The paltry amount crime bosses will pay someone to do their dirty work has been revealed in court as a man who helped ram raid and set fire to a Midland tobacco shop was sentenced.
Darryl John Campton, 23, was a drug addict and a career criminal somehow recruited by an organised crime gang in November 2025 to target a store that refused to sell their illegal vapes and smokes.
Now he’s heading to jail for his involvement and he didn’t even get paid.
Campton was sentenced on Tuesday in the Perth District Court to 4½ years over a spate of offending in September and November 2025, that included the raid on the Great Eastern Highway shop that caused almost $20,000 worth of damage.
The incident was caught on CCTV with Campton seen in the footage with two other men using a stolen car and a street sign to “battery ram” the metal shutters on the front of the shop.
They’re later seen peeling apart the metal so they can get inside, pour some fuel from a jerry can and set the shop on fire before fleeing the scene.
Campton was paid $5,000 for being the getaway driver.
One of his co-offenders carried out the task in return for having his drug debt wiped.
Judge Belinda Lonsdale said Campton was “susceptible to pressure from peers” as a result of “a dysfunctional childhood” that included abuse, leading to drug use and anti-social behaviour.
During the hearing, the 23-year-old was also sentenced over a terrifying nighttime burglary in which he woke the occupant of an Iluka property by standing in his bedroom doorway with a hatchet in his hand and a bandana covering his face.
He told him to be quiet before stealing keys to a BMW which he later dumped in nearby bushland.
He was arrested and confessed to the crime, but two months later was at it again, this time breaking into the home of a Craigie acquaintance. It was his car that was used an hour or so later in the Midland ram raid.
The court was told Campton’s history of offending and drug use stretched back into his childhood, including a suggestion he was suffering from fetal alcohol spectrum disorder.
“The impetus for this offending is to feed his long-standing and insatiable drug habit,” the court was told.
Judge Lonsdale sentenced him to a total of 4½ years in prison – two years for his involvement in the attack on the Midland store which is the same sentence as one of his co-offenders.