A STUDENT caught with around £5,000 of drugs that he would deal among friends has been spared an immediate jail sentence after the judge found it was “impressive” how he had turned his life around.

Vincenzo Granato’s intelligence meant he got involved in buying party drugs and selling them among friends, Swindon Crown Court was told.

The cybersecurity student, who started using drugs as a teenager whilst his parents were going through a divorce, would buy them from the darknet using cryptocurrency, and have it delivered to a postal service in Commercial Road.

But his parents’ house was raided by police after one of the parcels containing drugs was spotted by customs.

Normally, defendants charged with possession with intent to supply Class A drugs would expect to be sentenced with a starting point of four years and six months – but Judge James Townsend decided that the remorse he has shown and how he has turned his life around was reason to reduce it to two years and suspend it.

It will mean that should he not commit any further offences, he will not serve any time behind bars.

Addressing Granato, supported by a packed public gallery full of family and friends on Tuesday, Judge Townsend said: “The efforts you have made since your arrest are genuine and impressive, and you have radically turned your life around.

“I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s in the public interest that the sentence should be suspended.

“All the factors in your favour that I have mentioned would never be available to you again if you were caught drug dealing, it would be straight inside for a very long time, but what I have learnt about you is that you are determined it will never happen again.”

Earlier, the court had heard that Granato, now 21, had pleaded guilty to ten drugs-related charges at a hearing last month.

“For a period of about six months in 2020, Mr Granato was involved in buying drugs using the dark net and selling them to a relatively small group of people,” prosecutor George Threlfall said. “He used the proceeds to buy cryptocurrency.

“This was a sophisticated albeit small scale drug importation operation, by using the dark web and conducting transactions online using cryptocurrency, these dealings were in effect anonymous.”

After a package containing pink oval-shaped tablets, with a batman motif, were seized at a sorting centre near Heathrow in January 2020, Wiltshire Police started investigating and six months later, raided his parents’ address, where he was living.

They recovered more than £3,000 in cash, as well as phones, a laptop, and cannabis sweets.

Meanwhile, tablets were also found in a car, including:

  • 250 tablets of 2C-B, worth £2,500, a Class A drug
  • 115 tablets of MDMA (ecstasy), worth £1,150, a Class A drug
  • 39 tablets of LSD, worth between £195 and £390, a Class A drug
  • £20 of cocaine, a Class A drug
  • White Xanax branded tablets, worth between £308 and £775
  • Cannabis worth £400, a Class B drug
  • 25 tablets of Clonazolam, a painkiller but a controlled drug of Class C, worth £15.

In mitigation, Robbie Ross said that Granato, of Kembrey Street, Gorse Hill, was “seduced” into the drugs lifestyle.

“He got sucked deeper and deeper, and whilst youngsters feel that partying and party drugs are an alright thing to do, he went one step further because he was able to use his intelligence for a disreputable purpose,” he told the court.

Mr Ross added that following his arrest, he “buckled down” at his University of West London course and “looked in the mirror… of his own volition”.

“If it wasn’t for that period where he was selling party drugs to his friends, we would be saying this young man is an example to every young man we come across.”

Citing Granato’s progress at University, which he is on course to get a first-class degree from, he asked Judge Townsend to take a “fairly exceptional course” and go outside the sentencing guidelines.

“The question is does the court take those guidelines as a full stop, or does it say there are occasions and what do we gain by putting a person like this in prison?”

He added that the author of a pre-sentence report could “see a soul worth saving”.

“This boy has already sorted himself out, and he is on course to a productive, useful, energetic life, which is what we want all young people to aspire to, and importantly what the criminal justice system has always inspired to.”

He was given two years in prison for two counts of possession with intent to supply Class A drugs, suspended for two years.