The Squad

by Yoni Bashan

  A turning point in the argument came on a warm December afternoon in 2005 when a short fight erupted between three lifeguards and a group of Middle Eastern beachgoers on the sand at Cronulla Beach. Construed as an assault on Australian values, what followed were three days of ugly, roiling scenes of public bashings and anti-Muslim sentiment that would become known as the ‘Cronulla Riots’. In retaliation, convoys of Middle Eastern men wreaked havoc across the beach suburbs, trashing cars and local businesses, catching police off guard and testing the law enforcement response to sudden and fluid eruptions of violence.

  The job of investigating the Cronulla Riots and reporting back on the police response fell to Detective Chief Superintendent Ken McKay, a fixer of sorts and a maverick operator. McKay was regarded as a cool head by Police Commissioner Ken Moroney, someone who could parachute into a tricky situation, handle the television cameras, and bat away questions from journalists.

  Under great pressure to respond to the riots, the NSW government made a sudden announcement in January 2006: a permanent Middle Eastern Organised Crime Squad would be set up within months. It was an ironic twist considering the Middle Eastern men arrested during McKay’s investigation of the riots were not even remotely involved in organised crime; most were ordinary guys with wives and day jobs, who had been whipped up in the week’s hysteria. After seven years of gangland violence and multiple reports urging a permanent solution to the MEOC problem, it was a punch thrown on a beach that made all the difference.

  Moroney asked McKay to be the commander of this new Squad and gave him 108 officers: forty-seven criminal investigators, twenty-two Target Action Group detectives, sixteen uniformed police on general duties, twelve highway patrol officers, eight intelligence analysts, two Arabic interpreters and one executive assistant.

  On Monday, 1 May 2006, these officers and their support staff formed up for duty.

  CHAPTER ONE

  NO PAIN, NO GAIN

  INDUCTION DAY, MEOCS HEADQUARTERS, MONDAY, 1 MAY 2006

  A corpse flashed up on a projector screen in front of a darkened lecture hall full of police officers. The dark brown eyes were fixed in a stare as the body cooled on a concrete floor of a western Sydney car yard. The arms were slung out to the side like they were strung up to a crucifix and the blood had stopped pooling just past the elbow, oozing in a puddle that started from beneath the torso. If you looked hard enough the puddle almost passed for an angel’s wing. The cause of death: a volley of gunshots, five at close range. He hadn’t even seen it coming – four in the back, one in the head. A classic gangland hit, said Detective Inspector Mick Ryan, curating the slideshow at the front of the room. He clicked a button to load up the next image. It was another death scene, this time a bedroom – a man lying facedown on a mattress, the sheets soaked wet with blood and the body turning purple; a drug runner, Ryan said. The next slide was a two-storey mini-mansion, renovated with a driveway and Christmas lights dangling from a balcony – a picture of good living. The only thing out of place was the bonnet of a police car jutting out from the corner of the frame, its presence explained in the next slide, a wide shot of the front door with another body on the ground, a well-dressed man who’d gone outside for a cigarette. A trickle of blood had been caught mid-rush as it coursed down the tiled walkway past an exhibit marker at his feet – the victim of a drive-by shooting, Ryan told the officers, all there on day one of their new assignment.

  Mick Ryan’s induction speech at MEOCS HQ was a welcome of sorts, a macabre presentation with a bit of everything: ugly mugshots, grisly death scenes, videos of drug dealing, crime theory 101. Sitting there taking it all in were 100-odd police representing a cross-section of careers and disciplines: detectives in black suits and cargo shorts, beat cops in soft vests, wide-eyed rookies, veterans who had seen it all, and a smattering of dead weight shanghaied from police commands across the city, there to make up the numbers in those early days.

  Their office was inside a sad-looking mid-rise, constructed with too much red brick and too little character – like a dreary science block from a suburban high school. This was probably intentional. It was supposed to be a covert building, its exact address kept a secret as a security measure. Criminals were never brought back there, and if charges were laid they were done at an actual police station.

