Qld gym junkies busted for crime
The enviable lifestyles of these bodybuilders, personal trainers and models were all undone by crime. Here are some of the state’s gym junkie criminals.
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The Sunshine State is known for its love of buff beach bodies, but there can be a dark side to the pursuit of a ripped and rugged physique.
Here are some gym junkies who ended up in court for a variety of crimes.
DANIEL ARRIAGADA
The prison guard turned powerlifter sold huge amounts of steroids while employed at a local gym, Brisbane Supreme Court was told in April 2020.
Arriagada, 30, had a spectacular fall from grace.
A decorated infantryman, he later became an Arthur Gorrie Correctional Centre prison guard before taking up powerlifting.
Until that time, he had no criminal history.
He joined a three-man syndicate and trafficked steroids across Brisbane and Ipswich in November, 2018.
The court was told the trio sold 100 steroid vials and 870 tablets in just one month but, amazingly, didn’t make much money.
The former World Gym Ipswich employee had discussed promoting the drugs to customers. When police searched his property in December 2019, Arriagada was found with steroids and the body-sculpting drug Clenbuterol.
Defence lawyer Scott Neaves said his client had since sworn off steroids and was remorseful. Arriagada has since started his own personal training business and was in a stable relationship.
Justice Martin Burns convicted Arriagada and sentenced him to 2½ years’ prison, suspended for four years.
EUGENE BRADSHAW
The personal trainer turned businessman was caught with a huge stash of steroids but escaped jail after convincing a court he was “turning his life around”.
Eugene Francis Bradshaw, 29, appeared in Brisbane Supreme Court this month where he was sentenced to two years’ jail, but with immediate parole, after pleading guilty to supplying and possessing dangerous drugs.
Prosecutor Michael Gawrych told the court that Queensland Police found 80g of steroids and a small amount of cocaine when they executed a search warrant at Bradshaw’s Middle Park unit.
The bodybuilder was on bail after he was found in possession of 8.5g of steroids and 1.24g of pure cocaine when a car he was a passenger in was stopped in August 2019.
WhatsApp messages on his phone revealed he had also sold $350 worth of cocaine to one buyer.
RICHARD BRUNELLE
This gym junkie, who was once jailed for his role in a botched drug deal that led to a double murder, was sentenced for trafficking steroids on the dark web.
Brunelle, an employee of a “highly sophisticated” trafficking business that sold steroids through the dark web to thousands of people across Australia, was jailed earlier this year.
US-born gym junkie Richard Allen Brunelle, 40, dispatched steroids and pharmaceuticals to more than 1700 people over six months while employed by the large-scale illicit business, a Supreme Court heard.
The court heard that while Brunelle was not profiting from the drug sales, he received a weekly cash wage and the drugs helped feed his own steroid addiction.
Brunelle was sentenced to 5.5 years’ jail and will be eligible for parole in June 2022.
BEDRI GENC
The self-confessed drug dealer and fitness trainer serviced dope smokers in his home town of Gatton, profiting to the tune of $17,000.
But Genc, 22, narrowly avoided jail in July 2020, despite Ipswich District Court hearing he sold cannabis and MDMA on what was considered a commercial level.
His age, lack of criminal history, and the positive efforts he was making to kick his own addiction spared him from a cell, Judge Alexander Horneman-Wren said in his sentencing remarks.
Genc was convicted and sentenced to a three-year jail term for trafficking, with the sentence immediately suspended for four years.
There were lesser jail terms of three months on 11 offences, suspended for two years.
DANIEL HEAZLEWOOD
A steroid-using gym junkie, he brutally killed his Gold Coast mother and buried her in a shallow grave filled with lime in the Coast hinterland.
Heazlewood was granted parole just 29 months after being sentenced to eight years’ jail for the manslaughter of his mum Linda Sidon, whom he called “a waste of space … a bogan … and an ugly b-tch”.
Her remains have never been found, but despite Queensland’s “no body, no parole” laws, the Parole Board agreed to release Heazlewood.
Heazlewood murdered his mother in 2009 but did not confess to police until 2015, after a listening device planted by cops in his car recorded him saying: “F@#ked her up. She just pushed me too far one day … ha, so I killed her. Gotta remember where I put the b*tch.”
