Underworld: The inside story of how police brought down corrupt baggage handlers smuggling drugs through Auckland Airport

Romney Fukofuka, also known as the musician Konecs, was caught with 20kg of methamphetamine inside Auckland airport during the 2020 Covid lockdown. Photo / Jared Savage

But Fukofuka freaked out. “I was high and there was a lot going on in my head. I thought people were watching me. There was a cop standing around. I was scared and didn’t want to go to jail in the States,” he told me. “So I panicked and took it on the plane with me.” He took his seat on the plane and, under the username KingofHELL, sent the following encrypted messages to the Air New Zealand baggage handler with the username Preacher, who, despite not being rostered to work, drove into the Air New Zealand staff carpark at 3.58am.

KINGOFHELL: Toko [Bro] man I made a mistake.

KINGOFHELL: Toko I carry the kato [bag] with me on board instead of putting at bulk.

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PREACHER: Toko f*** man.

Plan B was hastily made. Once he disembarked flight NZ1 at Auckland International Airport and cleared the immigration line, Fukofuka was supposed to put the drug-laden suitcase back onto the luggage carousel. Once the bag went back through to the loading zone, Preacher’s crew of Air NZ baggage handlers could safely remove it from the airport, as in the original plan. However, after clearing immigration, Fukofuka went into the toilets and sent messages to his partner.

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6.09am: I’m fucked

6.09am: I’m in toilet

6.09am: Heaps of cops

Sese Vimahi, a former Auckland Airport employee who oversaw a group of corrupt baggage handlers smuggling methamphetamine into New Zealand, appears via audio-video feed at Auckland District Court. Photo / Dean Purcell

As he exited the toilets to put the suitcase onto the luggage conveyor belt, an officer from Customs asked Fukofuka to come with him to the search area. The suitcase was opened. Nothing was inside except two plastic bags weighing a total of 19.4 kilograms, which testing later confirmed as methamphetamine with a purity of 80 per cent. “I tried to say, ‘I thought it was shoes’,” Fukofuka told me, “but I knew I was fucked.” He was arrested, and the subsequent investigation, Operation Santana, led to five Air New Zealand baggage handlers, including Preacher, being charged with various drug-importing offences.

Preacher’s real name was Sese Vimahi, a church-going youth leader who was soon released on bail. But instead of cleaning up his act, Vimahi brazenly used his freedom to carry on smuggling drugs for Aisake Feleti using an identical modus operandi, according to the Threema messages uncovered by Operation Worthington. Now in the hands of the police, the encrypted messages were so blatant. There were thousands for the police to comb through, and here’s just one example: “I got 9 in the bag for the next one took,” Wiseman wrote to Feleti on February 16, 2021. He followed up with photos of three vacuum-sealed plastic bags of white crystals on a bathroom vanity, then of the drugs placed inside a grey backpack. The message about “9 in the bag” clearly meant 9kg of methamphetamine, with Feleti telling Wiseman that each kilogram would sell for between $175,000 and $180,000.

Methamphetamine was placed inside a backpack to be sent to Auckland on a flight from Los Angeles.

He also told Wiseman that Vimahi had visited the airport crew and they wanted to keep 2kg as their fee for assisting with the importation. Vimahi was a blood cousin, Feleti explained to Wiseman, and could be trusted as he was not a gangster but a “kurupt Churchie man”. Over the next few weeks, Wiseman and Feleti kept making arrangements for the drug import, which eventually landed in Auckland at 7.19am on flight NZ5 from Los Angeles on March 4, 2021. The grey backpack was removed from the airport by a crew of Air NZ baggage handlers, unidentified at this stage, and at 8.58am Feleti advised Wiseman that the meth had been safely delivered.

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A little over a week later, Feleti sent Wiseman a video of a large amount of cash inside a duffel bag: $1,130,000. Some customers had yet to pay, he told Wiseman, but he would send the cash overseas as soon as possible. It was the same bag of cash that Feleti would be seen handing to the Asian money launderer in the supermarket carpark a week later. The Threema messages on Feleti’s phone were an absolute treasure trove of evidence, which gave the police chapter and verse on how the syndicate was still able to operate. These messages triggered a new investigation, Operation Selena, which revealed that Sese Vimahi, despite losing his job, still retained close ties to a number of Air NZ baggage handlers at the airport. This was because the handlers caught through Romney Fukofuka’s bungling was a crew hastily cobbled together while Vimahi’s “A Team” was unavailable.

