INTRODUCING: Cocaine Inc.

Hi.

I'm Stephen Drill, the host of a new podcast from the team behind I Catch Killers. It's called Cocaine Inc. A team of three reporters have traveled fifty thousand kilometers across the globe to bring you an unprecedented insight into the cocaine business. We speak to corrupt doc workers in Rotterdam, shady gold dealers in Dubai, and taking inside Mexico's Narco tunnels where cocaine is smuggled into the US. Check out Cocaine Inc. Wherever you get your podcasts.

This is not a video game, this is real life. Your goals to a fucking poplar Christmas Eve with a machine gul if it was someone going there with a baseball. But I have a grievance with someone that's Sunderds. That happens every weekend. But you go somewhere with the machine muscle when it is you go on as kill someone.

It's Christmas Eve. On the We're all a comfortable suburban area just outside Liverpool, a port city in the north of England. Twenty six year old Ellie Edwards is heading to a local pub with her younger sister Lucy. Ellie is a little less enthusiastic than her sister. She's been hungover for a couple of days already, but she's decided to head out for another night a beautician. Her long blonde hair falls down over her leather jacket and a

So you were part of a group that smuggled one hundred million pounds out of the UK. How do you reflect on that?

And Stephen Drill from News Corps Australia.

This is the end of the line.

I'm just about to go in knock on the door of a ten million dollar house that is accused of being the proceeds of crime.

This investigation has taken us to ten different cities in six countries, traveling over fifty thousand kilometers, following trail from that pub in northern England where Ellie was celebrating Christmas, and leading us to Colombian cartels, drug smuggling in Mexico, a torture chamber in the Netherlands, money laundering in the Middle East, and police raids across Australia.

Sydney's gun crime epidemic has claimed two more lives tonight.

Police have established Task Force Magnus to try to win the bloodshed.

What we uncovered was a global business operation based around a single illegal product, one so common that, let's be honest, it's likely that you or someone you know has snorted a line recently we'll reveal how the world's legitimate business empires trading floors and boardrooms have their shadowy equivalents in the cartels, traffickers and kingpins. But for now, this story starts with Ellie Edwards. David Collins, the Sunday Times Northern editor, went to meet her father.

I'm in Merseyside, probably most famous around the world for the Beatles and Liverpool football club, from the city of Liverpool itself. I've made a short drive through the Kingsway tunnel under the river to an area called the wirel Like David, I've come to meet Tim Edwards. He's the father of Ellie Edwards, the young woman who went to the pub on Christmas Eve. He's never spoken about that night. In the detail you're about to hear.

It doesn't get any easier. Sometimes you can. You can feel you're getting ahead a bit and dealing with things, and everything's getting you know, it's going to be brighter as the future, and then something will come along and trigger a memory or and then I might struggle for a couple of days, But as it happens, today, today's a good day.

Tim is tall and broad, with thick streaked gray hair and a beard. He's an imposing figure and I guess you might describe him as a man's man, the type of guy you'd sink a few pints in the pub with and chat about football and life. He was born in nineteen seventy one and came of age in Liverpool in the eighties, a tough time for the city with high unemployment, but he remembers a close knit working class community.

No matter how bad things were, your neighbor would be looking out for you, you know, the local bobby. He would be on a bike or he'd be walking around and he'd be keeping an eye on the kids. Then if the kids would get up, you know good, he'd just go on knock on the door and tell your mother than father the next minute you get a clip around here.

Or when he got in as a young man, like many, he went out clubbing, which is where he met his wife, Gainer.

Back in the ninety early nineties. The club seems massive and Liverpool and.

Yeah, I met her on a nighthouse and what happened after that you were.

Just yeah, just fell in love. Yeah, fell in love. I started having kids. I was a young lad and I was just a whatever I could to put food on the table and build a family, you know, build a home. That just did me best.

The couple's first child was a boy, and then on the tenth of May in nineteen ninety six, their second came along, a daughter called Ellie.

She was never a problem. She was always there's some kids want when the babies are to be up all night, the one feet and every couple of a couple of hours. What left my life? Yeah? So yeah, she was never a bother. We have four kids all together, Connor, Ellie, Lucy and George. It was a great It was a happy house.

Can you remember Ellie's bedroom when she was a tea?

Like typical typical girl, to be honest, if he could help, but never went in there. Yeah, typical teenagers where you just don't want to go in there.

You just don't know what you're going to find. What was she into? What would she do on her a Saturday night for.

Example, Well when she was a child, or.

She's in a fifteen sixteen.

Oh god, I remember their best friend. She died of her and I must have seen every color of the rainbow at least three times over. You'd see them coming now ready to go out on Friday, Saturday night or whatever, and you'd have different color of it.

