A big-time drug dealer has been jailed after a simple police visit to a butcher’s shop unmasked him. Dean Cooper, 51, supplied £3.68m of cocaine, £900,000 of heroin and other drugs, including ketamine, amphetamine and 50kg of cannabis resin in his major criminal operation.
He was finally brought to justice thanks to Operation Venetic, a long-running investigation into communications between criminals on EncroChat. For years, the totally legal EncroChat service allowed 50,000 users around the world – 9,000 of them in the UK – to communicate in the knowledge none of their texts would be uncovered by law enforcement.
That ended when investigators hacked into EncroChat’s server in Roubaix, northern France, in April 2020, sending bogus updates to devices across the globe which effectively mined the incriminating data criminals wanted so much to conceal.
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Cooper, who flooded Manchester with the drugs, is the latest criminal to be brought to justice. He used the handle Berrystar on EncroChat.
He sent messages to contacts about drugs deals and NCA officers used a variety of methods to establish that Cooper and Berrystar were one and the same. They were helped by Cooper sending one criminal contact a message, saying: “You’ve got to get to this butchers on Tuesday best meat ever had mate.”
Berrystar shared the butcher’s name and when officers investigated they confirmed Cooper had spent £34 at the shop.
Berrystar had also told one contact about spending £240 on two pairs of trainers. Cooper’s bank statement showed he had spent the same sum at the shoe shop mentioned in the chats. And officers also recovered from Cooper’s home a pair of Nike Air Max 270 React trainers that he had spoken about in a separate conversation.
Berrystar had also sent photographs on EncroChat from inside a house – the pictures matched the inside Cooper’s home.
In February this year Cooper, of Atwood Grove, Roby, Liverpool, appeared at Liverpool Crown Court and admitted, between 30 March 2020 and 24 April 2020, charges of conspiracy to supply cocaine, heroin, amphetamine, cannabis resin and ketamine to customers in Liverpool, Manchester and Sheffield. He also admitted possession of cocaine.
EncroChat conversations and notes involving Berrystar showed that Cooper was involved in payments and exchanges of cash amounting to at least £3.73million. He was jailed for 15 years.
After he was sentenced, NCA operations manager Mark Morrison said: “A lot of very careful work was initially done in this case to resolve the identity behind the Berrystar handle.
“Cooper’s conversations about his butcher and his trainers helped ensure the case was rock solid and he had no choice but to admit his guilt. Tackling the Class A drugs threat is a key priority for the NCA in its mission to protect the UK public.”
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