JAILED... for having more than one mobile
A FORMER drug smuggler has been jailed – for having more that one mobile phone.
Stephen Potter, 45, was made a subject to a series of conditions regarding his phone use under a Serious Crime Prevention Order (SCPO), after being caught in a Manchester plot to import £2m of cannabis hidden in crates of onions. The SCPO was designed to stop him communicating with criminals.
Potter was freed early from a six-year jail sentence for the smuggling, but has ended up back behind bars after police were called to a domestic in his new home at Silver Street, Yarm, Teesside.
Officers saw him playing with an iPhone when they arrived. He broke the phone and was arrested, Teesside Crown Court heard.
Potter pleaded guilty to five breaches of the SCPO, dating back to March 4 – including offences of possessing, controlling or using more than one mobile phone, possessing a SIM card and a Nokia phone without notifying National Crime Agency (NCA) officers, and possessing an iPhone which was not registered with the NCA and could not retain or display its internet use.
Judge Howard Crowson jailed Potter for eight months.
In 2013, Potter was jailed at Manchester Crown Court for being part of a gang which set up a fake grocery business next to New Smithfield Market as a front for the Class B drug deal.
The gang set up a company called ‘Walker and Sons,’ putting a sign above a unit at Norbury Court, Openshaw, and setting up a website claiming the company had been going since 1958.
They then arranged for 375kg of cannabis to be smuggled to Manchester in 20 pallets of onions after travelling to Costa del Sol to clinch the deal. But NCA officers secretly bugged their unit and caught the gang red-handed.
Potter, formerly of St Helens, Merseyside, was jailed after admitting conspiracy to import cannabis alongside Gary Wilkinson, then 50, formerly of Astley, Wigan, and Paul Farrell, then 34, formerly of Clinton Avenue, Fallowfield. Wilkinson was jailed for six years and Farrell for five-and-a-half years.
Fellow conspirator Andrew Soloman, 46, formerly of New Beech Road, Heaton Mersey, Stockport, was jailed for nine years after also admitting being concerned in the supply of heroin.
After the sentencing Steve Baldwin, head of investigations for the NCA, said: “This was drug trafficking on an almost industrial scale. These men were key players in a criminal organisation that had the ability to transport huge amounts of cannabis across international borders.”