By Staff Reporter

Last updated 14:37, Wednesday, 14 May 2008

HE was the shaven-headed heavily-tattooed thug who ran a network of heroin dealers with an iron fist.

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But Brian O’Neil’s evil empire came crashing down in one of the biggest operations ever carried out by Cumbria police.

O’Neil – known as Bimbo – was the leader of a crime ring that supplied the class-A drug to every estate in Carlisle.

Police said he drove his car around the city “like an ice cream van” as he handed out heroin to his underground web of street dealers.

But Operation Aqualine saw detectives bug the car he used – and it was this evidence that helped snare a man considered one of Cumbria’s most notorious criminals.

The secret recordings revealed the huge scale of his drugs business, with O’Neil claiming on tape that he had a 10kg heroin haul worth £1m in street deals.

At the time, Cumbria’s biggest ever single seizure of heroin was said to be 1kg.

The recordings also helped police gather evidence on his network of dealers, 12 of whom were jailed alongside him and his wife Linda after they were caught by detectives.

Among the evidence gathered was recordings of two of the dealers in O’Neil’s network of pushers meeting him at his family’s plot in Carlisle Cemetery.

While O’Neil dealt heroin from his own family grave, grieving relatives nearby tended the final resting places of their loved ones.

He even took time to point his own father’s grave out to one of his pushers.

O’Neil was described in court at the time of his sentencing as running “a mobile heroin shop”, phoning back to his wife to make up more heroin when supply ran out.

The level of their effect on the city was demonstrated when in the three months after the gang were seized, burglaries and thefts from cars fell to the lowest levels ever recorded.

The 14 members of the gang, including Bimbo and his wife, had chalked up a staggering 718 previous convictions between them by the time they were arrested in winter 2005.

Police said O’Neil ran his dealers by issuing threats and trading on a reputation as one of the biggest names in Carlisle’s criminal underworld.

Described in court as “a man not to be messed with”, Bimbo was fresh from a seven-year sentence for conspiring to supply heroin when he took on the role of being the city’s biggest dealer.

Deciding the best suppliers were dependent ones, he recruited heroin addicts – salesmen with an incentive: if they sold drugs they kept some for themselves.

He backed this up with “malevolent threats”, said the judge in the case.

In one meeting a dealer claimed someone was going to petrol bomb his mother’s house.

O’Neil’s answer to this was to declare: “You tell the charvers (men), go anywhere near your mother and tell them I’ll come and kneecap them.”

He added: “I’ll shoot them in the leg in bed.”

O’Neil also repeatedly boasted about the quality and quantity of his heroin.

He was recorded by police as saying he “never ran out of gear (heroin)” and that his drugs were “the best in town”.

“It’s always there – I never run out,” he told one pusher. “You won’t get no better” he claimed during another day carrying out his rounds of drug deals in the city.

But his reign at the top of the city’s drug world was to come to an end as Operation Aquiline was launched in 2005.

Neighbours even stood and cheered as dealers were seized in a string of raids across Carlisle and Penrith.

Now his downfall is complete, with the cash he gathered illegally set to go towards a police pot to snare future drugs barons just like him.