A jury took a little over two days to agree with prosecutors that Xavier Valent was the expatriate mastermind of one of New Zealand’s largest-ever drug syndicates. Herald reporter George Block covered the marathon trial charting the rise and fall of a homegrown cartel boss.
As Xavier Valent travelled the world living in the lap of luxury, he claimed his millions came from astute bitcoin trading.
In fact, he was the kingpin of a syndicate which brought tonnes of drugs into New Zealand during its heyday, netting the young Kiwi tens of millions to fund his lavish lifestyle.
Valent, formerly Harry Whitehead, was a relatively small-time drug dealer when he was arrested and jailed over a decade ago, aged only about 20 and an alumni of Auckland Grammar.
During the 34-year-old’s six-week trial at the Auckland High Court, culminating in guilty verdicts on dozens of serious drugs charges, a jury heard there was a good reason prison is known as “university” in the underworld.
Valent made the connections in prison and learned the tradecraft needed to establish his sprawling cartel.
Upon his release in 2015 he started an operation importing wholesale quantities of drugs from overseas via a courier system with a mate he met inside.
Customs caught several of the packages at the border and began covert surveillance of properties linked to the syndicate.
They swooped in 2016, arresting some of his minions, but Valent was able to slip overseas under their nose.
Then he really got to work.
He spent a little over three years abroad, pulling the strings of what became a massive drug importation ring, said Crown prosecutors Fiona Culliney and Ben Kirkpatrick.
“Mr Valent is the kingpin,” Culliney said in her opening address.
“He was the head of the drug syndicate, and the Crown says he controlled all facets of the drug operation from overseas.”
It was not until early 2020 that he was nabbed at the Italian border after landing on a flight from Hong Kong via Istanbul, after New Zealand detectives were able to obtain an Interpol blue notice against his name.
That he was caught at all was thanks to the staff of Operation Mystic, overseen by veteran National Organised Crime Group Detective Sergeants John Sowter and Angela Waugh.
The detectives targeted workers and safe houses in the syndicate with wiretaps and covert searches to chip away at the operation and slowly but surely build their case against Valent.
They were able to turn several key members of the syndicate against Valent - no small feat given the fear with which he ruled at the peak of his powers.
Four would go on to take the stand against their former boss.
Valent was extradited to New Zealand later in 2020, but he would not stand trial until February this year.
Such was Valent’s reputation for being able to influence others that he was housed in Paremoremo’s Prisoners of Extreme Risk Unit, set up after the Christchurch terror attack to house a handful of the country’s most dangerous inmates.
There was delay after delay as he awaited trial after pleading not guilty to more than 100 serious drugs charges.
He took Corrections to court in a failed bid to force prison staff to allow him to have a proper haircut - rather than shave his head himself - so he did not look like a “barbarian” before trial.
Valent fired his lawyer and eventually elected to represent himself.
He stood trial alongside Terrique Treasurer, for a time a key lieutenant in his operation and who presented as a tragic figure, driven to his crimes by debt and addiction and with a young child to support.
When he finally made it to the dock in mid-February before Justice Sally Fitzgerald and a young, diverse jury of five men and seven women, Valent got off to a bad start.
After hearing his charges read, covering the importation, possession for supply and manufacture of Class A and B drugs including methamphetamine, cocaine and MDMA, he declared he refused to participate in the trial.
“Should this trial proceed under the present circumstances I deem it a railroading and want no part in it,” he said.
Two lawyers appointed amicus curiae by the courts to assist Valent in his self-representation - Nick Leader and Sumudu Thode - appeared to be able to talk some sense into him and he remained quiet for the rest of the trial.
He followed the thousands of pages of evidence carefully and his attention never appeared to waver.
But he elected not to take the stand.
Neither Leader and Thode, nor Treasurer’s legal team of Ian Tucker and Lincoln Burns, elected to bring any evidence, as is their right. Justice Fitzgerald urged the jury to read nothing into it and said it was on the Crown to prove their allegations.
