Leamington drug dealer jailed after being caught red-handed by police and telling officers 'you’ve got me bang to rights'

A Leamington man was assaulted and forced to sell heroin and crack cocaine to pay off a drugs debt run up by his cousin.

But Hudhayfah Bernard continued dealing, selling hundreds of pounds worth of the class A drugs a day, even after the debt had been repaid.

And after hearing he was dealing from a car provided by his suppliers, a judge at Warwick rejected his claim that he was only doing so because he felt ‘trapped’ into it.

Bernard (30) of Marston Close, Leamington, was jailed for two-and-a-half years after he had pleaded guilty to two charges of possessing drugs with intent to supply them.

Prosecutor Rupert Jones said that at 10.15am on June 22 last year police officers saw Bernard in a Ford Fiesta supplying drugs to a known addict in Trinity Street, Leamington.

When they stopped him, he immediately said: “You’ve got me bang to rights.”

On the front passenger seat of the Fiesta was a bag containing 131 wraps of heroin and crack cocaine worth a total of £1,310 and just over £300 in cash.

A phone found on Bernard had been used exclusively for dealing in drugs, with exchanges between him and 40-or-so users over the previous two months.

And Mr Jones asserted: “The prosecution say the defendant was in some significant control of the operation. There is nothing on the phone to suggest he was under any threat.”

Asked by his barrister Simon Williams when he first became involved in supplying drugs, Bernard replied: “When I was approached by a group of men in relation to a drug debt my cousin had had.

“This was in March. They came over to me and said I owe a drug debt which was theirs for my cousin’s drugs.

“I was like, ‘no,’ then I was approached on a second occasion and I said no, but on a third occasion I was threatened and became frightened.

“I was pushed and headbutted to the face and slapped, and I was threatened to be killed and my family was threatened to be killed.”

Of the debt, Bernard, who said his cousin was in prison at that time, said: “Initially it was £500, but as that was worked away I was forced to keep going. I felt trapped in a cycle.”

Observing that he accepted dealing from nine in the morning until quite late at night, Mr Jones put to him: “Were you not earning your income from dealing drugs?”

Bernard replied: “That’s a negative, I was not.”

Asked by Judge Peter Cooke why he had not told that to the police, Bernard, who said the Fiesta was a rental car supplied by the drugs gang, answered: “I felt scared.”

Before sentencing Bernard, Judge Cooke said: “I do not feel able to reject his account of how this began.

“It is within my knowledge that people are prevailed upon to engage in drug-dealing by drug gangs, and that on occasions that involvement is secured in part by the making of threats to the wider family.

“It is also within my experience that these debts can sometimes be presented as being transferred from one member of a family to another.

“However, things did move on. There was a database on is phone of around 40 customers. I am driven therefore to conclude he was somebody who knew the scale of the enterprise.

“The gang obviously had a high degree of confidence in his willingness to conduct these transactions at a high level.

“On his own account they provided him with the transport he was dealing from and, as he has accepted, after the debt was cleared he went on doing it for another couple of months.

“He was a busy dealer. It is almost invariably the case that there are inducements as well as threats, and I take the view it is straining incredulity to accept he derived not a penny from this. That, I believe, is a step too far.

“I will accept he got into this because he was subjected to threats initially, but I find there is then an element of commercial gain.”