MATT HILTON
Cocaine trafficker Matt Hilton was sentenced to 10 year’s jail in February 2020 for selling “multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars” of a party drug in Cairns.
Cairns Supreme Court Judge Jim Henry said Hilton lived the “flash lifestyle” of the “big-time drug dealer about town”.
Hilton pleaded guilty to trafficking steroids, cocaine, crystal meth and ecstasy pills between March 1, 2016 and January 3, 2018.
Judge Henry said “damning evidence” was gathered by a listening device planted by police in his luxury Chrysler sedan during a covert two-year sting.
“Cocaine, that’s my game, there’s lots more profit in it, and it moves quicker,’’ Hilton was recorded saying on secret tapes.
The fitness trainer, former hairdresser and nightclub security company owner – with more than 13,000 followers on Instagram – is one of a new generation of party drug traffickers more “business than gangster’’.
With his Adonis looks, ripped physique and stunning girlfriend, the 33-year-old muscle model liked to post pictures of his gym workouts, tattoos, and social life in the tropical far north Queensland tourist haven.
JAMIE IANNA
A convicted armed robber out on parole just four days before joining in on a violent assault that went horribly wrong narrowly escaped more cell time. Jamie Lee Ianna, then 41, pleaded guilty in Beenleigh District Court in May 2020 to ambushing a man on the request of his drug dealer.
The court heard Ianna, who was accompanied by another man, stopped the victim as he climbed into his partner’s car to escape and belted him with his fists.
However to Ianna’s surprise when his accomplice caught up he was wielding a knife and began stabbing the victim’s leg, slicing an artery.
Ianna intervened on the stabbing and stayed with the bleeding man and applied pressure to his wounds.
Justice Craig Chowdhury heard that while Ianna’s criminal history was more than 12 pages long and had racked up more than $28,000 in fines, he had in recent years improved his life by holding down a job and studying to be a personal trainer.
Ianna pleaded guilty to grievous bodily harm and common assault and was sentenced to four years’ jail, wholly suspended and was placed on probation for two years.
NICK KEPU
The Logan personal trainer, who once worked at popular gym chain F45 Training, livestreamed a shocking assault on his ex-wife and her new squeeze after he let himself into the former marital home and rained blows on the hapless man, breaking his nose.
Beenleigh man Tamafaiga Nick Kepu, 27, a former personal trainer at F45 Browns Plains, amateur MMA fighter and former first-grade centre for Sunnybank Dragons Rugby Union Football Club, pleaded guilty in Beenleigh District Court in January to six offences.
They included burglary with actual violence, assault occasioning bodily harm, common assault and three counts of wilful damage.
The court heard the violent assault occurred on October 13, 2019, about 7pm, when Kepu attended an Edens Landing townhouse belonging to his ex-wife, in which he lived until their separation a few weeks prior.
He was sentenced to two years’ jail with immediate parole.
LUKE MELDON
The high-profile boxing trainer caught trafficking cocaine was given a suspended sentence earlier this year after telling a court it was a “blessing in disguise” that he was caught.
Brisbane boxing coach Luke Joseph Meldon, 43, appeared in the Supreme Court on Monday where he told Acting Justice Anthony Rafter: “I realise the errors of my ways”.
The Fortitude Boxing head coach, who has helped train a number of Australian champions, pleaded guilty to trafficking cocaine, two counts of possessing dangerous drugs and possessing cash.
Prosecutor Neville Weston told the court that while Meldon was running the gym, he was also operating a “very intensive business of trafficking”, selling cocaine on more than 150 occasions to 47 customers over three months in 2018.
Meldon was sentenced to four years’ jail, which was suspended immediately after he had served 12 days in pre-sentence custody.
He was also ordered to serve two years’ probation.
KOBI LEE MILLS
A high-profile Brisbane personal trainer caught with commercial quantities of steroids and cocaine, claimed he turned to steroids and went down a “body image rabbit hole” because he had been bullied for being overweight as a child.
Mills was sentenced in October last year in the Brisbane Supreme Court on nine charges relating to the possession of dangerous drugs including steroids, cocaine and MDMA.
His barrister, Martin Longhurst, said Mills, a popular trainer, had turned to steroids in order to compete in powerlifting competitions.
