A cocaine dealer who was paying off a £2,500 debt told police to arrest him – after they caught him parked up with a bag of powder.

Police had stopped to talk to dad-of-one Leon Aldridge, 22, when they saw his 2008-plate Vauxhall Corsa parked up beside the lake off Drayton Road, Berinsfield, in the early hours of March 30 last year.

Prosecutor Jonathan Stone told Oxford Crown Court that Aldridge was ‘honest from the off’.

He told the officers: “Just arrest me now. I have been doing drugs in my car.”

He produced a small bag containing 0.27g of powder cocaine. The police officers searched Alridge’s home later that day, finding a wad of £1,795 in cash stashed in a stack of clothes in his mother’s wardrobe.

Messages on a cheap Nokia ‘burner’ phone found in Aldridge’s Corsa pointed to him being involved in the commercial supply of cocaine.

They included arrangements to supply comparatively large amounts of drugs and refusing to sell on credit – or ‘tick’. One of the messages sent to a customer and asking for repayment read: “Yo m8, got any p [cash]? Could do with it, got to pay up £1,500 next week.” In another, he said: “I’m not ticking at the moment.”

A police drugs expert who analysed the phone messages said it was evidence of an ‘established and busy commercial enterprise’.

Mr Stone said of Aldridge’s role in the dealing: “We cannot say he’s top of the tree, but he’s certainly not at the lowest echelon.”

Jailing him for 28 months, Judge Maria Lamb told the defendant: “You are in the predicament that you are now because somebody was prepared to peddle you drugs and exploit your vulnerability at the time.

“It may be that you became ensnared by those people to a degree manipulated by them but the reality is that you have gone on to do the same.

“This was a business, it is clear from the expert witness, which had a client base numbered in the dozens involving significant amounts of drugs running into the hundreds of pounds on occasion.”

Mitigating, Alistair Grainger urged the judge to suspend any prison sentence. His client had developed a £2,500 drug debt and been forced by his creditors to work for them in order to pay off the debt.

Since his arrest, he had managed to rid himself of his cocaine addiction, his family had paid off the £2,500 debt and he in turn had reimbursed his family. He had a partner and the couple were expecting their second child.

Aldridge, of Diamond Drive, Didcot, pleaded guilty at the magistrates’ court to being concerned in the supply of class A drugs and possession of cocaine.

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