The head honcho of a drugs gang which flooded Southend with heroin and cocaine was a schizophrenic who started hearing voices after two of his friends were murdered, a court was told.
Keian Creary, 33, of Arbrook Close, Orpington, ran the so-called “Cash line” – a county lines drugs operation which trafficked Class A drugs from London to south Essex.
The prosecution portrayed him at Basildon Crown Court as an “aggressive” drug dealer who allegedly put a bounty on a teenage runner’s head over a financial dispute, and paid money to a man that stabbed another of his minions.
But his defence sought to portray him as a mentally ill man who was groomed for crime from a young age.
“Mr Creary is a man who became enshrined and involved in criminality at an extremely young age,” said barrister Matthew Radstone.
That happened “as a result of his surroundings, his personal circumstances and his upbringing, in terms of the area in which he was living.”
“He became entrapped in a world of gang rivalry and violence. He is somebody who has been shot at in the past, has had his house attacked in the past,” the lawyer said.
A sentencing hearing on Tuesday (July 21) heard Creary was a third-striker, having acquired two prior convictions for trafficking Class A drugs.
Prosecutor Laura Kenyon said he had convictions for 14 prior offences in total.
They included two robberies in 2009 and a common assault in 2011.
In 2016, he was convicted of three charges of possessing Class A drugs with intent to supply: cocaine, crack cocaine and heroin.
He was sentenced to four years imprisonment.
But by 2018 he was back on the streets and caught dealing heroin and crack cocaine again.
Police stopped him in Bishop’s Stortford with 68 wraps of crack cocaine and a smaller number of heroin.
He was also carrying three mobile phones, one of which turned out to be a drugs line.
Caught dealing Class A drugs a third time in Southend, Creary suggested he had been under some pressure from others to do so.
He had become involved with north London’s Get Money Gang (GMG) – ranked by police in 2017 as the second most dangerous street gang in the UK – as a child, Mr Radstone said.
Within that context, he suffered the loss of two friends to murders in 2018.
Since their deaths, Creary told a psychologist, he “struggled with his mental health”, including experiencing “auditory hallucinations”.
“The defendant has made clear that he hears voices,” his defence barrister said.
Creary was diagnosed with schizophrenia and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and assessed as having a severe score on the “hopelessness scale”, suffering from suicidal ideation.
But Mrs Kenyon urged sentencing judge Siew Loke to “reject any suggestion on the part of Mr Creary that he controlled the Cash line as a result of any pressure or intimidation from GMG or otherwise”.
She said he lived a “lavish lifestyle”, spending his profits on roughly £20,000 worth of designer watches, other expensive jewellery, renting luxury cars and buying designer clothes and concert tickets.
“That is not consistent with him operating the line otherwise than voluntarily,” she argued.
“He entirely voluntarily was controlling the Cash line without him being subject to any form of coercion or manipulation.”
Mr Radstone disputed that portrayal, saying that while his client “displayed the characteristics of having material possessions”, some of his supposed designer clothes had turned out to be “fake”.
“We are taking about tens of thousands, in terms of the monies that went through his bank account,” the barrister said.
“He is somebody who is desperate to change his life around, having been in prison every other year or so of his life, I think, for the last ten years or so.”
Creary was on an enhanced wing in prison and had “taken a number of courses”.
He was “trying to take the positives” from his inevitably lengthy prison sentence, the lawyer said.
Judge Loke jailed him for 12 years.
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