The police had been unable to identify them at the time, but the Threema messages revealed Puapii Mokotua, Soane Mataele and Misipele Tofilau were directed by Vimahi – whom they referred to as “Tongan Pablo” – to pick up several meth imports, of at least 10kg each, in baggage stowed on flights from LAX in February and March 2021. They split $200,000 for each successful job, but the cost of having a “door” into New Zealand was more than worth it for Feleti: he was happy to make $30,000 to $40,000 profit on each kilogram sold. And while he was easily able to import drugs by air, Operation Selena discovered Feleti was also able to get drugs by sea.

The Threema chats showed he was in regular contact with Ronnie Kivalu, who ran a business importing food from Tonga, called R&J Pacific Ltd. Looking back at the encrypted messages, it was clear to the police that Kivalu had arranged for 7kg of methamphetamine to be concealed among frozen produce in a shipping container that left Tonga in late March 2021. When the shipping container was offloaded at the Port of Auckland in April, Kivalu messaged Feleti to say the meth was almost ready to be picked up (“Morning yup latest tomorrow [fingers crossed emoji]”) and to bring plastic ziplock bags for packaging.

However, a few weeks later, Feleti messaged Kivalu to explain that the Tribesmen motorcycle gang had complained about the poor quality of the drugs, which was making them hard to sell. The emergence of another source of methamphetamine, by sea, was a lead that could not be ignored. So, while maintaining the surveillance of Vimahi and the Air NZ crew, a separate phase of the inquiry, Operation Schrute, was set up to focus on Ronnie Kivalu. Any freight consignments by R&J Pacific Ltd were flagged with Customs, an action which paid off immediately with the next shipment aboard the Liloa II, which docked at Auckland on July 30, 2021. Among the 477 bags of frozen cassava, taro and kava powder was a single white vinyl sack, which raised the suspicions of Customs officials. Inside the sack were two black duffel bags, both padlocked, filled with plastic ziplock bags wrapped in white electrical tape. Inside were ice-like crystals, which testing confirmed to be meth. The total weight was nearly 30kg.

While Kivalu’s fingerprints were metaphorically all over the methamphetamine, more evidence was needed to prove his involvement. The Operation Schrute detectives made a strategic decision to do a “controlled delivery” of the shipment, where the bags were carefully repacked with rock salt (a placebo replacement) and delivered to their destination as if nothing had been found. Watching patiently could lead to Kivalu being caught red-handed, not to mention anyone else he was working with. On August 6, 2021, the container was transported to a freight-forwarding company called EIF International Ltd, an import broker used by R&J Pacific Ltd.

One of the storemen there was a man called Nooroa Rairi, who was responsible for the oversight of the EIF warehouse in Wiri on a day-to-day basis. He was also accredited with the Ministry for Primary Industries, which checks imports of food for pests or diseases, and was in charge of unpacking shipping containers for inspection. Three days later, at 5.01pm, Rairi quietly removed the white vinyl sack from the container at EIF, put it in the back of his car and drove home to a property in Windrush Close, Māngere. About two hours later, undercover surveillance staff watched as a silver Volkswagen Golf arrived at the same address. The driver was Ralph Vuletic, who had previously made headlines as a high-flying property developer convicted of Serious Fraud Office charges nearly a decade earlier. Vuletic was seen taking two duffel bags to a storage lockup in West Auckland. He then returned the next day to retrieve the bags and took them to Kivalu’s house in Mt Wellington.

A few hours later, police raided the property. Officers found disposable gloves, electronic scales and a large amount of ziplock bags in the garage, along with the 30kg of drug placebo. Kivalu was arrested, but two other men managed to escape by jumping over the back fence. The pair were tracked down and identified as the Iuvale twins, Nigel and Tony, who were patched members of the King Cobra gang. Before they had been interrupted, the brothers and Kivalu had been busy breaking down the methamphetamine into smaller amounts for resale.

