A 65-year-old London grandma who masterminded the sale of up to £80,000,000 worth of cocaine while also collecting £50,000 a year in benefits (!) has been jailed for 20 years, with her family also receiving significant sentences for being recruited into the operation.
Deborah Mason AKA ‘Queen Bee’ shipped nearly a tonne of cocaine across the UK between April and November 2023.
Her couriers would make £1,000 a day as they collected packages of imported cocaine and drove them all over London, Bradford, Leicester, Birmingham, Bristol and Cardiff.
Here’s the moment Debbie was arrested at her flat in Tufnell Park, north London, and did a really terrible job of feigning innocence (it was 5am, to be fair):
Deborah Mason, 65, ran her cocaine dealing empire from her home in Tufnell Park with the help of her sister Tina Golding, 66, and her children Rosanne Mason, 29, Demi Bright, 30, Lillie Bright, 26, and Reggie Bright, 24.
Here she is being nicked. pic.twitter.com/1uUuHVf5pL— CourtNewsUK (@CourtNewsUK) July 18, 2025
Deborah spent her takings on designer goods, including a £400 Gucci collar and lead for her cat, and was planning a trip to Turkey to have cosmetic surgery.
In the end, she was found guilty of conspiracy to supply Class A drugs and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Judge Philip Shorrock told her: ‘You were effectively the site foreman working under the direction of a site manager.
‘You recruited members of your own family – as a mother you should have been setting an example for your children and not corrupting them.’
Deborah didn’t just play a ‘leading role’, though. Sometimes she would get stuck into the road activities too; taking part in 20 trips, delivering 356kg of cocaine, and also making trips to deliver and collect cash.
She was in ‘close contact’ with a supplier named Bugzy, using an encrypted app which had auto-deletion of messages set up.
Her daughters and son, below, also received sentences of 11+ years each:
Oh, and her sister Tina, too:
Obviously it’s never nice to see someone’s grandma go to prison for 20 years, let alone the entire family being sent down, but as they say: do the crime, you do the time, especially when there’s £80,000,000 worth of cocaine involved.
What’s really crazy is that she was raking in £50,000 a year in benefits at the same time. How in the world does someone qualify for that amount in the first place? Let alone be greedy enough to keep collecting it when you’re a cocaine kingpin. Does that include pension + housing benefit + council tax benefit? Must be some kind of disability benefit in there, too. Although you have to wonder how legitimate that was.
Well, in any case, she won’t be seeing any of that cash anymore. Maybe they’ll make a movie about her one day? Silver linings and all that.
To watch the moment a £500k-a-week British drug lord was arrested after stepping off his private jet, click HERE.
