The lead that caught a coke ring
It was described as a ‘‘simple lead’’ that brought down an international crime syndicate behind the largest cocaine smuggling ring in New Zealand history.
It was a lead Customs Investigations manager Bruce Berry likened to the corner piece of a jigsaw, ‘‘that corner piece, we built the frame around it’’.
That lead was one man, Australian Matthew Scott.
It was his presence in New Zealand, and a tip-off from Australian authorities, that enabled a joint Customs and Police investigation to join the dots between South American cocaine cartels, an international smuggling syndicate and crucially, deported Australian gang members now setting up shop in New Zealand.
spoke to Berry and National Organised Crime Group taskforce supervisor, Detective Sergeant Andrew Dunhill, about Operation Heracles, the investigation that smashed a global crime network whose reach extended from South America to New Zealand, Australia, Europe, Hong Kong and Vietnam.
The Australian connection was key, however.
Berry said the combined
Police and Customs investigation alighted on Scott as ‘‘a person of interest from his criminal associations’’.
‘‘That small piece of information Customs intelligence pieced together, we could see all the connections, linkages to other drug importations,’’ Berry said.
While Scott had no criminal convictions in his native Australia, he was on the law enforcement radar and suspected of involvement in methamphetamine trafficking across both Vietnam and Hong Kong.
Berry said he played another key role in efforts to smuggle the drug into New Zealand, via his associations with what are known as the ‘501s,’ Australian gang members deported back to New Zealand.
‘‘Then, we started drawing other connections,’’ he said.
Dunhill conceded that they never ‘‘drilled down into the distribution pattern’’ of the ring but Berry said the entire process likely would not have worked but for this new breed of organised criminal in New Zealand, groups with the ability to distribute huge amounts of cocaine.
‘‘The level of sophistication 501’s bring to the New Zealand scene is unprecedented, the connectivity and experience they bring is unheralded in New
Zealand,’’ he said.
Dunhill said the syndicate were thinking big too.
They were adjusting their wholesale prices into different exchange rates, and planned to use their Tauranga route to expand into Australia.
Berry said there was a simple reason international drug syndicates were increasingly casting their gaze towards New Zealand.
‘‘The price we pay for methamphetamine and cocaine is the highest in the world.’’
Scott was sentenced on Tuesday to a 24-year term of imprisonment for his role in a syndicate that had already successfully smuggled two 30 kilogram shipments of the Class A drug into New Zealand, the first on June 1, 2017, the second on July 18, 2017.
Sources close to the case believe there may have been four importations in total, but one fact is clear. As far as provable importations stand, it was third time unlucky.
The syndicate’s run came to an end in November 2017 when 46 kilograms of cocaine, with a street value of around $20 million, was seized in a dawn raid in Tauranga.
That raid saw Scott and three other men; Croatian national Mario Habulin, Serbian national Deni Cavallo and a second Australian, Benjamin Northway, plead guilty to a raft of charges including supplying class A drugs, money laundering, importing class A drugs, possession of class A drugs and participation in an organised criminal group.
They were sentenced on Tuesday to prison terms ranging from 27 years to 14 years.
The man described as the syndicate boss, a foreign national whose identity is suppressed, is also known to have visited New Zealand around the time of the first shipment.
It was a scheme described by sentencing judge Justice Grant Powell as ‘‘large scale, wholly commercial, well planned and extremely sophisticated . . . and intended to continue on an ongoing basis.’’
‘‘This was drug offending at the highest level.’’