A drug dealer who helped operate a £9m scheme to distribute cocaine across Britain kept details of his gang’s deals in notebooks.
Behnam Tavakoli-Juibari acted as the bookkeeper for a gang responsible for shifting huge amounts of Class A drugs. The 37-year-old is the last of the gang to be sentenced but was finally jailed on Friday, May 6 after being extradited from the Netherlands and admitting his role in the plot.
The group supplied hundreds of kilos drugs in England, Wales and Scotland throughout the first half of 2016, with eight members jailed for a total of 106 years in May 2018. The plot, which focused on the supply of cocaine but also included heroin, MDMA, and diazepam, was mainly run from the Wirral but collapsed after Merseyside Police’s Operation Wessex.
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Officers raided an address used by the group, seizing a £1.4m stash including more than 9kg of cocaine, 7kg of unadulterated heroin, 10,000 MDMA pills and 11,000 diazepam tablets. Martin Reid, prosecuting, told Liverpool Crown Court yesterday afternoon that Juibari played multiple roles in the scheme, operating as both a bookkeeper and a courier for drugs.
Mr Reid said that during searches police found numerous notebooks that had been filled with handwritten transactions by Tavakoli-Juibari. They included records of sales to other dealers, debts that needed to be settled and payments the gang had received.
Mr Reid said: “They represent the supply of at least 216kg of cocaine.” He said the quantities of drugs being dealt were “very substantially in excess” of the quantities that would put Tavakoli-Juibari’s offending in the top bracket of seriousness.
Emma Goodall, QC, defending, said while Tavakoli-Juibari, of New Brighton, clearly played a key role in the group, he was not a leading figure compared to a number of other members. Unlike some other members, Tavakoli-Juibari was not involved in the scheme when it was conceived and his involvement in it dropped for a period of time before police struck.
Ms Goodall also pointed to his lack of previous convictions and said those who knew him spoke highly of him and were shocked by what he had done. She said: “His mitigation goes beyond an absence of convictions and demonstrates there are some positive characteristics of him that can be taken into account.” Ms Goodall said members of his Tavakoli-Juibari’s family relied on him heavily, including his partner and her child and his own elderly mother.
She said he had stayed out of trouble in life before becoming involved in the scheme through one of his employers, Christopher Atherton, with whom he worked in a legitimate business. Ms Goodall said: “He had a good upbringing with a mother who instilled in him a good work ethic and strong moral compass.”
Judge Neil Flewitt, QC, replied: “I do not know what happened to that moral compass when he was dealing class A drugs.” Judge Flewitt had indicated at an earlier hearing that he could sentence to Tavakoli-Juibari to around 18 and a half years in prison.
Today, he told him he had made matters worse for himself by fighting efforts to have him brought back to the UK from the Netherlands and for originally pleading not guilty when charged. That resulted in a trial being listed four separate times, with covid-related issues forcing it to be adjourned.
Judge Flewitt said while administrative problems may have caused some delays Tavakoli-Juibari’s continued denials were the reason the case had gone on for so long. The judge said: “If you had wanted to avoid that delay and if you were truly remorseful this case would have been resolved at a much earlier stage.”
Having heard further arguments from Ms Goodall about Tavakoli-Juibari, including further information about his medical problems, Judge Flewitt reduced the sentence to 15 years. Tavakoli-Juibari, of Woodlands Avenue, has already served more than 15 months through stints on remand in both this country and the Netherlands. He has also spent a significant period under electronic monitoring while on bail, further reducing the time he will serve in prison.
