The Rise and Fall of Jamie Cassidy: From FA Youth Cup Champion to Drug Trafficking Convict

Jamie Cassidy after winning the 1996 FA Youth Cup

Jamie Cassidy was a surname that walked the path of promise. His conditions were praised as much as those of two other men who became Liverpool legends: Jamie Carragher and Michael Owen. Injuries began to punish him too soon, football became part of the past very quickly and the criminal world captured him. Today he faces a life sentence after agreeing to be part of a drug trafficking network.

At age 46, Cassidy was found guilty of participating in a multimillion-dollar drug operation that sent large quantities of cocaine from South America to Europe, which would be run by his older brother Jonathan Cassidy (50 years old), according to the English newspaper The Mirror after recording the statements before the court.

Through this business they transported “hundreds of kilograms” of drugs to Liverpool. According to the investigation cited by the Mirror, the cocaine was shipped from Brazil, Ecuador, Colombia and Bolivia to Amsterdam. Once they arrived from the Netherlands to the county of Merseyside in modified vehicles, Jamie directed the distribution throughout England and Scotland, relying on a group of people he “trusted.”

Prosecutor Richard Wright KC stated that the former Liverpool man had a “managerial” administrative role, for which he received a salary in the “business” that his brother Jonathan had together with a partner mentioned by the Daily Mail as Nasar Ahmed (51 years old). ). This medium states that these three men were specifically accused of importing 356 kilos of cocaine from South America to the United Kingdom in two shipments registered in March and April 2020, which would have an “estimated street value” of more than $35 million.

However, the team of prosecutors considers that this shipment that they managed to intercept was just a “photo of the operation”, since they consider that the drug trafficking network has been operating for years. They claim that the illegal money they earned was validated through real estate businesses: they bought land in Liverpool and even an old cinema.

They even claim that to communicate they used EncroChat devices, which was defined in England as a “WhatsApp for criminals.” In that hidden world, the former Liverpool man had a code pseudonym “Nuclear-Dog” and his brother “Whisky-Wasp”. The network began to be the target of investigators when a group of detectives in France exposed this encrypted chat system, which exposed thousands of criminals. “The devices were used to organize the purchase, import, sale and distribution of quantities of several kilos throughout the north of England,” they explained at Manchester Crown Court. Among the most curious details, the Mirror warns that they found messages on Jonathan Cassidy’s phone, where he boasted of having the same birthday as Chapo Guzmán, known worldwide for leading a drug cartel in Mexico.

They place the aforementioned Ahmed as an “intermediary and money transfer agent”, at the same time that they warn that Jamie’s work was associated with “accounting”: recording the quantities of cocaine before being distributed and managing the millions in cash that they received for payments.

The plot has completely unique moments. Initially, Cassidy’s brother managed to evade the raid that arrested the members of the drug trafficking network and escaped to Dubai, where he sought to buy a mansion valued at 3 million dollars and even requested a bed that cost almost 30 thousand dollars, he detailed. the Daily Mail. From there he carefully followed the judicial movements, to the point that he searched the Internet for Jamie’s name to find out if his brother had also been arrested. In October 2020 he returned to his country thinking that the situation was under control, but he was arrested at Manchester airport. Former Liverpool man Jamie suffered the same fate a month later at his house, where they found the encrypted phone.

The three people mentioned pleaded guilty to conspiracy to “evade the prohibition on the importation of controlled drugs”, they also admitted “conspiracy to supply Class A drugs” and “conspiracy to transfer criminal property”.

Jamie Cassidy was one of the promises along with Carragher and Owen

The topic is all over England’s sports covers because Cassidy truly was a rising star when injuries cut short his future. His name resonated when he arrived in the Reds’ youth team. At the age of 15 he was the top scorer for the English youth team (three of those goals came in the 1994 European Championships) and shone as a key player in the Liverpool team that won the 1996 FA Youth Cup along with Carragher, Owen and David Thompson. In the final they beat the West Ham youth team that had Frank Lampard and Rio Ferdinand as notable surnames.

The leg and knee injuries were a turning point: Liverpool decided to release him in 1999 when he was 21 years old and he decided to try for Cambridge United. But his career was already over. “He would have been a Liverpool regular if he hadn’t suffered so much from injuries,” Carragher said in the autobiography he published in 2008.

2024-03-21 14:18:00
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