Their hard-working parents sent them to Australia in the hope that a western education would give them to leg-up they needed to become successful businessmen and providers for their extended families.
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Instead, Ngoc Dien Pham and Thanh Quang Bui will return home to their native Vietnam in disgrace, forever carrying the title ‘convicted drug dealer’.
Both men were in Australia on temporary visas, although Bui’s had already expired, when they began working as “crop sitters” at separate hydroponic cannabis set ups in the Illawarra.
Pham, 22, was responsible for tending to nearly 300 plants growing at an innocuous two-storey house in Valetta Street in West Wollongong, while Bui, 34, took care of 43 plants inside a sealed up brick home in Coronet Place in Dapto.
Police received tip-offs about both premises and carried out separate raids within a week of each other.
Pham and Bui were subsequently arrested and charged with enhanced cultivation of a prohibited planted.
Neither man had come under the notice of authorities since their arrival in the country, however lawyers for the pair said both had turned to the illegal activity after falling into financial hardship.
In Wollongong District Court on Monday, Judge Andrew Haesler said it was a sad reality that such cases often caught and sentenced the low-level drug runners or growers, but seldom caught the principals of the syndicates – those responsible for establishing the sophisticated grow houses and who profited from them the most.
However, he said the vital roles Pham and Bui played in their respective criminal groups had to be acknowledged with a prison term.
“Without people like Bui [and Pham] participating in this role, the cultivation of cannabis collapses,” he said.
Both men were sentenced to 14 months jail. They are expected to be deported after the sentences expire.