A 33-year-old man has been jailed for four years for his role in a sophisticated cannabis growing conspiracy which could have netted criminals over £500,000.
A coordinated operation involving West Yorkshire Police and the Immigration Service led to the jailing of five members of an Albanian drugs gang last September after they set up hidden cannabis grows at houses in the Bradford district and South Yorkshire.
Bradford Crown Court heard the organisers used false identity documents to rent houses and set up cannabis factories by digging out spaces underground and using wardrobe doors to conceal access to loft areas.
On Monday, Erjon Xheladinaj, of Aspen Grove, Dewsbury, became the latest defendant to be locked up after admitting his involvement in conspiracies to produce the Class B drug.
His trusted accomplices Isuf Roshi, 24, and Armando Sulce, 27, of Tern Street, Bradford, were jailed for five years and four years respectively after also being found guilty of the conspiracy charge.
Andrit Toci, 33, and Revi Shehu, 25, were each jailed for 12 months for working as cannabis gardeners.
They both admitted production of cannabis.
At the sentence hearing last year prosecutor Gerald Hendron said officers from West Yorkshire Police and the immigration service had been observing addresses in Bradford, Keighley, Leeds and Barnsley and on July 7, 2021, a major co-ordinated operation took place to search the network of rented properties.
Cannabis farms were found hidden behind false panels and trapdoors and in unsafe dugouts that had rendered properties dangerously unstable.
He said access to the plants was through wardrobes, under kitchen cupboards and through well-concealed passages and loft hatches.
In 2019 a police raid on a shop in Leeds uncovered a £150,000 cannabis farm with some of the 275 plants hidden beneath a trapdoor in the basement.
At a rented house in Thurston Garden, Allerton, Bradford, officers found a cannabis farm hidden in an unstable excavated space accessed from under the washing machine.
At that address the plants would have yielded just over £19,000 worth of cannabis and a further £46,000 worth of the drug was discovered at a property in Keighley.
The court heard that plants were being grown in the loft of the Barnsley address and that the total haul of cannabis seized by officers could have had a street value of almost £500,000.
Mr Hendron said the gang leaders had invested heavily in the set-up with more than £45,000 being paid out to rent the properties and vehicles.
He said that total did not include the equipment needed to establish the farms and heat and water the plants.
He said serious damage had been done to some of the houses, with the repair bill at the Thurston Gardens address estimated to be £18,000.
The prosecution said that Gorcellari had directed and organised the production of cannabis on an industrial scale and would have expected substantial reward.
On Monday, Judge Jonathan Rose said it made no sense for university-educated Xheladinaj to have abandoned his family farm in Albania and to have paid a very substantial amount to get into this country where he was employed in menial work.
The judge said the defendant had made the worst choice when he became involved in sophisticated and extensive criminality.
“The court takes no pleasure whatsoever in sending a man of hitherto good character to serve a long prison sentence but there really is no alternative in your case,” the judge told the father-of-one.
He said the offending had taken place over three years and had involved the setting up of complex grows in residential and commercial properties.
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