As an adult, Ellie put that creativity to good use. She left school at sixteen to study beauty at college and also became a qualified dental nurse.

She had a bit of space in one of her friends had a beauty She wanted to build this beautician side of her life for killer if you like. And Monday to Friday she would do the gentleness work. So that was a bread and butter if you like. So she worked hard, she worked early hard.

Ellie was a young woman with a bright future ahead of her, balancing two careers and close with her family. Although Tim and Gainor had now split, Christmas remained a full and happy time.

Because although me and the one were not together, and I hadn't been for a couple of years, but I would still make the Christmas dinner and we would all meet up and have Christmas together.

So can you remember Christmas Eve? And did you see Ellie that day?

We'd been out the day before to Manchester, We've been to from markets and shopping.

And.

The next day she'd bought me a coat for Christmas And the original plan was for her to come to mine and she was going to help me wrap the presents for me grands, all the other kids and there and.

What she didn't Instead of wrapping presents, though, Ellie rang her dad and said she was going out with her sister Lucy. The pair were close, and Lucy had made a surprise trip back from Dubai for the festive period.

It could have been so different if we'd just stuck to our plan, but girls being the girls, it was never going to stick to that plan.

She just gone out.

We're friends, which is quite right what you should have been doing.

Ellie and Lucy headed to a pub called the Lighthouse. The pubs in the middle of a small row of shops and businesses, surrounded by residential streets and set a little back from the road. There's a large beer garden out front. Inside it's a big, spacious boozer, the kind of place where you can watch sport, play pool, gamble on the machines in the corner. Back at home, Tim went to bed.

I don't know what time. It was, well three o'clock, maybe two o'clock, I don't know. And they eventually they banged on my door and got me up power bed and he opened the doors saw.

And can you remember what he said to you? Said?

It was early we need Tory Gospel.

Let's pause a second, because on that Christmas Eve, it's the actions of someone Tim had never even heard of that would change his life beyond recognition. A few miles from the pub, a man puts on dark clothes with a hood and gloves. He gets in a stolen Mercedes with false license plates. For three hours, he drives to six different locations, watching and waiting, before finally settling on

I just remember getting to the hospital h as click as it could. It was quite hearing. There was no one there. Oh, I remember the sage and coming down and he's just just was awful.

And it was obviously the early hours of the morning Christmas Christmas Day. There's nobody there, and there's You're with your son and.

The kids and all the family and the apology the children's was which was crazy. It was I remember, I was just angry. There was no patience or kids in it. And yeah, yeah, I was just very angry.

Was it the surgeon in that moment that broke the news that Elliot had died?

And what was.

And your initial act reaction was anger?

Yeah? Yeah, I was just ready. I was ready to go to war. I was ready to flatten the hole of the world, no bother.

And did you have any idea at that point of how she died?

They knew she'd been shot. Well that was the only thing really I was still though. I was contained. She was going to turn up at the most. I tried drinking her phone.

After the moment with the surgery, tried to ring a phone.

Hm.

What was the purpose of ringing her phone.

To speak to her?

Did you get a voicemail or a message or just for I actually remember seeing Tim on television after Ellie's death. On Boxing Day, he went to lay flowers on the pavement outside the pub. The waiting news cameras zoomed in on him as he arrived.

At the scene where she was killed. Ellie's family came to lay flowers for a woman they so deeply loved. On what was supposed to be the happiest few days, they've undoubtedly been the worst.

It's a blair, to be honest.

So much happens.

I always explain that there's been in an elevator that doesn't stop at any floor, just keeps calling up so you can never get off. Just so much that goes on really quickly to process, and I was protecting the family from having to deal with all that, so I bore the brunts of all of it.

Merseyside Police acted quickly. Hello.

First of all, I'm going to read a statement on behalf of Ellie's family. There was no one as beautiful as our Ellie may her looks.

In a press conference in the week after Ellie's death, I watched Tim sitting next to a detective superintendent as she read from a statement the family had.

Written everyone that knew and met el knew how special she was.

Off the six people were shot that night, Ellie was only one not to survive. Looking back at this now, the grief is obvious on Tim's face. From time to time, he sniffs and his lip quivers as if he's holding back tears. The officer appeals for information.

They don't deserve to be protected. They belong in prison. We know that the answers to this lie within our communities. So my appeal to you is, please tell us what you know and help us get justice for Ellie's family.

And the public responded. In a week after her murder, the police received a hundred and fifty tips and leads, suggestions of people to look at and over potential evidence. Then, after two weeks, on the tenth of January in twenty twenty three, a twenty two year old called Connor Chapman was arrested in North Wales. He was spotted in a supermarket where he's rushed at the check out and detained by playing clothes police officers.

