A SELBY drug dealer is starting two-and-a-half years in jail after he became the latest victim of undercover police sting Operation Burgen.

Carl Anthony Roberts, 29, sold wraps of heroin six times to someone he believed was a drug addict, but was really a police officer in disguise, said Susan Kerr, for the Crown Prosecution Service.

Recorder Alan Hedworth QC told Roberts at York Crown Court: “It is apparent you were supplying on a commercial basis, albeit on a low level and those who engage in such activity have to realise the courts will not tolerate such conduct and therefore, only immediate prison is appropriate”.

Roberts, who gave an address in Pinfold Avenue, Sherburn-in-Elmet, at an earlier hearing, pleaded guilty to six charges of supplying heroin and one each of possessing heroin and possessing diazepam.

Mrs Kerr said police contacted Roberts through a mobile phone number given to them by drug users.

The dealer unwittingly arranged six drug meets with police between April 8 and April 29. At the first meeting, Roberts had a stack of 20 wraps with him, one of which he handed over for a £10 note. The last meeting was at a house in Denison Road, Selby, and when police raided the house on May 30, they found Roberts and drug dealing paraphernalia including address books, mobile phones, electronic scales, foil and a wrap of heroin. They also found five tablets of diazepam.

For Roberts, Nicholas Barker said: “He is a somewhat chastened individual.”

Roberts had been addicted to heroin for 12 years and initially had funded it through a job, the court heard. But he lost that employment at the same time as he went through a relationship breakdown and started selling the drug to a small circle of friends who also used the drug to fund his own habit. He hoped prison would help him get off the drug.