A member of a “well established” Dundee drugs gang which flooded the city with heroin and cocaine had his jail sentence extended for a second time after being caught with an illegal phone card in his cell.
George Black, 34, was serving four years and four months in prison after admitting trafficking heroin for the gang.
Police said at the time that he was part of a “large scale operation” intent on distributing hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of drugs on the streets of Dundee.
He was caught with the illegal SIM card by prison warders deploying a phone signal detection device on his wing at Glenochil Prison.
Alloa Sheriff Court heard that it showed up activity in his cell and officers burst in to find Black trying to stuff a mobile phone inside his trousers.
Prosector Suzannah Hutchison said the phone was seized and examined, and found to have an standard Vodafone SIM card.
Illegal SIM card
The incident occurred at around 7pm on June 21 2021.
Appearing by video link from the top security jail, Black, from Dundee, pled guilty to gave an unauthorised personal communication device in prison.
Prisoners in Scottish jails are now issued with mobile phones and locked SIM cards, as part of relaxations introduced during the Covid pandemic.
Outgoing calls made on the jail-issue devices can be monitored and should only be possible to numbers already included in existing prisoner call lists.
The phones are not text or Internet-enabled and are unable to receive incoming calls.
However, inserting a standard SIM card into the devices circumvents some of these restrictions.
‘Having difficulties’
Representing Black, solicitor Gary Foulis said the official devices rationed calls to 300 minutes a month.
He said Black was “having difficulties at the time” and “made the poor decision” to use an illegal SIM card.
He said Black had “held his hands up” immediately it was found.
Sheriff Neil Bowie handed Black a further 140 day sentence, consecutive to the jail term he is already serving.
He said: “These rules are in place for a good reason, as you well knew.”
Past crimes
It is the second time this year Black has been handed extra time by the Alloa sheriff.
In March he admitted having a sharpened plastic spoon in his cell, which he claimed he had “because of concerns about violence in the jail” and was given an extra six months.
The improvised weapon was found only six days before the SIM card.
Before the latest extension, Black’s earliest date of release was said to be “early 2024”.
Black, along with Kevin Ferguson, 34, Crawford Murphy, 30 and 36-year-old Zane Astbury, admitted being concerned in the supply of heroin and cocaine, which had a street value of approximately £365,000 and was jailed in December 2019.
