Johnny Kock provided cocaine to the northwest’s crime groups in one of the most profitable smuggling schemes ever witnessed in the UK
A man who presented as a "respectable businessman" used a pond liner company as a front to flood the streets of Merseyside with cocaine potentially totalling almost a billion pounds. Johnny Kock used the company as cover to ship in vast amounts of super strength cocaine in boxes of washing powder - using legitimate companies as unwitting allies.
The Dutchman, who lived in Wavertree, could have been responsible for trafficking up to six tonnes of the illicit drug in 57 separate shipments at the behest of the region’s crime groups. Kock, who lived in Liverpool for several years and posed as an antiques dealer, was caught in a sting launched by the National Crime Agency (NCA) in late 2013.
When the case eventually got to court, the prosecutor said: "It’s at the very highest level of drug importation into this country." A crown court judge added: "In terms of the amounts of cocaine this must be one of the biggest ever offences considered by the courts."
Kock was sentenced to 25 years behind bars for his role masterminding the huge plot. However, the ECHO later revealed he was found dead in his cell at HMP Berwyn in Wales in August 2021. As part of a weekly series about Merseyside’s criminal history, the ECHO has taken a closer look at how the police managed to track down one of the largest hauls ever brought into the UK.
Kock lived in a nondescript semi-detached house on Willow Road in Wavertree with his younger partner Deborah Fagan. To those who knew him, he came across as "quiet, intelligent and unsuspecting". A source who knew Kock said: "[He] presented himself as a respectable businessman, getting on in age, and there was nothing to raise suspicion.
"Everything about him seemed legitimate, even down to the way he dressed. It was perfect for the crime gangs because no-one in authority would cast doubt on him." Speaking to the ECHO after his death, Kock’s brother Rob said it was known he was a criminal, but described him as not being a "bad guy".
Rob Kock said: "He ran a transport business, but transporting illegal stuff. He fetched the stuff and delivered it. He was long in this business and made a lot of money with it all those years." Despite this, Kock long went under the radar and it wasn’t until a Border Force seizure that attention began to fall on the pensioner.
125 kilos of cocaine seized on their way to Liverpool. Imported by antiques dealer Johnny Kock
Alarm bells began to ring in October 2023 after 23 kilos of cocaine and 110,000 Euros, destined for a warehouse on the Knowsley Industrial Park in Kirkby were discovered by border agents at the Channel Tunnel entrance in Coquelles, France. The drugs were buried within a consignment of soap powder.
An unwitting German firm, Geaplan Folien, which arranged deliveries of pond liner and later washing powder to Koch, was made aware of the discovery and told police that another shipment was on the way. Some 107kg of high-purity cocaine was found in a shipment in Bremen by German customs.
The consignment was allowed to travel on to Kirkby but with the drugs replaced by dummy packages. While his latest delivery was being searched by police Kock was anxiously checking why it had been delayed but, failing to spot anything amiss, was there to pick it up along with his partner Fagan.
He loaded his boxes of washing powder into his van, unaware the drugs had been swapped and was then arrested as he drove away on Edge Lane onto the M62. Police also found £4,570 in his van and £7,170 at the home he shared with Fagan - said to be money obtained through his drug importing business.
Investigators believed the capture of Kock, who was thought to have operated under the radar in Liverpool from 2010 until his arrest in October last year, has ended one of the biggest volume drug routes into the UK. Investigations found Kock had regularly travelled to Geaplan’s headquarters in Edewecht – 40 miles from the Dutch border – in person to pay for the pond-liner in cash since at least April 2010.
Orders were delivered to several different addresses but always the end customer was Kock’s company, Aquaries Ltd, based at the Binns Road industrial estate in Old Swan. When Kock appeared in court in 2014, the prosecution said the two seized shipments represented were just two out of 57 shipments known to have been delivered to Kock’s business.
