A party animal who racked up debts tried to smuggle cannabis through Manchester Airport in a failed bid to solve his financial problems. George Samuels said he was offered £10,000 to carry two suitcases containing £200,000 of the class B drug into the country.
But the scheme failed and landed him in jail. Samuels, 20, is now serving a 28-month prison sentence and is currently being housed at Altcourse prison in Merseyside, hundreds of miles from his native Essex.
Minshull Street Crown Court heard Samuels was stopped by Border Force officers at terminal one of the airport on Sunday, May 12. He told officers that he’d travelled from Toronto in Canada, via Reykjavik in Iceland.
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Samuels had two large suitcases, and told the officers that he’d packed them himself. Asked where the keys were to unlock the suitcases, Samuels said they were in a separate holdall, but no such keys were found.
When they gained access to the suitcases, officers discovered they were ‘absolutely full’ of vacuum packed packages of cannabis. In total, they weighed 36.7 kilos and the drugs were worth £220,000 at wholesale value, prosecutor Bob Elias said.
Samuels, who has no previous convictions, was held and declined to answer questions during an interview with police. He has been remanded in prison ever since.
His barrister Harriet Lavin said Samuels was finding the experience ‘scary’ and ‘extremely difficult’. She told how Samuels had previously worked as a drainage engineer, but after his return home following a trip to Thailand he began ‘partying all the time’.
“He was using balloons all the time,” Ms Lavin said. “He says he lost his job and then at that point he ran up a debt, and that’s when he made the decision, being offered it, to go and bring these suitcases back. He was offered £10,000.”
Samuels was described in court as a ‘very immature’ young man, but Ms Lavin said that he had pleaded guilty at the earliest possibility. Sentencing, the judge, Recorder Paul Hodgkinson told him: “What led you to commit this offence was the fact that you partied, spent money on balloons and the like, and lived a party lifestyle. Finding yourself in debt, you tried to find undoubtedly a quick way to repay this debt.
“You foolishly decided to smuggle £220,000 of cannabis into this country, for a not insignificant sum of £10,000.” Samuels, of St Michaels Close, Harlow, Essex, pleaded guilty to the fraudulent evasion of a prohibition on the importation of a class B drug.
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