True crime: Drug convictions a package deal

On an unremarkable Wednesday afternoon in February 2022, in the quiet suburb of Oakleigh South, a silver Mercedes Benz sedan arrives at the local post office. A woman in her 70s exits the vehicle, enters the post office, and lodges 37 packages before purchasing a large quantity of Australia Post envelopes with cash. She leaves the post office, returns to her vehicle and drives away, blissfully unaware that Victoria Police detectives were keenly watching on as part of a drug trafficking investigation.

Those investigators later seized the 37 packages and found them all to contain varying quantities and types of illicit drugs. But they would soon find out they were only scratching the surface of a highly sophisticated trafficking operation.

The offending first came to the attention of police on 18 January 2022 when, through routine mail screening, Tasmania Police intercepted a package of incoming mail containing 60 grams of methylamphetamine. Further investigation found the package had been lodged at the Oakleigh South post office the day prior.

Exactly one week later, police in Tasmania intercepted another package containing 35 grams of methylamphetamine, again lodged at Oakleigh South.

Tasmania Police sourced CCTV footage from the post office that showed an elderly woman of Asian descent lodging several parcels on the day in question, before referring the matter to Victoria Police’s Icarus Taskforce.

The taskforce, which operates as a partnership between Victoria Police, Australian Border Force and the Australian Federal Police, has a mission of reducing the supply of drugs to the Victorian community by halting importation and trafficking of illicit drugs via air cargo and international and domestic mail.

Icarus Taskforce officer-in-charge Detective Senior Sergeant Mark Newlan said this investigation fit the unit’s remit perfectly.

“We do many of these jobs, and the volume of packages we saw going through in those initial stages was pretty consistent with what we’d seen in other investigations,” he said.

An old-fashioned stake-out

Equipped with the CCTV from Tasmania Police and confirmation of the post office location where the parcels had been lodged, the first port of call for Detective Leading Senior Constable Edmond Shkembi and Sergeant Joey Kurtschenko, who were both working as investigators at Icarus Taskforce at the time, along with Detective Sergeant Jason Schubert, was to stake out the post office and hope for a glimpse of the woman in the footage.

It was that fateful day in February when detectives first saw her in person.

“We waited all day until around 3:45pm when the lady in the Mercedes arrived to lodge more packages,” Det Ldg Sen Const Shkembi said.

After running registration checks on the woman’s Mercedes, and after confirmation of their identities from other surveillance operatives at Australian Border Force, 77-year-old Southsada Sananikone and her 42-year-old daughter Mimi Sananikone, who both had completely clean criminal records, were identified as persons of interest.

For Det Ldg Sen Const Shkembi, the early stages of the investigation weren’t too unusual from others he’d worked on.

“At that time, we didn’t know the full magnitude,” he said.

“We thought, ‘Yeah, it’s trafficking’, but the more we started to scratch, the more we found.”

Further investigation revealed nearby post offices at Darling and Murrumbeena were also being used by the pair to lodge items in the post.

Police seized 253 packages from the three post offices over a three-day period in February 2022, finding drugs of varying types and quantities in all of them. On one day, 89 packages were seized from just one post office.

Further enquiries with those post offices revealed Southsada had been dropping off packages regularly for approximately 18 months.

As the massive scale of the offending became clear, detectives were eager to intervene. Police had already sourced a warrant to search the pair’s home and vehicle, but were waiting for the right time to move into the arrest phase.

“From our surveillance, we already knew they were doing drops at the post offices but we were keen to see how they were sourcing the drugs,” Det Sgt Schubert said.

“So our trigger point for arresting them was not if they dropped off, but if they collected from somewhere. And on 23 February 2022, they did two collections – one from a parcel locker and another from a post office.

“That’s when we moved into the arrest phase.”

A bounty uncovered

Just three weeks after the investigation was referred to Victoria Police, both Mimi and Southsada were intercepted by police in their vehicle and swiftly arrested. The search warrants were conducted shortly after.

At the pair’s humble home, police found an elaborate set-up where the mother-daughter duo received, divided and packaged hundreds of illicit drugs, including methamphetamine, MDMA, ketamine, cocaine, as well as various hormones and anabolic steroids.

“We could see the dining table was set up with a laptop, cash on the coffee table and then there were just packets of drugs all over the remaining surfaces,” Det Sgt Schubert said.

“It also appeared that they were pre-packaging things into common weights, so when the orders came in they could just pick them accordingly.”

The total haul of drugs found in the residence and vehicle weighed more than 10 kilograms, a mere fraction of what police would later calculate as 126 kilograms sent by the duo over a three-year period.

