by Yoni Bashan
With no formal support, Adney came up with his own ad hoc training package. He put it together in his spare time. With money donated from the NSW Crime Commission – $10,000 seized from a criminal – he bought a second-hand van, decking it out with tinted windows, sound equipment and gadgetry. The TAG detectives used it for practice; if the Highway Patrol was conducting routine vehicle stops, they piggybacked, following them in the van to hone their surveillance technique, perfecting the art of the clear, crisp shot.
Adney took his team to the trenches at the Anzac Rifle Range in Malabar so a range of guns could be fired over their heads. He wanted them to hear the difference between the various bullet calibres. The idea was to train them to recognise the guns they might come up against in a shoot-out. He strapped a bulletproof vest to a garbage bin and had it shot up to show them the limitations of standard police armour. The vests, as was revealed, were not indestructible.
There were also other insights that day. House doors that had been left out on the side of the road on council clean-up days were collected and set up for breaking practice. Adney showed them where the stress points were located and the proper way to use a Halligan bar, the pronged metal tool that firemen often carry.
The Target Action Group’s brief was low- to mid-level drug investigations, a broad ambit that covered the legion of street dealers, run bosses and upline suppliers working patches of southwestern Sydney. Attacking this problem could be done quick and fast, one person at a time – Roberts and Mitchell–style – or it could be done slowly, over weeks and months, rolling from one target to the next until a net was ready to close around an entire supply chain. In a best-case scenario this ended with a cast of characters under arrest – the dealer, the driver, the run manager and the drug boss. One of the first TAG cases to tread this path was Strike Force Crotty.
Though there were many investigations like it, Strike Force Crotty symbolised many of the TAG’s early forays into mid-level drug work, a time when detectives were still finding their feet at the Squad. Crotty was assigned to Ben Gray, a likeable young detective still in his twenties, barely three years out of the academy. Before MEOCS he’d been at Macquarie Fields working general duties, point duty and menial tasks; his last shift there was spent checking tickets at Minto railway station.
Gray’s arrival at the TAG office was like a revelation, something wondrous. At MEOCS he got a kaleidoscopic view of policing: tapped phone lines, listening devices, body wires, undercover operations. Adney wasted no time dispatching Gray to Bankstown for his first assignment: a small pot run with a crew of street dealers. Their leader was Hassan Bazzi, twenty-two years old, a budding entrepreneur trying to run a clean, simple drug business. Gray was given Bazzi’s phone number and told to infiltrate the syndicate using an undercover operative – or UC as they’re known by the cops. He’d never done that before, but Adney didn’t mind – he was there at the helm, shadowing Gray and showing him the ropes, guiding his new recruit through each step.
Bazzi knocked back the UC’s call, telling him to deal with one of his runners, a sneaky little man who liked to rip off his customers, as Gray would soon learn.
The goal was to buy slowly and work towards big amounts. This took patience; rush in too soon and walls would go up, phone numbers would change. The sting would look obvious.
Gray’s first deal with the runner was for a ‘fifty’ of cannabis, organised via text message, which equated to about three grams and cost $50. The pick-up location was an apartment block in Bankstown, a huge building that took up the entire corner of Stanley and Cross streets. The UC was back within an hour with a resealable bag of green buds. The buy went off without a hitch.
Two days later, Gray sent the UC back to the apartment block for another buy, the same amount, a fifty of cannabis. The runner slapped a bag into the officer’s hand. It was hard and filled with pellets. Somehow, wires had been crossed – the runner had just handed over fifty ecstasy tablets instead of a fifty of cannabis, a terrible mistake on his part and an incredible coup for Gray’s investigation.
It was a stroke of dumb luck that provided a huge leap in the case. Gray didn’t know Bazzi was supplying ecstasy – no one did. Besides, the law couldn’t care less about cannabis. As a threat to the community it ranked somewhere around Xanax tablets. But ecstasy? That was a different story, a harder drug that attracted serious prison time.
Through the body wire worn by the undercover officer Gray could hear the conversation on the ground.
