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Family-run Whitney drugs gang jailed in Liverpool
Seven members of Whitney clan jailed along with associates as The Wire becomes real on Merseyside
MEMBERS of a notorious family-run drugs gang (above) that flooded Liverpool with crack cocaine and heroin were jailed for a total of 82 years yesterday. Seven members of the Whitney clan and six of their associates were sent to prison after an undercover police operation brought the operation down.
The gang ran what Merseyside police called a "drugs cash-and-carry business" in the city and the Liverpool Echo reports that the mobile numbers used to contact the dealers became known as the "Whitney line".
They emulated the tactics of the dealers depicted in the American TV show The Wire, using unregistered, pre-paid mobile telephones and untraceable vehicles to rendezvous with addicts, often on street corners.
As the net closed and police raided the gang's safe-houses around the city, gang members resorted to desperate measures to evade capture.
The Daily Mail tells how Matthew Mayor threw one-kilo packets of cocaine out of the window of his Mercedes as he tried to flee police during a car chase through Liverpool in December 2010. "The packets split as they hit the road - showering the carriageway with £47,000 worth of drugs," says the paper.
Another member of the gang, Emma Mackenzie, tried to slip wraps of cocaine in a nappy bag as she passed her baby to her mother during a raid on her home in Anfield. Gang matriarch and banker Carol Whitney was found to have 520 wraps of heroin hanging from a bush in her garden.
During the raids, police found an assault rifle that had been stolen from an army base in Salisbury in 2005, complete with ammunition, plus body armour and CS gas.
The gang's ringleader Paul Whitney was jailed for nine years and four months, Mayor was sentenced to eight years and four months and Carol Whitney was given eight years. ·
