KEY POINTS:
A 23-year-old female student is in custody facing charges of importing and supplying pseudoephedrine with a street value of $22 million, in one of the country's largest-ever drug busts.
Police allege the woman imported 80kg of the class C drug, used to make P, in a single shipment
from China.
It was intercepted by NZ Customs and the woman was arrested on Wednesday. She was also charged with money laundering, after allegedly transferring $3.5 million back to China.
A look around the tiny flat she had rented for two years suggested the woman - who struggled for rent until a couple of months ago - had splurged plenty of cash on herself.
Landlord Wayne Isaako said police spent about two hours on Wednesday searching the room, which had a ladder up to a loft where she slept.
"Stupid girl," Isaako said. "I know she came from a not-so-wealthy family. I know she was struggling. All of a sudden everything changed - first it was clothes ... She bought a brand new car ... She's got a bloody money machine!"
When the Herald on Sunday visited yesterday, the money counter was on the floor beside her bed.
The unwashed coffee cup on the table was stamped with Louis Vuitton; LV loafers were stacked nearby on a cheap plywood bookcase, beside sandals in Dior and Dolce & Gabbana drawstring bags.
Christmas decorations and stickers were still stuck up all over the flat.
Eight pairs of new boots were lined up near the door, under three hooks draped with necklaces and feathers.
Perfumes - Gucci, Bulgari, Yves Saint Laurent - were stacked up near her bed, some still in their boxes.
A $500 gold heart-shaped pendant from Tiffany was on a table with pictures of the woman and her boyfriend, who Isaako said was back in China after being busted on similar drugs charges two years ago.
Isaako said that over the past few weeks three Asian men in their 20s had visited the woman at all hours of the night, staying only 10 or 15 minutes each time.
He had also noticed that she had started paying her rent in advance, and buying $100 phone cards instead of her usual $20.
Detective Sergeant John Sowter, head of the Auckland drug squad, said the 80kg haul was close to a New Zealand record. Bill Perry, manager of drug investigations for Customs, could recall only one interception to top it - a 150kg load, also shipped in from China, discovered last May.
"[The 80kg haul] is extremely significant in the scheme of border interceptions, definitely," Perry said.
The Chinese woman was granted interim name suppression in the Auckland District Court on Thursday.
Standing in the dock, she looked on the verge of tears, and made no plea to the charges. Bail was opposed by police and she was remanded in custody until next month.
Sowter said the woman had been in the country for about five years, lived alone in a Sandringham flat and was a student at an English language school in Auckland.
Police alleged that she supplied the pseudoephedrine to "a person or persons unknown" and it is understood she had been under surveillance since early May.
The tiny pink granules would have made up to 22kg of pure methamphetamine, which if sold by the gram would have been worth $22 million, Sowter said.
The granules came from capsules called Contac NT, which were banned in New Zealand but sold as an over-the-counter, legal drug in China.
"They almost look like hundreds and thousands," Sowter said.
Perry said the granules - as well as being freely available in China - provided much higher yields of methamphetamine than New Zealand cold and flu medications.
Those attractive factors meant that interceptions of methamphetamine and its precursors most often originated from China.
As soon as Customs started clamping down on one smuggling method, importers would switch to another, Perry said. He would not say how the 80kg haul was concealed but said he had found pseudoephedrine hidden in "all sorts of bits and pieces".
"Even food products - tea, all sorts of things like that. Engineering equipment, clothing, you name it basically. If there's a cavity it is being used to import."
Customs statistics measured precursors in tablets, rather than grams.
This year, figures until March showed Customs was busting at least one shipment of pseudoephedrine every day, on average - 76 interceptions had netted 310,000 tablets.
Just one batch of P, weighing about 1kg, had been found.
In 2006, 2.3 million pseudoephedrine tablets were seized in 254 swoops - enough to make up to 19kg of P. A further 111kg of P were intercepted on 17 different occasions.
Those figures included the record-breaking bust in May, where $115 million worth of drugs - 95kg of P and 150kg of pseudoephedrine - were found in two shipments of containers from China.
Six people were charged in connection with that bust and the case was still before the courts, Sowter said.
Neither he nor Perry could provide any more details of that bust.
Customs last year estimated it was able to intercept just 10 per cent of all illegal drugs smuggled into NZ.
