watching another episode and you or one of the interns
gives me that annoyed look when you hear that intro
song piping to Live and you're like, again, huh, Well,
I want you to know I learned a lot from
that show.
Speaker 3 (20:59):
I know you probably have.
Speaker 2 (21:01):
For instance, I know that if you're going to hide
things in a cave, there are inherent risks with that.
I would imagine maybe it work brilliantly. No, don't get
me wrong, it can. Obviously if you plan to bring
boats close to shore, there's gonna be problems with that
part of it, right r under the cover of darkness.
That also adds an element if you're there to offload goods,
another element of danger because you don't want to lose
your goods. But if you got a hardy crew, it
(21:22):
can be done. Pirates did it back in the day.
Speaker 6 (21:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (21:24):
But also you talked about the high water mark. That's
like an average high water mark.
Speaker 2 (21:28):
There you go. Sea is not consistent. No, no, the
sea is a harsh doun forgiving mistresses. Yeah, and she
will turn on you when you least expect it. Never
turned your back on the ocean. In nineteen eighty two,
in the autumn month of November, a ship smuggling bales
of pot came in to offload some some contraband. Right now,
some of the marijuana gets lost in the rough seas.
(21:50):
Forty kilows of pot gets lost. That's about eighty eight
pounds of jazz cabbage just washing onto the coast of Wales.
Oh boy, now you see Elizabeth. As the sea taketh away,
so doth the sea giveth somewhere else down the coast?
Speaker 3 (22:03):
Right, this is like those Garfield phones.
Speaker 2 (22:05):
Yeah, wash totally, the rubber duckies and the Pacific on
the Oregon coast. Yeah, this the pot equally buoyant, and
so like rubber duckies bobs along and the bales wash
ashore in a place called Newport, Okay, right, The locals
confused by this sudden gift of eighty eight pounds of
pot from the sea. So the local authorities are called
to look into this, like, what's going on?
Speaker 4 (22:25):
Is it?
Speaker 7 (22:25):
You know?
Speaker 2 (22:25):
Is it the French? What's going on? So one month later,
Boswell he deposits three quarters of a million pounds sterling
into a bank on the Isle of Man. He just
walks into the bank with two suitcases and inside the
two suitcases is seven hundred and fifty seven thousands, never suspicious, yeah,
in notes in cash right, So boswell, he's been now
(22:46):
making some small mistakes. Yeah yeah, right, he's getting sloppy,
he's losing bales of pot, he's walking in with briefcases
of cash. So it was only a matter of time
until the drug baron and his buddy, the rubber face
man were both doing something that they had not been
doing for a decade, which she's getting caught. Yeah all right.
So it wasn't exactly their fault though when it did
start to go wrong, it was their men. You see.
(23:07):
They had brought their men with them to this small
Welsh fishing village.
Speaker 3 (23:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (23:10):
Well imagine how some hard men who are used to
international drug smuggling are doing down at the pub, right,
and this town has like four thousand people. Oh it's small,
it's small, small, right, yeah, yeah, it has like it's
separated down to the fishing village part and then up
the road, a really steep road is the new modern
section of towns. They have any money, you live on
the hill, and everybody who works in the water and
(23:31):
around the.
Speaker 3 (23:31):
Water, everybody knows everybody exactly.
Speaker 2 (23:34):
Oh my gosh.
Speaker 3 (23:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
So in June nineteen eighty three, local police were alerted
after a bunch of men were described by the locals
as quote a gang, and they kept dropping big bills
in the local pub. And by big bills, I mean
fifty pound notes. They're like, who's got all the money
over there?
Speaker 3 (23:47):
Usually?
Speaker 2 (23:48):
Yeah, exactly. So Sue Warner, that was a young woman
at the time. She lived on the family farm near Newport,
and she recalled how quote, there were guys staying in
Dinah's Cross and spending an awful lot of money paying
for drinks with fifty pound notes, and lots of partying
going on, lots of money and nice big cars. People
just started to put things together. Now, I know that's
not a Welsh accent. I can't do a Welsh accent, right, So, yeah,
(24:10):
I'm not going to Elizabeth. You spent considerable time in Scotland.
