Tonight,... the gloves are off in the war on drugs. Detecting the dealers,... He just stuck a drill through the back and identified just over 10 kilos of heroin. ...and the growers... The largest ever seizure of dried cannabis. ...as the stakes are raised by methamphetamine. They become very paranoid. Mickey! (SCREAMS) GUNSHOT Captions by Anna Bracewell-Worrall. Edited by Virginia Philp. www.tvnz.co.nz/access-services Captions were made possible with funding from NZ On Air. Copyright TVNZ Access Services 2013 Like it or not, the demand for dangerous drugs never slows,... ROCK MUSIC ...and the drug dealers never sleep. While the drug of choice changes over time, the demand for getting high does not. Every time a new drug appears on the scene, police detectives must find news ways to stop the rot. Don't move! We're among the highest users of methamphetamine worldwide. They're more violent. Daily we see victims from drugs in one way or another. DRAMATIC MUSIC Cannabis has many names but the saying, 'Growing like a weed,' has never been more appropriate than in 1997, when detectives first heard whispers of the mother lode. I got a call from a detective in Whangarei, who` who sorta said this question ` I've got` been told of a massive cannabis-growing operation in the middle of the Whanganui National Park. Dave Kirby was working in Wanganui at the time of the investigation dubbed Operation Ragwort. Around a similar time, I had a pilot contact me and say, 'I was flying over the Whanganui National Park, 'and I saw the biggest cannabis-growing operation that I've ever seen.' If you were to find a place that, uh, is the furthest from any road-end, they were pretty close to there. Mike Hill soon joined the team of detectives gathering information on the dope plantation, with help from the air force. Yeah, Skyhawks flew over the plots. Um, using the cameras that they had, and allowing us, with those photographs, to get an idea of the dimensions and the heights of the cannabis plants. We knew that at some stage, we would have to seize the cannabis and confront what we knew would be armed offenders. A reconnaissance unit from the elite and heavily armed Special Tactics Group went bush to search out the camp of men thought to be living on the huge plot. TENSE MUSIC After tracking several days through thick forest to get as close as safely possible, the STG team actually crossed paths with their targets. Oi! How you goin'? Who are you? Who are you? We're the Army, up here on a training exercise. 'Our police staff had a cover story ` we were lost,...' Wouldn't happen to know where River Valley is, would ya? Yeah, yeah. '...so they point us in the right direction and the police staff came out.' Right. We better crack on, then. Catch ya, mate. Problem was that we didn't know whether they'd bought our story, and it turned out that they actually rung the Army and asked them, 'Do you have any army men doing any exercises in the National Park?' and obviously, the response at that stage was, 'No, we don't. Not that we're aware of.' So we found out later they've all flown out of the plots. As luck would have it, the police had already planned with the Army to be based in Waiuru when they raided the dope plots, so detectives got the Army to make a phone call back, saying there were, in fact, soldiers in the bush on an exercise.' Yeah, gidday, mate. It's Dave here in Waiuru. 'I was the SAS. We didn't know about it, because they didn't tell us what they were doing.' The guys are very very embarrassed. They've lost some points during the exercise and you're trying to keep that pretty quiet. What we were then able to monitor was that, following that conversation, our offenders felt safe ` it wasn't the police ` moved back in and carried on the cultivation. TENSE MUSIC (SQUEALS) (SQUEALS) Hey, give her a feed. For the first time ever, the full force of the Special Tactics Group was sent into the field. Stealth was vital as members tracked through the bush for days, quietly surrounding the camp. TENSE MUSIC Armed police! Don't move! PEOPLE CLAMOUR, SHOUT The four men were heavily armed, but heavily outnumbered and caught totally by surprise. No chance to fight back. And only now could police start examining the extraordinary scene. Electrified fence well set up; insulators. And this brings us into plot four, and, um, you can see signs of the cannabis plantation and, um, the maturity of the plants. Very healthy plants. OK, here we are back at the drying room, or one of the drying rooms. Uh, it's a 13m by 6m structure. The wires are set-up here to` to dry the cannabis plants and for stripping, and you can see the stripped cannabis plants down here. There's, um, a large` a large pile of it. And then they'd built netting shelving through these drying sheds, with gas blowers in there that were drying the cannabis, and they had two sheds of this sort of size. In fact, they couldn't keep up with the cannabis they were