Gang who ran drug line from Leeds to Harrogate and Scarborough jailed for 41 years

Six men who ran a drugs line from Leeds to Harrogate and Scarborough, using children as young as 14 to carry crack cocaine and heroin to the coast, have been jailed for a total of 41 years.

The line, which police said operated under the name “Reggie” and sent up to 3,000 text messages a day advertising drugs to about 400 users, was dismantled in February after a 14-month investigation by West and North Yorkshire police that began when a patrol in Scarborough found a 14-year-old boy from Leeds in a flat on the town’s Barrowcliff estate with £8,000 of class A drugs and a mobile phone containing 2,100 customer numbers.

Leeds crown court heard on Friday that the gang had taken over the flat, whose tenant was a 52-year-old heroin user, in a practice known as cuckooing, and had used it as a base for 11 months. The boy, who had been reported missing from Leeds four times, had been promised £150 a week and threatened with a knife when he asked to go home.

Jailing the six, Judge Richard Hallam said the men had treated the child as “a disposable asset, to be moved around the county like a parcel” and that their trade had “brought misery to two towns that could ill afford it”. He said the boy, who gave evidence by video link and cannot be named, had shown “a courage that puts the defendants to shame”.

Kieron Baines, 29, of Harehills, Leeds, who the court heard controlled the line and took most of its estimated £520,000 annual profit, was jailed for 12 years for conspiracy to supply class A drugs and for arranging the travel of a child for exploitation under the Modern Slavery Act. His brother Dean Baines, 26, was sentenced to nine years, and Tyrell Ogunde, 24, of Chapeltown, to eight. Three other men from Leeds and Harrogate, who ran the Harrogate end of the line and drove the couriers, received sentences of between three and five years.

Detective Inspector Sarah Bellamy, who led the investigation, said the case showed how the market in county towns had changed. “Ten years ago these lines ran from Liverpool or Manchester to the coast. Now they run from Leeds to towns an hour up the road, and they run on children,” she said. “Every parent in Leeds whose 14-year-old goes missing for a night should know what this case was about.”

The 14-year-old, now 16, was referred to the National Referral Mechanism for victims of trafficking and has not been prosecuted. He is in college. The tenant of the flat, who was not charged, has been rehoused.

North Yorkshire police said it had closed 19 county lines into Scarborough, Whitby and Harrogate in the past two years and that the number of children referred as victims of criminal exploitation in the county had risen from 31 in 2023 to 88 last year. Confiscation proceedings against the Baines brothers will begin in the spring.