ENOUGH P FOR ALL AUCKLAND

Two men who smuggled in enough P to provide a hit for every single
person in Auckland have been sentenced to life imprisonment, in a
legal first.

Life sentences have never been imposed for P, the street name for
"pure" methamphetamine, but the judge said the $135 million drugs bust
was by far the biggest this country had seen.

Yet that bust represented only a fraction of the lethal drugs that the
men had brought into the country in 2005 and 2006 - the rest is
presumed to have made it on to the streets.

The Mr Big of the operation - a shady figure known only as "Raymond" -
remains at large. The judge said he ran the operation from China.

Operation Major, a joint police-customs investigation, found 96kg of
methamphetamine hidden in plastic blocks at the bottom of cans of
green paint. Another 154kg of pseudoephedrine was concealed in bags of
cement plaster shipped from China.

On breaking down the doors of a Kohimarama Rd house that was being
used to distribute the drugs to gangs, police also found a
machine-gun, a pistol, $50,000 cash and sophisticated weights and scales.

"The distribution into the community of this amount of methamphetamine
would inevitably have caused tremendous damage," Justice Patricia
Courtney told the High Court in Auckland. "It would also have seen
millions of dollars flow out of the country without tax paid on it
into the hands of foreign drug dealers."

The court found that the men had brought in five previous shipments,
three of which contained commercial quantities of methamphetamine, one
of pseudoephedrine and one that may have been a dummy run.

One of the earlier methamphetamine shipments (also in the bottom of
paint cans) was x-rayed and searched by Customs but the officers did
not find the drugs, and let it through.

It is only with the benefit of hindsight that police and Customs
investigators realised that those shipments also contained drugs.

Wei Feng Pan, 38, and Ming Chin Chen, 48, were each found to have
arranged shipments from legitimate companies in China, then arrived in
New Zealand to receive the consignments at front companies they had
set up here. Between them, they transferred more than $500,000 to
Chinese bank accounts, believed to be in payment for the drugs. They
were both sentenced to life imprisonment.

Li Fan, 31, who armed himself to sell the drug from the Kohimarama
property, was sentenced to 19 years in prison with a minimum
non-parole period of 9 years. And Guo Wei Deng, 46, who with Fan
picked up the shipment from a car in St Lukes, was sentenced to 17
years of which he must serve at least 8.

A fifth accomplice, Kai Lok (Billy) Fung, a theology graduate who had
trained to become a Presbyterian minister, pleaded guilty in 2006 to
his role in the drug smuggling ring.

He was sentenced to a 15-year jail term with a minimum non-parole
period of 7 years. Two other men, Yong Lei Zhang and Kin Kwok Leung,
were found not guilty.

In sentencing last week, Justice Courtney said a "veritable flood" of
methamphetamine made its way across New Zealand borders each year.

"Its users quickly become addicted and the drug has a devastating
effect on the personality and function of almost all who use it," she
said.

"There have been cases in which methamphetamine use has been directly
implicated in instances of murder, lending truth to the Court of
Appeal's observation about the activities of major drug dealers being
equated with murder because they pose just as serious a threat to society."

Antonie Dixon, the samurai sword murderer, and Steven Williams, who
killed his 6-year-old step-daughter Coral-Ellen Burrows, were both on
P at the time.