A Florida court sentenced 42-year-old Ukrainian citizen Igor Polshyn from Yalta and 52-year-old Oleksii Tsurkan from Moscow, Russia, to 25 years in a federal prison for smuggling $10 million worth of cocaine on a “ghost ship.”
The pair were found guilty by a federal jury on Sept. 30, 2016 and sentenced by Susan C. Bucklew in Tampa, Florida on Jan. 13, according to a statement by the U.S. Department of Justice.
A U.S. Customs and Border Protection airplane detected the sailboat flying a Spanish flag and registration traveling with no lights 90 kilometers south of the Dominican Republic in November, 2015. U.S. narcotics officials in Madrid traced the boat registration number back to a sailboat near Barcelona. They said the Spanish identity was stolen to mask its true identity.
The U.S. customs authorities alerted the U.S. Coast Guard and they interdicted the sailboat 42 kilometers south of the Dominican Republic on its course towards the Mona Passage, a strait between the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. Polshyn and Tsurkan were the only people onboard the vessel.
“During an initial safety sweep, the Coast Guard found over 100 kilograms of cocaine over a bilge access. It ultimately recovered an additional 270 kilograms of cocaine, for a total of 370 kilograms of cocaine, including cocaine commingled with the food supplies of the crew,” the statement read.
