Virgin Islander Wayne Stout, Jr, a 35-year-old BVI boat captain has been sentenced to nine years in US prison for conspiracy to distribute cocaine. The sentence was handed down in Orlando, Florida by District Judge Roy B. Dalton, Jr.
Stout Jr. was caught in June as part of a multi-million-dollar drug bust in the United States.
A surveillance operation executed by the Department of Homeland Security showed his coconspirator Avery Lans (55, St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands) as the orchestrator.
Lans was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in federal prison for conspiracy to distribute cocaine.
According to reports Lans’s sentence was enhanced based on the “danger he caused” during his attempted escape from law enforcement on June 1, 2022. After his arrest, HSI learned that Lans was convicted of second-degree murder in 1990 in the Virgin Islands and pardoned in 2014 after serving over 20 years of his 40-year sentence. Lans and Stout were indicted on June 15, 2022. Lans was convicted after a jury trial on October 3, 2022. Stout pleaded guilty on August 19, 2022.
A report showed that based on evidence presented during the trial, on June 1, 2022, Stout drove from Miami to Orlando and retrieved a duffle bag from a storage locker in the Edgewater area. Agents from Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) were conducting surveillance on Stout as he traveled from Miami to Orlando and as Stout left the storage locker and went to the parking lot of a restaurant in the Winter Park area. At approximately 1:45 p.m., Lans arrived and received the duffle bag in a short, 30-second meeting. After circling the block, Lans led HSI surveillance agents to the corner of Lee Road and Wymore Road, where he abruptly turned on to Wymore Road in an attempt to escape while dropping the duffle bag out of his passenger side window. After a brief high-speed chase, Lans was detained and the duffle bag was retrieved. It contained five kilograms of cocaine, wrapped in black tape with a marking on it.
When HSI agents searched the storage locker in Edgewater, they found three coolers containing 109 kilograms of cocaine, some of which contained the same black and gold marking as the five-kilogram bricks that Lans was carrying.
A kilogram of cocaine was estimated to be worth at least approximately $27,000. Lans was carrying $135,000 of cocaine when he unsuccessfully attempted to flee. The storage locker contained nearly $3 million of cocaine.