‘I meant a fifty like last time,’ the undercover officer said, pretending to be annoyed. Gray called Adney to tell him the good news, but also to raise a slight hitch: the UC was only carrying $50 in buy-money. The fifty pills were priced at $2000, Gray said. What should they do? he asked.
Adney rushed out of the office and found an ATM. It was late and the banks were closed, so he pulled out $2000 from his personal savings account, marked down the serial numbers, and then drove into Bankstown to personally deliver the cash. Gray took the money when he arrived.
Later that night, back at the office, the pills were emptied onto a table, spread out, and counted one by one. It was a superb result. In a single buy the case had gone from a low-level pot run to a mid-level syndicate moving good amounts of ecstasy. From here, the awkward positioning for bigger deals was over.
Ten days later Gray made his next move, sending the UC back to the same corner, this time with $4000 in a wad of bills, enough to buy 100 MDMA tablets. The runner was waiting outside when the officer arrived. He took the money and said he’d be right back with the pills, disappearing into the apartment block and taking the elevator upstairs.
Ten minutes passed, then twenty minutes. Calls went unanswered. Messages were left. Gray started getting nervous. After a while it became obvious the runner wasn’t coming back. He had taken them in a classic drug rip.
Gray was beside himself, convinced his career was finished. His first run at a big investigation had just ended with $4000 lost in a drug rip. There was no coming back from that, he thought. He called Adney to break the news, preparing himself for the worst.
As they spoke the undercover officer stayed outside the apartment block furiously dialling numbers in his phone. He refused to stand down. It wasn’t the money, it was the principle – there was an indignity about being robbed. When he finally reached Bazzi he started shouting into the phone, putting in an Oscar-worthy performance. ‘That little fucker took my money! He fucking ripped me off!’ He said he wasn’t leaving until he’d gotten his money back.
Bazzi might have been a drug boss, but he was also a businessman. He didn’t like what he was hearing. Ripping off customers was a fast way of making enemies, the kind who leave anonymous tip-offs on police hotlines.
A car arrived a few minutes later, pulling up outside the apartment block. Bazzi stepped out and walked over to the UC, shaking his hand and apologising. This shouldn’t have happened, he said. Then he disappeared into the building. Gray, watching from an unmarked car, felt his mood lifting. A surveillance team took photographs as Bazzi emerged holding a bag with 100 pills. He apologised a second time and told the UC to deal with him directly from then on. The UC’s performance on the phone, it seemed, had cemented his credibility.
The next time they met, ten days later, Bazzi handed over 1000 tablets embossed with the Chanel logo. Another 500 pills followed, pink ones, then another 1000 tablets in a deal a few days later. Within three weeks more than $120,000 had been spent buying back drugs off Bazzi, deals that were almost inconceivable considering how they had come about. It was a crisis converted into a jackpot and it had taken a drug rip to make it possible – if it had happened in a movie people would have shouted at the screen and thrown popcorn, convinced the script wasn’t believable.
These were extraordinary deals that put the Drug Squad to shame. Their cases would need to run for months to replicate this kind of work – large commercial quantity charges – and yet here was Ben Gray, a rookie, knocking
it out of the park in less than a month.
On 23 September, barely eight weeks after that first cannabis deal, TAG detectives arrested Bazzi and the rest of his syndicate in a swoop on a handful of Bankstown addresses. He was ordered to serve a minimum of five and a half years in prison.
These short-term but high-yield investigations set apart the MEOCS Target Action Group from their colleagues working upstairs on Level 3 in the Criminal Investigation branch, known as MEOCS CI. The CI branch was split into three teams, each one led by a detective inspector with twelve officers reporting up to them. As Strike Force Crotty moved into its arrest phase, one of these teams, after weeks of negotiation, was preparing to pull off one of the Squad’s most stunning coups of all.
CHAPTER FOUR
ROCKET MAN
BANKSTOWN, SATURDAY, 30 SEPTEMBER 2006
Ken ‘Slasher’ McKay, Commander of MEOCS, stepped out of his car onto Stacey Street and walked towards the two shady-looking men standing in a driveway across the road.
