Drug kingpin's dole-queue cover

Ronald Brown paid $250,000 cash for a Porsche 911. Photo / Supplied

A 65-year-old man on the dole also owned a nightclub, drove luxury cars and laundered millions of dollars as the New Zealand kingpin of an international drug syndicate.

Now Ronald Terrence Brown faces spending the rest of his life behind bars after admitting drug and money laundering charges on the eve of a High Court trial.

Name suppression was lifted after the trial of Brown's co-accused finished this week, allowing the Weekend Herald to reveal more details of the Kiwi connection to a global drug ring.

A career criminal known as Terry or "RT", Brown is one of the godfathers of the underworld who mixed with the likes of Mr Asia's Terry Clark, safecracker Chas Willoughby and bankrobber Leslie Maurice Green.

He is an "old school villain" with a string of convictions for drugs and violence, so it came as no surprise to police when Brown's name was whispered by informants in 2008.

Drug squad detectives tapped his cellphone and discovered Brown was calling a fugitive in Europe who fled New Zealand nearly 10 years ago.

Rokas Karpavicius was charged with conspiracy to import cocaine in 1999 but escaped overseas two years later while on bail. The Lithuanian was 20 at the time. He was never caught and recent photos show Karpavicius living in luxury; lounging on a yacht launch in Europe surrounded by bikini-clad beauties.

The name of Karpavicius resurfaced when Brown's phone was bugged by police. His fingerprints were also found later on a Harry Potter book couriered from Spain to Auckland which had LSD - a Class A drug - hidden in the spine.

Detectives running Operation Keyboard believed Karpavicius was sending drugs to Brown in New Zealand hidden inside granite sculptures.

The shipments were "strikingly similar" to others sent from Lithuania to Sydney in 2007 and 2008.

All the containers of granite blocks were sent by the same person, with the same contact phone number and the same bank account.

The Crown could not - but did not need to - prove what type of Class-A drug the syndicate was supplying in Auckland.

Cocaine was one suggestion, and the intercepted Harry Potter book contained LSD.

Police raids on Brown's Westmere home also found 1000 MDMA pills - the Class B drug called Ecstasy - worth up to $80,000.

Millions of dollars were paid to Karpavicius for the drugs. The cash was collected by Lithuanian "money couriers" who came to New Zealand using false passports.

Martynas Cikas and his girlfriend Irina Mejeraite took more than $1.2 million from Brown to give to Karpavicius as payment in 2007.

The next year, Cikas and fellow Lithuanians Donatas Jukna and Povilas Grigaluinas took their place as money mules. As an alternative, Brown would get his "personal assistant" Kellie Simanu to transfer the money electronically to overseas bank accounts controlled by Karpavicius.

All up, he laundered more than $4.4 million over a period of two years. Total money transactions topped $7.2 million. Not bad for someone claiming the unemployment benefit for 20 years.

While on the dole, the 65-year-old Brown owned a nightclub called the K'Rd Ballroom, and paid cash for six expensive cars, including a $250,000 Porsche 911.

Despite his previous drug convictions, Brown was able to travel overseas with a false passport to meet Karpavicius.

The document was found by police in an ASB safety deposit box, with more than $100,000 in cash.

A three-week trial of Brown's co-accused Zvonko Dzomba, 49, Blair Aaron Bidois, 39, and Kellie Sheree Simanu, 33, ended yesterday.

The jury found all three not guilty, by majority verdicts 11-1, of conspiracy to import a Class A drug.

But Simanu - due to give birth in a few weeks - and Anna Keziah Sauer, 31, were found guilty of money-laundering charges.

The jury did not know that Brown had already pleaded guilty. He will be sentenced in the High Court at Auckland next month.

An "old school villain" is how one former senior detective described Brown, a longstanding member of Auckland's criminal fraternity dating back to the 1970s.

"Very staunch, quite tough and on the fringes of everything. He stuck to the principles of the criminal code and he would never talk to the cops. Never give anyone up.

"So for that, I'd have a grudging respect for him."