Queensland grazier Alexander Malcolm Lane was sentenced in Cairns Supreme Court on 16 August 2007 to thirteen and a half years’ jail for heading a multi-million-dollar marijuana-growing cartel.[1][2] Lane, a Cairns father of two, had presided over one of Australia’s most sophisticated marijuana cartels for more than a decade.[1][2] Justice Stanley Jones said Lane was second to none in the organisation, responsible for marketing the drug, distributing profits, converting cash into gold and keeping accounts.[1][2]
Lane and four other syndicate members were sentenced the same day after a three-year joint police and Australian Crime Commission investigation that traced the syndicate across Australia and to Europe.[2] Officers said that at the time of the arrests on 30 May 2006 it was one of the biggest and longest-running drug operations found in several decades.[1][2] The syndicate used helicopters to ferry men and supplies into remote bush camps on an outback cattle station near Chillagoe, producing tonnes of high-grade cannabis each year.[1][2] The helicopters carried each crop, worth between three and four million dollars, to waiting semi-trailers that drove it down inland roads to the Sydney and Melbourne markets between 1995 and 2006.[2] Helicopter pilot Peter Pantovich, the former manager of Bolwarra Station 75 kilometres south-west of Chillagoe, was sentenced to eight years for his role.[1][2]
