The Scene of the Crime

by Steve Braunias

  A grand façade. Inside, the 15 courtrooms with their bare walls and their venetian blinds are the usual modern nightmare of office work. Hermetically sealed against the outside world, they are kept in very clean nick, unlike the grubby, graffitied district courts. Decorum is maintained, in keeping with the serious consequences that await within. Signs which instruct NO TALKING add to the repressive atmosphere.

  Late on a Tuesday night, after the jury had returned their verdicts on Nobakht and Rye, I heard quiet sobs outside Courtroom 7. It was Nobakht’s wife.

  I went home to write something exciting about misery.

  3

  And so, ‘An Iranian living in Japan walks into a bar in Bangkok with another country on his mind: New Zealand.’ That was how the drug deal began. The unnamed Iranian drug boss living in Japan travelled to Thailand to find a courier willing to smuggle crystal meth to New Zealand. He found a man whose name remains suppressed. This ‘Mr X’ agreed on a fee of US$10,000. X was flown to Japan, then put up in a hotel, all expenses paid, for three weeks. He enjoyed himself tremendously — nightclubs, restaurants, a Russian prostitute. A date was set to travel to New Zealand: 6 February, Waitangi Day.

  Nobakht also happened to be in Japan that week. He said he was there on business — buying cars at an auction, and importing them to New Zealand. He booked the same flight home as X. But the courier was such a hapless individual that he took the slow train instead of the fast train to the airport, and missed the flight. He also bungled the way he fastened the drugs to his body: a bag burst open, and the precious P began to seep out. X refastened the stash, and booked another flight. Nobakht, meanwhile, cancelled his flight, and rescheduled. Once again, he booked the same flight back to New Zealand as X.

  Already, Nobakht was under suspicion. Police figured it was his job to shadow the courier into New Zealand, keep watch, and set up meetings. X and Nobakht arrived in Auckland on Air New Zealand Flight 90 on 8 February. Customs officials were waiting. X was pulled aside — traces of cocaine were found on his luggage. A body search revealed the P. Facing a maximum penalty of life imprisonment for importing a Class A drug, he agreed to act undercover for the police. Those negotiations took nearly two hours, while Nobakht sat in McDonald’s, watching the exit signs, unwittingly starring as a lead performer in one of New Zealand’s most boring films. Operation Precious was in motion.

  So, too, was X. For three days he led a double life, and both of those lives must have felt like hell. Welcome to New Zealand: it was a lovely week in summer, warm and relaxing, but before X left the airport he had been busted, turned, forced to wear a body wire, and sent out to get hold of drug contacts he’d never met in a country he’d never visited. Instead of carrying powerful narcotics, he was now a condiments salesman: police replaced the meth with rock salt. They allowed him to keep 5 grams of the real stuff. They followed him out of the airport — Nobakht had just left; he’d missed X by 10 minutes — and took him to the Auckland central police station for further debriefing. Acting on instructions from the Iranian in Japan, he booked into the Skycity Hotel.

  X changed his clothes. Stepping out into the casino, he looked like just another rube wearing the uniform of British tourists — an England football shirt. He soon made contact with the man who had waited at the airport arrivals lounge with Nobakht. They met at the casino bar. Surveillance revealed that Nobakht was also at the casino that night, and even went up to X and asked if they knew each other. No, said X.

  His goose cooked by police, his skin itching with wires, X’s first night in New Zealand just kept getting worse. He was told two prostitutes would be sent to his hotel room. The women failed to keep the appointment — they had either knocked on the wrong door, or X was asleep. The latter was unlikely. Earlier, he’d walked to a downtown café with Nobakht’s friend. From his evidence as chief witness for the prosecution:

  Having used the downstairs toilet, did you go back to the table?

  At the point I went downstairs, he [his contact] felt my back and felt the battery pack of my wire.

  What did he do?

  Basically put his hand over it and felt the wire. And back at Sky casino, he embraced me in a hug and also felt the wire there, in the first meet.

  At the café, you say he put his hand on your back?

