Dad-and-son drug racket as cops find 45kgs of coke

A NORTH Wales man and his son's role in a £31million drugs plot was revealed when police looked inside a Sports Direct Bag.

- By ADAM EVERETT and STEVE BAGNALL

Officers found a haul of 45kg of cocaine inside Raymond Kinnear's car, which had been left parked inside an industrial unit.

Kinnear, 63, was afterwards found to have enlisted his son, estate agent Nathan Kinnear, to work in an “administrative” role to help him with his criminal activities, which included booking hotel rooms and providing Sports Direct and Aldi 'bags for life' which were then used to store the illicit substances.

Liverpool Crown Court heard on Thursday that Merseyside Police attended Liver Industrial Estate in Aintree at around 10.45pm on June 18 and searched a unit which “appeared to be under the control of a bathroom company”, but had in fact been subleased by Raymond Kinnear around two months earlier.

His grey Audi A4 was found parked there, with 70 vacuum-sealed blocks of high-purity cocaine, weighing a total of 45kg, located in several Sports Direct bags for life inside the vehicle.

Nicola Daley, prosecuting, described how investigations subsequently established he had been in contact with his son throughout that afternoon, before the dad drove to Merseyside from his caravan at Abbey Farm in Llangollen.

Nathan Kinnear and his girlfriend had meanwhile visited a Sports Direct store to purchase eight bags “consistent with” those which would later be used to hold the drugs.

The 23-year-old also booked a room at the Travelodge at Stonedale Retail Park in Croxteth, where his father would stay the night.

The two men would visit the hotel together to check-in before stopping at a petrol station and then travelling onwards to the industrial estate, with the son leaving his Mercedes C-Class parked nearby, and his partner collected both shortly after 10pm and drove them to a garage.