A convicted dealer who ran a Europe-wide drugs ring from behind bars and orchestrated the import of £500,000 of an ecstasy-type substance to Aberdeen has been jailed.
Paul Bulman was imprisoned for six years and four months after he used hidden mobile phones to direct operations from Saughton jail in Edinburgh.
His gang peddled pentedrone, with 70kilos of the drug shipped in from Holland to Aberdeen on his instructions.
Telephone records showed he set up drug handovers in Dundee and Forfar that led to two of his gang getting jailed last year.
At the High Court in Glasgow, Bulman, 26, from Knightswood, Glasgow, pleaded guilty to dealing from September 2012 to January 2013 and his girlfriend Sara Walker admitted banking £90,000 of money to pay for the drugs.
While Bulman was jailed Walker, who is pregnant with his child, was placed under supervision for two years and ordered to carry out 100 hours unpaid work in the community.
Yesterday judge Lord Turnbull told Bulman: “You have demonstrated that your previous custodial sentence had no effect on you. You re-offended and the entire sophisticated operation was conducted from within prison.
The court heard that Walker, a former accounts department worker, met Bulman when she visited a friend in prison.
Bulman instructed her to bank the money, which went to accounts in Portugal and Malta, to pay for pentedrone.
Walker, 22, of Possilpark, Glasgow, admitted a charge under the Proceeds of Crime Act.
He was serving four-and-a-half years for drugs charges at the time of the operation to bring drugs into Scotland.
Defence QC Gordon Jackson, representing Bulman said: “He did what he did while he was in custody. He simply put his hands up and accepted it.”
Mr Jackson said his client had not re-offended since being released from jail in January last year and had passed exams to become a fitness trainer.