Their defence hinged on identity - that the circumstantial evidence brought by the Crown did not meet the high threshold needed to prove their clients were the meth mastermind or drug runner alleged.
Leader scored several points while on the mistaken identity tack.
The Crown said Valent was behind a slew of nicknames and aliases used on encrypted chat apps to communicate with his minions, including Fokus, Orchestrator Pacific Trading and Global Trading.
Leader had a co-operating Crown witness - a former Valent operative - admit that for a time she believed Global Trading and Fokus were different people.
He then established the possibility that two other key players in the syndicate were at least for a time behind the various usernames employed by the head of the operation.
Combined with inconsistencies in witness evidence, this meant the jury could not be sure where the truth ended and the lies began, he argued.
Leader and Tucker both targeted the credibility of the evidence of the co-operating witnesses, most of whom received years off their sentences and immunity from prosecution for testifying.
They therefore had a huge incentive to tell the police exactly what they wanted to hear, the lawyers argued.
During her closing address, Culliney said the masses of evidence showed all evidence pointed to Valent as the head of the operation.
“The Crown says all roads lead to Valent. That’s not surprising,” Leader said during his closing.
“All roads start from a place of lies. And all roads are paved with lies.”
As his syndicate grew while he was on the lam from New Zealand authorities, Valent was a frequent traveller.
Money appears to have been no issue.
Police experts said they tracked more than $26 million that made its way overseas to Valent via an allegedly corrupt money remitter in Auckland, who has name suppression as she is set to stand trial later this year.
About a year before his arrest in Italy, he landed at London Heathrow on a morning flight from Doha, according to written evidence from a UK border force agent who appears to have had her suspicions about Valent.
He was travelling on a UK passport under the name Troy Xavier Carlton and claimed his parents were British and living in Australia. Valent told her he had just been in Bali for a week with friends and was previously in Amsterdam on business.
His extensive travel was funded by trading the cryptocurrency bitcoin, and he had business interests spanning Brazil, China, Hong Kong, Colombia and Amsterdam, he claimed.
One part of that was true.
His passport seized by Italian authorities showed extensive travel while he was organising and co-ordinating the drug importation, with stamps from Turkey China, Hong Kong, the UK, Maldives, Qatar, Bahamas and the Republic of Panama.
A visit to the Maldives would produce one of the most colourful pieces of evidence in the trial in a crowded field.
While visiting the Indian Ocean islands, among the world’s most expensive holiday destinations, Valent sent a postcard to one of his minions promising a life of similar luxury and riches.
“Just a little taste of what the future holds,” he wrote.
A handwriting expert matched the postcard to Valent’s script. The fact he signed it “Don” in the Mafia sense was used by the Crown to show he was proud of his role atop the syndicate.
Written evidence from Valent’s mother Jane Whitehead showed him again spinning the bitcoin magnate line.
She received multiple lump sum payments of several thousand dollars each. They were sent by one of the former minions in the syndicate who would later turn on Valent and give evidence as a Crown witness.
At the time, she was caring full time for her partner. Cash was tight and she did not ask many questions but assumed the money was from an inheritance Valent had received.
But she also said her partner and Valent would often discuss her son’s “success with cryptocurrency”.
Evidence from police, Customs and co-operating witnesses revealed the structure and workings of the network.
Valent would arrange for the drugs to be purchased overseas and sent via airmail packages, hidden inside items ranging from truck exhausts to picture frames to books.
Exactly how he sourced the masses of drugs, spanning methamphetamine, cocaine, MDMA and key meth precursor ephedrine, remains unclear.
The nature of his travel and the destinations visited suggests some were sourced personally, while in other instances he may have ordered them remotely via the dark web.
Substances such as methamphetamine and MDMA are far more expensive in New Zealand than in other countries, making the country an extremely attractive market for transnational organised crime, Detective Sergeant Sowter explained.
Workers on the ground would take the role of “catchers” to nominate addresses where the parcels could be sent.
