Revealed.... The dangerously imaginative ways drugs are being smuggled into Sydney
THE overnight seizure in Sydney of $8m of drugs in ‘copy paper’ hidden in kids’ clothes is a stark and chilling reminder of the war being waged on increasingly elaborate attempts to bring deadly drugs into Sydney.
NSW
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THE overnight seizure in Sydney of $8m of drugs in ‘copy paper’ hidden in kids’ clothes is a stark and chilling reminder of the war being waged on increasingly elaborate attempts to bring deadly drugs into Sydney.
Illicit drugs are being concealed in cunningly imaginative attempts to evade Australia’s Customs and Border protection teams.
Only today NSW police revealed they had stopped $8 million worth of heroin hitting Sydney streets concealed in copy paper and wrapped in children’s clothing.
Last month, the Daily Telegraph revealed a new generation of syndicates are forming sophisticated trafficking and supply networks, creating a dangerous new threat to Australia’s borders.
“Everyone is making so much money there are no turf wars anymore,” Former NSW Police Force deputy commissioner Nick Kaldas said.
“It is also perfectly clear now that importers do not recognise, nor are they daunted by, borders or law enforcement,” he said.
WASHING POWDER
A man has been charged after nearly 50kg of the drug pseudoephedrine was allegedly discovered in washing powder cartons at an inner-Sydney property.
Police say the substance was uncovered, along with $1.16 million in cash and a loaded handgun, at the Lachlan Street premises at Waterloo in December.
A substance believed to be crystal methylamphetamine, an automatic firearm, two loaded magazines, and a silencer were also allegedly found.
The 44kg of pseudoephedrine has an estimated potential street value of $1.3 million, police say.
COFFEE MACHINE
Two teens landed in hot water after being accused of attempting to import illicit drugs from the Netherlands.
A 15-year-old girl and a 17-year-old boy linked to a Villawood address allegedly attempted to import more than 3kg of MDMA, or ecstasy, concealed in a coffee machine in July 2017.
EX PORN STAR AND WORLD TRIP
AN around the world cruise paid for by shadowy drug traffickers was meant to be an “easy job with easy money” for a former Canadian porn actress but it has ended in four and a half years in a NSW jail.
Isabelle Lagace, 29, plucked a tissue from a box and dabbed her eyes after last year being sentenced her to seven and a half years with four and a half years non-parole for smuggling up to $21 million worth of cocaine into Sydney aboard the cruise ship Sea Princess.
Her sister wrote in a letter previously tendered in court that Lagace was convinced the 51-day cruise from the UK to Latin America and Australia would be an, “an easy job for easy money.”
But Lagace wrote in her own statement to the court that it has ended with the stark reality that, “the defining years of my womanhood will be spent in a prison half way around the world.”
EX NRL STAR AND THE FISHING TRAWLER
A rugby league player pleaded guilty to his role in one of Australia’s biggest cocaine rings, which was smashed in a series of dramatic raids on Christmas Day in 2016.
Ex-Rooster John Roland Boyd Tobin, 58, was charged over the alleged syndicate which operated out of Sydney Fish Markets using commercial trawlers to move cocaine from Chile to Australia.
Tobin, who played 125 first grade games in the 1970s and ’80s, was one of 15 men arrested after a 2½-year top-secret investigation.
Tobin will be sentenced in the Supreme Court this year.
UNDIE SMUGGLERS
Sniffer dogs made a series of dramatic busts outside our state’s jails — discovering wives and girlfriends trying to smuggle contraband to some of the state’s most hardened inmates, usually in balloons hidden in their bras.
Last year, two women visiting Goulburn jail were found with 6.4g of heroin, 306g of tobacco and 11.2g of opioid buprenorphine strips between them.
A few weeks earlier another unannounced SOG operation sniffed out woman at the Mid North Coast Correctional Centre with 57 strips of the opioid buprenorphine and 11 ecstasy tablets encased in three balloons that she had stuffed in her bra.
Another women visiting the South Coast Correctional Centre was found with 8.4g of crystal hidden in a “large” drug-filled balloon secreted in her bra.
PRIME REAL ESTATE
Two years ago, police in the Macarthur region revealed they were battling new tactics by drug syndicates who were buying up homes in new estates to turn them into hydroponic cannabis houses.
Police from Strike Force Zambesi have executed 411 search warrants in five years across Sydney’s south west, including the Macarthur region, seizing more than 48,000 plants worth $140 million, 800kg of cannabis worth $7 million and charging 189 people.
