After a West Auckland builder was yesterday sentenced to five years in prison for collecting what he thought was a shipment of 200kg of meth, Yvonne Tahana looks at the economics behind drug operations.
The value of a large consignment of drugs quickly spirals when you start doing the maths, as Detective Superintendent Greg Williams, head of Police’s National Organised Crime Group, explains.
Asked about the 200kg of meth that Joshua Auina-Anae thought he was picking up from a commercial unit in Hobsonville in November 2023, Williams said you’re looking at “about $130,000 a kilo… that’s a wholesale price”.
Inside police’s fake meth bust that fooled a Kiwi builder – watch on TVNZ+
A quick calculation therefore gives the total price for the shipment, which unbeknown to Auina-Anae had already been intercepted in China, at $26 million.
But Williams isn’t finished.
“Then it’s cut down into ounce prices, which sell for around $5000 an ounce. And then by the time it hits the street, it’s at gram prices which are sitting around $480 to $380 sort of price. Now you’re in the range of $76 million to $96 million.”
So what did Auina-Anae stand to gain for going to collect the haul?
He’d never been in trouble before and worked in construction – in fact, he ran his own business. But he found himself caught up in an international law enforcement effort involving a tip-off from China’s Anti-Smuggling Bureau.
‘Cleanskin’, ‘catcher’ or ‘door’
This led to the meth he was expecting to collect being switched out for a dummy substance. And police and Customs were waiting for him when he went to pick it up in his role as, to use the various terms used, a “cleanskin”, “catcher” or “door”.
The terms all point in roughly the same direction.
Williams said: “The reality is that transnational crime sitting outside the country, and the organised crime groups sitting inside the country, often refer to ‘doors’ – doors into the country.
“So often, a door is, ‘I’ve corrupted someone within the system at the border or someone prepared to take this risk, someone without any criminal history who’s prepared to be the front person or the ‘catcher’, and then they organise the shipment into the country.”
In the Auckland District Court yesterday, Judge Evangelos Thomas heard that Auina-Anae was at the bottom of the chain.
A police DVD recording of the offender’s statement “advised that he received orders to do the job from an unknown person”.
Auina-Anae’s lawyer Jasper Rhodes said his client was expecting payment. “And he’s been candid about that,” he said.
However, he said the amount would be “absolutely disproportionate to the profits that the leading offenders were expecting to earn”.
He wouldn’t be expecting figures in the millions. Williams said he knew of a “catcher” in Christchurch pulling cocaine out of a container who received about $40,000 to take the risk.
“And it comes down to that greed aspect to this, right? And that’s the chilling bit here. These groups cannot operate unless they corrupt people in and around the border or people like this prepared to do it.”
Auina-Anae walked through a different door yesterday and as he begins his time behind bars, he can reflect on whether the amount on offer was worth the risk.
Watch more on this story on TVNZ+