  Yes. I knew he felt the wire, so I take the wire off in the toilet, come back, and he’s disappeared.

  At which point you might expect that the drug deal was off. But greed is a powerful narcotic: despite X’s contact feeling the wire, the deal continued. X met another contact the next day. They drove to Rotorua in the man’s car. Police followed, noting the Audi made brief stops at a Papakura gas station and the Te Poi pub. The two men arrived in Rotorua just after 9pm, and booked into Room 24 of the Ascot Motel. X’s second night in New Zealand just kept getting worse, too. In the motel room, the driver of the Audi asked to test the P. By mistake, the hapless X gave him some of the rock salt. The man smoked it in a glass pipe, and pronounced that in his opinion the drugs weren’t especially strong. He decided it might be better if he smoked it out of tinfoil, so he went to a Countdown supermarket and bought a roll of foil for $1.50. When he returned, X was able to give him some of the five precious grams of real meth. Crisis averted. From X’s evidence:

  What happened when he tried it?

  It burnt properly.

  Did he say anything to you?

  ‘This is good.’

  It turned into a long night of the alphabet: X also smoked some P, and the two men experienced Rotorua nightlife — a meal at Frodos, drinks at The Grumpy Mole, flesh at Alexandra’s Strip Club until 4am. They returned to the Ascot with a six-pack of Steinlager and stayed up drinking. Two women knocked on the door at 7am. It was Rye, and a prostitute called Nicky, who wore a nose piercing and a tattoo on her ankle. Nicky brought a bag containing lingerie and sex toys. She spent the rest of the day with X in his bedroom. From his cross-examination by Rye’s lawyer:

  You had a lot on your mind at the time?

  Sure.

  You were pretty tense?

  Yes.

  What was on your mind?

  That detection bringing in fake drugs could cause problems for my safety.

  You weren’t all that interested in Nicky’s services, were you?

  No.

  If Gina told the police that her client didn’t even get it up with Nicky, would that be right?

  Exactly. Yeah.

  X was taken into custody later that day. Rye and X’s driver had already left Rotorua, with the rock salt, and booked in at the Chalet Motel in Mt Maunganui. Another gorgeous summer’s day: the motelier hived off at midday to play golf all afternoon, while Rye and the driver lazed by the pool. The police entered their room early that evening. They found the useless salt, and something else, inside Rye’s bag — $259,940, plus $35,200 in American dollars, wrapped in clingfilm.

  The travelogue was over. All that crystal meth, 79 per cent pure, valued at three-quarters of a million dollars — but it spilled out of a courier’s boxer shorts on a slow train in Tokyo, was later nabbed and magically turned into rock salt in Auckland, where it travelled to Room 374 at the Skycity Hotel, up and over the Bombay Hills and through the green and pleasant pastures of the Waikato to Room 24 at the Ascot Motel in Rotorua, then beside the seaside at Mt Maunganui to make its final rest in Unit 9 at the Chalet motel. So much for the foreign intrigue, the international connections; once the P came to New Zealand, the cheap furniture of New Zealand life took over — Park Royal tobacco, $1.50 on tinfoil at Countdown. It was an assignation at The Grumpy Mole, a toilet stop at Te Poi. It was a hooker with a pierced nose, a motelier playing golf in the sun. And it was this, from X’s evidence:

  Did anyone visit your motel room in Rotorua?

  Yeah, some Maori guy, a big, thick-set Maori guy with a shaved head.

  Why did he come to your room?

  Nicky had phoned him to bring us some McDonald’s.

  Operation Pre
cious had caught two people red-handed. As well as X, there was the man at the Chalet Motel in Mt Maunganui — he said the drugs were his, pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment. X, who had intended to stay in New Zealand for eight days, was sentenced to six years’ jail.

  But the evidence against Nobakht and Rye was circumstantial. Why, Nobakht was asked in court, had he changed his flight? Because he wanted to take another look at the car auctions in Japan. Why did he wait so long at the airport arrivals lounge? Because his wife was supposed to pick him up, and he assumed she was late. So why did he leave? He assumed she’d got the wrong date, and was still at home in Napier. After he had sat with his friend at the arrivals lounge, why did he feel it necessary to use his cellphone to call him 19 times that evening, as late as 2am? Because the redial button was faulty . . .

