Murderer Led Plot to Get Ealing Drug Smuggler Out of Jail

Elaborate scheme aimed to falsely claim that juror had been bribed

Stefan Baldauf. Picture: NCA

An Ealing man jailed for his role in a £45 million international drug-smuggling plot has been named as one of the offenders at the heart of an extraordinary attempt to derail a major criminal trial.

Stefan Baldauf, 66, formerly of Midhurst Road, Ealing, is currently serving a 28-year sentence for his part in an organised crime group (OCG) that tried to send 448 kilos of MDMA to Australia hidden inside the arm of an industrial excavator. He was convicted alongside co-conspirator Danny Brown in December 2022 following a National Crime Agency (NCA) investigation under Operation Venetic, the UK response to the takedown of the encrypted communications platform EncroChat.

This week, the NCA revealed that Baldauf’s associates – including a convicted murderer already serving two life sentences – mounted a sophisticated scheme to falsely claim that jurors in the drug trial had been bribed, in an effort to have the convictions quashed.

The conspiracy was orchestrated by William Todd, 61, who was 21 years into two life sentences for the attempted murder of a business partner and the killing of a bodyguard in Pangbourne in 2001. From behind bars, Todd directed accomplices Danny Thomas, 46, and Sheree Avard, 41, to fabricate allegations of jury tampering during Baldauf and Brown’s trial at Kingston Crown Court.

When the jury retired to consider verdicts in June 2022, false reports were sent to the court and police claiming that five jurors had been bribed to convict the defendants. The claims collapsed almost immediately when investigators discovered that two of the named jurors had been discharged months earlier.

NCA officers later identified Thomas on court CCTV secretly recording jurors’ names as they were sworn in. He was arrested at Heathrow Airport in November 2022 carrying a phone linking him directly to Todd, who had been using a hidden mobile concealed inside a DVD player in his prison cell.

William Todd ran the attempt at getting the convictions quashed from a jail cell. Picture: NCA

After the first attempt failed, the group tried again. Avard contacted Baldauf’s and Brown’s legal teams under a false name, claiming she had been in a relationship with a juror who had confessed to being pressured into convicting the men. When this story began to unravel, the conspirators paid for a fake passport and arranged for a woman in Romania to sign a fabricated deposition repeating the false allegations.

Their aim was to persuade the courts that Baldauf and Brown’s convictions were unsafe.

At Southwark Crown Court, Thomas and Avard admitted conspiring to pervert the course of justice and were jailed for three years and four months, and one year, respectively. Todd was convicted of the same charge and sentenced to seven years.

NCA senior investigating officer Steve Ahmet said the case showed “the remarkable lengths that high-harm criminals will go to in order to cheat justice”.

The Crown Prosecution Service added that the plot “undermines a cornerstone of our justice system”, praising investigators for exposing the conspiracy.

Baldauf’s original conviction stemmed from an NCA investigation into encrypted EncroChat messages. Officers linked him to the OCG after he sent an image of a brass door sign in which his face was visible in the reflection. His co-conspirator Brown inadvertently helped investigators by sending a photo of his French bulldog, “Bob”, showing his partner’s phone number on the dog’s tag.

Both men were jailed for their roles in the attempted shipment of MDMA to Australia, one of the largest drug consignments ever intercepted by UK authorities.