I've never been to Scotland, but I have been to
England and I've spent some time in Wales. Yeah, I'm
guessing that based on your time in Scotland, you like me,
aren't surprised that these locals were suspicious of outsiders. Not
in the least, right, I mean, this is like it's
par for the course from what I.
Speaker 3 (24:26):
Spend a small town in the United States, I can
tell you like, yeah, outsiders come in and then radar
goes up.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
What do you think they started doing next? Once the
radar goes.
Speaker 3 (24:35):
Up, i'd keeping track of them. What would you do?
Speaker 2 (24:38):
They start surveiling them, right, So they start snooping on
an Elizabeth style and suite. Back to Sue Warner, our
young local farm girl. So one night my dad decided
to camp up on the cliff top with neighbors. They
found two men sleeping close to the side of where
the gang we're planning on keeping the drugs, and then
things started to unravel. So now the cutting man camping
on the hilltop watching them off low drugs.
Speaker 3 (25:00):
Especially because it's not just like who's this new family,
they're a little weird.
Speaker 2 (25:03):
This is like, yeah, who look rough and yeah they
don't wear like sweaters and we've.
Speaker 3 (25:09):
All seen those kind of like Jason State the movies.
You don't want to shoot out in the main town
with the cars driving over sidewalks and the whatnots.
Speaker 2 (25:16):
Don't need to keep that to yourself. Take that back
to Guilford.
Speaker 3 (25:19):
Yeah, we don't do that here.
Speaker 2 (25:21):
So okay, these land lovers were not the only ones
who were suspicious. The fishermen and the lobstermen who worked
the craggy coastline.
Speaker 3 (25:28):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 2 (25:28):
They started watching these yachts and these boats coming close
to the shore and offload something into smaller dinghies and
then these the zodiac style inflatable boats. Right, so they
get nervous these guys are trying to like poach their catch.
Speaker 6 (25:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (25:40):
They're like, wait, we're got competition, right, is it the French? Anyway,
So they contact the local authorities and they're worried about
these men who are working at night and they think
they're trying to their poachers, right, So they tell the
cops you got to watch these guys. And then some
of the lobstermen handle ourselves. So they go down and
they confront the men on the beaches who are offloading
the bales of pot. Wow, man, what are you doing
(26:00):
in Wales?
Speaker 7 (26:01):
Right?
Speaker 2 (26:01):
And so the drug smugglers they're like, oh, oh, calm down, no,
well we're not from here. They're like, yeah, we know.
What are you doing. They're like, we're filming a documentary,
you know, a nature movie. Everybody loves nature movies, right,
they tell them, Yeah, our movie is about seals and
whales and stuff in the ocean. And we're gon, we're
planning on filming in Greenland, so we're practicing off loading
and loading up equipment for the documentary. We take to
(26:23):
get really good at this because we're gonna be in
a rural place. And the guys were like, uh huh yeah.
So basically the local fishermen, the lobstermen, hey, like they're like,
that's a festering pack of lies. I'm not buying a
single bit of that. Like, trust me, mate, I'm a fisherman.
I know when something is fiscally unsound. Now you thought
I would say fishy, didn't you know, Elizabeth. Fisherman know
how to be fiscally sound. They have to be if
(26:44):
they're gonna make it. And a documentary crew practicing for
months to offload equipment is hinky and not fiscally sound.
So anyway, the locals they go to their dified powe's
maybe pronouncing that incorrectly, apologies Welsh, but it's d y
fowys okay, that place their police department, and reported what
(27:05):
all they'd seen, right, and what the men on the
beaches and the boats in the yachts were actually doing
was to prepare the pirate code for a major load
that was coming in on a consignment sale. It wasn't
even their dope a huge day. They're gonna like, oh,
we got this thick, great thing running in Wales. Just
give us your big load and we'll offload it for you.
And the connect. Yeah, high stakes deal entered DCI Don
(27:26):
Evans of Diffid Poe's Police. Now. DCI Evans led the investigation,
which was dubbed Operation Seal Bay. Really imaginative, took title
right anyway, the cops they get to work. And he
wasn't alone, Elizabeth. You see, he didn't call in some
crack team of investigators. He didn't establish some war room
to catch these drug smugglers. Nope, not him. Instead, he
(27:47):
knew he had all the local amateur talent he needed. Yeah,
your people, Norsey busy bodies who say things like I
just want to take a look and see what they're
doing over there. Yes, right, your people. So DC I
haven't seen knew with my special army of special investigators,
I can get this task done. So we went out
and he spoke with them and DCI Don Evans. He
(28:08):
told the press, quote, these villains totally underestimated the local
people and how observant they were, and all we took
five hundred and forty statements from people living in the area.
