The jewellery dealer, the cop and the missing gold
An undercover police sting trapped a second-hand gold dealer who melted down stolen jewellery and sold it. He served his time, now his home and assets are being seized, reports David Fisher.
It ’s a funny place to weigh your gold, but for Rob Burgess the second-hand business has always had its oddities.
So he sat in his car in the parking lot outside a West Auckland hardware stone, with wife Llannys, and waited.
Soon enough, a familiar face emerged. The undercover police officer would be called “Billy” in the court cases.
Waved into the car, Billy handed over gold jewellery. There was a 62g bangle and two gold earrings, all nine carat quality.
Rob Burgess weighed the gold on his scales as his wife got the cash out. A few bills went to Billy for the earrings but the sheaf of stapled $100 bills went to her husband.
He checked the figures on the scales and handed six $100 bills to Billy.
Billy: “You won’t put this in your shop on display, will you?”
Rob Burgess: “F*** no, Billy, we’re not that stupid. This will go straight into the melting pot.”
Llannys Burgess: “We wouldn’t do that to you.”
Rob Burgess: “It all goes into the melt, Billy, we all got to make a buck.”
That’s how the police say the Burgesses operated, and that’s what the courts accepted. The second-hand dealer’s own evidence was dismissed — both he and Llannys were found to be less than credible.
In one of the many court hearings that followed, Burgess was told he was an “active fence”, that the evidence showed he bought stolen jewellery and sold it.
“Many people would have been affected by the theft of the jewellery,” Burgess would be told in court. They would have lost precious items with “strong sentimental value”. As the fence, he “contributed to the loss suffered by the owners of it and facilitated the criminal activities of the thieves”.
Burgess said he expected a 12-month home detention sentence. He was planning on serving his time on the north-west Auckland lifestyle block he and his wife bought after years of running Rob’s Traders in Avondale.
Instead, he was sent away for three years. And the lifestyle block?
Well, even though he was convicted on charges worth $250,000, the police took a second court case after that, which looks likely to strip Burgess of almost every asset he and his wife have.
“If I ’d known that I wouldn’t have pleaded guilty to nothing. I lose my whole life.
“The Crown are not giving me one f***ing cent. I tell you, it leaves you in the darklands.
“I thought once I’d been to jail that would be it. They come at you twice. I ’ve worked my whole life and I ’ve got nothing to show for it.”
The plight of Rob Burgess can be traced back to another son of West Auckland. Peter “Pedro” Cleven was put on trial in 2002, accused of making his fortune selling drugs over the course of 12 years.
He had what he called a “movie star” lifestyle — a mansion in Titirangi, fast cars and motorcycles and plenty of cash.
But whereas police called him a drug dealer, Cleven called himself a businessman. When the police talked about methamphetamine, Cleven talked goat breeding — he claimed his money came from hard work and clever investments, including animal husbandry.
The Crown failed to convince the court and Cleven walked free.
Police were disappointed with the outcome and a proposal for a new way of dealing with the money of suspected criminals was developed.
By 2009, the new way was law — those suspected of having accrued assets outside the law could be forced to prove they were earned lawfully.
If they could not, the assets would go. The Crown could use the courts to legally confiscate anything that couldn’t be verified as 100 per cent lawful.
Rob Burgess says he never had a bank account.
“I ’m not interested a bank account. There’s no law against paying cash.”
He was more than a little stumped when police asked him to prove how he’d bought the house and paid for the renovations and where the Corvette came from.
He claims none of it was bought with tainted funds. In fact, he claims there were no tainted funds despite his guilty plea — a position he has failed to have accepted in court at every opportunity since his arrest in 2010. There were initially nine charges, folded into a single representative charge related to jewellery worth $250,000. Police talked about there being much more at stake, but Judge Geoff Rea made it clear to the court Burgess could be sentenced only on the charge to which he had pleaded. That meant the other evidence, which put the value of melted-down gold at $1.6m, had no relevance in the criminal proceedings. What Burgess didn’t expect was the value that evidence would have to police who were eager the “fence” wouldn’t profit from his crimes. Burgess said he was starting to serve his time when he was struck by the full impact of the Criminal Proceeds (Recovery) Act. Instead of strongly denying any criminality, which he continues to do, Burgess found to keep his wealth, he had to provide evidence of how he had earned it. His lawyer Shane Kilian says there is a reverse burden of proof. It shifts from the Crown having to prove the accused is guilty to the accused having to prove his cash and other assets are his.
For Burgess, the process was massively dispiriting. He never used bank accounts, always paid cash and never had enough records to satisfy a judge he was telling the truth.
The lifestyle property was bought in 2006. Two other homes were built on it for the Burgess’ children. He would have it that they paid shares on the mortgage. The court said the paperwork didn’t support the claim.
The police case went further. He didn’t just lose the money used to pay for the house in 2006 but would also lose any value it had gained since then.
Burgess reckoned the house was worth $3m-$4m, which will go to the Government, aside from a few hundred thousand his wife has clawed back. The court order targeting assets includes not only the value of the asset when it was bought but any profit made on it.
It also includes the hours of work Burgess has put into improving the property by planting hundreds of trees, digging a large pond and adding two dwellings.
Gone. Just like the tractor, the Corvette, the $20,000 in cash found in the safe.
“They’re just taking everything from you and leave you with nothing.
"The New Zealand public need to
kknow all of this. It ’s going on all the time.
“I was never involved in drugdrugs and that’s what the legislationislation was meant to be for. Now they use it for everything.”
At one stage, perhaps a little optimistically, Burgess went to his local MP John Key for help.
“They didn’t want to know,” he said. “It ’s really affected us mentally. It just goes on and on. It never stops. The stress has been horrendous.”
Burgess has not backed down on his denials, calling the police case “completely, utterly, unbelievably unfair”.
“I’m guilty of not writing it in the book. It was never tainted money. I don’t have a bank account. I do everything manually.”
Burgess, who says his only other conviction is for growing cannabis from 1977, is at a loss. The moment the house is sold, he and his family have 42 days to leave.
“I don’t know what I ’m going to do. I won’t even be able to afford to rent a place. Why was I put in prison? Wasn’t that my punishment?”
In seven years since the law came in, police have seized 110 homes worth $34.5m, cash and bank deposits worth $27m, four farms or orchards worth $7.6m, 234 cars and 97 motorcycles worth $5.6m, eight commercial businesses worth $4. 3m and a dozen lifestyle blocks valued at $3.9m.
The money is put back into law enforcement. Now police have permission to go even harder.
This week police minister Paula Bennett told the Herald on Sunday officers had been on track to seize $230m worth of tainted assets over the next four years but have now been asked to get $400m.
“We want to send a strong message to criminals that we won’t tolerate them profiting by victimising other people, whether that’s by selling drugs, burglary or theft.”
Asset recovery boss Detective Senior Sergeant Craig Hamilton said police had “strengthened our ability to target and recover the proceeds of crime”.
“We know that criminals exploit a wide range of New Zealanders through drugs and other activities to benefit financially.” Seizing the money they make is “disrupting their ability to cause further harm in our communities”.
Burgess’ lawyer Kilian says the law is “one of the most draconian pieces of legislation in New Zealand”.
“The legal test therefore requires people to keep the same standard of accounting records for their personal affairs as you would their businesses.”
And what chance of that? “Almost impossible”, reckons Kilian. “Thinking of your own personal affairs, how many documents do you keep for every asset that you personally own?”