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A drug lord who ran a network of 'cannabis farms' across the UK, earning millions of pounds while posing as a property developer has been jailed.
Albanians and Vietnamese worked for the drug lord, arriving on the island as illegal immigrants and forced to take care of the drug lord in order to repay the payments to the traffickers who had secured his passage to the United Kingdom.
Roman Le, 38, drove a £225,000 Bentley Continental between eight "farms" he supervised in the Midlands, north west and north Lincolnshire.
He would install scaffolding around buildings to make it look like the building had become a construction site being restored.
But behind the facade, his workers toiled inside the properties producing millions of pounds worth of cannabis.
In addition to the eight farms, Le also controlled a storage facility where both the equipment and the harvested cannabis were housed.
He set up cannabis factories across the Midlands, North West and northern Lincolnshire, including an abandoned nightclub in Coventry, a former public house in Birmingham and an old hotel in Lancashire.
National Crime Agency investigators put the gang under surveillance, spotting Le as he parked his Bentley outside the former Big Bamboo nightclub in Coventry before going inside.
When the place was later raided, police found 1,500 cannabis plants worth more than £1m spread across three floors.
Officers found hundreds of plants at the abandoned Wellington Hotel in Clayton-le-Moors.
On another occasion, they saw the gang's operations manager, Yihao Feng, 29, driving away in his Maserati sports car after visiting the Old Wellington Hotel in Clayton-le-Moors, which was later discovered to have more than 300 plants growing inside.
Many of the farms were staffed by illegal Vietnamese or Albanian migrants. When the gang was arrested, Feng pleaded guilty to conspiracy to produce cannabis. Another accomplice, David Qayumi, 36, who posed as a businessman to help Le rent or buy the properties, also admitted his involvement.
But Le denied the charge, claiming he was a legitimate businessman who had no knowledge that the properties were being used for cannabis. After an eight-day trial at Birmingham Crown Court, he was convicted of conspiracy to produce cannabis.
On July 4, Feng and Qayumi were sentenced to a total of 6.6 years in prison. And Le was sentenced to six years and two months in prison by the same court.
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