Cocaine hidden in cheese and chocolate spread: 15 jailed in £1.4bn UK drug bust
Fifteen men have been jailed for their roles in a conspiracy to smuggle up to £1.4bn worth of cocaine into northern England, concealed inside gouda cheese and chocolate spread.
Cocaine hidden in cheese and chocolate spread dismantled in West Yorkshire
Fifteen men have been jailed this week following what West Yorkshire Police described as the largest drug operation in the force's history — an international cocaine conspiracy worth up to £1.4bn that ran from October 2022 to December 2023, according to bbc.com.
Deliveries of gouda cheese, chocolate spread and frozen fish mince arriving at industrial units in Huddersfield, Cleckheaton and Halifax in West Yorkshire, and in Blackburn, Lancashire, appeared unremarkable. Beneath the shrink-wrapped pallets, however, lay cocaine sourced from South America and concealed within the food products.
The drugs entered the UK via Belgium, crossing into Dover as commercial freight. From there, consignments were routed through a legitimate distribution hub in Derby before reaching the various industrial units — a staging process designed to obscure the trail from investigators.
At the units, cocaine was cut from blocks of gouda and later other foodstuffs, then repacked into cardboard boxes or black bin bags. Prosecutors said there were sometimes multiple pick-ups in a single day at these sites.
Payment for extracting cocaine from two pallets was set at £3,000, with £1,000 for each additional pallet. Aiden McCullagh, 58, from Brighouse, who handled the unpacking and repackaging, is believed to have received £135,000 for his role. Craig Goulding, 39, from Wakefield — jailed in May for 25 years — was paid "thousands" to dispose of waste food through his waste management business, police said. Some cocaine blocks bore so-called "cartel stamps", brand logos used as quality markers for buyers.
Couriers from the Midlands, Lancashire and the North East would park near the industrial estates. Their vehicles were taken from them, driven to the units to be loaded with drugs, then returned — a method that ensured even insiders had only partial knowledge of the operation.
Detective Inspector Kevin Daly, from West Yorkshire Police's Protective Services Crime team, said what triggered Operation Grasmount was the seizure in January 2023 of cocaine and ecstasy worth £2m from a car stopped by officers in the East End Park area of Leeds.
"Officers spent many months painstakingly building up a complete picture of how the operation worked and who were the key people running it in the UK," Daly said. "It was only by taking the required amount of time to gather a detailed and comprehensive evidential package that we were able to dismantle this distribution network as fully as we could."
As pressure mounted, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said the group "changed tactics". After a distribution hub in Lancashire was raided in May 2023, leading to the arrest and conviction of Saleem Chaudhri and courier Rieadul Mohabath, the gang switched to concealing drugs in chocolate spread and frozen fish mince, chosen for their smell and density.
Motorway service stations became handover points. In June 2023, a lorry driver from Belgium was arrested at Toddington Services, off the M1 in Bedfordshire, after officers observed him transferring boxes to a courier's car. Police recovered 156kg of drugs from the lorry's trailer and a further 36kg from the car, with a combined street value of £19.2m. Further arrests in December 2023 brought the conspiracy to an end.
Those convicted came from varied backgrounds. Some were career criminals with prior drug offences. Others had no previous contact with police. Harry Johnson, 26, from Leicester — who had previously worked at a high street opticians and was living at home at the time — held a middle-management role, organising deliveries, collections and payments. He had also enlisted his older brother Darren, now 31, into the network. "It's a pretty serious, if not spectacular, entry into the criminal justice system," his barrister said.
The precise quantity of drugs distributed by the gang remains unknown. The CPS said intelligence and evidential assessments estimated it at between four and 14 tonnes, equating to a street value of between £400m and £1.4bn.
Zoe Nixon, senior crown prosecutor for CPS Yorkshire and Humberside, said: "Behind the creative attempts of this group to conceal their dealings was an industrial-scale criminal enterprise which had been funnelling vast quantities of illegal drugs across the country. Each of the defendants had a role to play in keeping that enterprise operating, whether that was running the hubs, unpacking the drugs or transporting them to buyers across the country."
Three further men are still awaiting sentencing for their roles in the operation, which the CPS said involved other defendants already serving custodial sentences.
"It's the biggest investigation West Yorkshire Police has ever had, without a doubt," Daly said.
Source: Google News IE — Crime (en)