After two years of public speculation about the identity of alleged co-conspirators in the cocaine-smuggling scheme that landed ex-premier Andrew Fahie in a Miami prison, United States prosecutors recently linked former Customs Commissioner Wade Smith to the plot in a public court filing.
“Cooperation from the Customs Department was a crucial piece of the cocaine importation scheme, and [Mr. Fahie] made clear [to a US informant posing as a drug smuggler] that he would handle Wade Smith by paying him a bribe,” Assistant US Attorney Kevin Gerarde wrote in a June 28 motion arguing that Mr. Fahie should be imprisoned for life.
But the US has not charged Mr. Smith or accused him of accepting a bribe, and in May Police Commissioner Mark Collins told the Beacon that he was unsure if police here would even investigate allegations revealed during Mr. Fahie’s February trial.
“It depends on what the Americans share with us, if anything at all,” Mr. Collins said at the time, adding, “If we are provided with any information in terms of any criminal activity that occurred in the British Virgin Islands, we’ll investigate it.”
Nevertheless, Mr. Smith was sent on administrative leave in August 2022 — less than four months after Mr. Fahie’s arrest — and court documents show that VI police have been investigating him in connection with matters that appear to pre-date the case against Mr. Fahie.
But Mr. Smith has battled both efforts in court, and in May police were dealt a serious blow when a judge quashed warrants used to search his home and vehicle in February 2023.
In the meantime, VI officials — some of whom are the targets of his lawsuits — have refused to say if he has been charged with a crime or even to provide basic information on his employment status in the public service.
US: Fahie ‘recruited’ Smith
The latest allegations linking Mr. Smith to the purported cocaine-smuggling conspiracy came in the June 28 court motion, which US prosecutors filed in advance of Mr. Fahie’s Aug. 5 sentencing in a Miami federal court.
In the motion, Mr. Gerarde wrote that the former premier had “recruited” Mr. Smith and others into his scheme to assist a US informant posing as a drug smuggler named Roberto Quintero.
The motion elaborates on allegations made during Mr. Fahie’s February trial in Miami, when jurors heard tapes of an April 7, 2022, conversation that the former premier had at a house in Parham Town with Mr. Quintero, who was secretly working as a confidential source for the US Drug Enforcement Administration.
On the tape, Mr. Quintero suggested to Mr. Fahie, who oversaw the Customs Department at the time, that Mr. Smith’s involvement was crucial to their plans. The informant asked Mr. Fahie if he thought that Mr. Smith would “play” along.
Mr. Fahie replied, “Well, he can play, but remember he has a lot of people with him under him, so I’ll have to see how we would handle that.”
The morning after the Parham Town meeting, Mr. Fahie called Mr. Smith, the prosecutor wrote in the June 28 filing.
After four missed calls between the pair, phone records indicate that they spoke for about 10 minutes around 8:30 a.m., Mr. Gerarde claimed.
The prosecutor also alleged that any bribes Mr. Fahie might have paid to others, including to Mr. Smith and his employees, would have undermined the integrity of VI law enforcement.
“The bribes paid to corrupt the high-ranking Customs officials would inevitably trickle down to the common Customs employees who would be tasked with searching vessels carrying goods into the BVI,” the prosecutor stated.
The filing did not further elaborate on Mr. Smith’s alleged involvement in the matter.
Home, truck searched
Though VI police have declined to say whether Mr. Smith faces charges here, details of their attempts to investigate him emerged recently in court documents after he successfully challenged a search of his Freshwater Pond home and pickup truck that was carried out on Feb. 14, 2023.
The investigation that led to the search, however, appears to be related to matters that pre-dated the case against Mr. Fahie.
Before carrying out the 2023 search, Detective Constable Dele Bolude appeared before Senior Magistrate Tamia Richards to request warrants, according to a May 14 judgment by VI High Court Justice Sonya Young.
“During that hearing, DC Bolude had presented a four-page document setting out the findings of the investigation into payments made to a named entity between the period of September 2020 to January 2021,” Ms. Young wrote.
After the magistrate found that the detective’s evidence was enough to satisfy her that the property in question could be linked to offences of “breach of trust and making a false claim by a public officer,” she issued the warrants, the judgment stated.
The searches were subsequently carried out, resulting in the seizure of cell phones, iPads, passports and a bank card, Ms. Young wrote.
Smith sues
More than four months after the searches, however, Mr. Smith sued Ms. Richards and Mr. Collins on June 23, 2023, asking the High Court to quash the warrants and declare them unlawful; order the police to return his property and any data gathered from it; and award damages.
