Ex-cafe owner faces jury over alleged drug operation

And federal prosecutors say that at the middle of it all, from his home in Canberra's leafy inner north, was Brendan Baker.

Mr Baker appeared in front of a jury on Monday at the opening of his trial in the ACT Supreme Court.

He faces 12 separate charges, including for the importation and attempted importation of drugs, trafficking various drugs, and dealing with the proceeds of crime. "I'm not guilty," he told the jury on all counts.

Federal prosecutor Darren Renton told the jury Mr Baker first met the Crown's key witness, a drug dealer, in about 2013 to 2014. A year or so later, it's alleged Mr Baker sent the man a message, asking if he wanted "molly", a slang term for drugs. The message was unanswered, but in March 2016 he sent another message, offering cannabis to sell at a better price than competitors.

Mr Renton said that over the next two years Mr Baker and the drug dealer met multiple times in their efforts dealing drugs.

Their dealing allegedly evolved to MDMA, or ecstasy, communicating via Blackberry because of what Mr Baker allegedly understood was police's inability to access them.

The dealer allegedly picked up drugs from Mr Baker's O'Connor home, concealed in a pink Barbie lunchbox containing three or four sandwich bags of MDMA, which he later shared with a second dealer.

Mr Baker allegedly started talking about importing drugs, which he claimed to have been doing recently within PVC pipes for a person in prison. He allegedly told the dealer about his source blowing himself up, and showed a clip said to be of the same explosion.

Mr Renton said the pair planned to import two kilograms of ethalone, a synthetic drug, and they used a special program to access an eBay-like shopping site to select the drugs, which Mr Baker would pay for with bitcoin bought from a man in Sydney. The drugs never arrived, Mr Renton said.

Eventually, Mr Renton said, the dealer wanted out and passed on his role to a colleague. But the pair had racked up a significant debt to Mr Baker worth more than $230,000. The prosecutor told the jury Mr Baker started to put pressure on the pair, and they allegedly met with his bosses in a Belconnen car park, which the second dealer was too scared to attend and where the first dealer was punched.

Mr Renton said Mr Baker had filed a tax return in the 2016 financial year and declared an income of of $12,000, listing his job as administration assistant. He later worked in recruitment for another company earning nearly $40,000.

But Mr Baker's social media profiles showed a man who had taken out a loan and bought a Mercedes, a BMW and a cafe on the Kingston Foreshore for $80,000, and opened another business called Grand Concepts, put a deposit of $20,000 on land with plans to build a six-bedroom house and took spontaneous overseas holidays.

It was the Crown case, Mr Renton said, that Mr Baker's lawful declared income was insufficient to explain his assets and lifestyle.

It was a sensational story, Mr Baker's barrister Astrid Haban-Beer, instructed by Boxall Legal, told the jury during her opening address, "a complicated ecosystem of personalities all said to have been involved in the illicit drug trade."

But she warned the jury that the evidence of the Crown's key witness, a dealer turned informant who had been offered immunity from prosecution, was very much contested. He had a vested interest in staying out of jail, she told the jury.

Mr Baker was not on trial for being part of the selfie generation or his prolific use of hashtags, she said, gauche, self-obsessed or ostentatious though it may be. She said the Crown was asking the jury to take leaps to fit Mr Baker into the bigger picture, and its circumstantial case.

The trial continues.