Their bags were so full of drugs, 'Cocaine Cowgirls' had little room for underwear
To their Instagram fans who saw their vacation photos, they were two beautiful, glamorous, 20-something Canadian women enjoying a luxurious, 40-day cruise to Australia.
The Sea Princess stopped at many ports along the way — Ireland, New York City, Bermuda, Colombia, Ecuador, Chile and points in the South Pacific.
The women lived it up. They wore bikinis and cocktail dresses, rode on ATVs, sipped cocktails from coconuts and posed for selfies in Times Square. Their photos were sun-drenched, steamy, colorful.
The New York Daily News calls the pictures "evidence."
In 2016, Melina Roberge and Isabelle Lagace — and a male alleged accomplice — were accused of smuggling $30 million worth of cocaine into Australia on that cruise ship, “the largest seizure in Australia of narcotics carried by passengers of a cruise ship or airliner,” according to CBC.
The women became known internationally as the "Cocaine Cowgirls," a reference to the "cocaine cowboys" who ruled Miami's drug scene in the 1980s.
This week, The Telegraph, a British publication, reported that Roberge and the third person — a 64-year-old man from Quebec named Andre Tamine — have pleaded guilty to smuggling cocaine into Sydney on that ship that began its voyage in Great Britain.
The pleas bring the case, which was set to go to trial this week, close to an end.
Lagace, 30, admitted in November to having a hand in the operation and was sentenced to seven-and-a-half years in prison, with eligibility for parole in 2021.
At sentencing the former porn actress claimed she had to be a drug mule to clear a $15,000 debt. She claimed she was getting death threats before she was "given an ultimatum," Australian TV reported.
Lagace called her actions an “error in judgment” that will haunt her for the rest of her life.
“It pains me to know my most defining years of womanhood will be spent in jail,” she told the court. “I feel remorse and anger at myself about being involved with people who are part of a dirty, dirty drug trade.”
According to The National Post, Roberge, 25, and Tamine, 65, both from Quebec, originally denied involvement in the operation. Roberge's lawyer told the court she didn't know there were drugs in the suitcase found in the small cabin she shared with Lagace.
But both changed their pleas to guilty ahead of trial in a bid for lighter sentences, the Post reported.
The maximum penalty for importing a commercial quantity of cocaine into Australia is life behind bars.
In August of 2016 in Sydney Harbor, the Australian Border Force, using drug-sniffing dogs, reportedly found 200 pounds of cocaine all three had allegedly stashed onboard. Authorities allegedly found 77 pounds of cocaine in the cabin shared by the two women, and 130 pounds more in Tamine's room.
The CBC reported at the time that the trio boarded the ship at the British port city of Southampton. Police didn't know whether they boarded with the drugs or picked them up at one of the several South American ports along the way.
“With 95 kilograms of cocaine stuffed into their suitcases, these three Canadian nationals did not have much room for clean underwear or spare toothbrushes,” the Australian border patrol alleged at the time on Facebook, according to Heavy.com.
"Following an international joint operation targeting drug smuggling syndicates, our detector dogs boarded a cruise ship in Sydney and sniffed out the narcotics. The huge haul represents a record for drugs seized off a cruise vessel coming into Australia.”
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Canada Border Services Agency helped identify the three as "high-risk passengers" among the 1,800 people aboard the ship.
Authorities called them a "very well-organized syndicate." One prosecutor called the cruise ship a "floating warehouse" for drugs with the three Canadians as the minders.
Roberge, who entered her new plea of guilty last week, is scheduled to be sentenced on March 21. Tamine, who also entered his plea in February, will be sentenced in October.
This story was originally published March 1, 2018 at 2:56 PM with the headline "Their bags were so full of drugs, 'Cocaine Cowgirls' had little room for underwear."