A GANGSTER has been jailed for 15 years after being convicted of numerous firearms and drugs offences.
Roger Rivers, 43, of Greendale Drive, Radcliffe, was arrested following a joint operation involving officers from GMP's Xcalibre Organised Crime Unit and the Metropolitan Police. Undercover officers watched him take a plastic bag from the boot of his car and hand it to Sharitta Warren outside Piccadilly train station.
She was later arrested as she got off a train at London's Euston station, and the bag was found to contain two Baikal guns, silencers and ammunition.
Police raided Rivers' home and his girlfriend's flat in Salford. They discovered an industrial drugs press and the machinery and tools needed to produce class A drugs on a large scale.
Detectives also found about 200 bullets along with a German Colt Double Eagle pistol and heroin and cocaine, with an estimated street value of £50,000.
Rivers, a career criminal with links to Moss Side drugs gangs, claimed to be earning £8 per hour as a lorry driver.
Yet he lived in a luxury home that even had a flat screen TV in the bathroom.
He was charged with 12 serious firearms and drugs offences and convicted after a trial at Woolwich Crown Court.
Det Sgt Nick Edge, from GMP's Xcalibre Organised Crime Unit said: "Roger Rivers is a well-known drug dealer and a dangerous man. "Clearly he had absolutely no care for where these guns would end up or what they could do to someone."
Sharitta Warren, 28, of Albert Carr Gardens, London, was sentenced to six years after being convicted of possession of firearms and ammunition.
Albert Tafshiu, 23, of Birch Road, Crumpsall, was jailed for five years in October 2008 after pleading guilty to possession of prohibited weapons in connection with the same police operation.
Nadia Akhtar, Bilal Akhtar and Darren Thompson were charged in connection with the operation but cleared of all charges.
Rivers was a well-known drug dealer in Moss Side in the late 80s, progressing from selling cannabis into more serious crime.
While he may have mixed with members of the Pepperhill Mob and other gangs, he was largely an independent operator who was involved in Manchester's criminal scene before the days of the infamous Gooch and Doddington gangs.
Quietly spoken, he was among a number of south Manchester criminals who left Manchester and settled in the Bury area.
In 2001 he was cleared of the murder of Dennis Wilson, 32, one of the founder members of the Doddington gang, and Clifton Bryan, 29.
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Gangster jailed over drugs and guns
March 05, 2009
Roger Rivers
Showing comments 1 to 14 and replies | View All
Kris-Kross, Ashton Under Lyne (05/03/2009 at 20:02)
isafact (05/03/2009 at 20:11)
heptarchy, aha (05/03/2009 at 21:01)
Esso Blue & Blue Firework The Arabian Blue Knight, , Never trust the human equivalent of a meerkat. Barred from all Meerkat den's (05/03/2009 at 23:36)
red one (06/03/2009 at 01:07)
Marquis de Sade et la petit monge tout (06/03/2009 at 08:26)
RJKS, St Retford (06/03/2009 at 09:10)
TheophilusW, South MCR (06/03/2009 at 15:04)
I would wager that the reason we are not doing it is because it is a well-documented result of criminological research that longer prison sentences do not serve as a deterrent to gun and drug crime. Whether you like it or not, there will always be a demand for drugs. What must be done is to break the link between criminality and drug markets. I think that the best approach to this may be to revise implementation of drug legislation and to try and carve off the 'soft' drug 'market from the 'hard' drug market, thus making the latter easier to police. And policed it must be.
Of course, there are many reasons why you would want to put a man like Mr Rivers in prison for the rest of his life. I am not arguing that his sentence was not too short. Obviously, the longer he spends in prison, the longer we go without one of his guns ending a child's life. I don't think, however, that deterrence of future crime is a good argument on which to base such a conclusion.
Poverty breeds crime, and crime breeds poverty. If you want to bring gun crime down, then you have to address the deeper problems that plague our society. If you find yourself resorting to draconian prison sentencing, you are trying to tackle the problem at completely the wrong level. Indeed, if this is your approach to crime, you have already lost the fight.
die hard utd09, manchester (06/03/2009 at 15:30)
The Right Honourable Person with a view. (07/03/2009 at 09:19)
'I love the bit 'he even had a flat screen TV in his bathroom'
Wow, he must have MILLIONS then lol
citycentre, manchester (07/03/2009 at 10:20)
you say poverty causes crime; but is it not the attempt to escape poverty, rather than the poverty itself (although it could be argued that there is virtually no pverty in the UK today, people do not die from lack of food or clean water, or freeze in large numbers during cold weather; there may be large income disparity, but not absolute poverty).
so we have a sizable population of relatively poor who aspire to a lifestyle which is likely to remain unatainable by legitimate means, but that they are encouraged by soceital pressure to want; it seems obvious that some people will attempt to gain it by crime, and as you say longer sentencing is unlikely to have much effect on that.
other than retreating into a kind of medieval religious thinking, such that everyone is in the place god made for them and they should stick at it for rewards in the afterlife i dont see what can be done to change the situation, but then our consumer driven culture can't exist anymore.
i would agree with you that taking the supply of drugs out of the hands of criminals can only serve to reduce their income and capacity to casue harm to others.
Ying & Yang, Manchester (08/03/2009 at 21:20)
Esso blue & The Temple of Boom,, under the Blue Moonlight (09/03/2009 at 20:22)
Bean B4, manchester (10/03/2009 at 09:23)
good post. the situation you describe is caused by the misguided emancipation of the owrking class. softening of penalties is also to blame for this excuse for humanity