Various tricks were used at this stage to elude authorities, witnesses said.
They would write “return to sender” on the package and leave it on the doorstep.
If no one turned up to collect the package it would be deemed safe and handed to the next person in the syndicate.
Each morning Valent, hiding behind one of various aliases, would dispatch orders to his drug runners in coded lists sent via encrypted messaging app Wickr, along the lines of “send X amount of drugs to Y for Z cash”.
He ruled over his harried staff with an iron fist.
One told of performing up to 18 or 20 deliveries around Auckland per day, some via e-scooter, a number only limited by Auckland traffic.
People who did not respond fast enough had their wages docked and he was a demanding and micromanaging boss.
A fear of Valent prevailed in the underworld at the peak of his powers because of his money, influence and gang connections and a belief he had the power to order violence against anyone who crossed him.
Other minions served as storage - holding drugs in safe houses and packaging them for sale.
His runners were sometimes armed and were regularly dealing in huge quantities of cash.
One told of trips from Auckland to Christchurch via the inter-island ferries where he once returned with $600,000 in hard currency.
Aside from always responding promptly, Valent had a code for his workers to follow based on the “10 crack commandments” set out by the late American rapper Notorious BIG as rules for dealing crack cocaine. Crack has also become a byword in New Zealand for meth.
Described as “good trade craft” by Detective Sergeant Sowter, the rules included never involving family in the business, never keeping any crack on you and never using what you sell. The rules were all regularly broken by members of the syndicate.
The former workers in Valent’s syndicate who turned Crown witnesses presented as ordinary Kiwis who for a range of reasons - including drug addiction, a desire to protect families and simple greed - became embroiled in the network.
An older rural woman, described in court by Culliney as a “pretty hard case” but ultimately a reliable witness, was the first to be called by the Crown.
Like all co-operating prosecution witnesses she was granted name suppression and immunity from prosecution on certain charges beyond what she had already pleaded to, and gave evidence via audio-visual link.
She was sentenced to prison for helping co-ordinate the arrival of packages containing methamphetamine precursor drug ephedrine into New Zealand.
Culliney said the woman’s son met the defendant when Valent was imprisoned over a decade ago for dealing LSD, MDMA and cocaine.
The woman said her son had been engaged in providing addresses for international drug parcel deliveries that came through Auckland International Airport but was jailed.
She picked up where he left off.
“I sort of knew [my son] was doing something, and because he had sort of gone on about addresses and everything. I was kind of quite paranoid about him not finishing off what he was supposed to have done. A bit fearful,” she said.
The woman used a cell phone her son had left behind to ring a man she only ever knew as “Fokus”, which the Crown says is one of Valent’s main aliases.
When she started she didn’t even know exactly what key meth precursor chemical ephedrine was.
“In the beginning I was pretty naive,” she said.
She called Fokus and said she would carry on where her son left off.
The woman said she went to his home in central Auckland where he gave her a phone with an encrypted messaging app installed.
“He was quite a nice gentleman,” she said.
“Quite tall, quite skinny, quite businessman-looking.”
Her job was simple.
If courier tracking showed one of the packages had arrived successfully, she would go around to one of the addresses she or her sons had provided, pick it up, carefully unpack the ephedrine then deliver it to Fokus.
Many were seized at the airport but some got through, she said.
Upon delivery, Fokus would give her up to $10,000.
“He’d just take the package and give us a wad of cash and off we go. Two minutes and we’re gone.
“We were supposed to use a new phone and a new sim card for every delivery. I didn’t really want to do any of that so I kind of avoided all of that.”
She testified she was also asked by Fokus to go to the North Shore to buy money-counting machines and to help him rent a storage locker.
At one stage, she said was asked to go to a bank branch in Auckland to pay for an overweight parcel, a decision she viewed as foolish because she would have to provide identification. At this point a different side to Fokus’ personality emerged, she said.
