Sam Gerrey-Burgess, Justin Murray jailed for MDMA importation role
An NRL hopeful known as ‘the other Sam Burgess’ told how a career ending injury partly paved the way for his descent into the criminal underworld.
Central Sydney
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Samuel Gerrey-Burgess once dreamt of a lucrative rugby league career, signing professional contracts with two rugby league clubs including NRL powerhouse franchise South Sydney Rabbitohs where he was known as the “other Sam Burgess”.
On October 6, 2018 the athlete, along with now 31-year-old butcher Justin Martin Murray, became entangled in a multimillion-dollar drug importation in exchange for cash in the “hundreds, not thousands” of dollars, a court heard.
The two men drove themselves to a Clyde warehouse about 9am to complete the “menial” role of unloading meat mincers from a shipping container sent from Turkey and take out about 371kg of pure MDMA and repackage the drug.
The duo weren’t to know that AFP officers had already uncovered the illegal importation and replaced the contents with worthless powder.
After the men worked for seven hours, police arrived and arrested the pair.
The duo, referred by Judge Dina Yehia as the “unpacking crew”, were found to have no idea of the scale of their role until given instructions shortly before arriving at the warehouse.
Ms Yehia also found the men weren’t involved “in the process of importation”, that there was no evidence they were going to distribute the MDMA, and that they were financially motivated.
“(The reward) was to be modest, in the hundreds not thousands of dollars,” she said.
The court heard Gerrey-Burgess placed some of the blame on bad influences he had been spending time with as his life spiralled following a torn ACL which halted his promising football career.
The 26-year-old is currently serving jail time for an unrelated kidnapping crime, which he committed while on bail for the MDMA offences.
Fatih Adalis, who played a role in co-ordinating the importation, was sentenced to nine years jail with a non-parole period of four and a half years by Judge Yehia last June.
On Monday, Gerrey-Burgess and Murray were convicted of attempting to possess a commercial quantity of an unlawfully imported border-controlled substance and sentenced in the District Court to six years jail.
Both men were given a three year non-parole period and will be eligible for release in 2024.
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