harvesting, and some of it was rotten. They had solar power, water pumps to pump water. See the generator system that they've got set up now? And the electric cords that are running up to the offenders' campsite to` obviously to run their TV and video and other equipment they've got there? There was so much gear at the camp, the growers had used a mate's helicopter to fly it all in. An array of tools ` chainsaws, cutting equipment, um, batteries set up here, there's battery chargers. Spray equipment here for spraying the plants. There's a kitchen area, cell phone. And we had two Iroquois helicopters flying five or six days, then getting all the stuff out. Can` Not just the cannabis, but all the equipment and the extras that was` were in there. We still pulled another nearly 5000 cannabis plants, many up to 2m tall, out of the ground. Some of the plots were up to 200m long, and we seized 600kg of dried cannabis, which is the largest ever seizure of dried cannabis ever in NZ. NEWS PRESENTER: The three men were remanded in custody after changing their pleas to guilty. Obviously we're relieved it's the end of three years' hard work from a team of police officers. We're relieved that it's over and that it's ended it way. The criminal gang called themselves the FTWs, claiming that it stood for their motto, 'Free the weed.' But unfortunately on their insignia had FTW, but the words, 'Fuck the world' tattooed across the` the head of the skull. Operation Ragwort would mark the beginning of the end of the vast outdoor plantations, as indoor cannabis growing began to take off. Much harder for detectives to spot a plantation from the air when it's hidden indoors. It used to be bush-grown cannabis, and sold in bullets ` in that fashion, but more and more, because of the success of our helicopter eradication programmes flying above the bush and destroying the crops from above, it's gone indoors, and there's a lot of hydroponic growing of cannabis. Instead of the growing season they used to have between October and April, um, the crops the` they'd harvest once a year. You can now grow cannabis every single day of the year in an environment that is contained. You've got pest-free, it's got the correct amount of CO2, it's got the right light. They're getting quality cannabis as a result and big money too. One such set-up was found at the Auckland factory of clothing label Insidious Fix, till high-flying label owner, Jason Crawford was busted by police. Auckland clothing label Insidious Fix enjoyed a high profile on the fashion runways, till Jason Crawford's clothing factory was visited by drug squad detectives. My friendly neighbour could smell cannabis and thought there was some odd goings on. Cos we couldn't find our way into this building, we asked if he could kick a hole in his wall. He kindly said we could, so we kicked a small hole in his Gib board, and when we shone a torch through, we could see a massive cannabis-growing operation in this building; probably the most sophisticated cannabis-growing set-up I've seen indoors in my career. The set-up was accessed by secret tunnels carefully hidden behind false walls. PRESENTER: It took the jury only three hours to decide Jason Crawford was guilty on all 12 charges. Crawford was sentenced to six years in prison. UNSETTLING MUSIC The drug-growers methods may have changed over time, but the tactics that detectives use to catch them are tried and true. They wait,... they watch... and they listen. In 1978 the amendments to the Misuse of Drugs Act allowed the police to apply to the High Court for a warrant to intercept private com` communications. A` And this is a huge step forward, because prior to that, uh, that sort of evidence was never admissible in any court in NZ. I was part of an investigation team that got the first interception warrant, and we had the technicians install these listening devices in the house, and we had to have our listening devices within 50yd of this house, so we rented a house down the road and, of course, the local villain, he knew a lot of policemen, so you couldn't just come and go a` at will, so at 3am in the morning, we used to swap shifts, and we'd go to the house, walk up the street, quietly let ourselves in, the other guys would leave, and by the time they'd been dropped off, it was 5.30 in the morning, so made for a pretty long shift of somewhere in the vicinity of 28 to 30 hours, of which you were awake the whole time and listening to, a lot of the time, people snoring and doing nothing, but all of the` the conversations were recorded. We talk about interception warrants. Someone has to do the legwork and you've gotta listen to the conversation, so I was a monitor, so I was the one who listened for 12-hour shifts and typed what I heard and what needed to be listened to again and what was evidential. Catherine McEvedy honed her typing skills over four months on the rural West Coast, working a wire tap on a cocaine importation. It's