Benjamin Thornton, Coorparoo dad and former Bandido, alleged mastermind of massive drug syndicate

Benjamin Thornton swore he’d gone straight and settled down to family life, running a business with his partner, a beauty therapy student. But the former personal trainer is accused of being a drug syndicate mastermind.

A former Bandido bikie who swore he had gone straight and settled down to family life is alleged by police to have been running a sophisticated high-level wholesale drug trafficking business using An0m.

Benjamin Joseph Thornton, 31, a father of one from the Brisbane suburb of Coorparoo, had been to drug rehab to kick his ice addiction and started a business on the Gold Coast with his partner beauty therapy student Natalie Cosgrove.

But by April this year Thornton, was on police radar when he was allegedly busted plotting the peddling of wholesale amounts of ice and cocaine in Brisbane in conversations on the An0m app.

Benjamin Joseph Thornton.

Documents filed in court during his bail application last month show that Thornton has an extensive seven-page rap sheet including a nine month suspended sentence for bashing a man in the toilets of the Victory Hotel in the Brisbane CBD in an unprovoked and premeditated attack in 2013 when he was a member of the Bandido bikie gang.

For that attack he was convicted of unlawful assault occasioning bodily harm in company.

The court also heard during his bail application that he was still serving a suspended sentence for ice supply at the time of his most recent arrest.

Thornton, who was previously best known for being abducted, assaulted and shot then held captive for several days in 2017 when police believed he may have been killed, went to high school in Tin Can Bay on the Fraser Coast and then moved to Brisbane where he finished Year 12 at Cavendish Road State High School.

Despite being diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder at school he trained as an airconditioning and refrigeration mechanic and later worked as a fly-in fly-out mine worker at the Lake Vermont Mine west of Mackay.

In between he has dabbled as a personal trainer at Goodlife gym in Alexandra Hills, and ran his own business buying and selling second-hand cars and even registered a business to bottle and sell mineral water.