On the day of the search warrant, police also seized the $65,000 Mercedes Benz, $473,600 AUD and $4000 USD in cash, a Rolex watch valued at more than $25,000, designer jewellery and 14 designer handbags with an average value of $3500. Mimi later surrendered her cryptocurrency wallet valued at more than $285,000 and bank accounts held by both Mimi and Southsada containing a total of about $235,000.

Additionally, police located identity packs comprised of fraudulent credit cards, mobile phone SIM cards, email addresses and Australia Post accounts at the house.

Australia Post records showed more than $140,000 in cash spent on the purchase of 14,370 Express Post satchels and envelopes on 241 separate occasions, as well as 221 lodgements of parcels at post offices in Melbourne’s south-east over a 19-month period.

“Those figures speak for themselves when it comes to showing the magnitude of what the pair was dealing with,” Det Sen Sgt Newlan said.

While the seized property in the warrants painted a strong picture of the trafficking operation, investigators were keen to speak to the pair at the centre of the offending to get their own accounts.

Mixed messages received

“I spent most of my time that day talking to Mimi, and it was clear to me that she was a very intelligent woman,” Sgt Kurtschenko said.

“I really think her downfall was not knowing anything about how police work, because the “business” she was running was actually quite impressive.

“I’d say because she was so intelligent, it became clear to her quite quickly that she was in a lot of trouble when we were at the house. So she was calculating in her responses but, in the end, she was talking pretty openly with me.

“She told me she had got into sourcing and selling drugs on the darknet with the intention of making enough money to start a legitimate non-alcoholic spirit business, and during the search warrant we saw she was close to launching that venture.

“She said she wanted to get out of the drugs business, and that she was going to wrap it all up if she had the chance to launch her other business.”

Detectives didn’t have as much luck with Mimi’s mother, Southsada.

“There was no cooperation from her. We’d ask her simple questions about how long the operation had been going and she would just say, ‘Ask Mimi’,” Det Ldg Sen Const Shkembi said.

Det Sen Sgt Newlan agreed, describing Southsada’s approach as “staunch denial” – an approach that would continue in the months that followed.

At the conclusion of the search warrants and police interviews on 23 February, both Mimi and Southsada were remanded in custody, which came as a surprise to police.

“Other than for murder, I’m not aware of any 77-year-old being remanded, and that demonstrated the seriousness of her offending,” Det Sen Sgt Newlan said.

Three months later, Southsada successfully applied for bail under strict conditions while Mimi stayed on remand.

Revealing the full picture

In the months following Mimi and Southsada’s arrests, the work was only just beginning for Icarus Taskforce investigators. Detectives painstakingly combed through and captured thousands of pages of correspondence from the pair’s electronic devices, and every drug seized needed to be forensically analysed and documented to confirm its identity.

Through his extensive work pulling together the enormous amount of evidence into an electronic brief for court, Sgt Kurtschenko learned more about the ins and outs of the duo’s operation.

“It seemed that Mimi was running the business and Southsada was responsible for taking the orders to the post office to send them out,” Sgt Kurtschenko said.

And while it appeared that Southsada played a lesser part in the operation, Det Ldg Sen Const Shkembi said her self-determination of complete innocence never wavered.

“Southsada’s defence was that she didn’t know that she was part of an illegal venture, she was just doing what her daughter told her to do, and she was adamant that she didn’t do anything wrong,” he said.

By the middle of 2023, Mimi pleaded guilty to four rolled-up charges of trafficking in a drug of dependence in a large commercial quantity, trafficking simpliciter in a drug of dependence, knowingly dealing with proceeds of crime, and possessing identification information of others with intention to commit an indictable offence.

In September 2023, Mimi was sentenced to 17 years and 8 months imprisonment. The sentencing judge stated that but for her early plea of guilty, she would have been sentenced to 22 years imprisonment.

Southsada’s offending went to trial in 2024, where she was found guilty by a jury of trafficking in drugs of dependence. She was sentenced to 90 days imprisonment, a 12-month community corrections order and 50 hours of unpaid community service in August 2024. With time already served on remand, she was not required to spend any more time behind bars.

Still staunch in her denial of any wrongdoing, Southsada’s attempt to appeal her conviction was rejected by the Court of Appeal in December 2025, marking the end of the matter altogether.

For Det Sen Sgt Newlan, Det Sgt Schubert, Sgt Kurtschenko and Det Ldg Sen Const Shkembi, the overall result was a resounding success.

“When we do jobs at Icarus Taskforce, there are three things we’re after: loss of the product, loss of assets, and a loss of freedom,” Det Sen Sgt Newlan said.

“And in this investigation, we got all three.”

Editorial Cassandra Stanghi
Photography Stephanie Pitts-Clark and supplied

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