£7m cocaine gang ran op from church drug factory

A GANG dubbed the ‘most organised outfit around’ have been locked up after peddling £7m worth of cocaine through a church ‘drug factory’.

- ANDREW BARDSLEY & AMY WALKER

The eight-strong outfit bought and sold huge amounts of cocaine and flooded streets across the country with the class A drug.

The dealers used a former Methodist church as part of the staggering operation. The building, in Bamfurlong, Wigan, was most recently the base of the Kenny family’s business antiques shop, J.W. Antiques, Manchester Crown Court heard.

But it was transformed into a drugs warehouse where cocaine was packaged to be dealt to addicts on the streets. Two Kenny brothers, Jamie and Leon, were among the members of the gang locked up for combined sentences of more than 60 years.

Jamie Kenny, 33, taught other dealers how to break blocks of cocaine in order to ‘maximise profits’, while others were employed in the antiques shop to package up the drug for street selling.

Their drugs operation was brought down following the law enforcement hack of the EncroChat network in June 2020, which led to each of the eight gang members being arrested and their houses searched. Officers found designer clothing, expensive watches and numerous phones.

Prosecutor Jonathan Savage told how messages from the EncroChat hack were handed over to GMP and provided an insight into how the drugs gang operated.

In one such message, Nathan Cooke, 31, offered two kilos of cocaine with a Hello Kitty stamp on, to be bought by another user for between £46,000 and £48,000.

A message from the user sent to Cooke said: “Probably the most organised outfit around.”