There's like thirty eight hundred people, so I'm pretty much
every seventh person's like, oh my got something. So many
people are children, so obviously you discount the children to
people who are like house bound, they don't leave, they
(28:28):
don't have Almost every adult had something to say anyway.
So the police they follow the clues from the five
hundred and forty witness statements, they determine a zone of
interest to investigate. They're like, oh, pretty much centered around
these two beaches. Then the cops go out and they
walk the coastline, searching through the sand the pebbles for
signs to drug smugglers. They also have like people with them,
But you were like, no, right over here, look right there, right,
(28:49):
there's this one farmer. He leads a pair of officers
over to the mouth of a cave and he wanted
to show them what he'd found. He's like, no, no, but
you got to see what I found. It's very importantright
he drags him over there. He picks up a stone
and tosses into the cave. They're like, what are you doing,
old man? And all of a sudden, it doesn't make
the expected sound. Anybody would think that a stone going
into a cave would make. Instead, you hear this really large,
(29:09):
hollow sounding metal tung kind of like yeah. They're like,
wait a minute. And even the police are curious, so
they investigate the ground. They part's pushing around, They push
back sand, they move pebbles and everything out of their way. Boom,
they find something. What if they find Elizabeth a hatch
like a submarine kind of hatch, right, the cops they
twist the handle and they open the hatch. They can't
see the bottom. Farmer grabs another stone. He's like, gosh,
(29:31):
this chucks it in there. Boom once again. It takes
a while to hit the bottom of When it does,
their rings, they're like wait a minute. They go down,
they climb in. It's an enormous subterranean chamber. The police
climb in and find all sorts of stuff in this
hidden drug smuggling bunker. DCI don Evan said quote, it
had obviously been a long time to build it was
(29:52):
held up with timber and totally lined with fiberglass. Resin
would have taken ages to dig out the sand and
rock and build, and they would have had brought all
the materials in by boat.
Speaker 3 (30:02):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (30:02):
So yeah, like you're building.
Speaker 3 (30:04):
When you were talking about fiberglass earlier, I was like,
did they just like bring a camper shell and like
shove it in a cave and.
Speaker 2 (30:10):
Force it into the earth. Now? No, they dug a
huge cave hole for themselves under a cave and then wow,
plastered it all in. Essentially. Now that the police they go,
they find all the equipment that you would need for
a modern professional drug smuggling operation.
Speaker 7 (30:25):
Right.
Speaker 2 (30:26):
For instance, the cops discovered quote a gargantuan inflatable that
could carry twenty four men and six tons of equipment,
powered by a two hundred and thirty five horsepower outboard motor.
Speaker 3 (30:35):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (30:36):
The chamber was large enough that an average sized man
could stand up at full extension comfortably. Yeah. And since
this is nineteen eighty three, the local Welsh police did
not immediately assume this was international drug smuggling. Instead, they're like, IRA, right,
this is IRA, this is a weapons cash right, So
they assumed with all these you know, this would be
a brilliant place to launch an attack on the English
coast side, so no one would see it coming from
(30:58):
whales anyway. They did notice though, some cops like, wait,
what remember the eighty eight pounds of pot that washed
up down the shorty thing? They might be related. And
somebody's like, that's a good point. Wait to go, dcibob
now all the reports of offloading of larger boats and
yachts and so forth. It filters in and they go, okay,
bounce that against the IRA gun running. Okay, probably drugs,
(31:18):
and they give up on the IRA gun running right,
and the police investigate. And then as they're investigating that
big load that I told you before that they were
planning for, it comes in and uh the one when
it arrives. It arrives on a seventy five foot fishing
trawler named Minnow Okay and Elizabeth. On that night, the
seas were stormy and pitched the ocean angry like an
(31:38):
irishman who's been mistaken for an Englishman. Now in those
dangerous and storm rexes came this fishing trawler. No fisherman
in his right mind would be out there in those
waters at night, right, So that alone makes it suspicious.
