A mum ran a dial-a-drug hotline from her home while her gangster boyfriend was behind bars. Katie Baldwin, 27, took calls from addicts wanting to buy cocaine and heroin after Adheel Ashgar, 29 was sent to jail.
The mother-of-three would then link the user with one of a number of street dealers operating in Cheetham Hill. She handed drugs to the dealers herself - sometimes meeting them on her bike to keep their supplies topped up.
Baldwin was arrested and admitted drugs offences after an undercover detective bought drugs from the phone line she ran, known to addicts as the ‘Snickers Line’.
In one of a string of 2013 raids, police searched her family home in Cheetham Hill, and found £2,061 in cash. She has now been sentenced at Manchester Crown Court, where a judge was told police launched a crackdown after drugs gangs turned streets into ‘no-go’ zones for the law-abiding.
Baldwin admitted being concerned in the supply of class A drugs and possession of criminal property. Asgar who is being held at Berwyn jail near Wrexham, North Wales, was jailed for five years at an earlier hearing after he pleaded guilty to being concerned in the supply of drugs.
Baldwin wept as she was ordered to serve three years in prison.
