Golden Triangle superlabs are manufacturing methamphetamine at record rates and the devastating drug is increasingly coming to New Zealand through new trafficking routes and methods. Kurt Bayer reports on the new ways global organised crime is getting it here.
When they swooped, officers clocked the teabags straight away. The brand was a trademark, a calling card often associated with drugs coming straight out of the Golden Triangle. They knew the colourful boxes wouldn't only contain aromatic leaves for a refreshing cuppa, but nor did they realise they had just made New Zealand's biggest ever drug bust: 613kg of methamphetamine, worth around $245 million hustled on the streets.
It was "a classic Golden Triangle" consignment, according to one crime-fighting source, air-freighted into Auckland International Airport, arriving amidst this Herald on Sunday investigation into how ruthless Asian gang syndicates are flooding New Zealand with meth at record levels through new routes and methods.
While Covid has slowed the human drug mule trade, and created a backlog of global shipping containers, Golden Triangle meth cartels have changed up their tactics, according to law enforcement agencies, sources, and official documents obtained during the Herald on Sunday's probe.
Over the last two to three years, a disturbing trend has emerged of organised crime groups paying off undercover insiders to infiltrate legitimate airport ranks, catching the drug shipments which have been organised by fixers that Kiwi gangs are now inserting to live in key foreign export hubs in Southeast Asia.
Customs NZ has seized over 1360kg of methamphetamine in more than 220 seizures sent from within the Golden Triangle and wider Southeast Asia region over the last five years, according to latest data.
Trying to keep up with the shifting methods of importation, Customs NZ has posted full-time agents in the region, the Herald on Sunday can reveal, with one in Kuala Lumpur, and another based in Thailand who is also spending increasing periods across the border in Laos.
Last month's bust, which saw some of the six people arrested across Auckland having alleged links with the Comancheros MC gang, followed a remarkable sting in Kuala Lumpur in October where 200kgs of meth, worth around NZ$80m, was uncovered.
Working on a tip-off, officers raided a Malaysia Airlines cargo warehouse and found five crates, purporting to contain thousands of Guanyin Wang brand tea bags – one of Golden Triangle syndicate's trademarks - stuffed with meth.
Four men, including a worker at the Malaysia Airlines Cargo Centre, were arrested and narcotics chiefs say they have since identified the cartel boss and are "actively pursuing him".
The drugs were bound for Down Under but NZ Police and their Customs counterparts, in joint Operation Selena, sprung to arrest a group of baggage handlers – again at Auckland's airport. Another 15 people were arrested, with the drugs this time allegedly having ties to the King Cobras, one of the oldest patched gangs in New Zealand.
It comes after a string of raids, involving many different high-profile New Zealand criminal gangs, with apparent links to airports and ports.
A string of raids
During New Zealand's first nationwide Covid lockdown, a crew of Air New Zealand baggage handlers were arrested for allegedly helping a rap musician avoid border security checks and smuggle $8m of meth into the country.
And in July 2019, a shipping container disappeared from the wharves of the Ports of Auckland before Customs could check it.
The container purportedly held 24 air compressors from Thailand and Customs wanted to take a closer look at the contents, as the company which imported the freight was set up by a member of the Mongols motorcycle gang recently deported from Australia.
On-the-ground Customs agents are trying to get inside the working of the big Golden Triangle gang syndicates pushing meth into New Zealand, and aiming for kingpins like Tse Chi Lop, a Chinese-born Canadian national known as "Asia's El Chapo" who was believed to have been behind a crime group known as The Company.
Even though Lop is currently inside a Dutch prison awaiting extradition to Australia for allegedly trafficking tea-bag meth to Australia, New Zealand, and across the Asia-Pacific, The Company is operating business as usual.
The international organisation, comprising members of five different triads - the fearsome 14K, Bamboo Union, Sun Yee On, Wo Shing Wo and Big Circle Boys, with links to Japan's Yakuza mafia, Thai organised crime, and Australasian bikie gangs – has long been suspected of drug shipments to New Zealand.