Officers raided a home in Leumeah and found an underground tunnel into the backyard where an old swimming pool had been converted into an underground bunker for growing crops.
After being tipped off by residents about the activities happening at the house and after initially coming up empty following a search, police discovered a hatch in the floor which led to the underground bunker.
SAUSAGE MAKER
A Potts Point man faces life behind bars after he was caught trying to import 16kg of cocaine hidden inside a box pretending to carry a sausage maker from the US into Australia.
He was also nabbed separately putting a bag filled with $40,000 into a white car at Bondi Junction shopping centre carpark meant to be used as payment to a syndicate member.
He will be sentenced next month for a number of charges including importing a commercial quantity of cocaine into Australia.
GREEN TEA
Methamphetamine precursor with a staggering street value of $3.6 billion was seized after the drugs were found hidden in bottles of green tea at the Sydney Container Examination Facility last year.
Authorities also seized 350kg of ice hidden in liquid plaster solution during a separate seizure as they arrested three people.
The 3.9 tonnes of liquid ephedrine, which authorities say would have made 3.6 tonnes of ice, and the 350kg ice, were imported from Thailand.
AUDIO SPEAKERS
SYDNEY border police have disrupted a major Mexican cartel drug smuggling operation, seizing 24kg of methamphetamine hidden inside home audio speakers.
Australian Border Force officers intercepted an airfreight consignment containing eight speakers yesterday and used X-ray scans to find “crystalline substance concealed within the speakers”.
The haul — which has a street value of $20.7 million — was removed from the speakers and replaced with fake drugs, which were delivered to addresses in Rozelle and Marrickville where officers arrested a 25-year-old Mexican woman and a 25-year-old Australian woman.
21,000 HIGHLIGHTER PENS
Three hundreds kilograms of ephedrine, which police allege could be turned into $120 million worth of the drug ice, were found hidden in thousands of highlighter markers from China.
The Australian Border Force made the unusual discovery inside 21,000 highlighter markers earlier this month when they arrived at its Sydney Container Examination Facility in February.
Officers noticed abnormalities with the colourful stationary.
The NSW Police Force claim the chemicals could have made about 2.4 million hits of ice — with a street value of around $120 million.
HAIR GEL AND SALAD DRESSING
Sydney’s palatial Hyde Park Plaza was the control room in a drug supply network allegedly involving French nationals, social media, hair gel and salad dressing.
The syndicate openly posted its “run phone” number for people to text an order for MDMA , or they used the encrypted messaging app Wickr.
One of the accused later allegedly revealed how he got drugs into Australia hidden inside hair gel containers.
HOT JAIL DINNERS
Prison guards are smuggling illegal contraband such as mobile phones into a privately run Sydney prison during dinner meals, a former prison inmate claimed last year.
Former inmate ‘John’ made allegations of widespread corruption about officers working at Parklea Correctional Centre in Sydney’s north-west.
“Stuff is smuggled in through the meals,” he said. “Every evening you get a hot meal. It’s a tray with a lid on it.”
NY MODEL AND THE TRAVEL RUSE
NEW York model Nathaniel Carty, 23, thought nothing of it when an editor for a Canadian magazine offered him a free trip to Australia because “a lot of people had bought him flights in the past to attend parties”.
But that trip has now cost Carty — who modelled for Nike, Adidas and Coca-Cola — three years and four months of his life after he was sentenced in NSW Downing District Court for importing 4.7kg of cocaine in two suitcases through Sydney airport.
The court was told Carty was one of four young men recruited by Slava Pastuk, former Canadian editor of hipster news magazine Vice to smuggle almost 20kg of cocaine worth nearly $16 million dollars.
The men were each offered holidays to Australia, spending money and up to $10,000 on their return if they carried the suitcases.
But when each one tried to back out of the trip they were threatened by what they believed was a Mexican drug syndicate.
‘DRUG VERSION OF UBER EATS’
Four men were jailed last year after they were caught operating a highly organised and successful Sydney business described as “the drug version of Uber Eats”.
They used taxis to deliver mobile phone orders for cocaine from up to 900 customers.
“This was a sophisticated criminal operation which ran a drug-dealing network along the lines of that legitimate business (Uber Eats), using mobile phones for customers to place orders and, in most cases, taxis driven by an offender to satisfy those orders,” NSW District Court Judge Peter Berman said.
Originally published as Revealed.... The dangerously imaginative ways drugs are being smuggled into Sydney
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