KEY POINTS:
Two men who smuggled in enough P to provide a hit for every single person in Auckland have been sentenced to life imprisonment, in a legal
first.
Life sentences have never been imposed for P, the street name for "pure" methamphetamine, but the judge said the $135 million drugs bust was by far the biggest this country had seen.
Yet that bust represented only a fraction of the lethal drugs that the
men had brought into the country in 2005 and 2006 - the rest is presumed to have made it on to the streets.
The Mr Big of the operation - a shady figure known only as "Raymond" -
remains at large. The judge said he ran the operation from China.
Operation Major, a joint police-customs investigation, found 96kg of
methamphetamine hidden in plastic blocks at the bottom of cans of green
paint. Another 154kg of pseudoephedrine was concealed in bags of cement
plaster shipped from China.
On breaking down the doors of a Kohimarama Rd house that was being used
to distribute the drugs to gangs, police also found a machine-gun, a pistol, $50,000 cash and sophisticated weights and scales.
"The distribution into the community of this amount of methamphetamine would inevitably have caused tremendous damage," Justice Patricia
Courtney told the High Court in Auckland. "It would also have seen
millions of dollars flow out of the country without tax paid on it into the hands of foreign drug dealers."
The court found that the men had brought in five previous shipments, three of which contained commercial quantities of methamphetamine, one of pseudoephedrine and one that may have been a dummy run.
One of the earlier methamphetamine shipments (also in the bottom of paint cans) was x-rayed and searched by Customs but the officers did
not find the drugs, and let it through.
It is only with the benefit of hindsight that police and Customs investigators realised that those shipments also contained drugs.
Wei Feng Pan, 38, and Ming Chin Chen, 48, were each found to have
arranged shipments from legitimate companies in China, then arrived in New Zealand to receive the consignments at front companies they had set up here. Between them, they transferred more than $500,000 to Chinese bank accounts, believed to be in payment for the drugs. They were both sentenced to life imprisonment.
Li Fan, 31, who armed himself to sell the drug from the Kohimarama property, was sentenced to 19 years in prison with a minimum non-parole period of 9 years. And Guo Wei Deng, 46, who with Fan picked up the shipment from a car in St Lukes, was sentenced to 17 years of which he must serve at least 8.
A fifth accomplice, Kai Lok (Billy) Fung, a theology graduate who had trained to become a Presbyterian minister, pleaded guilty in 2006 to his role in the drug smuggling ring.
He was sentenced to a 15-year jail term with a minimum non-parole period of 7 years. Two other men, Yong Lei Zhang and Kin Kwok Leung, were
found not guilty.
In sentencing last week, Justice Courtney said a "veritable flood" of
methamphetamine made its way across New Zealand borders each year.
"Its users quickly become addicted and the drug has a devastating effect on the personality and function of almost all who use it," she said.
"There have been cases in which methamphetamine use has been directly implicated in instances of murder, lending truth to the Court of Appeal's observation about the activities of major drug dealers being equated with murder because they pose just as serious a threat to
society."
Antonie Dixon, the samurai sword murderer, and Steven Williams, who
killed his 6-year-old step-daughter Coral-Ellen Burrows, were both on P at the time.
