A south London drug dealer has been jailed after his seized encrypted phone showed he had imported more than half a tonne of cocaine.
Kurtis Hoyte, 35, from Beckenham was arrested in May 2020 after he was spotted handing over five kilos of cocaine with an estimated street value of £180,000 to the driver of a flat-bed truck near Beckenham Hill Station.
Officers seized three phones from him, one of which was an encrypted EncroChat device. Forensic examination of messages showed he had used this to orchestrate the importation of 540 kilos of cocaine over a nine-month period between June 2019 and March 2020, using the handle 'retroblade'. This is estimated at £17m worth of drugs.
In October 2020 a jury convicted him and truck driver Kieran Graham, 27, of Rayleigh, Essex, in relation to the seizure of the five kilos of cocaine. Graham was subsequently sentenced to eight years imprisonment for this offence.
Hoyte was convicted by a jury at Southwark Crown Court on 25 March this year in relation to drugs and money laundering offences concerning the 540 kilos of cocaine.
He was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment in November last year for the five-kilo seizure, and to 18 years imprisonment at the same court today (8 April) for the importations shown on his EncroChat phone. The sentences will run concurrently.
This was down to an investigation by the Organised Crime Partnership (OCP) – a joint National Crime Agency and Metropolitan Police Service unit.
The OCP investigation formed part of Operation Venetic, the UK NCA-led law enforcement response to the takedown of the EncroChat service in June 2020.
Andrew Tickner, NCA Operations Manager from the OCP, said: "From the seizure of a relatively small amount of cocaine, my team was able to build a picture of large-scale drug dealing arranged by Kurtis Hoyte.
"He was behind multi-kilo importations which would have seeped on to the streets of London and the UK, leaving a trail of violence and exploitation with them.
"The crucial partnership between the National Crime Agency and Metropolitan Police Service has helped put a high-harm offender behind bars for a very long time. Our fight against the organised criminal networks behind the drugs trade will never slow down."
The team works to stop the flow of drugs to the criminal market in London, target upstream criminals that impact on London, as well as disrupting those overseas that make huge profits from this illegal activity.
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