How the businessman loving polo was a secret global Lord of drugs

On the surface, Mohammed Asif Hafesa was an ascending individual.

A global businessman and ambassador of a prestigious London polo club, he rubs his shoulders with the British elite, including members of the royal family.

He also regularly conveyed detailed information to the authorities in the UK and the Middle East, which in some cases led to the capture of huge drug supplies. He was motivated, he said, simply by what he saw as his “moral obligation to limit and emphasize criminal activities.”

At least that's what he would make people think.

In fact, Hafesa himself was what US officials have identified as “one of the most fruitful drug traffickers in the world.”

From his residence in the UK, he has been a puppet master of a huge drug empire, delivering many tons of heroin, methamphetamine and hashish from bases in Pakistan and India that have been allocated around the world. The banks he informed were his rivals – and his motivation was to save the market for his competitors.

His status in the underworld was won by the Sultan manager.

But this criminal authority and prestige would not continue forever. Following a complex joint operation between the British and US authorities, the 66 -year -old Hafesa was extradited from the United Kingdom in 2023. He pleaded guilty last November.

On Friday, he was sentenced to 16 years in a New York prison for drug imports conspiracy – including heroin for millions of doses – in the United States. After being in custody of 2017, Hafesa's sentence will end in 2033.

The BBC closely follows the case of Hafeez. We have collected information from court documents, corporate lists and interviews with people who knew him.

We wanted to find out how he managed to stay under the radar for so long – and how he eventually got caught.

Hafesa was born in September 1958 into a middle -class family in Lahore, Pakistan. One of the six children, his upbringing was comfortable. The people in Lahor who knew the family told the BBC that his father had a factory near the city. Later, Hafez also told the US court that he had trained as a commercial pilot.

From the early 1990s to around the mid-2010s, he managed an externally legitimate umbrella company called Sarwani International Corporation, with subsidiaries in Pakistan, UAE and UK.

According to its website – which has been closed since then – it has been selling technical equipment to military, governments and police forces around the world, including drug detection equipment.

Other businesses under the umbrella of Savani were a textile company registered in various countries, an Italian restaurant in Lahor, which was a franchise of a well -known Knightsbridge brand and a company named Tipmoor, based near Windsor to the West of London, which specializes in Polo and Horse Service.

Not only did these businesses provide him with a luxury lifestyle, they gave him access to the most exclusive circles in the UK. He was named as an international ambassador of the prestigious Ham Polo club for at least three years, from 2009 to 2011. He and his wife Shahina were also filmed in chat with Prince William and hugging Prince Harry in the club in 2009.

Ham Polo Club told the BBC that Hafez had never been a club member, that the club no longer had “ambassadors” and that the current council “had no links to it”. He added that the event, which Hafes and his wife were filming, meeting with the princes, was “managed by a third party.”

Savani's various global weapons were dissolved at different stages in 2010, according to their ads for House Companies and equivalent global registers.

A former Savani employee, based in the UAE, told the BBC that he suspected “something that is happening” when working for the business, as even big projects are “paid only in money”. The employee who wanted not to be identified for fear of repression – said he eventually left the business because he felt uncomfortable with it.

“There were no (bank) transactions, no records, no existence,” he told the BBC.

Hafeez will also periodically write letters to the UAE and the UK authorities, informing about competitive cartels, under the guise, to be an interested public member.

The BBC saw those, as well as letters he received in response from the British Embassy in Dubai and the UK's domestic office, thank him and expresses his appreciation for his association.

The interior office told the BBC that it did not comment on individual correspondence.

The Foreign, Community and Development Office and the Dubai Government contacted the BBC for comment, but did not answer.

Hafeez family members shared these letters with the BBC in 2018 while it was involved in a long legal fight against extradition extradition in the United States.

They also presented them to the courts in the UK and later in the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) as proof that he was an informant and needed protection. All the courts did not agree and ruled that this was a bet on Hafesa to free itself from the competitor market.