More than $500,000 cash was discovered when Operation Selena arrested 24 people for smuggling drugs through Auckland International Airport, including gang members and Air NZ baggage handlers.

Back at Vuletic’s storage unit, police found 5kg of meth in gold Chinese tea packets – a signature of Sam Gor, an organised crime syndicate in Asia that dominates the global drug trade. Another kilogram of meth was found in Vuletic’s home, along with a pistol. Although it was a side hustle to the main investigation, Operation Schrute was a success in its own right. The investigation had locked up two senior members of an influential Auckland gang, quickly uncovered Ronnie Kivalu’s drug-smuggling route, but most importantly, uncovered “insider threats” working unseen at the borders of both New Zealand and Tonga.

Nooroa Rairi was not a hardened criminal (he was to be paid $30,000 for his assistance) and was the first to admit everything. At the other end, in Tonga, Kama Manulevu was identified as the person who, acting on Ronnie Kivalu’s instructions, was able to hide the 30kg of methamphetamine among the frozen vegetables. The 45-year-old became the first person in Tonga to be sentenced to a mandatory life imprisonment under tough new drugs laws. But the job wasn’t finished yet. The sudden appearance of the Iuvale twins in Operation Schrute was most intriguing to Detective Senior Sergeant Jason Hunt and Detective Sergeant Scott Foster, the officers running Operation Selena. They would soon be the focus of a third phase of the investigation, which, again with a little luck, stumbled across a completely different crew of corrupt Air NZ baggage handlers.

Former airport employee Tungane Manuel in the High Court at Auckland for the start of the Operation Selena methamphetamine importation trial. Photo / Jason Oxenham

While building their case against Sese Vimahi’s network at Auckland International Airport, police intercepted a series of phone calls about a flight from Los Angeles landing on August 2, 2021. A backpack holding 5kg of meth was onboard, so the “A Team” of Mataele, Mokotua and Tofilau made plans to get the illicit luggage out of the airport, just as they had done so many times before. However, unbeknown to the trio – and police – another Air NZ baggage handler nearly beat them to the punch. Although he wasn’t rostered to work that day, Martin Pritchard tried to uplift the backpack from the plane on the pretext that the luggage needed to be transferred to a domestic flight. Recognising that Pritchard was not authorised to be there, another Air NZ staff member asked him to leave and reported their suspicions to management. He was immediately suspended, but the unexpected appearance of another dodgy baggage handler, who was not previously on the radar of Operation Selena, required further investigation.

A third phase of the inquiry was opened, which uncovered a rival crew of Air NZ baggage handlers smuggling drugs into the country, completely independently of Vimahi’s network. Analysis of Pritchard’s phone records identified the ringleader of the baggage handlers as Matangi Piukana, who was passing on instructions to Pritchard and other members of their group. Working backwards, detectives were also able to pinpoint several previous successful importations of drugs, on a commercial scale far larger than what could fit in a backpack. One of these, on July 31, 2021, was 118kg of methamphetamine stowed in a Malaysian Airlines flight from Kuala Lumpur. Security cameras at the airport captured Pritchard driving an Air NZ van from the domestic side of the airport, where he worked, to the international tarmac. He parked underneath the rear wing of the plane, then picked up three boxes which had been unloaded by another baggage handler, Tungane Manuel. Pritchard put the boxes in the van, then drove to where his late-model Audi was parked, and transferred the boxes of methamphetamine into the back of his car. The drugs were then supplied to an unidentified dealer.

By cross-referencing intercepted messages, flight manifests and security-camera footage at the airport, Operation Selena was able to work out that there had been at least two other earlier drug imports which had used an identical smuggling method. The ongoing surveillance on Matangi Piukana, who was regularly heard talking about “the usos” (brothers), eventually led police full circle, right back to Nigel Iuvale. The King Cobra had been arrested on the Operation Schrute charges, but by September had been released on bail with an ankle bracelet. Iuvale was, however, allowed to leave the address to buy groceries. It was on one of those approved shopping trips, on October 10, 2021, at the Gilmours supermarket in Mt Roskill, that he was seen with Piukana, who by that stage the police believed was a prolific drug importer. They spent 45 minutes together, loading up their trolleys in the aisles and talking. No one could hear their conversation, but the significance of the meeting soon became clear.

