A FATHER and son from Swindon have been jailed for a total of almost 15 years for their roles in an extensive drugs operation.

Gary Peapell, 38, and his 62-year-old father Keith, were part of a crime syndicate in Wiltshire dealing in cocaine and mephedrone.

The pair were supplied by an organised crime gang based at Cannock, in south Staffordshire, and were trapped during a lengthy police inquiry.

Undercover detectives kept the gang members under surveillance between November 2014 and June last year.

The pair were among 20 men and two women from Cannock, Walsall, Stafford, Redditch and Derbyshire being sentenced at Stafford Crown Court this week.

Gary Peapell was jailed for a total of eight years and eight months and his father for six years.

The two men, both from Commercial Road, Swindon, had admitted charges of conspiracy to supply drugs and possession of money as criminal property.

The court heard that a courier from the Cannock gang was twice the subject of police surveillance in December, 2014, when he drove to meet Keith Peapell at a secluded car park at Crickley Hill Country Park at Birdlip, near Gloucester.

Simon Davies, prosecuting, said that later in the same month there was another exchange at the Crickley Hill location involving Keith Peapell.

He said Gary Peapell was the head of the Swindon crime group and that only the heads of each gang would be in contact with each other before delegating the day-to-day risk of collecting drugs or money to others

In February, 2015, Gary Peapell was in Thailand and left the operation in the hands of his father, who was involved in an exchange of cocaine and methedrone at the same venue.

The kingpins of the drug gang, John Appleton and Michael O’Mahoney, both from Cannock, have been jailed for 14 years.

The court heard both men had been jailed for 10 years in 2007 for running a similar network and the current operation started a short time after they were released on licence in 2012.

They were ‘wholesale’ dealers in high-purity cocaine to the other crime groups, which was later bulked out with other substances.

Undercover police followed the ‘foot soldiers’ across the region delivering cocaine and Mephedrone, a class-B amphetamine also known as M-cat or meow meow, that regularly reached street values of £15,000 per delivery.

Mr Davies said that the details of the police operation which included arrested and a number of seizures of drugs and cash was just a ‘snapshot’ of the size of the drugs empire.

Other conspirators have received prison terms of between two and 10 years.