Operation Tarpon. The CJNG Scam That Was Foiled By New Zealand Police

At first glance, Tangaroa Demant was a fisherman whose life was going on peacefully in the waters of northern New Zealand, the neighboring island of Australia. In that modern region with no apparent crime, inside his boat “Buenos Tiempos” he enjoyed his best years. Or, at least, that was what he said.

Because beneath that personality detached from material things, there was that of a trafficker who was going to steal a shipment of drugs from a bloodthirsty Mexican cartel. A suicide mission.

In a bad investment, Demant had lost a million dollars, his business, four houses and even his marriage. In that houseboat he had converted his boat into, Demant used a central set of devices with which he maintained encrypted conversations with synthetic drug suppliers around the world. He particularly liked to do business with one: a Mexican living in New Zealand, Angel Gabriel Gavito Alvarado, who boasted of having dirty contacts more than 18 thousand kilometers away.

The two had known each other since December 2020, when Demant and his partner Waitai were looking for a medium-sized shipment of narcotics. Acquaintances introduced them to the Mexican national. He identified himself as a reliable distributor with arms that reached to the other side of the world. He promised them the best drug in the world. To prove its quality, they rushed to send a light package of cocaine from Mexico to New Zealand. 

On New Year’s Eve, the drug arrived in the seas of Oceania and the quality of the white powder pleased the New Zealanders so much that they agreed to pay for the product in about two weeks. Something strange in the drug business. 

As if it were an episode of ‘Breaking Bad’, Demant met the Mexican Gavito on January 14, 2021 at a ‘McDonald’s’, on the North Island of New Zealand, to complete the transaction. There, with the discreet delivery of an envelope with money and a handshake, Demant proved to be a punctual payer and Gavito demonstrated his efficiency as a supplier. Thus the partnership between the two drug traffickers was sealed.

The so-called ‘white gold’ managed to connect novice traffickers from New Zealand with one of the most powerful cartels in Mexico

​The next day, January 15, Gavito deposited 20,600 New Zealand dollars – almost a quarter of a million Mexican pesos – to a personal account in a local bank, Westpac New Zealand. And five days later, he transferred 19,676 New Zealand dollars to a Mexican bank. The flow of bills ended when someone in the Real Vallarta neighborhood, in Zapopan, Jalisco, withdrew the amount.

This is how the New Zealand National Police, who had been following Demant’s footsteps since September 2020 and had his phones tapped, realized that the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) was more established in their country than they thought.

It was not just any criminal group. According to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), along with the Sinaloa Cartel, it is the cartel with the largest presence in the world with more than 45 thousand representatives in more than 100 countries, a criminal expansion never achieved.

A judicial document CRI 2021-070-1570, in DOMINGA’s possession, tells how this fake fisherman with a hippie facade was a partner of a representative of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. And he was about to attempt a move as daring as it was suicidal: stealing a load of hundreds of kilos of cocaine from the Mexican drug trafficker.

New Zealanders begin doing business with ‘the Mexican’

A month later, on February 12, 2021, Demant used his supposedly spy-proof phone to give his partner Waitai some exciting news: Gavito, the Mexican, was proposing a new business deal. This time, he would sell them “a couple of kilos of ‘liquid.’” The police wrote down every word they heard, thanks to an order signed by a judge. Demant proposed picking up the package in Auckland, the largest city in New Zealand, and going to Rotorua to resell some to his partner. “Yes, it’s selling like damn hotcakes!” Waitai celebrated.

The two drug traffickers were happy with their new supplier, who offered frequent shipments and excellent quality of drugs arriving from the Mexican Pacific, so they were ready to increase the quantity of their orders: they no longer wanted to buy just a few pounds, but 200 kilos of cocaine.

The operation seemed simple but complex in execution: Demant and Waitai would use a customs employee – Swinton, according to the indictment – ​​infiltrated in the Port of Tauranga, the most important in the north of the country. He would use his position and knowledge of the place to receive the drug shipment hidden in a container on board a commercial vessel; he would take it away from customs employees and the police so that it would be quickly unloaded; then he would transfer it to a hidden warehouse.

Swinton also had to find another employee, from the other side of the port, to do the same task, in case the container was accidentally diverted to another area where he had no influence. So he recruited his partner Walsh, who accepted without concern. “Things go wrong all the time and containers tend to get misplaced,” he joked when he accepted the job offer. 

