An international drugs ring used a Welsh delivery depot to bring £186m of heroin and cocaine into the UK, a court has heard.
The gang imported up to 1,304kg of Class A drugs into the country by manipulating the UPS depot in Deeside.
This would involve UPS team leader Daniel Taylor ‘keeping an eye out’ for packages which contained high purity blocks of Class A Drugs sent from Spain and the Netherlands.
He would then lift the packages from delivery vans without scanning them, leave work and drive to meet accomplice Darren Roberts.
Mold Crown Court heard the parcels would then be passed to Wirral man Stephen Metcalf, who collected them on behalf of alleged kingpin Christopher Gibney. The gang were put under surveillance by covert officers, who soon put together a picture of how the audacious drug plot operated.
Ffion Tomas, prosecuting, said “Taylor would arrive during the early hours and intercept parcels by scanning them out, as if they had been collected. This meant the packages never made their way to the real companies they were addressed to. By using waybills, they were also able, via the UPS website, to track the movement of the parcels as they made their way from Europe to the UK, which allowed Taylor to know exactly which unit of the depot the parcel would be at. He would regularly scan the parcels out of the system using the names of other people who worked alongside him at the depot.”
His Honour Judge Rowlands took into account the defendant’s guilty pleas and letters of reference from friends, family and employers, but jailed them for 15 years each.
Read the full article here – £186m heroin and cocaine gang smuggled Class A drugs through Welsh delivery depot – Wales Online