Speaker 7 (31:51):
Right.
Speaker 2 (31:51):
Then they get close to the rocky stars that like,
are they an idiot or is this like a criminal
And they're like, it's definitely criminals because they also I
forgot to mention Hurricane four winds. Oh god, yeah, like
this pushing the boat around like a child's toy. Right,
So the drug smugglers are fighting against the sea, fighting
against the winds, trying to deliver their load to shore.
They've got eighty bales of pot loaded onto two zodiac
(32:12):
style boats. That's what they meant. That's the progress they
managed before things go afoul. The ropes tying the boats
to the fishing trawler they give way in the storm.
The sea's iron froth takes the boats, flips them. The
heavily overloaded with pot, right, so it's easy to flip,
yea flip. Now they've got eighty bales of pot sprinkle
into the ocean. Oh that's just it's like rubber duckies,
(32:33):
just imagine. Anyway, So along with all this snoop spinach,
the spugglers also watched a couple of them overseas, right,
So now we got people in the water so the
police are like, oh, crime, I need do we need
to save them, but we're under cover. We can't go
and save them. It'll blow our cover, right, So they're
trying to decide what they should do. They decide, we
got to reveal our investigations. So the cops watching this beach,
(32:54):
they rush out. They decide to do the right thing.
Dci Ron Davies, he was on a twelve hour shift
out there in the cold and the wet and the
dark of that night. He remembers the decision that they
tried to make about should we save the drug smugglers
or not? And I quote when the Dinghies broke free,
we had to break cover and rescue the gang members
that were in the sea. When rescued, both were in
(33:15):
a poor condition and there's no doubt in my mind
that they were left to drown. The crew of the
boat made no attempt whatsoever to rescue them. They were
regarded as being expendable. Yeah, so the police were like,
we can't have that, all right, let's go save the underlings.
Who wants to grab some henchmen? So they go out
there and then a couple other beachcombing cops they grab
a couple of guys who get washed ashore. All in all,
(33:36):
the cops now they also try to run and gun
and grab the actual boat. Maybe we can catch the minnow.
Speaker 7 (33:41):
Right.
Speaker 2 (33:42):
Also, they go racing off to London because they've been
told by the guys they capture some names. So the
cops just start scattering trying to take these leads and
do whatever they can.
Speaker 6 (33:51):
Right.
Speaker 2 (33:51):
So, as I told you, the minnow is starting to
get away as the cops are headed to London to
grab people who are in homes who don't know what's
gonna happen. Because they don't have cell phones, they can't
be warned. Right. They also have to call to the RAF.
They're like, launch a helicopter. Yeah. The refs like, oh blimey,
let's do it, right, So they send out helicopter to
chase this fishing trawler, the minnow.
Speaker 3 (34:10):
The minnow wasn't that the Gilligan's Island?
Speaker 2 (34:12):
Yes, this is a French one because it ends in
a year, Yes, exactly. They launch a sea king helicopter.
It's a big helicopter, doesn't matter, and so yeah, imagine a.
Speaker 3 (34:25):
Big long day in the visual.
Speaker 2 (34:28):
So it's given chase, right, The fishing trawler. Imagine like
a big seventy five foot like a boat you t
off the coast of Alaska, right, okay, okay, So that
thing's just hauland as fast as it can, but it
can't go that fast. But it manages to slip away
in the night because it's that foggy and dark the
helicopter cannot. Finally, weather's absolutely terrible. It does manage to
get spotted the next day at Cork Harbor in Ireland,
(34:49):
so power over, it went that way, okay, exactly. So
the same night though, Robin Boswell doesn't know any of
this is going down, and so he gets arrested when
he when he does see cops coming for him, he
tries to make a run for it, or so it seems,
because two young boys and their mother spotted him and
they phoned the police. So he's like out in the town,
like walking along. The cops a catch up to him easily.
Speaker 3 (35:12):
See. I'm like a mind where everyone should just mind
their own business, except for you know, their times when
under discretion you realize, no, I can't mind my own business.
Speaker 2 (35:20):
Well you just you keep saying it your own business.
