Drug baron told to pay back £1.9m (From The Wiltshire Gazette and Herald)

Drug baron told to pay back £1.9m

ONE of Britain's most successful drug barons, who owns property in Salisbury and in the village of Brook in the New Forest, has been given six months to pay back £1.9m or face another three years behind bars.

Michael Tyrrell (57), who is serving 26 years in prison for his doomed plot to bring a £100m consignment of cocaine into Britain by yacht, claimed he is penniless and said he would prefer to suffer the extra three years in jail to avoid causing his family problems, Snaresbrook Crown Court in London heard last week.

The court heard that Tyrrell's assets include Saddlers Cottage in Brook, worth £784,000, a shop in Fish Row, Salisbury, valued at £90,000, and a £67,500 cottage in Love Lane, Salisbury.

His £744,000 luxury Antiguan property, bought from the profits of drugs, is home for his 83-year-old mother and the court was told devoted son Tyrrell was desperate to avoid making her homeless. At last week's confiscation hearing, Judge William Kennedy said he could have ordered Tyrrell to serve an extra ten years for failing to pay back the £1,899,200 asked for by the Crown at the end of a six-month trial in 2002.

But the judge agreed to reduce the term to three years, to run consecutively to the 26 years, on the grounds of compassion.

Simon Farrell QC, for Tyrrell, said: "He may well be near 70 when he is released from his current sentence. He has taken a practical view of this and he will not be able to meet this order.

"You know his mother is 83 years of age and he may never see her again when he is at liberty. It really is a matter of compassion."

Addressing the court, Tyrrell said: "I really just want to apologise to the court and everybody for causing all this trouble and of course, my family.

"I am truly ashamed of being convicted of being involved with cocaine and if I do come out of this alive, I won't touch it again."

Tyrell and his gang had planned to unload 396kg of cocaine on to his private beach near Ventnor, on the Isle of Wight, in 2000, but bad weather hampered their landing.

They were caught by 150 customs officers at the end of a 3,000-mile voyage across the Atlantic from the Caribbean. Tyrrell's common law wife, Jill Fuller (57), was jailed for four years for helping to hide his millions through a series of property deals, including the Brook cottage and the property in Love Lane.

A friend of the former James Bond star Timothy Dalton, she also bought the house near Ventnor in December 1999.

Tyrrell's helper and Caribbean lover, Julie Paterson, was sentenced to 24 years, later reduced to 22 years - one of the longest jail terms passed for a female drug smuggler.

Tyrrell is thought to have amassed £100m from drug trafficking and was recently second in an underworld rich list.