The deceit of prosecutions? The disgrace of them

Did I hear a top lawman this morning expressing his displeasure over the slackness, the absence of any conscience of prosecutions to disclose all they know to courts?

Out in the real world, we might well apply the word dishonesty. The dishonesty of prosecutions.

Hearing the criticism on Radio 4 this morning, I really didn’t know whether to laugh, burst into anger, or end this nonsense called life before the government’s new suicide agency gets into action.

I feel certain the prosecution in the longest criminal trial in England, of which I was promoted to the role of a key figure, knew only too well that I wasn’t and couldn’t have been guilty.

Sunday sailors

Yet in their eagerness to have an alleged drugs gang imprisoned, they claimed that I was the smuggler that they had portrayed in their fake modus operandi.

They reckoned, they claimed, that the many men they were holding in prison belonged to a drugs gang supplied by yachts with drugs from the Caribbean.

And they asserted that yachtie smugglers supplying the gang were in fact no more than Sunday sailors.

I believe it proved the prosecution was deceitful. And so did ignoring ocean conditions between here and the Caribbean.

It was thoroughly deceitful, too,to pretend that well-heeled people behind smuggling would risk millions and millions of pounds of product in frail yachts run by amateurs.

Just at the wrong moment, seemingly ideal for the prosecution, I arrived in UK by air. I had been sailing towards UK, it’s true, but rigging failure in the Bay of Biscay forced me to turn away and seek mild weather and safety to the south.

I was sentenced to 19 years, two years longer than the Lockerbie bomber, with the horrendous slaughter of 243 passengers, 16 crew, and 11 on the ground, to his credit, plus the destruction of a Boeing 747–121, price about US$39 million.

 A singlehanded Cape Horner

However, the prosecution needed a yachtsman because of that landlubberish modus operandi, and so what if they grabbed a highly qualified yachting pro who was also a singlehanded Cape Horner?

They knew I came no closer to Britain than 1,100 miles and yet told the jury that I had handed 'my cargo' worth many millions of pounds onto a submarine. What submarine? They wouldn’t say.

I watched them deceive the jury, a collection of not exactly astute customers, who had the pants bored off them through the 18-month trial. They knew, an’ that, it was a boat what brought the drugs, an’ the only boat what was in the trial was managed by that geeza there in the box, an’ that.

The prosecution’s lies and deceit obliged them to find me guilty.

I was sentenced to 19 years, two years longer than the Lockerbie bomber, with the horrendous slaughter of 243 passengers, 16 crew, and 11 on the ground, to his credit, plus the destruction of a Boeing 747–121, price about US$39 million.
Continues on the blogs for my ocean-travel adventure book, Sailing to Purgatory, at SailingToPurgatory.com