In a country like New Zealand, ranked as the third least corrupt – below Denmark and Finland, according to a 2023 measurement by Transparency International – organized crime with ties to Jalisco had easily bribed two government employees with the promise of $250,000 and a kilo of cocaine as payment in kind. 

On March 13, 2021, a call between the group led by Demant alerted the authorities. The recording captured the conversation: “How much is three times nine?” Demant asked. “27,” Swinton replied. “Remember that date.”

The police concluded that the 27th would be the arrival date of the “narco-container” and prepared for a raid to seize the drugs and arrest the group on the spot.

Seizure of cocaine at the Lázaro Cárdenas port

An unforeseen event with the shipment of a cargo upset the group of New Zealanders

But five days before the scheduled date, Demant called his partner Waitai with bad news: the Mexican suppliers had asked him to wait one or two more weeks. There was a problem with a phone, which Demant could not fully understand.

He was frustrated, angry. Gavito was breaking his word and that made them nervous, especially because the world was closing again: that month, the World Health Organization again recommended confinement after declaring the third wave of the covid-19 pandemic, aggravated by the Delta variant. A delay in delivery by the Mexicans meant a huge loss of money for the New Zealanders.

According to reports filed in the Supreme Court of New Zealand, the police stated that they would speed up their action: “in multiple calls between Demant and Waitai, both discussed the intention that, once they received the import of drugs controlled by the criminal group [CJNG] in Mexico, they would take the drugs and not make the payment required by the cartel.” That would be the punishment for Gavito for his delay.

The Ostula community reported that the presence and violence by the CJNG increased.

In retaliation for the delay, Demant’s group hatched a scam against the CJNG, a decision that would have turned New Zealand into an epicenter of violence

If the betrayal were to take place, one of the most peaceful countries in the world could be splashed with blood. The CJNG would not allow its criminal brand to be humiliated in this way. Allowing some criminals to steal 200 kilos of cocaine from them would be tantamount to allowing others to follow suit. There would most likely be an exemplary and public sanction for Demant’s gang.

The authorities understood that it was time to stop listening and start acting. The most critical phase of the “Tarpón Operation”, initiated with the wiretaps, had to start.

New Zealand was a door to conquer Australia

In a mansion in the Polanco neighborhood of Mexico City, the then Australian ambassador to Mexico, Patricia Holmes, told me something I didn’t expect to admit so candidly: “My country has an organized crime problem and it is related to the Mexican cartels.” Our interview took place in June 2023, when I was starting a project on the presence of Mexican cartels in more distant places in the world.

A month later, Holmes would give way to the current ambassador Rachel Moseley. I don’t know if Holmes knew that her days in Mexico were numbered, but her frankness makes me assume that she did. It is not common for a diplomat to admit to a journalist that the cartels are affecting the security of her country, especially if that nation is considered “first world” and has a global image of strong and bribery-proof institutions.

“Methamphetamine use has increased significantly. Cocaine too. Australia is a rich country and since we are far from the countries of origin of the drug, it makes the price high, but users can pay for it because there is money in the country […]. More than half of the methamphetamine seized in Australia originated in Mexico,” acknowledged the representative, who is also the mother of teenagers and has heard from them that recreational drugs run through their country as if they included an accelerator.

A year after our talk, the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission released a report last July in which it described its own country as “a nation of stimulants” and acknowledged that, among the 30 most important countries in Europe, Oceania, Asia and America, Australia is in second place globally in methamphetamine and cocaine consumption, below the United States in that dishonorable ‘ranking’.

With a population of almost 27 million people, this is a market in which any criminal organization would like to participate. There, the cartels can sell up to 3,000% more expensive a single dose: in the United States, a dose of “meth” can cost about 100 Mexican pesos on the street, but in the land of kangaroos the same amount can be sold for up to 3,200, according to the UN.

“Australia has agents in Mexico,” Holmes acknowledged, confirming an old rumor: the narcotic connection between both countries has caused the Australian Federal Police, since 2017, to have members dispersed in Mexican territory doing criminal intelligence work. A kind of DEA but from Oceania.

​To conquer Australia, the cartels had to get in somewhere. And the most vulnerable access was New Zealand, just 1,500 kilometres away. Anthea McCarthy, a researcher of criminal phenomena at the University of New South Wales, has a date for the beginning of the Mexican cartel invasion: 2015.

