The Story of The Milkman – the infamous cocaine smuggler who was hunted for 11 years

Brian Brendan Wright, known as The Milkman, flooded the UK with enormous amounts of cocaine in the 1990s and ended up becoming one of Britain’s most wanted fugitives.

The operation to catch The Milkman brings down criminals from Colombian cartels to criminals at the heart of Britain's drug trade.

How did he build a transatlantic cocaine empire? And why did it take 11 years to catch him?

In a new series of Gangster from BBC Radio 5 Live, investigative journalist Livvy Haydock traces how Wright's operation moved industrial quantities of cocaine from laboratories in Colombia, through smuggling routes in Venezuelan jungles, to marinas in coastal towns across Britain, while he built a seemingly respectable life within racing circles.

Listen to Gangster: The Story of The Milkman on BBC Sounds.

Brian Brendan Wright was born in Dublin in 1946.

Image credit: PA

When he was 12, his family moved to London.

His parents, like tens of thousands of other Irish immigrants after the Second World War, moved to London for work. They settled in the North West suburb of Cricklewood, and nearby was Kilburn, his teenage stomping ground.

When Wright was avoiding attending school, he’d work at the Kilburn markets. When the pubs would open in the morning, they'd get the horse racing on the TV, and he’d be running up the betting slips down to the bookies and getting people’s bets on for them.

“He's one of the smartest guys I've ever come across”

Former HM Customs and Excise officer Barry Clarke, was a part of Operation Extend. This operation began in 1996 following the seizure of a large quantity of drugs on a boat in Cork, Ireland. It was called the Sea Mist. The drugs found on board were estimated to be worth £47 million.

This seizure was just the beginning of the decade-long hunt for Brian Wright.

Barry had heard Wright’s name before, as “he’d cropped up on previous operations, not as the main focus, but on the periphery”. He said The Milkman was someone who liked to go under the radar. He was so far under the radar that he didn't even have a bank account.

“I don't know if he's passed any exams, but you know what? He's got that streetwise, street sense. He's a sharp individual. And it was clear that he had a very strong reputation as a high-class criminal, someone who was very careful in the way he operated. He had a strong reputation within UK criminality.”

Asked why Wright was known as 'The Milkman’, Barry said it’s “supposedly because he always delivers".

In the 1990s, cocaine was the social drug of choice.

Cocaine grows almost exclusively in the Andes region of South America, and the further it travels, the more valuable it becomes.

The Colombian cartels were well-connected, multinational businesses and were relying on an international market for their product. Brian Wright was part of that market.

He was buying and distributing the loads of cocaine in the UK and making millions from it.

Barry Clarke’s wife, Karen, also worked for HMCE, and she said that Wright “was the kingpin”.

“He was almost untouchable at one stage. He had a lavish lifestyle. He lived in a beautiful apartment in Chelsea Harbour. He had friendships with celebrities. And it's targets like that that you really do the job to arrest. You need to put an end to that lifestyle because it's undeserved.”

By 1996, HMCE were tailing Brian and his gang constantly. But it's when out for a weekend stroll that Karen unexpectedly gets her first glimpse of the man they're trying to take down.

“I saw him in 1996 on a weekend when Barry identified where he'd been living. We took a stroll down to Chelsea Harbour and as we walked past his apartment, he came out in a fluffy white dressing gown, gave a big yawn, a cup of coffee in his hand."

“He looked the part. He looked like someone who had money. [He] looked like he didn't have a care in the world.”

Brian’s public life involved racecourses, money and celebrity friends. But his love for this lifestyle put him in the spotlight.

Image credit: Getty

By the mid-1990s, there were rumours going around that Wright wasn't just watching races, but shaping them.

David Yates is Newsboy of the Daily Mirror, and before that, he was at the Racing Post, where he watched the racing landscape for decades.

He remembers clearly when Brian Wright's name began to surface.

“In the 1990s, the spate of dopings began. It was later claimed by a former jockey, Dermot Brown, that he had doped 20 horses for Brian Brendan Wright. It became an emerging story, particularly in the jump racing world, that there was what seemed to be a pretty small coterie of jockeys who were, for want of a more delicate phrase, in the pay of Brian Wright. They supplied him with information. This was obviously used for purposes of betting.”

The picture emerging was of a small group of jockeys supplying inside information or helping to manipulate results.

However, there was not enough evidence of Wright's involvement in race fixing or dopings to charge him, so the charges were eventually dropped.

Allegations of race-fixing and doping saw his Chelsea Harbour flat raided by police. Then a covert raid on an Essex lock-up uncovered £61 million worth of cocaine hidden in holdalls, and arrests reached from Colombian suppliers to Wright’s own son. As the net closed, Wright disappeared, fleeing abroad to become one of Britain’s most wanted fugitives.

He was eventually traced to the Costa del Sol, arrested and extradited to face trial, where former associates gave evidence against him.

In the end, it was time, surveillance, phone calls and the steady unravelling of loyalty from the people who worked with him that brought him down. The people who once moved his cocaine turned on him one by one.

On 3 April 2007, Brian Brendan Wright was sentenced to 30 years after evading investigators for more than a decade. In total, there were 20 criminals captured, from Colombian cartels to the streets of Britain.

Wright was released from prison in April 2020.

BBC 5 Live did ask him to take part in this podcast. He declined, but told us, through a contact, "Mr Wright appreciates the interest in his story but has chosen not to participate in the podcast. He wishes the producers well with their project".

You can listen to BBC Radio 5 Live's new series of Gangster: The Story of The Milkman on BBC Sounds.

It’s hosted by investigative journalist Livvy Haydock and uncovers the story of Brian Brendan Wright, the racehorse owner and racing regular who investigators say became one of Britain's biggest cocaine traffickers in the 1990s.

For the first time, the officers who spent 11 years hunting him, alongside the smugglers who worked for him, tell the story of how he was finally brought to justice.

Across the six-part series, Livvy speaks to former customs officers, cartel insiders and people who knew Wright, revealing how he built a transatlantic cocaine network and examining the decade-long pursuit that led to his arrest.