The country’s largest city, paralyzed by a 100-day COVID lockdown starting August 2021, became the stage for this villain’s audacious drug ballet.
The dealer, identified as 44-year-old Ngawi Hokianga Anthony Westrupp, was caught red-handed with $100,000 of the Wairoa Mongrel Mob’s dirty money, prowling Auckland’s underbelly for meth to buy for the gang.
With the city’s gates closed to the outside world, Westrupp played the devoted father card, exploiting his own child’s chemotherapy treatment as a Trojan horse to smuggle wholesale methamphetamine to Hawke’s Bay.
Little did Westrupp know, the eyes and ears of the law were already one step ahead, having bugged a Mongrel Mob den where whispers of his meth mission echoed. The plot thickened as Westrupp, oblivious to the trap set for him, strutted through Auckland, his Hyundai Santa Fe caught on CCTV, marking his every move.
The climax hit when, on December 6, police eavesdropped on a phone call sealing a drug rendezvous in Napier. Westrupp’s vehicle was seen meeting with an associate’s black Ford Ranger, the exchange of poison for profit captured by unsuspecting CCTV.
But the saga took a sinister turn on December 29, when Westrupp, playing the family man with his partner and toddlers in tow, was stopped by police. His vehicle concealed a backpack filled with a meth cutting agent and the tools of his trade.
In a final act of defiance, Westrupp faced the music in court, draped in a Maori korowai, a symbol of honour, starkly contrasted by the dishonour of his crimes.
Despite his lawyer’s plea for leniency, citing a break from gang ties and rehabilitation efforts, the judge slammed a three-year sentence on him.
