by Yoni Bashan
The less-sophisticated targets, the drug-addled who rampaged through the suburbs and needed to be caught because of the risk they posed to the community, were assigned to the Uniform branch, a company split into Highway Patrol and General Duties officers. They were the public face of MEOCS, the only staff who deliberately looked like police. Cruising hot-spot neighbourhoods like Punchbowl, Bankstown, Auburn and Granville each day, their cars were instantly recognisable by the green and yellow paint, or the word MEOCS emblazoned on the bonnet.
For those cops working General Duties, each shift started with a printout of names and addresses: criminals on bail, parolees with curfews, repeat offenders and fugitives wanted for anything from car theft to assault. The idea was to find as many of them as possible and disrupt their routine. Catch them buying milk, or driving to their girlfriend’s house. If they weren’t wanted for arrest, the objective was to search them for weapons, ask questions, make them feel paranoid about being watched. In this way the MEOCS brand itself became a powerful tool, a passive crime deterrent, creating the impression of an all-seeing, all-knowing Squad with endless resources for close surveillance. That, of course, wasn’t the case – but if a crim thought twice about leaving the house with a gun, well, that was half the job done. Informants were soon reporting back to their handlers about the psychological effect these constant interactions were having, telling MEOCS officers that carrying anything was no longer tenable when their Squad cars were live in their area.
It was the same routine for the Highway Patrol – constant interaction. McKay didn’t want them running breath tests and speed traps. Let the local cops do that, he said. The job of the MEOCS Highway Patrol, in his mind, was to focus solely on top gang members and their associates, the troublemakers doing burnouts and running red lights. Sure, these were relatively minor infractions, but they presented all kinds of opportunities.
Most of the MEOCS Highway Patrol officers had spent their careers on the road; they were family men, avuncular and paunchy, sages of the front line who were known for their quick talk. They gathered intel under the guise of general banter. Each question, friendly and casual, was loaded with an angle: Where are you headed? Who’s that sitting next to you? Are you still living round here? As a support unit, they were an in-house luxury at MEOCS that no other crime squad had at its disposal. If a listening device was being installed in a house and the target was spotted coming home earlier than expected, the Highway Patrol could discreetly stop the car and buy the operatives a few extra minutes. It was the same with the General Duties cops: if a target was having their phone tapped but wasn’t making enough calls, a uniformed officer could knock on their door, ask them a few questions, and rattle the cage to stimulate some nervous dialling to associates.
These were just the small bonuses to having these units available. But being the public face of MEOCS put them in a prime position to win back the community’s trust, to build up the kind of alliances and back channel sources of information that were needed to stop crime in the neighbourhood. The community was filled with good people, families and business owners all fed up with the drive-by shootings and gangster mentality. It was their shops being stood over, their children being lured into street life, their houses broadcast on the nightly news when shots were fired.
One practical measure McKay implemented to keep the community onside was to use discretion on the roads. One morning while flicking through the overnight Traffic Infringement Notices, McKay realised that way too many ‘mum and dad’ members of the community were being hit with petty traffic fines. Stinging these people did nothing for the MEOCS cause. McKay gave his officers an edict that from then on any motorist caught doing a low-level offence could be let off at the officer’s discretion. McKay wanted to show the community – his potential eyes and ears on the ground – that not all cops were bad. ‘Win hearts,’ he said.
At a corporate level, McKay was working the same concept, organising training days for his staff with community representatives and getting himself spots on local Arabic radio stations. At every turn, he encouraged the community to align itself with the police. Help us help you, that was the message. Talk to us. Tell us where to look. Tell us where the crime is happening. Fridge magnets were handed out with the MEOCS logo on one side and the phone number of an anonymous crime tip-off line on the other. When the magnets became too expensive, the letterbox dropping started, a job delegated to the uniform staff.
