A taxi driver who supplied heroin to a family of Cornish drug dealers has been jailed after his package was found by police in a grandmother's bag of pasties.
Simon Kinney supplemented his income from running an airport taxi service in Liverpool by becoming a courier who brought drugs to Devon and Cornwall and returned with cash.
He acted as the driver in an operation which led to grandmother Teresa Wood being caught with a half kilogram of heroin in the same shopping bad as her family's dinner of Cornish pasties
He helped supply a family business in which three generations of the Wood family supplied addicts in Bodmin.
The same Liverpool-based drugs gang ran a £1 million plot to bring heroin from the North West to Tiverton, Exeter, Torbay and Cornwall.
Kinney, aged 49, fled to Spain but was tracked down by Devon and Cornwall police after returning on a family visit which coincided with an appeal on the BBC Crimewatch programme last year.
Kinney, who had been living in Benidorm but came from Liverpool, admitted conspiracy to supply class A drugs and was jailed for three years by Judge Francis Gilbert, QC at Exeter Crown Court.
The judge told him:"You brought half a kilogram of heroin to Torquay where it was handed over to Michael and Teresa Wood for onward journey to Bodmin where the Woods family ran a business as drug dealers.
"They were intercepted and the heroin was recovered in a Sainsbury shopping bag where it had been put with Mrs Wood's pasties.
"Some six weeks later you went to Bodmin where you stopped at Monument Way and met Calvin and Ivan Wood and shortly after leaving them you were stopped and found with £10,800 which was the proceeds of the sale of drugs."
The judge said Kinney had gone to Bodmin via Torquay but there was no direct evidence he had dropped off another consignment of heroin on his way.
He rejected his claim that he was acting under duress after being threatened with a gun by a mystery passenger who got into his taxi at Speke airport in Liverpool.
He also dismissed Kinney's suggestion that he did not know what he was bringing to Devon and that he had ended up in Bodmin after getting lost on his way to buy a car with the money.
Kinney was part of a gang which brought an estimated £1 million of heroin into Devon and Cornwall until it was targeted by a two-year-long police surveillance operation codenamed Raby.
The supply chain started in Liverpool and then passed through Torbay before the drugs were distributed over a wide area which included Tiverton, East Devon and Cornwall.
Three generations of the same Cornish family took part in the plot by which a stream of couriers brought drugs to Torbay and Bodmin.
Grandparents Michael and Teresa Wood helped two of their three sons and their grandson run the supply chain which was disrupted by a lengthy and sophisticated police surveillance operation.
It resulted in the couple being stopped as they drove from Torbay back to Bodmin with £50,000 worth of heroin in granny Wood's shopping bag alongside the Cornish pasties she had bought for their supper.
The hub of the distribution network was in Torbay but they were sent on to many parts of the region, specifically including Tiverton.
At a hearing earlier this year Michael Wood, aged 75, was jailed for six and a half years; his wife Teresa, aged 63, and grandson Jake, aged 24, were both jailed for four years. All lived at Furze Hill, Bodmin,
The couple's sons Ivan Wood, aged 43, was jailed for nine years and his brother Calvin, aged 41, for six. They both lived at Monument Way, Bodmin.
The main organiser in Torbay, Mark Gale, aged 41, of Willow Avenue, Torquay, was jailed for eight years and street dealer Richard Heywood, who sold drugs from addresses in Berry Pomeroy and Dornafield Drive, Ipplepen, Newton Abbot, for three years and eight months.
One of the gang leaders Craig Corrigan, aged 23, was jailed for nine years. Couriers John Pogue, aged 27, Keith Anderson, aged 30, and Vincent Toohey, aged 29, all from Liverpool, were jailed for six, six and four and a half years respectively.
Money launderers Ryan Morgan, aged 29, and Brian McDonald, aged 48, also from Liverpool, were jailed for two years and 16 months respectively.
Key conspirator Stephen Blundell is on the run and will be sentenced later.
All the defendants admitted conspiracy to supply class A drugs with the exception of Teresa Wood and Mark Gale, who denied the charge and were convicted.