very hard to operate undetected in a small country town, as I'm sure you can imagine. Our cover story is we were soil scientists with the PSIR. We were in a caravan, parked up, and I think it was summertime, cos we used to go surfing in our breaks. We had our wee desk with our wee computer, and we'd just type away and, uh, listen and wish we were out in the sun, because it was a beautiful day. They'd sleep in. They'd probably get up about 9 or 10. And the first thing they'd do is turn the stereo up, and they'd play it really loud. ROCK MUSIC So the difficulty was, it was a little shack ` a bach ` so every time it rained, it was a tin roof. The rain tipped down, so you couldn't hear a thing, so it made the job quite hard. ROCK MUSIC MUFFLED ROCK MUSIC We found through the operation that he owned this block of dirt, and we couldn't track him. We couldn't keep him in sight, cos we couldn't see where he went. but we know he wasn't gone for long, so we had a rough idea of how much searching we'd have to do, and we were really lucky on the day of termination that one of our cops went in there and, uh, was scuffing around going,... (GROANS) and then kicked his foot on the ground and hit something, and we started digging, and we found an ammunition tin,... TENSE MUSIC ...which was full of cocaine, so we had our product; we had our man; and we had enough evidential to, um, put him away. DRAMATIC MUSIC It used to be, you know, landline telephones that you'd intercept, but now no one talks on a landline telephone. It` Cell phones are still around, but you` now you have Skype, you've got encrypted emails ` just the technology where drug dealers and suppliers can communicate's changed. The technology now allows us to beam conversations a considerable distance, um, and of course, the ability to, uh, decipher what has been recorded has improved significantly now. Gone are the days where a wire job would be English conversations. The majority of them now are all in foreign dialects. They're in either Cantonese, Mandarin, they're in Farsi, um, they've been in Spanish, um, there is Igbo ` I think, uh, a West African dialect, so we have interpreters from all different walks of life and nationalities that are doing our interpretation for us. So it's` it's really a game between our techos and the abilities of the criminal and what's around there to work out what is available, what can we use? And` And if they are using this type of medium, how do we intercept it? How we make, uh, entry and what we do in order to install listening devices is for me to know, and hopefully, you'll never find out. A successful drug bust takes a lot of careful planning, but a lucky break doesn't hurt, either, as Greg Williams recalls from a bust early in his career. LSD was coming out as just plain blue squares, and we knew there was a link to` to one of our Wellington gangs, but we didn't know who was bringing it in. We ran this electronic job on this senior patch member, and I was a transcriber on that job, and one Tuesday morning, out of the blue, this, um, guy wanders in, knocks on the door, comes in, American accent, and he was the importer. Greg listened to the American importer boasting. He said he'd been active for 20 years and now had a major client base that he was supplying and even how he was smuggling the LSD into NZ ` disguised as plain blue paper. The drugs, he said, were in a leather folder in his hotel room. Unfortunately the gang member was in Southland trying to buy a Harley, so he arranged with this woman to do the swap over of money and the drugs, and the place he picked to do it was the park right in front of the drug squad, and sure enough, he meets her at the` at the appointed time right in front of us and the money gets exchanged. I just sat there watching it. I didn't even have to get out of my seat, and she gets grabbed and he gets grabbed and of course he's thinking, we don't know anything, cos he just didn't look like anything either. He was a balding sort of guy in his mid-40s, and, we went and executed the warrant in his unit. Sure enough, detectives found the leather folder in the unit, with 10,000 tabs of LSD hidden inside. He didn't think anything of it until we sat him down and played the tape, and I can remember his jugular just going... (IMITATES BLOOD PUMPING) when he realised what had happened. Drug dealer are always coming up with new ways to smuggle drugs into the country, and detectives have to be just as clever at finding them. Hmmm. Ooh, enough window-shopping! It's time to make your choice in the first referendum on the New Zealand flag. Just rank the five options, then pop them in the post by Tuesday. I've made my decision. How about you? Call 0800 36 76 56 or visit elections.org.nz. TENSE MUSIC Right from the early days of heroin importing, drug dealers have constantly dreamed up clever ways to smuggle drugs into the country. The challenge for detectives like Ted Cox is to stay