Brett Stevens announces retirement

[aussiblue]

and this old story too http://www.minerscorp.com.au/index.p...s_full&id=7657

A south western Queensland quarry near Roma has reached settlement after a protracted dispute between landholder and operator.

Sutton Range Quarry operator Queensland Quarry Group (QQG) has come under fire for a series of alleged breaches, which quarry manager Brett Stevens said were initiated by the Cosgrove family, who own the land where the quarry is located.

This morning the Courier Mail reported that the Queensland Quarry Group had been accused of being an unlicensed venture, and did not have approval to sell material to construction companies.

Maranoa Regional Council compliance officer Warren Oxnam said that there were various exemptions available for the QQG quarry permits, but that council did not know enough about QQG’s customers to know if they qualified for those exemptions, which led council to issue a ‘show case’ notice.

“We issued them with a show cause notice, and as part of that we required them to lodge a development application which they’ve now done, and council is in the process of assisting with that as we speak,” Oxnam said.

“We’re still not entirely sure who their customers were, but council was concerned which is why we issued the show cause notice against them.”

The council issued the show clause notice to all entities involved, including the property owner, the operators and the management company.

“…To anyone we could identify,” Oxnam said.

“It’s our habit to give them all the show cause notice to make sure that nobody escapes the net, they can’t say they didn’t know.”

The next step in the council’s approval process for the quarry to sell materials will be to carry out a public notification.

“We will issue a notice placed on road frontages of the property for local community to have the opportunity to object or put submissions in about it, and after the public notification period ends then councillors would be in a position to make a decision about it.”

The Sutton Range Quarry produces hard rock and sand used for road bases and aggregate, and counts among its customers gas field contractors and local businesses.

Quarry manager Brett Stevens, a former drag racing champion, has become a subject of interest to the media with the Courier Mail reporting that he is currently defending against drug distribution charges, and that one of the owners of the quarry is a former Rebels bikie gang member whose share is owned through a company named ‘Don’t Ever **** With Our Money’ (DEFWOM).

“They’re jumping on the bikie thing and charges that I’ve been on that are still going through, so, never let the truth get in the way of a good story,” Stevens said.

“There’s five shareholders in the company, they all have their own business interests as well, the venture was something I’ve put together, I met the landowner here in August 2012, and he’s the one that’s gone and told all these stories.”

We had an extraction permit for 100,000 tonnes in May last year, but there’s a bit of a grey area between council and environmental protection, they changed the laws last year, if you get a permit from EHP, if it’s for flood related works you don’t need a DA from the council,” he said.

Stevens said the quarry has two 100,000 tones permits for extraction, but that the second permit doesn’t stipulate the uses for the material.

The nature of the dispute is subject to non-disclosure, however Stevens told Australian Mining that the dispute has reached settlement through mediation.

“It was just all about greed,” he said.

“Nothing’s actually been to a trial, we’ve done everything right, but you know, turning up at eight o’clock at night full of rum and chaining the gate up… is just not f-ing cool.

“The good thing about it all is that every person or department that has had complaints made against us, we have worked with them, and if we had made any mistakes they were rectified immediately.”

The quarry is currently operating, and Stevens said he hopes approval of the one million tonne permit for sale will be approved by council within the next few months.

“We’ve actually got a million tonne permit, the application has been properly made with the council,” Stevens said.

“We’ve had someone working on this permit since March last year, but the property owner’s son took over the permit application and now we’re out of pocket.

“We still have 80,000 tonnes left on our second permit to send out.”

Stevens said that since the quarry was started in 2013 there have been some minor issues including silt containment, a two day shutdown by the Mines Department over incomplete paperwork, but that all issues were promptly rectified and that all departments concerned are satisfied with the operation of the quarry.

[aussiblue]

It's a worry that it has taken until now to get him to court. It makes one wonder how good the evidence is (or perhaps how brave any witnesses are); I expect if the prosecution lose the case there will certainly be some follow up litigation.

[aussiblue]

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-09-0...icking/6744426

Racing champion Brett Stevens guilty of drug trafficking

Posted about 10 hours ago


Former Australian drag racing champion Brett Stevens has been found guilty of producing and trafficking ecstasy.

The 50-year-old was on trial in the Brisbane Supreme Court accused of masterminding a $1.2 million ecstasy trafficking ring between 2007 and 2009.

On Wednesday, the jury found Stevens guilty of producing and trafficking a dangerous drug, though not guilty of supplying the drug.

Stevens, or "Skunk" as he is also known, was an Australian drag racing champion before retiring in 2008.

A year later he was arrested with police alleging he was at the centre of a large ecstasy operation involving tens of thousands of pills and hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Prosecutor Daniel Boyle alleged Stevens was the ring leader of the drug operation.

"It will be alleged that Stevens was a puppet master in running his entrepreneurial drug business and was able to coordinate the running of the business without much hands on contact," Mr Boyle said during the trial in July.

"While he successfully distanced himself from the operation, he is inextricably intertwined with others in the trafficking, production and supply of drugs."

The alleged drug operation ran between July 2007 and February 2009 and was said to have produced up to 100,000 ecstasy pills a week, and to supply areas throughout Queensland.

Stevens' arrest followed an electronic surveillance operation, involving telephone intercepts and video surveillance, which Queensland police ran for several months.

His defence barrister Stephen Courtney claimed it was a complex case, relying heavily on circumstantial evidence and that there were no clear recordings of drug dealings.

