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They were a multi-million pound drugs import ring with seemingly no connection to Teesside.

Lance Kennedy and his mob were bringing in vast quantities of cocaine to the UK - but when they wanted a ready target market they looked away from their home city of Liverpool.

Their focus moved out of the North-west, along the M62, and to Teesside.

Kennedy became the latest North-west underworld kingpin to spot the potential to make a fortune selling cocaine in the North-east.

But he's now living to regret it.

Why was Teesside targeted?

The trafficking of cocaine and heroin by Manchester and Liverpool drug lords has become well-established among organised criminals.

It has led to multi-million pound rings forming as dealers work with counterparts in Middlesbrough and Stockton.

The appeal to criminals is obvious - cash and lots of it.

Teesside is seen as an opportunity by criminals, given the traditionally high level of class A drug use, which provides dealers with a ready customer base.

In 2016, research suggested cocaine use in parts of Stockton was higher per person than that in London, Amsterdam and Paris.

Middlesbrough and Stockton are usually the places mentioned in court cases involving cross-country drugs gangs.

But a disturbing feature of the Kennedy case was that smaller Tees towns were also being targeted.

The market town of Guisborough and Thornaby were among the locations the gang was attempting to flood with Class A drugs.

Cleveland Police detectives are also well aware of how their patch is being eyed by suppliers.

And it was an operation by Cleveland - rather than the much larger Merseyside Police - which brought the Scouser Kennedy to justice.

Aged just 32, he has received one of the longest jail sentences ever handed to a Merseyside drugs crook after masterminding a plot that saw half a tonne of the Class A drug flown into England.

The cocaine was so pure that his conspiracy could have been worth around £350m.

How did the gang operate?

The true scale of Kennedy’s operation may have been far greater, with detectives believing he may have been behind more than the six helicopter drug flights ultimately pinned on him, the Liverpool Echo reports.

Kennedy grew up on Wirral and recruited trusted contacts from the area, including at least one of his old school friends, to build a network that supplied cocaine to gangs across Britain.

His friends from home operated on the frontline, greeting the drug-laden helicopters in Kent, distributing the cocaine to regional criminals and feeding cash payments back to Kennedy.

Working from a base in Spain the dad-of-four used encrypted mobile phones to control the gang’s movements.

It was from that Barcelona hub that he also used his criminal contacts to source hundreds of kilograms of cocaine on the European mainland and convince Dutch helicopter pilots to fly it across the Channel.

Gangland connections led to fears of a prison break

When Kennedy was hauled back to the UK after his arrest in Ukraine, it wasn’t to Liverpool where he was brought but Middlesbrough.

He appeared at Teesside Magistrates’ Court, where details of his underworld connections were laid bare.

They were believed to be so significant that when he was brought back to the UK to face justice he was remanded in HMP Frankland.

The high security County Durham jail, dubbed Monster Mansion, holds some of the nation’s most dangerous murderers, rapists and terrorists.

Kennedy was sent there because detectives genuinely believed his criminal contacts were capable of a serious attempt to spring him from custody.

A global conspiracy

The tactics that underpinned Kennedy’s exploits were extraordinary.

Helicopters would be loaded with huge consignments of cocaine, his pilots would register trips - typically between the Belgian town of Antwerp and airfields in southern England - and his cronies back home would book rural holiday homes that lay beneath those routes.

The helicopters would then land in nearby fields to drop off the drugs before returning to the air having barely diverted from their flight paths.

Days before Christmas 2015 one such trip disappeared from radar after passing the market town of Faversham, in Kent.

It reappeared eight minutes later near Eastling, a tiny village in the middle of Kent countryside designated as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

Five weeks earlier Matthew Payne, a courier and organiser managed by Kennedy, had handed over £3,950 to secure Crow Cottage, a holiday home near the village, for six months.

At the time of the helicopter flight mobile phone masts placed Payne - and associate Jay “Flip-Flop” Robinson - in the area of the secluded retreat.