  MEOCS had been given two levels of office space in the building, a place that in its heyday had been a prestigious NSW Police Region Command, a nerve centre where top brass gathered and big decisions were made. Since then it had been allowed to dilapidate. The Region office moved out and a rolling cavalcade of strike forces, task forces and incident responses moved in. By the time it was gifted to MEOCS, its rooms had been abandoned for years. Relics from these bygone eras were still there when Ken McKay, the Squad’s newly appointed commander, first arrived for an inspection in April 2006. In one corner was a rickety metal cupboard sealed with crime scene tape. Kitschy Christmas decorations pointed the way to Santa’s village. A map of southwestern Sydney the size of a small suburb was still hanging on a wall from previous strike force operations; largely ornamental, its utility for planning search warrants had been made redundant by GPS technology. As McKay surveyed the room he could detect a faint stench of mildew. Pigeons were flying in and out through open windows.

  He had the two floors industrially cleaned and set up a bullpen of desks on both levels. Level Three would be assigned to his Criminal Investigation (CI) teams while the rest of the Squad – the Uniform branch, Highway Patrol, Target Action Group, Intelligence division, Telephone Intercept translators – were told to share the space on Level Two.

  Few detectives under McKay had more experience policing Middle Eastern organised crime than Mick Ryan, which was why he was up there on Day One with his slideshow, giving the rest of the Squad a three-hour primer on the lessons he had learned from Task Force Gain.

  Ryan was a very fit 46-year-old, a triathlete in his spare time. He was gruff, like Clint Eastwood, with a slight squint in one eye – hence his nickname ‘Dirty Harry’. Years of working in organised crime had given him an intense manner. Before Task Force Gain he’d worked at the Gangs Squad. Before that it was the Drug and Organised Crime Strike Force Program (East Coast), another forerunner to MEOCS. It was a unit of pioneers who had made their careers during the late 1990s, a time when Middle Eastern organised crime was still a nascent industry and the police force was rudderless after the Royal Commission. Informants had dropped off and crime figures had risen, but even in this climate several cops had thrown it all to the wind and gone out on their own. Celebrated cases like Strike Force Mask, Strike Force Lancer and Strike Force Ranger routed out the drug dealers of Telopea Street and ended the shooting rampages of DK’s Boys. These were investigations that had won awards and gone on CVs, creating a distinguished alumni out of the detectives who were part of them; it was like being at the Sydney 2000 Olympics, or Woodstock. Being on just one of these cases was enough to cement a cop’s credentials. Ryan, a veteran, had worked on all three.

  He rarely smiled while he was on the job, but his humour was wicked and biting. After an argument about overtime pay with a disgruntled detective, he dumped a box full of babies’ dummies on the guy’s desk, $50 worth, laughing as he walked away. But he was also fiercely protective of his staff. Prior to his job at the Squad, he had once heard a rumour about an underworld figure making plans to assassinate one of his detectives; Ryan had gone out of his way to track the criminal down, hauling him into a police station and locking the door behind him in an interview room.

  ‘I’m the one telling him to go after you,’ Ryan had told the criminal, getting in close to the guy’s face and thumping a finger into his chest. ‘It’s me you’ve got to be worried about. Threaten me,’ he’d said, the words coming out as an invitation. The rumours ceased after that.

  Even as he gave his induction speech and clicked through his slideshow, Ryan’s demeanour made colleagues wary, signalling he was not to be trifled with. W
hen a reasonably senior highway patrol officer yawned at the halfway point, Ryan stopped everything and pointed at the officer.

  ‘Am I fucking boring you?’ he asked, stunning the room, before moving on.

