Custodial sentences totalling more than 15 years were handed out to four Bradford street drug dealers yesterday as part of a police operation.

“Third strike” dealer Paulo Gallone was jailed for five years and 220 days by the Recorder of Bradford, Judge Roger Thomas QC, after admitting 13 drugs offences.

Bradford Crown Court heard that Gallone, 36, of Whiteways, Bolton Lane, Bradford, supplied class A drugs.

Kyle Sterling, who was already serving a four-year sentence for drug supply offences, was given a further three and a half years youth custody after pleading guilty to three charges of supplying crack cocaine, in April and May.

The court heard Sterling, 20, of Elmfield Drive, Odsal, was sentenced to four years youth custody in July for drugs offences in August last year. He committed his first offence this year only three days after pleading guilty to the 2012 offences.

Hamid Akhtar, 40, of Harlow Road, Lidget Green, was jailed for three years after pleading guilty to supplying drugs in April and May this year.

Ahsan Khan, 20, of Murgatroyd Street, East Bowling, was given three years’ youth custody. The court heard he was caught selling heroin from a car in Drummond Road, Manningham, in February. When police went to arrest him at his home in November they found evidence of ongoing drug dealing, including heroin and cocaine, £500 cash, phones and electronic scales.

The defendants were arrested as part of Operation Stalebank, in which undercover officers bought drugs from street dealers, arranging meetings by ringing mobile phone drugs lines. The dealers handed over heroin or crack cocaine from cars at street locations.

Judge Thomas told Khan: “Yours is one of many, many cases I have been dealing with over the last few months, which have come about because of the work of undercover officers in Bradford to unearth drug dealers such as you.”

The judge told Akhtar that addicts were supplied by people like him in a slick and professional way.