Inside the Biggest FBI Sting Operation in History
Sometime after midnight on May 26, 2020, a sleek black-and-white speedboat darted through the sea’s waves off the coast of Sweden. The two men on board were barreling toward a set of coordinates in the darkness, armed with navigation equipment, night vision goggles, and fishing rods. The Donousa, a black and red, 225-meter-long cargo ship, was sitting motionless in the water around 17 kilometers ahead.
On its way from Brazil to Poland, the Donousa had made this unofficial stop in the North Sea so that some corrupt sailors could throw nets holding 400 kilograms of cocaine—a quantity with a street value of about $39 million—into the water. Then the ship would light up the area “like a disco in the middle of the sea,” a member of the drug gang wrote in a text message. And with that, the speedboat crew would reel in the nets and whisk the drugs to docks on Swedish soil.
That was the plan as the courier understood it, anyway. Stationed onshore in a white van, his job was to wait for the speedboat to return, then transport its payload to a warehouse, all while fielding minute-by-minute commands from the operation's mastermind and two other higher-ups. In an encrypted group chat, they peppered him with orders in Swedish: Stay calm, avoid looking shady, melt into traffic when the time comes. “You’ll drive slow as fuck.” The four men were all using Sky phones—pricey, customized devices that not only sent encrypted messages like Signal or WhatsApp did, but could also be remotely wiped on demand if they fell into the hands of law enforcement. By 2020, phones made by Sky and a handful of competitors had become a widespread and sophisticated part of the drug trafficker’s toolkit. For the truly paranoid, some brands even removed the GPS, camera, and microphone from their devices.
