A 66-year-old West Ealing man jailed for 28 years over a £45m MDMA smuggling operation was among drug traffickers whose trial a convicted murderer tried to derail from prison.
Stefan Baldauf, of Midhurst Road, was jailed in December 2022 alongside Danny Brown after they were convicted of attempting to smuggle 448kg of MDMA to Australia hidden inside the arm of an industrial digger.
The case was uncovered by the National Crime Agency following the takedown of the encrypted communications platform EncroChat as part of Operation Venetic.
At Southwark Crown Court last week (13 March 2026), jurors heard how convicted murderer William Todd orchestrated a scheme from his prison cell to derail the trial and later challenge the traffickers’ convictions.
Todd, who was already serving two life sentences for murder, attempted to collapse the case by sending false reports to police and the court claiming jurors had been bribed to convict the defendants. Proceedings at Kingston Crown Court were briefly paused while the allegations were investigated.
Investigators later discovered the claims were fabricated. Officers found that an associate, Danny Thomas, 46, had attended court during the trial and recorded jurors’ names as they were read out.
Prosecutors said Thomas later worked with Sheree Avard, 41, to fabricate claims that jurors had been pressured into convicting the defendants. The pair arranged for a woman in Romania to sign a deposition under the false identity “Ioana Andrei” alleging jury misconduct, which was then sent to defence lawyers in an attempt to challenge the convictions.
Investigators later linked Thomas to a secret mobile phone concealed inside a DVD player in Todd’s prison cell.
Thomas and Avard admitted conspiring to pervert the course of justice and were jailed for three years and four months, and one year respectively. Todd was convicted by a jury and sentenced to a further seven years.
Steve Ahmet, senior investigating officer at the NCA’s anti-corruption unit, said: “This case shows the remarkable lengths that high-harm criminals will go to in order to cheat justice and why they pose the greatest corruption threat to crucial pillars of our society.”
