In a significant blow to organized crime, one of the UK’s most wanted men has been jailed for his role in a £100m cocaine smuggling plot. The operation, which involved hiding cocaine in banana boxes, was dismantled by authorities after an extensive investigation.

One of the most wanted men in the UK has been sentenced to 20 years in prison for planning to smuggle almost a tonne of cocaine from South America to Scotland inside a shipment of bananas.

Jamie Stevenson, widely recognized as “Iceman,” confidently admitted to orchestrating the importation of the drug that was intercepted by Border Force teams at Dover in September 2020.

The shipment from Ecuador – which contained 952 blocks of cocaine within 119 foil packages – was addressed to a Glasgow fruit merchant.

The inquiry, named Operation Pepperoni, was led by Police Scotland and the National Crime Agency (NCA) as part of their Organized Crime Partnership (Scotland).

The probe was closely linked to Operation Venetic, which has seen hundreds of arrests after the infiltration of encrypted communications platform EncroChat.

The authorities estimated the cocaine’s value at £100m. Although a lawyer for one of the defendants in the case said the drugs have achieved “a value of £76m”.

Stevenson, 59, admitted to participating in organized crime by producing and supplying etizolam, commonly called street Valium.

He was previously jailed in 2007 for money laundering, with his operation likened to hit US television series The Sopranos – which revolved around the escapades of mafia boss Tony Soprano.

That prison sentence followed Operation Folklore, an investigation by the Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency which used electronic surveillance, undercover officers and forensic accounting to probe his criminal activities.

The agency’s director general at the time, Graeme Pearson, told the BBC that Stevenson “has for many decades now been a very senior figure in organized crime”, adding: “He ran his business in much in the same way as the Sopranos ran their business as shown on television.”

After the discovery of a suspected etizolam pill factory in Kent in June 2020, Stevenson, of Rutherglen in South Lanarkshire, fled the country.

The banana shipment full of cocaine was then seized three months later while he was on the run.

Police described him as a “dangerous individual” when he appeared in a list of the UK’s most wanted in 2022.

Within weeks of the appeal, he was arrested while out jogging in the Netherlands and was extradited back to Britain to face justice.

At the High Court in Glasgow in August, Stevenson pleaded guilty to the two charges mid-trial and returned for sentencing on Wednesday.

Co-defendant Paul Bowes, 53, admitted his participation in organized crime by being involved in the production and supply of Class C drug etizolam at a string of premises, including in Abu Dhabi, in London, and in Rochester, Kent.

Bowes was jailed for six years.

Fruit market trader David Bilsland, 68, Gerard Carbin, 45, Ryan McPhee, 34, and Lloyd Cross, 32, also admitted serious organized crime and drug offences.

Carbin was sentenced to seven years in prison, both Bilsland and Cross received six years, and McPhee was jailed for four years.

Meanwhile, Lewis Connor, 27, was jailed for three years in July after the investigation found encrypted phone messages that proved he had set fire to properties and vehicles across central Scotland.