A DRUG dealer has been jailed for four years after he was caught peddling a stash of crack cocaine, heroin and skunk cannabis from his home following a tip-off from the neighbourhood.
When the police turned up with a search warrant, they seized more than £3,000 of drugs from Kevin Haley’s address in Sandhill Close, Allerton, Bradford.
Haley, 31, had already been jailed for dealing Class A drugs when he was caught at it again on December 9, Bradford Crown Court heard on Friday.
Prosecutor Oliver Connor said he had 20 convictions for 47 offences, including robbery, house burglary and assault. In 2013, he was locked up for a string of drugs offences.
Mr Connor said the police came knocking on his door following “community intelligence” that he was dealing drugs from the house.
They found £2,962 of skunk cannabis, £356 of crack cocaine and heroin valued at £127.
A large number of messages, including “blanket texts” advertising the sale of drugs, were discovered on his phone.
Haley at first said the drugs were all for his own use. He claimed he was feeding a cannabis habit of up to seven joints a day as well as his use of crack cocaine and heroin.
But he owned up to the offences the next day and pleaded guilty at the magistrates’ court to possession with intent to supply the Class A and Class B drugs.
Haley’s barrister, Taryn Turner, conceded that his criminal record was “unsavoury and unattractive.” But he was still a young man and motivated to make big changes to his life.
He had wrongly been accused by drug dealers of being party to a raid on a cannabis farm that saw their plants being stolen. Because they blamed him, they made him work selling the drugs to get the money back from the lost crop.
Mrs Turner said Haley hoped to learn a trade such as plastering while in prison but the Covid-19 lockdown was still very much in place with inmates confined to their cells for 23 hours a day.
The Recorder of Bradford, Judge Richard Mansell QC, said Haley’s long-standing drugs habit was at the root of his offending.
He warned him that if he was convicted for a third time of trafficking Class A drugs he would face a seven-year jail term as a “third-striker.”
Judge Mansell said the offences were aggravated by Haley’s previous conviction and the fact that he was peddling the drugs while on prison licence.
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