“Previously, everything that had to do with cocaine went back to Colombia. Until 2015 there was a report commissioned by the Australian government on synthetic drugs and that’s when Mexico started to appear. Then, 2019 became a year of mega seizures connected to Mexican cartels,” she says.

New Zealand used to be a place to send drugs to Australia, but there is a lot of evidence to show that it is now a consumer market.

Drug wholesale outside Mexico

“One of the really interesting things I’ve found is that the high-reaching cartel is no longer the Sinaloa cartel, but the Jalisco New Generation Cartel appears more frequently,” says Anthea McCarthy from her cubicle in a video call.

The cartels’ business, she says, is in narco-wholesale, that is, the commercialization of large volumes of narcotics outside the country. To do this, criminal groups have travelers who go around the world imitating Fernando de Magallanes and conquering new lands. Like Gavito Alvarado.

On the other hand, drug dealing in New Zealand – or the distribution of personal doses – is no longer done by Mexican cartels, but by the so-called OMCG (Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs). They are clubs of dealers who move on wheels in cosmopolitan and millionaire cities selling drugs created in poor neighborhoods of Jalisco, Colima or Nayarit.

“There is the case of two people from New Zealand who were operating a drug corridor. They were making shipments that went to and from Mexico. Obviously they were being attacked and recorded by the police. And apparently they thought it would be a good idea to accept a shipment of cocaine and not pay for it. What idiots!, right?” McCarthy mocks.

There are less painful ways to commit suicide than stealing money from Mencho.

The operation stopped the plan to steal from ‘Mencho’

Although the New Zealand Police knew that the cocaine shipment would not arrive in their country on March 27, 2021, through telephone surveillance against Demant, they mounted a discreet operation anyway. The guard was extended until the next day and no drug shipment, apparently, reached the Port of Tauranga.

The quietness worried the agents. Demant, Waitai and Gavito continued doing dirty business such as buying and selling methamphetamines, but they had returned to drug dealing. That made the New Zealand Police suspect that the 200 kilos of cocaine were yet to arrive and that the Mexican didn’t know that his partners were planning to leave him with a debt of about 946 million pesos. An outstanding balance of that size would certainly lead to a series of murders.

So a month later, on April 28, 2021, local authorities grew tired of waiting for an eventual bloodbath and took the leash off the so-called “Tarpón Operation.” Police, military personnel, experts, coast guards, customs agents and canine teams set out to target the drug traffickers’ homes, who had already been located by the geolocation of their tapped phones. The mission’s name implied the priority objective: “tarpón” in Spanish means “sábalo,” a type of fish very popular in New Zealand. Demant told his family and friends that his income was due to his skills as a fisherman of this sardine-like species.

The next day, New Zealand authorities proudly announced their double feat: not only had they made eight simultaneous arrests—including that of Gavito and another alleged Mexican accomplice named Moreno González—but they had done it without a single shot fired or any bloodshed. 

Demant acknowledged that he had “lost the moral compass of his life.” A decade before his arrest, he had been living a dream life: he had been married for 30 years to the love of his life, with six sons and daughters who loved him and a successful legal business exporting lobsters to China. Until he lost a million dollars in a bad investment. 

“I was arrogant and I let myself be dazzled by easy money,” he told the captor during his trial. “I chose to go down a dark path. I was weak and I gave in to temptation.”

That temptation was called Angel Gabriel Gavito Alvarado, born in Guadalajara, whom he met at the beginning of 2020 when the tapatío arrived in New Zealand as a conqueror of the CJNG with the facade of being the new head of operations of a trucking company in the Port of Tauranga.

Demant was sentenced to seven years in prison and two months; Gavito to three years and eight months; the others to variable sentences, according to their role in the gang and the aggravating factor of attempting to traffic drugs taking advantage of their positions in the local government.

The arrival of a mysterious metal container

The story could very well end here and do so with a happy ending, but there is an epilogue that doesn’t let the New Zealand Police rest: on July 26, 2024, customs agents at the Port of Tauranga identified a metal container, among the hundreds that arrive every day, with a suspicious substance.

When the inspectors checked the contents, they realized they were looking at 175 kilos of methamphetamines, enough for up to nine million doses. After removing the cargo, the New Zealand agents confirmed their suspicions: it was another container that had left Mexico.

The Jalisco New Generation Cartel had lost a few soldiers with Operation Tarpón, but it continues its stubborn war to conquer Oceania.

Source: Milenio