MOST people wouldn’t look twice at the mild-mannered former bus driver who had become a cleaner to support his family.
A slightly tubby middle-aged man, living in Hendon in north London, Jesus Ruiz-Henao , now 64, had carefully curated a persona as a upstanding member of the community who had a charity helping kids back home.
But in reality, he was a ruthless drug trafficker who bought £1billion worth of cocaine into the UK and was at the centre of two different police investigations for his illegal dealing.
In a new documentary on Discovery+, The Bus Driver: Britain’s Cocaine King, Ruiz-Henao boasted: “My life story is a lot like Hollywood movie. I was doing the drug trafficking for over 10 years and I was arrested and sentenced for over a billion pounds of cocaine.
“I was like a pioneer of the cocaine in the UK.”
Finally arrested in the early noughties, after four years of investigative work by the National Crime Squad and the Metropolitan Police , cops believe reckon Ruiz-Henao’s affable demeanour hid a much nastier side.
In an exclusive interview with The Sun, former Detective Sergeant Ian Floyd told The Sun: “He’s a manipulator. He uses people. And the threat of violence doesn’t have to be direct. It can be inherent. It can be perceived.
“Although he’s very softly spoken, not outwardly violent, there’s always that level behind him where people will perceive a threat, even if it’s not overt.”
Ruiz-Henao had spent his teenager years as a low level cocaine dealer in Colombia following the death of his father in 1974.
He got into the trade as a quick and easy way to make money – and it didn’t hurt that some of his cousins were already working with cartels .
But when Ruiz-Henao lost a stash of drugs and wasn’t able to pay what he owed, he was targeted by gangs and shot in the stomach, prompting a move to the UK in 1986.
He took his wife, sister, and brother-in-law with him, claiming the move was to allow him to live a normal life but, unable to repay the lost money to cartels, he later admitted “If I didn’t move to the UK, I was already dead.”
With the help of his wife, and local MP Jeremy Corbyn , the crook was able to claim asylum in the UK, with indefinite right to remain, and got a job driving a bus.
But he claims everyone kept asking him for cocaine because of his Colombian roots and 1989, just two years after he began driving the 134 double-decker, he returned to selling cocaine.
My life story is a lot like Hollywood movie … I was like a pioneer of the cocaine in the UK
Jesus Ruiz-Henao
Initially, it would take Ruiz-Henao up to five weeks to sell a kilo of cocaine that he had got through friends and relatives back home.
By 1993, he was selling cocaine in bulk and had to quit his bus driving job to focus more on his burgeoning criminal empire.
At the time of his arrest in November 2003, he and his brother-in-law, Mario Tascon, now 42, were thought to be smuggling around £25million worth of cocaine into the UK each year.
Idolising Escobar
In the documentary, the former drug dealer brags about his life of crime and ambition to be like Colombian cartel boss Pablo Escobar .
He even goes as far as to claim he met the notorious drug lord, saying: “My first bicycle in my life, I get it from the hands of Pablo Escobar.
“I was thinking he has the power, he has the money. I want to be powerful like them. I want to have everything.”
But investigators who brought down Ruiz-Henao in 2003 have slammed the kingpin as a “budget version” of the feared cartel boss.
We used to get 20 to 30 prostitutes. They’d go around the swimming pool just wearing their knickers and we’d party for two to three days there
Jesus Ruiz-Henao
Former Detective Sergeant Steve Lear, who was part of the team who put Ruiz-Henao behind bars, said: “The story about him getting a bike from Pablo Escobar, I think that’s just complete hogwash. They’re from completely different parts of Colombia.”
Ex-Detective Sergeant Ian Floyd added: “He was a budget version of what he wanted to be, which was Pablo.”
Family connections
Ruiz-Henao had easy access to the drugs thanks to relatives in the dangerous Norte Valle Cartel, which rose to prominence after the Medellín Cartel fell apart following Escobar’s death in 1993 and the rival Cali Cartel were destroyed by police.
The cartel supplied London-based Ruiz-Henao with hundreds of kilos of cocaine.
In return, he sent millions of pounds back through various routes to pay for the drugs from wire transfer services, people couriering the cash personally and even through his charity allegedly helping poor kids in Colombia.
One of his money launderers, Fernando Carranza Reyes who worked at the Le Grand Colombia, had become a police informant and allowed cops to build a case around the money being sent back to the country.
Clever concealments
As larger and larger quantities were being shipped to the UK in the early noughties, Ruiz-Henao and the cartel became more inventive with their methods of transportation.
Ian explained: “There were shipments out of Colombia in submarines , homemade submarines which had a tonne of cocaine on it, smuggling cocaine in through pineapples, dissolved into pineapple juice. Thousands upon thousands of cans were imported.”
Another cocaine importation Ian’s team intercepted was impregnated into a woman’s suitcase.
“The suitcase she was carrying, we could tell from a swab test, contained cocaine,” he said.
“When we weighed the suitcase, it was five kilos heavier than a normal suitcase of that description. They’d managed to dissolve the cocaine into the plastic, but we couldn’t get it out.”
The police were never able to recover the drugs from the plastic.
While the cops couldn’t figure it out, the cartel had flown over a specialist chemist to extract the Class A drug.
Ruiz-Henao bought a small house near Clacton-on-Sea with his drug profits and set up a home laboratory for the cocaine to be extracted from the plastic.
Ruiz-Henao said: “There’s a big container of chemicals put in there and just mix it up and the cocaine will sink and the plastic, it floats up.”
He also boasted of having customs officers on his payroll to ensure the laced suitcases and the passengers bringing them were able to get through the border without issues.
Lavish holidays
The crook believed that because he didn’t spend lavishly in the UK and paid someone to attend a cleaning job as him, that cops weren’t going to notice him.
But he did go wild on trips abroad to Spain and other countries, where he felt it was safe to splash the cash.
Ruiz-Henao boasted: “We used to get 20 to 30 prostitutes. They’d go around the swimming pool just wearing their knickers and we’d party for two to three days there.”
But he wasn’t as discrete as he thought. Under new rules in the early 2000s, the cops were able to get access to his credit cards.
Steve said: “One of the things that we used in financial investigation in his case, was the amount of money that he had spent utilising his credit cards and his bank cards over his legitimate earnings.
“He was allegedly earning £45,000 per year as a cleaner and he was spending, I think, around about to £250,000.”
And Ian’s team were tracking the drug money to Colombia and then back to Ruiz-Henao.
The teams combined forces after both posting surveillance on a property belonging to the kingpin.
This meant that, when they swooped in to arrest Ruiz-Henao and the gang in November 2003, they were confident that he’d have no choice but to plead guilty and he did.
In 2006, Ruiz was sentenced to 19 years in prison after pleading guilty for conspiracy to supply class A drugs. He was handed a further ten years for a guilty plea for money laundering.
Following the arrest of Ruiz-Henao and his second in command Tascon, the price of cocaine went up 50 per cent, indicating the gang’s large share of the market.
But cops rubbish the crooks claim that he pioneered cocaine in the UK.
Ian said: “He was a cog in the wheel of the supply of cocaine. And he was probably one of the larger cogs. But I wouldn’t necessarily put it the whole exponential rise in cocaine demand, down to him.
“Cocaine was the becoming the drug of choice, and the demand for it was there, and he was one of many supplying it.”
After serving his sentence in the UK, Jesus Ruiz-Henao was deported to Colombia, where he was once
- The Bus Driver: Britain’s Cocaine King, streaming exclusively on discovery+ from August 11th
