• Dion Robert Taiapa, a 501 deportee, was sentenced for laundering $662,000 through gold bullion purchases.
• The money was swindled from a victim trying to purchase a new house.
• Judge Nevin Dawson denied Taiapa’s request for home detention, noting that, despite Taiapa’s apology, the gold was still missing.

A 501 deportee who has spent the past two decades in and out of Australian prisons is now serving time in New Zealand after a swindle that involved hacking a lawyer’s email account and stealing $662,000 from a client.

Authorities said North Shore Auckland couple Dion Robert Taiapa, 50, and Amber Barbara Wereta, 33, rushed to convert most of the ill-gotten gains into 1kg bars of gold bullion in the short period between the July 2023 offending and when police caught up to them.

The effort was successful — the gold has never been recovered.

“In the past two years, the price of gold has gone through the roof,” Crown prosecutor Conrad Purdon pointed out last month as Taiapa was sentenced in Auckland District Court for money laundering. “Police don’t know where that gold is.

“There’s only two people who know where the gold is: the man in the dock and his partner.”

The Herald attended Taiapa’s sentencing following his guilty plea but has not reported on it until now to preserve Wereta’s right to a fair trial. However, she subsequently pleaded guilty the day her trial was to begin.

Made in Australia

Taiapa’s chequered past has put him in the spotlight on more than one occasion on both sides of the Tasman.

In 2022, he spoke to Newshub’s Australia correspondent from an immigration detention centre and was used as an example of the unfairness of Australia’s heavy-handed 501 deportation policy. Taiapa said his pregnant mother was Australian but visiting New Zealand on a 12-week holiday when she gave birth to him in 1974.

He was taken to Australia while still an infant and never visited New Zealand again, he said, arguing a line should be drawn in the sand for people such as him, who see Aotearoa only as a “foreign country”.

“Obviously, we’re Australian,” he said, pointing to his accent. “That’s all we’re asking for is a bit of common sense.”

Fifteen years earlier, he had been in Australian media headlines for a bizarre case in which he admitted trafficking a large haul of methamphetamine but claimed he only did so under duress after two drug bosses — identified only by their first names, Tony and Salvatore — put a gun to his head and threatened to kill his then-partner, who was pregnant, if he didn’t do their bidding.

A jury didn’t buy the story, and he was sentenced in 2007 to seven years’ imprisonment, to be served cumulatively with a six-year sentence he was already serving for trafficking of cannabis and ecstasy.

The case grew in notoriety as it was appealed to the Supreme Court of Queensland and later to the High Court of Australia. His sentence, however, did not change.

According to an outline of the case summarised by the Supreme Court, Taiapa’s blue Ford Falcon had been pulled over by police in Helens Hill, three hours south of Cairns, in July 2006. He drew suspicion when over $25,000 cash was found in the boot. Upon further search back at the police station, authorities found a hidden compartment under the rear seat where foam had been cut out to accommodate a plastic container with meth inside.

Police estimated the total meth found inside the car would have a value of between roughly A$500,000 ($551,000) and A$1 million depending on if it was sold by the gram or the ounce.

Taiapa told jurors at trial he had sold cannabis earlier in his life and had graduated to cocaine use about five years earlier, with Tony and Salvatore being the main suppliers of his habit until his debt had grown to A$60,000.

He said the duo paid a menacing visit to him and his de facto wife in May 2006, when he was on parole for the first drug trafficking sentence.

“There was a knock at a door at around 8 o’clock,” he explained. “I’ve gone to answer it and as I’ve answered — opened the door up the door’s come flying open and someone’s grabbed me by the neck … I had a bit of a scuffle with him … Before I knew it I had a gun shoved down my throat.”

They told him he had four weeks to pay the debt and warned if he went to police “you and your girlfriend here will end up with a bullet”, he claimed while in the witness box.

His partner at the time gave a similar account and said she moved away a short time later for her own safety. Taiapa’s mother also testified, explaining that she had given her son A$29,000 cash so that he could pay off the debt.

But when he offered the money, Taiapa claimed, the two men said they had other plans in mind for him.

“You’re lucky we haven’t shot you already,” he recalled them saying, adding that they wanted the cash and for Taiapa to “collect something for them from Sydney”. He said they again reiterated that they would target his partner — as well as his mother — if he went to police.

