Business of crime proves costly for heroin supply network
19 July 2011
Six men were sentenced to a total of 100 years in prison today after conspiring to supply close to half-a-tonne of heroin to towns and cities throughout Britain, and launder a minimum of £5m in illicit profits.
Another gang member, Akbar Bukhari, will be sentenced next month after masterminding the trafficking of at least 420kg of the drug between January 2007 and May 2009. He had utilised the knowledge acquired during his time as a business student to keep a detailed ledger of his complex criminal enterprises.
Bukhari was under SOCA surveillance for heroin trafficking when he and an accomplice, David Edwards, were arrested following the handover of a holdall in a street in the Small Heath area of Birmingham.
The bag’s contents included a firearm and ammunition. It also contained the ledger, which was found to identify the five other crime group members as well as their partner organisation in the Netherlands, which would oversee the ‘cutting’ of heroin with other substances to increase eventual profits.
The scale of illegal activity set out by Bukhari led to guilty pleas from himself, Edwards, Lee Whelan, Abdul Haque and Kevin Smith in June 2010. Brian Blankson and Steven Dobson were convicted at trial on 16 May 2011.
SOCA’s Regional Head of Investigations, Richard Watson, said:
“This is the end of the road for a crime group that did major damage to UK communities. It was led by an individual who chose to apply his business aptitude to drug trafficking, and the sheer scale of his gang’s criminal dealings show how important it was that this network was identified and dismantled.
“The lesson for criminal gang members is clearly that no matter how intelligent, educated or professional your associates are, you can never trust them to keep you out of trouble with the law. The members of this network have learnt that the hard way.”
Haque, Dobson, Smith and Edwards were enlisted by Bukhari to divide the drugs into blocks, package them for sale, store and transport them.
Blankson and Whelan were customers of Bukhari’s group who would distribute the drugs to areas of London, Merseyside, the Midlands and Scotland.
Assisted by SOCA, the Dutch gang was dismantled by the Netherlands’ National Crime Squad, which seized 49kg of cocaine in Rotterdam during the process. The UK investigation was assisted by officers from the Merseyside, Metropolitan, Staffordshire and West Midlands Police forces.
The heroin supplied by Bukhari’s network had an unusual forensic profile, which had been identified by SOCA Project Endorse* in several seizures throughout the UK. Following the arrests made under this investigation, negligible amounts of this particular mix were seen in drugs recovered through law enforcement activity.
Notes:
*Project Endorse is a nationwide forensic initiative to collect and analyse information from UK Class A and amphetamine seizures. More information can be found at http://www.soca.gov.uk/threats/drugs/forensic-intelligence