Drug dealer’s ‘relief’ at being caught
A COCAINE-DEALING dad of two was “relieved” when police raided the family home and arrested him.
Luke Edwards threw packages of drugs out of the window of the house as officers forced their way in through the front door but subsequently provided the PIN to his phone which revealed the scale of his dealing.
Sending the defendant to prison, a recorder told him Class A drugs destroyed lives and families.
Nuhu Gobir, prosecuting, told Cardiff Crown Court that Edwards was arrested in September this year after police executed a search warrant at the Cwmbran house where he lived with his partner and young children.
The raid followed intelligence-gathering work by officers, including a subscriber check on a phone attributed to the defendant which showed links with known members of organised crime groups.
The prosecutor said the investigation showed the number was an “extremely” busy drugs line.
In August police raided a house of a drug dealer in Cwrt y Gamlas in Cwmbran and recovered a significant quantity of cocaine, and inquiries then led officers to his “upstream supplier” – 29-yearold Edwards.
The following month officers
forced entry to the defendant’s house, and as they did so he threw packages out of the window.
Those packages were subsequently found to contain cocaine with a street value of around £11,700.
Further smaller quantities of cocaine were recovered from inside the property.
Officers also seized a phone, and after Edwards provided the PIN police found the device contained messages relating to drug dealing over the previous year including references to “T-shirts”, a slang term for a 1.7g deal of cocaine.
The defendant was arrested and interviewed, and he told officers he had been addicted to cocaine since 2018 and after losing his job he found himself dealing to fund his habit.
Luke Edwards, of Pontnewydd Walk, Cwmbran, had previously pleaded guilty to possession of cocaine with intent to supply and to being concerned in the supply of cocaine when he appeared in the dock for sentencing. He has no previous convictions.
Christopher Rees, for Edwards, said the defendant had been a drug user who got into debt and then into dealing, and he said his client had told him he found himself subjected to threats and unable to get out of supplying.
The barrister said it had been “something of relief” for the defendant when he was finally caught, and the fact he had co-operated with police and provided his phone’s PIN was perhaps evidence that he wanted to “make a clean breast of it, and move on”.
Recorder Ifan Wyn Lloyd Jones told Edwards that Class A drugs destroyed lives and families.
He said the story of how the defendant became involved in supplying drugs – and was pressurised into continuing – was one the courts had heard “time and time again” and was part of the “dangerous world” of drugs.
With a one-third discount for his guilty pleas, Edwards was sentenced to three years in prison.
He will serve up to half that period in custody before being released on licence to serve the remainder in the community.