£62m drugs gang face jail after Yorkshire smuggling

From September 2008 the drugs were shipped to Hull and taken to a warehouse in Leeds.

The gang had so much money they left bundles of bank notes rotting in a forgotten underground safe. To get around the problem they used an east London bureau de change to clean up their dirty profits, Southwark Crown Court heard.

Members of the gang were seen carrying bags stuffed with up to 200,000 into the World Currency Exchange. A money counting machine recovered from the bureau de change had processed 520,000 individual notes.

Ringleader Terrence Bowler and 11 other gang members are now facing jail. They will all be sentenced today. The gang brought at least 62m of skunk cannabis into Britain hidden in boxes of flowers from Holland.

At one point they were shipping in consignments worth up to 750,000 a week. A 14-month undercover investigation found that the drugs were imported through Harwich ferry port in Essex and taken to a warehouse in Chatham, Kent.

Officers at the port intercepted a shipment of 494lb (224kg), worth more than 750,000 to the gang, in July 2008, prompting a major change in tactics by the criminals.

From that September the drugs were shipped to Hull and taken to a warehouse in Leeds before being taken to one of a number of lock-up garages in Kingston, Worcester Park, Epsom and Ashtead, where the skunk cannabis would be unpacked and stored. Timothy Cray, prosecuting, said their activities amounted to "organised crime involving drug smuggling and money laundering on a massive scale".

He told the court police had the gang under surveillance from August 2007 to November 2008.

Mr Cray said: "The cash-rich nature of the business set the defendants a number of challenges. Storage of these amounts of money was something that caused difficulty."

He said one garage used by the defendants had built-in floor safes where 392,000 in cash was found, including 60,000 which had rotted through water damage.

Bowler, 40, of Kingston, Surrey; Peter Moran, 37, of Fulham, west London; and Mark Kinnimont, 40, of Surbiton, Surrey, made up the gang's "board of directors".

All pleaded guilty to conspiracy to import controlled drugs and conspiracy to launder the proceeds of crime.

Others pleaded guilty to conspiracy to supply controlled drugs and conspiracy to launder the proceeds of crime. One was convicted of laundering the proceeds of crime. A driver was found guilty of possession with intent to supply controlled drugs.