THE YACHT Zero carried a precious cargo below deck. Hidden away in 40 duffel bags were 380 kilograms of cocaine, 344 kgs of MDMA and 171 kgs of methamphetamine — together, enough illegal highs to net the criminal gang behind the enterprise almost a billion Australian dollars on the streets of the continent.

Back in the day a little over a decade ago, when Scott Felix Jones was going to local weddings of these he played football against in Penrhyn-Coch, those he did work with around Aberystwyth, covering the costs of his cottage near Devil’s Bridge, the currency was pounds sterling — pounds hard earned and spent in Goginan and the like.

The lure of crime and easy money was too strong for the electrician who turns 39 this month — despite the fact too that a close relative had served in the police. Now, instead of a birthday celebration, Jones will be sentenced this month for his part in a crime caper that stretched from a bar in Phuket to South Africa and beyond and back across the pacific to Western Australia (WA).

He faces a lengthy stretch in prison in a state penitentiary there — there are no federal prisons in Australia — and it’s likely to be a decade before he can ever return to Devil’s Bridge.

Jones and four others were convicted for their part in a plot that reads like a screenplay from a Hollywood movie.

Many details of the case had been surpressed while various legal dealings were completed in Western Australia.

Crown prosecutors told Cambrian News that they would not be commenting on the case because legal proceedings had still to wrap up with sentencing of the trio in June.

Over the past several weeks, as Cambrian News worked on this investigation, lawyers defending Jones declined to answer emails seeking an interview.

Details of the case have been shared with Cambrian News courtesy of the West Australian newspaper, based in Perth, judicial sources in Austraia, and local sources in Ceredigion.

The trial that began in April and lasted weeks heard that the kingpin was John Alexander Roy currently in prison in Jersey for other drugs offences. Australia Federal Police have a warrant for him too.

The waters of the Abrolhos Islands are pristine, filled with corals just 80 kilometres to the west of the continent – the islands as it were, dip their toes into the Indian Ocean.

For generations, since the days when the Portuguese sailors named the reefs, mariners have voyaged there with caution.

On September 2, 2019 at Stick Island, the Zero and its precious, illicit and deadly precious cargo, ran aground. Skipper Antoine Dicenta knew he could not leave that cargo behind. He and crewmate Graham Palmer — also Welsh, an erstwhile carpenter and roofer originally from Swansea — had sailed more than 7,000kms since they left the west coast of Madagascar on July 19. Palmer had helped local the boat near Dubran, South Africa, weeks before.

But the pair now needed a way out. They called Roy.

The drugs kingpin knew a fair bit about drugs, and boats.

“Please ask the guys to hurry up or we are f....d,” one text message read.

Those guys were Texan importer Jason Lassiter, Australian hotelier Angus Jackson and the lad from Devil’s Bridge — buddies who became friends in a bar in Phuket, Thailand.

Jones and Lassiter were keen yachtsmen, Lassiter and Jackson were both interested in e-commerce and cryptocurrency. The friendship was based around Roxanne’s Restaurant, a cheap but cheerful bar in the Phuket Island village of Rawai, owned by Lassiter’s partner, Nida. It became a convenient watering hole for the boys — another of whom was Roy.

Lassiter had met him the same night he had met Jones, at a London pub in 2015. By the time Roy came to Thailand soon after, they were all firm friends.

Roy had already served seven years of a 14-year jail stretch for smuggling eight tonnes of cannabis resin in a yacht off Queensland, Australia in 1996.

Roy is currently serving time over another sailboat incident, this time one loaded with 5,113 MDMA tablets, two kilos of MDMA powder, a kilo of cocaine and 4.6kgs of cannabis which was nabbed by police services off the Channel Islands.

According to testimony from Lassiter, as close as they were, he knew nothing of his friend’s criminal history, or that Jersey police believed the Ceredigion man was involved in the Channel Islands’ plot.

As Dicenta and Palmer set sail from Madagascar with their cargo of narcotics, Lassiter, Jackson and Jones were preparing for its arrival. They began looking for a boat to carry them all from the WA shoreline out to the Abrolhos Islands. They snapped up a 30-foot Bayliner craft called ‘DW140’ – which in June 2019 they snapped up for just under AUS$60,000 .

Other arrangements were made – two satellite phones, jerry cans for fuel, a hand-spear, binoculars, a knife, a straw hat— and in August, they took two trips out there.

According to Lassiter, they had been roaring fun. Snorkelling, fishing, sightseeing, drinking.

But in the midst of it all, Lassiter claimed he had wanted to test to see if his satellite phone was working worldwide. So he made a call. He just happened to have Roy’s new number back in the UK. So, he gave him a ring. And then another. And then another.

When the stranded skipper’s call came into Roy – all the way back in the UK – he had the number of the satphone on DW140. On September 2, just as his mates were steaming back out to explore the south of Abrolhos he called.