Of course, there were missteps along this route of goodwill too, but these were corrected fast. The MEOCS emblem itself became a source of unexpected controversy. A complaint was lodged about its central design feature, a wood wasp, the natural enemy of the cedar tree. Given the cedar tree’s iconic and central role in the design of the Lebanese flag, the emblem underwent a hasty redesign. It was the kind of faux pas that could derail all the effort going into strengthening community relations. Ties belonging to some Squad members had to be replaced – the wood wasp featured on them as well. An email went around inviting officers and staff to contribute to the redesign process. Some took it more seriously than others. One suggestion, which someone actually drew up, was a mullet being trimmed off with a pair of scissors – the mullet was a popular hairstyle among some Squad targets. ‘Cutting out crime,’ was the suggested tagline.
Eventually, a more neutral design with a sword, feathered wings, and a Latin motto was agreed upon. The motto – Auspicium Melioris Aevi – meant ‘Omen of a Better Age’, but it didn’t quite catch on with staff.
An unofficial motto – ‘but fuck one goat’ – got repeated more often.
CHAPTER THREE
MEOCS TAG: THE EARLY YEARS
REVESBY, WEDNESDAY, 24 MAY 2006
He was lanky and jittery, with messed-up hair and an unusual bulge protruding from the front of his jacket. A junkie. Detectives Dave Roberts and Andrew Mitchell had spotted him from their car. Years of street policing had taught them to spot the odd and unusual in a neighbourhood. And sure, there was nothing illegal about a man walking through a park after dark; but to them something felt unsavoury about him.
‘What’s in the front of your jacket?’ Roberts asked him, more curious than suspicious. A big man with a deep voice, Roberts looked more like a debt collector than a cop. He was dressed in faded blue jeans and a t-shirt – the standard dress of a MEOCS TAG detective. In a bumbag around his waist was capsicum spray and spare ammunition. Handcuffs and a Glock pistol were just visible at his hip.
The junkie reached into the pockets of his jacket and produced a collection of sexual lubricants clenched in each fist – squishy KY Jelly sachets, the kind that look like McDonald’s ketchup packets. There were seven in total, all stolen, he admitted. The plan was to sell each one for a dollar.
Roberts had been expecting cannabis, maybe cocaine; you could never tell with junkies. Whenever he thought he’d seen it all, the street would show him something new. He turned to Mitchell. On the surface this looked like a waste of everyone’s time, but, technically, the KY Jelly was stolen property. It was also leverage.
A brief check over the police radio revealed the guy had form as a skilled thief. He had a lengthy rap sheet and was fresh out on parole. Roberts played the bad cop, telling the thief his situation was more serious than it looked. His parole could be revoked. Mitchell stepped in with the lifeline. ‘Is there anything you want to tell us?’ he asked, signalling the start of that subtle interplay between cop and criminal, the invitation to barter in exchange for assistance. The man understood the implication immediately, happy to turn informant for the night.
He told them about a heroin dealer in Riverwood, a guy selling directly from his apartment. It wasn’t much, barely a lead, but enough to get started. ‘I don’t know his name,’ the junkie told the detectives, ‘but he drives a red BMW.’ If he was lying they’d come back and find him, Roberts said.
The next morning, as always, McKay flipped through the overnight paperwork from each team inspecting each arrest, a typ
e of quality control as he saw it. He stopped at the Revesby incident and scanned through the notes about seized KY Jelly packets. The finer details about the drug dealer in Riverwood with the red BMW had been left out. That kind of follow-up intelligence wasn’t normally included on standard paperwork.
‘Is this what MEOCS has come to?’ McKay asked, bemused but laughing. He had taken the printout and walked into the bullpen, pulling up a swivel chair next to Roberts and Mitchell at their desks in the Target Action Group (TAG) section of the room. He held the report up in the air and squinted at it, like it might be exposed as a fake in better light. With each read-through McKay found something else to laugh about, a new detail he’d missed. ‘He’s not even Middle Eastern!’ he ribbed, which was true; the man Mitchell and Roberts had stopped did not fall within the Squad’s usual charter – he was more Mediterranean than Middle Eastern – and didn’t come close to being an organised crime figure. Roberts assured McKay there was more to the story, a heroin seizure potentially.
Had it been any other detectives with the same explanation, McKay might have stayed dubious. But Roberts and Mitchell had reputations behind them. They had started at the TAG office like everyone else only a couple of weeks earlier, but had already proven themselves to be heavy lifters.
