A life can take many turns, and lead a person in unexpected ways - perhaps none more so than in the case of Martin Evans.

From running a successful double-glazing business he ended up as a "Mr Big" of the drugs world, running a gang of cocaine smugglers while living the high-life in a luxury apartment in Marbella - all via an audacious ostrich scam which resulted in his victims running around a field near Swansea trying to catch the famously fleet-of-foot birds.

Some of those who knew him - and some of those who were taken in by him - describe him as "charming".

He was certainly an accomplished liar.

Evans grew up in Pontarddulais, and attended Ysgol Gyfun Ystalyfera in the Swansea Valley.

He was said to have left school with few qualifications.

After dabbling with DJing, he ran a video rental shop but his first taste of success came when he launched a double-glazing firm in Neath .

Within 18 months the firm was employing 20 people, and in 1987 he scooped the Welsh Young Businessperson of the Year title.

Business was good, and Evans and his wife Esther began to enjoy the trapping of success, including Mercedes cars with personalised number plates.

So far, it seemed, so good.

But the double-glazing business eventually folded, and in 1994 Evans was convicted of obtaining property by deception and sentenced to 15 months in prison.

And it appears that was while in HMP Usk in Monmouthshire he dreamt up his ostrich scam.

Martin Evans on his Swansea ostrich farm

In the mid-1990s Britain was in the middle of the BSE or "mad cow disease" scare, and ostrich meat was seen by many as a low-fat and safe alternative to beef and lamb.

Evans saw an opportunity to make money.

Shortly after his release from prison, he and his wife launched an ostrich farm and breeding business in Dunvant near Swansea.

The Ostrich Centre was advertised in national newspapers with the slogan "Ostrich Nest Egg", and used glossy brochures which traded on Evans' previous business award - though presumably not on his conviction for fraud.

Evans offered investors the chance to buy an ostrich, promising them big returns of 70 per cent or more on their investment.

The idea was simple - investors would pay thousands of pounds for a bird, then reap dividends from meat sales, and from the makers of fancy ostrich skin handbags, when the birds were culled.

More than 100 people, many pensioners and retirees, were attracted to the scheme, and in total they invested £875,000 in the fledgling company - for some, the investment was their life savings.

That promise of that "nest egg" in a growing business must indeed have seem attractive.

The ostriches themselves were real - but were perhaps the only real thing about the whole scam.

Evans was selling each bird several times over to different investors - and pocketing the cash from the people he duped. As quickly as the cash flowed into the business it left again, being channelled into off-shore bank accounts in Jersey and the Bahamas.

Between February and July 1996 investors pumped hundreds of thousands of pounds into the venture, taken-in by Evans' sales patter.

But just six months after being launched, the company was declared insolvent - though not before £329,000 had been stolen from investors.

When the business was revealed as a scam, a number of angry investors descended on Bevexe Fawr Farm in Dunvant and seized birds to try to recoup some of their money.

Auditors nothing in the firm's bank account - save for a £440 overdraft.

A police investigation was launched, and the Evanses were subsequently charged with fraud and theft.

And the story may well have ended there, as just another scheme that indeed proved too good to be true.

But just as the trial was about to start in 2000, Martin Evans faxed Swansea Crown Court to say he would not be attending - in fact the 38-year-old had skipped the country and run away to Spain with his mistress. His wife was left to face the charges alone.

Martin Evans went on the run after being charged with with fraud over his Dunvant ostrich farm scam
Martin Evans went on the run after being charged with with fraud over his Dunvant ostrich farm scam

The money in the offshore accounts had also vanished, meaning investors lost everything - apart from those who had indulged in a spot of unofficial Swansea ostrich wrangling.

The case against Mrs Evans, who is originally from Brynamman , went ahead in her husband's absence - she was found guilty of four charges of theft and one of fraudulent trading, and given a two-year suspended prison sentence.

Judge Michael Burr told the court he had no doubt the ostrich farm had been a scam from the very beginning.

He said: "I am satisfied that the whole ostrich farm was set up from the beginning as a dishonest means of depriving investors of their money."

The judge told Mrs Evans that he did not believe she was the "innocent dupe" she had pretended to be, but he accepted that she had been manipulated by her husband.

As for the on-the-run Evans, after video rentals, double glazing, and ostrich farming fraud, he became involved in a new and highly lucrative kind of business - international drug dealing.

From a hideaway in Spain he masterminded a multi-million-pound drugs and money laundering operation, which smuggled huge quantities of cocaine and ecstasy from mainland Europe into Britain.

Evans reaped an estimated £9million leading a gang of couriers who trafficked the drugs from Holland and Spain to the UK - the money was laundered through a bureau de change next door to the world-famous Harrods store in London.

Gang members would carry cocaine into Britain in multiples of one kilo packets, with upwards of 100,000 ecstasy tablets also being carried on each trip.

