Dom’s Pizza and Pasta Restaurant used as ‘front’ to sell drugs

A restaurateur has been sentenced in court on drug trafficking charges after police repeatedly watched customers walking out of his Sunshine pizza shop without food.

Dom's Pizza & Pasta Restaurant was raided by police on August 19 amid suspicions the owner was selling drugs from the business.

The owner of a Sunshine pizza restaurant who turned his business into a drug-trafficking front after police secretly watched customers enter and leave without “pizza boxes”, has escaped a jail sentence.

Police raided the Durham Rd premises of Dom’s Pizza and Pasta Restaurant on August 19 when they found Goran Bijeljic with 5g of ice and $1932 in cash hidden in his trousers.

A search of the building found 55g of cannabis, two small bottles of 1,4 butanediol, a Taser and a bowie knife.

As police searched the business, a customer walked in and admitted she was there to buy meth.

“Going to ask him to meet me in the kitchen and have it done up already,” a text message to a friend said of the $140 deal.

An investigation of the 52-year-old’s phone uncovered a number of messages organising the sale of drugs on previous occasions.

Bijeljic reappeared in the Sunshine Magistrates’ Court on Friday for sentencing after pleading guilty to trafficking methamphetamine and cannabis, dealing with the proceeds of crime, possession of prohibited weapons and committing an indictable offence while on bail earlier in the week.

The court heard Bijeljic had been jailed for two and a half years in 2008 for his part in a 50 person trafficking syndicate, which was selling drugs across Melbourne’s western suburbs.

On Friday, the court heard the restaurateur had been found suitable for a community-based sentence, leading magistrate Amina Bhai to impose a 12-month community corrections order after taking into account the 64 days he’d spent in custody.

He was also ordered to complete 75 hours of unpaid community work.

His lawyer Ahmet Yucel said he had been running the shop as a legitimate business for 31 years and it had suffered through Covid lockdowns.

“It’s his passion, it’s what he does,” he said. “He lives and breathes pizza.”

He said Bijeljic had told investigators the business had collapsed during Covid, down to about a dozen pizzas a night.

“While he’s in custody an acquaintance is running the restaurant but that’s only a temporary set-up,” he said. “He wants to get back to work.”

But Senior Constable Sean Armstrong argued the pizza shop was a “front business”, saying police believed it was not able to operate “at a scale you’d expect from a pizza shop”.

“A review of the state of the messy kitchen led police to contact the Sunshine Council, which issued a notice to cease operations,” he said.

“It‘s been open as a pizza shop, but through our observations no one was leaving there with a pizza box.”