This town is their business business. There you go. So
they're minding their own anyway, DCI Evans. He recalled how, quote,
Robin Boswell was arrested, a man who gave us seventeen
false names and addresses. He was a mystery man and
clearly not up to any good. It transpired after arresting
Boswell that he wasn't going to tell us anything. So
(35:42):
these poor cops, they're up against her, right. So, of course,
to a veteran cop like DCI Evans, this is no
real big surprise. But he was kind of hoping maybe
they'd be you know, forthright.
Speaker 3 (35:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (35:51):
However, as he put it later on, but what was
unique he was wearing walking boots with specs of fiberglass resin.
So now boom, they've connected ron CSI Yeah, exactly. Oops,
the fibers gave me away. As d c I Evans
puts it, quote, we thought that's what we needed to
link him to the bunker at the cave. Right, So
now they've got d c I Evans. Now, however, he
(36:12):
was still denying Boswell, still denying that he was the
man they were looking for, so instead he insisted he
was an innocent property developer who happened to be out
on a walk looking for new investments on a rainy, stormy.
Speaker 3 (36:23):
Night, because you want to see it under its worst
condition exactly.
Speaker 2 (36:28):
I want to see if there's any rain damage that's
happening right now. So the cops were like, that's a
cute story. You have any others. So his co conspirator, Elizabeth,
the rubber face man, what's up with him? He's still
on the run right soon, Well, let's take a little
break and after that I'll tell you about sorenberg on
bach Ak, our master of disguise, Elizabeth. Yes, Saren, we're back. Hi.
(37:07):
I promised you a manhunt. Yes you did. Yeah, you're
ready to get stupid? Where? Yes? Where is the rubber
face man? Okay, are you really really ready? Ready?
Speaker 3 (37:17):
I'm ready ready.
Speaker 2 (37:18):
No, if you're that ready, I'd like you to close
your up a clue. I'd like you to picture it. Ike, Elizabeth,
you are a body an English copper Johnny Law and
the Land of Lords and Ladies. You're a member of
the Flying Squad. Oh my god, ess DC I Dutton
to investigate as part of a multi agency task forse
(37:39):
the Flying Squad send out their best, which is you.
At the moment, you're near the Welsh coastal town of Fishguard.
It's a brisk night, A stiff wind chops at the
waves and blows a cold, wet breeze on shore. A
storm is a bruin. You can tell you're a good
detective now. In Welsh the town is called Abergwan, which
means the mouth of the River Gwan. It's a tiny hamlet,
a fishing village situation in a deep v in the
(38:01):
hills that runs down to the coast. There's not much
to this town. Their main business district is called High Street.
There's a parish church and that's about it. There are
thirty two hundred souls that call Fishguard home. You've learned
from the locals that there was a nineteen fifty five
film version of Moby Dick' darring Gregory Peck that was
shot in Fishguard. Huh right, the lo cow. It's idyllic
if you want to imitate New England or you know,
(38:22):
show the reality of the rough and royal coast of Wales. Anyway,
a manhunt is under way. You are a crack member
of the Flying Squad, sent out here, as I told you,
from London, and you always find you're a man You're
like Tommy Lee Jones and the Fugitive, only you have
an English accent, and unlike mister Tommy Lee Jones, you
do care. Your police radio crackles and sounds. A pair
of bobbies has spotted a man with a rocksack heading
(38:43):
out of town. You huff it. You run, your feet
slap at cobblestones as you race against the wind, which
is now growing quite lusty. Then you see something, or
rather someone, walking along a fence. You spy the stranger
with the rocksack. You call out to them. You there stop.
The stranger is the rubber face man, Sorenberg on a bach.
He looks back, takes one good eye full of you,
(39:04):
and then turns and sprints in the other direction. Berg
Armbach is in good shape for a middle aged drug smuggler.
He tosses his rucksack, hops a low fence and sprints
across the fields. You radio in his position and his
direction of escape. Then you hop the low fence, splash
down in a mess of fresh mud. You regain your
footing and chase after the rubber face man. He's running
(39:25):
at full speed. He approaches the edge of the farmer's field.
There's a line of hedges. Standing low and squat like
a thick leafy fence. The rubber face man heads for
the hedges. When he draws closer, he spies the barbed
wire fence that runs along the hedges. At full stride,
the rubber face Man leaps up and over the hedgerow
and the barbed wire fence. You are also at full pace,
(39:47):
charging after him. The rubber face Man disappears over the hedges.