It was a lucrative enterprise.

But unbeknown to the gang, police had them under surveillance following a tip-off about the large sums of money they were changing into different currencies.

A complex undercover operation saw officers following the couriers as they went about the business, and police even managed to bug the car of Evans' second-in-command, former soldier Paul Jeffreys from Llanelli .

In October 2001, officers swooped on the gang as Jeffreys and his girlfriend, Lucy Kift, handed over £145,000 in Dutch guilders to another gang member at a motorway service station near Reading.

As officers moved-in, the bug in Jeffreys' car picked him up saying "I have had it".

In Jeffreys' car police found another £284,000 worth of guilders and Spanish pesetas.

Other members of the gang were then arrested as their operation was dismantled.

Evans, however, slipped through the net and remained at large.

But his time as a fugitive - his first time as a fugitive, that is - would be short-lived.

Later that year border staff New York's JKF airport became suspicious of a man who arrived in the country with a passport in the name of Paul Kelly - it was a time of heightened security in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Kelly, it turned out, was one of the alias being used by Evans.

The passport proved to be a fake, Interpol were alerted, Evans was arrested, and he was deported to France - where he would spend the next three years in jail before being extradited to Britain to stand trial.

While on the run, Martin Evans ran a lucrative drug smuggling operation which trafficked huge quantities of cocaine and ecstasy into Britain
While on the run, Martin Evans ran a lucrative drug smuggling operation which trafficked huge quantities of cocaine and ecstasy into Britain

While he was in prison in Paris, eight other members of his gang were jailed for a total of 70 years at Swansea Crown Court, with Jeffreys receiving 16 years for trafficking.

Judge John Diehl attacked the gang's "ugly, repulsive" trade in human misery which had blighted communities across South Wales.

One member of the gang, Richard Hughes, of Llansamlet, Swansea, was found to have a loaded Walther handgun in the boot of his car. He was jailed for 10 years.

Alan Thomas from Pontardawe was sentenced to seven years, and Steven Summers, from Llanelli, to six years.

Three men from Folkestone were also jailed - Jason Flisher got 14 years, Freddy Lawrence 11 years, and Leslie West three years.

Kift was jailed for three years - the court heard the 22-year-old had "gained little from the operation apart from sorrow".

When Evans eventually appeared at Swansea Crown Court it emerged he had been involved in yet another alleged scam, this time involving "healthy" chocolate bars - but the prosecution said it was not in the public interest to pursue the charges given the sentence the defendant was already facing for the drug conspiracy offences.

Evans was sentenced to a total of 24 years in prison for drugs trafficking and the Ostrich farm scam, and hit with a £4.8million confiscation order to reclaim his ill-gotten gains.

The court heard that as well as properties in Swansea the defendant had a £2million luxury villa in Marbella - complete with a swimming pool and staff - and a penthouse in Miami's South Beach near Trump Towers. He also bank accounts in Latvia, Antigua, Switzerland, Dominica, and the UK.

Simon Flowers, Wales branch commander at the National Crime Agency (NCA), described Evans at the time as a "Mr Big".

He said: "Evans was in control of the Wales market. He was the number one drug importer into Wales in and around that time.

"No two ways about it. He would also have had significant influence on the rest of UK as well."

Evans' 24 year sentence was later reduced to 21 years on appeal.

By 2011 Evans was in Erlestoke open prison in Wiltshire, and was being prepared for early release the following year - as part of the arrangements to facilitate his return to the community he was granted "re-settlement visits" back to Swansea.

On one of these trips he took the chance to flee the authorities once more, and again skipped the country.

His second period on the run would last much longer that his first.

The NCA launched an international manhunt to find him, and put him on the list of the 11 most-wanted British fugitives.

It is believed Evans first fled to Northern Cyprus - which had no extradition treaty with Britain - but given Evans' international connections the search operation included law enforcement agencies across Europe, the Caribbean, and America.

It took three years to find the elusive Evans.

The ostrich conman turned drug boss was eventually tracked down to South Africa, where local police in Johannesburg - acting on information from Interpol and the NCA - put him under surveillance.

In August 2014 armed officers swooped on him at the upmarket gated housing complex in the Midrand area of the city where he was living with his fiance and baby daughter, and arrested him - his life on the run was over.

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Mr Flowers from the NCA said Evans had been living a life of luxury in Johannesburg, and had been using several different false names.

He said: "Martin Evans has been a thorn in the side of law enforcement in Wales for many years so the time spent getting him back behind bars is more than worth it."

In October 2014 Evans was extradited back to Britain, and sent to a maximum security prison to serve the rest of his sentence - which was thought at the time to be around four years.

A jail term does not extinguish a confiscation order - and upon release the full amount becomes payable.

It will take a considerable nest egg to pay off what Evans owes to investors who lost their savings.

Repaying the debt caused by the miseries of the drugs trade is another matter.