Hafesa, said ECP, is “someone who has attracted the attention of the authorities the criminal behavior of others whom he knew was actual or potential rivals of his essential criminal enterprise.”

While Hafes wrote these letters, in 2014 there was a meeting that – although he was not there – it would lead to his decline.

Two of Hafeez's close associates met with a potential buyer from Colombia in an apartment in Mombasa, Kenya. They burned a small amount of heroin to demonstrate how clean it was, and they said they could supply him with each “100%… white crystal”.

The supplier of this high quality heroin, they told the buyer, is a person from Pakistan, known as the “Sultan” – that is, Hafesa.

What they will soon learn is that the “buyer” from Colombia actually works undercover for the US Administration for Drug Administration (DEA). The whole meeting was part of a complex sting operation and was hidden – footage received from the BBC.

The US court documents reveal that the deal was coordinated by Bactash and Ibrahim Akasha, two brothers who lead a violent cartel in Kenya. Their father himself was afraid, who was killed in the Red Light area in Amsterdam in 2000.

The deal also included Vicky Goshagiri, an Indian citizen who manages Akashas' operations.

In October 2014, with Akashas, ​​Goswami and Hafesa, they still do not know who the buyers are actually, 99 kg of heroin and 2 kg of crystal meth were delivered to the fake Colombian traffickers. Akashi promised to provide hundreds of pounds more than each medicine.

A month later, the Akasha and Goswami brothers were arrested in Mombasa. They were released on bail shortly afterwards and spent more than two years fighting extradition in the United States.

In the background, US human rights worked with colleagues in the UK to unite their case against Hafes, partly used evidence gathered by devices they had seized when arrested Goswami and the Akasha brothers. They had found numerous references to Hafeez as a major supplier and were able to find enough evidence to identify it as Sultan.

Following accusations in the United States, he did not stop one of the men, Goswami, to continue his illegal enterprise. In 2015, while on bail in Kenya, he hatched a plan with Hafesa for transporting several tonnes of medicine called ephedrine from a chemical factory in Solapur, India, to Mozambique.

Ephedrine, a powerful medicine that is legal in limited quantities, is used to prepare methamphetamine. The two men – Goswami and Hafesa – planned to create a Met factory in the capital of Mozambique, Maputo, the US court documents show. But their scheme was abandoned in 2016, when police attacked the Solapur plant and seized 18 tonnes of ephedrine.

The Akasha brothers and Goswami finally went on a flight to the United States to face the trial in January 2017.

Hafesa was arrested eight months later in London, in his apartment in St. John's wealthy neighborhood. He was detained in Belmarsh prison in southeast London, and it was he who spent six years fighting extradition in the United States.

Great development happened in 2019 in the United States. Goswami pleaded guilty and told New York a court that he had agreed to cooperate with prosecutors. The Akash brothers also pleaded guilty.

Bactash Akasha was sentenced to 25 years in prison. His brother Ibrahim was sentenced to 23 years.

Goshawi, who is yet to be condemned, would have testified against Hafesa in the United States if the case went to court.

Belmarsh Hafes was running out of options.

He tried to stop the extradition to the United States – but failed to convince magistrates, the Supreme Court in London and the ECtHR, that he was actually an informant of the authorities, which was exposed to his fellow prisoners. ”

He also claims that the conditions in the US prison will be “inhuman and humiliating” for him due to his health conditions, including type 2 diabetes and asthma.

He lost all these arguments at every stage and was extradited in May 2023.

His case did not go to court. In November last year, Hafesa pleaded guilty to two charges of conspiracy for the production and distribution of heroin, methamphetamine and hashish and for introduction to the United States.

The prosecutors have described the “extremely happy circumstances” of Hafez's life in advance, which “cast his decision to scheme in raw relief … and to profit from the distribution of dangerous substances that destroy life and whole communities.”

“Unlike many traffickers whose drug activities are taken over, at least partly, out of despair, poverty and lack of educational opportunities,” they said, “The defendant lived a life filled with privilege and choice.”