THE day before he was arrested for his part in the industrial-scale importation of cocaine Jonathan Cassidy went online to buy a £22,000 bed. But, as one member of GMP's organised crime unit said: "He'll never sleep in it".
The purchase was made as Cassidy was in Paris on his way back to the UK from Dubai, and was to have furnished a bedroom in his villa in the UAE. He had fled to the United Arab Emirates when the encrypted EncroChat network-a WhatsApp for criminals - was cracked by French intelligence services in summer 2020. Police are unsure why he returned to the UK later that year. He may have thought he was lucky, and that the police had not penetrated his phone.
But, when he arrived at Manchester Airport on October 17 2020, he was arrested. A multimillion pound drugs empire he had built with his brother, former Liverpool FC starlet, Jamie, and business partner, Nasar Ahmed, from Bury, collapsed.
The scale of the business was reflected in Jonathan's lifestyle trappings. A clip shows the former builder filming himself driving around Dubai. The phone camera zooms in on the Lamborghini crest on the steering wheel, and then pans to a Louis Vuitton bag next to him stuffed with cash, and the £250,000 Richard Mille watch on his wrist. On his arrival in Dubai he instructed property agents to find him a villa. His budget was £2.5m.
He and his brother Jamie - who had played in the same Liverpool youth team as Michael Owen and Jamie Carragher-invested their drugs money on property.
Their partner in crime, Ahmed, of Moreton Road, Elton, Bury, had previously been jailed for two years at Manchester Crown Court in October, 2001 for possession of a firearm and assisting an offender.
That conviction followed a shooting at a nightclub in Astley Bridge, Bolton, in 2000 which resulted in the shooter, Wayne McDonald, being jailed for life in 2010 after spending years on the run.
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