A Vietnamese overstayer who vanished for several years after he was caught running cannabis “grow houses” out of two neighbouring South Auckland rental homes has finally been sentenced, eight years after the initial raid.
Authorities lost track of Dinh Vuong, 41, when he didn’t show up for sentencing in October 2018.
But they caught up with him again in July 2022, inside a Mt Eden home that was being raided after another long-running undercover investigation into cannabis cultivation and money laundering.
This time, Vuong was found in possession of nearly 5kg of cannabis that had been packaged for supply in large resealable bags.
His explanation, that they were the very same plants that police sloppily left behind after the 2018 raid, defied belief, Crown prosecutor Arahi von Sturmer-Karanui argued last week as Vuong appeared in Auckland District Court for sentencing on both charges.
Judge Belinda Sellars agreed.
“You state that you had kept that for your private use,” the judge noted. “I do not accept that. I consider it self-serving and lacks credibility.”
Because of the claim, an earlier sentencing date for Vuong had been postponed so that prosecutors could obtain an affidavit from police confirming that all of the cannabis discovered in the 2018 raid had been removed from the address and destroyed.
“It is simply not credible,” the judge added of Vuong’s claim.
Vuong and his partner, co-defendant Thi Thai Van, were living together in April 2018 when police raided their Paerata Rd home in Pukekohe. They had been living in the lounge while the rest of the three-bedroom house served another purpose, court documents state.
Police found 62 plants in the bedrooms. They found 85 more plants at a neighbouring unoccupied four-bedroom home also rented by Vuong.
Police also recorded finding heat lamps, ducting, filters, light timers and irrigation systems to aid the indoor growing process. Tarpaulins covered the windows, stapled down with plywood. The electricity for both homes had been diverted from another address.
“The defendant Vuong admitted to growing the cannabis at both addresses but said that the cannabis was for personal use,” the agreed summary of facts for his 2018 case states.
The pair caught authorities’ attention again after the launch in December 2021 of Operation Bush, focusing on money laundering by cannabis-cultivating organised crime groups.
Their new home in Mt Eden was raided eight months into the investigation, resulting in the discovery of 11 pounds (almost 5kg) of cannabis.
“Evidence of supply and money laundering was also located, including cash located in a handbag belonging to Ms Van and over 500 cash deposit receipts located in the same handbag belonging to Ms Van, the bedroom occupied by Ms Van, the kitchen and lounge,” court documents state.
“A further 56 used large-format resealable bags were also located at the address containing cannabis residue.”
Van, 57, was set to be sentenced in a separate hearing this week, but it was postponed to April.
Vuong faced up to seven years’ imprisonment for the 2018 charge of cultivating cannabis, and up to eight years for the 2021 charge of possessing cannabis for supply.
Defence lawyer Ron Mansfield, KC, argued that his client should be sentenced as if it were one continuing offence, due to Vuong’s claim that it was the same cannabis for which he was twice caught.
“He went back to the property [in 2018] and there were quite a lot of cannabis remains, and he took them with him,” Mansfield said of his client. “They [police] hardly sweep it clean.”
The judge was unconvinced, to which Mansfield replied: “I can only tell you what he says.”
But Mansfield successfully argued that Vuong should get a significant reduction in sentence for the four months he had already spent in custody, and the more than three years on electronically monitored bail since his second arrest. He spent more than a year of that under 24-hour house arrest.
“He’s effectively served a sentence, if not more than a sentence,” Mansfield said. “A remand in custody would serve no point and undermine the steps he’s taken to get away from this sort of offending.”
He described the Pukehohe operation as “just another cannabis grow”, albeit relatively large.
“He was hardly a leader or boss. He was a worker.”
The judge agreed there was no evidence that Vuong set up the growing operation discovered in 2018. But it was clear, she said, that it had a “degree of sophistication” and was a commercial operation.
The potential yield of that operation was between $41,000 and $123,000, Judge Sellars noted.
It was “clear” that the Mt Eden property was also part of a commercial operation.
She agreed with the Crown’s suggested starting point of four years for both charges. She then allowed a 15% reduction for Vuong’s guilty pleas, explaining that it might have been higher had Vuong not fled after pleading guilty the first time, and had he not waited until a week before trial to admit his guilt on the second charge.
She allowed one more discount of 5% to account for Vuong’s personal circumstances. He told authorities he became involved in the offending “through a lack of options and financial necessity”, she noted.
Those discounts alone would not have resulted in a sentence of under two years, at which point a judge can consider an alternative non-custodial outcome.
But Judge Sellars said she also had to account for the “extraordinarily long amount of time” that Vuong was on electronically monitored bail. When doing so, she noted, it brought his sentence below the two-year threshold.
She ordered two concurrent sentences of six months’ home detention.
With the unusually long court process now finished, Vuong is likely to face deportation.
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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