A JUDGE rejected a young Kingsteignton drug dealer’s claim that he was forced to sell cocaine by a gang who threatened to break his legs and leave him naked on Dartmoor.

Bradley Perkins was caught because the smell of cannabis from a car in which he was the front seat passenger was so strong that it could detected as it drove past.

He had cocaine and cannabis with a street value of £2,290 in his rucksack, £603 cash in his pocket, and drugs messages on his smartphone.

He claimed he had been bullied into dealing by a Torbay drugs gang after he bought £240 worth of cannabis on credit and was unable to repay. He said the debt was doubled as a result and soon grew to over £1,000 before he was ordered to work unpaid for the group and that he and his family were subjected to threats of violence.

Perkins said he was slapped by a member of the gang and pushed around in a ‘bully circle’ and told he would be beaten up and dumped naked ‘on the moor’.

Members of his family told Exeter Crown Court the gang had turned up at his house in Kingsteignton and his father’s house in Newton Abbot to demand money from him.

Perkins, aged 22, of Priscott Way, Kingsteignton, admitted possession of cocaine and cannabis with intent to supply but entered a basis of plea saying he only did so because of intimidation.

Judge David Evans rejected his account during a factfinding hearing. He said the messages on the phone, the money in his pocket, and Perkins’s own drugs being stored with the cocaine in his rucksack all showed he was dealing for himself. Perkins may have been under pressure to repay his own drug debts, but that was the result of his own actions.

Miss Bathsheba Cassel, prosecuting, said Perkins was a passenger in a silver Subaru which police stopped on the road between Newton Abbot and Torquay at 1.15am on Saturday October 20, 2018.

It attracted suspicion because of the strong smell of cannabis and Perkins was smoking a joint when police stopped it. He had an axe handle and small lock knife in the passenger footwell, along with a black rucksack.

He told the officers ‘everything you need is in there, you have got me’. It contained drugs worth £2,290, snap bags, a hatchet, and Perkins’s own cannabis grinder and cigarette papers. He had £603 cash in his pocket, and two phones, one had drug texts.

Perkins told the judge he got into debt to a drug gang which then increased the amount he owed them and made it impossible ever to clear his account. They then ordered him to deal for them without payment.

He said they threatened to beat him up and to attack his family home and increased his debt to £13,000 after his arrest because of the lost drugs and money. He said on the night of his arrest, he was ordered to pick up the rucksack near Newton Abbot cattle market and deliver it to Torquay railway station. He put his own tub of cannabis into it but did not know what else it contained.

He believed it to be all the items which others had been using to deal drugs in the town. He said the cash and weapons were passed through the window to him separately.

He said he was terrified of the gang, which had a reputation for violence and using weapons.

He said: ‘They joked about taking me up to the moors and burying me. They told me what would happen to my family and said they knew where I lived. I became their errand boy.

‘I thought that if I rang the police, I would honestly have ended up dead. They talked about making me walk naked back from the moors. It only stopped when they were all arrested last year. I did not choose to sell drugs, there was no other way.’

Perkins’s mother Diane said a group of youths in hoodies turned up at her home two weeks after the arrest and demanded to see him.

She said: ‘They were shouting “Brad, get down here, we want our ******* money, we are going to chop your legs off and break your legs. We’re going to take you up the moor, you’re dead, mate”.

‘I was so terrified I taped up the letter box in case they came back and put petrol through it.’

She borrowed more than £1,500 from other members of the family to try to pay off the debt.

The judge adjourned sentence until next month, ordered a probation report, but told Perkins that did not mean he would not receive an immediate jail sentence.