“He got quite nasty because I didn’t want to do it. I thought it was quite stupid for me to do it.
He also asked her to go to a Western Union branch to wire money offshore, she said.
“Fokus needed money to go overseas for some reason.”
After a few months, Fokus visited her at her home in a rural area south of Auckland in October 2016, when she said she told him she was getting out of the game.
“He could burn the house, break my legs, I didn’t care, I just wasn’t doing it any more.”
The woman was arrested the following month, when Customs executed a search warrant at her home.
She co-operated with investigators from the start.
The Crown says she identified Fokus’ property in central Auckland as the same property linked to Valent, and identified Fokus as Valent from a photo montage.
By the time of her arrest, Valent had already fled the country.
Leader asked the witness if she had spoken with Fokus about the cryptocurrency bitcoin at the apartment.
His cross-examination culminated in a question alleging Fokus was helping her in the bitcoin trade, not the drug game, a suggestion strongly rejected by the witness.
“It wasn’t this man called Fokus that was giving you money to perform these tasks, it was you taking the money to Fokus so it could be changed into bitcoin, wasn’t it?” Leader said.
“You’re joking! This is the first I’ve heard of this bitcoin stuff,” the witness said.
“Sorry, you’re barking up the wrong tree on that one.”
The second secret witness to be called was a woman who became embroiled in the syndicate via a friend of her husband.
She was a methamphetamine addict in financial strife who had lost custody of her child.
The woman described receiving a list of orders on her phone from a person going by the name Global Trading, but who would also respond to “Harry”, Valent’s former name before he changed it to Xavier.
Her orders amounted to a list of instructions of where to deliver which drugs and how much cash to pick up.
“How many deliveries were you doing for Global Trading per day?” asked Culliney.
“A lot. A lot of kilos,” she said.
“At one point in time, we were doing 18 deliveries in one day. And it was seven days a week.”
She would use an e-scooter to make some of the deliveries, the jury heard.
Her downfall began with a fire at a central Auckland apartment she and her husband used to prepare methamphetamine for sale.
Knowing police would discover how the apartment was used, they went on the run. During their two weeks on the lam, they talked to a lawyer.
The woman said they agreed to be completely honest with investigators.
During cross-examination, Leader suggested they conspired to fabricate a version of events to advantage them while throwing Global Trading under the bus.
“We didn’t fabricate, no, we chose to be honest,” the witness said.
Leader also had her admit that at one point, she believed Fokus and Global Trading were different people, scoring a point in favour of the defence’s identity argument.
Her husband was the next to be called.
Like other witnesses, the man said he was drawn into the operation while he was battling financially.
His wife had lost her job and a childhood friend of his moved in with the couple.
That friend was a man whose name has cropped up repeatedly as a key figure in the syndicate, who formed a nexus between various underlings in the operation.
The witness noticed the friend often had large wads of cash in his wallet.
At one point, he caught him with about a kilogram of meth sitting on tin foil with a heater blowing warm air across it - meth is wet after production and needs to be dried before sale.
The witness said he was soon approached about “doing some work”.
His first assignment saw him thrown in the deep end.
He was sent to deliver a key ingredient of methamphetamine, ephedrine, to a clandestine laboratory in Northland.
“My first job was basically I was dropped off at the end of a road up north with a half a kilo of ephedrine, and left on the side of the road, and some people came and picked me up and we went on a boat to what I was told was an island.”
It was not an island but rather a clearing with a shack hidden in the bush at Whangaruru, a remote peninsula and harbour southeast of Paihia.
He discovered he was part of a large-scale methamphetamine production.
After two days and nights of cooking meth at the shack, where they stayed awake the whole time, he was given a ride back to Auckland, the witness said.
They went to collect their money from a man called “Gold”, whom the witness described as a skinny man of African descent.
The Crown said Treasurer went by the alias Gold, perhaps due to the colour of his BMW.
In the three years the witness worked in the syndicate he would meet Gold many times, with the witness telling the jury the man was responsible for storing and distributing the drugs.
