County lines gangs using children to shift drugs in Scotland
They prey on vulnerable youngsters, using them as mules to ferry heroin and cocaine north of the Border. And police are battling to halt their expansion across the country...
DRESSED in everyday clothes and trainers and clutching a backpack close to his chest, the youth would have blended in seamlessly with the rows of passengers on the cross-country train travelling north out of Liverpool.
He could have been on a weekend trip to visit distant Scottish relatives or meeting up with old friends for a concert. Perhaps only the beads of sweat forming on his brow might betray a certain nervousness about the contents of his bag – a consignment of class A drugs being ferried far across the Border on behalf of a powerful criminal cartel.
If this ‘runner’ manages to avoid being picked up by police, his consignment of drugs – usually heroin or crack cocaine – will likely end up in a safe house operated by dealers in one of northeast Scotland’s fishing ports.
The drugs will be sold using dedicated mobile phones to a ready market of addicts desperate for their next fix. For the young drugs mule, there is a long taxi ride to the nearest bus or train back south, where the whole nervejangling journey will begin once more.
Police believe this terrifyingly simple yet highly effective sales technique, known as ‘county lines’, has allowed English drug lords to ruthlessly expand their crime networks throughout Scotland at an alarming pace.
The cartels have taken a grip in areas far beyond their traditional power bases and now have footholds from rural Aberdeenshire and Ayrshire, to the Lothians, the Borders, and Dumfries and Galloway.
To minimise the threat of being caught themselves, the kingpins stay hands-off and rely on coercing young boys and girls – some as young as 15 – to deliver their illicit cargo.
While some couriers hope to earn up to £3,000 a day helping to stock supply chains controlled by the dedicated mobile lines, the thought that they are somehow prepared to risk their liberty at such a young age in such a foolhardy project seems extraordinary.
What is even more shocking, however, is that this pernicious cross-Border practice has been going on for decades. Since the 1990s, police have been encountering young runners and adult dealers with non-local accents as English gangsters cast their net ever wider, targeting those working in the North East’s profitable fishing and the oil and gas industries.
WHEN one line of supply is detected and dismantled, another is quickly set up in its place. All it takes is a few anonymous youngsters riding the trains and buses that cross into Scotland every day.
Efforts to tackle this scourge have now become a UK-wide priority, but only after gangsters realised the huge potential for mirroring their Scottish success across rural parts of England and Wales.
The sudden explosion in county lines activity there prompted the establishment of a £3.6million county lines coordination centre, opened last month by the National Crime Agency (NCA). A clampdown on county lines operations followed which led to 200 arrests. Last week, Police Scotland mounted a series of raids in Fraserburgh and Peterhead against the area’s latest influx of English-backed dealers.
During that operation, 37 people aged between 23 and 48 were arrested, almost £10,000 worth of cash and £7,380 of diamorphine and crack cocaine seized.
For Scotland’s lead officer on county lines operations, it is just the latest small but necessary blow in the relentless fight against this deeply-rooted and ugly form of organised exploitation.
‘The anomaly with county lines is that it has operated in Scotland for decades. It’s a phenomenon that does not just affect the North East [of Scotland], it affects a range of areas,’ said Detective Chief Inspector Garry Mitchell.
Linked to many other forms of criminality, including human trafficking, prostitution and serious violence, it is county lines’ value to gangsters that fuels such viciousness. The NCA estimates that it earns organised crime £7million a day – around £2.5billion a year.
The name ‘county lines’ came originally from the use of a branded mobile phone line which is established in the gang’s new rural marketplace and sends out group messages periodically to their new customer base to advertise the availability of drugs.
Orders are placed to this line which is generally controlled by a senior gang member located in the urban hub. A second phone is then used to pass orders onto dealers in the rural marketplace.
Mr Mitchell estimates 75 per cent of county lines drugs dealing in Scotland is co-ordinated by crime lords in Merseyside.
‘The rest come from the West Midlands and London,’ he added.
And 85 per cent of county lines operating in Scotland are selling crack cocaine and heroin. The people behind this are serious players, but they will never travel into these rural communities.
‘The people sent out into these Scottish communities work almost like a franchise. In a sense they are entrepreneurs. What they’re looking for is a market opportunity to exploit a rural community. We are working very closely with Merseyside police... to try to target some of that criminal activity,’ he said.
Efforts to unravel county lines activities are complicated by the involvement of children and the ingenuity of the criminal gangs in masking their activities.
In 2015, Wolverhampton crime baron Karl Wilson was sentenced to 16 years in prison after his gang was caught couriering heroin and cocaine between the Midlands and Aberdeen in coffee tins.
Wolverhampton Crown Court was told Wilson, 58, and his associates soaked the tins in vinegar to deter police sniffer dogs before moving them north of the Border by train, coach or hire car.
They used rented flats in Aberdeen to store drugs and dealers would call a mobile phone number to place orders.
Officers believe between two and three kilos of heroin and crack cocaine were being transported to Scotland every week at the gang’s peak, earning them more than £10million between 2002 and 2009. Child drug mules in England have been found with wraps of heroin hidden inside a Kinder Surprise chocolate egg.
The role of children in the supply of drugs is arguably the most disturbing aspect of this story. ‘We are aware... of children as young as 15 being used in the drug running of county lines,’ confirmed Mr Mitchell.