one step ahead. There was some cheap heroin coming on to the street, and Miles, who had been involved in importation of, um, major drugs in the past, was the importer. Miles arrived at Barry's place one day carrying these shoes, and we had a lovely picture of him with these Adidas shoes. When Miles was followed away from that a` that address, uh, he eventually dropped some rubbish off at a nearby shopping centre, and the guys who were actually following him recovered that rubbish, opened it up and here's a pair of running shoes that had been ripped apart, and cos we're fairly smart, of course, we, uh, realised that this was the importation method. Detectives busting the drug ring days later immediately found proof of the importation method at the crim's hideout. We went to the motel, and we found one of these bags. It was a perfect imprint on the bag of heroin that was the Adidas with the emblem and the shoe size, so it had actually been worn in ` totally compressed ` almost like a fingerprint. And it's still a method tried on by crims today. 10 Malaysian drug couriers were stopped at Auckland Airport in early 2011 with some $10 million of pure methamphetamine hidden in their shoes. They had itineraries that were in English, but they don't speak English, and they really couldn't purport to be in NZ for legitimate reasons. Creating closer relationships with foreign border agencies has also proved fruitful for detectives. Some pictures ` well, you'd call them pictures ` um, they got taken into a DHL company over in Bangkok. The freighting for them to go to NZ was something like the equivalent of NZ$400, whereas looking at the paintings as they were, you'd be lucky to get $5 for them from a flea market, so the DHL officer at that stage over there thought it was a bit suspicious, and they were a` like a resin painting. They were approximately 2 inches to 3 inches thick, and so he just got a drill bit out after the person had dropped them off, and just stuck a drill through the back of one of 'em,... DRILL WHINES ...and as a result, identified what appeared to be white powder compacted on the inside. As it ultimately turned out it was` it was just over 10kg of 80% pure heroin. It was coming to NZ. We had a police and customs liaison officer based over in Bangkok, around that area, so in conjunction with a policeman that was over there at the time, um, organised what we call a controlled delivery of that` those drugs, and then we apprehended them in a postal place in Auckland. For crims dealing on a larger scale, importing drugs through the postal service just won't cut it. Career criminal Terry Brown was running a huge Ecstasy business. Brown was a crim that was around back in the days, when my dad was a cop. Um, he always had a notorious reputation. He was always assaulting police and assaulting other people. Our enquiries showed he was importing it through granite-type items ` statues, granite columns, that sort of thing. John's team discovered the Ecstasy pills were being hidden in hollowed-out granite and shipped from Eastern Europe to Brown's fake importing company in Auckland. It was just a storage or warehouse area. When we went in one night, there was no business documentation ` nothing at all. It was just simply a front. But Brown was pulling in such large volumes of cash it caused a major headache. His suppliers had to be paid in euros, but exchanging huge piles of Kiwi cash could easily give the game away, so Brown had two Lithuanian men come out to NZ and wire the money overseas in smaller amounts. We were aware that they were coming, because we'd heard it over the wire, so we had surveillance on them. They were here for two weeks. During that time they went to different companies ` money exchange companies ` and sending money out overseas. At that stage, it becomes a delicate, sort of, I guess, part of the investigation ` whether you show your hand and terminate at that point or allow the money to go out overseas, so effectively, we were` we decided we would let the money go overseas, and they would have sent, probably, $800,000 over. Went they left, we did a covert search on their baggage, and they had the equivalent of, uh, NZ$330,000 in their bag, which we took without them knowing. We didn't get them back off the plane. We took the money out of their bags, repackaged it and sent them on their way. We found through the intercepted communications, they thought they'd been ripped off by baggage handlers. And it was at that time that we thought, 'Well, we can't let any more money go. 