Last updated 11:41, Wednesday, 14 May 2008

Natural justice always dictated that no criminal should be allowed to profit from the proceeds of wrongdoing.

Instinct has forever told us that no criminal, trading persistently in the misery of others for illegal personal profit, should ever be allowed to benefit from its returns.

But reclaiming the spoils of crime has until relatively recently been an overlooked and neglected aspect of punishment. Not so now.

Carlisle drugs dealer Brian ‘Bimbo’ O’Neil, jailed for 12 years for trading in heroin, has been ordered to hand over £123,000 of the money he made in a long career of scarring the lives of the vulnerable and weak in his own home town for his personal grubby advantage.

It’s likely he’ll have to sell the home he shared with his wife Linda, who will herself have to surrender £41,292 along with her wedding and engagement rings.

There’s no way of knowing whether O’Neil may have secreted further funds from his life in organised crime. Though he boasted of owning an £850,000 property, police have been unable to locate it.

But the message from this pay-back judgement is clear. Cumbria Police are determined drugs dealers will not be allowed the upper hand of prosperity. They are backed unambiguously by the courts and must be supported by communities resolute in rejection of criminal profiteering.