Big-time P cook spent $1.3m at SkyCity casino

Christian Clifton. Photo / Supplied

A prolific methamphetamine cook jailed for life gambled $1.3 million as a SkyCity VIP before he was banned from the casino.

Christian Clifton was given a sentence of life imprisonment at the Auckland District Court after pleading guilty to 10 charges of manufacturing the Class-A drug and other offences.

It was the first time a life sentence has been handed down at a District Court anywhere in the country.

The 48-year-old was a major target of Operation Royale, a covert inquiry by the Auckland drug squad between July and August 2009, when Clifton was cooking P for a number of underworld figures, bugged text messages and cellphone calls show.

At his sentencing on Wednesday, Judge Roy Wade summed up Clifton as a man who spent large sums and treated cash as "easy come, easy go".

But the Herald can reveal that Clifton was a VIP member of the high-roller club at SkyCity casino and gambled $1.3 million in the three years before his arrest.

Between August 2006 and 2009, he spent more than $700,000 on his VIP card at table games and a further $600,000 on the gaming machines.

From the $1.3 million gambled, he had a return of $1.1 million - a loss of around $200,000.

Clifton was served with a trespass notice by the casino while under police surveillance during Operation Royale.

SkyCity general counsel Peter Treacy was unable to comment on specific cases or details relating to Clifton for privacy reasons. But he said that under the Gambling Act 2003, SkyCity had the right to remove or exclude anyone from its sites.

Clifton is not the first member of the criminal underworld to spend time and ill-gotten gains at SkyCity.

Last month, Albert Wayne Hunter, 63, was sentenced to six years in prison after being found guilty of multiple counts of conspiracy to supply and manufacture the Class-A drug.

Police had tapped his cellphone and put surveillance cameras around his headquarters in Mt Albert, a "concrete bunker" under the Video Ezy store in New North Rd.

At the sentencing in August, Judge Mark Perkins noted Hunter described himself as a "professional gambler".

In fact, Hunter was barred from SkyCity during the Operation Helar trial along with co-accused Kamal Jonathan Butt, 36, and Hong "Rose" Scott.

In another twist, one of the people Hunter was found guilty of conspiring with was Guozhi Li - a key player in the drug ring run from the VIP lounges of SkyCity in 2006.

The syndicate leader, Ri Tong Zhou, ran a sophisticated distribution network and supplied 3.7kg of P while using SkyCity as the "office" for his multimillion-dollar drug enterprise. He spent $8 million at the casino in six months.

In sending Zhou to 15 years in prison in 2009, Justice Rhys Harrison noted that anti-gambling lobbyists had warned that the casino could become a "scene for large-scale criminal activity or a meeting place for people who commit serious crimes".

Zhou was seen rubbing shoulders in the VIP lounge with rival kingpin Tac Kin Voong, who was nicknamed "Mr Casino" after gambling $11 million in six months.

Police suspect the millions of dollars gambled is a way of laundering profits from the drug trade.

Voong was sentenced to 18 years in prison after being found guilty of methamphetamine charges arising from Operation Ice Age.

SkyCity says criminal or undesirable behaviour is not tolerated at the casino, and surveillance footage and criminal intelligence are shared with the police and the Department of Internal Affairs.

- Additional reporting: and Edward Gay of APNZ