The £50m-a-year cannabis kingpin
Police bring down ringleader behind 7 factories ... and it all began when they found a single plant
BRITAIN’S cannabis farm kingpin was jailed for 14 years yesterday after his record-breaking £50million drugs ring was smashed by police. Michael Corcoran, 50, ran a sprawling empire turning out huge harvests of potent skunk cannabis to feed demand for the drug. He lived a life of luxury from the profits of his crimes, posing as an executive as he drove a Range Rover and enjoying numerous foreign holidays. the businessman led a small army of employees who opened up almost identical farms hidden inside industrial units across Kent and norfolk. But his lucrative operation collapsed when police were called to a suspected burglary at one warehouse and discovered a single cannabis plant on the floor. they obtained a search warrant and found that the building had been divided into rooms over two floors to house individual farms. Hundreds of plants at various stages of growth were being carefully tended using state-ofthe-art watering and lighting equipment. Over the next four months, investigators uncovered another six factories in Rochester, Sittingbourne and north Walsham, and seized nearly 16,500 plants. they believe the farms, some of which were built more than two years earlier, were putting cannabis worth £50million on the streets every year. Detectives discovered that Corcoran, a family man who lived in Yalding, Kent, was jailed for a similar cannabis conspiracy in 2007. Yesterday friends and family watched as he and 13 others, including his most trusted lieutenants, were jailed for a total of 90 years at the Old Bailey. Judge anuja Dhir said they were responsible for a ‘highly professional, well- planned, organised cannabis production enterprise’. the estimated street value of the cannabis produced in one year was ‘over £50million’ and those involved were ‘motivated by financial greed’, she said. the rented sites were ‘expertly adapted’ and ‘carefully equipped to enable the production of vast, industrial quantities of cannabis’, she added. Most of the gang were used as ‘gardeners’ to water, fertilise and tend the drug before harvesting and sealing it into bags. the judge told Corcoran he had hidden behind false addresses and used a legitimate business as ‘ cover for your criminal enterprises’. She added: ‘You were the head of this crime group. You were the mastermind and had overall control. You involved your family, your friends, your business associates.’ the other members of the gang, who are aged 18 to 51, were jailed for between 18 months and nine years. Corcoran’s daughter Ellie, 21, was cleared earlier this year after telling a jury she believed he was running a tomato growing equipment business. Police exposed the first factory in Rochester High Street in June 2013 when officers were called to a suspected burglary. it had been rented in the name ‘Martin green’, slang for cannabis. But it took two years for officers to uncover the true scale of the operation, which included industrial units known as ‘the old taxi rank’ in gravesend. Officers found a huge cannabis farm fuelled by £5,000 worth of electricity every month rigged to bypass the meter. Detective inspector James Derham, of Kent and Essex Serious Crime Directorate, said: ‘it was off the scale. it was being run as an industrial process. these people thought they were untouchable. they thought they had this boxed off quite nicely and police would never know.’