A mum discovered that her teenage son had been recruited to deal drugs when she checked his old phone.
Carl Ashall and Neil Swift put the boy to work selling cocaine and manning their graft phone in return for small sums of cash. He was left living in fear of reprisals from the two older men, whom he perceived as "dangerous" dealers.
Liverpool Crown Court heard today, Monday, that his mother discovered a string of text messages between her son and the two defendants on his old phone. Sarah Griffin, prosecuting, described how these communications revealed that Ashall and Swift had been using him to sell drugs over the course of several months, with the youngster subsequently confessing that he had first become involved after the latter had told him to hand over an unknown package in a car park.
