Todays story starts in Windermere, a pretty town in the lake district about 280 miles north-west of London and 50 or so miles south of Carlisle. You may think of Windermere as a pretty place where you have maybe been on holiday in the past, or maybe you have been to nearby Lake Windermere, the largest natural lake in both the Lake District and in England, with a length of about 11 miles (18 km) and a width of 1 mile (1.6 km) at its widest point. Nasty things like seedy drug deals don’t happen in a place like this, but of course they do. And todays story tries to go behind the headlines of “A drugs gang of ten men have been sentenced to more than 100 years in prison for their part in a £53 million supply of cocaine.” Let’s see how much more light we can shed on what happened.
And when we pick up the story in March 2022, Cumbria Police were aware of a drugs dealer, 31 year Reece Barnes, operating in the Windermere area. A man supplying large amounts of cocaine in a relatively quiet area can quickly attract attention and word soon got back to the police. They asked the North West Regional Crime Unit for help in bringing in Reece after becoming aware he was responsible for selling large quantities of cocaine as what could be described as a ‘regional retailer’. Enquiries revealed all the tell-tale signs of the lifestyle he was living in that that Reece didn’t have a job or any legitimate way of making the money he seemed to make – which appeared to be a lot. It which provided him with a nice lifestyle of luxury holidays and city breaks.
Detectives started to watch him and quickly found evidence of how he worked. He would meet in local country lanes with a convicted class A drug dealer based in Cheshire, 62 year old Stephen Stockall. Detectives soon realised that these meetings saw Stockall make the trip north to the Windermere area and usually involved Barnes leaving the meeting with whatever he had bought in a JD Sports bag. It turned out that during these meetings, Barnes had been paying out around £30,000 in cash for cocaine which he would take away in the innocuous sports-shop bag. Barnes didn’t seem to be very forensically aware and CCTV evidence captured him hiding the drugs he had bought in a shoe box – old skool – in a key-coded local storage unit near to his home address. All covered very clearly by cctv as these storage units always are. He would then supply customers in the local area in cocaine at a hefty margin and so making very nice profits for him.
Officers could have moved in straight away and getting Barnes off the streets would have been a decent result. But the fact he had been working with Stockall made officers realise that Barnes could lead them to players further up the food chain.
It appeared that Stockall had not learnt from his previous brush with the law when he had been jailed at Southampton Crown after being found guilty of being involved in illegally importing a £1.7million heroin haul into the UK in June 2006. He was sent to prison for 16 years after 13.8kg of heroin was found hidden in a loudspeaker in a lorry driven by an employee of his – who was also imprisoned for the same period. The lorry was one of a fleet belonging to a firm owned by Stockall, and Customs officials found the drugs when they pulled over a haulage lorry for examination at Newhaven ferryport in Sussex. The lorry had come from Spain and was carrying pile driving equipment. Stockall denied emphatically as the charges against him and any knowledge of the heroin, but the jury didn’t believe him.
And when he appealed against his conviction, he was confident that fresh evidence would clear his name. This was a statement from a man awaiting trial on drugs charges, and was put forward by Stockall as evidence he played no role in the smuggling operation. Sounds legit, right? Lord Justice Hooper didn’t believe it for a second and dismissed the evidence as ‘quite incapable of belief’, adding “What convinces us that this statement is quite incapable of belief is the schedule of phone calls,” he said, referring to a significant number of calls between Stockall, his employee who was caught with the drugs and the man who made the statement. “The application for leave to appeal against the conviction is dismissed.”
3 February 2023 – Stockall
Let’s go back to todays story, and the 3 February 2023. Having watched Stockall supply Barnes with drugs, officers decided the time was right to make their move and so they stopped and arrested Stockall him driving on the M56 in Cheshire. Officers found more than 40g of cocaine hidden in his car. But there was lots more at his home which clearly indicated how he made his money. A detailed search of his house showed all the records he had kept of dealers he had supplied to and the list of deals he had made, in addition to more drugs and drugs paraphernalia – I think when talking about drugs is the only time I ever use the word paraphernalia – you too?