The drugs pipeline between mainland Europe and Merseyside was said to have been made possible because of Kock’s contacts in Holland. The police estimated at the very least he was responsible for importing £3.5m of ultra-quality cocaine on a fortnightly basis. However, the court heard he may have, in fact, shipped up to 6,000 kilos in total - potentially worth almost a billion pounds if sold on the streets.
At the time, the NCA estimated that between 25 and 30 tonnes of cocaine were imported annually into the UK. The same source added that Liverpool’s gangs "must have thought they had struck gold" when they found a discreet but also regular supply line of cocaine into the north west.
Kock pleaded guilty to conspiracy to evade the prohibition on the importation of class A drugs as well as three counts of possession of criminal property, but later tried to change his plea on the drug case to not guilty, claiming he thought he was moving cannabis and never opened the packages. That bid failed following a two-day court hearing.
Judge Mark Brown told him: "It was in my opinion a relatively simple but audacious way of getting class A drugs into the UK. Whilst it isn’t possible for the prosecution to determine precisely the weight of cocaine you imported it was obviously a vast amount, at least between 1,300kg and 6,000kg, worth many, many millions of pounds.
"Also this was high purity cocaine that no doubt would have been cut up for street dealing. This case highlights the ease with which vast amounts of cocaine can be imported into this country. You must have known you were playing for high stakes both in financial reward and the consequences if discovered." Kock’s partner was also jailed - sentenced to 12 months after admitting charges relating to the drugs money.
Kock later appeared before a Proceeds of Crime Act hearing as prosecutors sought to claw back what was left of the profits of the huge operation. The court heard Kock had previously escaped the authorities in 1992 and 1994 in separate plots. A hearing was told he absconded after customs officers found 108kg of cannabis in a case inside a lorry he was driving.
The court heard: "There was a successful prosecution in relation to his ex-wife’s brother, but (Kock) never faced criminal proceedings. He was never heard of until he was stopped with a fake passport in 1994, but he absconded from a customs controlled area before he could be arrested."
The ECHO reported in 2021 that Kock, who was serving his 25 year sentence in HMP Berwyn, was found dead in his cell on August 16. An inquest heard Kock - who had refused a Covid vaccination along with treatment for his longstanding cardiac issues during his time in prison - had tested positive for Covid-19, but this was not a factor in his death, according to Home Office pathologist Dr Brian Rodgers.
An inquest instead heard the cause of death of heart failure was provided following a Home Office post-mortem and the coroner concluded it was a death arising from natural causes.
After the inquest, the ECHO spoke with his brother Rob, who said Koch had a "difficult life" yet remained as a "big guy full of humour", even while serving his jail sentence. Rob Kock said: "The last years before he got arrested we had no contact at all. I had my own life with relatively young kids and he had his own business as we found out when he got arrested in 2013 and convicted in 2014.
"His sons came to Amsterdam to tell me about what happened. Because he was my brother, I wanted to know if he was interested in contact. I managed to find the address of the prison where they locked him up and sent him, together with my other brother, a letter to see if he was interested in contact. Which resulted in over two hundred letters sent by him to me and my brother over the years.
"In those letters it was clear despite the incredibly long sentence he got, he always stayed positive and full of humour. His letters were really fun to read and even made me feel proud of my brother.
He accepted his fate, his sentence, did not complain, and through the lines I could read he was like a big father to all the prisoners and wardens in HMP Whitemoor. Everybody liked him, which I experienced myself twice, when I visited him in 2018 and 2019."
He added: "He was definitely not the big drug baron as mentioned in all those newspaper stories. In the years that I’ve met him I always had the feeling ’he had the heart in the right place’ as we say in Holland.
"He disliked class A drugs, he always mentioned to us, so I was very surprised he was caught with class A drugs. I asked him when I visited how this could happen, but he never gave a clear answer. Now I will never know why, but this must have had some reason."
For whatever reason Kock decided to get involved in the drugs trade, it was undoubtedly a lucrative one. His role in bringing what could have amounted to nearly £1bn in cocaine into the north west remains one of the most significant drug trafficking plots ever seen in the UK.
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