There’s something almost impressive about running a £3 million dirty cash operation during Covid lockdown when everyone else was making sourdough. Alistair McKenzie and Daniel Kerrigan were using EncroChat phones to coordinate money drops while the rest of us were learning Zoom.
Police raided their counting house in Clydebank in 2020 and found £300,000 stuffed in a Tesco bag for life. That detail alone tells you everything about the sophistication of this operation. Multi-million pound money laundering outfit, shopping bag logistics.
McKenzie, 60, ran the show from Knightswood. Kerrigan, 56, did the pickups. The messages showed £3.7 million in various currencies passing through their hands, shipped off to Birmingham and London. They even had a proper cash counting machine, because apparently counting three million quid by hand gets tedious.
EncroChat’s Final Gift
Both pled guilty at the High Court in Glasgow, which saves everyone the theatre of a trial. They’ve been remanded for sentencing in April, and I imagine the sheriff’s not going to be handing out community service.
EncroChat was supposed to be the encrypted phone network that kept criminals safe. Then the French police cracked it in 2020 and handed law enforcement across Europe a database of incriminating messages. It’s been a steady parade of guilty pleas ever since.
McKenzie and Kerrigan are just two more names on that list. They thought they were invisible, encrypted, untouchable. Then one day the police knocked on the door and found their retirement fund in a shopping bag.
Lockdown Entrepreneurs
What gets me is the timing. March 2020, the entire country’s locked down, nobody’s supposed to be going anywhere, and these two are running a cash logistics operation across multiple cities. The sheer brass neck of it.
They’ll have plenty of time to reflect on their career choices. I hope the bag for life was at least one of the sturdy ones.