A MAN caught with cocaine - estimated to have a street value between £5.7m and nearly £7m - in his car has been jailed for 10 years.
Garry Sinclair was transporting 57kg of the drug when he was targeted by police on Valley Road in Bradford on October 5 last year.
The 37-year-old has now been locked up for a decade following sentencing at Bradford Crown Court. Her Honour Judge Kirstie Watson told Sinclair the starting point for a 10-year sentence was 5kg of drugs, and he was carrying ten times that amount.
Prosecutor Amber Walker said police officers were acting on intelligence when they used two cars to box in Sinclair’s Volkswagen Passat as it waited at a red light.
An unmarked vehicle stopped in front of him and another car pulled up behind, which illuminated its lights.
Sinclair initially froze before trying to reverse but collided with the patrol car 2ft behind him. He then tried to drive forward in an attempt to escape but the manoeuvre had been anticipated by the officers and his car was pinned between their vehicles and a tree.
He was then arrested for dangerous driving.
On being searched he was found to be carrying £250 in cash and an airline ticket.
Inside his car officers discovered 114 vacuum-sealed bags of cocaine. Each half-kilo bag was estimated to be worth between £12,500 and £15,000 with a street value of between £50,000 and £60,000 per bag.
The estimated wholesale value of the drugs was between £1.425m and £1.7m.
The street value was estimated to be between £5.7m and £6.84m.
On being tested the cocaine was found to have a purity of between 73 per cent and 90 per cent, making it a high-purity seizure.
The total weight of the drugs seized was 57kg.
Sinclair was interviewed on October 6 but answered “no comment” to all questions.
Miss Walker said: “The vast quantity of the drugs indicates that Mr Sinclair was a trusted individual who had an expectation of significant financial or other advantage.”
The court heard that Sinclair, of no fixed address, was a director of several companies and was a signatory to more than 16 bank accounts.
He indicated guilty pleas for possession of Class A drugs with intent to supply, and dangerous driving when he appeared at magistrates’ court.
The court heard that Sinclair had a previous conviction relating to the possession of counterfeit money dating back to 2009.
Mitigating, Laura McBride said Sinclair, who appeared via video link from HMP Leeds, had no relevant previous convictions and had agreed to be a driver after losing his job.
She said he was “in a dark place” at the time of the offence as his relationship had broken down, he was suffering from clinical depression, and found himself borrowing money that resulted in significant debt needing to be repaid.
She said: “In order to repay he was asked to work as a driver moving these drugs from on place to another.
“He regrets that now.
“The benefit to him was to reduce that debt.”
She said the offence related to a single incident, that he was working under instruction from others, and that there was no evidence that he had influence further up the chain of command.
She said Sinclair was “genuinely remorseful” and understood the position he was in.
In sentencing Sinclair Judge Watson said he had an awareness and understanding of the scale of the operation, which related to “a vast quantity of drugs that must have meant that you were trusted.”
She described Sinclair as a man who, in the past, had led a very good life.
She added: “This is a case in which one small thing – the breakdown in your relationship – has snowballed in a way that you could not expect.
“As you fell deeper and deeper into debt you borrowed money and it was the return of that money, which you were unable to pay, that resulted in you becoming involved in this incident.”
Sinclair was handed a further nine months for the offence of dangerous driving, to run concurrently, which Judge Watson described as “an act of mercy”.
She banned him from driving for 12 months plus an uplift of five years to make a total of six years and ordered the forfeiture and destruction of the drugs seized.
A proceeds of crime hearing will take place on February 17, 2025.
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