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A former Sydney business owner who was deported after shooting a local bikie gang leader and his brother later reinvented himself as the New Zealand-based boss of a drug trafficking syndicate.
Alvin Junior Tuala, 48, enlisted the help of package handlers at Aramex, FedEx and NZ Post to smuggle methamphetamine and MDMA into New Zealand.
“I’m always looking for new doors constantly,” he wrote in 2022, in an encrypted message that was later extracted from his phone by police. [...]
Details of his offending were outlined in the Auckland District Court recently as Tuala returned to the dock for sentencing. He was already serving a prison sentence for another drug import scheme.
Police again turned their attention to Tuala in 2022, after an investigation into a $2.5 million methamphetamine haul from Iran that was hidden inside shock absorbers led investigators to his son-in-law.
When police knocked on Tuala’s door with a search warrant later that year, the defendant snapped multiple cellphones. Cumbersome efforts to reconstruct the phones to extract information are among the reasons it has taken four years for the case to resolve.
Not all of the information was recovered, but the messages that police were able to retrieve suggested that Tuala had helped import at least 28kg of methamphetamine in crystal form and 8.5 litres of the drug in liquid form. He also imported at least 2.5kg of MDMA.
Illicit packages sent to New Zealand – only some of which were intercepted by Customs - were listed as a belt sander, sleep salts, coffee beans, permanent markers and other seemingly innocuous items.
Tuala had in his possession a Customs document showing a list of countries that were good to send drugs from.
“The messages made it clear that the street value of some consignments was in excess of $1 million, and suggested that Mr Tuala would sometimes get paid in significant amounts of cash and a quantity of the imported drugs,” according to the agreed summary of facts for his case.
Other messages threatened violence.
“It’s time to give the box over. Or cop a bullet. True!” he wrote at one point.
On another occasion, he wrote: “Yeah we can put a bullet in these c**** but that will f*** everything up.”
The judge allowed a 40% reduction for Tuala’s guilty pleas, his background, the impact imprisonment will have on his children, and his efforts at rehabilitation. It resulted in an end sentence of 10 years and six months’ imprisonment.
New Zealand Herald