'We've got enough evidence now to charge him.' John Sowter's team paid Terry Brown an early morning visit. BANG! BANG! Police! Get on the ground! We kicked his door in. He got bit of a fright. He was running around half-naked and got jumped on. Both hands on the bed. Do it now! He was outwardly showing signs of` of large amounts of money. He had, uh` a Porsche 911, um, that he'd purchased for $275,000 cash; he had a 7 Series BMW he'd bought for $185,000 cash; another 5 Series Beemer. Effectively, when we did the, um` the final termination phase, we seized six cars, uh, that he'd purchased in the space of a year and a half and paid $690,000 cash for them, so that's not something you'd expect from a sickness benefit. Terry Brown had cash all over town. Police found just one safety deposit box was stuffed with a couple of hundred thousand dollars. In his nightclub safe, another $60K. Some at his associate's address; some at his own address, but in total, there was $930,000 recovered. A lot of money. In the end, Brown pleaded guilty to all charges, uh, that` that he faced, and he was ultimately sentenced to 11 years' imprisonment. With such big money being made by drug dealers, detectives needed new tools to hit them in the pocket and cripple their business. New legislation came into effect in 1992, allowing the crown to confiscate their ill-gotten gains. This one came up that someone in Ashburton was selling vast quantities of cannabis, and it wasn't your traditional, um, criminal. It wasn't your traditional drug dealer, and it was slightly unusual enough to think, 'Well, this sounds a bit bizarre. 'We probably need to give it a further look.' This was a situation where a farmer was producing quite large amounts of cannabis and had been for a while. I think it was a 200 acre farm, so I organised 50 staff, which really only, in those days, happened for undercover terminations, to take that quantity of staff. I remember my boss saying to me in the car, 'You better be right, mate. 'Look, you've got 50 staff. You better get this one right.' I remember thinking, 'Please, God, please, let there be the evidence.' We knocked on his door. He bolted to the back door, and we had guys at the back door to intercept, but he had a loaded gun at the back door. He just freaked out. I was there when they asked him, you know, did he have any cannabis on the` on the premise? And he said that he just had a bit of Percy in the garage, which is a term for, you know, just personal use stuff, you know ` small amount. So I remember, we walked out to the garage and opened the garage door up. It was just everywhere. There was these black wooden hoppers there, full of cannabis, as were these wool sacks behind it. There was seeds. They just kept finding more and more and more. And as all good farmers should do, when he got a particularly good plant, he had kept it and labelled it ` put dates on them, going right back to 1988, and they were good cannabis plants. They had produced good seeds, because he was, obviously, trying to improve the quality of his cannabis. Catherine's team found $31,000 cash in the bedroom and a bewildering array of antiques. He had antiques for Africa that he'd bought at antique auctions that still has their labels on. What he was trying to do here ` as you can imagine, he's generating a lot of cash. As a farmer, you don't actually generate much cash. I think we found in one year he generated $80 in selling lambskins from cash, so in the same year, he spent something like $200,000 in cash. I was into my wine at the time, and there were bottles of Bordeaux. I spoke to him on the way back to Christchurch to arrest him. I said, 'What's your favourite type of wine?' He said, 'Oh, Muller-Thurgau.' I thought, 'You've got bottles of first-growth Bordeaux there and you say you like Muller-Thurgau.' So I knew, really, that it was a way of hiding the money. Assorted, um` Assorted silverware. The new Proceeds of Crime laws meant the Crown could confiscate assets proved to come from drug dealing. This farmer had receipts and records showing his cannabis growing stretched back years. I mean, it's like he almost looked at the Proceeds of Crime Act and decided, 'How best can I do it to ensure that I can have all these things taken?' Because that's what he did. Banana boxes full of receipts ` quite amazing. We were able to show the judge that he was earning $80,000 to $100,000 cash a year that` that we could show which was cannabis dealings. It was enough to earn him a $400,000 fine and lose him the farm that had been in the family for generations. He served four years' jail, and after he finished that he went to the West Coast and tried to cultivate cannabis there and was caught again and was caught with a boat coming back from his plot, so his boat and his car was seized subsequently too, so I don't think he learned his lesson. Cannabis had made and lost this farmer a lot of money, but a new drug was on the way to keep detectives busy. (SIZZLING) (INDISTINCT CHATTER) (CHILD GIGGLES) WOMAN: We feed our families because we love them, to show them we care. (PEOPLE LAUGH AND CHATTER) But we're feeding them too much food... (CHILDREN GIGGLE) ..and too much junk. (DRINK FIZZES) So some of our kids could end up living shorter lives than their parents. We're giving our families too much love. (UPBEAT MUSIC) TENSE