KAREL SROUBEK’S
LINKS TO ‘BREAKING BAD’ SCIENTIST AND THE FONTERRA 1080 BLACKMAILER
Just days after being found guilty of passport fraud, Karel Sroubek — better known as Jan Antolik at the time — was back in the Auckland District Court. The man now at the centre of a New Zealand deportation row was caught up in Operation Ark; a covert police investigation in 2011 which targeted the widespread manufacture and distribution of millions of Ecstasy analogues.
Those behind the designer drugs claimed they were “legal highs”.
A jury disagreed and the Supreme Court eventually upheld their decision that the chemical structure of the pills was “substantially similar” to banned drugs, and therefore illegal. Antolik, as he was known in 2011, was a New Zealand representative kickboxer and an aspiring businessman. He was a minor player in Operation Ark; charged with manufacturing a few hundred pills and evidence he ordered 10,000 more.
Antolik argued the pills were training supplements, but in 2014 he was convicted in a judge-alone trial of making a Class-C drug and sentenced to home detention. The conviction was seized on by Immigration, as Antolik had been discharged without conviction on the passport and immigration fraud — despite the jury’s guilty verdicts. But the Operation Ark conviction was overturned on a technicality by the Court of Appeal.
Instead, the Court of Appeal said the charge of manufacturing a ClassC drug should be replaced with possession of a Class-C drug for supply. A new trial was ordered but never went ahead, as he traded Ecstasy analogues for the real deal.
He was arrested in 2014 and charged with importing MDMA, a Class-B drug, then convicted at trial in 2016. He’s now serving a prison sentence of four years and nine months and was declined parole in September.
So the Crown decided against pursuing the Operation Ark prosecution, because even if he was convicted on the amended charge, Antolik would not spend any more time in prison.
While he was a minor player in Operation Ark, Antolik was linked to two of the more colourful characters.
The evidence showed Antolik was working with Dr Andy Lavrent and Jeremy Kerr in October and November 2011 — around the time of his passport trial.
Lavrent was a bio-chemist who, like the lead character in the Breaking
Bad television show, gave scientific advice to the Operation Ark ringleaders on the merits of various compounds.
Parcels of white powders — labelled as “corrosion inhibitor” and later as “taurine” — were sent from China to Lavrent’s lab.
Lavrent then supplied the powders to pill pressers, such as Jeremy Hamish Kerr, who fulfilled the orders for customers. Antolik was one of those customers, according to the Crown case.
Lavrent and Kerr talked about someone called “our friend” or “our friend Mr Y”, whom the Crown alleged was Jan Antolik.
Antolik never disputed Lavrent and Kerr were dealing in illegal drugs, just that he was ordering legal training supplements from them.
Nearly $900,000 cash was found in Lavrent’s Remuera house and he is currently serving a prison sentence of nine years and eight months.
Kerr, who was pressing the pills in his pest-control poison factory in east Auckland, eventually pleaded guilty to possession of a Class-C drug for supply and selling a Class-C drug.
He was sentenced to 15 months in prison, on top of the eight-and-a-half years he received for blackmailing Fonterra. Kerr was unmasked as the poison pen behind anonymous letters threatening to spike infant formula with 1080.
The threat triggered national security protocols, frightened parents, threatened New Zealand’s relationship with trading partner China and cost the country millions of dollars; nearly $5 million for the police investigation alone.
Detectives in Operation Concord spent months whittling down a list of 2600 suspects to just one.
When he was finally interviewed by police in 2015, Kerr was shown a photograph taken inside his factory in which a container labelled 1080 was visible.
Kerr: “God, where on Earth did you get that? Amazing . . . well there you go, there’s the sample . . . ” The photo had been taken during the Operation Ark raids, four years earlier.