  Ryan likened organised crime to a sickness; the violence and crime scenes weren’t the causes, but the symptoms, emblematic of something bigger. Every street dealer, every gangland execution, every drive-by shooting or half-baked extortion was a shift in a broader narrative: a patch of drug turf under threat; a broken alliance; a powerplay beneath the surface. The key players were revealed to the room as super-savvy villains who changed their phone numbers twice a month and used high-frequency scanners to look for bugs planted in their homes. One guy even drove the length of his street every night with a torch to check parked cars for surveillance operatives.

  Historically, Ryan told the Squad, the Vietnamese had their heroin imports and the Italians had their ‘grass castles’. Those were their niches and they stuck with them; violence was a last resort. Middle Eastern organised crime was a new beast in this arena. Whatever had come previously was no match. One of Ryan’s slides had the word ‘MEOC’ written in the middle of it and a series of straight lines sticking out, each one joining with a subheading – rape, serious assault, murder, arson, explosives, extortion, prostitution, money laundering, immigration offences, insurance fraud, identity fraud, terrorism, car rebirthing, weapons offences.

  Task Force Gain had revealed this concept in practical terms. There were guys involved in arms trafficking who were wanted by the Arson Squad. A suspect in a homicide was running a home-loan scam. A standover man was rumoured to be holding C4 explosives. A family in Punchbowl was sending pot to South Australia and buying handguns with silencers from Melbourne. Every case was like a fractal pattern moving out in all directions, each job leading to three more.

  The arrival of Task Force Gain had come as a shock to these crims. Working like a ground radar, it mapped out two distinct layers of underworld character. Beneath the topsoil were the sloppy criminals, many of whom were rounded up through routine work like pat-downs, search warrants and vehicle stops. These low-hanging fruit were quickly flipped into ‘street assets’ and given benefits if they worked as informants – small cash payments, a reduction on their sentence. The intelligence they fed back to detectives was harvested to track the second type of targets, those at the bedrock, the drug bosses who stayed ahead of the law by hiding their stash in telephone pits, or who used encrypted walkie-talkies to prevent their conversations being intercepted. These were the people who carried modified handguns with thirty-bullet magazines and imported new weapons via the Melbourne ports. Having never been fired, the guns had no scent for the sniffer dogs to pick up.

  These people had been Ryan’s world.

  But even though Task Force Gain had locked up many of these targets, its work had unearthed a legion of others. It had swept through the MEOC community and identified the breadth of the problem, but arrived late to the game. By the time MEOCS was formed, the criminals who had been arrested by Task Force Gain were, in many cases, either out of prison or due for parole. For the fledgling Squad, this meant figuring out the lay of the land all over again, the who’s who in the zoo. The work of Task Force Gain, Ryan told the men and women before him, had only scratched the surface. Now it was up to them.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE LAY OF THE LAND

  By mid 2006, at the time the Squad was formed, the world of Middle Eastern organised crime – a world of drug empires, notorious families, hired guns, street dealers, run managers, big-noters, grifters and bullshit artists – had settled into a hierarchy of status. Picture it in your mind like a triangle partitioned into several tiers, kind of like the food pyramid.

  At the very top were senior members of powerful families with surnames like Ahmad, Ibrahim, Kalache and Darwiche, each with their own pseudo-governance over a patch of Sydney. They controlled turf and wielded power, mediated disputes and maintained order. The Ahmads had Punchbowl. The Ibrahims had Kings Cross. Successive police investigations had failed against them. In some areas it wasn’t a family but a street gang. In Fairfield it was DLASTHR, an Assyrian crime group, its members Christian and mostly Northern Iraqi in heritage. In Villawood, the suburb next door, it was the Bronx Boys, now a footnote in history after their leader was murdered.

  In the same league as these families and street crews were outlaw motorcycle gangs – Hells Angels, Nomads, Bandidos, Comancheros and Rebels. They provided muscle, manufactured drugs, did the importations, or helped with distribution; they were omniscient actors who sat outside the MEOC triangle but established partnerships with its top tier players. Some of these arrangements were closer than others. When Hassan ‘Sam’ Ibrahim, the eldest brother of the Ibrahim clan, joined the Nomads in the 1990s his membership immediately gave him an army and, in exchange, created an opening for the gang in Kings Cross, where Sam and his siblings had cemented themselves in the nightclub scene.

