The Squad

by Yoni Bashan

  ‘You’re geeing me up, aren’t you?’

  ‘No,’ Dyson said, deadpan. ‘It’s sitting here in the middle of the office.’

  The supervisor’s tone darkened. He ordered her to evacuate the building as a matter of urgency and set up a clearance zone. Dyson said that wasn’t possible; the building shared its real estate with a police station that couldn’t just be cleared out. ‘There are guys in the cells downstairs,’ she said.

  Another, unforeseen logistical problem soon emerged. In something of an ironic twist, the Bomb Squad was not equipped to store a live rocket launcher at its depot in Zetland. The same problem arose at every police station across the city as Dyson tried to find a suitable gun safe. No one, it seemed, had the capacity or willingness to babysit the rocket launcher they’d just recovered. Normally, she would have just called the army, but that wasn’t possible either; giving back the weapon could tip off the person who had stolen it, and therefore jeopardise enquiries into how it went missing. As a last resort Dyson called the Forensic Services Division. But they also refused to take the device for safety reasons. As the minutes ticked by, McKay began running out of patience. Sure, there were safety issues, but the meddling bureaucracy of it all gave him the shits. His team had just brought home the most sought-after weapon in the country and suddenly no one wanted to go near it.

  ‘Well, where the fuck are we going to put it?’ he asked, loudly. ‘We can’t just leave it in our office.’

  He called back the Bomb Squad and pulled rank with the supervisor, coming up with a deal to reach a compromise – if their people could just pick up the launcher and store it for the rest of the weekend, then the Australian Federal Police would take it into their charge on Monday. Fine, said the supervisor. A forensics officer tried to examine the device when it arrived at the Bomb Squad’s depot but was so nervous about touching it that only a few surfaces were given a dusting.

  That Monday morning it was taken from the Zetland depot to the AFP’s headquarters in Sydney’s CBD. Forensic technicians went to work on the device. They pulled it apart until it was in pieces on the floor, removing its wings and examining its panels for any serial numbers. Each component was run through an X-ray machine to find any details that might have been scratched off. Envious types in the MEOCS office joked that the weapon was probably a dummy, nothing more than a tin tube handed over by a scheming criminal wanting a discounted prison sentence.

  When the AFP was done with its examination they sent a 24-page report back to Detective Sergeant Mick Adams with their findings, concluding, in no uncertain terms, that the launcher was not a fake. A full profile of the weapon followed. The device was an M72 Light Anti-Tank Weapon, model number L1A2-F1, assembled using imported parts (the ‘M’ in M72 denoting manufacture in the United States) at an ammunition-filling factory in St Marys, a suburb of western Sydney. The launcher had been fitted with a high-explosive, Norwegian-made A3 warhead that had detonated on impact during live test firing in Adelaide. These tests showed the missile had been capable of penetrating twenty-eight centimetres of steel plate, seventy-five centimetres of reinforced concrete or 180 centimetres of soil.

  Records suggested the weapon had been brought to Sydney around 1990 or 1991 for assembly, had a lifespan of about a decade, and was one of several devices scheduled to be destroyed on 8 June 2001 at the Myambat Ammunition Store near Muswellbrook, an army outpost several hours north of Sydney. Somehow this had never happened. Whoever stole it seemed to have a thorough working knowledge of where the important serial numbers were located, because they were all scratched off. But they were sloppy with the warhead itself. Its unique identifier, RAN90, was still intact on the side of the rocket fuse, allowing a trace to begin.

  As McKay noted in a memorandum to superiors much later, the recovery represented a reality check for law enforcement, proof of the raw power at the fingertips of some MEOC identities. It was also a massive coup for the fledgling Squad; barely five months after its formation its detectives had not only recovered a weapon of enormous significance, but they had also confirmed that a much larger stockpile was still in the community, somewhere. Most concerning of all was the people with access to the devices, jihadists looking to cause heavy casualties in a civilian setting.

  ‘For a number of years there had been talk within the criminal community of the existence of rocket launchers,’ McKay wrote in his memorandum, a circular that went high up the chain of command. ‘The validity of the information was difficult to judge. As a result of this investigation we now know for a fact that this weaponry exists and is [in] the possession of criminals/terrorists.’

