Drugs and dirty money
This last year my weekly emails have been a bit of a lifesaver.
You see, like most of you, I've spent a huge chunk of the last 12 months cooped up in my house with the family.
Now, I love my wife and kids - but sometimes I just need a little bit of space and some human interaction with someone I'm not related to.
The great things about my weekly emails is that they go both ways - sure, I send them out to my list - but every week I also get tons of replies, with people sharing their views or even sending my interesting little stories and ideas.
A couple of weeks ago one of my email buddies sent me a link to an interesting article about a haulier here in the UK who'd been sent to prison for smuggling drugs and dirty money all over Europe!
From copious amounts of cocaine to hundreds of thousands of euros in dirty cash, the guy had spent more than 20 years evading the authorities and making himself a pretty penny.
But how did he get caught?
The tax man of course.
No one escapes the tax man here!
The silly bugger had been paying himself minimum wage to avoid paying taxes, but living a lifestyle of luxury.
He owned hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of cars, the same again in watches and jewellery, he lived in a big house and spent nearly £90k on holidays alone!
You can't do that on £8.71 per hour!
He's since been sentenced to 14 years behind bars, following a substantial investigation that unearthed a ton of encrypted and incriminating messages.
But he's not the only “master criminal” in the logistics industry.
Due to the nature of the business - crossing borders, transporting goods - it's a prime target for anyone involved in drugs and dirty money.
I learnt this myself when I was young. My first year on the job in freight, I had been sent out to deliver a thank you gift to one of the trucking companies that my employer worked with.
I arrived in the car park but within seconds of me stepping out of the car, a swarm of black BMW X5s raced into the industrial estate and surrounded the building I was heading into.
One of the coppers took one look at me and said “Back in your car lad, go home” so I did.
Turned out that the big boss of the company I was going to visit had been doing the beer run for nearly 13 years, but his life of crime had finally caught up with him.
Anyway, the moral of the story is always pay your taxes and only work with freight forwarders you can trust…
Here at Millennium, I put a lot of time and effort into getting to know all our partners personally, so you can be sure that you're goods are in safe - and honest - hands wherever they are in the world.
Chadd Blunt
Millennium Cargo