MUSIC There's one drug above all others that NZ detectives fear the most, and it's not just the cooking and dealing in methamphetamine, but the associated crime and violence. But the scale of the meth trade today was forecast more than 10 years ago, when Detective Inspector Harry Quinn warned the Police Commissioner of a new drug coming our way. About 1996, uh, some Australian detectives on an interchange with NZ came and briefed me as the head of the NDIB ` The National Drug Intelligence Bureau ` and they talked about their concerns about what was likely to happen as a consequence, or they'd discovered a lot of methamphetamine, uh, laboratories in the outback of Queensland, uh, and almost invariably, the cook was a NZer, he'd been sentenced to prison in Australia, and when he finished his prison sentence, he was gonna be deported, so they said, 'You're gonna get a whole lot of, uh` of, uh, criminals coming back to NZ under deportation, and they'll be looking to cook methamphetamine, and I wrote this report that suggested that by the year 2002, we would have discovered over 200 clandestine laboratories in NZ, and in that year ` 1998 ` I think we'd only discovered seven in that entire year, and some of the senior members of police scoffed at me and said, you know, this was an exaggeration, but it actually proved to be pretty prophetic, because I think by 2001, we'd found over 200 laboratories in that year. Detective Senior Sgt Dave Nimmo worked in Operation Flower, targeting 'career criminal turned methamphetamine dealer', Waha Saifiti. Saifiti's practically a pensioner now, but he was well-known when I joined the police. He had his fingers in all sorts of pies. Where there was an armed robbery in town, his name came up. But Saifiti had found a new way to earn a living. Detectives with an interception warrant heard him bragging about it. All the information was that he was active in the meth manufacturing scene. I mean, it's easy money, so every criminal worth a pinch of salt has tried to be involved or is involved. Police set up an operation to bring down the ruthless meth syndicate. With Operation Flower, Waha led the team to Bird Hines, senior patched Head Hunters member in Auckland and also to a chap by the name of Donut, or Brett Lionel Allison, and as the operation progressed, the` it became evident that Donut was the m` uh, the cook and by all accounts, quite a successful one too. TENSE MUSIC Detectives on surveillance followed Saifiti one night to a factory in East Tamaki, where several of the group were manufacturing. TENSE MUSIC Armed police! Get your... (SHOUTS INDISTINCTLY) The whole crew were caught, except the meth cook himself. Brett Allison, or 'Donut', wasn't scooped up in the net. Uh, he was then on the run because he was aware that police were looking for him, and, uh, approximately two months later, uh, some information, uh, came to hand where Donut might be hiding, and we found him hiding in the basement of a Kelston mechanics shop, manufacturing in there with highly caustic ingredients. SIRENS WHINE, RADIO CHATTER Once he got wind the police were outside, there was two large Bailey bins, which were several thousand litres of caustic liquid he began pouring down the drain. SIREN WAILS The factory was on a busy intersection, and there was a school nearby. Fearing the worst if the poison spread, police cordoned off the whole area while negotiating with Allison to come out. Knowing the game was up, he finally surrendered. He was covered in sores, and he was actually quite a sick man at the time. DRAMATIC MUSIC Brett Allison, the cook, was sentenced to 10 years in prison; Waha Saifiti, the ringleader, nine and a half; and William Hines, Saifiti's sidekick, received a seven-year stretch. Methamphetamine is not just dangerous for the end user. Detectives constantly see the carnage caused by cooking and consuming the drugs. REPORTER: The man suffered severe burns to most of his body when the backyard chemistry backfired. Concerned neighbours had questions about threats to their own health today. None had any idea a toxic drug lab was right next door. I don't see drugs as a victimless crime. If a user gets a habit, and plenty of them do, then they've gotta fund their habit, and if you've got a ` and let's take a bit of an extreme ` but $1000-a-week habit, and there's, um, plenty of, uh, examples of that ` of methamphetamine ` where are they going to fund that from? So it will start off, probably, slow and borrowing and then it will start off from fraud or theft and the people they're affecting is generally their family members, their friends, uh, close associates, uh, sometimes the money can be, uh, taken from work funds. You're gonna be on the street, uh, selling your body, or you're gonna be committing crime to get that money. You just can't do it any other way. You get to a certain habit per week, and then you're finding struggling to fund that habit, so it can turn a basic