A MAJOR police investigation that formed part of the UK's biggest ever law enforcement operation led to the downfall of a Greenock organised crime group (OCG) that plied Inverclyde with illegal drugs, the Telegraph can reveal.
We told exclusively yesterday how the gang of five - Lee Docherty, Ian Millar, Brendan Gillan, Daniel Gillan, and Christopher McKellar - admitted at the High Court to heading up the criminal enterprise.
The drugs gang, supported by a network of local dealers, earned hundreds of thousands of pounds producing, buying and selling class A, B and C narcotics from their Larkfield base, known as 'the shop'.
Now we can reveal further details of how the scheme and its leaders were toppled by the crime-fighting authorities.
A taskforce known as Operation Emma was set up by Europol, led by French and Dutch experts, in 2020 following years of efforts to dismantle an encrypted phone network widely used by criminals.
A breakthrough by investigators four years ago enabled them to intercept, share and analyse millions of messages exchanged between criminal groups using EncroChat to plan serious offences.
READ MORE: Lee Docherty drugs gang smashed in Europe-wide probe flooded Inverclyde with dope
Operation Venetic - the UK law enforcement response to the Europe-wide probe - helped the National Crime Agency (NCA) monitor the movements of gang members unbeknown to the criminals.
Nikki Holland, director of investigations at the NCA, described the infiltration of the communication platform at the time as 'like having an inside person in every top organised crime group in the country'.
The EncroChat servers - which previously had around 10,000 users in the UK - have since been shut down after the successful operations, and the data harvested from the Greenock gang members was fed to Police Scotland to allow officers to finally take them down.
Details of numerous messages sent amongst the group were read out at the High Court in Glasgow on Wednesday, with ringleader Docherty - under the usernames 'renegadeball' and 'goldenshark' - in constant contact with second-in-command Millar - also known as 'sarcasticflamingo' - and the rest of his underlings.
Messages sent by the members, on almost every day between March and June 2020, included information about the gang's accounts and daily takings, orders placed, stock remaining, warnings over police activity in the area, updates on new batches of product that had been tested for quality, and options in the event of a police bust.
Code names were used for cocaine of relatively high purity (tops), heroin (bottoms), street benzodiazepines such as etizolam (scoops), and strains of cannabis called 'gelato' and 'papaya'.
On one occasion that year, one gang member advised the group that £170,000 in cash had been moved to a safe house, while in a separate message, Docherty stated that a dealer in Kilmarnock had begun selling pills from the gang and the stock was 'going much quicker now'.
Another message said: "[It] would be great if you could take a class on the science of this", to which senior member Daniel Gillan responded with advice on the process of producing substances like crack cocaine, and claimed it was 'not in any way complicated'.
Other messages stated, 'We can't always be lucky' and, 'They're coming again, any time soon', in apparent references to the threat of a possible nationwide crackdown by the authorities.
In another exchange, the gang debated the introduction of a delivery charge for drug orders under £20, but decided against the fees as it could have led to more 'punters' turning up at the Oxford Road 'shop' and more attention being drawn to the property.
The communications led to a massive raid by police on a stash house elsewhere on Oxford Road in December 2020, the recovery of cocaine, cannabis, heroin and etizolam tablets as well thousands of pounds in cash, and the prosecution of the gang.
They are due to be sentenced at the end of February.
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