If McKay was nervous, he didn’t show it. There was a loaded gun down the back of his footy shorts. In his shirt pocket was a mobile phone, its line open for detectives nearby, ready to broadcast any signs of distress. It wasn’t the world’s most sophisticated body wire, McKay thought, but it would have to do. Flanking him as he crossed the street was Mark Wakeham, a gifted 20-something-year-old detective and the architect of this gathering. Wakeham was very familiar with the men they were meeting. He’d studied them, knew the dangers; there was no way he was letting McKay meet them on his own.
They were leaning against a car and popped the boot as McKay and Wakeham got closer. Inside was a torn-up garbage bag with an olive-coloured tube sitting on top of it. The tube was about one metre long with capped covers on both ends and had a shoulder strap that hung loose. On the side were helpful, illustrated, step-by-step instructions: pull pin, remove rear cover, extend, release safety, aim and fire.
McKay looked at the tube then back at the men.
‘Is that it?’ he asked.
They said nothing, just nodded.
It was a rocket launcher, one of an untold number that had been stolen from the army and, as the lore suggested, sold into the underworld. It was a one-shot device, light enough to hold up with one hand and capable of causing heavy casualties in a civilian setting. In policing terms, this was the Holy Grail, El Dorado and the lost city of Atlantis rolled into one: after years of conjecture and fruitless searching, McKay was finally looking at something the Australian Defence Force (ADF) insisted had never gone missing from its stockpiles, and from what he knew there were others still out there. Military brass had been adamant that all their rocket launchers were accounted for – either secured in their armouries or destroyed via decommissioning. The notion that even one device, let alone several, had made it into the hands of a criminal was scandalous.
McKay probably should have called the Bomb Squad on the way out to Stacey Street, but he didn’t. Too much fuss, he thought. Protocol would have called for the street to be shut down and homes to be evacuated, but McKay, an old-school type, couldn’t be bothered. He didn’t have time to organise all those ‘bells and whistles’, as he called them, and it wasn’t his style anyway. He was a larrikin, a swashbuckler, a throwback to a time when the rules were bent just enough to get the job done, a larger-than-life character who could have stepped right off the script of a 1970s cop show, the ones that open with a montage.
Detectives still trade Ken McKay stories, passing them around like football cards, each time embellishing them just a little more in his favour. In this one he’s chucking a live rocket launcher into the boot of his car, ignoring every workplace safety protocol imaginable; in another one he’s being demoted to the Property Crime Squad as punishment for telling his boss – who had pulled the plug on one of his more ambitious investigations – that he was the ‘best fucking friend organised crime ever had’; and in yet another one he’s being presented with a bottle of Chivas Regal by Phillip Bradley, head of the NSW Crime Commission, who had lost a bet that McKay couldn’t lock up Tony Vincent, an untouchable Sydney crime figure of his day.
Friends called him ‘Slasher’, a nod to the 1950s and 1960s Australian cricketer with the same name and, aptly, a wink to his management style – he was a chainsawer of red tape, a commander with a never-ending budget allocation. One time a federal police counterpart confided in McKay that he didn’t have the money to keep an investigation going. McKay just laughed and said: ‘It’s the government, mate, it’s never gunna run out of money.’
His journey to Stacey Street that afternoon had started an hour earlier at the Cronulla Hotel, a pub about forty minutes’ drive from Bankstown. The sky was overcast and strong offshore winds had killed off his plans to go sailing, a favourite off-duty pastime. He pulled up a bar stool and resigned himself to an afternoon of drinking with a few buddies. He was either on his first beer or fourth, depending on who’s telling the story, but just after midday his phone started vibrating. Private number.
