Jobless man '˜with no education' sold drugs on dark web

The 26-year-old was expressionless in the dock at Portsmouth Crown Court as he was jailed for 16 years.

Portsmouth Crown Court heard he had ‘no education’ but together with his father Ralph ran a ‘sophisticated’ operation on the secretive dark web importing the pills to his home in Fratton before selling them on to users.

At trial the court was told how two brothers had died from a drug overdose after buying drugs from a dark web vendor page run by Lailan.

A jury heard Tori and Jacques Lakeman, 19 and 20, died in December 2014 after taking ecstasy they had bought from Stone Island, a vendor page run by Lailan and hosted on the Agora marketplace.

But Lailan’s lawyer said there was ‘no causal link’ between the drugs Lailan sold and the death of the brothers.

Transactions were made using the cryptocurrency Bitcoin and they used devices to mask their online activity.

But the operation unravelled when police from the South East Regional Organised Crime Unit intercepted a delivery of 8,000 tablets to his home in Cuthbert Road, Fratton, imported from Holland in jigsaw puzzle boxes.

But judge Roger Hetherington said this was ‘the tip of the iceberg’ after jurors heard Kurt and his father Ralph – who fled to South Africa after being arrested – had made transactions worth hundreds of thousands of pounds on the dark web.

The court heard Lailan was stopped at Gatwick Airport on June 6, 2017, attempting to board a flight to South Africa.

Sentencing, judge Hetherington said: ‘The investigation into the dark net marketing activity, which you were undertaking, shows that you must have dealt in pills worth several hundreds of thousands of pounds.

‘It was an activity to which you applied considerable sophistication using devices and programmes designed to mask what was going on and you sought to launder the proceeds through Ralph Lailan’s accounts.

‘You then removed your ill-gotten gains in cash and spent it on high-end living, designer clothes and jewellery and cars and the like.’

When arrested on May 10, 2016, Lailan threw a memory stick over a back garden fence and had tried to hide a laptop.

But analysis found he and his father had been running the vendor pages Stone Island, Stone Island 1, Stone Island+ and Tony Soprano999 on various marketplaces on the dark web, including AlphaBay, Agora, Hansa and Nucleus.

The court heard deposits of £337,963 were made into one account between November 2014 and May 2016.

Lailan was found guilty after an 11-day trial of fraudulent evasion of prohibition between January 2013 and May 2016, and supplying the class A drug.

His mother Shereen Lailan, a city school maths teacher, said her son was beaten and ‘manipulated’ by his father.

Anthony Bailey, mitigating, said: ‘This is a troubled individual who has been used and manipulated and coerced, we suggest, by his father to involve himself in this dealing of ecstasy class A drugs, and he’s obviously benefited to a limited extent.’

But this was rejected by the judge who said he was ‘at least an equal participant’.

Judge Hetherington told Lailan: ‘You were thoroughly calculating as you have been throughout the whole trial.’

He said Lailan’s defence of claiming to not know what his father was doing was ‘ludicrous’.

Mr Bailey also said there was ‘no causal link’ between the drugs bought on the dark web and the deaths of the Lakeman brothers.

He said a post mortem report found the amount ingested ‘exceeded’ the amount bought online.

Detective Inspector Neil Cripps said SEROCU had ‘extensive capabilities’ to ‘trace illicit market sales in Bitcoin’.