The offer seemed too good to be true.
“Okay, awesome, and we’re sure this is legal, right?” travel-loving Toronto city employee Priya Mohan asked an acquaintance who had just days before Christmas last year messaged her with a proposition: bring a mystery suitcase to New Zealand for 10,000 Canadian dollars.
The Canadian citizen sought assurance again on March 24 this year, two days before she would arrive in New Zealand claiming falsely to be here for the Spirit Festival in West Auckland.
“Just confirming nothing illegal in the bag, right? Just need the assurance,” she wrote to “Miquel R” on encrypted messaging app Signal.
“Yes, as always. No problem,” the handler responded. “I was wondering when you were going to ask ahah. Every time I’m used to you asking at least once.”
But he was quite clearly lying.
And Mohan should have known better, a Manukau District Court judge told her last week as the 23-year-old was handed a six-year prison sentence for arriving at the border with just over 15kg of methamphetamine in a locked suitcase.
Customs, which uncovered the scheme upon flagging Mohan at Auckland International Airport, estimated the stash would have been worth about $4.55 million had the drugs reached the streets.
“If I had known, I wouldn’t have done this,” Mohan told a pre-sentence report writer after admitting she was a drug mule but maintaining that she had been duped into the role.
Judge Ngaroma Tahana was not sympathetic to her claimed naivety.
“You must have known something was not right when you were offered $10,000 and told to meet up with a stranger in the hotel car park,” she said.
“I would have thought ... [it] raises some pretty big red flags.”
It appears not to have been the first time Mohan ignored red flags.
Messages extracted from her phone show she flew to Ireland with two pieces of mystery luggage in December.
“And for sure I’m taking arts frames and what not to Dublin, right?” she asked handler Miquel R, whose identity remains unknown. “I’m just not trynna get bagged for anything illegal. Can’t put my freedom at risk like that. Hope you understand.”
She followed up: “So just in case I’m asked at the airport what am I carrying in the suitcases what do I say?”
On December 11, Mohan voiced her suspicions again.
“A lady on the news got caught for transporting drugs from Canada to Switzerland this is why I keep asking for the reassurance to make sure that it is art and not illegal substances in the bag,” she wrote.
Two days later, she added: “Why do you guys hire people to take these luggages instead of you guys taking them? Just a curiosity that’s all.”
Miquel R eventually answered the questions, albeit somewhat tersely.
“Hello, my partners are very busy dealing with people going and coming back so we’re trying to get everything sorted for you and accommodate but to be answering questions throughout the day that doesnt pertain to the trip becomes a little too much,” he wrote.
“Just as before, this is not your first time going with us. Nothing has changed. Everything is still the same. To answer this question, we do take them. However we only do it 3 times a year each. But there is only so much of us. Hiring people saves us money. And makes everybody money.”
The handler then instructed Mohan on what to tell authorities when she arrived in Ireland - that she was there for sightseeing - and not to declare anything.
It appears to have worked, and the New Zealand offer came just days later.
In preparation for that trip, Mohan was advised to tell Customs she had flown to New Zealand to see reggae artist Sam Garret perform at the festival and to do a little sightseeing.
“On the declaration form it ask if I know what’s in my baggage,” Mohan wrote after arriving. “If they do [ask] what do I say? I checked off yes.”
Miquel R responded: “Yes you do. Your clothes and bags, same answers as always. Just message once outside the airport. Our guy is at the hotel.”
But she didn’t ever get to the hotel.
During the search by Customs, she came clean that the bag wasn’t hers, court documents state. During a subsequent interview, she explained that she had taken an Uber to Toronto’s Adams Park, where a man in a ski mask put the luggage in the boot of the vehicle, then travelled straight to the airport for the flight.
She had met Miquel a year earlier at a party and did not know the identity of the person she was supposed to meet in New Zealand, she said.
During last week’s hearing, defence lawyer Shane Tait pointed out that the vacuum-packed drugs were only “primitively disguised” in the suitcase, suggesting his client didn’t know she was risking her freedom.
But he acknowledged his client suffered “naivety, stupidity and the old blind-eye syndrome”. He suggested she could be characterised as a “reckless courier”, having ought to have known better even if she didn’t.
At the time, she had been having a hard time with her mother and was “motivated to make a quick buck” so she could move out of the family home, the judge was told. She had no prior criminal record, in Canada or New Zealand, Tait noted.
Crown prosecutor Mafi Taumoepeau asked the judge to consider a 14-year starting point, pointing out that the drug smuggling operation appeared to be significant even if Mohan wasn’t a major player in the syndicate.
The defence argued 14 years would be “manifestly excessive” for the circumstances. While Tait sought a starting point of 10-and-a-half years, he wouldn’t be in a position to complain, he said, if the judge opted for a compromise of 12 years.
The judge concurred, allowing the compromise starting point before factoring 50% in combined reductions for her quick guilty plea, previous good character, youth, background and the extra difficulty of being a foreign national in a New Zealand prison with no local support network.
Judge Tahana acknowledged that Mohan reported an upbringing marred by violence and the involvement of Canada’s version of Oranga Tamariki. The judge said she accepted that the defendant’s role was “unsophisticated and under the direction of others”.
“Nonetheless, you assisted ...” she said, reiterating that she did not accept Mohan’s claimed ignorance about the drugs.
“... His response that you were to say it was your clothing in the suitcase demonstrates to me that you were prepared to be dishonest.”
Mohan wept as the sentence was imposed. But she didn’t appear to have genuine remorse and so wouldn’t receive an additional discount for that, the judge said.
“There was no sincere acknowledgement of the harm methamphetamine causes the community,” she explained, describing Mohan’s apology letter instead as self-serving.
“You appear to focus more on the unfortunate and regrettable position you now find yourself in.”
Craig Kapitan is an Auckland-based journalist covering courts and justice. He joined the Herald in 2021 and has reported on courts since 2002 in three newsrooms in the US and New Zealand.
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