You lose sight of him in a moment. You're at
the hedges. You pull up, though uncertain if you want
to go leaping into the unknown. You look over the
hedges and thank god you did. You spy on the
other side a sheer drop seventy feet straight down into
a quarry.
Speaker 3 (40:04):
Oh.
Speaker 2 (40:05):
Then you hear some dirt and soil ship pebbles come loose.
That's followed but grunts and the sound of a man
desperate not to die hill. He shouts. You look over,
and you spy the rubber face man hanging there off
the side of the cliff, clutching at a thick exposed
tree root. The cliff face runs below him. You tell
them to stay calm and you'll radio back to the
other coppers and the man hunt. You tell them where
(40:27):
you are and who you've got trap Hanging above the quarry.
The tree root is strong, but not strong enough. As
you direct the cops to the bottom of the quarry,
you hear the snap. Your head spins fast, and you
catch sight of the rubber face Man as he falls
and plummets into the quarry. Luckily for him, he hits
the sloping cliff face and he bounces and rolls harmlessly
(40:47):
down the quarry wall until he comes to a rest
at the bottom of the old quarry. Waiting officers rush
over and arrest him. Nice work, DCI Dutt't hey, once again,
you got your man. DCI Pickles would be so proud. Yes,
now this arrest ends sorenberg Arnbox eleven year run as
a wanted man.
Speaker 3 (41:05):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (41:06):
After the cops, yeah, nabbed old rubber face Man. They
search his backpack, or as the British press would call it,
a rucksack, and they I have to admit, that's a
much more fun word, rucksack. I'm like, I want to
call it. I don't want to be pretentious. Americans were like,
who are you trying to be? Burnette feel like I'm
being me. It's rucksack like the Germans taught it to me.
Is that cooler anyway? So the cops they go tearing
(41:28):
through dude's rucksack and they open up and they find
a short band radio. The cops were like, oh, this
looks like fun. You want to see if it works.
Come on, Nigel, and they go on up and they
climb to the highest hill in the area and they
set up the short band radio. They flip it on,
they listen, nothing, They listen some more more nothing. They
keep listening though, because they're British, and finally, after a
(41:49):
few hours of plucky determination, the radio does indeed crackle
to life. Back to DCI Evans, the radio equipment came
to life in the words mother, mother, I want to
come in and to get the dirt off my hands
were heard. That communication was enough. We knew there was
a vessel out in the bay wanting to come in
and to get rid of the drugs that were on board.
So now the cops they searched the horizon of the seat.
(42:10):
There's a boat out there. Yeah, So they're like they're
scanning it like like someone walking the Widow's walk.
Speaker 3 (42:14):
Right, Well, if you're like, I'm sorry, but if you're
the if you're going to come up with code, the
kid is like, mother, but like no, like you're not
going to listen to a radio and hear that. You
have to say something like, you know, I got like,
however much fish, all this mackerel whatever, fresh load of
(42:35):
Oh yeah, you know, speak the language of the people.
Speaker 2 (42:38):
Mother. I want to come in, get the dirt off
my hands.
Speaker 3 (42:42):
Oh yeah, that's what kids radio their moms all the time,
Crackley radio. She's all come in over like a.
Speaker 2 (42:50):
Whiskey soak voice to come in. So dark and stormy
and foggy as that night was and where they were,
they could not see the boat on the horizon right now,
Quincy deadly. Not long after this one thousand pounds of
primo Lebanese hash washed up on the sandy beaches of Scandinavia.
Speaker 3 (43:10):
Oh that's so interesting, all the currents that would take
right Yeah, I.
Speaker 2 (43:13):
Thought you'd dig that. So the cops assumed that the
smugglers must have just dumped their load of a gold
hash at sea. Now that they had their two masterminds
and their mini underlings and associates the local police, they
follow the threads of this network, right, they go, this
has got to go lots of places. The connection they
spanned from this tiny Welsh like fishing village, they connect
to London, then over to France, to Denmark, to Spain.
(43:35):
They start going around the international real quick, right. As
one local detective put it, it was a coup for
the smallest police force in the country to take on
the biggest drug gang at the time.
