The great paper chase

What started with the discovery of £500,000 worth of drugs destined for the streets of Southampton resulted in an international investigation and the jailing of gang members for more than 80 years.

Spanning more than two years the key to the investigation linking the main players of the conspiracy through the peddling of drugs, was not the drugs themselves but the paperwork behind the deals.

Subsequent searches at the homes of the gang yielded very little in the way of cold hard drugs but what police did find was of much more significance.

Diaries and notebooks Scraps of paper, backs of envelopes, pocket diaries and innocuous looking notebooks were all to prove vital in snaring the network of dealers.

They enabled police to follow the money trail between suppliers and ultimately to the head of the syndicate Michael Smith who oversaw the operation from his Spanish villa.

Not content with tracking the money to Spain detectives were then able to locate several accounts between which money was being laundered in a bid to avoid detection.

The evidence gathered by Hampshire's Serious and Organised Crime unit and expert drugs officers resulted in the jailing of the defendants for a total of 85 years.

That day in court marked the end of Operation Berrow, one the biggest drugs conspiracy networks tackled by Hampshire detectives and the end a four year investigation which started with the discovery of a half a million pounds worth of drugs.

It was December 2002 that officers found the crates of drugs stashed in the lounge of a Southampton terraced house.

From the outside the home at Breamore Road was an unlikely drugs warehouse, but inside police found some £565,400 of drugs including 668 bars of cannabis, up to £20,000 of amphetamine, Ecstasy worth £4,000, cocaine with up to 95 per cent purity worth more than £50,000.

The tenant at the property at the time was unsurprisingly charged with supplying controlled drugs after police also found paperwork implicating him in the supply chain.

But detectives realised the significance of the haul and set up an operation in a bid to snare the bigger fish in the operation.

Along with the drugs and some forensic evidence, officers seized paperwork which was identified as deals lists. These were passed to specialist drugs investigation officers DC Mick Ellis and DC Annie Hodge.

Money trail Although a far cry from an ordered filing system these scraps of paper, 16 envelopes and lists of names were to prove vital in cracking the case as they were a record of transactions between dealers and suppliers.

The ink stained, dog-eared paperwork documented part of the trail of money, the profits from dealing class A drugs on the streets of Southampton.

Meanwhile similar raids on homes of Ben Gray, described in court as "the moneyman" and Shaun Lanaghan, the brother-in-law of Smith described as "a trusted lieutenant" in court, also uncovered a significant section of the paper trail, which combined with surveillance evidence built-up a damning picture.

DC Mick Ellis was the man in charge of making sense of the lists and diaries.

He explained how some of the key evidence was pieced together when diaries taken from both the men's properties were matched up, a clear money trail could be identified.

The starting point for him was the initial deals list found at Breamore Road. All the information was inputted into a spreadsheet and then filters focussed in on the information needed.

"It took more than 20 hours to input all the information, and the 30-page statement that I presented to the court took about three weeks to put together.

"It is a very specialist area, working out the drugs lists, only two of us can do it. It is like cracking a code. Drug dealers each have their own code, you have to get into the minds of the suspect and work out what commodities and the system he is dealing in.

"It was very rare to get a complete deal list like the ones we found in this case."

He explained how the investigation was passed onto the specialist organised crime and drugs team after the initial drugs haul.

"We had one charged but there wasn't enough evidence at the time to charge any more so it was passed on to us to work pro-actively on Michael Smith, who had been arrested. We were able to find not only evidence of that conspiracy but a second conspiracy as a result of the deals lists we uncovered at a later raid.

"After the first seizure there wasn't a major seizure of drugs after that just evidence of their involvement in drugs."

In court he described how a 2004 diary taken from Lanaghan's Exford Avenue home in Harefield was set out in columns with a running total kept of the profit and how it was being moved about between gang members.

Profits documented Half a million pounds could be documented going in and out over just a nine week period.

A similar diary was also found at the Gatcombe Gardens address of co-defendant Ben Gray in which the numbers corresponded almost exactly with the numbers in one of the columns in the diary seized by the police from Shaun Lanaghan.

The evidence was presented to the jury along with accounts from surveillance operations.

The large sums of cash shown on paper moving between Lanaghan and Gray were backed up by sightings of the pair meeting up at city addresses on days transactions were noted in the diaries.

The amount of money shown on what is described as the business pages of the list total led to more than £900,000 and the figures indicating the total quantity of cocaine involved added up to a total street value of just over £1.5m.

Major drug dealers DC Ellis said: "It was quite surprising that this amount of drugs was being dealt on Southampton's streets they were major, major drug dealers.

"We maintain it was a snapshot at a particular time. What we were able to show was what they were doing at a particular time."

In addition to the evidence presented by DC Ellis, forensic searches at properties belonging to several suspects, recovered fingerprint and handwriting evidence, linking other members of the gang to the operation.

Despite the raids on his home and those of his co-conspirators Smith continued to live the high life in Spain, keeping an overview of the operation at arms length from his villa in Marbella complete with panoramic views of the coast and surrounding golf courses.

Unbeknown to him and his father Gordon who Smith jnr, had recruited to his empire, their money transfers would be scrutinised by the British authorities.

Detectives uncovered some ten bank accounts handled by Smith jnr which showed significant amount of cash being transferred between father and son between July 2003 and May 2004.

Transfer slips found at Smith's house at Smythe Road, Spanish bank transfer slips of £13,000 and £900 also helped build up the picture. Documents relating to Spanish bank accounts were also found in his rubbish bins. It took six weeks for the evidence to be presented and scrutinised by the jury who eventually convicted the accused for their involvement in the conspiracy.