Chilean brothers Patricio and Fabian Castillo Castro jailed for Auckland cocaine import scheme

Two brothers from Chile who flew to Auckland with nearly $2 million worth of cocaine strapped to their legs under compression sleeves – later explaining that a drug cartel had promised a free holiday – will now be staying in New Zealand for the foreseeable future after they were handed twin prison terms.

Fabian Alonso Castillo Castro, 27, wept this week as he sat in the dock at Auckland District Court beside 35-year-old brother Patricio Andres Castillo Castro, who cast his gaze to the floor for much of the sentencing hearing.

Defence lawyer Oliver Salt said Patricio Castillo Castro now very much regrets having included his brother in the scheme.

The older sibling claimed that he didn’t have much of a choice but to become a mule to pay off a drug debt at home in Chile, but his brother had a bright future ahead – being a former pro basketball player in their home country who was on the verge of completing a five-year university degree in business administration and engineering.

“This is a classic cartel exploitation case,” Salt said, emphasising that neither brother viewed the risky gambit as a get-rich-quick scheme.

“The brazen and high-risk nature of the import ... tends to suggest the defendants were expendable assets at the lower end of the food chain. That’s the bottom feeders that do that.”

Court documents state that the brothers arrived on a flight from Santiago exactly one year ago this weekend.

Just under 5kg of cocaine had been concealed in double-layered plastic packaging, which had a eucalyptus paste applied to the middle layer to throw off detector dogs at the airport.

Customs officers did seem to sense that something was off, interviewing the duo about their short itinerary in New Zealand and then searching their baggage. But no other search was conducted, and the Castillo Castro brothers left the airport for a central Auckland hotel.

Five days later, after the brothers did not board a flight to Tonga that had been on their itinerary, officers with the National Organised Crime Group obtained a search warrant and came knocking on their hotel room door. The cocaine was still there, with an opened bag found in a desk drawer and seven other bags stuffed under a mattress.

A video found on Patricio Castillo Castro’s phone showed him taking cocaine from the open package and putting it onto a piece of paper. Police found he had been using the phone to communicate with associates in Chile via Signal, an encrypted messaging app popular with criminal organisations.

The older brother told police the drugs had been given to him after he arrived in New Zealand, insisting he hadn’t imported them himself. His younger brother, meanwhile, claimed to know nothing about the cache.

With a current street price of around $350 to $400 per gram, the drugs could have netted between $1.74m and $1.98m, the brothers’ shared agreed summary of facts states.

Both brothers’ explanations to authorities have changed since their arrests.

“I apologise to New Zealand and to the Crown and to the court and to the community for my acts,” Fabian Castillo Castro said in an apology letter written in Spanish.

He went on to say he had failed his family, who didn’t deserve the social stigma he and his brother had brought on them, but he wants to become a better man.

“This process has transformed my life,” he said.

Defence lawyer Lorraine Smith elaborated, explaining that the New Zealand arrests had destroyed his budding career and “caused heartbreak to his mother”. Fabian Castillo Castro and his mother had moved away from his father and his older brother when he was 11 years old and seemed to thrive for the next decade, Smith said.

But when he moved back to his hometown, he got into the habit of visiting his drug addict brother and smoking cannabis with him on weekends, the defence lawyer said. He got introduced to cocaine through the electronic music scene and his use of that drug, as well as ketamine, increased substantially after a grandparent died, the court was told.

Crown prosecutor Lisa Cwetler suggested a starting point of up to 12 years and nine months for the younger brother. She noted that, “despite some naivety and some influence by his older brother”, he still chose to hide a large amount of cocaine in his pants during the international flight.

She sought a 13-year starting point for the older brother.

Judge Kevin Glubb instead ordered starting points of 12 and a half years for the older sibling and 11 and a half years for the younger of the two. He then allowed reductions for their guilty pleas, personal factors, remorse, rehabilitation efforts and the extra difficulties they’ll face in prison due to having no family in New Zealand and a minimal grasp of English.

Because the older brother pleaded guilty earlier, he received a larger overall discount, resulting in both brothers receiving end sentences of six years and three months’ imprisonment.

The judge noted that both brothers reported a rough upbringing amid “house parties, drugs and alcohol, and taking care of intoxicated adults at a young age”.

The older brother reported being physically abused by his father, who blamed him for the marriage failing, and he started using drugs around age 14. His drug addiction escalated significantly about a year before the arrest when he lost his job, the court was told.

“He had a drug dealer who encouraged him to get involved in this escapade to clear his debts,” the judge said. “That was promoted to him as a low-risk task to clear all his debts, and they’d have a paid holiday at the same time.”

The judge noted a letter from Patricio Castillo Castro’s partner back in Chile, who described him as a committed father and “not a criminal by nature”.

Both brothers, he said, played a crucial role in smuggling the drug, which had the potential to cause substantial harm to the community.

It’s expected that both men will be deported after their sentences are completed.

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.

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