Border line
The flow of illegal drugs into New Zealand has escalated in recent years. For frontline Customs staff, detecting criminal importers is a game of cat and mouse.
The silver measuring bowl sits on the digital scales on a stainless-steel bench, almost overflowing with a mound of white crystals. Men in equally white boiler suits stand over it. One, face covered with a protective mask, looks closely at the bowl’s contents, clocks the weight and writes it on a label, photographs it from various angles.
The other stands ready with a clear plastic bag ready to collect the crystalline product.
It’s like a scene out of Breaking Bad. But instead of chemistry teacher-turned drug manufacturer Walter White and his errant sidekick, the men in boiler suits are working for the other side of the law.
The white powder is likely pure methamphetamine and the men poring over it are Customs officers.
Outside their lab — far from the clandestine-style set-up the meth would have been made in — a handful of other Customs officers look on.
They are nonplussed about the highly addictive and socially destructive drug in the bowl. They almost shrug it off.
Because while it looks like a big haul to an outsider, to them it’s a drop in a rapidly growing ocean of illicit drugs arriving at New Zealand’s borders.
“Five or 10 years ago it would have been like ‘wow’, but now it’s just ‘meh’ . . .” a Customs officer says.
Drug Zealand — what’s coming in, and from where
Since 2010, more than 14.5 million grams of illegal drugs have been intercepted by Customs.
That’s the equivalent of 60,484 Big Mac burgers, 29,032 blocks of butter, the weight of at least four buses or 130 of former All Blacks captain Kieran Read.
Paper clips weighs about a gram each — so imagine a pile numbering more than 14 million and you begin to get an idea of how big the issue is.
The drugs have come in by air, by sea and by mail from Kaitaia in the far north to Invercargill in the deep south.
Customs officers intercepted 3,012,574 items containing illicit or illegal drugs — such as prescription medication available outside New Zealand but not allowed here.
However the figures for 2019 are preliminary so the figures are likely higher.
“Meth has been at the top for a while,” Customs northern ports manager Mark O’Toole told the Herald.
“With drugs it’s peaks and troughs, but it’s pretty consistently meth.
“Five or so years ago it was a lot less than today — we’ve gone from small shipments to larger, multi-kilo shipments.
“More recently meth concealments are becoming more sophisticated; in the past they didn’t put a lot of effort into things, into trying to conceal their drugs crossing the border.
“But as they get smarter, we get smarter in what we’re looking for and how we’re finding things.”
The biggest seizure of meth at the border was recorded in September when 469kg of the ready-to-sell product was found hidden in a shipment of electric motors.
The record haul came after a joint investigation by Customs and police — such operations have increased markedly in the modern war against drugs — that detonated after they discovered a shipping container holding 60 electric motors each hiding an average of around 8kg of meth and a total estimated street value of $235 million.
Additionally, authorities reckon the vile substance would have caused $582 million worth of social harm within the community.
O’Toole said the electric motors — now sitting in a row in a Customs seizures area awaiting their potential day in court if the alleged importers go to trial — were among a handful of devious concealments of late.
When you ask O’Toole what the biggest find of his career is, the most unusual, the most complex concealment, he shakes his head.
He can’t answer it, he’s seen so much during his time with Customs that “it all blurs together“.
“Nothing is unusual anymore,” he laughs.
“People will use absolutely everything, try absolutely everything to bring drugs in.
“That’s why we don’t just use one tool or technology, we have multiple resources and as concealments change, so does that technology.”
Fentanyl poses a real risk.
Jamie Bamford, Customs
New Zealand’s most popular drugs
What he does know is that what would have made his eyes bulge five years ago — a few kilos of meth perhaps or a million bucks worth of blow — wouldn’t even make him flinch now.
The volumes coming in now are huge, and growing.
“Take MDMA for example,” O’Toole posed. “It spiked in January (2019) and we thought it was because of the summer festivals — but it kept going.”
The top portion of the list also include psychoactives, cocaine, steroids, cannabis — leaf and seeds — synthetics and amphetamines.
Lower down the list morphine, mephedrone, opium and heroin make an appearance.
And far less common is LSD, date rape drug rohypnol, painkillers oxycodone and pethidine.
Interestingly, one of the drugs du jour in the US, connected to about 30,000 deaths including Michael Jackson, Tom Petty and Prince, has only been intercepted once in little old New Zealand.
Fentynal is a synthetic opioid used as a pain medication — or together with other medications for anaesthesia.
Illegal users often mix it with heroin or cocaine for a rapid onset and effects lasting several hours.
Customs have found just three grams of the lethal drug — said to be 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine — since 2010.
Kiwis not keen on heroin
“New Zealand has a different drug appetite, a different palate — we like our uppers, we like out amphetamines,” explained Jamie Bamford, the head of Customs’ investigations.
“We’re not massive on opioids, heroin. Our concern is if drugtrafficking organisations decide to push that stuff into New Zealand and create a market.
“If there’s a real profit to be made and it’s easy to traffic, we may see it.”
But Bamford said the drug was not just dangerous to users.
It can be absorbed transdermally — meaning it can be quickly absorbed through the eyes and mouth, including by any Customs’ staff processing or testing the substance.
“Fentanyl poses a real risk to our frontline officers,” he explained. “Fentanyl is a very dangerous narcotic.”
