Drug gang robbed of £100,000 in hit at city traffic lights
ADRUGS gang was robbed of £100,000 in takings in a “professional” hit on their van as it waited at a set of traffic lights, a court has heard.
The organised crime group, or OCG, had just delivered a consignment of cocaine and collected its payment when masked men armed with a crowbar swooped on their vehicle in front of startled motorists at a busy junction.
The loss of the money led those high up in the OCG to arrange for Albanian thugs to be sent to Swansea to recover the money “by any means necessary”.
The robbery led to police uncovering the gang’s operation, which saw around 50kg of high-purity cocaine trafficked from Essex to south Wales.
Swansea Crown Court heard that at lunchtime on May 28 last year a VW Caddy van was waiting in traffic at the city’s busy Dyfatty junction when a car pulled up alongside it.
Paul Hobson, prosecuting, said two masked men jumped from the Ford Mondeo and smashed the windows of the van, snatching a rucksack from the lap of the passenger and taking the keys from the ignition. The robbers then sped off,
with 38-year-old Jonathan Norris at the wheel of the car.
Police were soon on the scene, and found the driver of the van, Alex Shields, was still with the vehicle but the passenger, 36-year-old Nicholas Bailey, had fled.
The van was taken to a secure compound on Swansea Enterprise Zone, and in the hours and days that followed was the object of attention from a number of callers who wanted access to it. This attention led a crime-scene investigator to search the vehicle, and she found a generator in the back had been built with a hidden compartment which contained 1.25kg of cocaine and £81,000 in cash.
Mr Hobson said an organised crime group led by Bailey and Ainsley Wood had been trafficking huge quantities of cocaine from the Essex and London areas to Pontypridd and Swansea in the weeks before the robbery – a conservative estimate put the amount of the
Class A drug involved at 50kg worth, around £1.9m.
Wood and Shields have been jailed for their part in the crossborder cocaine conspiracy.
Jonathan James Norris, of Eppynt Road, Penlan, Swansea, had previously pleaded guilty to robbery when he appeared in the dock for sentencing. At the time of the robbery he was out of prison on licence.
Nicholas Bailey, now of no fixed address, had previously pleaded guilty to conspiracy to supply cocaine when he appeared in the dock. At the time he was running the drug operation he had been at large and wanted by the police in the south-east of England for six years for recall to prison.
Stephen Donnelly, for Norris, said the robbery was not one characterised by a great deal of planning, adding: “His criminal abilities are limited, quite frankly.”
Judge Paul Thomas QC gave the defendant a 10% discount for his guilty plea and sentenced Norris to nine years in prison.
Mohammed Anwar Ramzan, for Bailey, said his client had “foolishly” got himself involved in the cocaine conspiracy, and was remorseful for what he had done.
Judge Thomas gave Bailey credit for his guilty plea and sentenced him to 13 and a half years in prison.