Share
19th July 2025
01:54pm BST
A 65-year-old woman has been convicted as the mob mastermind behind the supply of £80 million worth of cocaine.
When the children’s author David Walliams released his 2011 novel Gangsta Granny he probably imagined the ridiculous plot — in which an elderly woman commits serious crime — could never have been recreated in reality.
This week’s events however have proven that in the UK nothing is out of the realms of possibility.
A pensioner from Kent has been sentenced to prison for the majority of the rest of her life after committing a range of drug-related offences.
Deborah Mason, known to her family as ‘Queen Bee’, was a key cog in a complex criminal organisation that transported around a tonne of the Class A drug cocaine right across the country.
Mason is said to have profited upwards of £90,000 from her involvement, which she spent on a bursting wardrobe of designer goods, including a £400 Gucci collar for her pet dog.
Mason directed other members of the gang as a kind of "site foreman working under a project manager”, according to the Judge who convicted her to 20 years in prison for conspiracy to supply Class A drugs, per The BBC’s Thomas Mackintosh who reported from the court in Woolwich, London.
The rest of the ‘mob’ — mainly made up of other members of Mason’s direct family — received similar sentences of around 15 years.
Judge Philip Shorrock added: "You recruited members of your own family – as a mother you should have been setting an example for your children and not corrupting them.”
The ‘project manger’ under which the crime family operated was a supplier known only to police as “Bugsy.”
Mason was in close contact with the supplier via an encrypted phone app that deleted messages after receipt.
The ‘gangster granny’ made at least 20 illegal trips to transport the drugs herself, and directed family and other gang members to transport even more.