Speaker 3 (43:44):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (43:45):
So Operation Seal Bay phenomenal success. Waiting go guys, good
for them. Now, as the cops chase leads, they also
followed the money trail, right, and this led them back
to the Isle of Man And I remember how I
told you Boswell walked into that bank with the two suitcases. Correct,
Remember how memorable that was? Yes, it was for the
p at the bank too, imagine. So they went to
the bank staff and DCI Evans is like, hey, yeah,
so you guys have anything strange you want to tell
(44:06):
us about. We've been following bank records and they all
lead to your bank. And as he put it, quote,
we asked the bank manager why he didn't think of
reporting it to the authorities, and his face reddened and
he said, mister Evans, it's not unusual for people to
come in carrying a shopping bag with fifty pounds in cash.
Speaker 3 (44:21):
Oh, then i'm the cops. I'm like, well, I'm gonna
set up shop out here, right, it's happening.
Speaker 2 (44:25):
Well, Nigel, you're staying here. Eventually, the cops they get
all their charges in order. Boswell gets charged with conspiring
to import large quantities of Class B drugs. During his
arrest period, police kept finding heidi holes of cash. While
they were going through all the stuff. They found money
buried under gardens and drugs hidden in smaller underground chambers.
They also seized lots of his cars. They grabbed a
(44:45):
rolls Royce, a ranger over, a Ferrari, his wife's portia,
his cars, his boats for that matter as well. They
often had hidden smuggler compartments. Right, So this was all
brought up during his lengthy trial in nineteen eighty eight,
and Boswell he had a ready answer for him, like,
I know this looks suspicious, guys, but let me explain,
And he said, and I quote, Look, I'm a wealthy Englishman,
(45:07):
so of course I'm also a bit of an eccentric.
The reason why my boats and cars all have smuggler
compartments is I was trying to hide Nazi gold. Wait, what,
that's not a direct quote. I made that up. Oh
that was his plan. He went in and he said,
basically went in doubt, Elizabeth. If you're a certain age
of England, you're like, oh, it's muddy the waters with
some Nazi gold. People will believe it. It's kind of
(45:27):
like we have in the in California, like Spanish gold.
So they have Nazi goldis everywhere on this coast and
everyone's like, oh yeah, I totally get that. Boswell. He
claimed that he'd hired all these men and dug all
these holes and built the secret chamber and had ships
offloading trial runs for when he finally found the gold.
He was searching for unsunk in Nazi U boats from
World War Two, right, and you see old chap. But
(45:49):
the reason I kept to so hush hush it because
the notts a gold player may not have been legal
to scavenge. Come on, obviously, you know it's all been
a terrible misunderstanding drugs. Now, the judge and jury in
the Crown Court, they listened to his side of the story,
and then they unanimously decided to not listen to a
single word he was saying. All right, the judge, mister
Justice Mars Jones, can I pause for a second to say, hot, damn,
(46:11):
that's the name and a half, mister Justice Mars Jones.
Mars Mars like as in the planet mister just me.
He sounds like he's a black man and he's got
like one of those white wigs on, mister Justice Boss Jones. Now, okay,
back to it. Justice Mars Jones ruled in almost record
speed guilty. Then he told Boswell, you also have lots
(46:32):
of money, of which I have no general power to
deprive you. Only wish I could, now, my man, mister
Justice Males Jones, he sentenced the ring leader Boswell to
ten years in prison. Oh he was thirty seven at
the time, gonna miss out on some of the best
years of his life. Now was co ring leader, the
man on the run, the rubber faced man aka sorenberg Arnbach.
He gets jailed to eight years. Okay, yep, finally caught
(46:53):
Boom and now Boswell, of course, being a true old
money britt, what does he do. He appeals the rule,
expecting it to go his way, always gets his way.
Elizabeth of course, after his appeals court trial, the court determined, quote,
the mind boggles at what might have been happening in
that lonely places the months and years rolled by if
this conspiracy had not been uncovered. So they basically has
(47:15):
the original prosecution stated, and I quote, these greedy schemes
were brought to light because of the neighborliness or nosiness
of local people, the interest and curiosity shown by decent people. Yes,
aka your people, Elizabeth, Yes, nosy lobstermen and fishermen and
farmers daughters. Yes, So there you go, Elizabeth. What is
your ridiculous takeaway from this tale?
