Big-spending drug dealer with luxury lifestyle is ordered to pay back £96k

SHE IS CURRENTLY SERVING A JAIL SENTENCE

- By MARK NAYLOR

A LUXURY-loving woman who ran a long-running cannabis and cocaine dealing operation to fund a lavish lifestyle of foreign holidays and expensive treats has been ordered to pay more than £96,000 as the proceeds of crime.

Danielle Stafford made so much money by selling drugs that she bought a second house and lived without touching any of her job salary. She pretended that most of the expensive items that were found were not designer goods but were fake or had merely been given to her by family members from their foreign holidays.

She was caught only by pure chance when police spotted her speeding. A phone constantly rang with 30 calls or pinged with up to 20 drug messages after she was arrested and police later found £26,917 cash stashed around her home and drugs with a street value of £33,600.

She had luxuries including nine watches and three expensive Louis Vuitton handbags, Hull Crown Court heard. Engineer and University of Hull graduate Stafford, 31, formerly of Hallgate, Cottingham, was jailed for seven-and-a-half years in April 2023 after she admitted three offences of being concerned in supplying heroin, crack cocaine and cannabis and another of possessing cash as criminal property, on dates spanning October 2017 and May 2020.

But the case resurfaced and was mentioned again so that the court could make a final decision on how much money Stafford was said to have made from her criminal activities. Nadim Bashir, prosecuting, said that the criminal benefit figure had been agreed at £96,263. She was ordered to pay it within three months or face a default prison sentence of one year, to be served consecutively.