The town, an hour south of Darwin on the Stuart Hwy, is a world apart from the bright lights and titty bars of Kings Cross, where Kontorinakis, the former “porn king” of Sydney spent much of the 1980s and 1990s as a second-tier power figure on the corrupt Golden Mile.

Kontorinakis, sentenced on Wednesday to 14 years in jail, had come to the Top End to reinvent himself.

The former Sydney grub merchant, who boasted of still dabbling in the flesh trade until his arrest, had grand plans to flood the Territory’s hungry drug market with high-grade Queensland methamphetamine.

Kontorinakis, also known as Con Kostas and Kostas Kontorinakis, had a habit of collecting nicknames.

To his new mates in the meth trade he was “The Hamburglar”.

In the late 1980s, he had the “well deserved” nickname of “Salami Con” because, in the indelicate words of colourful Sydney identity John Ibrahim, “anyone who deals with Salami Con ends up copping a salami — or in plain English, you get f*cked over”.

Infamously, one of Kontorinakis’s associates once started a scuffle across the road from Porky’s Nite Spot, in which a young Ibrahim was knifed and disembowelled. In his book, The Last King of the Cross, Ibrahim says his big brother Sam beat Kontorinakis to a pulp over his henchman’s carelessness.

Kontorinakis had only ever served time for a bashing he arranged on behalf of his long-time crony and Sydney crime boss Lennie McPherson.

But while in jail, an ICAC report concluded, Kontorinakis greased the palms of crooked prison guard Robert Brown.

As if that weren’t enough, a 1999 Police Integrity Commission uncovered, Kontorinakis was also keeping corrupt former detective Roger Rogerson in on “the laugh”.

Just shy of 20 years after finishing up his sentence at rural NSW’s Grafton jail, Kontorinakis would find himself back behind bars.

When Kontorinakis pulled into a seemingly random roadblock just south of Adelaide River on the evening of July 3 last year, it was an NT Police sniffer dog, Cougar, who got the first whiff of meth.

Cougar confirmed what Queensland’s elite anti-bikie and anti-organised crime unit — Taskforce Maxima — had suspected.

Specialist surveillance police had tailed Kontorinakis into the roadblock, which was manned largely by drug squad detectives dressed in uniform, to dupe Kontorinakis into thinking he hadn’t been targeted.

At precisely 2.07pm the next day, Detective Senior Sergeant Justin Bentley hit pay dirt, the culmination of thousands of hours of steady policing in the Territory and beyond.

In the forensics compound at Territory Police headquarters on Darwin’s outskirts, Sen-Sgt Bentley found 15 vacuum packed bags of meth expertly stashed in the roof lining of the grey Ford Ranger police had seized from Kontorinakis.

Syndicate middleman Dean Kingston, a washed up former bodybuilder from Upper Caboolture who would later become a rollover witness, had loaned the ute to Kontorinakis for the trip north.

Facing the prospect of a lengthy jail term himself, Kingston would turn snitch on the man he once said he would be “friends for life” with.

Kontorinakis’s three week trial came with all the trimmings — police surveillance, phone taps, literal bags of cash and death threats.

There were tropical business identities, equal parts colourful and shady — whose names are mostly suppressed — who allegedly had deep links to the drug trade while also running respectable businesses by day.

At one point, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Graham had to turf a member of a known local crime family out of court, when police raised concerns the man was there to intimidate Kingston.

Kingston’s evidence, according to Crown Prosecutor David Morters, was “icing on the cake” of an already strong case.

Kingston, who got nothing out of the drug ploy but debt and legal strife, was about to give Kontorinakis a salami of his own.

Mr Morters told the jury Kingston “is a drug dealer, there’s no doubt about it”, who went into the meth trade after his own addiction, legitimate business acumen and dodgy mates made it seem like an offer too good to refuse.

“I was going to make quite a substantial amount of money, no doubt about it,” Kingston said, adding he expected to see a return on his investment when drug shipments reached 40oz or so, an amount worth more than $1 million on the streets of Darwin. Police had been listening in to Kingston and Kontorinakis’s foul-mouthed phone calls for months by the time the two — along with more than 30 others — were arrested.