‘I’ve got that thing,’ the voice said. It was male and vaguely familiar, a call McKay had been told was coming, part of a secret deal that his detectives had hashed out with Adnan ‘Eddie’ Darwiche. Housed behind the five-metre walls and concertina wire of Lithgow Correctional Centre, Darwiche had first revealed in a series of clandestine meetings with detectives Mark Wakeham and Jenny Nagle that he was prepared to hand back several rocket launchers in his possession if he could get a reduction on his murder sentences. They hadn’t been handed down yet, but he was facing life for the 2003 Lawford Street shootings that killed Mervat ‘Melissa’ Nemra and drug boss Ziad ‘Ziggy’ Razzak. Nearly three years to the day after the incident, Darwiche had been convicted of the shooting by a jury. Aware that he may never see daylight outside of a prison, Darwiche was weighing his options. In that sense, the rocket launchers weren’t just a bargaining chip, but also a ransom demand, a pressure point not just for the police but also the national security services. Darwiche knew damn well they wanted those weapons back. If nothing else, he had everyone listening.
Wakeham and Nagle’s work had drawn out his first and only admission that he was currently storing, somewhere in Sydney, a number of rocket launchers that had been taken from the army. Previously, this hadn’t been clear. The army denied that any were missing. McKay had joined the dialogue with Darwiche a bit later as these negotiations escalated. He had the rank and pull of a superintendent, and could make these sort of deals possible; but he wouldn’t be held hostage by big talk. He had laid things out plainly for Darwiche, telling him his admissions meant nothing without some kind of proof. If he wanted to talk deals, he’d have to hand back one of the launchers to get the ball rolling. As a goodwill gesture, Darwiche said he would deliver one rocket launcher through an intermediary, who would call in good time. Deal, McKay said, and he would find a way to return the favour in kind.
And so it went: that afternoon at the Cronulla Hotel, the call came through. McKay hung up the phone, set his beer aside and started dialling numbers, putting together a team to head out to Bankstown to meet his mystery caller. First he called Detective Sergeant Belinda Dyson, a trusted colleague. Dyson was home, off duty, doing the washing.
‘What are you doing?’ McKay asked.
‘Nothing. Why?’
He asked if she had a gun.
‘Yeah, it’s in the safe,’ she said.
‘I’ll pick you up in ten minutes,’ McKay said. ‘Bring your shooter and your bullets.’
They took the M5 out to Bankstown, calling Mark Wakeham and Mick Adams along the way and arranging to meet them at Punchbowl Park. Adams, Wakeham’s team leader at MEOCS, had been pivotal to the Darwiche negotiations; a lateral thinker and a problem solver, it was his idea to get McKay to use his mobile phone as a makeshift listening device. He’d even had a warrant typed up at the office before arriving at Punchbowl so any admissions recorded over the line could, potentially, be used in a courtroom.
At Punchbowl Park they formulated a plan. Dyson would drive with Adams and provide security from a distance. Wakeham would stay with McKay and shadow him at the meeting. Their biggest concern was an ambush. To let an unguarded commander walk into the heartland of Middle Eastern gang activity and pick up a rocket launcher linked to Adnan Darwiche seemed like an unwise move, especially without appropriate security precautions, of which they had none.
It was a five-minute drive from Punchbowl to the townhouse on Stacey Street where the two men were waiting. McKay picked up the launcher with a towel to avoid transferring any fingerprints onto it, then he walked back to his car and carefully rolled it into the boot.
‘That wasn’t too hard,’ he said, getting into the passenger seat. They drove slowly back to the MEOCS HQ, careful not to let the device roll around too much in the back. No one knew the capability of the thing – would it go off if another car bumped into them? Could it be activated just from rolling around? McKay knew the weapon had a safety catch, but he was damned if he knew where it was. He’d never seen a rocket launcher before. No one had. Tailing them close behind was Dyson and Adams who provided a buffer from other cars.
Back at the office they all posed for photographs with the launcher, hamming it up for the camera, gathering around it like a trophy. Naysayers had said this day would never come. Bets had even been taken around the office on how quickly this mission would fail. One guy had said he would run naked down George Street if they recovered it successfully.
Dyson called the Bomb Squad and explained the situation to an on-call supervisor: they’d just picked up a rocket launcher from a community source and needed an expert to come out and pick it up. The supervisor laughed. It was an obvious joke.