That was the same role the witness said he played.
He would receive his orders each morning on Wickr, telling him what was to be picked up or delivered, how much each bag should weigh and the amount of money to collect in return.
The witness said he was paid up to $2000 per week but this could be docked by the leader of the syndicate if he failed to message back on time, which would incur a $500 fine.
He would work 12 hours a day or more, seven days a week, but there was a limit on how much each worker could achieve.
“No more than 18 to 20 tasks a day,” he said.
“Otherwise it just becomes unmanageable. And you can only be in so many locations with Auckland traffic unfortunately.”
He described runs down to Christchurch for the syndicate, where he would drive down and cross the ferry with kilograms of drugs, once returning with $600,000 in cash.
During his time in the syndicate, the witness estimated he would have handled a literal tonne of drugs for Valent across hundreds of packages - 40 per cent meth, 40 per cent MDMA and the remainder being various other substances including cocaine, GHB or ecstasy tablets, he estimated.
Midway through 2019 the curtain came down on his life as a drug runner.
By that point his wife had also become enmeshed in the operation and a central Auckland apartment they used to store and prepare meth before sale had caught fire.
Knowing what emergency services would find, they went on the run, consulted a lawyer and eventually resolved to hand themselves in.
The witness, who was accompanied by his father, was arrested at a bus stop on the North Shore in September 2019.
He and his wife were interviewed at the old Auckland police station in Vincent St.
Police charged him with unlawful possession of a sawn-off shotgun, possession for supply of methamphetamine and MDMA and importing MDMA.
After the husband and wife had their first court appearance, the detectives helped them get bail and arranged for them to be put up in a suburban Auckland hotel used for housing informants. They kept them well-fed and arranged for the couple to have visits from the child they had lost to Oranga Tamariki custody.
The husband pleaded guilty within a month and received four years, despite meth supply carrying a maximum penalty of life in prison.
Discounts were applied for his guilty plea and his assistance to authorities, and he received immunity from prosecution for further offences committed within the syndicate. It was a similar story for the wife.
The fourth and final witness to be called was a methamphetamine addict who was recruited into the syndicate by the same childhood friend of the husband.
The friend gave him methamphetamine on tick (credit) and the witness was soon working as a catcher, sourcing addresses for drugs to be sent to.
He became adept at finding drug delivery addresses but later stepped back from the syndicate, frustrated at the pressure Valent was putting on him and the risks he was taking.
But not before he took part in a grandiose but bungled scheme to import meth into New Zealand from Tonga strapped to the underside of a yacht.
At Valent’s behest, the witness and several others including a skipper travelled to Tonga where they planned to meet the yacht.
The plan was foiled when one of them got drunk at a hotel and confessed the scheme to a fellow guest.
The plotters were arrested and deported. No one knows what happened to the meth.
The most unlikely witness to be called was a former spy who said he was paid by Valent to administer lie detector tests for workers in his syndicate - Craig Gubbins, a neatly presented man in late middle age.
Gubbins said he had joined the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service in 1980 and spent the next 25 years as an intelligence officer.
He retired at 50 and started a private intelligence business before undertaking training in Missouri at a law enforcement academy, where he received a diploma in polygraph examination.
Gubbins then began offering paid lie detector tests to clients.
Polygraph examiners use a machine to detect physiological changes in a subject in response to questioning, thereby determining the accuracy of answers.
Proponents including Gubbins claim an accuracy rate of 87 to 94 per cent, but their efficacy is disputed.
The American Psychological Association has said there is little evidence they can be effectively used to detect lies.
Under cross-examination by Burns, one of Treasurer’s defence lawyers, Gubbins said he required approval from the US State Department to import his polygraph machine, the Lafayette LX 5000, because of its potential to be used by dictatorships.
Gubbins said he conducted several lie detector tests at the request of a man who introduced himself as Xavier Valent, with whom he had just one in-person meeting, at the beginning of their interaction, in 2016.
