Australian “Pablo Escobar” Vaso Ulic arrested in dramatic raid over massive $500 million cocaine haul, following 10-year manhunt across three continents

Australian drug lord Vaso Ulic has been caught in a dramatic police raid in a massive international cocaine smuggling operation after being on the run for years.

The former Kings Cross police officer, whose criminal network is allegedly so large he is known as the new Pablo Escobar, has been arrested over a 2.5 tonne shipment.

Police in Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro (where Ulic lives in luxury on a private vineyard with vines imported from South Australia) arrested the 65-year-old on Wednesday.

He is accused of masterminding a plot to import a 2.5 tonne shipment of cocaine to Australia and Europe from Colombia.

Ulic, who fled Australia in 2005 after a $50 million ecstasy bust, was arrested along with nine others, including his son Nikola, in a police operation – codenamed “General” – ordered by Montenegro’s Special State Prosecutor’s Office.

The joint operation, which lasted several months, involved the Australian Federal Police, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the United States Drug Enforcement Agency.

Australian Federal Police have been assisting Montenegrin authorities for at least the past seven years in pursuing Ulic for allegedly using their territory to coordinate massive drug shipments to Australia.

Intelligence reports into his alleged trafficking have convinced police that he is the godfather of a huge trade in illegal drugs and weapons that are smuggled into Australia every year.

Ulic is now in pre-trial detention in Montenegro but has denied any wrongdoing, Libertas Press reported.

It was previously considered an Australian Priority Organisational Target (APOT) by the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, but that status no longer exists.

Ulic was last arrested in Montenegro in 2017, when a senior AFP officer said that, in addition to trafficking ecstasy, “he traffics cocaine, methamphetamine… and launders money. He is a very sophisticated and high-level character in the world of crime.”

Following the latest raid to arrest the gang of 10 suspects on Wednesday, investigators allege the group attempted to smuggle 1.57 tonnes of cocaine from South America to Australia and Europe during the Covid pandemic in October 2020.

The shipment “was intercepted by the detection authorities in Colombia,” said Vukas Radonjic of Montenegro’s Special Prosecution Service.

A second shipment of 900 kg of the drug, scheduled for June 2021, was intercepted by detection authorities in Australia.

Ulic was born in Albania in the late 1950s and emigrated to Australia in 1979.

He became a petty ‘thug’ on what was known in the Sydney underworld as the ‘Golden Mile’ of Kings Cross, where corrupt policemen were in the pay of criminals.

Ulic graduated to become a major player leading a criminal empire that spanned the globe and centred on massive shipments of cocaine and other illicit substances through Sydney’s docks.

When Ulic was last arrested in Montenegro in 2017, the AFP did not request the extradition of Ulic, then 58, despite having been a priority target for 12 years.

There is no extradition treaty between Australia and Montenegro, but fugitives can be returned under a legal agreement.

At the time, Commander Bruce Hill, the AFP’s head of organised crime, said: “We can say categorically and without any doubt that he is one of the kingpins, if not THE kingpin, of drug trafficking into Australia.”