Operation Romeo Russet: Inside the police sting that brought meth trafficker Gregory Peter Betts and his suppliers Joel Anthony Olm and Thomas Leonard Peter Fines-Frost to justice
A drug kingpin who trafficked a significant amount of methylamphetamine across Cairns and the suppliers who covertly mailed the drug from Brisbane and interstate have been sentenced. Step inside the police operation that brought them undone.
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GREGORY Peter Betts let out an audible “yow” as he realised his reward for trafficking significant amounts of methylamphetamine into Cairns would not see him eligible for parole until June 15, 2028.
He turned to the courtroom gallery, full of his family and friends, and mouthed it again.
His partner, Serena Holm, sobbed.
The sentencing of Betts, a 47-year-old recidivist drug offender who had previously been jailed for nine years for trafficking meth into Cairns in 2012 and was only four months out of prison and on parole when he embarked on his latest venture between December 2019 and March 2020, marked the conclusion of a significant operation for Cairns detectives.
But Betts didn’t flood Cairns with upwards of 637g of methylamphetamine in a short three-month period on his own.
Due to lockdowns and border restrictions as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, police identified that large quantities of methylamphetamine were being sent from capital cities through Australia Post.
Led by detectives from Cairns’ Major Organised Crime Squad, Operation Romeo Russet also secured convictions against Betts’ major suppliers, 29-year-old Joel Anthony Olm and 27-year-old Thomas Leonard Peter Fines-Frost, and other lesser players who were integral to the running of the trafficking business.
‘I need four new tyres’
In December 2019, Betts rented a shed in Portsmith, setting it up under the guise that it was a legitimate automotive workshop.
There were cars out the front, and it was settled with Betts’ customer base that if they wanted drugs they would have to use some sort of codeword along the lines of fixing cars in a bid to avoid detection by authorities.
“I need four new tyres” was one such exchange that was described to the Cairns Supreme Court upon the sentencing of 30-year-old Jonathon Joseph Grimwade, the man whose job it was to run the trafficking shopfront.
Betts would direct customers to attend the shed, where Grimwade was also living, and he would facilitate the deals, the court heard.
It was all part of Betts’ attempts to distance himself from his trafficking operation.
But it was ultimately fruitless, because it was Betts who wound up on the radar of police, and it was from Betts’ phone that detectives eventually unravelled his web of criminality, arresting and charging his suppliers and employees.
For his part, Grimwade pleaded guilty to two counts of drug trafficking and a number of summary offences and was sentenced to four and a half years imprisonment, immediately suspended taking into account 429 days served in pre-sentence custody.
The Brisbane connection
Betts’ significant criminal history is essentially, one of a drug addict.
His barrister, Martin Longhurst, described him at his sentencing to 10 years and nine months imprisonment earlier this month as “not some irredeemable villain”.
“He’s someone who’s suffered under a drug addiction for a very long time,” Mr Longhurst said.
Yet effectively serving out the entirety of his nine and a half year prison sentence for his 2012 trafficking conviction did little to dissuade him from getting into business with former Cairns man and Brisbane-based criminal Olm, a month after the latter was released on parole for armed robbery with personal violence.
On that occasion, Olm pulled a sawn-off shotgun on the rightful owner of a stolen vehicle in a Townsville supermarket carpark.
Olm pleaded guilty in the Cairns Supreme Court on August 24, 2021 to trafficking and knowingly having possession of dangerous things with intent to use them to commit a crime, and was sentenced to seven years imprisonment, cumulative upon the serving out of his five and a half year sentence for armed robbery.
Olm’s childhood, the court heard, was a dysfunctional one, marred by a variety of extreme behaviours that should not have been visited on any young person, including sexual abuse.
Leaving school at a young age and embarking on the use of drugs did him no favours, and he ended up spending a substantial amount of his 20s behind bars.
From his Eight Mile Plains base, Olm supplied substantial quantities of methylamphetamine to Betts in Cairns – up to five ounces at a time.
At one stage he even offered to supply Betts with 10 ounces for $28,000.
Olm refused to operate on credit and took steps to conceal his business, using encrypted messages.
The court heard Betts’ “employees” Grimwade and Carlee Maree Alice Duncan,28, would fly to Brisbane strapped with large wads of cash for Olm, and packages of methylamphetamine would then be posted back to others whom Betts recruited to avoid detection.
For her role, Duncan pleaded guilty to five counts of supplying dangerous drugs among other charges and was sentenced to three years imprisonment, with a parole release date of June 27, 2022.
It was a system that worked well up until February 17, 2020 when Duncan flew to Brisbane to meet Olm at a hotel with $20,000 cash.
Olm obtained the methylamphetamine from his supplier, and he posted it to Betts.
The package was intercepted by police, with detectives seizing 139 grams of methylamphetamine, at 82.42 grams pure.
From there, his supplier cut him off and Olm’s behaviour worsened.
He set up a lab at the place where he was staying and after purchasing iodine, pseudoephedrine and hypophospohorous acid began producing liquid methylamphetamine.
Police executed a search warrant on April 1, 2020, but evidently Olm was not home.
Just over two weeks later, Olm stole some number plates and hired a car and drove from Brisbane to Cairns, only stopping to buy some methylamphetamine.
As the court heard, the purpose of Olm’s visit to Cairns was because he was planning an armed home invasion on the Tablelands.
