Boat used in gun-smuggling crime features in TV show Ill Gotten Gains
The boat used in Britain's biggest-known gun smuggling operation is to feature on a television series about selling off criminal assets.
The story of the Albernina yacht, which arrived with a deadly cargo of £100,000 worth of arms near Cuxton Marina outside Rochester in Kent last year, will be among those included in the BBC series Ill Gotten Gains.
The National Crime Agency (NCA) said the assault weapons seized were similar to those used in the terror attack on the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine's Paris offices.
They were intercepted because the agency had the plotters under surveillance and swooped to seize the cache of 31 assault rifles and sub-machine guns before it could be buried and then passed into the wrong hands.
The mastermind behind the operation, Harry Shilling, bragged "we now officially gangsters" after 22 assault rifles and nine Skorpion sub-machine guns from eastern Europe sailed up the River Medway from Boulogne in France.
Shilling, 26, was handed a sentence of 30 years in jail, plus five years on extended licence, while Michael Defraine was given 27 years in jail, plus five years on extended licence.
Ill Gotten Gains will also feature the cases of Kirk Claus, one of the UK's biggest second-hand dodgy car dealers, who is ordered to pay back £6 million he cheated out of customers by selling them faulty cars, and con-woman Claire Miller who duped an estimated 17,000 men into parting with money to join an escort agency she claimed to have set up.
Police seized her large collection of shoes and handbags from brands such as Chanel, Louboutin and Jimmy Choo, and sold them all off at a Proceeds of Crime auction.
The series also looks at how proceeds of crime money then goes to good causes, including helping to fund a Manchester youth club, Lylac Ridge farm in Wales which helps disadvantaged children and adults, and the Chesterfield Canal Trust.
:: Ill Gotten Gains will be broadcast on BBC One at 9.15am from Monday to Friday.
