Leader of gang dubbed 'Tesco of drug smuggling' faces 20 years

A drug baron who created the "Tesco" of cannabis smuggling is facing up to 20 years behind bars.

Anthony Mills, 43, was the boss of the so-called Flowers Gang, who hid super-strong skunk weed worth £61 million inside crates of blooms from Holland.

The plot was reworked in a recent episode of the BBC crime drama The Shadow Line. Mills's syndicate moved 18 tons of cannabis through UK ports between June 2006 and November 2007, making £22 million profit. Mills also oversaw money laundering, setting up companies in international tax havens to hide the 13-strong gang's profits.

But they made so much money they could they could not spend it quickly enough. When police raided a damp lock-up in Ashtead, Surrey, they found £60,000 in wads of rotting £20 notes.

Mills was photographed at "board meetings" at the gang's base in Surrey, but spent most of his time in Holland liaising with Dutch suppliers.

When police moved in, he escaped and was only arrested in Amsterdam in March last year - the same month that his deputy, Terrence Bowler, was jailed for 16 years and two more gang "directors", Peter Moran and Mark Kinnimont, each got 14 years.

Mills, of no fixed address, admitted laundering money on behalf of others, and was convicted at Southwark crown court of conspiracy to import cannabis and conceal proceeds of drug supply.He will be sentenced on July 22.

Prosecutor Timothy Cray told the jury: "If the man pushing cannabis on the street, the small-time dealer, is equivalent to the market trader selling his fruit and veg outside London Bridge station, then this group were the big players, the Tesco. Anthony Mills was the director of this Tesco."

The cannabis was grown in greenhouses hidden among legitimate crops. The gang paid £2,200 per kilogram for the drug before selling it at £3,400 a kilo to regional wholesalers in the UK, who traded it on the street for £5,760.

Regular shipments arrived at Harwich with shrink-wrapped packages of skunk hidden inside boxes of flowers. The crates were delivered to a warehouse in Chatham, Kent where the drugs were separated and ferried to secure lock-ups in Kingston, Worcester Park, Epsom and Ashtead.

When a shipment was intercepted in July 2008, the operations to Leeds, via the port of Hull. Police are now trying to unravel the gang's overseas assets ahead of confiscation hearings.