£250k drugs gang are put behind bars
Dealers flooded streets with heroin and crack -
JON MACPHERSON
ADRUGS gang have been jailed for nearly 20 years for their role in a £250,000 drugs conspiracy.
Nathan James Walker, Jacob Fisher, Thomas Ian Edwards, Connor Coulburn and Naomi Winter were convicted after helping to flood the streets of Accrington with heroin and crack cocaine.
They did this by using vulnerable, teenage males to act as their street sellers and were caught after they were targeted by undercover officers posing as drug users as part of Operation Sark.
The conspiracy was carried out between November 2018 and May 2019, a court heard.
All five defendants pleaded guilty at Preston Crown Court to conspiracy to supply heroin and crack cocaine and were sentenced by Judge Simon Medland QC.
Walker, 29, of Milnshaw
Lane, Accrington, also admitted three offences of burglary and jailed for a total of four years.
Fisher, 21, of James Avenue, Great Harwood, was jailed for 42 months. Edwards, 23, of Dickens Road, Chorley, and Coulburn, 25, of Dale Street, Bacup, were both jailed for four years.
Winter, 29, of Thurston, Skelmersdale, also pleaded guilty to smuggling drugs into Channings Wood prison in Devon. She was jailed for a total of three years and 10 months. A 17-year-old boy from Accrington, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was given a three-year youth referral order and 150 hours unpaid work.
DS Martin Kennedy of East CID, said: “Organised crime, including the supply of drugs, blights our communities and puts ordinary law-abiding people at risk. I would urge our communities to work with us on identifying those responsible for this type of activity so that we can continue to keep our communities safe.”