A cocaine and heroin importation gang armed themselves with hand grenades and were ready to recruit "lads who blow any c***'s head off".
Graham Minards used an international network of criminal contacts in countries such as Colombia, Brazil and Dubai as he and his associates flooded the UK with tens of millions of pounds of class A drugs. When his business partner Peter Bradshaw came under significant threats after racking up huge debts with those higher up the chain, they hatched plans to respond with violence through their access to a fearsome arsenal of weapons and explosives.
Liverpool Crown Court heard this afternoon, Thursday, that the two men organised their "very large scale and sophisticated nationwide drugs supply business" via encrypted communications platform EncroChat. A series of messages from between March and June 2020, recovered when the network was infiltrated by law enforcement authorities, showed that they had been "involved in the purchasing and supply of multi-kilo quantities of drugs on a daily basis" and would also move drugs and cash on behalf of others - "believing they would make millions of pounds" in doing do.
