Hell-on-Sea: how a drugs gang took over a sleepy Devon town

Retired couples and a smattering of teenagers bunking off school watch the grey swell of the Channel under a pale winter sky. The gaudy amusement arcades of penny-pushers and flashing gambling machines are almost completely deserted. The bored-looking staff in the ice-cream parlours and takeaways gaze into their phones, waiting for customers.

Dawlish on the south Devon coast is everything you might expect of a seaside resort in February. Yet this ostensibly sleepy West Country town was for well over a decade the nerve-centre of a violent gang from the north-east who built a brutal drug empire worth at least £1m while also preying on vulnerable young women who fell under their spell.

Earlier this month, 13 gang members – who were known locally as the Geordies, even though the core of the group originated from Sunderland – were sentenced collectively to 105 years after a four-month trial at Bristol crown court. They were found guilty of flooding Dawlish and the adjacent seaside town of Teignmouth with cocaine and heroin brought in by drug couriers from larger gangs in Liverpool and Sunderland. Five members were also convicted of multiple rapes of three women.

The gang was led by self-proclaimed “King of Dawlish”, James Lee Brooks, 41, who boasted that it “ran the town”. Brooks, known as “Geordie Lee”, was sentenced to 25 years for 20 offences, including conspiracy to supply cocaine and cannabis, as well as 13 counts of aiding and abetting rape.

The dominant figures in the group have been in custody since the police swooped on addresses across the country last March, but many locals are still struggling to come to terms with the fact that a drug gang was able to take hold of their community for so long. “My friends had heard of them … some knew them,” says Hannah Perry, 20, working in an ice-cream kiosk on the seafront. “It’s scary what can go on under your nose, especially in such a small town.”

The detectives from Devon and Cornwall police’s organised crime branch – which spent three years investing Brooks’s network of couriers, enforcers and dealers – had never encountered a criminal outfit like the Geordies. Typically, gangs seeking to expand into smaller towns use so-called “county lines”, where runners bring in drugs and then return with the cash. But the Geordies actually moved to Dawlish, taking over the drug trade and terrorising much of the town’s population with violence and threats to anyone who displeased them.

“I’ve been in the job for 30 years and I cannot think of a case like it,” says Nick Wilden, head of the organised crime branch, in the canteen of Exeter’s police HQ. “They gained a stranglehold on the community.”

Wilden first encountered Brooks in 2009 while investigating crimes linked to the vast caravan and mobile-home parks that carpet Dawlish Warren, a popular resort near the town that welcomes up to 15,000 holidaymakers in the summer.

“I was the detective inspector for Teignbridge 10 years ago. I remember him causing me problems then,” he says, sipping from a cup of coffee. “It was general criminality: burglaries, car thefts and assaults. It was low-level, but it built and built and he brought people down with him.”

Although Brooks doesn’t look like a gangland boss, he has an air of menace about him. “He is actually quite a small, strange looking character,” says Wilden. “But he has a nasty edge to him – people were frightened of him and what he would do.”

Brooks had much more powerful masters in the north but he behaved as if he owned Dawlish. “Organised crime is very hierarchical,” explains Wilden. “Someone like Brooks is like a local branch manager but he has got his loyal lieutenants and enforcers around him.”

The police suspect Brooks and his family may have been chased out of Sunderland by rival gangs but admit they are still not certain what prompted him to pick on Dawlish. “They were possibly forced out and they probably chose Dawlish because they had come down here on holiday,” says Andy Glanville, the detective in charge in the investigation. “There was also a gap in the market because no one was running the drugs scene in Dawlish and Teignmouth.”

The other members of the gang from Sunderland came in dribs and drabs over the following years. “Some of them came down for holidays and didn’t go back. One split up from his wife and came down to get away from it,” explains Glanville. “They knew Dawlish was a Sunderland stronghold, which they could join.”

The crimes escalated as more of them arrived. In 2011, police broke up a gang including Brooks and Dave Rowntree, also from Sunderland, bringing crack cocaine and heroin into Exeter. Brooks and Rowntree were each given five-year sentences.

On their release from prison in 2014, they resumed their life in Dawlish. Meanwhile, the crimes linked to the Geordies continued to grow more serious. In 2017, a Dawlish shopkeeper carrying his takings to the post office had ammonia squirted in his face during a robbery by two men including Rowntree’s brother, Paul Rowntree, with a key member of Brooks’s gang, Ross Morton, driving the getaway car. Later that year, another member of the gang, Nazrul Islam, was arrested after he arranged for a debtor to be viciously beaten up. Officers discovered large amounts of cocaine and MDMA hidden in a safe in his car outside his house Teignmouth.

Islam, who was not from the north-east, got involved with the gang after Brooks helped him deal with a local bully. Wilden says this is typical of the way gangs find recruits and root themselves in communities. “You find that organised criminals like to style themselves as some of kind of Don Corleone. I’m not suggesting Brooks was the Godfather but he cultivated that sort of persona where he gets things sorted for people,” says Wilden. “Then they are in debt to him.”

