A big-time drug dealer behind bars for his part in a £1m cocaine supply racket told a confiscation hearing his life is in danger behind bars because he’s skint and in debt to a rival.
Leon ‘Aki’ Atkinson, 47, from Atherton – a friend of jailed police killer Dale Cregan – was jailed for 15 years in 2022 after he was unmasked as a ‘regional supplier’ for a gang smuggling huge amounts of cocaine into the UK.
He used the handles ‘Carrot Horn’ and ‘Maiden Bear’ on the encrypted messaging platform EncroChat. Today (Thursday, January 9) he failed to persuade Manchester’s top judge he was in debt and made NO profit from his admitted drug dealing.
He sold drugs imported into the UK and was behind the supply of at least at least 28 kilos of cocaine. Atkinson took on 13 kilos of the cocaine after it was stolen in an audacious armed robbery at the stash house of a notorious Liverpool gang.
Currently at Buckley Hall prison in Rochdale, where he is serving a 15-year jail sentence after admitting two counts of conspiracy to supply drugs, Atkinson appeared at Manchester Crown Court, where the Recorder of Manchester Judge Nicholas Dean KC dismissed his claims he earned no profit from his admitted dealing.
Questioned by his own barrister Brett Weaver, Atkinson claimed that in 2018 he had to sell his house to pay off a £68,000 confiscation order after he had been convicted of mortgage fraud and tax evasion, and had been forced to move his family into rented accommodation.
He said he had submitted bank account details for himself and his children and claimed eh had ‘no assets’ apart from the £420 found in his pockets when he was arrested for cocaine supply racket.
Atkinson told the judge that, in fact, he owed a £220,000 drugs debt, saying: “I have vouched for a so-called friend basically saying he’s a good person. He didn’t pay the debt so that debt became my debt.”
He said police had handed him ‘threat-to-life’ warnings while he was behind bars which he said he believed was related to the alleged debt.
The defendant claimed he paid couriers to move drugs and cash for up to £3,000-a-time, that he incurred losses on drug deals and that had to shell out expenses such as £1,400 for an EncroChat mobile device for employees. He claimed he was only earning a ‘wage’ and that a Rolex seized by police was a £350 fake.
Cross-examined by Alexander Langhorn for the prosecution, Atkinson denied messages dated long before the admitted cocaine supply conspiracy which landed him in jail suggested more money from other drug dealing. “If there was money, it would have been going to pay off the debt,” he said.
Mr Langorn suggested to the defendant he had hidden assets, and Atkinson said: “I don’t understand where I have not been honest. Everything I have said has been honest.”
Ruling against Atkinson at the hearing brought under the Proceeds of Crime Act, Judge Dean KC ruled the defendant’s ‘hidden assets’, or profit from his drug dealing, was ‘at the very least’ £28,000, although the ‘benefit figure’, or the total amount earned through his admitted drug dealing, was estimated at more than £1.2m.
Atkinson was told he had three months to pay £28,000 or face an extra nine months behind bars.
During a search of his home in Atherton following his arrest, officers found prison letters addressed to Aki from Dale Cregan. The letters were found in a bedside table in a chest of drawers in the property’s master bedroom. Cregan will die behind bars after being handed a whole life term for four murders, including police officers Pc Nicola Hughes, 23, and Pc Fiona Bone, 32.
Cregan also murdered 23-year-old amateur boxer Mark Short at The Cotton Tree pub in Droylsden in May 2012, before murdering his victim’s father, 46-year-old David Short, in a gun-and grenade attack at his home in Clayton three months later. Prosecutors at Cregan’s trial alleged he was acting on orders from Atkinson to exact revenge against the Short family, after one of them had ‘disrespected’ his mother.
Atkinson denied any involvement and was acquitted.
