That investigation was an offshoot of Operation Trojan Shield, a scheme by the FBI and Australian Federal Police to create a fake encrypted messaging app called Anom that was marketed directly to criminals. It resulted in hundreds of arrests around the world, including Lea’aetoa and his co-defendants in New Zealand.
The FBI and Australian Federal Police tricked organised crime figures to communicate with one another on the Anom communication platform. Photo / Supplied
Court documents state the defendant was approached in November 2019 by a childhood friend who is alleged to have been the head of the criminal syndicate in New Zealand. That man vanished on what was supposed to be the first day of his trial earlier this year and has not yet been returned to custody.
The friend gave Lea’aetoa an encrypted phone and asked if he wanted any “work”. The two then discussed Lea’aetoa paying $110,000 for one kilogram of methamphetamine. Lea’aetoa indicated he would get an associate known as “Sips” to pick up the haul the next evening.
The next day, however, Lea’aetoa informed the old acquaintance that “Sips” couldn’t make it because his mum had died. He made no further arrangements to get the drugs.
Had the deal been completed, Lea’aetoa would have been facing up to life imprisonment.
The judge noted that Lea’aetoa’s last prison stint came as the result of a melee between two groups in which the victim was punched, struck with wood and stabbed in the lower back by the defendant’s group.
While in prison, he focused on education and learning a trade. He’d been in steady employment for the past 13 years, taking on a foreman role, and had become a dependable husband and father, the judge noted. And he had no apparent slip-ups until his friend tempted him with the offer of a quick profit, she noted.
“I have a real doubt that you ever intended to carry this agreement through,” Justice Wilkinson-Smith said, adding that she still needed to sentence him on the basis that he did intend to before getting cold feet.
“I accept, though, that your involvement in this conspiracy was short-lived in the extreme. You withdrew from that almost immediately.”
Justice Michele Wilkinson-Smith. Photo / Bevan Conley
Lea’aetoa described his involvement with the other man as “stupid” and suggested he had no real plans to go through with it.
Defence lawyer Paul Wicks, KC, argued that his client’s mistake was a “conflict avoidance response” relating to the re-emergence of “a figure from his distant past” rather than a considered and intentional return to a criminal lifestyle.
“He is embarrassed by these decisions he made,” Wicks said. “He deeply regrets his involvement … It’s not aligned with the 23 years Mr Lea’aetoa has strived to turn his life around despite much adversity in his younger years.”
Returning to prison after all these years, Wicks said, would be a “devastating outcome” for his client.
It was important, the judge said, to give large reductions to people who voluntarily abandoned such conspiracies. Just as a prison sentence could act as a deterrent, acknowledging a change of heart may incentivise others to do the same, she explained.
She ordered a four-year starting point, lower than the five to six years that Crown prosecutor Amelia Mateni had requested. The judge then allowed 30% in combined reductions for his guilty plea and other factors, including remorse and his “exemplary” efforts at rehabilitation over the past 23 years.
She did not increase the sentence for a 2023 objectionable material charge that came about after police searched his phone in relation to the drugs investigation. Authorities found a single image, which Lea’aetoa said he forgot to delete after an acquaintance sent it to him unsolicited. A District Court judge had earlier sentenced him to a $400 fine.
Justice Wilkinson-Smith’s calculations should have resulted in an end sentence of two years and four months’ imprisonment, more than the usual two-year threshold for non-custodial alternatives.
But she said prison would be disproportionately severe given the defendant’s “extremely pro-social response” since his imprisonment as a young person.
“You went to prison as a boy,” she said, adding that he managed to transform himself into “a fundamentally good and pro-social man”.
“Most people can’t achieve that.”
There were deep breaths and applause in the gallery as the judge said she would instead order a sentence of one year’s home detention.
Craig Kapitan is an Auckland-based journalist covering courts and justice. He joined the Herald in 2021 and has reported on courts since 2002 in three newsrooms in the US and New Zealand.
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