Max Williams from Wolverhampton and Daniel Morgan from Birmingham tried to hide their illegal and dangerous dealings behind encrypted phone chats.
But they were unmasked as part of an international operation by West Midlands Police officers.
The huge investigation is one strand of our Operation Target, which is our focus on tackling the most serious criminals in the West Midlands.
The pair thought they’d evade detection using EncroChat, a phone messaging service favoured by criminals because they believed messages on it could not be seen by law enforcement.
But they were wrong and investigators began pulling together a case against the pair.
Williams was found to be a broker in firearms, ammunition and class A drugs and the decoded chats showed that he was trading in semi-automatic and fully automatic weapons, as well as ammunition.
Hiding behind the user handle of Skilledtwig he spoke openly about his business and had regular conversations with Morgan, who was known as Noisy Jade.
Both men were also involved in the buying and selling large quantities of cocaine, heroin, MDMA and different strains of cannabis in addition to 100s of pills which are believed to have been ecstasy.
But in 2020 law enforcement agencies in Europe had developed a way to collect to data from EncroChat, and the information was shared with officers from our Regional Organised Crime Unit for the West Midlands Region (ROCUWM)
We found chats showing the men sourced the drugs and took a wage, or as they put it ‘a drink’ off the top of the costs.
By cross-referencing their chats, mobile data, and images from their phones our investigators were able to link them to their criminal trade.
Among those images were a semi-automatic pistol which was being traded with another firearm for around £15,000, and a kilo block of cocaine, stamped with the word ‘Paris.
Most of the discussions the men had around drugs talked of quantities in kilograms, half kilograms and quarter kilograms.