“He said he had some friends that were in the Abrolhos Islands, and he said … that they’re on a yacht and they had bumped a reef and might need a pull off the reef,” Lassiter testified in court. “I said: ‘Well, sucks to be them’.”

As they approached the Abrohlos, the weather turned, and a broken cable on the mast almost took Palmer’s head off. Then around 2:40am on September 2, they get stuck at Stick. The texts to Roy begin almost immediately.

His replies are also increasingly urgent: “Drifted a mile … we have no control where we end up,” one text reads.

“Where are the girls? Dad worried about [where the] girls are exactly,” Roy asks in reply.

“Girls R with us.”

The girls were the drugs. The boys on DW140 were the anticipated antidote to this billion-dollar bungle.

But hours went by. And they didn’t show.

Because despite their years of yachting experience, the unique perils of the Abrolhos had scuppered Jones, Lassiter and Jackson as well – leaving their plan to flood Australia with drugs high and dry.

With Roy increasingly urgent in his messages, it was already falling dark when DW140 reached the Abrolhos Islands on the evening of September 2.

But their well laid plans were already slowly sinking.

An attempt by Roy to put the Thai trio in touch directly with the Zero failed, after a wrong number was scribbled down and dialled without success. Phone calls and texts would not go through. And messages kept coming in from Roy.

“Go to that exact place.”

“He at that landmark.”

And so they tried, despite not knowing what the landmark was.

“It was very dark, I believe it just started to kind of sprinkle, but it was just really dark,” Lassiter explained. “It just came to a - just a kind of a scraping stop with a loud scraping noise. The boat wasn’t budging, no.

“After the last call with John Roy, Gus just turned the phone off just because there was nothing — everything was out of our control at that point.”

While the DW140 waited for the tide, Dicenta and Palmer felt like they could wait no longer. And so using the dinghy attached to the yacht, they began moving the drugs, heading east to Burton Island.

Once there, the messages to Roy resumed.

“Tell your friends to stop f.....g around and come and get us ASAP otherwise I will leave the girls here and get my own taxi out of here,” they warned

But taxis are hard to come by on a rocky outcrop 200m long by 150m wide. And so they had to sit and wait and worry.

Meanwhile, the Zero, minus its dinghy, had been spotted, reported and boarded – with the identification papers left behind a clear clue of who had been there. A search for those on board was scaled up.

And the stranded DW140 was now also attracting attention, with some locals offering the three men on board help to get moving. Pearl farmer Jesse Liddon was one of them.

“I suggested that, you know, the normal currency at sea was … beer, and they came up with a six-pack of Tooheys Extra Dry which was very unpopular with the crew,” he said. “A carton would be the minimum payment for any sort of favour.”

By 2:45pm, authorities had spotted a tiny white tender perched on the beach of Burton Island by a local, who also saw a man – dressed in a hot pink shirt – waving.

Weirdly he was asking him to leave, not to help.

By 3:30pm, police were on that beach. And minutes later Dicenta and Palmer were in custody, after the briefest of pursuits stopped in quick time by another local – an elephant seal.

By 5pm, police were removing strands of seaweed covering 40 duffel bags, each packed with the kilos of ice, or coke, or ecstasy.

And they also spotted something else. A distinctive blue and white Bayliner, registration DW140, slowly cruising north past the island.

A registration check the following day showed the owner as an Angus Jackson from New South Wales. Further probes put the boat in a dry dock, and the owner in Jurien Bay.

A roadside arrest and police questioning, quickly followed.

“I was scared. Obviously I wanted to distance myself from all of that — that whole incident. Obviously I had no knowledge of any of that, the farther I could get away from it the better I was thinking,” Lassiter would later explain. “I mean, I was - I was - I basically felt numb inside. I mean, just a fear and a panic that, oh my God, here I am.”

But police released the Thai trio – along with a listening device in their car, and another at their hotel in Perth. It took police just days to swoop again. They were arrested by WA and Federal Police officers in a takedown captured on CCTV footage.

Having first looked at the text messages on Roy’s phone in the UK, this time around, Lassiter, Jackson and ‘Knuckles’ — as Jones from Devil’s Bridge is commonly knownwould not be released, despite protestations of innocence for the years which followed.

“It was about a boys’ trip,” Gus Jackson would tell a jury. “Don’t have anything to do with drugs. I don’t buy them. I don’t sell them. I don’t use them. I certainly don’t attempt to possess them.”

But a jury disagreed, finding all three of the Thai trio guilty in late April.

On hearing the recording of him loading the drugs on board the Zero, Palmer pleaded guilty an hour into his separate trial – with a prosecutor later revealing prison calls had caught the former Ibiza DJ telling contacts how he helped on the yacht voyage.

Dicenta, the skipper, abandoned ship last, admitting the charge two weeks after Palmer.

That leaves Roy now, serving a 12-year stretch for his part in the Jersey importation, to be dealt with again by Australian authorities. His prison visitors have twice included detectives from the WA Police.