TWO drug dealers who transported nearly £750,000 worth of cannabis hidden inside a van full of boxed lettuces have been jailed.

Eneo Zace and Patrick Duffy had the marijuana in vacuum-sealed packs labelled with names like 'AK 47', 'Critical Widow’ and ‘Chanel Plus X’.

They would move their narcotics between addresses by concealing their valuable stash of class B drugs under 115 boxes of 6,900 wrapped lettuces in the back of their panel van.

Duffy, the mastermind, and Zace, the assistant, had chosen the vegetables because they were cheap, available and more or less the same colour green as the drugs they were trying to disguise rather than as part of a contrived cover plan to pose as genuine greengrocers.

The duo were sentenced at Manchester Crown Court yesterday when Zace, of no fixed address, was jailed for three years and four months and Duffy, of Lentworth Drive, Walkden, was imprisoned for four years and eight months after they both earlier admitted supplying cannabis.

Detective Constable Mark Ellis, of GMP's Serious and Organised Crime Group, said afterwards: "As the judge remarked at the sentencing, Duffy and Zace were drug dealers on a ‘professional and commercial scale’.

"The sheer volumes of cannabis, the professional packing equipment and the way they transported the drugs concealed underneath the vegetables in the back of a van demonstrates that these men were experienced drug dealers who had gone to great lengths to evade capture.

"Thankfully our officers are determined to ensure drug dealers such as this pair pay the price for their criminality, and with the sentences they have received today they have done exactly that.

"I would like to point out at this point that though our officers work incredibly hard to tackle drug dealing in our city, our communities also play a key role in the fight against criminality."

The court was told the dealers transferred the cannabis from the van into large black holdalls at a garage at a home in Walkden.

It was one of these holdalls containing 15kg of the drug that Zace loaded into a Volkswagen Passat on December 17 last year.

The car was stopped and searched by offiers from GMP's Serious and Organised Crime Unit.

A set of keys found in the car led officers to the garage where they discovered a further 71kg of marijuana packed and ready to be transported along with a vacuum-packing machine and empty plastic bags.

The total street value of the drugs seized was estimated to be around £737,000.