In 2019, the sailors’ convictions were overturned, following a campaign by their families that became a cause célèbre in Brazil. Yet the case went largely unnoticed in Britain, except for a report as part of a broader one Telegraph investigation into the transatlantic cocaine trade.
The Brazilian police assumed that Saul had subsequently gone into hiding. Our BBC investigationHowever, discovered that Saul lives openly in Norwich, where he now runs a property business and is a member of his local Round Table Club and a business networking association. On his social media feed last March, he even posted photos of himself with the city’s then-mayor James Wright (Wright says Saul was just one of many hundreds of people photographed with him during his civic duties).
In a setting perhaps more suited to an Alan Partridge episode, we tracked down Saul at his networking association’s weekly business breakfast, in a Holiday Inn near a roundabout on the outskirts of Norwich. Asked about the accusations that he was a drug trafficker, he replied: “It is not,” and then drove away.
The Brazilian sailors say they still want to see Saul explain his side of the story in a courtroom, even though there appears to be no clear prospect of that. The NCA told us that “no warrant has currently been issued to arrest the suspect and we are not aware of any offenses he may have committed in Britain”. They added that if Brazilian police still wanted to pursue the case, they would have to submit a new extradition request. Brazil’s Justice Ministry declined to comment.
The question remains, how did a man from a wealthy Norwich family end up accused of involvement in a major drug trafficking ring? Saul certainly doesn’t look like Norwich’s answer Pablo Escobar. Old friends in Norwich describe him as a charming, friendly person, whose father was a local barrister.
At sailing clubs on the East Anglia coast, members are now encouraged to report suspected smugglers, who usually do not look like typical sailors. “You can usually tell if something doesn’t look right: people not sailing well, or not looking like regular sailors,” says James Thomlinson, commodore at Orford Sailing Club in Suffolk.