user into a low-level dealer. Naturally, we see the, um` the low-life street sort of junkies and that sort of type of thing, but you also see people that are involved in high-business-type areas. It seems to be a drug that is used all` all walks of life. A lot of the people that I've dealt with are on the bones of their arse ` they've lost houses; they've lost businesses. It's quite a destructive drug, and it's really destroyed some lives. Playing for the high stakes on offer in the drug underworld is proving attractive to people from the most unlikely quarters. David Shaida was export manager, uh, for a place mat company, he had legitimate reasons to travel in and out of the country on a regularly, and when he got back, um, he was just brought into the customs search area. Then we did a search and located in` in one of the carry on bags he had was 2kg of methamphetamine, so a couple of million dollars of drugs sitting in his bag that he carried through the airport. REPORTER: On the outside, David Shaida and Theodore Graaf portray an image of respectability and privilege, but underneath, they were drug smugglers, propping up their lifestyle by bringing methamphetamine into NZ ` almost $10m worth. He was making, uh, over $100,000 a year in` in his business, um, that he was working for. He was mixing with, um` with, yeah, people that you'd say would be reasonably high profile. He was your general businessman type of person ` no one you'd really expect to get involved in drugs. Shaida pleaded guilty and received a six year prison sentence, but he hasn't been the only respectable citizen to fall foul of the law while chasing the big money. (GASPS) Mickey! Mickey! The lure of easy money is a powerful one, even for people who might otherwise never mingle with the drug underworld. Manufacturing meth requires access to specific chemicals, but some are commonly found in some flu remedies. Telfast tablets are sold at pharmacies in NZ, but they were a popular, um, cold and flu remedy that was used to manufacture methamphetamine. They had 120mg content of pseudoephedrine, so that was one of the higher tablets around at that time that had that sort of quantity of pseudoephedrine in it. So you'd get a box that you'd purchase from a pharmacy for around $20 for 10 tablets, and that could sell on the black market for $150 a box, so it was good money being made. A landlord who was renting an apartment out ` he thought it was supposed to be vacant, and he'd gone to do some tidy up of it and as a result, he'd opened the door and found that there was about, uh, 1800 boxes of Telfast stacked up in one of the bedrooms, $140,000-odd cash and a little bit of cannabis in a 2-litre pack. Ended up locking up two Asian gentlemen, young Asian gentlemen in their 20s, who came that night and unlocked the door. They were arrested and charged with possession of those particular tablets. From h` having a look at those cartons of Telfast tablets, we managed to identify where they'd been distributed from, and our enquiries led us to find that this Dr Chen was a cardiothoracic surgeon. He was working at Auckland hospital at the time, um, was well thought of, um, but over the space of` since October 2003 through to about July of 2004, he had uplifted 20,000 packets of these Telfast tablets, uh, and some of those are the ones that were found in the apartment, so as a result of` of that information, um, we carried out a bit of a sting operation on him. CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS Police staked out the warehouse from where Chen was uplifting the pills. Late one afternoon, their target fronted in a rented van and picked up 2000 packets of Telfast. Police tailed him through the Auckland traffic. He ended up driving all the way from West Auckland into town, parked on some double yellow lines and low and behold, one of the Asian gentlemen that had been arrested in the apartment fronted up. He was actually on bail at that time. Fronted up, Dr Chen got out of the car, walked off and this gentleman jumped in to the` to the van with the tablets in it and drove around the corner. He uplifted his other associate that had been arrested in the apartment, and they ended up taking the tablets out to an address in Hillsborough, um, where they progressed to strip them all out of their packets. Freeze! Police! We ended up recovering all the tablets, arresting those two ` there were three people in the end ` at that address. Later that night, Dr Chen was arrested. When we spoke to him, um, he stated that he didn't know what pseudoephedrine, um, was used for, as in, the manufacture of methamphetamine. Really didn't know much about methamphetamine, is what he'd said in his interview. Um, he had stated that he was approached by one of these young Asian males, who purported to be a representative for Chinese medicine company overseas. Uh, that person had said, 'Look, if` can you arrange, you're` you're a well-known, uh, person in NZ, 'can you arrange to get these tablets for us? 