£70m county lines drug gang jailed for 111 years
A DRUGS kingpin who flooded the streets with cocaine worth £70million was jailed with his cohorts for a total of 111 years yesterday in a major blow to the county lines trade.
Police announced that they had struck at the heart of the illegal supply chain across the UK after more than 100 criminals in 20 drugs networks were brought to justice in a huge three-year operation.
One of the major players was drug baron Dean Beeton, who masterminded an operation selling a tonne of cocaine to drug dealers and county lines networks across London and the South East. He was selling £2.7million of the drug a week.
The 37-year-old kingpin used a convicted drug dealer who was behind bars to supply vast quantities of cocaine using an encrypted mobile phone he had smuggled into prison.
From his cell, Giovanni Luciano, 33, peddled wholesale quantities of the Class A drug with a 90 per cent purity, which had been transported from the West Midlands over at least 38 trips to safe houses around London.
Less than halfway into a nineyear sentence for the supply of class A drugs, Luciano took advantage of the open conditions of Ford Prison in West Sussex to contact drug dealers across London and beyond.
Beeton used at least 21 pay-asyou-go phones and four heavily encrypted devices to orchestrate his drugs empire. He ordered a vast network of couriers to deliver the drugs in cardboard boxes to runners who are thought to have been working for drug dealers and county lines networks across London and beyond between December 2016 and January 2018.
County lines gangs recruit children and teenagers to transport drugs from major cities to provincial towns. County lines crimes are named for the phone lines used to arrange drug deals. At Kingston Crown Court yesterday, Judge Elaine Coello sentenced seven members of the gang for conspiracy to supply Class A drugs.
Beeton, from Watford, was given 27 years while Luciano was jailed for 17 years. The other five gang members were given sentences of between ten and 16 years.
The judge told them: ‘You cause the most damage because you are the main source of supply to the wholesalers, drug dealers and ultimately individuals.
‘You cause the most damage as you are at the top of the tree, the supply fuels violence, acquisitive crime and does untold damage to communities.’
Their sentencing marks the end of a three-year police investigation during which detectives smashed 20 drug distribution networks, with around 100 people arrested.
They were given jail sentences totalling more than 800 years.
Meanwhile, judges and magistrates were told that county lines drug dealers caught running child couriers or taking over the homes of vulnerable adults should be given much tougher jail terms.
The Sentencing Council, which sets down punishment levels for courts to follow, said that in the most serious cases a drug baron found guilty of exploiting children or vulnerable people is likely to face a typical prison sentence of 14 years instead of the present ten.
■ One young man was stabbed to death in broad daylight yesterday and a second was critically injured in a ‘ targeted’ attack suspected to involve county lines drugs gangs in the Warwickshire town of Leamington Spa.
Officers arrested a 33-year- old man on suspicion of murder. They are also hunting another suspect.