  As for Rye, she said her only role in all of this was as the mama-san who supplied escorts. But what was she doing with so much cash? Rye did not elect to give evidence. Her lawyer, a trim South African woman who wore a pearl necklace, began her closing address by saying to the jury: ‘Kia ora.’ She emphasised that Rye was one of us. On the subject of Rye’s texts (Luv ya heaps, etc.) while she was under surveillance at motels in Rotorua and Tauranga: ‘She was obviously very involved with the lives of her whanau and her friends . . . A lot of living and loving was going on.’

  What about all that cash? ‘It’s not illegal to have large amounts of money.’ And: ‘Money on its own doesn’t mean anything.’ Also: ‘There are any number of reasons why people keep large amounts of cash.’

  The lawyer’s closing statement clocked in at an economical 57 minutes. Then the judge summed up, and the jury was released to consider its verdict. It was Tuesday afternoon.

  4

  It was just another P trial. But once I sat in, I had to see it through. My editors said that they’d rather I didn’t, but they were indulgent. Yes, they said warily, that sounds like good copy, as I kept them updated by talking up the tension of X’s dangerous charade, how it involved hookers and hard cash and ‘an international drug cartel’ — I probably didn’t mention the $1.50 tinfoil. The days and weeks passed; finally, the jury came back with its verdict at 10.16 on Tuesday night. They had gone out for dinner, at the court’s expense, at the Hyatt. It was a cold night. The lawyers hung around the courtroom. One or two smokers put on their expensive overcoats to step outside. All the bright overhead lights in the High Court were kept on.

  The jury was escorted by a registrar back down the leafy English street from the Hyatt to the court, the judge was alerted, the defendants were called up from their cells. The courtroom was unlocked. ‘Silence for Her Honour. All stand.’ Justice Winkelmann took her seat, and asked the foreman of the jury whether it had reached a unanimous verdict. It had. The charges were read out. Nobakht was found guilty. Rye was found not guilty. ‘You are free to go, Ms Rye,’ said the judge, and Rye was all smiles, ready to resume a lot of living and loving, as she stomped out of the courtroom in her Ugg boots without giving Nobakht so much as a backwards glance. He was remanded in custody. The judge said to him, ‘A lengthy term of imprisonment is inevitable.’

  He appeared for sentencing a month later. The judge said, ‘I have received a pre-sentence report in respect of you. At the time that the report was written you continued to deny any involvement in the offending, but this morning I have had placed before me a letter from you in which you admit your involvement.’

  And then she said, ‘You say, however, that it occurred because of associating with bad people and you assure me that you will never offend again.’

  She listed submissions from the prosecution and the defence. Both agreed that there were mitigating factors. Nobakht had no previous offences, ‘and you have family who will be affected by your imprisonment’.

  And then she said, ‘I do not take into account your personal circumstances. In cases involving such serious drug offending, such considerations carry little if any weight. Part of the cost of your offending will be carried by your wife and child. That is inevitable and you must accept responsibility for that.’

  She said, ‘Mr Nobakht, please stand.’ He stood. She read out his sentence. He got 10 years. And then she said, ‘Stand down, please.’

  The sentence was brutish, ugly and long, and that’s the way it goes. All trials are horrible from beginning to end, a meticulous, tormenting re-enactment of alleged wrongs. I had my pick of whatever was happening in the High Court in that spring; I may as well have walked in with a blindfold; it didn’t matter that it was the P trial of Nobakht and Rye. It could just as easily have been someone else’s terror of their guilt being detected or their innocence being overlooked. Secretly I knew that what I was after was ordinary, run-of-the-mill courtroom misery. This is all that so many P trials ever achieved. From the last, sorry part of Nobakht’s evidence to his lawyer:

  Mr Nobakht, what do you say is your primary source of income?

  I worked in the orchard, and I was trying to expand my business.

