Guilty: Kurtis Hoyte has been sentenced to a total of 28 years for drug dealing and money laundering
A drug-dealer from Beckenham has been convicted for supplying cocaine and jailed after evidence gathered from his encrypted phone showed he had imported more than half a tonne of the Class A drug – estimated to have a street value of almost £40million.
Kurtis Hoyte was investigated by the Organised Crime Partnership – a National Crime Agency and Metropolitan Police Service joint unit – and arrested in May 2020 after he was observed handing over 5kg of cocaine to the driver of a flat-bed truck near Beckenham Hill Station.
The police seized three phones, one of which was an encrypted EncroChat device. Forensic examination of messages showed he had used this to orchestrate the importation of 540kg of cocaine over a nine-month period between June 2019 and March 2020, using the handle “Retroblade”.
In October 2020, a jury convicted Hoyte, 35, and truck driver Kieran Graham, 27, of Rayleigh, Essex, in relation to the seizure of the cocaine. Graham was sentenced to eight years imprisonment for this offence.
Hoyte was convicted by a jury at Southwark Crown Court on March 25 this year in relation to drugs and money-laundering offences. In November last year, he was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment for the 5kg seizure and yesterday he was sentenced to 18 years imprisonment at the same court for the importations shown on his EncroChat phone. The sentences will run concurrently.
Large shipment: the police found £180,000-worth of Class A drugs in the back of a vehicle
The OCP investigation formed part of Operation Venetic, the NCA-led law enforcement response to the takedown of the EncroChat service in June 2020.
The OCP’s Andrew Tickner: “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.”
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He’d have got less for murder, and much less for converting replicas into live-firing guns. In some countries the possession of a small amount of coke for personal use has been decriminalised. Here politicians kid themselves and us that their war on drugs is necessary and is successful, while ignoring evidence to the contrary. If we drug tested every MP, this facade would crumble.