4 February 2023 – Barnes
Barnes had naturally heard that Stockall had been caught and was spending time in police custody, but he still needed more drugs to supply his list of customers. He didn’t appear perturbed by the arrest, seemingly not believing that the police could be on to him too. He contacted other associates in Manchester, Scott Owen and Daryl Preston, to source larger quantities of cocaine and they sent one of their men, 32 year old Cain Taylor to re-supply him. Barnes was unaware he was being watched when on the same day he was arrested following a drugs deal with Turner. Detectives found in the possession of Barnes the kilo of cocaine he had just bought from Cain Turner.
4 February – Cain Turner
When Turner, from Manchester, was stopped on the motorway in his car after the meeting with Reece Barnes, the £30,000 he had just been given by Barnes for the cocaine was found was hidden under the front seat. He had had a busy day, delivering more than 22kg of cocaine to customers that day. It was later estimated by police that in his time dealing drugs, he had transported more than 100kg of cocaine with a street value in excess of £13 million.
And detectives, through the arrests of Barnes and Cain were able to seize the phones of the two men which provided them with lots of information, allowing them to piece together where they sat in the cocaine gang. In particular, there was very rich evidence on platforms such as WhatsApp and Signal which revealed the two men in custody, along with Stockall, were part of a 10 man criminal gang, based around the Manchester area. And this group were importing and distributing huge amounts of cocaine generating large amounts of money.
Thomas Whittaker and Michael Evans
As detectives worked through the web of inter-connected dealers, they found two others who had both been regularly supplying Reece Barnes with cocaine. Local men, Michael Evans and 42 year old Thomas Whittaker, who lived in Skelmersdale, about 70 miles south of Windermere. They also had links to an organised crime group based in Portugal.
As well as keeping Barnes in drugs, these two dealt extensively in Wales, and Evans was arrested in his car in Cardiff in possession of 7kg of cocaine which was worth over £700,000 if sold on the streets.
It was 25 May 2023 when Whittaker was caught after detectives took out warrants at his partners address. His usual mode of transport to deal drugs was a BMW X5 and this was seized along with 600g of cocaine hidden in a car parked not too far away from his house.
As the investigation progressed, it was clear that Barnes and Whittaker were doing a lot of work for the two men who seemed to be running this major operation, Andrew Stephens and Simon Buller
45 year old Simon Buller was a married father who was a self-employed scaffolder. Not the classic stereotype we may have as the leader of the leader of a major drugs gang. But as well as his involvement with this gang, he also had strong links to another organised crime gang in Lancashire.
41 year old Andrew Stephens was the father of a young daughter who was unemployed, but living a very comfortable lifestyle.
Andrew Stephens and Simon Buller – 11 May 2023
Stephens and Buller would use encrypted messages on platforms such as WhatsApp and Signal to keep in touch with their suppliers and send the postcodes of drug deals to their drugs couriers. For extra security, and to ensure the drugs were only given to the people who had ordered them, the gang used a token system. The token would be an image of a banknote with the serial number being the key identifier. This gave piece of mind to the buyer who were always wary that the gang had been infiltrated and they were in fact meeting an undercover police officer.
The messages from their platforms showed they were working closely with major criminals in Dubai who were managing huge importations of cocaine from the Netherlands into UK ports in the south of England where they were taken to be stored in a number of safe houses in Manchester.
But on the 11 May it all went wrong for the two kingpins. They had used one of their drugs couriers, Anthony Warhurst, to pick up 50kg of cocaine from a port in Harwich, Essex which had come in on a shipment from The Netherlands. Warhurst was not a man who stood out from the crowd – mid 50’s, thinning hair, on the heavier side. But driving back to the north-west Warhurst was pulled by the police on the M6 motorway. One minute he was in slow moving traffic, radio on, the next minute he must have felt that horrible sense of foreboding as the flashing blue lights came up from behind him and he was boxed in by police cars on either side and in front of his car. Moments later the 50 kilos of drugs, valued in excess of £5 million were found in a box under a blanket in the boot of his estate car. The drugs were barely even hidden. Detectives estimated that the drugs found in the car would have been bought for around £1.5million, so the margins on this haul were huge. When you step back and consider it as a business, except for the clear risks of prison or violence from rival gangs, with those sort of margins and the lack of other costs that needed to be absorbed, it isn’t surprising that some are attracted to the relatively easy big money of importing cocaine. Further investigation revealed that Warhurst had been working for Buller and Stephens in making numerous trips to Harwich and Stephens and Buller were arrested the same day. It was estimated that in their time running the operation, Buller and Stephens were responsible for the distribution of over 230kg of cocaine worth over £23 million pounds.
