The gang, headed by Paul Green, is thought to have imported a staggering 50 tonnes of drugs into the UK.
A gangster warned his foot soldiers "there'll be f***ing murders" after a drunken mistake led to the downfall of his £7bn drugs empire.
But unaware that Dutch police officers had been monitoring the pair, Leonard and his accomplice decided to go out drinking all night and left the van unguarded. From the south east England to Scotland, crime gangs were fed drugs from the organise crime group's importations – which are believed to have contained more than 50 tonnes of drugs. Judge Paul Lawton who presided over the trials said the drug smuggling was "on an industrial and hitherto unprecedented scale".
The OCG exercised a high degree of criminal tradecraft to evade the authorities. Green rented a hotel room near his home in Widnes so he could use its Wi-Fi without it being traced back to him. Conspirators rented a warehouse in Uithoorn, northern Netherlands, and hid the cocaine in four cardboard boxes packed with ginger for deliveries to be made to warehouses they had rented in Bolton, Wigan and Ormskirk. The OCG also rented warehouses in Leeds, Preston, Sheffield and Warrington over the course of their offending.
Green was also convicted of fraud by false representation when he and accomplice Leslie Kewin, 63 and of Runcorn, stole a man’s identity and raised a £262,000 mortgage on the victim’s four-bedroom house in Mount Way, Waverton, near Chester, to pay for a drugs debt. Instructed by Green, Kewin rented the property and changed his name by deed poll to the same as the landlord.
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