The court heard that in February 2019, police officers raided Mills’s home where they found seven different types of steroid drugs weighing more than 210g, along with cocaine, MDMA and other restricted narcotics.
Prosecutors in the case accepted that while the drug amounts were in commercial quantities, the drugs were for personal use.
In sentencing, Justice Susan Brown said she took into account submissions that Mills had tried to turn his life around after being charged and had sought psychological help.
She sentenced Mills to two years’ imprisonment wholly suspended for three years.
MARY VINCENT MOLLOY
A former Commonwealth Bank teller-turned-Instagram fitness model, Mary Molloy was spared jail time for her part in a $1 million pill selling racket.
She was given a suspended three-year sentence in the Supreme Court in April 2020.
Molloy first made headlines in 2015 when she sued her bank boss for sexual harassment after he allegedly made lewd comments including that her boyfriend should “go easy on her during sex’’.
Molloy, formerly of Newstead and Bulimba, was handed the suspended sentence by Supreme Court Justice John Bond because of reasons including “COVID-19 considerations” and the fact that she was six months’ pregnant at the time.
Molloy, who once boasted of 70,000 followers on Instagram, pleaded guilty to 18 charges including one of being a party to a boyfriends’ $1 million MDA racket.
The charges included supplying cocaine worth $5900 and possession of a cryovac machine. The court heard that she fell into selling cocaine in 2015 while in a physically and emotionally abusive relationship with the boyfriend and was forced to collect drug debts for him.
JOEY MYER
The Sunshine Coast personal trainer and wannabe politician was sentenced to eight years and six months jail in March this year for 11 counts of indecently treating a child under 16 and one count of rape — charges to which he had pleaded not guilty.
Crown Prosecutor Christopher Cook described the offending as predatory, persistent, and put the teen in a position where she felt powerless and unable to tell anyone.
Thirty-seven-year-old Myer, who had in 2013 run for the federal seat of Fisher, had previously spent time behind bars and had an invasion offence on his criminal history the court heard.
NERIDA LEE SHADFORTH
The high-paid Department of Justice employee of Capalaba, was earning $85,000 a year and had two houses when a bad relationship sent her spiralling into a crippling drug addiction.
The glamorous ex-bodybuilder was sentenced in Brisbane District Court to 11 counts of supplying ice and Subutex, possessing dangerous drugs and 10 summary charges.
She pleaded guilty to all charges in November 2020.
The court was told a police search found drugs and ammunition under her bed along with text messages revealing her drug deals.
After being bailed, she was later picked up at a random breath test on Old Cleveland Rd where police found drugs in her handbag, the encryption app Wickr Me on her phone and evidence of other drug deals.
In March this year, while on bail and parole, Shadforth was pulled over at Alexandra Hills where police found the drug ice, $4000 in cash and drug supply messages.
Shadforth was sentenced to two years’ jail, to be served cumulatively on top of a prior two-and-a-half-year sentence.
She will be eligible for parole in April 2022.
GARRY JAMES TURNER
A teacher turned model and bodybuilder, Turner narrowly missed jail time after he was caught supplying thousands worth of steroids.
In September 2020, he pleaded guilty to nine counts of supplying dangerous drugs, including testosterone and a growth hormone, over a six-month period in 2018.
Turner, who graduated with honours qualifications in science and worked as a science teacher for 13 years, was sentenced to a two-year jail term but granted immediate parole.
The bodybuilder’s side gig was uncovered by police in March 2019 after a search of his home over a separate drug matter.
JACK RYAN WARNE
Fitness trainer, Warne, formerly of Gympie, was convicted of selling $10,000 of marijuana as well as MDMA.
In October 2019, he made a tearful promise before Brisbane District Court that, for the sake of his son, he would never be seen in a court again.
The court heard police found the huge stash of marijuana and MDMA at his Warner home on June 5, 2018.
Warne pleaded guilty to five drug and possession charges and some other charges.
Judge Nicole Kefford said while Warne’s level of commerciality was low, she noted that he was only one year into suspended sentence when he was caught.
She sentenced him to 18 months’ jail but was released immediately on parole. A conviction was recorded.
* For 24-hour sexual violence support call the national hotline 1800 RESPECT on 1800 737 732 or MensLine on 1800 600 636
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