Oleanvine Pickering Maynard, the former director of the British Virgin Islands Ports Authority convicted of a brazen drug smuggling plot, and her 33-year-old son, Kadeem Maynard, will be released from prison in the United States well ahead of schedule, according to government officials.
In June 2024, Pickering Maynard, 63, was sentenced to more than nine years in prison for her role in a plot to ship at least 6,600 pounds of cocaine from Tortola to the U.S. mainland. If released March 21 as scheduled, she will have been incarcerated for less than three years since her April 2022 arrest. In February, she was moved from a prison cell to a “reentry center” or home confinement in Baltimore, according to a Bureau of Prisons official.
Pleading guilty in May 2023 to a single count of conspiracy to import more than five kilograms of cocaine, Pickering Maynard avoided money laundering and racketeering charges by agreeing to testify against her former boss, then BVI Premier Andrew Fahie.
Kadeem Maynard was sentenced to 57 months in prison. If released from a Florida prison April 1 as scheduled, he would have been incarcerated less than 36 months.
A Bureau of Prisons official in Washington D.C. said there were several factors that could lead to early release, including good behavior, credit for time behind bars between arrest and conviction, and completing programs meant to reduce the chance of recidivism.
The Bureau of Prisons declined to say what would happen to the Maynards after their release — if they’d be officially deported, be allowed to leave the United States on their own, or be allowed to stay in the U.S. However, according to their plea agreements, “removal is presumptively mandatory” due to the nature of their crimes and they have waived “any rights relating to any and all forms of relief from removal or exclusion” and agree to cooperate with the Department of Homeland Security during removal proceedings.
Fahie, 54 — who was found guilty by a Miami jury in February 2024 of conspiracy to import more than five kilograms of cocaine, conspiracy to engage in money laundering, attempted money laundering, and foreign travel in aid of racketeering — is scheduled for release from a Georgia prison in June 2033. He’s appealing his conviction.
Fahie argued unsuccessfully that he had a relatively minor role in the smuggling plot compared to Pickering Maynard’s, who was supposed to get required licenses for cocaine-laden ships to gain legitimacy by spending a few days in the British overseas territory.
The pair were arrested at the Miami-Opa Locka Executive Airport on April 28, 2022, after stepping off a private jet they thought contained $700,000 as prepayment for a first cocaine shipment, prosecutors said. That same day, Maynard was arrested on St. Thomas, where prosecutors said he expected to receive his first payment.
Evidence presented at trial included text messages, WhatsApp communications, and more than 8,000 minutes of secretly recorded audiotape on which the three enthusiastically agreed to make Tortola a major narcotics through point. On those recordings, Fahie, a fixture in BVI politics since 1999, bragged to undercover U.S. government agents about decades of ill deeds and gave the name of at least one smuggler that he considered like family.
The plan was for enormous cocaine shipments to sit on cargo ships off the Tortola coast for a few days to gain legitimacy before sailing to Puerto Rico and the U.S. mainland.
Fahie, represented by attorney Theresa Van Vliet, said that he believed he was being “framed” by U.K. officials in a bid to remove him from office and that he intended to have the cash-laden jet seized when it landed in Tortola.
Despite evidence that a network of BVI police and port officials may have agreed to partake in the smuggling plot, no on-island arrests directly connected to the scheme have been announced.