In 2019, when nearly half a ton of meth, with a street value of about $235m, was stopped at New Zealand's border, it had all of its hallmarks. Operation Manta uncovered the massive stash inside a shipment of electric motors, sent from Thailand.
Canadian nationals Harpreet Lidder and The-Hoang Thai took the brunt of the fall. It was found that they'd come to New Zealand with the sole intention of importing the drugs – what drug agents call being "shore parties" - setting up in an Auckland CBD apartment.
Lidder rented a nondescript storage unit where he later took the motors. He deposited $45,000 in cash into his bank account. When he was jailed for more than nine years for his role, prosecutors said that while he was not the head of the snake, he was by no means its tail either.
And when MMA fighter, black-belt, and celebrity bodyguard Anthony Netzler was fingered as the mastermind behind a 500kg meth shipment, with a police raid finding rolls of cash in his Mount Maunganui home, it was also revealed he'd been in Bangkok hustling the deal.
Super facilitators
Kiwi gangs are strategically placing their own people on the ground in Thailand and other Southeast Asian trafficking centres. Some of the major Australian gangs, like Comancheros, Hells Angels, and Bandidos have either established chapters in the region or else wield a hefty presence. Using underbelly links and shady face-to-face meetings, encrypted apps, and burner phones, the deals are made and trafficking rigged.
"They're not just here to have fun in the sun," one Asian-based crime-fighting source said.
"This is where they make their connections and this is where they do their business deals."
Intelligence reports handed to NZ Police tell of transnational drug syndicates using "super-facilitators" to foster a successful methamphetamine supply chain.
"A super-facilitator has links to a global network of manufacturers and supply and distribution chains to successfully import methamphetamine to New Zealand. The super-facilitator is usually based offshore and is never in direct contact with the shipment," says a police report, Methamphetamine in New Zealand: What is currently known about the harm it causes, which was circulated last year.
One of the biggest alleged fixers is New Zealand national Shane Ngakuru.
The FBI believe that Ngakuru had been living on the Thai party island of Phuket and helping to smuggle meth. Ngakuru's cousin is Duax Hohepa Ngakuru, the "international commander" of the Comancheros allegedly behind some of the world's biggest drug deals and reportedly hiding in Turkey under aliases including Negotiator, Bullseye, Chuck Norris, and El Mito (The Myth).
During last year's 'sting of the century', US law enforcement officers charged Shane Ngakuru with being a key player in distributing the encrypted devices developed by the FBI which eventually brought about the downfall of 800 organised crime figures around the world.
He's now considered a high-ticket fugitive by the FBI – and New Zealand has no extradition treaty with Thailand.
There is evidence of others like Ngakuru setting up shop around the Pacific, Mexico and South America. In 2014, kickboxer Peter Leaitua was arrested in Colombia on drug trafficking charges while other links crop up every time a major shipment is busted.
"We've got them all around the world. And they are not there for a holiday," Customs NZ investigations manager Bruce Berry told the Herald on Sunday.
The rise of meth
For many years, the most methamphetamine discovered in one shipment was 96kg hidden in the bottom of green paint tins after Operation Major in 2006.
Now, 100kg or more is almost routine.
Two decades after meth took hold in New Zealand, wastewater data shows that crime-fighting efforts have failed to drastically curb its devastating popularity.
An estimated 1 per cent of the population collectively spend more than $500m a year on the drug, fuelling a lucrative criminal trade, causing extensive social harm and putting enormous strain on communities.
The latest nationwide wastewater testing results, released in November, showed Kiwis spending an estimated average of $6.9m per week on meth, MDMA and cocaine. Meth remained the most prevalent, and had even gone up, with the highest usage rates found in Northland.
New Zealand gangs typically no longer use precursors and cook their own meth in P labs. Smuggling it from overseas is now seen as being more efficient, more profitable, and results in a higher-quality product.
But while the typical price of 1kg of meth dropped from between NZ$230,000 and NZ$250,000 in 2016, to NZ$140,000 in 2019, Kiwi drug users still pay more for their fix than most places in the world.
