Stephen Crump, 41, who once earned £250,000 a year, was arrested by an undercover policewoman in a pub on the edge of the Square Mile. He was seized in a Met operation that uncovered a number of cocaine dealers selling drugs to City workers. Three dealers who sold between £20,000 and £30,000 worth of the drug a week to office workers in their lunch breaks have already been jailed.
Crump blamed the stress of his job after being caught plying the woman officer with cocaine on three separate occasions at the Mr Pickwicks bar. He was held in a 20-month investigation codenamed Operation Telon - the biggest of its kind ever carried out by Scotland Yard's Clubs and Vice Unit - which uncovered drug dealing at Mr Pickwicks and Bar Bed in Whitechapel. The former stockbroker was given a suspended sentence and ordered to do 250 hours of community service after his lawyer told the court he had turned to drugs to cope with his high-pressure career. Crump, who is now taking an IT course and trying to start up his own business, started work in the City at 17 and said he was offered cocaine almost immediately. At the peak of his addiction the father of two was spending £400 a day on cocaine and drinking two bottles of wine, 10 pints of lager and a bottle of vodka. He said: 'The pressures were immense and everyone was doing it. You would hear sniffing in the toilets. We would start work at 6.30am, take our first line at 11.30am, then be entertaining until 2am. I was very young and impressionable and suddenly I was earning all this money. 'I then became involved in a co-dependent relationship and would get home and carry on doing cocaine and drinking, then have a shower and go back to work. I was working in Singapore, Tokyo and Hong Kong, flying first class on holiday to Barbados and buying £2,000 Gucci suits. 'Now everything is gone. But I've been clean for 18 months and am pressing on, turning my life around and fighting to see my kids. I'm also engaged to a wonderful woman who has had a big part to play in my recovery.' In court his lawyer, John King, described how his client had only offered the cocaine to the officer in an attempt to woo her. This was about impressing a woman rather than commercial dealing,' he said. 'This sort of thing is rife in City traders and people working in the City as he was.' Venue: Bar Bed in WhitechapelHe added: '(Crump) had essentially been living in a dream world for 15 years, living with cocaine and therefore not taking care of his life or his family. Now he is, and he has changed dramatically.' Crump, of Basildon, Essex, admitted three counts of supplying a class-A drug and one of facilitating the supply of a class-A drug and was sentenced to a year in prison, suspended for two years. In November, Phillip James, 38, who lived in a Docklands apartment off The Highway, and Lee Ingram, 40, of Harwood Hall Lane, who had a £1.5m Upminster home, were each jailed for 10 years by Southwark crown court.They ran a highly lucrative cocaine and Viagra racket based at the Bar Bed in Leman Street. They spent their profits on holidays in Dubai and southern Spain and expensive jewellery. Anthony Best, 37, of Firbank Road, Romford, a crack addict who worked for the pair, was jailed for seven years. A spokesman for charity DrugScope said that many City workers turned to drugs. 'The problem is so bad that many City employers now have drug and alcohol policies and run random drug tests,' he said. 'Cocaine makes people more energetic and confident, which they might see as a benefit. When taken with alcohol it can also mean people are able to drink more.'
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United Kingdom: stamp (Photo credit: Sem Paradeiro)An Ethiopian embassy official who attempted to claim diplomatic immunity after he was caught at Heathrow Airport trying to smuggle cannabis into the UK has been jailed. Mother-of-two Amelework Wondemagegne, a diplomat based in Washington DC, was stopped at the airport carrying three suitcases containing 56 kilograms (123lb) of herbal cannabis with a street value of £160,000, Isleworth Crown Court in west London was told. The 36-year-old initially said a man had given her the bags before she departed from Addis Ababa airport, and she then tried to claim diplomatic immunity. But the court found she was not entitled to it and she was jailed for 33 months after admitting one count of drugs smuggling on Thursday. Judge Richard McGregor-Johnson, the Recorder of Kensington and Chelsea, told her: "The fact that you smuggled these drugs in the expectation that you would not be prosecuted if you were caught because of your diplomatic status is a significant factor in this case." The diplomat, who had worked in the visa section of the embassy since 2006, travelled into the UK on April 7 using an Ethiopian diplomatic passport and had a ticket to return to the US on April 17. When her suitcases were opened by UK Border Agency officers at Heathrow's Terminal Three, they were found to be full of slabs of cannabis that had been sprinkled with chilli powder. Wondemagegne had claimed she did not know what was in the suitcases, but that she believed it was meat and spices. But photographs taken on her camera showed her with the bags. One depicted her wearing a necklace which was later found to be in a suitcase with the drugs. Judge McGregor-Johnson said Wondemagegne had told "a pack of lies" and that she was caught with a "substantial quantity" of cannabis, in the second category of seriousness. The judge described her as being "worldly wise", adding: "You knew perfectly well what you were doing and you knew perfectly well that drugs smuggling is illegally and seriously regarded." Wondemagegne's two children, aged 10 and 17, live in Washington DC and are being cared for by Ethiopian Embassy staff there. She has been their sole carer since her husband died of cancer in 2005. Judge McGregor-Johnson said of that fact: "It makes it more extraordinary you should have committed this offence." He told the court he was satisfied she had not been coerced into being a drugs courier and that she had played a "significant role" in the smuggling of the cannabis. Wondemagegne, of Silver Spring, Maryland, will be deported from the UK after serving her sentence.