These incidents alongside a lengthening list of assaults and increasingly brazen drug-dealing, attracted the interest of the force’s organised crime branch. “There were areas of Dawlish where people were taking loads of drugs,” says Glanville. “We arrested street dealers selling heroin, and all of them had Brooks’s number in their phones.”

Raids on houses used by the gang revealed more of their inner workings. Police discovered lists of debts scrawled on notepads and saved on mobile phones, with some of the gang’s customers owing up to £50,000. On Brooks’s phone, the police found footage of an assault on a dealer as well as messages threatening to “open up” a supplier.

This was not an error on the gang’s part: they often record beatings in order to intimidate customers and maintain control of the market. Yet the Geordies’ violence was not restricted to those who owed them money. Police showed a video in court of gang member John Jackson, who was convicted of grievous bodily harm, punching a man in a pub. “There is an altercation, and he goes over and knocks him halfway across the pool table and breaks his jaw. It was nothing to do with drugs,” says Glanville.

The gang also used their grip on the town to rape young vulnerable women who came into their orbit. “One of the ways they exploited people was sexually. It might be people who happened to get involved with them or people who thought they were in ‘relationships’,” explains Wilden. “They would twist anyone for a profit or any kind of gratification.”

Today in Dawlish, Brooks and his group still inspire fear. In the town’s pubs, few are prepared to give their names. One landlord claims he has been sent threatening messages instructing him not to talk about the gang since they have been imprisoned. “They are nastier than you think. What you read about in the papers is only the surface – it’s underneath,” he says pacing nervously around the bar. “They mean business.”

A plumber on a nearby table recalls a few run-ins he had with Brooks and his gang, even though he had nothing to do with drugs. “They are very intimidating. I know people who were beaten up. One young lad was beaten up outside this pub,” he says. “I’m happy they are off the streets but we need to be careful because they still have people here.”

He claims he was threatened when he turned up late to fix a boiler for Brooks, and on a different occasion when he stepped in to protect an 80-year-old man who had let a room to a gang member. “I’m in the van, and he is trying to get me out of the van. Then Geordie Lee turns up in his Range Rover but I managed to drive off.”

A few locals seem to have a strange admiration for the Geordies. One tradesman remembers that Brooks didn’t charge him for the hire of a bouncy castle – which was one of the gang’s cover businesses – and also recalls watching the town’s carnival with Brooks and his girlfriend. “I’ve met him 30 times in my life and 30 times a gentleman,” he says. “You hear stories but he was no trouble to me.”

Another landlord, who gave evidence against the Geordies, recalls the group’s enforcers bursting into the pub, searching for people who owed them money. “You could say that Geordie Lee was the king of Dawlish because he ran the drugs in the town and had lots of people working for him. But obviously there are loads of people who don’t live in the centre who had no idea.”

The area feels safer now, he says. “The atmosphere has changed. I don’t have to hang around on a Saturday night any more. I used to worry about what was going to happen.”

The narrow lanes that rise up steeply from the town’s main thoroughfare were controlled by the gang. One elderly couple living on the same street where Brooks parked his white Range Rover recorded the mayhem linked to the Geordies’ activities on CCTV outside her house night after night. “I saw drugs changing hands, fighting and people being beaten up,” says Sheila Thomas. “This is why I’ve got no neighbours left. They have all moved.”

Yet it was the town’s most vulnerable inhabitants who suffered most. Many of these found sanctuary in the community centre and cafe in the nearby Strand church. One of the centre’s volunteers, himself a former heroin addict, knows most of the users in the town. He is rake thin, his face crumpled from years of addiction, but his eyes are bright and warm. “Everyone was fearful of them,” he says. “Drug users in the town sold their drugs to feed their own habits. But they could never pay the debt back. They were always owned.”

The drugs trade, he claims, has now moved to a different part of Dawlish. “The town has a big drug problem,” he says. “I’m sure that someone else will move in.”

This prompts a perhaps unexpected thought from the retired minister, Roger Whitehead, 78, who runs the centre. He suggests that drugs need to be taken out of the hands of organised crime gangs such as the Geordies. “The only answer is to make it legal and controlled,” he says. “We have to admit that we have lost the war on drugs.”

Others in the town are focused on preventing any repeat of what happened. One community leader – who organised a well-attended meeting to stop another gang gaining a foothold – warns that the poorer parts of Dawlish have deep-seated social problems, and drugs are rife. “A mile outside town are people riding on horseback as if they’re on the pages of Devon Life, but a mile into town you’ve got the kind of deprivation you see in Plymouth,” says the man, who asks not to be named. He adds that naivety allowed the gang to go unchecked for so long: “The nightmare scenario is that another gang moves in.”

The convictions of the gang have shaken the parts of the Dawlish that remained largely oblivious to the rise of the Geordies. The town’s mayor, Alison Foden, only found out about the extent of their activities from the court case. “I wasn’t aware what was happening until I read about it,” she says. “I feel shocked and horrified.”

As night falls on Dawlish, a fine drizzle rolls in from the heaving sea. The lanes are empty and the lawns where users and dealers used to congregate are deserted. But it will take a long time for the legacy of the Geordies to fully wash away.