By: Staff Writer
May 19, 2026
A passenger on board a plane that crashed in Bahamian waters off of the coast Florida was arrested in a federal drug investigation, records show.
Jonathan Gardiner is being charged with cocaine importation conspiracy, a federal complaint showed.
Gardiner was one of 11 people who survived the crash that happened on Tuesday. Two large bundles of Bahamian dollars was found in the wreckage, one with a handwritten note with a Bahamian politician’s name on it.
Gardiner, it is alleged, was a major supplier of drugs for the organisation from South America which had passed through The Bahamas. The DEA launched a major operation that, over time, involved using two ‘confidential sources’ (CS) to assist their investigation.
One agreed to become a source in return for charges against him being dropped – he had been arrested for possession of narcotics and approximately $84,000 in May 2023.
He had previously been convicted of multiple narcotics, fraud, robbery, firearms and immigration offences and was facing a lengthy prison sentence. In other words, he would escape unpunished if he helped the DEA bring in bigger fish.
The plane, a Beechcraft 300 King Air turboprop, was on its way from Marsh Harbour, on the Bahamian island of Great Abaco, to Grand Bahama International Airport in Freeport when it suffered engine failure, authorities said. The pilot ditched the plane in the water about 50 miles (80 km) off Vero Beach, Florida, and managed to get its 10 passengers, three with minor injuries, onto a yellow life raft.
The member of parliament (MP) that chartered the plane was said to have chartered the Election Day flight declined to answer questions on Mpnday, saying only: “No comment right now, buddy.”
When told there were serious questions about how Gardiner, now in custody in the United States, came to be aboard the flight, Kingsley Smith, the PLP MP for West Grand Bahama, said: “We will get to that at some point.”
He would not elaborate.
His refusal to explain the flight leaves unanswered basic questions about who the plane was chartered for, who chartered it, why it was chartered on Election Day, and how Gardiner came to be allegedly found with $30k among the passengers rescued from the downed aircraft.
Mr Smith, who served as parliamentary secretary in the first Davis administration after winning the West Grand Bahama and Bimini by-election, has not been named among the ministers or ministers of state announced so far in the new administration.