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Metropolitan Police Detective Constable Dec James’s investigation into a drugs line serving 1,000 customers began with a 14-year-old who should have been in school.

It was April 2022, when officers in Brent, North London made the disturbing discovery that the teen playing truant had a large quantity of crack and heroin in his underwear. A further search of his house uncovered more drugs.

But when the boy was beckoned to the police station’s interview suite, he provided few answers as to why he was carrying over £1,000 worth of Class As.

A young person being used in this way is not a new phenomenon. Teenage drug mules have been exploited by organised groups for many years because of their lack of culpability in the eyes of the law.

What has changed in the past decade is the attitude toward their exploitation. Using a child to sell drugs is now considered a more serious crime than a dealer being caught with the stash themselves. In Metropolitan Police DC James’ eyes, there is only one way to describe this act: child abuse.

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He told Express.co.uk there was also a shift in the way in which police approached investigations into drug dealing too. Instead of spending resources prosecuting vulnerable people at the bottom of an operation, efforts these days are made to cut the head off the snake.

DC James understands this strategy better than most having previously been part of Operation Orochi-a specialised Metropolitan Police unit funded by the Home Office focused on disrupting drug dealing operations.

Rather than relying on the teenage drug mules to provide evidence or needing to raid a kingpin’s address to turn up the type of quantities that can send a dealer down for a while Orochi takes a data-led approach using mobile communications evidence.

The unit’s 95% conviction rate is a testament to it building such overwhelming cases that when an evidence dossier is delivered to a defendant’s lawyer the plea tends to be guilty.

This was precisely DC James’s method when he was asked to examine the situation around the 14-year-old boy in Brent.

He said in an exclusive interview with Express.co.uk: “We looked at it from a data perspective and got their communications data.

“We could see that two numbers were in contact with them with high levels of frequency.

“One was [a man named] Dante Morrison’s personal number. The other was known to intelligence as the Class A drugs line in the area. 

“So we were pretty confident the child was working for Morrison on the drugs line.”

Having gathered a sense of the structure of who might be in charge, DC James hunkered down and started to collect evidence.

“When we looked more at Dante Morrison we were able to see that he was quite clearly in control of the drugs line most of the time.

“So we decided to expand the investigation, look at [it operating for] a six-month period and identify all the runners which had worked for it. 

“They were quite easy to identify because they were the only people the drugs line called frequently and we identified three other children. 

“Our investigation into Dante Morrison quickly identified his neighbour, Wojciech Huczko, as heavily involved. The main runner for the line was coordinating the children and holding drugs for him.

“That was all identified through data and a little bit of surveillance, we arrested all parties at the beginning of August 2022.”

‘He claimed to be a modern slave’

In addition to Huczko, who was in his 40s, one of Morrison’s main runners, Judah Ross, 19, was arrested.

For DC James, the teenager occupied a potential grey area, although he was implicated enough to be charged his age raised questions about vulnerability. 

“It’s not a cliff edge the age of 17 to 18, [we considered] they might be victims of exploitation when we arrested and interviewed them no exploitation defences were raised. Throughout the court process [they also didn’t offer that defence],” he added.

One person who did, remarkably, was Morrison.

A Met Police release explained that Morrison claimed to be a “modern slavery victim forced to run the drugs line by older gang-members with no financial reward for doing so.” 

This, the force said, led to a referral to the National Referral Mechanism (NRM)-the method for assessing whether a person is a victim of modern slavery-the investigation process for which is conducted by the Single Competent Authority (SCA).

The release said the SCA’s inquiries found, during the relevant period, Morrison “had led a cash-rich lifestyle, regularly wore high-end designer clothing and enjoyed foreign holidays.”

The SCA concluded these were not considered to be conclusive grounds to consider Morrison to be a modern slave during the period under investigation and returned a negative NRM decision.

It matched with what DC James had found when looking into Morrison. 

“We did quite a detailed investigation into his financials and saw that he was living a cash-intensive lifestyle,” he added.

“[Morrison] was regularly traveling abroad, wearing designer clothes every day and hiring high-value motor vehicles. That’s not consistent with the life of modern slaves subjected to debt bondage and coercive control.”

Either way, it was not the Metropolitan Police who were determining whether Morrison was a victim on not, that decision fell to the Home Office department which operates the National Referral Mechanism for those effected by modern slavery.  

“He got a negative decision which is quite unusual, they tend to be positive, at which point he pleaded guilty,” said DC James.

That resulted in Morrison, 25, being handed a seven-year prison sentence for conspiracy to supply Class A drugs as well as an eight-and-a-half year Community Behaviour Order (CBO) prohibiting the use of unregistered mobile phones and large quantities of cash. 

Huczko was sentenced to three and a half years’ imprisonment for conspiracy and intent to supply Class A drugs. Ross, charged with the same offences, avoided jail and was handed a suspended sentence of one year and four months.

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‘He was selling wholesale’

Morrison’s claim illustrates one of the complexities which modern slavery laws have introduced to the legal system.

Although he was rejected, cases have come to the courts where those charged with modern slavery are simultaneously arguing an exploitation defence.

“On Orochi at the beginning, the line holder[-the person operating the drugs line]-was a senior gang member. But over the years the average age of the line holder has decreased as the role has been deferred to others. [So we had to change the way we looked at it from splitting] ‘line owner’ and ‘line holder,’ DC James explained. 

“But with Morrison, he wasn’t performing that limited role under direction. We could see he was doing the daily accounting and divvying up the funds amongst different gang members.

“He was offering out wholesale quantities and involved in sourcing drugs, as well as living a cash-intensive lifestyle. 

“Essentially, he fit all the management and leadership roles of that drugs enterprise and there wasn’t really room for anyone else.”

DC James also found those beneath Morrison had to chase him for wages that were far beneath what he was earning, despite them working for one of the busiest lines in that area of North London.

He continued: “It was a 24-hour drugs line, by far one of the busiest I’ve ever seen. There were over 1,000 unique numbers in contact with it during the investigation period,”

DC James believes it was only because of the knowledge and experience he’d gained at Orochi he was able to conduct such as swift and effective investigation.

Had the methods of the past been used, it is unlikely the same results would have been delivered. 

“I think that the way this probably would have been approached, without someone who has used data to investigate drug supply, would have been the traditional things like forensics on the drugs and trying to access the child’s handsets [after we’d] unsuccessfully [asked them] to give us the PIN codes.

“Once the forensics and phones had been exhausted and a positive NRM come back to the child, which it did in our case. It probably would have been a ‘no further action.’ 

“Whereas actually, within the space of about a day or two picking up [the case] we had the first batch of communications data back from the mobile network providers. 

“We were already conducting analysis and quite far down the road to identifying who was at the top of the drug enterprise. 

“Doing the DNA analysis on drug wrappings compared with the cost of resourcing communications data acquisition and analysis is not really comparable. It’s so much more efficient, quicker and cost-effective.”

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