By Gangsters Inc. Editors
Çetin Gören, a Turkish-Dutch drug trafficker long considered one of Europe’s most powerful cocaine brokers, was taken into custody early Sunday during a large-scale police operation across Turkey. Authorities believe he was the mastermind behind a record-breaking cocaine shipment seized earlier this month off the Canary Islands.
That shipment contained nearly 10 metric tons of coke concealed among a legitimate cargo of salt aboard a cargo ship. The ship was intercepted on January 7 during a joint operation involving the Spanish Navy and National Police, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and Britain’s National Crime Agency (NCA). It was the largest single maritime cocaine seizure ever made by Spanish authorities.
According to Turkish media, police carried out dawn raids on 19 locations, arresting at least seven suspects. Authorities seized real estate, bank accounts, and cryptocurrency during the operation. Gören was among those detained and is believed to have played a central role in organizing the shipment.
Days after the seizure, Turkish newspaper Gazete Pencere reported that law enforcement attention had turned squarely toward Gören as the alleged architect of the operation. Gören’s Dutch lawyer told Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad that his client told him “he has zero percent connection to that shipment”.
Career kingpin
Gören has been active in the drug trade since the mid-2000s. Brazilian police suspected he trafficked ecstasy into the South American country. By the 2010s, he had climbed the ladder and gotten into cocaine.
He was the suspected mastermind in the smuggling of a total of 15,000 kilograms of cocaine. One investigation into one shipment took two years and turned into one of the largest investigations of its kind. In October 2012, police seized 8,000 kilos of coke in the port of Antwerp in Belgium. The drugs were hidden inside a container packed with bananas from Ecuador. At the time this was the second-largest drug seizure ever made in Europe.
Dutch prosecutors later linked him to at least ten additional large-scale cocaine imports, often hidden among fruit shipments. The total street value approached €500 million, which earned him his nickname.
In 2016, he was sentenced in the Netherlands to 12 years in prison. But by then, he was already gone. Released from pretrial detention, he cut off his ankle monitor and fled to Turkey.
He was eventually arrested again in Turkey and accused of leading a major trafficking and money laundering network. But he managed to get out of that jam as well. In 2024, he was acquitted in a stunning legal outcome.
Now, the “€500 million Man” faces a new legal hurdle. Will he overcome it?
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