Mr. Smith’s lawyers argued that the senior magistrate and the police failed “to disclose the factual and legal basis” to issue the warrants; failed to “properly outline” the items that the warrants covered; and failed to bring his property to a hearing with both sides present before Ms. Richards to determine if the police could retain the seized items.
These failures, Mr. Smith’s lawyers argued, violated protections granted by the VI Constitution and the Magistrate’s Code of Procedure Act.
‘Unlawful’ searches
Ultimately, Ms. Young mostly agreed, finding in her May 14 judgment that Ms. Richards’ decision to issue the warrants was “flawed” and the searches were therefore “unlawful.”
Accordingly, the judge ordered the items and all data extracted from them returned to Mr. Smith. She also awarded him $5,000 in damages due to the police’s “trespass.”
In supporting her decision, Ms. Young explained that the warrants for the electronics lacked sufficient details, including even the names of the offences being investigated.
“They simply said an investigation,” the judge wrote. “This authorised an unrestrained intrusion, a free hand to extract information from a place where the contents are vast and varied and demand serious protection.”
She also criticised Ms. Richards’ warrants on other grounds.
“This court has considered that the decision to issue the warrants was flawed as insufficient reasons have been given by the senior magistrate,” the judge wrote. “The warrants were also unlawful because they were drafted in extremely wide terms. The search, based on the warrants, was therefore unlawful.”
As Mr. Smith battled the government in court, police announced last December that they had arrested a “senior government official” on Dec. 13, 2023, and charged them with breach of trust in relation to an ongoing investigation within His Majesty’s Customs.
In a highly unusual departure from their standard practice, however, police declined to name the accused, and they declined to say if Mr. Smith faces any charges.
Ms. Young’s May judgment notes that Mr. Smith had been arrested the morning that his house was searched but he had not been charged.
Sent on leave
In a separate judicial review, Mr. Smith has also challenged the government’s attempts to send him on leave from his position in the public service.
On Aug. 18, 2022, Mr. Smith received a letter from the government’s Human Resources Department placing him on immediate administrative leave “until further notice or for three months,” according to a fixed date claim form his attorneys filed with the High Court on Nov. 13, 2022, seeking judicial review.
Nearly three months after the first letter, he received a second one, this time from the Governor’s Office, placing him “on compulsory leave in the public interest” until Feb. 17, 2023, according to Mr. Smith’s subsequent court filings.
On March 7, 2023, Mr. Smith received a third letter, this one interdicting him as customs commissioner, his filings state.
“No reports, documents or evidence was provided on which the assertions were made, nor was the claimant given the opportunity to be heard on any allegations that [were] pending against him,” his lawyers argued.
The case appears to have continued working its way through the court since Nov. 22, 2022, when Justice Heather Felix-Evans granted Mr. Smith permission to seek judicial review.
Still, officials have refused to comment about Mr. Smith’s current status as a public officer.
Karia Christopher, government’s acting director of communications, declined to comment on what she called a “human resource matter.”
And although the governor ultimately oversees the public service, attempts to obtain more information from the Governor’s Office were not successful either.
Customs under scrutiny
The actions taken against Mr. Smith come after a flurry of scrutiny into the Customs Department in recent years.
In 2021, during two days of hearings before the Commission of Inquiry, it was revealed that six years earlier, the Internal Audit Department discovered that someone had presented receipts for cash payments of almost $265,000 to the Customs Department for importing fuel at Port Purcell, but this money never made it into the government’s coffers.
Though the IAD suspected fraud, no one was charged in connection with the incident, according to the agency’s report.
The COI also reviewed the Import Duty Partial Payment Plan, the Customs Automated Processing System, and the Courier Trading Declaration Process at the agency, identifying potential conflicts of interest and multiple issues with officers’ efforts to recover fees.
The COI report released in April 2022 recommended that police probe possible corruption within Customs, and the next month then-governor John Rankin announced that he had asked the police commissioner to launch this criminal investigation.
Additionally, a wide-ranging review into VI law enforcement agencies published last month roundly criticised practices and conditions found at HM Customs and several other law-enforcement agencies and made dozens of recommendations for reform.
Implementation of those recommendations is ongoing.
No comment
Neither Mr. Smith nor his attorney Terrence Williams responded to requests from the Beacon seeking comment.
A representative of the VI law firm Chase Law & Co, which worked with Mr. Williams to represent Mr. Smith during his recent judicial review claims, declined to comment on the case.
Ms. Richards and Mr. Collins did not respond to requests for comment for this story.