Your days are numbered, judge warns as 21 county lines thugs get 100 years

A JUDGE has warned county lines drug bosses to expect a knock on their door after locking up 21 members of a notorious gang for a total of 100 years.

Judge Geraint Walters said yesterday: ‘The police are having ever-increasing success in stamping out this evil trade.

‘The public are rightly fed up with this activity blighting their communities – the courts will do their bit by passing sentences which ought to deter.

‘Those caught at any level peddling this misery which destroys lives and communities can expect prison sentences of some length.’

In Swansea Crown Court yesterday, Judge Walters handed out a four-year jail sentence to Ryan Jolly, 39, the last of the 21-strong Liverpool gang caught by police in Operation Regent.

He said: ‘Those out there had better watch out, the next knock might be on their door.’

And he told Jolly, who admitted conspiring to supply Class A drugs: ‘ There’s no final chance coming to you, we can start at eight or nine years next time. If we meet again I will make the sentence as long as I can within the guidelines. People have to learn.’

Jolly, of Eardisley, Herefordshire, was a ‘trusted courier’ for the Liverpool gang which flooded South and Mid Wales with Class A drugs – particularly heroin.

The other 20 members were jailed for between three and 12 years at a sentencing hearing at the same court last month.

They trafficked heroin and cocaine with a street value of £1.1 million into the rural towns of Rhayader and Llandrindod Wells, Powys. Gang members also recruited small-time local drug users to act as couriers and spread their evil further into South Wales.

The sentences came as members of another Liverpool gang were jailed for a total of more than 60 years for trafficking heroin and cocaine from Liverpool to Bournemouth on the South Coast.

Dubbed the ‘Scouse Porky Line’ after ringleader 31-year-old James Brown, whose nickname was Scouse Porky, the gang used vulnerable adults as mules to make 500-mile round trips to deliver the drugs and cash, disguised in Amazon boxes and car battery packs. The empire was smashed by the South West Regional Organised Crime Unit working with Merseyside and Dorset police forces.

A police spokesman said yesterday: ‘Gang members were regularly exchanging between 250 and 300 messages a day with drug users in Dorset, which shows the scale of their supply and the harm they were causing.’