  Now, do you have anything you wish to say or add in relation to your employment as an apple-picker?

  I wanted just simply to show the jury and you that I do work in an orchard and I have got all the equipment here.

  When you talk about equipment, Mr Nobakht, what is it that you want to say about that?

  Prosecution: Objection. This is a court of law, not an opportunity to give speeches about apple picking. Moving into irrelevance.

  Her Honour: It is not relevant.

  Defence: As Your Honour pleases.

  Two boxes of Pacific Rose apples had been placed under a chair outside Courtroom 7. Nobakht’s wife had brought them up from their orchard in Napier. The intention was to produce them as evidence. After it was ruled that they were irrelevant, the boxes disappeared. I asked Nobakht’s wife where they had gone. She said she gave them away, to friends in Auckland, to a homeless man she had met, and to the Salvation Army. The apples had looked so fresh and delicious. Their absence took away the only goodness to be seen.

  Chapter 5

  Falling down: Guy Hallwright

  1

  It would have taken, oh, say maybe three minutes for former Forsyth Barr investment advisor turned New Zealand’s most vilified road-rage wretch Guy Hallwright to start showing signs of something resembling a nervous collapse during cross-examination in an upstairs office in downtown Auckland. Employment Court proceedings have a unique kind of dismalness. The worst thing that can happen to you in the criminal courts is that a roll of the judicial dice — a jury’s whim, a judge’s discretion — will send you directly to jail. Yes, quite bad, but Employment Court offers another misery, and the anguish of it is as personal as if you took your ex-partner to court to say that their decision to dump you was unfair. You tell the judge: they shouldn’t have done that. You argue: they broke my heart without, you know, due process. You might also beg: please, for the love of God, make them take me back.

  It’s a humiliating ordeal, pitiful, almost indecent. I sat next to journalist Matt Nippert during Hallwright’s cross-examination at his three-day Employment Court hearing, and after a while — oh, say maybe four minutes — the two of us couldn’t look at him any more. We averted our eyes. We whispered to each other: ‘Jesus Christ.’ The poor devil was torn apart by Peter Churchman QC. He stammered and raved and sweated and reddened, all for want of his job. Churchman rather enjoyed it; a tall, severe character, he turned to Matt and myself at one point, and winked.

  Hallwright had driven over an angry Korean, and been sacked. He said it happened outside of work, and wanted his job back. ‘There’s no impediment that I can see,’ he said. Churchman counted the impediments. He told Hallwright that he was remorseless, feckless, useless, more or less a completely hopeless case. ‘You’re damaged goods,’ said Churchman. At least that last remark seemed fair, and when I later met with Hallwright in his old neck of the woods, at a café upstairs in Hotel DeBrett, just around the corne
r from the Forsyth Barr tower on Shortland Street in downtown Auckland, I asked him, ‘Are you a mess?’

  Tall, elegant, thin-lipped, he said, ‘Am I a mess? No, I don’t think I’m a mess. No. But, you know, it is all very upsetting. For everyone involved. Not just me.’ He looked like a mess. He was a furtive, gaunt presence, twitchy and bristly — maybe he just needed a shave. But I thought back to a photo of him that is still rattling around online, taken before his public shaming, from when he was in his pomp as a blameless and successful financier. He is at a business function with a man who really is called Paul Hamburger. Hallwright looks overweight, florid, with a glass in his hand while he chews the fat with Hamburger; he’s perfectly at ease, untroubled and benign, just another rich Parnell schnook on the after-work drinks circuit. The 61-year-old twitching over his latte in a corner of DeBretts Kitchen was a kind of ghost.

  He sometimes took sleeping pills to knock himself out, and also to avoid waking up at whatever dark o’clock of the soul where he would inevitably replay the two or three minutes — a second would have made all the difference, even a quarter of a second — when his whole life changed and collapsed. Oh, and when someone else’s life changed and collapsed, too, and Hallwright’s sorry about that, but he never really altered his position from the comment he gave at the time of the ‘mishap’, of the ‘incident’, when he told a reporter, ‘I did not instigate the incident. The other guy did.’