Published: September 3, 2026
MONROVIA – A grand jury has charged that George Wah Harria, alias Leroy Harris, owner of Private Bar Entertainment Center at Joe Bar in Paynesville, offered US$100,000 to two Liberia Drug Enforcement Agency special agents stationed at Roberts International Airport to recover 200 kilograms of cocaine seized there in June, and handed US$5,000 to one of them at the bar. Only one of the two agents is a defendant.
By Melvin Jackson
The other is named in the indictment as LDEA Commander Clarence Clarke. He is not among the defendants listed on the writ of arrest, and none of the counts available to the Liberian Investigator charges him. The indictment states that Harris, in a written statement to police, admitted that he called Clarke to say he had heard something had happened at the airport involving a friend of a co-defendant and asked Clarke to check with someone there.
The agent who is charged, Moses Jallah, is accused of taking US$5,000 from Harris at the bar as an inducement to swap or return the drugs. The same document uses Jallah as a source against Harris. It says Jallah told investigators that he went to the bar about 10 p.m. on June 7 after a WhatsApp call from Harris, and that Harris told him he owned 25 percent of the cocaine sitting in the airport cargo warehouse and intended to get it back.
Criminal Court ‘C’ issued the arrest warrant on Aug. 27 for the defendants, who are charged with unlicensed possession of controlled drugs, unlicensed importation, unlicensed sales and transportation in transit, illicit trafficking, criminal conspiracy, criminal facilitation, and money laundering. The possession and importation counts are graded as first-degree felonies, which the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act of 2023 makes non-bailable and punishable by 10 to 20 years.
The shipment at the center of the case departed from a residence on Old Road on June 5. According to the indictment, Paul J. King, general manager for operations at Global Logistics Services, used WhatsApp to contact Arthur B. Abdullai, country manager of Express Handling Services at the airport, and arranged to send six boxes weighing 200 kilograms on Brussels Airlines to Heathrow, declared as Maggi cubes and lappas. The consignee was listed as Usman Ali at an address on Bordesley Green in Birmingham, England.
King is accused of instructing co-defendant Emmanuel Kpah to deliver the boxes and pay US$2,150 in shipping costs to his residence on V.P. Road, Old Road, Sinkor, and to leave the money with his maid. Two men then collected the cargo and transported it to the airport.
It came apart at the weighbridge. A Global Logistics agent found that the cargo’s actual weight did not match the air waybill. The discrepancy went up the chain to co-defendant Philip Yeoh and then to Abdullai, who sent it back to King. The indictment says King promised to have the waybill amended, but the cargo still went to the scanner. There, an agent raised an alarm that the contents looked blurred and dark and called for a physical check.
The first box was opened on Sunday, June 7. It held a white powdery substance. An officer told the airport’s security director, Mohammed Gbowrah, and Yeoh sent photographs of the powder to King over WhatsApp. King, the indictment says, gave Yeoh two sets of phone numbers and told him to negotiate with the airport security officers holding the cargo, offering first US$400 and then US$600 to have it released.
Michael U.S. Brown, alias Rahim Bah, a former Roberts International Airport employee, is accused of arranging both this shipment and an earlier one. According to the indictment, on May 20 Brown called the Global Logistics office near St. Joseph Catholic Hospital Junction and arranged for four black boxes with yellow lids, delivered by Kpah and declared as Maggi cubes and lappas, with US$1,400 paid to move them to Europe. On June 5, he arranged six boxes and paid King another US$1,400 through a foreign exchange bureau on GSA Road named in the indictment as Seventeen Collateral Enterprise.
According to the indictment, when the powder was found, Brown called a security officer at Roberts International Airport and offered money to get the consignment released, then got into a vehicle with Harris and drove to the airport through heavy rain, telling King by phone not to panic because he was going to retrieve the drugs.
Harris is also accused of offering his warehouse in Sayon Town, Bushrod Island, to store the cocaine until it could be exported. The indictment says the warehouse and the surrounding area proved unsuitable.
The defendants are entitled to the presumption of innocence. A grand jury finding establishes only that the panel considered the offenses more likely than not, and the state must still prove each element at trial.
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