Umina Beach drug dealer Mark Chartres-Abbott has jail sentenced slashed on appeal
One of three people sentenced with the supply of `ice’ and guns to an undercover police officer on the peninsula has had his jail term slashed on appeal.
Central Coast
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Umina Beach drug dealer Mark Chartres-Abbott will be eligible for parole on May 25, 2025, after he appealed the “manifest excess” of his 14-year sentence.
The 66-year-old was jailed for three drug trafficking charges and two firearm offences in August last year. A number of other offences on a Form 1 certificate were taken into account at the time of his sentencing.
However he appealed the severity of his sentence with the Supreme Court of Criminal Appeal on Wednesday reducing his head sentence to 10 years and his non-parole period from eight years and six months to six years.
The court found while the sentencing Judge had not erred, other separate offenders who had pleaded guilty to similar offences but had sold higher quantities of drugs and more dangerous weapons had been granted lighter sentences.
The appellant court also accepted his role was as a “middle man, there clearly being others higher in the hierarchy” and the two working firearms were “single-shot, not semiautomatic, weapons”.
Chartres-Abbott, also known as Norman Frances Smith, was arrested on May 24, 2019, after Brisbane Water Police established Strike Force Basic in November 2018 to investigate the supply of the drug `ice’ around Woy Woy and Umina.
On four separate occasions between April and May 2019, Chartres-Abbott supplied a total of 372.63g of methylamphetamine to an undercover cop or his co-offender Dean William Maxwell Phillips, 40, who onsold it to the undercover operative, for a total of $54,800.
When police raided Chartres-Abbott’s Umina Beach home they seized more drugs, $94,285 in cash and three firearms and ammunition buried in PVC pipes in the backyard. Two of the rifles were operational and one had nine rounds in a magazine.
The total amount of drugs involved was about 1.6kg.
The sentencing court heard Chartres-Abbott was a long-time heroin user with a lengthy criminal record who was on the methadone program before a chance meeting with an old acquaintance saw him become “reinvolved in the drug milieu”.
In a letter to the court Chartres-Abbott claimed he was forced to supply drugs by bikies who would drop them off and return later for the cash.
“My role became a burden,” he wrote. “I didn’t have the strength to stop it.”
His downstream supplier and co-offender Phillips was sentenced to eight years jail with a non-parole period of four years and 10 months after pleading guilty to knowingly taking part in the ongoing supply of drugs and unlawfully selling three firearms to the undercover police officer.
It came after the undercover officer befriended Phillips, who later introduced him to his up-line supplier in Chartres-Abbott.
Chartres-Abbott’s former partner Deborah Mulholland, 54, who was living with him at the time, was sentenced to an intensive corrections order for 11 months and 17 days after pleading guilty to knowingly taking part in the supply of drugs and possessing a prohibited drug after police found 17g of cannabis during the raid on their Lentara Rd property.
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