A gang wearing a courier uniform and identical pink backpacks to deliver drugs worth nearly £2 million across London has been jailed for over 37 years.
Four women in London disguised themselves as delivery drivers selling copious amounts of drugs during London’s lockdowns. They claimed they were sourcing from a so-called ‘candy shop’ where customers could purchase over 90 kinds of party drugs despite COVID-19 restrictions preventing people from going out and indulging in the otherwise rowdy London nightlife.
The Brazillian drug-dealing women involved were kitted out in glaringly obvious courier uniforms. Each of them carried a signature pink backpack with a ‘team’ number assigned to each person carrying out the delivery. Their gang leader, who has been found out to be the 31-year-old Tiago Thomaz De-Lima, uses a highly encrypted chat service to communicate with these women, arranging wholesale purchases of kilos of cocaine, MDMA, and crystal meth.
De-Lima paid them a fair wage of £220 a day, delivering from Monday to Saturday between 1pm and 10pm in the surrounding Notting Hill and South Kensington area.
After their arrest on 22 February, the police seized stock valued at almost £2,000,000. The team of five were sentenced to a total of 37.5 years in prison. DC James Hughes from the Specialist Crime Unit said:
“We know that violence we see in London’s streets is inextricably linked to drugs such as the ones that De-Lima and his colleagues were distributing across London.
“The meticulous investigative work carried out by my team which unravelled this case of highly organised criminals demonstrates the detective capabilities of the Met and shows our commitment to taking these controlled substances off London’s streets.
“We hope that today’s result sends a clear message to those involved in illicit activities that the Met does not welcome this kind of enterprise in London, and our Specialist Crime Units will work determinedly to dismantle organised crime groups such as this.”
De-Lima received an eighteen-year sentence, while the other drivers were jailed for between four and a half and six years. The group’s bookkeeper is due to be sentenced in November.