He later told his psychologist he was driven by a desire for vengeance against a person who had dealings with a female with whom he was involved with.
The Crown submitted that whether the proposed home invasion was for retribution or not, it was calculated at obtaining methylamphetamine, guns, and cash.
A variety of phone conversations set out by the Crown in its court material demonstrated Olm was acting in concert with a number of other criminals, preparing in a very deliberate way.
Olm referred to “getting this c*** in Mareeba” and that he would “bash his missus” and take their money, gear, and gun safe, because he had a handgun and a few pump actions.
He said he could get a double barrel in Atherton, and that he wanted anyone who joined him in the home invasion to be armed.
“Aim below the knees and be discreet”, the court heard Olm said to his associates.
When police arrested Olm on April 20, 2020 at a property at Tinaroo, they found drugs, dark clothing, a diagram of the target house and its approach, and in Olm’s hire car, a loaded pump action shotgun, a loaded .22 shortened rifle, 19 shotgun shells, five zip ties, and masking tape.
It was, as Justice Jim Henry described, “a very serious example of that offence”.
From Cairns to Melbourne to Lotus Glen
Fines-Frost’s path to becoming a wholesale drug trafficker who pumped large amounts of methylamphetamine into the Cairns community was markedly different from Olm’s.
At his sentencing in the Cairns Supreme Court in March, the court heard Fines-Frost had the benefit of “great education prospects” in his youth, completing Year 12, landing various construction and labouring jobs, and work in bars.
He also spent a year and a half studying a business degree.
It was in Melbourne that things seemingly went wrong, the court heard.
At the age of 23 or 24 and working in civil construction, Fines-Frost lost his job and went on Centrelink.
Having previously dabbled in recreational drugs, he became addicted to methylamphetamine.
“Doubtless, it is the associations you formed through dabbling in that drug that led you to be in a position to be a wholesale methylamphetamine trafficker,” Justice Henry noted.
Like Olm, Fines-Frost also posted packages of methylamphetamine to Cairns, selling in quantities ranging from half an ounce to six ounces.
Fines-Frost pleaded guilty to trafficking over a seven month period between November 2019 and August 2020 in the Cairns Supreme Court in March and was sentenced to eight and a half years imprisonment.
The court heard the 27-year-old took as many steps as he could think of to try and distance himself from the “coalface” of his drug trafficking with Betts and two others.
He used encrypted messaging apps like Wickr and had four different usernames.
Sometimes customers would post money to him, other times he would have them deposit money into his accounts.
He would also have money deposited into the account of a woman with whom he lived, and into the accounts of his co-offender and housemate in Victoria, 27-year-old Christopher Mark Woolley.
The drug money would go into those accounts, and generally be immediately withdrawn or transferred into Fines-Frost’s accounts, the court heard.
In total, Fines-Frost received some $255,341 worth of deposits, with about $100,000 of that amount passing through Woolley’s account.
Working on a notional amount of $5000 an ounce, and taking into account the way the price of methylamphetamine increased significantly during the course of the pandemic as drug supplies dried up, Justice Henry estimated Fines-Frost supplied around 35 ounces of methylamphetamine into Cairns.
He acknowledged those calculations didn’t include cash that Fines-Frost would have been receiving.
“Whichever way you come at it, in other words, this was a significant volume of wholesale methylamphetamine that was being pumped into the Cairns community.”
Fines-Frost didn’t, however, have much to show for his efforts.
There was no evidence of accumulated wealth or trappings.
Justice Henry accepted much of the money would have been on-paid to his supplier, but he inferred that Fines-Frost wound up spending the money on “everyday living” as “one can well imagine (a young, immature man) may when the money is coming so easy”.
It was also submitted by Fines-Frost’s defence counsel that he, during the trafficking period, wound up with a two-to-three gram a day meth habit.
The court heard Fines-Frost moved back to Far North Queensland following his arrest, working in his mother’s restaurant at Port Douglas before in January 2021 taking up a carpentry apprenticeship on the Gold Coast.
Justice Henry accepted Fines-Frost since his arrest had extricated himself from the drug milieu, taken steps toward rehabilitation, and testing indicated he was drug-free.
He also said he had no doubt as to Fines-Frost and Woolley’s “high levels of regret”.
Woolley also pleaded guilty to trafficking, earning himself a three and a half year jail term with a parole eligibility date of January 28, 2023.
Fines-Frost will be eligible for parole on September 28, 2024.
He has appealed his sentence.
Operation Romeo Russet
MOCS Detective Senior Constable Trent Odmark was in court earlier this month to watch Betts being sentenced.
The conviction marked the finalisation of the methylamphetamine trafficking arm of Operation Romeo Russet.
Of the more than 30 people who were charged with various offences as a result of the probe, police have secured convictions against at least 10 people for trafficking.
Det Snr Con Odmark said it was satisfying to see the police work which had gone into busting Betts’ drug syndicate brought to its ultimate conclusion.
Unfortunately, Betts’ operation of using drug-dependent employees to distance himself from detection, in turn paying them with methylamphetamine to feed their addictions, is something police see all the time.
A separate cocaine trafficking arm of the Romeo Russet investigation remains before the courts.
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Originally published as Operation Romeo Russet: Inside the police sting that brought meth trafficker Gregory Peter Betts and his suppliers Joel Anthony Olm and Thomas Leonard Peter Fines-Frost to justice
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