And the drugs keep coming. Every time one method or drug-stream is cracked down on, the gangs change things up, and try another tactic. It's a continuous high-stakes game of cat-and-mouse.
"Because organised crime is quite agile and they will learn if you're targeting one particular seizure commodity or concealment, then they'll adapt and change. We try and be ahead of that as much as we can," Berry says.
Lately, there's an increased number of drug parcels coming through the post – especially originating from Malaysia, Thailand and Laos.
The packages are often less than 1kg, making it harder for authorities to check, and so frequent that 6 per cent of the time, brazen senders don't even try to hide the illicit contents.
Jeremy Douglas, Southeast Asia and the Pacific regional representative of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), calls it a "shotgun approach", spraying out many parcels in the knowledge that at least some will hit the target, making the enterprise worthwhile. If they do slip through, they're picked up by "catchers", workers for gangs, before the drugs are sold on the street.
Bangkok-based Douglas says Golden Triangle meth production is at record levels, and can see no slowdown in the near future. The borderlands area of Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar is "likely to remain primary source and threat for New Zealand", he believes. The industrial-scale factories of Myanmar's lawless, remote jungles crank out hundreds of kilos of meth every week and supply various global organised crime syndicates.
A new way to hide
Arts and crafts, paper and stationery is currently the most commonly-used concealment method, as well as officers finding stashes inside cardboard, corflute plastic, water pumps, purifiers and filters.
Last year saw a "notable increase" in meth being mailed to New Zealand from Laos. The average weight per seizure was also one of the highest, averaging 3035 grams of methamphetamine per package.
It gives officials trying to intercept illicit parcels a headache, especially with Kiwis, like consumers around the world, increasingly buying goods online, and expecting them to arrive within days. And sifting through piles of packages looking for drugs can bring delays for innocent purchases.
"Organised crime uses legitimate trade and commerce to hide," Berry says. "So the issue for us is balancing facilitation for legitimate travel and trade and bringing in the enforcement consequence. Because every time we reach into a particular stream, we add cost and time."
Customs NZ says that are working with international postal colleagues to utilise electronic mail data to increase their targeting skills but the biggest live threat to New Zealand is the rising use of trusted insiders.
The Border and Migration Five Heads of Intelligence group warned in 2020 that the inclusion of well-positioned insiders, such as port workers and airport baggage handlers, in trafficking networks by criminal business entities is an emerging threat in New Zealand. Recent arrests appear to show that has been playing out.
"It is an internationally-recognised method of operation for organised crime that is really difficult to detect and is well-polished in offshore jurisdictions," Berry says.
"The border is a really complex operating environment. It sounds simple: people turn up at the airport, get their bag, and go on the plane. [But] there are so many systems between the time you book online and the time you get out of the airport at the other end and get into a taxi that can all be subverted and that we have to keep across."
Detective Superintendent Greg Williams of the NZ Police national organised crime group says they are dealing with "illicit globalisation" which is bringing a "seriously evil" drug into "pretty much every small town in New Zealand".
A major focus of the transnational organised crime strategy is a "deep dive into the border", Williams says, while there's also been a shift towards health-based initiatives, like Te Ara Oranga, a groundbreaking $3m police-led project that partners with community and district health boards. It aims to steer meth addicts towards treatment in the health system and employment, rather than the revolving door of criminal charges in the courtroom.
But the challenges facing Customs and NZ Police are high - and something that Berry says his officers take extremely seriously.
"We use all of our skill and powers to try and stop the bad stuff coming through, in whatever form it is," he says.
And every time they see evidence that they've missed consignments – and Berry doesn't profess to get it all – they try and pick it apart and see just how it snuck through.
"These international syndicates just don't give a care for the damage their product brings here," Berry says.
"Because organised crime is all about money. Drugs have traditionally been at the top, but there's people smuggling, tobacco, child exploitation material, there's all this stuff we're looking for. And we throw everything we have at it."