Hells Angels drug dealer Daniel Brown jailed for four years, banished from the Territory

A Darwin Hells Angels associate who sold $45,000 worth of meth while on bail for earlier drug charges has been jailed for four years and banished from the NT.

A DARWIN Hells Angels associate who sold $45,000 worth of meth while on bail for earlier drug charges has been jailed for four years and banished from the NT.

Daniel Brown, 28, pleaded guilty in the Supreme Court to supplying a commercial quantity of the drug last year.

The court heard police had been tapping Brown’s mobile phone after he was convicted in the Local Court of possessing meth and recorded him making 67 individual sales of between 0.25g and 1.75g.

In sentencing, Chief Justice Michael Grant said Brown was jailed for a month for earlier offending in June but resumed his illicit trade “immediately” upon his release.

Chief Justice Grant said Brown sold a total of 54.14g of meth after getting out of jail and had “provided absolutely no assistance to authorities” in identifying his supplier.

“That is perhaps understandable because what is known, however, is that you procured the methamphetamine – at least those lots after your release from prison in July 2020 – from the Hells Angels clubhouse and you are properly characterised as an associate of that particular group,” he said.

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“That is not a matter that works to your credit.”

Chief Justice Grant said Brown’s life had been going “extraordinarily well” before a relationship breakdown in 2016 caused him to leave Victoria for the NT where he went “off the rails”.

“You ultimately had no fixed place of address,” he said.

“Your life revolved around procuring methamphetamine, using methamphetamine and supplying methamphetamine.”

Chief Justice Grant said while he did not accept Brown was a “small time” dealer, his involvement in the drug trade was “a long way down the rung in a larger supply chain”.

“I also accept that your supply activity was in part to support your own habit, that the use of methamphetamine was unfortunately normalised in the circle of people that you hung around with and that you were not any sort of drug kingpin who was making hundreds of thousands of dollars out of it,” he said.

“I can only hope, however, that the time that you spend in prison and the enforced abstinence from methamphetamine during that imprisonment … makes any form of formal rehabilitation unnecessary.”

In suspending Brown’s sentence after 18 months, Chief Justice Grant said imposing a non-parole period would deprive him of the support of his family back home in Victoria.

As a condition of his release, Brown was banished from the Territory for the remaining two years and six months of his sentence.

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