Groote Eylandt drug dealer Mareko Nai ‘caught red handed’ in cannabis selfie

An NT drug dealer sent his Qld supplier a photograph of himself with 4.5kg of cannabis. Days later, police were on his doorstep.

Chief Justice Michael Grant said Nai sold the drug at the ‘customarily inflated price’ of $100 per gram.

A Top End drug dealer “caught red handed” after snapping a selfie “posing with 4.5kg of cannabis” has been banished from the Territory for two years.

Mareko Gibson Nai pleaded guilty in the Supreme Court to commercial drug supply and receiving the proceeds of crime following his arrest on Groote Eylandt in December 2022.

The court heard the 49-year-old moved to the island after the break up of his marriage in 2021 to take up a job with his stepfather doing landscaping.

But when his stepfather was “tragically killed in a car accident shortly thereafter”, Nai lost that employment and started selling cannabis he sourced from a supplier in Cairns instead.

In sentencing, Chief Justice Michael Grant said Nai sold the drug at the “customarily inflated price” of $100 per gram, sending at least $235,000 in proceeds back to his Queensland contact.

On December 15, Nai sent the other man a photograph of himself with 4.5kg of cannabis but Chief Justice Grant said when his home was raided less than a week later, most of the cannabis was unaccounted for and police seized just $3740 in cash.

As a result, Chief Justice Grant said “I suspect you didn’t make any huge amount of money”, instead remitting most of the profits back to his supplier in Cairns.

“Although you weren’t the apex organiser of the operation, the courts have been at pains to point out that middlemen and underlings in these sorts of operations will be subjected to severe punishment because without their involvement, the illicit drug trade couldn’t flourish,” he said.

Nai was due to walk free from jail on Monday after almost eight months’ time served. Picture: Pema Tamang Pakhrin

Chief Justice Grant said while Nai couldn’t be punished twice for both selling cannabis and possessing the proceeds of those sales, the proposition he earned the $235,000 from selling the 4.5kg of the drug was “inherently improbable”.

“You sold in one-gram bags, on that calculation to have generated $235,000 in sales between the 15th and the 22nd of December 2022 would have required you to sell something in the order of 400 gram bags per day,” he said.

In handing Nai a three-year and six-month sentence, suspended after almost eight months’ time served, Chief Justice Grant said he was motivated “solely by greed” and “essentially caught red handed”.

“I haven’t seen anything to indicate that you’re genuinely remorseful in the sense of appreciating the very serious nature of these offences and regretting the deleterious impact of the supply of large quantities of cannabis in the Groote Eylandt community,” he said.

“That’s no doubt due in part to the fact that cannabis use is normalised both on Groote Eylandt generally and in your life specifically.”

In also banishing Nai from the NT for two years as a condition of his suspended sentence, Chief Justice Grant said his previous desire to return to Groote was untenable as the Anindilyakwa Land Council did not want him there.