AN ILLEGAL immigrant has been jailed for three years following the first crack house raid by Cleveland Police.

Mother-of-six Arecia Williams, 39, of no fixed address, admitted possessing crack cocaine with the intention to supply and to attempting to pervert the course of justice when she appeared at Teesside Crown Court yesterday.

The court heard how Williams had fled to Middlesbrough to escape from London yardie gangsters.

But on June 24, less than a week after moving into a house in Meath Street, she was arrested in a drugs raid and was found to be hiding cocaine in her underwear.

Williams, who at first gave a false name to police, was also found to have outstayed her six-month visitors visa and will be deported to Jamaica following her prison sentence.

Richard Bennett, defending, said that Williams was a respectable businesswoman in Jamaica and had travelled to Britain on a buying trip where she intended purchasing clothes for her shop. On arrival in England, she had stayed with friends in Nottingham, but following an argument with them had headed south, ending up in Brixton's Afro-Caribbean community where she found herself in trouble with gangsters who had had a run-in with her brother back in Jamaica.

The criminals, the court was told, had repeatedly threatened and assaulted her, and on one occasion had put a gun to her head.

Frightened to make a formal complaint to police, she had fled to Teesside where she moved in with two other women.

During her stay she had bought cocaine from a local drugs dealer.

At the time of the raid she had been found with 12 rocks of cocaine concealed in her underwear.

Sentencing Williams to three years in prison, Judge George Moorhouse said that anyone who provides that kind of drug must know of its appalling effect on people