Some days the courts deliver the sort of result that makes you wonder why it doesn't happen more often. On 23 July a 61-year-old man from Southall was handed a 12-year prison sentence at Isleworth Crown Court, not for some minor infraction but for running what amounted to an industrial-scale date-rape supermarket.
Ahoor Ramabark Fathi pleaded guilty back in April to possession with intent to supply class A and class B drugs, along with a firearm, ammunition and a healthy chunk of criminal property. The haul was grotesque: more than 2,000 litres of gamma-butyrolactone, neatly packed in 188 boxes of 12 one-litre bottles each, sitting inside a storage container he had rented. Officers also found £100,000 in cash, 456 grams of crystal methamphetamine, a gun and the bullets to go with it during searches of addresses in Ealing and Southall.
The whole miserable enterprise unravelled because Greater Manchester Police passed on intelligence about trafficking between the two cities. The Met's Specialist Crime Unit did the rest, surveillance, phone data, months of work that ended in Fathi's arrest in March. One of the largest GBL seizures ever made in the capital, according to a Metropolitan Police statement reported by The Independent, and one that kept a substantial quantity of the stuff off the streets.
GBL is the colourless, odourless liquid that too often ends up in drinks without the drinker's knowledge. Memory loss, sedation, the full chemsex nightmare; it is the substance people reach for when they want to exploit the vulnerable and then pretend it was all just a party that got out of hand. Detective Inspector Mark Gavin, who led the investigation, put it bluntly: drug supply causes significant harm to communities and the force would continue to target those involved in the exploitation of vulnerable people, as The Independent reported.
Of course the usual suspects will mutter about prison not solving addiction or whatever the fashionable deflection is this week. Yet here is the uncomfortable truth. Take 2,256 litres of this poison out of circulation, lock up the man who was moving it alongside guns and meth, and you have done something concrete to protect people who might otherwise have woken up with no memory of the night before. The cross-border network linking Manchester and London has been dented. That is not symbolism. That is policing.
The operation was not flashy headlines or ministerial announcements. It was the grinding work of passing intelligence between forces, analysing data, turning up at a storage unit and finding enough sedative to knock out half the city. And for once the system responded with a sentence that matches the scale of the offending rather than shrugging and offering community service.