They first met at Burwood back in 2003 where Roberts had been part of a proactive crime unit, a scaled-down version of what was to come at MEOCS. Burwood was an incubator, a testing ground where tactics could be trialled and tweaked. They were a team of four who practised surveillance and broke up gangs: Islanders, Asians and Middle Eastern crews who loitered on the steps of the Uniting Church and walked in packs through the street malls.
As a team they cruised the suburb in a 4WD with their windows down and their forearms planted on the door frames, their eyes scanning for faces, their ears listening to the streets. There was a hint of the Riot Squad about the Burwood Proactive Team, particularly Roberts and Mitchell – both men were six-foot something, hair carved to the scalp, their bodyweights never below 110 kilograms. Roberts had been a bouncer in a previous life. Mitchell had played rugby in England.
The Target Action Group’s first arrest had been theirs, a coke dealer stopped in Punchbowl with a gram tucked into his underwear. Four days later they hit a small milestone: the TAG’s first raid: a home in Roselands, a villa among the modest brick houses and churches of suburbia that concealed boxes filled with the remains of a drug lab – dismantled glassware, chemistry equipment, beakers, funnels and baking trays. In the freezer were two bags of freshly made crystal methamphetamine worth about $25,000. In the living room was a phone book peppered with bullet holes. The phone book led the detectives to their second milestone: the unit’s first gun seizure, a sawn-off rifle found leaning against a wall. The owner of the house, newly married and looking for a deal, told Roberts he would plead guilty to everything if he spared his wife who, on account of living in the house, was charged with the same offences.
Given this track record, McKay didn’t doubt his detectives were onto a good thing with their lead about the Riverwood dealer and his red BMW. Both officers showed up to work the next morning, grabbed a set of car keys and drove laps through the suburb looking for the car. The streets were like a snapshot out of the 1950s, all triple-front housing and local bakeries. An old service station looked like it might have once had a mechanic on duty. After three hours, they spotted the car turning right onto Belmore Road and pulled it over, quizzing the driver, Anwar Elabbas. He had cash in his pocket – about $1600 – but no drugs. His passenger had a small rock of heroin in his underpants. The two detectives were familiar enough with crims by then to know what these guys must have been thinking: cops won’t search underpants. Some cops were too squeamish for it, but any suspected dealer unlucky enough to cross Roberts and Mitchell got a gloved hand, a torch and a series of orders: squat down, cough three times, lift that up, move that to the side, cough again. No gloves? No problem. Mitchell went in anyway, probing deep.
Elabbas’s apartment was in a complex of low-rise buildings on Roosevelt Avenue, a public housing estate across the road from a childcare centre. As the TAG officers stood guard at the entrance, waiting for someone back at the office to type up a search warrant, customers turned up and made lame excuses for why they were there. ‘He wanted me to come and fix his air-conditioning,’ one buyer told them.
Four hours later, the search warrant approved, Roberts and Mitchell burst inside the apartment with a team behind them. They were looking for heroin but stumbled instead on a .22-calibre revolver loaded with five bullets. They discovered it in a bedroom wardrobe; it was a prized find, their second weapons seizure in a fortnight. At MEOCS, finding a gun was a coup, worth more than a bag full of drugs – firearms arguably posed a more immediate threat to the community.
But gun charges were difficult to prosecute in court and filled with gaps for defendants to argue their innocence. Elabbas’s lawyers argued that he’d never seen the gun before, and used the lack of DNA or fingerprints on the weapon to advance their point. Unable to prove Elabbas had ever touched the gun, even though it was found in his bedroom, the charge was withdrawn. However he was charged and convicted over the cash offence.
This brand of fast-moving arrest became a specialty of the TAG office, creating a surge in firearm and drug seizures. Within months, search warrant statistics were off the chart: eleven raids in June, seven in July, four in August, then back to eight in September. Rival commands couldn’t come close to those numbers; they averaged one, maybe two in a month. A handful of officers thrived in this environment, spurring each other on, creating a kind of revved-up rivalry. But few were more talked about, by police and the criminals themselves, than Roberts and Mitchell. McKay called them ‘the Breaker Brothers’. They were huge characters with a style of their own, magnets for trouble.