[aussiblue]

http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2...ug-trafficking

Former Australian drag racing champion Brett Stevens is facing a long stint behind bars after he was convicted of running a large-scale ecstasy operation.
Source: AAP

2 Sep 2015 - 3:26 PM UPDATED YESTERDAY 5:09 PM

Australian drag racing legend Brett Stevens is facing a lengthy jail term after he was convicted of producing and trafficking ecstasy.

The 50-year-old was found guilty of both offences in the Brisbane Supreme Court on Wednesday after a six-week trial.

The jury heard that between 2007 and 2009, the veteran racer masterminded a $1.2 million operation that produced up to 100,000 pills per week.

He met a key associate at Queensland's Willowbank Raceway.

Stevens, who won three national drag racing titles, was the operation's "puppet master" who deliberately distanced himself from the drug network in a bid to keep his hands clean, the crown said.

He and associates were recorded discussing drugs in code.

Detectives collected 800 recorded interactions during a multi-agency operation over almost two years.

They identified $1.2 million in income that couldn't be attributed to any source, and arrested Stevens in February 2009.

He pleaded not guilty to trafficking, producing and supplying dangerous drugs at the start of his trial in July.

The jury retired on Monday and took two days to find Stevens guilty of trafficking and producing, and not guilty of supplying.

Stevens' bail was revoked and he is due to be sentenced on November 20.

[aussiblue]

Interesting https://www.facebook.com/brett.steve...39949136037803 I wonder if those that gave still think it was a good cause?

[46302ute]

and i thought this had gone quiet!

[buggerlugs]

13 years..............will be appealing

[Top_Ghia]

13 years is a good stint for filth like that. The system can work.

[sleepisforthedead]

..and won't get a better result..

[aussiblue]

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news...-1227617292297

AUSTRALIAN drag racing legend Brett Stevens has been sentenced to 13 years’ jail for producing and trafficking ecstasy.

The 50-year-old was earlier this year found guilty on both charges following a six-week trial in which jurors heard the racing veteran masterminded an operation worth up to $1.2 million that produced about 100,000 pills a week.

Stevens, who has three national drag racing titles to his name, was today sentenced to 13 years in prison in the Supreme Court in Brisbane.

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http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-11-2...siness/6960074

Former drag racer jailed for 13 years over ecstasy distribution network

By Louisa Rebgetz

Brett Raymond Stevens

Former Australian drag-racing champion Brett Raymond Stevens has been jailed for at least 10 years for running a million-dollar ecstasy ring in Queensland.

Stevens, 50, also known as "Skunk", retired from drag racing in 2008.

In September, a Brisbane Supreme Court jury found Stevens guilty of producing and trafficking MDMA, also known as ecstasy, between 2007 and 2009.

Prosecutor Daniel Boyle said Stevens ran a large-scale drug operation said to have produced up to 100,000 ecstasy pills a week, and to supply areas throughout Queensland.

Today, Justice Peter Lyons sentenced Stevens to 13 years in jail.

He also convicted Stevens of a serious violent offence, meaning he must serve at least 10 years of his sentence before being eligible for parole.

Mr Boyle had told the court Stevens "was a puppet master in running his entrepreneurial drug business and was able to coordinate the running of the business without much hands-on contact".

Stevens' arrest followed an electronic surveillance operation, involving telephone intercepts and video surveillance, which Queensland Police ran for several months.

Outside court, Stevens' lawyer Chris Hannay said the sentence was a surprise to his client.

"Obviously he is bitterly disappointed, his family is upset and it carries all that associated grief that goes with it," he said.

"Probably not what he was expecting or what he was hoping for but certainly within range."

Mr Hannay said Justice Lyons was making a statement in handing down his sentence.

"He sent a clear message to those who want to get involved in that sort of behaviour that the courts certainly won't tolerate [it], no matter what the circumstances are and no matter what the hardship is to families and friends."

[The Monty]

Good riddance to a pathetic POS drug trafficker.

[filthypig]

yep **** bag right there

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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

[Top_Ghia]

Are we meant to feel sorry for this piece of trash?

[aussiblue]

Are we meant to feel sorry for this piece of trash?

Certainly not me; but I do feel a little sorry for the suckers who made donations in response to his Facebook appeal.

[aussiblue]

Appeal failed.

http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/q...39f95c5b838cb9

Former Australian drag-racing champion Brett Stevens to serve at least 10 years in jail

Melanie Petrinec, The Courier-Mail

April 11, 2017 1:23pm


FORMER Australian drag-racing champion Brett Stevens has lost an appeal of his 13-year jail term for producing and trafficking ecstasy.

Stevens was found guilty in 2015 following a six-week trial in which jurors heard the racing veteran masterminded an operation worth up to $1.2 million that produced about 100,000 pills a week.

Stevens, who has three national drag racing titles to his name, appealed the decision to the state’s highest court.

He argued the conviction was not supported by the evidence, and the sentence was manifestly excessive.

But the Queensland Court of Appeal this afternoon handed down its decision, rejecting both appeals.

All three Court of Appeal judges concluded there was ample evidence for a jury to convict Stevens.

Stevens became national champion in 2004, 2005 and 2008.

He was buying MDMA from Serbian contacts in Sydney and turning it into party pills devoured along the east coast to fund his racing team.

He would boast of operating from “Cairns to Sydney” and was soon in the crosshairs of investigators from Operation Brazen, launched in 2007 to investigate drug supplier Vlatko Tesic, the brother of Gold Coast nightclub baron Ivan Tesic.

His racing empire began unravelling when investigators caught wind of the drug connections to the drag-racing industry and Stevens, whose winnings on the track did not account for his mounting fortune.

Stevens has to serve at least 10 years of his sentence before being eligible for parole.