'We're gonna export them back overseas to the Chinese Hubei medicine company.' He was supplied with documentation from the company, but the company never existed, so over, uh, his period of` of uplifting these tablets, which was on eight occasions, he uplifted 22,000 packets, and if you work it out that he was getting around $13-odd for each packet, he would have made, uh, oh, around $300,000 in cash. REPORTER: The Crown painted a picture of a man driven by pure greed, but the jury took less than 10 minutes to disagree. The difficulty with the offence that he faced in those days, you needed to show, uh, that the person had knowledge that those Telfast tablets were used in the manufacture of meth. He was acquitted at trial. I'm a person who is honest to other people, but unfortunately, these people is not. They are dishonest and, uh, you know, cheated on me. Because we know the milligram strength of a particular tablet, um, the ESR can provide you with a potential yield based on the milligram content of pseudoephedrine, so from that quantity that he uplifted and provided, uh, would` would work out to the equivalent of about 13kg of meth once it's manufactured, which at street level would be around $10-million-odd once it hit the street down in` if sold in gram weights. DRAMATIC MUSIC You don't have to be a user or a dealer to run risks from the effects of P. There has been some evidence of some truck drivers using it to try and get by and work longer hours while they're on the road. Obviously, that is of great concern, considering the great size of some of those trucks on the road and some of the great distances that they travel. HORN HONKS It's about risk and gain, at the end of the day. You're gonna take that risk to gain a few dollars here and there, but the impact on your family, the impact on the community, and the reality is, we're waiting to come and get ya. It was a gentleman that lived in Rotorua. He was a truck driver, uh, and he had no form ` no` no criminal history, um, but you know, he got to that stage in life where he was looking for something else, got turned on to methamphetamine. DRAMATIC MUSIC He went over to uplift some methamphetamine from a couple over in Tauranga. Gotta pay off our debts. Gotta pay off our debts. It'll be good. I'm gonna do this, babe. I'm gonna do this, babe. < OK. DRAMATIC MUSIC Hey, mate. Hey, mate. Hey. It's just in the back of the car. Just get it, man! DRAMATIC MUSIC The drug dealer was getting the drugs out for him, out of the car, but he mistook it as going to get a gun. Mickey! (SCREAMS) Mickey! (PANTS, SCREAMS) GUNSHOT (SCREAMS) No! No! (SCREAMS) No! No! Shut the fuck up! Shut up! (SCREAMS) No! No! Shut the fuck up! Shut up! GUNSHOT CRICKETS CHIRP Those parts of the mind that enable us to` to make informed decisions and` and proper decisions about our actions just get burnt away by the use of methamphetamine, and he was going to get caught. He didn't think about the fact that he was the last one to talk to them on the phone, text them about picking gear up ` that type of thing. They just don't realise those decisions that they've made previously that are affected by the immediate response to a threat or perceived threat. They become very paranoid. Mickey! (SCREAMS) Mickey! (SCREAMS) GUNSHOT It's made our clientele a lot more unpre` unpredictable. Firearms seem to be a, uh, choice for drug dealers now. Armed police! Don't move! Go to the right! If we kick a door in, we announce that we are the police, but that person is either waking up from a` a drug-induced coma or out of sleep or whatever. They don't have their wits about them, so immediately, that would be a panic situation. It's a lot more dangerous out there now. There's no doubt about that. One of the low points for me would be losing a mate, Don Wilkinson. That's directly related to the methamphetamine trade. One of the two people from the dwelling produced a rifle. Both their officers were shot, one fatally. When Sgt Don Wilkinson was shot and killed while on a covert drugs operation, it rammed home to the police and the public that this is a dangerous business. You go out to do a job like this and you're never expecting the ending that we had that night. To see the shock on the faces of the other staff who were involved in that operation, the families, the disbelief that this could have happened. Just a sobering thought. Just brings it all back to you ` the dangers and risks that are out there and faced by front line staff daily. Next week, policing the gangs. I thought I'd seen gang violence, but what I saw just took it to a whole new level. A special type of policing for a special type of criminal. They would be the most evil people I have ever dealt with. Bringing law to the lawless. (SCREAMS) They are significantly donkey deep in the distribution of methamphetamine. The bikies, the brawlers and the big business of crime.