Police have revealed how they seized the largest-ever cocaine shipment to reach New Zealand shores.
The 725kg haul entered the Port of Tauranga via Panama in February 2022 and had a street value of more than $250 million.
A recent breakthrough in the joint police and customs operation has led to the arrest of three people, two men and a woman, who have also been charged over another cocaine shipment in 2021.
“It’s stunning to be able to go back a couple of years and be able to almost close the book on what is our biggest import of cocaine,” Detective Inspector of the National Organised Crime Group Tom Gollan told 1News.
He said customs already knew about the shipment on board the Safmarine Bayette before it even landed in New Zealand.
“It’s fantastic, particularly the method that was used,” said Terry Brown, Customs’ group manager of intelligence, investigations and enforcement.
“It was a piggybacking method, which in short is the adversaries inserting the drugs or infiltrating the supply chain by placing it in bona fide and imported goods.”
The container ship had sailed from Ecuador via Panama with the drug packages hidden among bananas.
“Previously, we’ve seized seizures of cocaine in a single digit, so 6kg or 7kg was a fairly sizeable seizure, but these 700 kilograms would be a completely different scale and really signal something pretty big that’s going to happen in New Zealand over the next few years,” drug researcher Chris Wilkins said.
Last week saw a stunning breakthrough when two men and a woman were arrested and are now before the courts.
Gollan said getting to the bottom of a case like it was “not as easy as a one-hour crime drama”.
“That’s the reason why some of these things take a lot of time to be able to connect and identify that evidence,” he said.
He wouldn’t say exactly how police zeroed in on the alleged importers.
“Some of these syndicates are trying multiple methods and obviously banking on some getting through obviously so it’s almost a game of trying to be in front of everything.”
Police are also linking the trio to a 30kg cocaine run in Tauranga a year earlier.
Wilkins said New Zealand’s cocaine use was small compared to the rest of the world but believed those habits were quickly changing.
“It’s gone at a population level of less than 1% to probably around 5%, perhaps 10%.”
Gollan said cocaine was “probably becoming a little bit more mainstream and available”.
He also believed there was a lot more money to be made. Asked about its value, the detective inspector said: “At the moment, I’d estimate about $250,000 a kilogram.
“So, for meth, probably anywhere between $150,000 and $160,000, so there is a big difference between that and cocaine.”