Three minutes after the friends went their separate ways, Piukana called Tungane Manuel to discuss his work roster. He asked Manuel if he wanted to come “pick it up”, meaning a $26,000 payment, before providing his home address. Over the coming days, Piukana also contacted two other baggage handlers – his brother Kimela and Tokofa Toroma – to discuss an impending shipment from Malaysia. A week later, Matangi Piukana called Manuel to confirm “so Saturday’s a green light” for the Malaysian Airways flight to arrive. Piukana asked Manuel to confirm, when he got back to work, what time the flight would be landing. Manuel thought MH145 normally arrived between 1pm and 2pm.

On the morning of October 23, 2021, the four baggage handlers started their shifts at Auckland International Airport. At 6.42am, Manuel messaged Matangi Piukana to say: “Kuz. 82. Across from gate 2″. This was where flight MH145 was scheduled to park upon arrival. Four hours later, Piukana messaged Manuel to “cancel”, and to call when he was free. In a subsequent phone call, he told Manuel that “it didn’t make it on”. What the baggage handlers didn’t know yet was that Malaysian police had examined MH145 before departure and located a “commercial quantity” of methamphetamine (reported in the local media as 200kg) concealed within bags of Chinese tea wrapped in green or gold foil. Of note to Operation Selena, the Malaysian meth was packaged identically to the 5kg discovered in Ralph Vuletic’s storage locker two months earlier.

The following month, police raided 20 addresses in Auckland, arrested 24 people and seized more than $500,000 in cash. The most significant pieces of new evidence discovered during these searches, however, were not drugs, guns or cash but some innocent messages found on the iPhone belonging to Nigel Iuvale’s new girlfriend. Police and Customs said the investigation had exposed how organised crime recruited “insiders” in the supply chain, to circumvent security and border processes.

“Businesses know what their normal looks like – by reporting suspect shipments, situations or interactions to Customs, they can help to build further intelligence and stop cross-border crimes,” said Bruce Berry, Customs’ intelligence manager. “We continue to work closely with industry, including across airports and ports, who have been very cooperative with such investigations.”

Air New Zealand had “zero tolerance” for such offending, said Captain David Morgan, the airline’s chief operational integrity and safety officer. “Organised crime impacts many parts of the community, and we don’t want it in our workplace. We will continue to work closely with Police, Customs and other relevant agencies to help stamp it out.”

Nigel Iuvale in the High Court at Auckland at the start of the Operation Selena trial. He was found guilty of possession of methamphetamine for supply, and conspiring to import a commercial quantity of the drug from Malaysia. Photo / Jason Oxenham

Operation Selena had been an eye-opening experience even for experienced investigators. There had long been rumours about corruption at Auckland International Airport, but neither of them could believe the scale that the investigation had uncovered, or the ridiculous ease with which the drug syndicates had been able to circumvent border security. It was so simple that it was genius. With hindsight, it had clearly been going on at Auckland International Airport for years. The investigation could be considered a success because the detectives had managed to push past the baggage handlers, who were really just pawns acting out of greed or desperation, and into the “management team” of competing organised crime groups.

In particular, nailing Nigel Iuvale (jailed for 18 years for playing a major role in the scheme) had made all the hard work worthwhile. If they hadn’t, the King Cobra would have simply started again with a new team of underlings. Saying that, the National Organised Crime Group wasn’t so foolish as to think they’d rooted out all the bad apples at the airport; they knew there were other “doors” into the country which they hadn’t yet identified. It wasn’t long before another insider threat at Auckland International Airport was exposed through New Zealand’s biggest meth bust.

Underworld: The new era of gangs in New Zealand, by Jared Savage.

Underworld: The new era of gangs in New Zealand by Jared Savage is out on July 29 via HarperCollins.

Jared Savage covers crime and justice issues, with a particular interest in organised crime. Based in Bay of Plenty, he joined the Herald in 2006 and has won a dozen journalism awards in that time, including twice being named Reporter of the Year. He is also the author of Gangland, Gangster’s Paradise and Underworld.