Speaker 3 (47:36):
My ridiculous takeaway is, if you are going to smuggle
something out of Lebanon, it should be white gold. And
by that I mean tomb.
Speaker 2 (47:45):
Could you imagine garlic spread?
Speaker 3 (47:47):
Yeah, like how much beauty be sharing in the world.
Of course, Lebanese tombs.
Speaker 2 (47:53):
I don't think that's technically illegal, No, but you know,
I don't.
Speaker 3 (47:57):
Really need to smuggle it with all sorts of exercise
taxes and who knows, and you know whatever. That's my
ridiculous takeaways there, And what is your ridiculous Are.
Speaker 2 (48:07):
You feeling all right? Yeah? Okay to give me a second.
It feels really nice. Feel heard if you listened to
hang my ridiculous take away, Elizabeth, the rubber Face man
really disappointed me because he's got this great name. You
think he's gonna do stuff, and all he does is
just nothing. He's like, got I got a plan. I'm
(48:27):
gonna hide out my buddy, and my buddy's gonna rubber face.
Come on, rubber face man, when you try to get away,
you just try to walk out of town.
Speaker 3 (48:35):
Yeah, he's just like he's a disappointment.
Speaker 7 (48:38):
Right.
Speaker 2 (48:38):
I'm a developer. Yeah that's a ticket mother. Okay, So
I got a question for you. Yeah, you have in
the mood for a talk back? Yes, Producer Dave hit it.
Oh my god.
Speaker 5 (48:55):
I w.
Speaker 7 (49:01):
Hi Elizabeth and Zarin. My name is Rachel. I'm from
Fort Worth, Texas. I love your podcast. I think y'all
have such a great report together. You're so funny, Elizabeth.
I found a mash up today while I was walking
in Target. It's Native Times Girl Scout cookies. Do you
order it body wash, shampoo, et cetera? That smells like
(49:23):
Girl Scout cookies? I found it highly ridiculous.
Speaker 6 (49:26):
I love it.
Speaker 3 (49:27):
If you feature it. Bye girl, I'm gonna let you
do it per gross.
Speaker 2 (49:36):
There you go. That's how I feel.
Speaker 3 (49:37):
Every time to be on the receiving.
Speaker 2 (49:41):
You're just like, why is that pile of mess in
my lab?
Speaker 3 (49:43):
I like to be the mischief maker, the mischief taker.
Speaker 2 (49:47):
There you go. Girls just too sweet.
Speaker 3 (49:50):
I don't like sweet scents like that.
Speaker 2 (49:52):
No, I want to smell like butter.
Speaker 3 (49:55):
I want to smell like an angel's sneeze.
Speaker 2 (50:00):
Well you can find us smelling sweet like angel sneeze
is online always a Ridiculous Crime on Twitter, Instagram and
all the other socials. Maybe who knows. Good luck trying
to find us. We have a website though. You can
find us at ridiculous Crime dot com. Go there, hit
it up. We got all sorts of little tricks and
treats for you. Also, as you can tell, we love
your talk back, So please go to the iHeart app
and hit us up there, or you can email us
(50:22):
if you like, at Ridiculous Crime at gmail dot com.
As always, it's dear Elizabeth and then say whatever you want.
Once again, thanks for listening and we'll catch you in
next crime. Ridiculous Crime is hosted by Elizabeth Dutton and
Zaren Burnett, produced and edited by the vegan Leatherface Man
(50:44):
Dave Kuston. Research is by Marissa the Drug Baroness Brown
and Andrea the Pirate Queen of the Smugglers. Song Sharpened
Tear our theme song is by Thomas Shortman Radio Lee
and Travis Cbe Radio Dutton. The host wardrobe provided by
Botany five Hundred. Executive producers are Ben the Welsh Beachcomber
Boldlin and Noel notting Hill is a Good movie.
Speaker 4 (51:06):
Brown, Ridicous Crime, Say It One More Timequeous Crime.
Speaker 1 (51:18):
Ridiculous Crime is a production of iHeartRadio. Four more podcasts
my Heart Radio visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hosts And Creators
Zaron Burnett
Elizabeth Dutton
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