Breaking Brit: Suburban Car Wash-Owning Couple Were Running $900M Drug Empire

A British couple from suburbia were each sentenced to 33 years prison on Tuesday after smuggling £700 million ($900 million) of cocaine on commercial flights to Australia. 

Arti Dhir, 59, and husband Kaval Raijada, 35, from Hanwell in west London smuggled up to seven tonnes of cocaine in 16 shipments to Australia – where the drug is worth three times more than in the UK – between 2019 and 2021. 

The couple, who police said played a “pivotal role” in the cocaine trafficking operation, set up a Breaking Bad-style car wash in order to launder their profits.

They also bought an £800,000 ($1 million) apartment and a £62,000 ($79,000) Land Rover. Police found £3m in cash in a storage unit, as well as silver bullion bars and £740,000 ($942,000) in cash deposited into 22 different bank accounts. 

An investigation by the UK’s National Crime Agency found the couple – who had a 24 year age difference – set up a front company to fly the Class A drug to the other side of the world hidden in tool boxes. They used their experience of working for a flight services company at Heathrow Airport to carry out their huge cocaine trafficking operation. 

In a further twist to the lives of what their suburban London neighbours presumed were just an average, law-abiding husband and wife who raised funds for a local breast cancer charity, Dhir and Raijada stand accused of adopting a farm boy in India in order to have him killed for an insurance payout. 

In 2015 they placed an advert in a local newspaper in Gujarat offering to adopt a child to live in London. They ended up adopting 11-year-old farm boy Gopal Sejani, and Indian police say that a few days later Dhir took out a £150,000 ($190,000) life insurance policy on the boy. 

Two years later, while still in India waiting for clearance to live in London, Sejani was abducted by two men on motorbikes, stabbed and dumped on the road. He later died of his injuries. Police said two previous attempts had been made on the boy’s life. The insurance policy never paid, but four months later the couple were arrested in the UK at the request of the Indian government. 

In 2019 a UK judge refused to extradite the couple for trial in India on human rights grounds because the penalty for double murder in Gujarat is life in prison without parole. The judge however acknowledged a "circumstantial prima facie case that Ms Dhir and Mr Raijada acting together and with others committed the offences".

An appeal against the ruling by the Indian authorities was later turned down.