R v Mella

Judgment

1. HIS HONOUR: Robert Aldo Mella stands for sentence for four offences to which he pleaded guilty. At the time of the offences he was 29 years old. He pleaded guilty to the first two charges at an early stage in the Local Court and pleaded guilty to the final two charges on 13 September 2016 after the matter had been listed for hearing in Sydney on 11 September 2016 in this Court. However, conveniently the four charges have been listed in the one indictment presented on 13 September 2016 which is the only indictment I shall refer to in these reasons.
2. A short overview of the crimes committed by the offender is contained in the first eight paragraphs of the agreed facts. In citing these agreed facts I would use some licence in correcting poor expressions of English and poor grammar, and excluding unnecessary material.
3. In March and April 2015 the offender operated a cocaine "delivery service" to a client base that exceeded 900 customers primarily in the Sydney CBD, the inner suburbs and in particular the Eastern Suburbs. The offender supplied cocaine for between $250 and $300 per bag. Each bag weighed approximately 0.65 grams. On 4 March 2015 police commenced an authorised controlled operation using undercover police officers to purchase prohibited drugs from the offender. On 11 March 2015 the police obtained a telephone intercept warrant for a telephone service being used by the offender. The offender was known to customers by the name of Sam and would also respond to the name "Mikey", which it appears from the material before me, was the name of the former user of the telephone service in question. The offender would receive text messages or phone calls from customers on the telephone service. The customer would generally state his or her location and ask the offender if he were available to supply cocaine. The offender would then respond that he was available if he were and advise the customer of his estimated time of arrival. Customers who contacted the offender would use coded conversations and refer to cocaine as either "Bs", "bags", "tickets", "tix" or state things such as "can we catch up tonight?" The customer would then enter the front passenger of a vehicle driven by the offender and state how many bags or she required. The offender would then retrieve the required number of bags of cocaine from a large freezer style bag which he kept on his lap. He would hand the bags to the customer and would obtain in return payment in cash. The offender used two vehicles in his delivery service. Each was his own which would make identifying him easy for the investigating police. Each cocaine transaction was conducted inside one of his two vehicles. Between 5 March 2015 and 17 April 2015 police lawfully intercepted over 11,000 phone calls and text messages from the offender's mobile phone service. The phone was used exclusively for the purpose of supplying cocaine. Indeed in one intercepted conversation the offender pointed out to an unidentified male that it was not a "social phone".