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http://www.theguardian.com/australia...to-do-business

Drag racing champ Brett Stevens's drug empire a crash course in how not to do business.

The supreme court judge who was about to send Brett “The Boss” Stevens to jail looked up with a realisation.

“He had a remarkable career,” Justice Peter Lyons said, interrupting Stevens’s lawyer as he ran through his background.

It was not just that Stevens, who now sat in a dress shirt, jeans and thongs poring over legal notes, was a three-time national champion in the high-risk, high-cost sport of drag racing.

As well as rising from apprentice mechanic to the pinnacle of the largely blue-collar motorsport, he had built a considerable business empire.

He had the country’s biggest drag race team – attracting sponsorship from Jack Daniel’s – was a manufacturer of car parts, had an earthmoving business, a cement haulage business with 14 trucks, a charter boat business and a tattoo shop.

He had 18ha in properties north of Brisbane worth $14m at their peak, a contract for a reality TV show and lived what the crown prosecutor described as “a celebrity lifestyle”.

Lyons said it was Stevens’s “capacity for hard work, [his] skill and energy” while having large numbers of people working under him that “might indicate a capacity to carry on” his shadow enterprise: a wholesale MDMA manufacturing and distribution business.

Stevens did not take drugs. But in the twilight of his racing career, tax and business debts were mounting up.

By the time of his last national championship in 2008, Stevens was orchestrating the sale of hundreds of thousands of ecstasy pills along the east coast. The pills, made up by presses in a series of rented homes across Brisbane, were meant to be a timely venture to solve his financial difficulties.

Through drag racing, Stevens knew a Sydney crime figure – a Serbian-born man who commands a formidable reputation throughout Australia’s underworld – and chalked up a $200,000 loan to him.

“That’s where all this **** has come from,” Stevens said last year.

“The coppers had [the Sydney man and his brother] under investigation and when those two were talking about the money that I owed him, the coppers obviously thought, ‘Aw, it’s a drug debt.’

“My **** up. I wasn’t wealthy and I needed some money because I got a bill from the taxman and I had to pay it.”

Stevens proved a tough nut for police to crack. In a manner typical of those at the apex of drug rings, Stevens directed his syndicate from a distance, spoke in code on the phone and met associates only in public, knowing he was under police surveillance.

Other forms of pressure were brought to bear on him.

Investigators once played his wife, Kath, a tapped phone call in which Stevens purportedly ordered services from a sex worker. It was irrelevant to Stevens’s criminal conduct. The couple regarded it as an attempt to divide them through humiliation.

His disgrace was further compounded by the publicity around his arrest. Sponsors disappeared, he was stripped of his racing records, his business loans were called in and his assets unloaded in a fire sale.

While on bail, the ever enterprising Stevens tried to rebuild a business career, including as “chief executive officer” of a quarry venture with a former Rebels bikie gang member under the company name Defwom, an acronym for “Don’t Ever **** With Our Money”.

Stevens had earlier hatched a plan to unload one of his frozen properties worth $2.2m to his wife, then Defwom, which ended up occupying it rent free before it was evicted by supreme court order.

The quarry foundered after a dispute with the landholder, as did Stevens’s other attempts at a career in mining and the transport business. By the time he was found guilty of trafficking and producing MDMA, he was working in demolition.

For his part, Stevens refused to cooperate and proclaimed his innocence to the end, soliciting donations on Facebook for his legal fees when his own funds ran dry.

“Honestly, I get paid to work, I rent a house now,” he said last year. “As long as my missus and kids are all right, if [going to jail] is what happens. [But] I can’t afford to go doing appeals. I can’t even afford a solicitor.”

His wife continues to stand by him.

The precise scale of Stevens’s drug business was unclear.

There was the testimony of his associates – who rolled despite his recorded threats to them – one of whom claimed he cleared $600,000 profit in six months at a margin of 50 cents a pill.

Lyons concluded Stevens probably made at least this much himself.

But the judge found a better indication of the trade he was doing were the amounts of cash seized by police from his associates and an employee on three occasions. These ranged from $99,000 to the $200,000 that was slated to repay the Serbian crime figure.

Lyons noted evidence by a police forensic accountant that Stevens had $1.2m in unexplained income but could not rule out the possibility that some of this was cash from racing merchandise sales.

Even if every cent were from drugs, such gains rate as a trifle beside the incomes of many other trafficking syndicate leaders busted in Queensland and Australia – a trifle even beside Stevens’s own capital gains through legitimate businesses until he hit the wall.

But his sentence of 13 years – which Lyons indicated was heavily weighted as a deterrent to others who would turn to trafficking as a commercial venture – ranks among the harshest punishments meted out to a Queensland trafficker. Amphetamines trafficker Charlie Cannon, who the government pursued for $27m in a proceeds of crime case, was given just over 12 years.

Rarely has a public figure lost so much for so little gain as Brett Stevens