Bamford said sometimes the drugs came in piecemeal, while other suppliers — generally big offshore organised-crime groups — took a “big bang approach”.
“They do it one go rather than multiple streams where there is more risk of being caught,” O’Toole reasoned.
Under their eye
There are 17 ports in New Zealand where Customs roam, probe and discover the illicit and illegal.
There are the big three — Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch — and then Kaitaia, Hamilton, Tauranga, Rotorua, New Plymouth, Napier, Palmerston North, Picton, Nelson, Lyttelton, Timaru, Queenstown, Dunedin and Invercargill.
Outside the main cities the most drugs are found in Queenstown — but it’s mainly cannabis seed by volume and prescription meds by incident numbers.
O’Toole said there was no way to know what might be getting past Customs.
“When someone gets an illegal product through they generally don’t share it on social media or go around telling everyone,” he said.
“But if they succeed, they will generally try to do it again and it’s only a matter of time and they will get caught, people definitely get complacent.
“It might be their lucky day today — but it won’t be their lucky day tomorrow.”
The ultimate goal would be for Customs to cut the smuggling industry at the neck — and they do a lot of work with other agencies around the world to stop drugs ever leaving the country of origin.
O’Toole said his people worked closely with overseas agencies to share intel on everything smuggling related — drug types, trends, concealment methods.
Through the constant and vital information sharing with the global partners, Customs’ officers here knew what to look for and when. That’s how they knew to dig deep into the electric motors, the golf carts.
“I think we’re getting smarter and smarter,” said O’Toole. “We learn from what we see . . . we think about what we can do differently to do this better in future.
“In recent times there has been an increase in drugs intercepted at the border and whether that continues we really can’t tell you — but when things change we adapt quickly.
“But then when we are successful in one import stream, people will shift and we have to go with it.
“There’s never a dull day . . . it’s important that we try to think one step ahead.”
Never-ending — the war on drugs
Between 2010 and this year Customs officers logged more than 29,500 incidents where drugs were found in 3,012,574 items at the border.
About 68 per cent of the illegal substances were found in mail destined for addresses around the country.
Just under 30 per cent was nabbed at air or sea ports.
A portion of that was found either on people or luggage at Auckland International Airport.
Customs have staff on site 24/7 and their work is constant in the departure and arrivals area.
They are trained to spot people who may have something to hide, whose behaviour is not quite right, indicating they may need to be spoken to or checked out.
Like the ACIF team, the airport staff have an endless list of things they have found on passengers.
The manager at the airport for all things Customs is Craig Chitty.
“The volumes we deal with are smaller compared to the cargo teams and probably will always remain that way,” he said.
“We’re one of the cogs, we’re part of the process.”
Chitty’s crews have had some decent finds in recent years.
In April they nabbed a man coming in from Eastern Europe with almost 11,000 cigarettes on his person and in his luggage.
Ciggies are not prohibited but anything over the limit has to be declared and excise tax paid.
The man stuck out like a proverbial sore thumb, wearing a bulky jacket and moving oddly.
You would too if you had boxes of fags lining your pant legs and the entire inside of your top half clothing.
“He made himself too obvious,” said Chitty of the man, who is still before the courts here.
“Customs officers start to pick up on what’s normal and what’s not — when you deal with a lot of people who don’t have a problem you start
to see things that are not as normal as they should be.”
Drug mules rampant at NZ borders
In May this year Chitty’s team stopped 22kg of cocaine and meth getting into New Zealand after separate passenger finds within hours.
Customs estimate the potential social harm that would have resulted if the drugs filtered into the community at more than $27 million.
On May 5 a 30-year-old Hamilton man and a 20-year-old Auckland woman arrived from Argentina and were snapped with 7kg of cocaine paste — with a street value of $2.1 million — in the bases of their two suitcases.
In an unrelated incident just hours later two Canadian women, aged 21 and 26, landed on a flight from Hong Kong.
A search of their baggage found an estimated 14.9kg of crystal methamphetamine in their four suitcases.
On the street that would have fetched upward of $7.5 million.
Chitty said the majority of drugs these days were found concealed in luggage rather than inside humans.
But he estimated a major courier was pinged at the border every four to six weeks.
He’s proud of that, and hopes all his staff get to experience the feeling of taking a player off the dangerous field of drug smuggling.
Chitty remembers his first bust well.
He discovered a man with 1.4kg of amphetamine in his shoe, which had been carved out so all that was atop the sole was drugs and his foot. He laughs about the amount now. “That was in 1998, that was a really big seizure back then,” he said.
Cat and mouse — Customs v the world
“We’re trying to make New Zealand an unattractive market to feed, really,” explained Bamford.
“Our adversaries are becoming ingenious, well funded, sophisticated.
“Every which way you can imagine to get drugs in has been tried.”
The increase in some drugs and emergence of new product in New Zealand wasn’t about demand, Bamford revealed.
Rather, users were just sheep, lapping up what was being pushed in from around the world because of the willingness of some Kiwis to pay an exorbitant price to put the trash into their bodies.
“It’s not necessarily demand driving it, it’s not addiction,” Bamford said.
“When we start to have success in one particular stream, we see them change and evolve.
“It’s a constant game of cat and mouse.”