Kingpin guilty of running jail P racket

Arthur Taylor. Photo / Paul Estcourt

Underworld kingpin Arthur Taylor was discovered planning P deals inside a maximum security prison after police bugged the cellphone of a businessman suspected of murder.

Taylor, 54, was yesterday found guilty of forming a criminal conspiracy with a fellow inmate, who has name suppression, to supply the class-A drug between May and June 2007.

The pair used smuggled cellphones to organise P deals from inside Paremoremo prison and to arrange for money to be deposited in TAB accounts.

But Taylor was found not guilty of three charges of offering to supply methamphetamine. The conspiracy was discovered after police bugged the phone of a Tauranga businessman.

Operation Spider was launched in 2007 to find missing man Grant Trevor Adams, a P cook and known associate of a company director, Brett Ashby, 50, who was Taylor's brother-in-law.

Detectives were granted a High Court warrant to bug the cellphones of Ashby and Taylor to intercept phone calls in which the pair discussed drug deals.

Ashby was later charged with the murder of Adams. Police alleged he shot Adams and buried his body with a digger near Taupo.

He denied the charge, but died from liver cancer before a trial.

The tapped phone calls prompted further police investigation which led to the drugs charges against Taylor.

He represented himself at the two-week trial at the High Court at Auckland, with the assistance of David Jones, QC. In his defence, Taylor told the court he could have been referring to sugar, which is contraband inside prison, and not methamphetamine.

He will be sentenced in May on the single conspiracy charge.

Taylor is a notorious figure with dozens of convictions for armed robbery, kidnapping, firearms offences and escaping custody. In 1998 he escaped Paremoremo with three other prisoners, including Graeme Burton, before being caught in the Coromandel after several days.