The leader of a County Lines gang which flooded Somerset, Devon and Cornwall with heroin and crack cocaine has been jailed for ten years.

 

Daniel Ryan ran four Scouse Joey drug lines that supplied thousands of users all over the three counties and sent up to £5,000 a day cash back to Liverpool.

 

He carried on dealing despite being caught by police in 2018 and set up new supply networks in Plymouth and Newquay before being arrested again with £16,800 worth of drugs in 2020.

 

His gang were known as The Liverpool Firm and may have trafficked a million pounds worth of drugs over a 14 month period.

 

Money was sent back to Liverpool from Weston-super-Mare and other areas of Somerset, Poole, East Devon, Exeter, Plymouth, St Austell, Falmouth, Bodmin and Newquay.

 

Thousands of text advertisements were sent out all over the region advertising special offers for drugs, including three £10 bags for £25. The main conspiracy carried on despite repeated police raids and seizures of phones or drugs.

 

The network unraveled because their customers included three undercover officers who were posing as addicts in Exeter, ordering supplies through the Scouse Joey phone lines.

 

Their intelligence enabled detectives to identify the leaders of the group and arrest Ryan for the first time in March 2018.

 

The gang used euphemisms to try to cover up their activity in text messages, one of which described drugs being packaged as ‘food getting plated up now’.

 

Ryan set up shop again from a flat in Wilton Street in Plymouth in July 2020 with the help of friends Michael Dickinson and James Clinton, who ran supply lines in Newquay and Plymouth.

 

They sent bulk messages to 1,470 potential customers in the eight days before police broke up the racket.

 

Ryan, aged 28 of North Road, Plymouth, admitted four counts of conspiracy to supply class A drugs and was jailed for ten years by Recorder Mr Mathew Turner at Exeter Crown Court.

 

Dickinson, aged 22, of Acre Grove, Leeds; and Clinton, aged 25, of Barratt Road, Halewood, both admitted two counts of conspiracy and were jailed for two years nine months and two years two months respectively.

 

Five others were jailed for a total of 12 years, 11 months in December 2020.

 

The judge told Ryan: “This was a major County Lines operation in which a large amount of class A drugs and cash were sent to and from the South West from Liverpool.”

 

Mr Brian Fitzherbert, prosecuting, said the initial conspiracy involved at least a kilogram of class A drugs and ran for more than a year from September 2017.

 

Intelligence from three undercover officers posing as drug addicts in Exeter led to further tracking of phones, cars, people and cash.

 

Lawyers representing all three defendants said they had difficult childhoods which led them into the world of drugs. They said they have all tried to turn their lives around in the two years since their arrests.

 

Mr William Parkhill, for Ryan, said he was the main organiser of the gang in the South West but was not the head of the crime group and answered to more serious dealers in Liverpool.