Anti-gang operation nets a businessman offering to sell a gun and cocaine

Shane Daly offered to sell 14g of cocaine for $4000. Photo / iStock

A business owner who offered to sell a semi-automatic firearm and half an ounce of cocaine to a former gang member has been sentenced to home detention.

Shane Joseph Stuart Daly, 53, was arrested after his communications with his customer were intercepted by Operation Dusk, an 18-month police crackdown on Hawke’s Bay gangs which ended two years ago.

The Napier District Court was told on Tuesday that Daly had a conviction for drug-dealing in 2010, for which he went to prison, but he had managed to live offence-free in the years afterwards until he was caught in 2021.

Crown prosecutor Clayton Walker said the offending in both decades followed a downturn in Daly’s business, leading to financial difficulties - following the global financial crisis in 2008, and the Covid-19 epidemic more recently.

“He did it for the money and he didn’t think he would get caught,” Walker said.

Defence counsel Ron Mansfield KC said Daly’s window-tinting business got drawn into Operation Dawn because Daly had employed a man who was one of the targets of police interest. That person had since died.

A Crown summary of facts said police intercepted communications at the business in April and May 2021, in which Daly offered to sell 14g of cocaine for $4000 and a firearm - a mini MP5 semi-automatic - to a former member of the Mongols MC gang.

Daly described the firearm as small, like a pistol, but having a big magazine. Police heard him say “the thing retracts right in so it’s virtually just a grip”.

Daly told his potential buyer he had paid for the weapon but had not taken possession of it. He would send a photograph when he did have it, and he wanted the transaction to be done at night.

Daly was subsequently charged with and pleaded guilty to offering to sell cocaine, and offering to sell a prohibited firearm - a relatively new offence created by the 2019 reform of the gun laws following the Christchurch mosque shootings.

Walker asked Judge Bridget Mackintosh to impose a prison sentence but Mansfield sought home detention, saying that “if this man is sentenced to a term of imprisonment, this man will lose his business - effectively everything he has worked for”.

He said Daly would be offered no programmes in custody for this type of offending, but could be offered rehabilitation courses in the community if sentenced to home detention.

Judge Mackintosh said it was hard to see what legitimate activity the semi-automatic firearm could have been used for.

“You must have been aware that it was heading out, potentially anyway, into the criminal world.”

Judge Mackintosh said that a pre-sentence report had identified a low risk that Daly would reoffend, and she believed there was a lower risk of further offending if he were on a home detention sentence than if he were sent back to prison.

He could receive counselling in the community.

She sentenced Daly to 12 months on home detention.

In 2011, Daly was convicted of possessing methamphetamine for supply after police found 125 grams of crystal methamphetamine, deal bags and electronic scales hidden in the under-floor heating system of his Clive home the previous year.

Daly initially told police he had not inspected the heating system since buying the house in 2001, but investigators found the batteries in the scales had not been sold until 2010.