A reporter once wrote Kontorinakis used the English language “the way schoolgirls play hopscotch”.

“He jumps on to a word and then looks desperately for a second one. If he can’t find it, he substitutes four-letter words, mostly starting with F.”

Kingston at one point boasted on the phone he and Kontorinakis would be “multi-millionaires in f*ckin’ two years”.

The two spoke of their burgeoning drug empire in the Northern Territory in an obvious code, under the guise of Kingston’s legitimate business, installing and servicing lifts.

“I might transport … all the tooling I need to get up there, you know, because it’ll be job after job, so we’ll take a lot of tooling up there,” Kingston said. He suggested they should rent a “small f*ckin’ shed” to save them from “dragging all the heavy sh*t around every day”.

When one of Kingston and Kontorinakis’s associates made off with money owed to a group of Nomads bikies, Kingston told Kontorinakis the man was “on the f*ckin’ run from … the f*ckin’ push bike riders club.”

Despite the precautions they took, it seemed Kingston never suspected police might be listening in.

In one of the last phone calls before he was arrested, he told alleged drug wholesaler Shawn Gibb, “f*ckin’, imagine if anyone every listened to this f*ckin’ sick conversation”. At the start of more than two days of evidence, Kingston had made it plain the two were discussing “drug distribution in the Northern Territory in large quantities”, a claim which Kontorinakis flatly denied.

If the conversations were coded, Justice Graham would later tell the jury, they were “not like an Enigma machine”. The pair were setting themselves up for a fall.

Kingston said it was his personal dealer who first put him in touch with Kontorinakis, an introduction which would seal the former underworld figure’s fate. “(The dealer) had a long relationship with Mr Kontorinakis and he wanted to make a heap of money distributing good grade drugs in the NT,” Kingston said. “The market down in Queensland was a pretty flooded market ... you’d maybe get $4000 or $4500 an ounce for the same quality ... they could get up to $14,000 an ounce in the NT.”

Kingston said the shipments began with a few eight-ball samples which Kontorinakis probably stuffed down his jocks and jumped on a plane to Darwin with.

When Kingston later flew to the NT capital, police were watching, snapping pictures of him and Kontorinakis wandering around town and chatting on the balcony of Kontorinakis’s Waterfront apartment.

Kontorinakis still wore one of the lairy shirts that were the signature of his glory days in Kings Cross, where he ran the Eros Cinema and purportedly had stakes in the Lady Jane lap dance parlour and Tudor Court escort agency.

During his trial, Kontorinakis looked the archetype of a washed up organised crime figure, as he sat in the dock wearing a daggy tracksuit top and sporting a ratty grey ponytail.

Kontorinakis, the man who had grown up in a Greek orphanage and who came to Australia penniless for an arranged marriage, before climbing up the ranks of Sydney’s underworld, had been reduced to begging for legal aid.

He had spent his last night as a free man staying in what his defence lawyer Jon Tippet QC described as “a two or three-star hotel” at the cheap end of Darwin’s Mitchell St party strip.

For nearly two days in the stand, Kontorinakis spun what Justice Graham later described as a “cock and bull story” story about his innocence and legitimate business plans.

At times his memory betrayed him, and at one point he said, in his thick Greek accent, “before this court case I don’t know what methamphetamine is”. It took the jury of seven men and five women less than two hours — including a lunch break — to find him guilty of four of the five counts he had been charged with.

Justice Graham was scathing of the self-described businessman and caring father who was seemingly blind to the lives his planned meth empire would destroy.

“He did not care about the damage he would do, the lives he would ruin and the families he would see torn apart by the drugs he ladled out to this city, probably largely to the youth of our community,” Justice Graham said. “I have no doubt, but for fine police work both in Queensland and the Northern Territory, the Darwin market for methamphetamine would have been substantially augmented by the drugs brought in pursuant to this scheme.”

Kontorinakis, in frail health, will be eligible for parole in 2023.