“Back from the dead”
By summer 2017 Yarmouth was flooded with crack and heroin, brought in from London and dealt via the Deano county line.
A “county line”, is the police term for a phone number known to addicts, which is run by a criminal gang who source drugs in a major city and import them into regional towns and cities.
The dealers send bulk texts to their contacts over the phone line, and recruit vulnerable addicts and children to work as street level dealers and runners.
Into the gap in the market stepped Shaun Ellis, who ran the Chase line. His gang’s exploitation of teenagers was so egregious it led to the region’s first conviction for modern slavery in a county lines case.