Operation Mike Tyras: How police busted $3m Sunshine Coast drug syndicate

Names, faces, details: The intricate details of a $3m drug syndicate that sourced meth from China and made millions through its Sunshine Coast network can be revealed. WATCH THE VIDEO

The head honchos and top tier dealers of a major drug syndicate that sourced smuggled goods from China and made millions through its Sunshine Coast distribution network can be revealed.

The $3 million syndicate was run by an Esk man through a Brisbane safe house in a network that was one of the region’s largest drug rings.

Meth with purity levels of 80 per cent was shipped throughout the southeast pockets.

For the first time since the investigation closed, police have released intricate details of the 12-month operation that cracked open the syndicate and identified the who’s who of the network.

The syndicate was headed by Luke Perrett and Brad Matthew Watt who were based in the Toowoomba region.

Detective Sergeant Craig Mansfield was part of the operation from day one.

“If you saw them on the street you’d see tradies, you wouldn’t see drug dealers,” Sergeant Mansfield said.

He said like any business people, the dealers had weekly meetings, profit and loss ledgers and paid out bonuses to their “staff”.

Police said the pair had been suspected to have been in business for “years”.

The semi-structured syndicate imported the ice from a Chinese agency who smuggled it in from Sydney every two to three months.

It came wrapped in a Vietnamese community newspaper, sprinkled with pepper and was vacuum sealed.

It was spread throughout the Sunshine Coast, Ipswich and Moreton Bay.

Perrett and Watt co-ordinated the supply of drugs and distributed the drugs through a safe house at Mount Gravatt. It was a shared unit complex, with no glitz or glamour.

The pair used a man only known as “the driver” to deliver the goods.

It was the repeated talk of the driver which lead to the Drug and Serious Crime Task Force catching wind of the syndicate and its web.

The arrests of street level drug dealers by officers from the Sunshine Coast Criminal Investigation Branch all pointed to one man, Adam Charles Johns, aka The Driver.

In June 2014, Operation Mike Tyras was launched.

When the operation closed 12 months later it resulted in 92 people being charged with 214 offences.

Police said the top syndicate had carried out more than 260 individual deals to 24 customers totalling a minimum of 10kg of methamphetamine trafficked with a street value of about $3m.

“We kicked it off in 2014 with covert and overt investigations,” Sergeant Mansfield said.

“In the end we closed on almost 95 targets, the vast majority being drug traffickers in their own right.”

Cash seized by detectives who closed on a multi-level drug syndicate in operation throughout the Sunshine Coast in 2014.

Who was in the syndicate?

Perrett and Watt sourced ice directly from an Asian syndicate which smuggled the drugs into Sydney.

“For them, it all came back to money and they were succeeding pretty well,” Sergeant Mansfield said.

“You don’t go from being a tradie to supplying hundreds of kilos of drugs overnight.

“You have to build up to get to that level, a long, long period of time.”

The driver was employed to deliver the drugs through the southeast to at least 24 customers.

Cash and drugs seized by Sunshine Coast Drug and Serious Crime Task Force as part of the investigation.

Through the driver, the syndicate supplied to at least 10 Sunshine Coast drug traffickers including Rebecca Castner, Craig Barker, Joshua Wilkinson, Robert Daldy, Dean Lacey, Lynda Hill, Reginald Oakhill, Julie-Anne Freier, Carly Wood and Adam Wegner.

“These were all good-level drug dealers in their own right, who had people under them running for them, they were upper-tier suppliers,” Sergeant Mansfield said of the 10.

The 10 traffickers had tiers below them.

“If someone is buying an ounce of meth, 28g, a user quantity is a point. A single use or a toke on a meth pipe is 0.01 of a gram. People would use more in one session depending on their tolerance. So even one gram of meth is 10 points, so anyone can make money off a gram,” he said.

“Here we have people distributing 10kg, that’s a lot of users at the end.”

Operation Mike Tyras closed in June 2015 and resulted in 92 people charged.

Sergeant Mansfield said there was a significant hole in the market after the closure.

Perrett was sentenced to six years jail in the Brisbane Supreme Court on February 21, 2018 to charges of drug trafficking, drug possession and other drug related matters. He was set a parole eligibility date of January 2020.

Watt was sentenced to six years jail in the Brisbane Supreme Court on January 16, 2018 to charges of drug trafficking, drug possession and other drug related matters. He was set a parole eligibility date of June 2020.

Johns was sentenced to five years jail in the Brisbane Supreme Court on July 26, 2017 to one count of drug trafficking and several other matters. His sentence was suspended for a period of five years after serving 20 months.

Castner was sentenced to 10 years jail in the Brisbane Supreme Court to one count of drug trafficking and several other matters. There was no parole eligibility date declared.

Barker was sentenced to eight years jail in the Brisbane Supreme Court on July 12, 2017 to more than 50 charges including drug trafficking and weapons possession. He was set a parole eligibility date of March 2018.

Wilkinson was sentenced to six and a half years jail in the Brisbane Supreme Court on November 2, 2016 to drug trafficking and several other matters. He was given a parole eligibility date of December 2017.

Daldy was sentenced to nine years jail in the Brisbane Supreme Court on March 16, 2017 to drug trafficking and several other matters. He was set a parole eligibility date of March 1, 2022.

Lacey was sentenced to nine years jail in the Brisbane Supreme Court on July 19, 2018 to drug trafficking and several other matters. He was set a parole eligibility date of November 27, 2022.

Oakhill was sentenced to five years jail in the Brisbane Supreme Court on May 30, 2017 to drug trafficking and several other matters. Oakhill’s sentence was suspended after serving 692 days.

Freier was sentenced to five years jail in the Brisbane Supreme Court on March 1, 2017 to drug trafficking and several other matters. Freier’s sentence was suspended for an operational period of five years.

Hill was sentenced to five years jail in the Brisbane Supreme Court on June 13, 2018 to drug trafficking and several other matters. Hill’s sentence wholly suspended with no parole eligibility date declared.

Wood was sentenced to six years jail in the Brisbane Supreme Court on December 15, 2016 to drug trafficking and several other matters. She was set a parole eligibility date of December 14, 2018.

Wegner was sentenced to four years jail in the Brisbane Supreme Court on April 26, 2017 to drug trafficking and two other matters. Wegner was set a parole eligibility date for June 2018.

On Thursday, we unveil the second part to this series: how a painter with no criminal history turned into a drug trafficker virtually overnight.

Read more of this series in the print edition of the Sunshine Coast Daily which will be available weekly on Fridays, starting August 27.

Originally published as Operation Mike Tyras: How police busted $3m Sunshine Coast drug syndicate