On slow afternoons they rode out to Telopea Street, Punchbowl, or Pine Road, Auburn, both difficult neighbourhoods considered too unsafe to go without backup. There they would park outside the most notorious family’s house and eat lunch on the bonnet of their MEOCS car, turning up the radio to attract attention, sitting back and waiting for a dirty look, an insult, any kind of interaction. That was their MO: work the streets, start a dialogue, recruit informants, get the tip-offs.
Within a few months criminals were asking about them, dropping their names on intercepted calls, warning friends to look out for them. They were respected, feared and hated. They were exactly what McKay had wanted in his Target Action Group.
MEOCS TAG would over time become its own community within the Squad’s general apparatus, walled-off and rife with its own code and jargon. It was a mix of personality types and male dominated: alphas and easy-going beta types, rookies with big egos, quiet achievers, loud achievers and mild-mannered detectives with families, mortgages and golf on Sunday.
As a unit they comprised roughly twenty-two officers, plain-clothed and spread across two teams. A team was eight detectives plus two team leaders ranked detective sergeant. They answered to the TAG’s commander, Detective Inspector David Adney, who in turn reported to Ken McKay, the Squad’s commander.
Adney was old school in attitude, but new school in strategy. He was a scrupulous details man, a man who believed in spreadsheets. He meticulously recorded every arrest, every gun, every drug seizure, and typed them up alongside street names, suburbs, logos and colours – green Mitsubishi ecstasy pills in Roselands; purple dolphins in Campbelltown. He worked the stats to find the trends, trace the drug runs, scan for hotspots.
Adney called this proactive policing, the art of self-generating, finding crimes and then solving them. It could be street dealing in a nightclub or a drug run taking over a suburb; the point was to work informants, figure out the problem, and then attack it with solutions: drugs dogs, undercover officers, uniform police, more visibility. This was Adney’s niche, something that wasn’t pushed at the academy, and something he developed as the TAG commander during Task F
orce Gain. As a mainstream tactic, it was underutilised. Of course Adney, with a background in special tactics, was anything but mainstream.
As a police officer, Adney straddled the worlds of commando and cop, a by-product of his early career in the Tactical Response Group and Tactical Operations Unit. They were the big guns, the men of last resort, the guys who arrived not by car, but by armoured vehicle and helicopter. Their world was counter-terrorism and high-risk resolution, days filled with fast roping, stress shoots, kill houses. If you were in that group it meant you were comfortable with the sound of gunfire. If you excelled it meant being handpicked to train with the nation’s elite, the SAS commandos in Perth. Adney was one of them, thrown into night manoeuvres and embassy assault missions. It was there he got the nickname ‘the Frag’. Most cops say it’s a nod to his fighting style, explosive and uncontrollable like a fragmentation grenade. Adney tells people, wryly, that it’s because he’s ‘fragile’.
Six years as a tactical operative gave him a militaristic edge to his bearing. He brought this mindset to MEOCS. He was methodical, a goal-setter. He wanted at least two guns off the streets each month. At least one search warrant a week. If presented with an elevator or a set of stairs, Adney always took the stairs. ‘Incidental exercise’ he called it. That’s what cops working for him remembered.
When he first arrived, the TAG office was a motley bunch of officers, each one with varying skills and capabilities. Some had never breached a door. Others couldn’t use a surveillance camera. Most had never heard gunfire.
There wasn’t much support from the police hierarchy to upskill these detectives with tactical training. Their work fell into a grey zone: on the one hand, it was accepted that they would routinely deal with high-risk targets. On the other hand, as detectives, they hadn’t been trained to deal with the basic risks. No one had shown them what to do in a gunfight or how to properly clear a house. From the police hierarchy’s perspective, there were tactical police who were better suited to those challenges but, in reality, those teams were a finite commodity, not always available when called, and not always willing to take a job if it didn’t meet certain risk thresholds.