Our busiest burglar goes back to prison
Allan Adams is well spoken and polite and now has 402 convictions for burglary, making him New Zealand’s most prolific burglar.
Adams, 46, has a staggering total of 444 convictions – some for dishonesty and arson – but the vast majority for breaking into businesses.
On Tuesday Wellington District Court judge Jan Kelly jailed him for six years for the latest set, which took place around Wellington and the Hutt Valley in 2015.
Dressed in grey prison sweats, he calmly thanked the judge for her fairness as she sent him back to the place he has spent about 20 years of his life.
Adams had been found guilty of seven charges of burglary, and pleaded guilty to five more, along with possession of cannabis, cannabis and methamphetamine utensils, and theft of petrol.
The judge also imposed a minimum non-parole period of half the sentence.
Adams has a modus operandi well known to police. He carries a screwdriver or crowbar, which he used to jemmy open doors or windows in the dead of night.
He crouches or crawls to avoid cameras, wears a hooded jacket to shield his face and looks for easy pickings: tills to crack open, petty cash and sometimes donation boxes.
He is in and out quickly and moving on, usually to the business next door.
This time he targeted mainly cafes and takeaway stores, including hitting five in one night.
He was later found to have broken into the Teaspoon coffee house in Upper Hutt after blood left at the scene was matched to his DNA.
The judge called his history of offending extraordinary. A previous sentencing judge called it remarkable.
And it started when Adams was 13. He had been put into a child welfare home in Hawke’s Bay in 1984 after the Department of Social Welfare was granted custody. He had set fire to a former school and been put into care.
He ran away after being sexually abused at the home and committed his first burglary.
He admitted some of it was survival, but it gave him a sense of power, helping to reduce his stress and anxiety.
It continued to do so for the next 30 years.
A lawyer who acted for him in 2012 said he appeared to be addicted the burglary, but Adams does not see it the same way.
It was about the feeling of power he got doing it.
He has only recently been diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder and is now getting counselling after having his case accepted by ACC.
He says it is helping him move on.
Adams claimed the abuse through ACC and in 2011 he was paid $27,000 in compensation and received an apology from the chief executive of Ministry of Social Development for his treatment in care.
He also laid complaints with the police that were investigated, but nothing has come of it. It is something he still feels strongly about and it has impacted his whole life.
‘‘It’s all good and well to punish me for what I’ve done, I can accept this,’’ Adams told the judge.
‘‘But what I’m struggling with, however, is the fact that the ‘person’ who damaged me, destroyed me, and whose actions were therefore the catalyst for the direction that my life has taken, will not, as things currently stand, do a single day in prison.’’
Adams has burgled businesses all over the North Island.
After his last release from prison he got a job but then lost it in early 2015 after turning to methamphetamine.
At a Parole Board monitoring hearing in December 2015 they said he hadn’t offended for five months, the longest time he had gone without committing a burglary. They commended him and said they did not need to see him again.
Four months later he was committing burglaries.