Under cross-examination, prosecutors pointed out that Taiapa had numerous opportunities to get help from authorities but he insisted that strategy wouldn’t have been “100% safe”.

“These blokes, they’re not your everyday drug dealers,” he said. “They’re like, there’s drug dealers and then there’s drug dealers. These blokes are up there. They’re not going to fall into a booby trap or anything like that, I believe.”

But the Supreme Court was unmoved by the response, determining that he “gave no evidence at all which might allow the jury to conclude that his professed lack of faith in the ability of the police to defeat the threat was reasonable”.

House payment lost, gold bars gained

Drugs were again an aspect of Taiapa’s sentencing last month in Auckland. He was charged with possessing cannabis for supply, which carries an eight-year maximum sentence, after police found 194g of the drug along with baggies and scales while searching his and Wereta’s Hillcrest home.

But the main focus of the sentencing was the money laundering, which is punishable by up to seven years in prison.

Court documents state that an unnamed lawyer’s account had been hacked in July 2023. A client of the lawyer needed to pay the $662,000 balance for a new house purchase and was instructed, via the hacked email, to put the money into the lawyer’s bank account. But the details provided to the victim were actually for a bank account belonging to Taiapa’s partner.

Neither Taiapa nor Wereta were ever charged with hacking the account themselves or stealing the money — only the act of laundering it.

The same day the money landed in Wereta’s account, the couple went to gold merchant TJ Handcrafted in Sylvia Park and ordered 5kg of the precious metal for $528,000, according to the summary of facts that Taiapa agreed to.

The value of gold rose steadily in 2024. (Image: Getty)

Several days later, Wereta requested to purchase another 1kg of gold bullion for $106,000 but cancelled the order and instead inquired about purchasing jewellery from the store, putting down a $5000 deposit.

An additional $20,000 had been transferred to Taiapa’s bank account, while $7000 was given to another person and about $8300 was paid to No 1 Currency Exchange. Over a 10-day period, the duo also withdrew, transferred and spent another $20,000, police alleged.

‘Hit the ground running’

Despite the still-missing gold, the current net loss to the victim is about $178,000 — roughly a third of his initial loss — thanks to frozen bank accounts and returned funds.

Defence lawyer Maja Harris encouraged Judge Nevin Dawson during last month’s hearing to allow a sentence of home detention, noting that her client was “willing and able” to start paying $1000 a month towards his half of the restitution.

He was owed money by the Australian Government due to an ACC claim from his time living there and could get lump payments whenever he requested, he explained.

The judge agreed that restitution was a “major component” of the sentencing. But he was sceptical of the offer.

“I need to have some understanding of how realistic that is,” he said of the promised payments. “People standing in the dock for sentencing will tell me anything on occasion.”

There were other reasons, Harris continued, for a non-custodial sentence. She said Taiapa’s personal circumstances have changed substantially in recent months as he finally received “wrap-around” rehabilitation services while on electronically monitored bail in Northland, allowing him to evolve from the “institutionalised state he’s been in for the past 20 years”.

“He is committed to making these changes,” she said. “Imprisonment will only set him back to the only life he really knows as an adult but is taking steps to move away from.”

Purdon, the prosecutor, disagreed. He noted the missing gold and argued in most cases, including Taiapa’s, “prison is appropriate for offending of this magnitude”.

In the end, Judge Dawson ordered a sentence of two years and nine months' imprisonment.

He noted that Taiapa had no prior convictions in New Zealand, but he also noted that the defendant had been deported from Australia — where he had over 20 convictions — just five months before the money laundering took place.

“It appears upon your return to New Zealand, you’ve hit the ground running as far as your offending goes,” he said.

The judge also noted the high degree of pre-mediation involved in the offending, the still missing loot and the “substantial financial loss” and “great deal of distress” caused to the victim. It’s difficult to take Taiapa’s proclaimed remorse at face value when he’s offended so many times previously, he added.

The judge declined to order any restitution for the remainder of the missing money, reiterating his scepticism about the $1000-a-month offer.

“I do not want to raise the hopes of the complainant unnecessarily,” he explained.

Craig Kapitan is an Auckland-based journalist covering courts and justice. He joined the Herald in 2021 and has reported on courts since 2002 in three newsrooms in the US and New Zealand.