(Image: Cleveland Police)

Prosecutors David Potter and Kyra Badman argued Payne and Robinson had been waiting for the cargo of cocaine to land.

It was later revealed the suspicions of an estate manager had been aroused when a white bed sheet was spread out on the ground of an orchard behind the cottage on the day of the drop off.

The concerns were heightened weeks later when a dispute over the second instalment of rent led to the booking being cancelled.

Payne told the owners he would send his brother-in-law to collect children’s clothes and toys left at the property.

Days later the estate manager let in two men with “Liverpool accents” to pick up the items only to watch them pull two holdalls from a cupboard under the stairs.

The bags were so heavy the men had to drag them to their vehicle before leaving without any of the children’s belongings they were supposedly sent to pick up.

Home had link to Harry Potter star

A second holiday home used by the gang was Gun Emplacement Cottage in Dover.

The picturesque retreat, rented out on behalf of BAFTA-winning actress Miriam Margolyes, has a garden that overlooks the Channel and crumbles into the White Cliffs of Dover.

Built by the Army in 1910 it is said to be the closest home to France on the English mainland.

One of Kennedy’s highest ranking subordinates, Paris Newcombe, booked the property for the gang in April 2016.

It was around this trip that detectives uncovered a bizarre chain of events in which Kennedy’s key contact Robert “Ferry” Stewart and his driver and lookout, David Campbell, repeatedly travelled the length of England.

On April 10 the pair left Wirral for the North-east, reaching Teesside at 4pm.

One hour later they started a journey to a hotel in Ashford in Kent that took them six hours.

The next morning Stewart drove to Gun Emplacement Cottage to meet other gang members before staying the night in the property then driving back to Ashford to pick up Campbell and heading back to Wirral.

The following morning the pair drove back to Dover.

“We were on a trip to Euro Disney”

Under police interview Campbell claimed him and Stewart were actually on a trip to Euro Disney in France which they pulled out of before reaching Dover.

But texts uncovered by police revealed what really happened.

As Stewart and Campbell were travelling to Dover another of the conspirators, Connor Fraser-Clark text his wife Alison from Gun Emplacement Cottage saying:

“Things are changing again. Might be tomorrow. Something to do with the weather and we need to get a hotel ‘cause he’s got someone else staying at the cottage with flip flop (Jay Robinson).”

Later that night Connor text his wife:

“Just had a phone call in the cottage – the woman said she was in Australia but 1471 the number and the area code is London?? It’s made ferry and flip-flop really paranoid”.

After Stewart and Campbell returned to Wirral, Connor text Alison to say “stuff coming at 12:15 tomorrow”.

That morning Stewart and Campbell began the long drive back to the south coast.

While they were travelling a helicopter took off from Antwerp at 11.32am and at 12.17pm Connor text his wife:

“I’ve gotta wait ‘til 2 though, Ferry went home last night and I’ve been asked to wait until he get’s back”.

Thirty two minutes later he wrote, “chopper is here” and referred to “160 bits”. “Bits” is slang for a kilo.

At around 2.20pm Stewart and Campbell arrived in Dover. By just after 3pm they headed back the 300 miles to Birkenhead with a car now laden, the prosecution said, with drugs.

In just three days the pair had travelled from Birkenhead to Stockton, down to Kent, back to Birkenhead, down to Kent and then back to Birkenhead.

The Teesside detectives who smashed the ring

Kennedy may have been an international smuggler building a powerful contact book but he was brought down by the police officers left to deal with the misery his drugs were causing on the streets of England.

The gang’s main customer base was Teesside.

Cleveland Police launched Operation Spoonbill to probe the sources of cocaine supply.

In September 2016 detectives identified the Fraser-Clarks as potential drugs couriers and monitored them on a trip to Newcastle before stopping them on the A19 in North Yorkshire.

Inside their vehicle, one of many used by the gang that had secret compartments built into them, was £210,630.

A subsequent raid on their Wirral home led to the discovery of 16kg of high purity cocaine hidden under a bed.

