ABSTRACT
On 3 October 2007, Polish-born Ricardo Fanchini was arrested at his home in London and subsequently extradited to the United States (US), where in August 2008 he was indicted on a total of 20 separate criminal counts. The charges listed in his indictment included conspiracy to import, distribute and supply a variety of illegal drugs (including the trafficking of large amounts of heroin and cocaine from Thailand to the US via Belgium and Poland); money laundering; fraud; illegal possession of firearms and general criminal enterprise. These offences were not only intercontinental in scope, but had also been committed over a sustained time period, spanning the decade 1997–07.
