‘Beer’ text that led to Danielle Hogan’s life imploding, arrest over Sydney cocaine ring
On the outside, 21-year-old Danielle Hogan appeared to have it all. But behind the beachfront Bondi apartment and lavish lifestyle - she was hiding a dark secret.
The glamour of Bondi was the perfect mask, but underneath lay a toxic reality for former party girl Danielle Hogan, whose involvement in the high-octane world of Sydney’s drug scene eventually left her life in tatters.
At just 20 years old, Hogan was a key runner in a multi-million dollar cocaine ring, part of a notorious ‘dial-a-dealer’ syndicate. Today - speaking with a hard-won clarity to former homicide detective Gary Jubelin for his I Catch Killers podcast, that world seems several lifetimes away.
“To be honest, upon reflection recently,” she told former homicide detective Gary Jubelin, “I feel like if I wasn’t arrested, if I wasn’t prosecuted, I would either be a junkie or I’d be dead.”
A traumatic past that created a layer of bad decisions
Hogan’s dramatic fall didn’t begin in a nightclub, but with a fracture to the fabric of her safe reality as a teen. Growing up in Sydney’s affluent North Shore, a harrowing sexual assault in her teens and subsequent court process, in her own words, turned her into a person who was “reckless and selfish.”
“I was 15 at this point. I didn’t know how to handle it. In court, I wasn’t answering questions in the way that was deemed necessary; I completely shut down. I was made out to be a liar, and that broke my heart. So unfortunately, the abusers weren’t even convicted,” she says.
“That was just such a kick in the mouth to me at such a young age, because I thought the system that was supposed to protect me, the one place that I was so scared and so vulnerable being in, pretty much turned against me. So in my mind, from there that just changed me as a person, that made me feel like, what’s the point of being honest anymore?”
By the time Hogan reached Bondi, she was vulnerable, carrying a history of trauma, and - crucially - needed money, after breaking up with a financially abusive partner.
The path into the syndicate was deceptively simple. A friend, sensing her desperation, asked her to help out, but as an initial runner, she didn’t grasp the staggering scale of the operation (a syndicate prosecutors estimated was raking in millions) until she was fully immersed.
“I was living in a Bondi beachfront apartment, and I’m going, ‘how the hell am I gonna afford anything?’ I didn’t want to admit defeat,” she tells Jubelin.
“I didn’t want to run back to my family and basically prove everyone right, saying this is what’s happened. I didn’t want to ask for help. I had a friend who said, ‘look, do … some things several times. Just drop some things off. Very minimal.’ The whole thing was very downplayed in my mind, I thought, ‘sweet, every second person in the eastern suburbs at the time was doing cocaine. So I thought it was nothing.”
A role in a much bigger game
Hogan quickly became a cog in a perfectly oiled machine. The scheme was a professional drug delivery service with a simple premise: customers would use simple codewords, casually texting to ask for ‘beers’ for a cocaine delivery, which she’d fulfil, making just $25 each drop. In this murky, highly competitive world, she realised she was an anomaly: she was the only woman in the area doing it.
“I was just a pretty face, and unfortunately, I was the only female that was available in the eastern suburbs at the time,” says Hogan.
“So at first I played on that, knowing how much money I could make, but then I got to a point where it made me sick.”
“I’d wake up every morning with anxiety, like something sitting on my chest,” she recalls, explaining that after confiding in her flatmate, she worked up the nerve to tell her parents what was going on.
“It was my 21st birthday, and I told them everything. They said, ‘Be honest, do the right thing, get out of this.’”
After concocting a story that her partner had discovered her criminal activities and forced her to stop, Hogan sent a text to her bosses, handed back all the drugs and - so she thought - walked away unscathed.
Until two weeks later.
‘We’re going to make an example of you’
The arrest came in a brutal spectacle. Police raided Hogan’s Bondi apartment in November 2019 after having collected surveillance evidence that incriminated her. She says officers were chillingly direct about the public nature of her downfall, telling her as she was taken into custody: “Sorry, we are going to make an example of you.”
Hogan describes the immediate aftermath - in which she was taken to Surry Hills on remand for a week and a half - as “terrifying”. Totally unprepared for prison, her most vivid recollection is being made to shower in front of male prisoners, a moment of utter dehumanisation and what she describes as “literally hell in a cell.”
And then came the conviction. Charged with five drug-related offences, the then-24-year-old was eventually sentenced to three years and 10 months imprisonment.
“I was thrown into a dry cell, strip-searched, all the rest of it,” she says.
“And that was the pivotal moment for me. Everyone always says it’s when you’re arrested or when you spend a few days in jail, whatever. No, no, no. That was the moment that I was like, this shit needs to change now.”
A redemption arc and a second chance at life
Released on parole after serving 17 months in jail, Hogan has a determinedly optimistic view of her time behind bars, horrific as it was.
“Jail was one of the best things that ever happened to me,” she admits, detailing new career path working at Confit, a gym for ex-prisoners that helps people find meaning through health and fitness as they adjust to life on the outside.
She also works with a program to assist youth offenders released from the juvenile justice system to turn their lives around, believing that more needs to be done to help former inmates reintegrate into society.
“The system doesn’t teach them that they’re worth anything more than that, that they can have a fresh start,” she says.
“But it’s a different story if they’re upskilled, if there’s some form of glistening hope that’s provided to these women. It’s like, OK, you haven’t had that life before, it doesn’t mean you’re not capable of living this one when you get out.”
“It’s not about what you went through,” she concludes thoughtfully, “it’s about what you do with it”.
