An employee at a Glasgow-based haulage company has been jailed for more than four years after using company vehicles to run a drug trafficking operation, writes Carol Millett.
The High Court in Glasgow was told that Russell Smith exploited his access to his employer’s trucks by arranging for drivers to use them to transport cocaine.
Russell Smith use EncroChat, the encrypted phone network used by criminals, to organise the drug running during the Covid pandemic in 2020. His nickname on the site was ‘On Top Non Stop’.
He was arrested after police breached the encrypted network and found a number of discussions between Smith and associates, including messages referring to him selling 15kg of cocaine and ‘wishing’ that he had another 50kg to sell.
In another conversation Russell Smith agreed to buy £385,000 of the drug.
He pleaded guilty at the High Court in Glasgow to a charge of being involved in serious organised crime.
Lord Cubie sentenced him to four years and three months for what he branded ‘corrosive, exploitative and damaging’ drug dealing.
The charge spanned between March and June 2020.
Prosecutor Bill McVicar told the court that Russell Smith had access to his employer’s trucks and used them for the movement of the cocaine.
He added that he was implicated by the messages he had sent and received on EncroChat, which showed that Smith had between March 2020 and June 2020, acquired and sold ‘substantial’ amounts of cocaine, making a profit of around £3,500 per kilogram.
Sentencing, Lord Cubie said Smith’s involvement had not been “peripheral” and told Smith that, but for his guilty plea, he would have served five years and three months, rather than the sentence of four years and three months the judge had imposed.