Scott Owen and Daryl Preston
The final gang members to be rounded up with Manchester-based Daryl Preston and Scott Owen. Preston, and Owen teamed up to act as ‘brokers’, connecting suppliers of the drugs and wholesale buyer Barnes. We heard earlier that they supplied cocaine to Reece Barnes and the pair also had links to Buller and Stephens.
On the 13 May 2023, Preston was arrested near his house and Owen was met by police when he got off a plane from Portugal.
Trial
At the opening of the trial, Prosecutor Tim Evans told Carlisle Crown Court:
“This was an inter-linked group of people, say the Crown, and supply relationships would shift within the conspiracy if a particular conspirator was having difficulties at a particular time.”
Some criminal “middle men” involved in the plot never actually took possession of cocaine themselves, neither did they use their own couriers, the court heard. Instead they simply acted as drug supply “brokers” — putting manufacturers of product in contact with wholesale dealers — and took a wage for that role.
: “This is Amazon-style drug-dealing with that level of organisation and commerciality about it.”
It was Cumbria’s biggest ever drugs supply probe and one of the UK’s largest.”
All pleaded guilty to conspiracy to supply cocaine. Let’s spend a little bit more time than usual on the sentencing, as it is, I think, interesting to see how the legal representatives for each tried – as is their jobs of course – to reduce their sentences.
Andrew Stephens, was, as we have heard, one of the two most leaders of the gang arranging the importation of cocaine with contacts in Dubai. “This was a planned and resourced operation by you,” said the judge, who rejected a defence claim that Stephens, was purely acting “on instructions”. His defending KC argued that Stephens had been more involved in the logistics of the operation, by organising drivers and other transport for the conspiracy but he had played no part in negotiating prices for the drugs that were bought and sold. The court heard how he was a dad to a young girl and had been well thought of at his work until the lost his job during covid. Unable to find another he took the option of making, as he described it, “easy money” by becoming involved in the drugs trade – a choice he now bitterly regretted and for which he felt considerable remorse.
The Judge sent Stephens to prison for 20 years.
Simon Buller
Simon Buller was the other gang leader. His KC said the following: “Mr Buller was not the spark or genesis of this conspiracy. He became involved a little later in it because of the role of others: those who he knew by association in the building trade and others. He certainly wasn’t at the top table at the inception of this particular conspiracy.” Explaining how he was a scaffolder when arrested, the KC continued: “There were financial difficulties. That was the other reason he became involved in this conspiracy.”
Buller wrote a letter to court expressing his remorse for his actions and the KC reckoned this wasn’t about him saying: “Not for his own sake. He appreciates he is in custody and will be in custody for some time. It is the ramification which his actions and his incarceration has had on those who are completely blameless, particularly his children and his wife.”
The children sent Buller to prison for 15 years and 2 months.
Stockall
Stephen Stockall’s KC told the court that his previous years behind bars for smuggling heroin, meant he fell into arrears to the tune of around £150,000 with an organised crime gang and he began supplying cocaine to repay his perceived debt, his barrister said. His Barrister did say however,
“It is correct that Mr Stockall had never received a direct threat. But he was being directed to obey orders from an organised crime gang and he feared that if he did not obey, he – or more worryingly his family – would come to harm.”
The Judge sent the 63 year old to prison for 12 years.
Reece Barnes
The barrister representing Reece Barnes said he had operated lower down the criminal plot’s pecking order. But the court heard he had been dealing drugs from March 2022 until February 2023 and was believed to have supplied 14 kilos of cocaine within Cumbria. His KC told how others in the conspiracy had referred to him as “the kid,” suggesting that he had no influence on anybody else in the operation.
The Judge sent him to prison for 12 years.
Thomas Whittaker’s barrister told the court that 42 year old Whittaker was just a courier, transporting both cash and drugs. “There is genuine remorse,” said the Barrister. The judge commented: “This was high level delivery driving.” Before sentencing him to 12 years in prison.
