A drug dealer who used the guise of a Deliveroo driver to deliver cocaine and MDMA on his moped has been jailed.
Mohammed Ali, 27, was arrested in April 2022 after police in Withy Grove spotted him handing a brown package ‘too small to be a takeaway’ to a customer. Officers searched him, and found a number of drugs including cocaine, MDMA and cannabis.
A court heard how Ali used a Deliveroo coat and bag to “masquerade” as a takeaway driver. An analysis of his phone also revealed messages about dealing the illicit substances, including communications with his “superiors” and customers.
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He was sentenced to four years and four months imprisonment at Manchester Crown Court. Prosecuting, Mr Knight said Ali was found with drugs at an estimated value of between £1,730 - £2,549, and had appeared to have a “repeated management role” in the dealing.
He said there existed “a greater parity between the two than is regularly seen between a grafter and their superior”.
Ali, of Princess Parade, pleaded guilty to the charges of possession with intent to supply Class A drugs at an earlier hearing. The court heard how the offences were committed while Ali was still on licence after serving a previous four-year jail term for impersonating a delivery driver while involved in supplying drugs.
Mitigating, Mr Doran said just a few years ago, Ali was an “optimistic man with ambition,” who was studying at university and keen to make something of his life. But he fell into debt to drug dealers, and was “pressured” to start dealing as a way to pay it back.
“He has messed the whole thing up not once, but twice. He acknowledges that,” Mr Doran said. “He is quick to accept he is in the wrong.
“He struggles to understand himself why allowed himself to be back in the same position as he was in previously.”
Mr Doran argued Ali had acted “under direction of others” and had a “significant but lesser” role in the dealing.
Sentencing Ali, Judge Manley said Ali had shown clear intentions of returning to study and improving his life after being released from custody in December last year, but added it was “very sad indeed that those realisations did not last.”
“You had the guise of being a Deliveroo driver, but you were actually supplying a variety of illicit drugs,” she said, and stressed that the four years and four months was “the least” sentence she could give.
Ali, who appeared on video link from HMP Forest Bank, was visibly upset and cried as he was sentenced.
Judge Manley also sentenced him for driving without a licence and driving without insurance.
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