JAILED DRUG DEALER’S SIGN-OFF
Judge calls Hilton’s drug ring role ‘pivotal’
“BRB in a bit” is the new message on drug trafficker Matt Hilton’s Instagram page sent out to his 13,100 follows.
They’re going to be waiting almost a decade for another post after the 33-year-old bodybuilder and social media identity was handed a large 10and-a-half year sentence for his part in one of Cairns’ biggest drug operations.
With his head in his hands shaking as Justice Jim Henry delivered the punishment in the Cairns Supreme Court yesterday, he looked a far cry from the oiled-up gym junkie who lived the high life for two years surrounded by fast cars and stunning women.
The former nightclub security officer, who met the drug syndicate’s Cairns kingpin Ryan Hill in a gym, must serve 80 per cent of the sentence before being eligible for parole.
Between 2016 and 2018 he peddled “multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars” worth of cocaine, testosterone and other substances around the city as a major customer of the syndicate, with his lawyers claiming he was also sustaining a gram-per-day habit.
The former Sydneysider, who moved to Atherton with his parents in 2006, had packages of drugs sent to him from Sydney, including some addressed as “Fitness Supplements” to his mother’s Edge Hill hairdressing salon.
He set up a business name – Tank G Industries – and met his customers at various places around town including Nando’s and the Coffee Club, encouraging them to start dealing drugs themselves.
“You played a pivotal role in bringing dangerous drugs into the Cairns community,” Justice Jim Henry said. “(You were leading a) big deal drug dealer about town wasteful lifestyle. Your trafficking was a business exercise, a calculated commercial exercise.”
Justice Henry handed down a 10-year sentence for trafficking, adding a further six months for contravening an order as he refused to give police access to his encrypted phone, which was then wiped remotely by persons unknown.
Ringleader Hill is due to be sentenced in early April and is expected to earn a record penalty for the region as he has pleaded guilty to trafficking as part of an organised crime syndicate, which adds an extra seven years to his sentence.