Toi Van Le, 54, a Vietnamese man living in Telford, played a leading role in a nationwide cannabis conspiracy that ran from January 2006 to May 2016 and could have produced cannabis worth several million pounds.[1] He controlled a workforce of illegal immigrants as gardeners who tended the crops, and the courts later heard he had personally profited by about 750,000 pounds.[1][2]
The flagship site was a disused three-storey Barclays bank on Cleethorpe Road in Grimsby, raided in August 2014 after conversion into an industrial-scale factory with plants on all three floors; police found about 1,170 viable plants, a single crop of which could have yielded almost 70 kilos, and arrested one gardener, an illegal Vietnamese immigrant.[1] Van Le’s operation also controlled production in Telford, Birmingham, Burton upon Trent and Stoke-on-Trent, a disused leisure centre in South Wales and a former doctor’s surgery in Cumbria, with his movements between sites traced through phones, satnavs, CCTV and two cars he drove.[1]
After a 17-day trial, a jury at Shrewsbury Crown Court convicted Van Le of conspiracy to produce cannabis, and Judge Peter Barrie sentenced him in December 2016 to 11 years and 10 months, calling him a valued and trusted member of a team producing skunk cannabis on a commercial and industrial scale.[1][3] The Court of Appeal later recorded that Van Le was the main organiser of the wider conspiracy investigated as Operation Azure, cultivating cannabis at nine premises.[3] A proceeds hearing ordered him to pay 6,100 pounds from a bank account and the sale of an Audi, in default of which he would serve three more months, and he may face deportation when released.[1][3]
