100 years for £117m drug gang
23 December 2010
Six drug traffickers who used legitimate business service centres as a front for their illegal trade have been jailed for 102 years. Judge David Aubrey QC, sentencing them at Liverpool Crown Court yesterday, estimated the street value of the drugs they trafficked at £117m.
The group is believed to have been the UK distribution arm of an international network which attempted to import around 22 tonnes of Class A and B drugs to the UK between February 2007 and April 2009. They used a number of tactics to keep their activity hidden, including:
• Adopting multiple company identities, including the fraudulent use of real company names and logos
• Contracting business service centres to act as messaging and collection points, unwittingly receiving and forwarding packages of cocaine and cannabis on their behalf
• Employing legitimate courier companies to carry out collections and deliveries
• Spreading their activity across a number of different locations
• Using pseudonyms, pay as you go mobiles, and cash payments
The existence of the gang came to light in November 2008 after staff at a business service centre in Cheltenham grew suspicious of a number of packages which had been delivered to them and called Gloucestershire Police. Officers discovered 40 kilos of cocaine and contacted SOCA which launched an investigation.
Links were soon identified between several police drug seizures in the UK and abroad which till then had been investigated separately. Arrests were carried out nation-wide on 16 March 2010 with assistance from Greater Manchester, Surrey, Hampshire and Cleveland Police forces.
Three of the gang - Paul Hewett, Karla Reeves, and Wayne Reed – had their sentences reduced by a third because of early guilty pleas but even so received sentences of 20 years, 16 years and 13½ years respectively. Glen Cornick had his sentence reduced by a fifth for pleading guilty at a later date and was sentenced to 9½ years. Michael Pollard and Trevor Holland, both of whom went to trial, were sentenced to 23 years and 20 years. Ian Hockerday was sentenced to 12 months for money laundering.
As part of its work with specific business sectors, SOCA has issued alerts to companies providing business facilities and to courier companies, warning them of the signs that their services are being exploited by criminal groups.
For more information on SOCA's work with industry see our Alerts page.