|
Drug traffickers get 30 years
21/12/2007 16:30 - (SA)
Pietermaritzburg - British drug traffickers John Tutton and Tony MacKinnon were each sentenced to an effective 30 years in jail on Friday.
Regional magistrate Fred Heuer, sitting in Camperdown, imposed a 20-year sentence for dealing in 8.1 tons of dagga which was seized by British authorities in Felixstowe harbour, and a 20-year term for packing 150kg of cocaine into a container which was intercepted near Durban.
Heuer ordered that 10 years of this sentence run concurrently with the 20 years for the dagga offence, making their effective terms 30 years.
He ordered that they serve 10 years before being considered for parole.
The value of the cocaine was R150m and the dagga R11m. Syndicate
Heuer said that both were members of a drug trafficking syndicate which handled large amounts of drugs. Their enterprise was elaborate and carefully planned.
Tutton, 56, and MacKinnon, 35, were part of a syndicate of which Briton Robert Flook was a kingpin. Flook has been convicted in London of 11 counts of dealing in drug dependence substances and will be sentenced on January 3.
Tutton and MacKinnon centred their criminal acts near Durban harbour which, it was said during the trial, the drug industry regarded as a low-risk gateway for drugs.
The drugs were in increasing quantities sent from Latin America to Durban for distribution to the United Kingdom mainly, other parts of Europe and less to other countries, Senior Superintendent Devin Naicker, who heads the fight against drugs in South Africa, told the court.
The authorities did not have enough facilities to check the more than a million containers passing through Durban harbour a year, Naicker said. Processed in warehouse Tutton and MacKinnon processed some drugs in a Pinetown warehouse, but when the dagga was seized they moved operations to Tongaat.
Naicker said that stern steps should be taken to combat the sale and use of dagga, which was regarded as a gateway to worse drugs. Many hopeless drug addicts said that their first drug was dagga.
The drug lords sold dagga to generate funds to buy the dangerous drugs such as cocaine and heroin. Drug mules
Drug mules, who were often down-and-outs, were offered between R15 000 and R50 000 to take consignments from country to country.
Hundreds of mules are languishing in prisons in various countries.
He said that the "bad guys who had lots of money had no law but the poor guys had plenty of law". The drug industry was huge with networks that traded just about every place.
Heuer said that Tutton and MacKinnon had shown no remorse for their crimes. This lack of contrition did not influence the sentence he imposed but showed the type of people they were. False identities
He said Tutton had falsified documentation and used false identities to try to disguise their activities and had tailored his evidence to try to meet the exigencies ranged against them.
Tutton tried to punch a reporter who photographed them in the court building.
Their former co-accused, Ernie Smith, of Umhlanga, was found not guilty of the charges at a previous hearing. Heuer said that although there was a suspicion that he knew about the activities, it was not enough to convict in South Africa.
|
