A secretary who swapped office life for a highly p

A secretary who swapped office life for a highly profitable role as a drug smuggler’s ‘moll’ was jailed for three years today (Friday).

Her lover – already a month into a 12 year sentence for running hard drugs – introduced Barbara Stanley to the underworld venture.

Malcolm Anderson, a former school teacher, is thought to have pocketed millions of pounds flooding Britain’s streets with cannabis, cocaine, heroin and ecstasy.

The businessman, a 59-year-old grandfather, has been branded a ‘ducker and diver’ with the ‘charm of the devil and the morals of an alleycat’.

He was said to have used his ‘corruptive influence’ to embroil his lover of ten years in the scam.

Employing his mistress as a trusted lieutenant, Anderson is believed to have organised up to a dozen successful importations of heroin, cocaine and ecstasy.

He was arrested in May last year after smuggling more than pnds stlng 1 million worth of the various Class A drugs through ports at Ostend and Ramsgate, Kent.

Aided by meat wholesaler Anthony Goddard, the highly addictive consignments were cunningly hidden inside blocks of frozen ham and bacon.

In a method of smuggling never met by Customs officers before, the slab of meat were defrosted, hollowed out, filled with drugs, and resealed and refrozen.

Goddard, 46, who runs a legitimate meat importing business, collected the packages from the gang’s safehouse in Ostend, and mixed the refilled packages with genuine products before transporting the load back to England.

Anderson, a boxing instructor – teaching the sport at youth clubs in Waltham Abbey to keep youngsters off the streets – would arrive at the courier’s home to pick up the drugs in his pnds stlng 25,000 jeep believing he had outwitted the law.

However, on May 24 last year as he loaded 11 packages into his car in broad daylight, Customs swooped bringing an end to a seven week operation.

Anderson’s lover 44-year-old Stanley was arrested the next day.

At London’s Southwark Crown Court last month, Anderson, of Harrier Way, Waltham Abbey; Goddard, of Goldsmith Drive, Hullbridge, Essex, and Stanley, of Kings Road, Chingford, Essex were convicted of smuggling 1kg of heroin, 10kg of cocaine and 5,000 tablets of ecstasy.

Anderson and Goddard were both jailed for 12 years.

And today Judge Jeffrey Rucker imprisoned a sobbing Stanley, saying she had an ‘utterly ambivalent’ attitude to drugs.

He said: ‘If asked over a cup of tea what you thought of drugs, you would say you utterly detested them, and say the people who imported them were evil.

‘At the same time, you allowed Anderson to introduce you to the cannabis and the cocaine as well.

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The judge told her: ‘I have tried a number of very similar cases over 12 or more years.

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and seen many women in the dock facing drug trafficking offences who were there because of a fondness for some man who was a co-defendant.

‘It is very sad to see women, relatively innocent compared to the men they are fond of, going so low.

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However, when jailing the two men, Judge Rucker was even more scathing: ‘Crimes of this seriousness demands imprisonment in double figures.

‘Hard drugs are the fifth horseman of the modern Apocalypse.

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The judge said the cost to the public in crime was ‘absolutely immense’.

He added: ‘Apart from the drug trafficking itself, addicts commit an absolute swathe of crime everywhere – usually theft from the person or burglaries – to feed their addiction.

‘And to a lesser extent you have the drugs gangs fighting their turf wars on the streets of inner cities.

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Judge Rucker said the cost to the NHS and other social services was huge.

He said Anderson, a man of previous good character, had fallen ‘very low’, while Goddard – who was imprisoned in 1995 for a plot to manufacture counterfeit currency – ‘learned nothing’ from the experience and shortly after his release was ‘back into heavy crime.

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Judge Rucker said ‘genuine villains’ were often in the dock after graduating into drug trafficking for its easy profits.

‘But quite often they are people similar to yourselves, family men,’ he said.

‘The trouble with you is that you have a completely amoral and ambivalent attitude to drugs.

‘Yet you would be horrified if one of your children or grandchildren were involved in drugs.

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The judge said it was a ‘very clever’ importation, although he accepted Goddard’s business was not specially set up for the scam, he said the toing and froing across the Channel had been seen as a brilliant method for drug smuggling.

He told Goddard: ‘You were no doubt approached, tempted and fell.

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Anderson, he said, was higher up the chain of command.

Goddard, who admitted making five earlier smuggling trips, claimed he thought the consignment was gold.

The judge described the claim as the ‘last refuge of the seriously guilty drug trafficker.

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Judge Rucker also discounted Anderson’s claim he took part under threats from a mysterious Mr Big.

And he told the once merchant sailor: ‘You have one hell of a lot to answer for by involving Stanley.

‘How could you bring yourself to involve her? A woman who has shared your bed for ten years as your mistress.

‘If you had any real sense of decency, you would have pleaded guilty and given evidence on her behalf, but you dragged her in and dragged her down.

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The court heard that after his career in the Merchant Navy, Anderson studied for qualifications in mechanical engineering and for a time taught in schools in Walworth and Stepney Green.

He later built up garage businesses, opened a wine bar, a cafe in Chingford and a restaurant in the Canary Islands, and was a qualified scuba diving and waterski instructor.

However, Customs will now probe Mercedes sportscar driving Anderson’s bank accounts, his plush Spanish villa, and his business interests in Tipperary, Eire.

After the arrests in England, Belgium police searched Anderson’s beach property in Ostend, discovering further traces of illicit drugs, a commercial size freezer, three commercial vacuum packing machines and hundreds of plastic.

And Customs officers believe the flat had been used for 15 months by the gang, giving the potential for frequent smuggling runs, believed to have taken place every six weeks.

Packs of frozen meat were also in the freezer ready for the next importation once drugs were purchased in Holland by Anderson and Stanley.

Case officer Steve Dryland, of Customs national investigation team, said: ‘We regard this as a particularly successful operation because we have managed to take out a major organiser.

‘It’s certainly our belief this has been happening for 18 months, approximately once every six weeks.

In interview Goddard admitted making five earlier trips since January 2000, but claimed he believed he was smuggling gold.

‘And judging by his apparent wealth, Anderson has been a drugs baron for sometime.

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