This is surrendous. What do you know you go so pub with a machine gun and Christmas Eve? Really, come on, this is not a video game. This is real life. You go so fucking pub on Christmas Eve with a machine gun if it was someone going over a baseball bat and have a grievance with someone, that's standard, that happens every weekend. But you go somewhere with the machine guns matter when it is you go on is kill someone. That machine gun is not gonna just slightly hate someone.

Chapman soon found himself in the dock at Liverpool Crown Court.

The very first day of the trial, he walked into the courtroom. He's obviously behind a piece of glass and all that protected, but he decided to give it a bit of a show of bravado. But you know what, within twenty minutes he never looked at me again, because he's just a coward.

The trial lasted sixteen days and after around four hours of deliberation, the jury found Chapman guilty of Ellie's murder. The judge sentenced him to forty eight years behind bars.

The murder of Ellie Edwards has caused profound and permanent grief to her family and a great shock to the entire community. So that it's understood by you, Connor Chapman, as well as those who are observing. It means that you will have to serve forty eight years in custody before you could apply for release, and if you're ever released, and considering your dangerousness, that might never happen.

Just in the last few minutes this guilty verdict for Connor Chapman found guilty of murdering Ellie Edwards.

Ellie Edwards's father Tim once again looking directly at Connor Chapman as those verdicts were read out to him as he stood in the dock.

The amounts of people involved in this investigation from day one, literally from the minute it happened, has been remarkable, and they did not give up. They were relentless and achieving the goal, which is to get justice for Ellie and catch the killer. Thankfully, now he's got forty eight years and hopefully he never sees Christmas again.

What are your feelings towards I mean, I know you said earlier to me before the interview. You know you can't even say his name.

I'll never mention his name. Doesn't deserve the breath out of my mouth. So mentioned his name as far as I was a piece of shit, And what happened to him until his last breath, I couldn't curless.

So what was Chapman doing that night? Why was he spraying bullets into a busy pub beer garden. Well, he'd actually been targeting two men who Ellie happened to be standing near. You see, Chapman was from a place called the wood Church Estate, a notorious area not far from the pub. The previous day, one of his associates had been beaten up by rival gang. He was seeking revenge. When the case came to court, Chapman said he was

Conflict, escalating gang wars in Sydney is leading our bullsom with New South Wales police under pressure to approve they have controlled the street.

That conflict was over a shipment of cocaine that went missing. The shipment was said to be worth around one hundred million Australian dollars. One of the murdered men was left lying on the road. School children subjected to the horror on a Canterbury street passing the body of a man his death. Like in that gang war, and like Ellie's, had one thing in common we rid all is cocaine.

Mainly that gets enormous profits for criminals here in Sydney.

The cocaine trade one of the most lucrative businesses in the world, a business where the global supply is currently at record levels, where the profits are counted in millions and the loss is measured out in murders. But those in charge don't care about the human cost. It's only business and right now business is good. Coming up in this series we go inside that multimillion dollar global industry.

I raise my hands and I say to my God, I forgive the person that did me that. And I say to my God, forgive them and forgive me, because in this thing I need you so much.

I think we can arrest our way out of this. They are twenty four to seven.

They are notified by money, greed and ego, and that drives and it's power.

Just between you and me, just between your me. Literally. Some of the money might be from like drugs in the UK.

Yeah, the cameras.

It's too dangerous.

You're worried, it's too dangerous to get out. Are you worried about my safety?

Of course.

You are, my guest.

What are these rows about? Do you think you know.

What it's about. I don't have to say the word, you know the word drugs.

I'm getting down today.

The first time I saw the money, I felt like I was in a film. I couldn't believe how much it was, and I thought, what the fuck have I got myself into?

How would you like her to be remembered.

I'd like it to be remembered for being a good soul, good example, two women.

You know.

I'm fortunate there I got to to see the grand kids that we may have had. Really but just oh, she's always spoke about in a good, positive way.

Since Eli died, a foundation that has been set up in her name. Its mission is to raise awareness of gun crime and help families affected by it.

Cocaine Inc. Is a joint investigation from the Times, The Sunday Times and News Corps Australia. The reporters are David Collins, Stephen Drill and me Fiona Hamilton. The series is produced by Sam genter Attack. The executive producers are Will Row and Dan Box. Audio production and editing is by Jasper Leak, with original music by Tom Burchill. And If you want to get in touch with any questions or thoughts on the scene series, email Cocaine Inc. At The Times dot co dot UK.

Mm hmmmm