A police officer shouted ‘bingo’ after finding 9kg of cocaine in the boot of a drug dealer’s car – as a woman is jailed for six years.
Nine blocks of cocaine, worth up to £750,000, were found in an open cardboard box in the boot of a car belonging to 58-year-old Linda Lawrence.
She was stopped by Staffordshire Police while driving on the M6 through the West Midlands.
Officers also found two mobile phones, brown parcel tape, disposable plastic gloves, slips of paper with telephone numbers on them, hotel receipts and £140 in cash.
Lawrence was arrested on October 8 last year after West Midlands Police received a tip-off.
Her home was searched and bank statements revealed that several hundred pounds had been paid into her account at random intervals over a period of at least a year.
Bodycam footage shows an officer searching the boot of Lawrence’s brown Mitsubishi ASX before coming across an open box.
When he saw the box, the officer shouted ‘bingo’ before counting nine vacuum-packed packets of cocaine contained in the box.
Linda Lawrence, 58, was caught with £750,000 worth of cocaine stuffed in the boot of her car
Lawrence, caught on bodycam footage as police arrested her for possession with intent to supply
Nine bags of cocaine were found in a box in the trunk of her Lawrence’s car
The video then shows officers turning to Lawrence who was sitting in a car.
The officer said, “You are currently under arrest for possession with intent to deliver a controlled substance of class A.”
Lawrence, from St Neots, Cambridgeshire, admitted possession with intent to supply Class A drugs and was sentenced to six years in prison at Stafford Crown Court on Thursday.
DC Liam O’Brien, of the Regional Organized Crime Unit for the West Midlands (ROCUWM), said: ‘We believe Lawrence was paid by others to transport these drugs across the country, and investigations into the wider drugs network continue.
‘This was a truly significant seizure of Class A drugs – drugs that would have caused untold misery on the streets of Britain.
“We are working across the region to disrupt and arrest those involved in the supply and sale of drugs.”