These conduits – predominantly boys from troubled backgrounds – are enticed into a life of crime with promises of money, kudos and a sense of belonging often lacking in their home lives.
IT just takes one person to come up to you and promise you money, nice clothes and a better lifestyle,’ one victim told a Daily Mail investigation. The county lines gangs seem adept at choosing their prey, targeting children from broken homes, some living with foster parents or in care.
A Home Office report has identified Pupil Referral Units, which deal with disruptive children excluded from English mainstream education, as a particularly fertile recruiting ground.
Researchers who interviewed drug mules from Merseyside also found most were users who owed
money to a dealer after being offered drugs on a ‘buy now, pay later’ arrangement.
Those who failed to pay on time found themselves forced to work off their debt by doing their dealer’s bidding.
‘The drugs are couriered up north by various means, by rail, by train,’ said Mr Mitchell. ‘The amounts [carried] will be small and often, in order to avoid detection.’
Police Scotland works closely with British Transport Police trying to identify ‘frequent travellers’ who may fit the profile of drugs mules.
When they reach their destination, outsiders will often identify themselves, sticking out like a sore thumb in a place like Fraserburgh.
Mr Mitchell said: ‘If you are there with an accent that is different to locals then that tends to draw attention.’
Unfamiliarity with their new surroundings may also lead to behaviour which marks them out. In one extreme example, one youth is said to have paid a taxi driver £1,000 to take him back to Liverpool from Aberdeen after selling drugs in the city.
The recent focus on Fraserburgh will be unwelcome for a town which has fought for years to shake off its unenviable reputation as ‘Scotland’s drug capital’.
Hard drugs took a heavy toll on the town’s young population during the boom years of the 1990s, where many were away for days at a time at sea, then blew their wages on drugs once back ashore.
For the gangsters, those years have been spent honing their methods of dealing, which frequently involve targeting vulnerable locals.
One of the most popular tactics is known as ‘cuckooing’, where dealers exploit addicts and people with mental health problems, often threatening them with violence before taking control of their homes, often forcing the inhabitant to flee. Here they can cut and package drugs and distribute them using dedicated mobile phone lines to minimise detection.
The advent of the internet and smartphones has allowed dealers to develop online apps and social media platforms to distribute, including a 24-hour ‘dial-a-deal’ delivery service to a buyer’s door.
The impact of cuckooing can be devastating, not only on the vulnerable individuals whose homes are invaded but for the wider communities ravaged by the influx of addictive narcotics. At the scene of one of the recent raids in Fraserburgh, one neighbour said: ‘I will get so much relief and sleep, I’ve got a young boy. He’s on drugs as well, I think he’s off it just now, but this has been hell.
‘Drugs has a hold on this town just now, it really does. You are afraid to go out your front door. I feel scared, anxious. The problem is getting worse in this area.’
The deadly effects of county lines drug-running are becoming evident everywhere. According to the latest available national figures there were 867 drug-related deaths in Scotland in 2016, a 23 per cent rise on the previous year and almost double the figure for 2006.
Almost one in three of the deaths was in the Greater Glasgow and Clyde health board area. And around 90 per cent of the overall deaths were from heroin, diamorphine and methadone. In Dumfries and Galloway, there were nine drug-related deaths recorded in the ten months to February 2017, rising to 22 in the same period ending this year.
Addaction, the UK’s largest drug and alcohol charity, has warned of a sharp increase in cocaine abuse across Ayrshire, an area which has traditionally been controlled by Glasgow gangs and where, according to Mr Mitchell, county lines gangs have started a turf war. ‘Over the last few years, that has been a bit of a concern there,’ he said.
HE is quick to point out that no Scottish county lines operate south of the Border. ‘In other words, there are no Scottish organised crime groups that are putting young people into England and Wales to sell drugs.’ Such reassurances sound depressingly hollow.
Vanessa Case, a substance misuse worker in Fraserburgh, has seen first hand the human cost of drugs in her town down the years.
She said: ‘A number of our clients who all went to school together will tell us about photographs that they’ve had of their classes and a few of them have said, “I’m the only person left alive from that picture”. That’s the impact that the drugs have had on the local community over those years. It’s incredibly sad to think that that level of attrition has happened in a community that’s so tight-knit.’
Miss Case fears that if education around drug misuse does not improve, the next generation could face a similar level of tragedy. At present, it is far from clear if those who most need to hear the message are actually listening.
‘It doesn’t matter where you are in the world, if you want to start selling drugs you will find out pretty quickly where the buyers are,’ said Mr Mitchell. ‘We have all been on holiday and been offered hashish – it’s as straightforward as that. It just depends how blatant they are going to be about it and, unfortunately, in Scotland the general population seems to like controlled drugs in whatever shape or form it comes.
‘And if the market’s there, it doesn’t matter who is selling.’
Part of the police’s strategy is to work with partner agencies to help potential victims escape from the clutches of the gangs, especially those caught up in cuckooing.
In the latest raids, six vulnerable people have been identified who may be referred to agencies such as Action for Children Scotland for help. An independent evaluation of the charity found three-quarters of those who went through its services have not reoffended.
Its director, Paul Carberry, said: ‘Drug dealing may seem glamorous at the beginning, but there’s never really a happy ending. These kids watch these gangster films and think it’s really glamorous.
‘That’s fine, but I tell them only watch the last five minutes of every gangster film because that’s how it will end. And it always ends badly.’