See the moment officers found 9kg of cocaine in a car boot
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This is the moment we caught a woman with more than 9kg of cocaine worth up to £750,000 as she drove on the M6 through the West Midlands.
Acting on information, our colleagues from Staffordshire Police pulled over Linda Lawrence, aged 58, at Norton Canes services as she was driving her brown Mitsubishi ASX on 8 October last year.
Nine blocks of cocaine were found in an open cardboard box in the boot of the vehicle, along with two mobile phones, her passport, a roll of brown parcel tape, plastic disposable gloves, pieces of paper with phone numbers on them, hotel receipts, and £140 in cash.
At her home, bank statements were found showing payments of several hundreds of pounds had been paid into her account at apparently random intervals over a period of at least a year.
Lawrence, of St Neots, Cambridgeshire, went on to admit possession with intent to supply class A drugs and was jailed for six years at Stafford Crown Court on Thursday (9 January).
DC Liam O’Brien, from the Regional Organised Crime Unit for the West Midlands (ROCUWM), said: “We believe Lawrence was being paid by others to transport these drugs around the country, and investigations into the wider drugs network continue.
“This was a really significant seizure of Class A drugs – drugs which would have gone on to cause untold misery on the streets of the UK.
“We work across the region to disrupt and arrest those involved in the supply and sale of drugs.”
The jailing of Lawrence forms part of Operation Target, our ongoing mission to tackle serious and organised crime around the West Midlands region.
We’re working 24/7 to tackle those involved in drugs, guns, money laundering and exploitation.