  Beneath this upper echelon was a middle tier of movers who paid protection money to operate within patches of turf. These people were known as the upline suppliers; they were the backbone of the drug industry, the wholesalers who distributed big bags of ecstasy and cocaine to syndicates feeding the end users. In routine swindles common to the trade, they artificially inflated the volume by adding lignocaine, the dental anaesthetic, or Glucodin, the energy powder.

  Under them were the syndicate bosses, the retail side of the industry, the franchisees who dealt direct with the customers. Their ventures were run like small businesses, each one requiring a run manager to handle operations and street dealers to do the dealing. They worked in shifts. Each day the run manager would get up early, bag the drugs at the safe house, count the cash, plan the roster, dole out the drug phones, make sure the delivery cars were fuelled up, and work any security.

  Then came the triggermen and toughs who settled scores and collected debts. They were freelancers who worked for anybody, getting paid to do dirty work ranging from a bashing to a murder. There were tales of runners getting severely beaten just for crossing the street and dealing in the wrong territory, incidents that almost always led to war.

  Finally, at the very bottom, were the dealers and delivery drivers, the cockatoos and gofers. These aspiring gangsters were often teenagers, or junkies who got paid in their drug of choice or worked to pay off a debt. They were the easiest targets for MEOCS, the low-hanging fruit who could easily be snatched off the street and shaken down for intelligence – the address of a safe house, the run cars doing the deliveries, the name and phone number of their bosses.

  Ken McKay, the commander of MEOCS, was a man whose philosophies were captured in football metaphors and a handful of phrases – ‘You can do 100 things right,’ he’d say, often, ‘but fuck one goat and you’ll forever be known as a goatfucker.’ He wanted this hierarchy organised into a priority list of the top 100 MEOC identities and crime families across Sydney. He gave this task to Mick Ryan, one of the most experienced detectives in the Squad. Ryan came up with a list of forty-two. These were the captains of industry, a grab bag of Teflon-coated figures: godfather types who never got their hands dirty, drug importers with low profiles, street bosses juggling five or six runs at a time, and tattooed musclemen just out on parole. The official name of this document was the MEOC Risk Assessment Register, but within the Squad it was simply called the Most Wanted List.

  Making the cut was a carefully managed process. A big name wasn’t enough; you had to be a risk to the community as well. Prospective names were run through an intelligence matrix and assigned a risk rating – medium, high or critical – and then given a corresponding number to quantify their risk. Anything above 190 was deemed critical. High risk started at 150 and medium at 125.

  The twelve names on McKay’s original ‘critical list’ were heavy with authority. They were survivors who are still around today, characters like Sam Ibrahim, Mahmoud ‘Brownie’ Ahmad, and Nasser Kalache who wa
s a tow truck operator and, at one time, the owner of a pizza shop.

  In the ‘high-risk’ category were people like Shadi Derbas, a Telopea Street original; Abdul Darwiche, another authority figure in the Darwiche family; Moustapha ‘Wak’ Assoum, a professional boxer and gun-for-hire; and Tony Haddad, a gifted conman with an unflappable poker-face. Known for his grifting, Haddad had once shown up to a drug deal with an empty suitcase, handing it over in exchange for $300,000. There were twenty-one others in this category.

  As the commander, McKay had several options to deal with the players on his Most Wanted List. The ‘critical’ targets were mostly assigned to his criminal investigators: MEOCS CI. They were teams of detectives who were prepared to take on months of telephone eavesdropping and risky undercover operations. Microphones were snuck into houses and tracking devices planted on cars. This all made for slow-burning investigations, but the outcome was almost always a straitjacket of charges, the kind that left no wriggle room when the case ended up at court, resulting in lengthy prison terms.