36 year old Michael Evans was sent to prison for six years for his role as a courier where he transported 57 kilos of cocaine during 20 trips.
Caine Turner, aged 32, from Manchester, and a man of previous good character, had it seemed been doing well before the covid pandemic, when he had been a management training scheme. When he lost that job he did his bit in the community delivering vehicles to NHS trusts.
But the court heard he had completed 17 trips during the conspiracy, delivering an estimated 130 kilos.
He was jailed for eight years and eight months.
Then we have 58 year old Anthony Warhurst, whose timing wasn’t great and had worked as a courier for just three weeks before he was stopped. His KC expressed his remorse telling the court that he became involved with the gang after a fall which meant that he was unable to work for the first time in his life.
Warhurst was jailed for nine years, eight months.
Judge
The judge told the men: “It is the daily diet of these courts to deal with the outcome of drug dealing and drug use,” said Judge Barker. “It is the addiction which ruins lives, destroys relationships, even causes death. It is that supply of drugs which drives criminal activity through thefts, robbery, burglary; and often, lying in the background, violence and disorder.
“That is why drugs and particularly class A drugs are illegal and it is why dealing in them receives such significant sentences. That is why those who do so at a large scale can expect to receive very lengthy sentences.
Post Trial
Speaking after the trial, Detective Chief Superintendent Ian Whitehead said: ‘The convictions of these individuals will have a significant impact on drug supply in the North West and the UK as a whole because we have effectively shut down a drug importation route from Holland into the UK.
“In total, ten people have now been convicted and sentenced to over 120 years in prison, with one more to be sentenced next month
‘Collectively, these individual crime groups assisted each other in distributing hundreds of kilos of cocaine not only to Reece Barnes, but to hundreds of customers across the UK.’
“To try and evade police, they used sophisticated, encrypted apps to communicate with each other, regularly changing their travel routes, and would use multiple locations and couriers to facilitate the importations and supplies.
“We hope that this sends a message to criminals that you are not untouchable. We are committed to ridding the streets of drugs, robustly dealing with high harm offenders to reduce crime and restore trust and confidence in communities across the North West.
So what do you make of what we have heard today
A little bit of a more recent and different story today, which I hope you have found of interest. So let me ask you if you have any sympathy for any of the men we have heard about today? We have heard hard luck stories, issues caused finding work after covid, and other reasons why these men got involved in smuggling cocaine.
Let’s not get involved in the debate today about whether cocaine should be legal or not – that is for another podcast. As it is illegal in the UK, I guess the bottom line for me is that all were happy to take the money and knew exactly what they were doing. If you are a drugs dealer you know that it is the classic trade off between risk and reward.
With he police breaking encrochat, you may have thought that would have made the gang consider other ways to communicate with each other outside WhatsApp and signal. But seemingly not. And going back to what I said in the introduction, the history of these gangs is that however clever the people running the operations are and whatever steps are taken, it only takes one weak link to infliltrate operations. And here is was Reece Barnes in Windermere of all places, who attracted significant attention for his actions which led to the authorities being led to higher players. One thing we should add here is that although the police spoke about further investigations to uncover the people at the very top of the tree in Dubai and Portugal, I think we all know they are unlikely to be locked up in jail anytime soon.
All of the men we have heard of could have taken lesser paying work which didn’t have the possibility of wasting years of your life in prison. But instead, they rolled the dice. And lost. And for Anthony Warhurst, if you believe him, he didn’t just lose but threw the dice out of the area after only being involved in the conspiracy for three weeks which cost him 9 years of his life wasting his time in a prison cell, where they all are today.
.This story was released as episode 439 of the UK True Crime Podcast, using the following sources:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce972n44qzpo
https://www.rocu.police.uk/news/2024/nine-members-of-crime-group-jailed-for-more-than-100-years/
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1113915013084251
https://www.northwichguardian.co.uk/news/4481351.lorry-firm-boss-fails-to-overturn-drugs-conviction/
https://www.northwichguardian.co.uk/news/2111181.man-jailed-for-drug-smuggling-will-appeal/