The drugs were given a street value of £11m but, perhaps of more value to detectives, were the mobile phones they seized from the husband and wife team.

After cracking those mobiles, officers gained access to messages detailing gang member movements and mentioning helicopters.

Cleveland Police launched inquiries with air traffic control that matched suspicious private helicopter flights with dates and times the gang had associates meeting in holiday homes beneath the scheduled routes.

The net closes in

(Image: evening gazette)

Before that crucial bust on the Fraser-Clarks the National Crime Agency, by coincidence, took out one of Kennedy’s pilots.

On April 21, 2016 - just days after 160kgs of cocaine was dropped off in Dover for Kennedy - Niels Wartenburgh was arrested with passenger Ricardo Vorstenbosch as they landed at Redhill Aerodrome.

The flight, which was being traced by the NCA and other agencies, had dropped from RADAR near Yalding in Kent.

There, Joseph Peel had loaded his rented BMW with drugs from the helicopter before joining the M26 - where he led police on a 100mph chase as they swooped on him.

Inside his car were holdalls containing 43kg of cocaine, 60kg of heroin and 30 encrypted phones.

The haul was valued at £12m.

All three admitted conspiracy to supply Class A drugs.

Wartenbergh and fellow Dutch national Vorstenbosch were each jailed for 18 years and Peel, from North Kensington in north-west London, for 16 years.

That drop’s connection with Kennedy’s operation is unclear but Peel, when arrested, was found with a slip of paper in his pocket on which was the phone number of Russell Ford.

Ford was one of Kennedy’s drug couriers and cash collectors.

Cleveland Police arrested most of the gang in October of last year.

The group used ‘sophistication’ to adapt vehicles to conceal drugs. Honda Accords were the ‘vehicle of choice’.

When Russell Ford was stopped in an Audi A6 at the Tees Barrage in October 2016, he had a hidden compartment in his car operated by the cigarette lighter and a stash of cash was found.

The bizarre break which snared the top men

(Image: evening gazette)

Key man Kennedy and his pal Stewart were not in the UK at the time of the arrests.

Stewart had fled to Thailand, where he met Kennedy, while on bail for his role in a different cocaine supply conspiracy in Newcastle.

The 38-year-old was sentenced in his absence to three years in jail last November.

What happened next is unclear but in February, in what came as a complete surprise to the detectives hoping for their capture, the pair emerged when they were stopped while making an illegal river crossing from Moldova to Ukraine.

Thwarted by armed Ukrainian border soldiers near the Black Sea port of Odessa, they were banned from the country for five years and returned to Moldova, which allowed for their extradition to the UK.

How was Kennedy’s sentence decided?

(Image: evening gazette)

Kennedy - wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with ‘Boss’ - watched via video link from Strangeways as he was jailed for 18 years and four months after admitting conspiracy to supply Class A drugs.

Had he not pleaded guilty - a move that saw his sentence reduced by one third - Judge Sophie McKone told him he would have been jailed for 28 years.

Despite his guilty plea the sentence he received is far longer than those handed out to most of Merseyside’s most notorious drug smugglers, including Curtis Warren and the Fitzgibbon brothers, Ian and Jason.

Such was the case against Kennedy just a day earlier his barrister was simply left to argue why the starting point of his sentence should not be 30 years or above.

Asking Judge McKone to simply be “as merciful as possible”, his argument centred on how only a select few drug smugglers linked to the importation of “extraordinary” amounts of Class A drugs had been given 30 years or more.

That group includes Mehmet Baybasin, the London-based smuggler who plotted to import 40 tonnes of cocaine with Paul Taylor, from the Vauxhall area of Liverpool.

What do the police say now?

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Cleveland Police’s Detective Sergeant John Fitzpatrick, who led on Operation Spoonbill, said: “These individuals took lengthy and complex steps to mask their criminality, which was controlled from abroad.

“The volume of Class A drugs attributable to this group within the conspiracy period is huge and the damage caused locally and nationally by this evil trade is unquantifiable.”