Breaking Bad style kingpin who built clan-lab, jailed for trafficking

A middle-aged man who’s already served jail time for setting up a clandestine ice lab with parallels to cult TV show Breaking Bad is back behind bars for trafficking $3.4m worth of ice into the state.

A middle-aged ice kingpin who served jail time for setting up a clandestine ice lab with parallels to cult TV show Breaking Bad, and who told a lieutenant he wanted a debtor’s “head in the ground”, has been ordered back behind bars for trafficking $3.4m worth of ice into Queensland.

Paul John Vella, 51, formerly from the Gold Coast and now a fabricator from Sydney’s western suburbs, was in the Supreme Court in Brisbane on Wednesday where Crown Prosecutor Caroline Marco told the court that Vella had run a “profit driven” wholesale ice ring and didn’t hesitate to order violence be used to collect drug debts.

Ms Marco told Justice Glenn Martin that phone intercepts captured Vella discussing using a weapon to recoup debts with his lieutenant and ice mule, Ian Levy, and telling him to get a weapon to slap debtor Marat Nuchimov, and he wanted “Nuchimov’s head in the ground”.

Ms Marco said Vella ran a business for 10 months, between December 2013 until October 2014, sourcing at least 12kg of the drug ice in Sydney and arranging for mules Levy and Patrick James Lowery, from Riverstone in NSW to smuggle it by car into Queensland in seven trips, where Vella on-sold it to other lower-ranking drug pushers.

Actors Bryan Cranston (L) and Aaron Paul in TV series 'Breaking Bad'.

While police were unable to calculate how much profit Vella made from ice trafficking, Ms Marco said that the amount of cash was believed to be substantial as phone taps revealed Vella and his mates owed an unnamed Sydney drug tsar $700,000, and Vella lost $350,000 when lower-ranking dealer Steven Phillips was arrested.

Ms Marco said that after Phillips was arrested in 2014, Vella moved to the NSW country town of Cowra where he reinvented himself as the boss of a clandestine lab manufacturing ice in commercial quantities.

She said that Vella used the search engine Google to educate himself about how to manufacture ice, ultimately setting up and running a reasonably sophisticated lab which was kept clean and tidy and used “proper laboratory equipment”.

The clandestine lab he set up with associate Bradley Paul Vella involved the construction of a dam to collect water, pumps and generators, as well as an electrical network and exhaust equipment to expel vapours.

In March 2017 Vella was sentenced in a Sydney court to six years prison with a non-parole period of four years after he was convicted of manufacturing ice.

Within days of his release in 2019, Queensland Police charged him with trafficking the ice into this state.

Vella’s barrister Peter Nolan submitted to the court on Wednesday that police had no evidence Vella received a lot of money from ice trafficking and that the search engine Google was not a tried and tested method to build an ice lab.

Scene from TV program "Breaking Bad" 05.

Mr Nolan also submitted that police had no evidence that Vella or Levy ever obtained a weapon to recoup debts, as they discussed in the tapped phone call and that people talk up their capacity in phone calls.

In court on Wednesday, Justice Glenn Martin sentenced Vella to four years prison, suspended after serving 18 months, for an operational period of four years.

Vella’s son Joshua Paul Vella has previously been sentenced to three years jail for ice trafficking, the court was told.
Vella’s close-knit family, who are Maltese, were in court to support him.