A West Auckland builder is today starting a jail sentence for importing what he thought was 200kgs of the drug methamphetamine.
Joshua Auina-Anae was expecting to collect what Judge Evangelos Thomas called one of our biggest commercial methamphetamine importations.
But he found himself at the centre of an international law enforcement operation involving China’s Anti-Smuggling Bureau (ASB), NZ Customs and Police.
The drugs had been switched out en route from China and he was picked up by New Zealand police when he went to collect the haul.
Today Auina-Anae was sentenced at the Auckland District Court to five years in prison. He had previously admitted attempting to possess meth for supply.
Suspicions in China
The attempted drug importation first raised suspicions in China on October 16, 2023.
Court documents reveal the ASB examined a consignment of two pallets of granite and found the meth stashed inside.
Officers removed the drugs and replaced them with a dummy substance before tipping off New Zealand officers. The granite then left aboard the ship the NYK FUSHIMI from Yantian Port.
It landed at Ports of Auckland on November 7 that year with Customs and police working on a planned “managed delivery”.
The granite slabs left the port on November 16 for a freight forwarding company at Airport Oaks and then onto an Avondale storage facility.
On November 28 at about 1.15pm a truck, not involved in the importation, picked up the granite and was followed by a Hiace van registered to Auina-Anae.
The vehicles then travelled across the city to a Hobsonville commercial space where the slabs were dropped off. Auina-Anae was observed coming and going from a unit there.
At 3.21pm, members of the police’s special tactics group arrested Auina-Anae inside the unit.
The statement of facts before the court said: “Mr Auina-Anae had smashed the top of one of the granite slabs and had begun accessing the area where the drugs had previously been stored.
“Mr Auina-Anae had removed the thin layer of placebo from the top and exposed scoria-type rocks underneath.”
When officers busted in he had begun placing the dummy substance he thought was meth into containers and had a sledgehammer and crowbar.
In a statement to police, Auina-Anae said he received orders to do the job from an unknown person.
‘Bottom of the chain’
In the Auckland District Court this afternoon Auina-Anae’s lawyer Jasper Rhodes said his client was the definition of a “capture”, someone who was at “the bottom of the chain” and “responsible for taking all the risk” but not expecting the profits of those at the top of the operation.
Auina-Anae nodded when Judge Thomas told him he had previously been a person of “good character” who had let down his supporters. They filled out the public gallery and their soft crying could be heard throughout the sentencing.
Judge Thomas said police caught Auina-Anae “redhanded” after he’d extracted what he thought was methamphetamine, also making the point that if it had been the drug Auina-Anae would’ve been facing life imprisonment.
Judge Thomas noted his sentencing starting point was eight years’ imprisonment and listed pleading early, previous good character and time already served as possible discount factors of about 45%.
Still, Judge Thomas told the court that applying all of them wouldn’t have done justice to the scale of the offending.
“This was one of the biggest attempts to manufacture and to import methamphetamine that we have seen. There is a incalculable public interest in deterring methamphetamine crime of any kind,” he said.
“Having said that, I must still impose the lowest sentence that I possibly can for you, and I do that.
“Your sentence is five years in prison.”
* 1News will have further coverage on the operation to catch Auina-Anae tomorrow.
