POLICE found gay porn DVDs worth up to £12,000 during a raid on an illegal sex shop being run from a house in Leeds.
Gary Pickard advertised his DVDs in a string of gay magazines during seven years running the mail order operation.
Leeds Crown Court heard police discovered around 1,500 DVDs during a raid on 55-year-old Pickard’s home in Parkwood Road, Beeston.
Prosecutor Kate Batty said Pickard would place repeat adverts in gay magazines, asking for between £5 and £8 for each DVD.
Mrs Batty said prosecutors don’t know how much profit Pickard had earned in seven years but said the DVDs found at his home would have generated income of between £7,500 and £12,000.
At Leeds Magistrates Court in March, Pickard admitted using a premises as a licensed sex establishment and five offences of possessing unclassified video recordings for purposes of sale.
The court was told he was given a police caution in 2006 for similar offences.
Handing Pickard a six month prison sentence suspended for two years and 150 hours unpaid work, Mr Justice Butterfield told him: “The persistency in which you carried out this business suggests to me you require a clear indication from the court of what is going to happen if you were unwise enough to continue to offend in this way.”
The judge told him the sentence would have been harsher if Pickard hadn’t got the responsibility of caring for his elderly mother, who is dependent on him.
All the DVDs were seized by West Yorkshire Trading Standards after the raid last October.
A confiscation hearing will be held at Leeds Crown Court at a later date to determine how much Pickard profited from the business.