The court heard earlier that the syndicate suffered a major setback when a safehouse was robbed, and the Crown says Valent believed a worker’s loose lips were the cause.
He suspected something was untoward with Valent’s subjects.
“They’re unlike any polygraphs I’ve ever examined,” he said.
“They were all very frightened.
“I realised they were likely involved in criminal activity. That’s why I didn’t inquire into their backgrounds.”
After that first and only in-person meeting, emails from Valent came around 3am or 4am, which Gubbins said led him to suspect the client was overseas.
Among the nervous subjects he questioned was a man who turned up as a nervous wreck, claiming he was late because he thought the police Eagle helicopter was following him.
When he reached around to attach an electrode he noticed a pistol sticking out of the man’s pants.
“He was very embarrassed to have turned up with this,” Gubbins said.
“I said ‘you won’t need that here’ and we continued with the test.”
Tucker, in his closing address, urged the jury not to consider Treasurer guilty by association.
“The burden of proof is with the Crown from go to whoa,” Tucker said.
Everyone else arrested when police terminated Operation Mystic was found with either cash, drugs, drug paraphernalia or firearms - except Treasurer, he said.
“What was found? Nothing.”
Photos showing Treasurer with another member of the syndicate, who pleaded guilty last year, merely depicted a friendship borne out of a shared interest in cars, Tucker said.
He described the evidence of the co-operating witnesses as “entirely self-serving”.
“They are strangers to the truth,” he said.
Leader, in his closing address, also again targeted the credibility of the witnesses.
“They’ve been locked into their lies from the moment they spoke to the police.”
In cross-examination, the defence had the witnesses admit to regular dishonesty in their day-to-day lives before the arrests.
“These four witnesses are habitual, practised, competent and indiscriminate liars.”
As a result, Leader said, it was impossible to sort the truth from the fiction in their accounts. And because a jury needed to be sure each charge was proved beyond reasonable doubt, they must acquit.
“Where the truth stops and lies begin, that’s a guess. And you can’t guess in jury trials.”
The jury retired late on the afternoon of Wednesday, March 29, to begin deliberating.
One juror passed a note to Justice Fitzgerald suggesting some sort of deadline be set because they feared some fellow jurors wanted the deliberations to continue into the following week so they could avoid work for a seventh week.
Justice Fitzgerald said this was not possible and they needed to take as long as they needed to be sure.
They returned after the weekend and announced they had reached a verdict shortly before noon on Monday.
Treasurer was found guilty of three representative charges of supplying methamphetamine, MDMA and ephedrine, covering hundreds of drug deliveries, but not guilty of manufacturing methamphetamine or supplying cocaine.
The jury returned guilty verdicts for Valent on eight charges of importing ephedrine, five of possessing ephedrine for supply, 25 of possessing meth for supply, one of importing cocaine, 10 of supplying meth, two of manufacturing meth, four of supplying MDMA, nine of importing methamphetamine, seven of possessing MDMA for supply, one of possessing materials capable of producing controlled drugs, four of importing MDMA and one representative charge of supplying cocaine.
Not guilty verdicts came back for one charge each of importing ephedrine, importing MDMA, possessing meth for supply and importing cocaine, together with four not guilty verdicts for importing meth.
All verdicts were unanimous.
Valent remained silent when the verdicts were read out and he was led back down to the cells of the High Court.
His lawyers have not confirmed if he will launch an appeal, but it is expected that he will because he has nothing to lose.
He has already chalked up a lengthy sentence for drug dealing in his early 20s and will receive no discounts for guilty pleas, co-operation with police or previous good character.
As a result, the life sentence the Crown is expected to seek at sentencing on June 9 could lead to decades behind bars, barring an extraordinary result on appeal.
Life sentences carry lifetime parole restrictions for people upon release.
So even if Valent obtains release as he nears retirement age, it appears his days of visiting the Maldives are over.
The man is now in a critical but stable condition in hospital.