Tom PowellA BRITISH grandmother could be jailed for up to ten years over her alleged involvement in a Mafia drug-smuggling operation run out of Tenerife.
Sheryl Rogers, 46, spent 16 years as the lover of the Mafia boss in charge of a €125 million business smuggling up to six tons of cannabis from Morocco to Italy very month.
Horse-lover Rogers, from Surrey, UK, is accused of helping to launder hundreds of millions of pounds in profits from the operation.
She was arrested three years ago in a raid at her former lover Guiseppe Felaco’s home in Tenerife, spending five months in prison before being released on bail.
Felaco, the father of her 16-year-old son, died shortly after his arrest from cancer, aged 57.
And now, in a writ at Madrid’s Central Criminal Court, prosecutors claim Rogers ‘participated actively in financial operations’ to conceal money gained by illegal means.
Her trial, along with 20 other alleged members of the Nuvoletta family, one of Italy’s most dangerous criminal groups, will begin in months.
However, Rogers has described the charges as ‘daft’, claiming the police ‘got everything wrong’.
“I did not have anything to do with the business,” she said. “I was put down in the books as if I worked in his business but that was because we weren’t married and I had no social [security] and he wouldn’t let me work.”
Felaco reportedly claimed to have bought the 200-apartment Marina Palace resort in Adeje in Tenerife for £3.2million in 1999 with a bank loan.
But police believe he built the complex and installed henchmen to launder drugs profits.
I would of thought she must of had some idea where the money was coming from
From your’s and Judges’ statements, no longer is it believable that a wife doesn’t know “where the money she uses and enjoys comes from” – especially if she is an Officer of the Company generating the money. In a true democracy, all are equal under the aw – tho some do seem “more equal than others”!!