MONROVIA – For four months, Liberians have treated this year’s two great cocaine seizures as one story. The airport bust came first, the record haul followed six weeks later, and officials spoke of a single network that had burrowed into the state for more than six years.
By Rodney D. Sieh
Investigators now say that picture is wrong.
“We haven’t identified yet any connection between 19M and 317M,” investigators told FrontPageAfrica this week. “Leroy Harris doesn’t have connections to [the] 317M [case].”
If that holds, Liberia is not fighting one cartel. It is fighting two, with different suppliers, different routes, different customers and different methods. It also helps explain one of the stranger features of the State’s case: the disappearance of George Wah “Leroy” Harris, the Paynesville bar owner the government publicly charged in the US$317 million probe in August, from the indictment that followed.
It does not explain everything. A close reading of both indictments shows threads that still run between the two cases, and questions the Ministry of Justice has yet to answer.
Case one: the airport pipeline
The first case broke on June 8 at Roberts International Airport (RIA). Screeners flagged six cargo boxes declared as Maggi cubes and lappas. Inside were 198 compressed plates of cocaine, 237.6 kilograms in all, valued at about US$19.2 million.
The shipment was going out, not coming in. According to the indictment, a logistics manager arranged for the boxes to fly Brussels Airlines to London Heathrow, consigned to Usman Ali at an address in Birmingham, England. Prosecutors say a similar four-box consignment, also declared as Maggi cubes and lappas, left on May 20 for US$1,400 in fees.
This is the network investigators describe as running Sierra Leone–Liberia–United Kingdom/Netherlands. FPA sources now tie it to Jos Leijdekkers, the Dutch fugitive whom authorities believe has been sheltering in Sierra Leone. A senior security official had earlier linked Leijdekkers to Liberia’s drug trade in general terms; investigators now place him with the airport pipeline specifically. Leijdekkers has not been charged in Liberia.
A Montserrado County grand jury indicted 10 defendants in the August Term of Criminal Court “C”: Harris; Paul Jamaal King; Philip Yeoh Jr.; Mohammed O. Gbowrah; former LDEA airport deputy commander Moses Jallah; Michael U.S. Brown, alias Rahim Bah; Polo Bah; Oscar J. Brown; Usman Ali; and an unidentified “private bar” entity or person.
Harris sits at the centre of the bribery allegations. Prosecutors say that after the seizure he offered LDEA agents US$100,000 to return the boxes, handed US$5,000 to Jallah at Private Bar, offered a warehouse in Sayon Town for storage, and told Jallah he owned a quarter of the drugs. Harris is in Monrovia Central Prison and is presumed innocent.
Case two: the sea route
The second case is a different animal. On July 21, a joint security team raided a compound on Cement Road in the VOA Community, off the RIA Highway. They found 3,971 plates of cocaine in 157 bags, which the State values at US$317.68 million.
Two foreigners were arrested on the spot: Johann David Garces Grajales, who holds Spanish and Colombian passports, and Srdan Seles, a Serbian. A third man, known only as Tom, allegedly slipped away before the raid.
This cocaine came in by sea. Prosecutors say it was landed from the Atlantic in May, carried by canoe up the Po River at Royesville through ground the group had secured in Bomi County, then trucked to the VOA house. The cover was a fishing business on the riverbank and a front airline, Afri-Connect Airlines, whose aircraft was bought in August 2025 and flew into Spriggs Payne.
Investigators describe this pipeline as Colombia–Brazil–Liberia–Ghana–Eastern Europe (Serbia, Croatia, Ukraine)–Dubai. The 55-page indictment, issued with an October 7 writ, names Nikola Ivancic as the cartel’s paymaster and puts the network’s political recruitment in a Dubai meeting.
Its reach is far wider than case one. The defendants include former Vice President Jewel Howard-Taylor, former NSA deputy director Gerald Folley Smith, former airport operations chief Mark Kuiah, and a string of security officers. The charges run to 11 counts, including money laundering and weapons offences.
Where the two cases part
The differences are not cosmetic. They go to how each network made money.
* Direction. Case one was an export: cocaine already in Liberia leaving by air for Britain. Case two was an import and storage operation: a mother shipment landed by sea and held near the airport road.
* Scale. The VOA haul is nearly 17 times heavier and about 16 times more valuable than the airport seizure.
* Method. The airport network used ordinary commercial airfreight, false cargo declarations and small cash payments to handlers. The sea network bought land, boats, a plane and, prosecutors say, protection at the highest levels.
* People. Case one’s defendants are mostly Liberian logistics workers, airport hands and a UK consignee. Case two is run by foreign operators with Latin American and Balkan links, allegedly shielded by senior Liberian officials.
* Markets. One route ends in Britain and the Netherlands; the other fans out to Eastern Europe and the Gulf.
On that reading, the State’s treatment of Harris makes some sense. His alleged conduct — the US$100,000 offer, the US$5,000 payment, the claim to a quarter share — concerns the airport boxes. Prosecutors may simply have charged him where their evidence lies.
The Harris gap
But the record does not move in a straight line.
In early August, the Ministry of Information announced that Harris had been charged in the US$317 million probe. Security forces sealed Private Bar and searched it three times; management says nothing illegal was found. Harris was arraigned at the Monrovia City Court. Police said at the time that he had called security officials in the hours after the seizure to try to free the shipment.
On August 27, Criminal Court “C” issued its writ in the airport case, naming Harris. On October 7, the US$317 million indictment arrived. Harris is not in its caption, its counts or its narrative.
No one has told the public whether the August charge was withdrawn, merged into the airport case, or left pending.
That matters for a man in pre-trial detention: he is entitled to know which case is holding him.
The threads that remain
Investigators may be right that the two networks are distinct. Yet the 317M indictment itself keeps brushing against the smaller case.
Private Bar appears in both. The new indictment places the cartel’s introductory meeting for its front airline at Private Bar in Paynesville — Harris’s venue — while charging no one over it. Witnesses separately told FPA that Usman Ali, the airport case’s UK consignee, attended a birthday party for Harris and Michael Browne at the same bar on May 17.
The “19” in the voice notes. Among the State’s evidence against Howard-Taylor are WhatsApp exchanges with co-defendant Sheik Bashiru Kante. In them, prosecutors attribute to Kante references to “the 19 kilos” and “19 million.” If those words point to the airport seizure, the larger case’s own evidence invokes the smaller one.
The airport in the middle. Both cases run through RIA. The June boxes were caught there. The sea cartel allegedly paid Kuiah, then RIA’s operations chief, US$50,000 to smooth its path. Kuiah is named in the big indictment, though no count lists him, and he was dismissed after the airport seizure.
Leijdekkers and Sierra Leone. If the Dutch fugitive stands behind the airport pipeline, has Liberia asked Freetown and The Hague for help? The Inspector General promised in July to pursue suspects abroad through extradition and mutual legal assistance. The public has seen no request.
The 2022 shadow
Liberia has been here before. In 2022, a jury acquitted all four defendants in the US$100 million Freeport case, then the country’s largest, and all four left the country within a day.
Two indictments now stand where one case once seemed to. Whether they are two cartels or two halves of one is a question for evidence, not press briefings. But a prosecution that cannot say clearly who belongs in which case will hand defence lawyers their opening — and risk repeating 2022.
All defendants named in this report are presumed innocent unless proven guilty by a court of competent jurisdiction.