According to a police summary of facts, Samuels started using her Facebook profile Riripeta Hamiora to first sell drugs on Christmas Day last year. Between then and April 27 this year, she was active in about eight Messenger group chats named things such as “Premium Scores”, “0800 for 20”, “Whacked”, and “Hustle on Bitches”.
She regularly promoted herself as a cannabis seller uploading images of cannabis, advertising prices and quantities, offering a delivery service or allowing buyers to collect their purchases from her house.
Quantities and prices she offered ranged from two ounces of cannabis for $600 down to $20 for a gram.
And, for every $40 spent, she offered free cannabis worth $20.
Police analysis showed that in one group “For 20”, Samuels posted more than 750 times. She was the administrator of the group, five times more active in it than the next active member. Her posts included her putting participants in touch with other sellers and directing other sellers to members.
The active audience across all the groups in which Samuels operated, totalled 536 people.
Her bank accounts showed she had received 446 deposits, totalling $27,160 from personal bank accounts with transaction values consistent with her advertised cannabis prices.
About a quarter of the bank payments were identified as being from the chat group participants or people Samuels had texted. Many of them had previous histories of drug-related offending.
Based on the bank transactions alone, police estimated Samuels sold at least 1.9kg of cannabis. They could not account for any cash sales.
Samuels was arrested on April 27 this year, when police searched two properties linked to her. She tried to get a friend at the house to destroy her phone, handing it to that person and yelling, “quickly, smash it, smash it”.
It was thrown on the road, causing the screen to smash and detach from the body but even broken, police were later able to access crucial evidence on it.
Judge Cathcart rejected Samuels’ claim that she was only involved in the offending to get cannabis for her own use. It was clearly a “commercial enterprise” and “designed to get profit”, the judge said.
He also rejected her initial claim that a stranger had hacked her Facebook account, which was negated by her later guilty pleas.
Samuels was unemployed at the time and couldn’t offer any explanation to police for the payments she had received. When asked why she had her associate smash her phone Samuels said, “that’s what you do”.
The later offences came to light when police went to a dispute between Samuels and someone else at a Wainui Road property on August 27 this year.
Samuels was standing beside her car when officers noticed a strong smell of cannabis wafting through a partly open window. They also saw a small dish of cannabis on the front seat. Searching the vehicle, they found 112.99 grams of the drug, some in a sealed bucket in the boot and some packed in variously-sized commercial quantities known as “baggies”. There was also $1960 cash and other items associated with commercial drug dealing.
The judge ordered destruction of all the seized items and forfeiture of the cash.
He set a sentence starting point of 31 months imprisonment for the Crown drugs charges with an uplift of three months — the maximum available — for the attempt to destroy the phone. For that offence, Samuels was lucky not to have been facing a charge of attempting to pervert justice, the judge said.
There was a further 12 months uplift for the police charges and two months uplift for the offending on bail, the judge said.
From a global starting point of four years, two months, imprisonment, the judge allowed a full 25 percent discount (12 months) for Samuels guilty plea and similar discount for her personal circumstances.
