Feature
Heavy traffic
by Mark Revington
Customs and police are facing a dramatic increase in the flow of illegal drugs across our borders.
David Shaida piled up frequent flyer points as a drug courier; Auckland to Singapore or Malaysia, back to Auckland, on to Japan and back again. In one month alone, he made three trips to Singapore. When Customs officers finally intercepted him at Auckland Airport in March, they found methamphetamine or P with a street value of $2 million. There was more. Another $900,000 worth, hidden down the back of a couch at his family home.
Shaida was an unlikely courier, a 47-year-old businessman with no criminal past, who sat on the board of King’s School in Remuera. That made him an enticing prospect for a drug syndicate. He may have slipped under the radar completely if not for a police electronic surveillance operation, eavesdropping on a suspected drug ring. It ensnared Shaida and a 51-year-old associate, Theodoor Graaf, who both pleaded guilty to drug importing and dealing. The pair will be sentenced on September 21.
Shaida’s standing in the community became the news, but what was unusual in this case was his final destination. Illegal drugs are pouring across the border in vastly increased quantities, according to Customs and police, but they’re usually destined for either New Zealand or Australia. Methamphetamines and the purer derivative, crystal methamphetamine or ice, are popular with Kiwis. Their use has skyrocketed throughout Asia, but New Zealand has one of the highest rates of amphetamine abuse in the world, according to a United Nations report, second along with Australia, behind Thailand, where it is known as yaba or mad medicine.
Cocaine is usually bound for the much larger Australian market. A kilogram of cocaine, seized at Auckland Airport two weeks ago, was to be sold to fund an operation smuggling 20kg of cocaine into Australia. Three people were arrested: a Chilean woman, a Peruvian national living in New Zealand and a man with dual Australian and Chilean citizenship.
Another syndicate tried to avoid suspicion by sending 300 envelopes, each stamped with the mark of a fake charity, and each containing 10g of cocaine, to post-office boxes all over Auckland. Drug-enforcement officials call this the shotgun approach.
“That’s three kilograms in total, all to post-office boxes in the greater Auckland area, taken out in false names and false leafy addresses,” says Simon Williamson, Customs’ manager of drug investigations. “We’d heard of it [the shotgun method] from overseas agencies. They’re working on the basis that even if one gets detected, the rest may get through. We know from overseas experience that some syndicates favour the approach because, even if we intercept some of the drug, it’s much less likely to attract massive law-enforcement attention.”
In this case, the whole lot was discovered, says Williamson, “through overseas intelligence and just bloody good work by investigators who put a couple of characters under surveillance on arrival here at Auckland Airport because of concerns about what they were really doing here. It proved fruitful within a couple of days as they led the investigators on a merry chase all over Auckland.”
And then there were the two men with seven kilograms of cocaine jammed into the bottom of a suitcase, who had travelled to New Zealand from Chile, via Tahiti and Rarotonga, and planned to take the drug on to Australia. The cocaine had been crammed into the gap inside the hard shell of the suitcase, which had to be cut open to get at the drug. It was discovered after a South African man presented a fake British passport.
“We’re seen as a non-source supply country, so anything that comes from New Zealand is not scrutinised as thoroughly by overseas authorities,” says Detective Sergeant John Sowter, who heads Auckland’s drugs squad.
“We get what we call second-leg couriers who arrive here from Australia and they will then uplift drugs that people have brought in from other countries. The authorities see that they have just been to New Zealand and back, so there’s no problem, they don’t even get looked at.”
Whatever the destination, one fact is inescapable; the sheer volume of illegal drugs coming in over the border has risen dramatically.
Take cocaine. Customs officers and police intercepted 22kg of the stuff in the 12 months to June 31. Crystal methamphetamine was almost unknown at the border three years ago, says Williamson. Last year Customs seized a paltry 862g.
“This year to date we’ve seized 12.5 kilos plus another nine kilos close to the border through police and Customs initiatives. That’s 22 kilos of crystal methamphetamine, worth $22 million, imported into this country and seized this year. It’s a huge amount.”
In the 12 months ending June 31, Customs also seized 1.2kg of heroin, 180,000 Ecstasy tablets and 1.2 million ephedrine and pseudoephedrine tablets, known as precursors and used to manufacture methamphetamine. That compares with 254,987 pills seized in 2002.
Ecstasy pills, which can be bought for as little as $4 overseas and sold for up to $100 in New Zealand, bucked the trend, with the flow dropping slightly from 265,447 tablets seized in the year ending June 2003, to 188,000 in the last financial year. But that’s still a whopping increase compared to the 28,166 tablets discovered in the year to June 2001.
The flow of precursor tablets across the border is turning into a torrent as the supply dries up here. Both ephedrine and
Page 1 2 