  Two months prior, when the launchers had still been a rumour, Mark Wakeham and Jenny Nagle got together one night to try to figure out whether the weapons really existed. This was done at a dive bar, somewhere. The actual place has long since been forgotten, but you can imagine something low-lit with neon, Dwight Yoakam playing in the background. It was over drinks when one of them came up with a novel suggestion: asking. This might have seemed like an obvious strategy, but the man they wanted to ask – Adnan Darwiche – had been sitting in a jail cell for almost two years and not once had anyone even tried to talk to him about the rocket launchers. It was during his murder trial for the 2003 shootings on Lawford Street that Khaled ‘Crazy’ Taleb, the star witness and main informant, had given up the first reliable intelligence about Darwiche’s arsenal of rocket launchers. Taleb’s statement ran to eighty-odd pages and provided the court with the inside scoop on life in Darwiche’s crew. At the time of the Lawford Street shootings, Darwiche had allegedly brought the rocket launchers to a safe house at Greenacre but had decided against using them in the attack on the Razzaks. Concerns were raised that the warheads would pass right through the fibro home and hit an unintended target.

  The prevailing view at MEOCS was that Darwiche had nothing to gain by making any admissions about the rocket launchers. If the ADF’s assertions were true – that there were no launchers missing from their stockpiles – then, technically, there was also nothing to ask about.

  The other reason why approaching Darwiche may not have been tried during this time was because he loathed police, few more so than Wakeham and Nagle. They were the plucky young detectives who had put him in prison for the Lawford Street shootings in the first place. They were the heartbeat of Strike Force Grapple, one of the state’s largest investigations in recent years.

  They were a partnership, a duo – young and feisty with a rare energy for the job. They were adventurous but practical, sticklers for detail who believed in letting ideas flow and trying new things. Crusty old bosses, with their textbooks and formulas, didn’t know what to do with them.

  For three years, their world had been Adnan ‘Eddie’ Darwiche and his war with the Razzak family. During Strike Force Grapple, on any given night, you could walk into the office and still find them at their desks, re-reading statements and poring over timelines, making sure their evidence married up. Some nights were spent guarding cheap motel rooms, sometimes in other parts of the country, where witnesses had been holed up for their safety. Some were illiterate; others were simple. Each had their own quirks. Khaled ‘Crazy’ Taleb wouldn’t speak without first receiving a family pack meal from Red Rooster. And he always got it.

  Throughout the nine-month trial for the Lawford Street shootings, Wakeham and Nagle had sat in court each day and watched Darwiche protest his innocence; he was convinced that Wakeham and Nagle had skewed evidence against him as part of a corrupt police conspiracy.

  Naturally their relationship with him had become frosty. Threats had been made to both detectives. Teams of security staff had to be organised each day at the courthouse to manage the risks, not just to Wakeham and Nagle but also their witnesses, some of whom were top gang lieutenants giving evidence in exchange for immunity. Having worked so hard to put him in prison, the idea that he would now talk to these two detectives candidly, let alone admit he had a cache of stolen rocket launchers
, which could add extra years to his sentence, was ludicrous.

  To everyone, that is, except Wakeham and Nagle.

  Before Taleb’s admission, the rocket launchers had only existed in the spook stories and gossip of big-noting criminals, always talked about but never actually seen. Dozens of intelligence reports were collected but enquiries were put to bed when the ADF laughed off the suggestions. After that, any mention of rocket launchers was almost mischief-making. People got tired of hearing about them. Even in law enforcement circles it became unfashionable to bring them up for investigation. Trying to find them was akin to a wacky crusade, a mark of naïve ambition.

  Wakeham and Nagle didn’t care. Strike Force Grapple was over, Darwiche had been found guilty of two murders, and both detectives wanted a new challenge, their zest for the job starting to wane. Like many transplants from Task Force Gain, they arrived at MEOCS with reputations trailing them. McKay had heard the stories. Insubordination, freewheeling – whatever, McKay thought. He assigned them to Mick Adams, a team leader at MEOCS CI, a big man with a big heart who everyone knew as ‘Grizzly’. In Adams, McKay knew he had someone to keep the two detectives in check.

  Adams had come up as a beat policeman in Pyrmont during the early 1990s. It’s different there now to what it was back then. He walked the beat alone, the streets filled with wharfies and tuna fishermen, loaders and unloaders, rowdy old salts who could walk into a bar with a roll of coin and drink for two days straight. For fun, they beat the crap out of each other. It was Adams’s job to make sure innocent bystanders didn’t get hurt – he’d step in when things got out of hand. Brawlers would turn on him, two men at a time, his backup a good fifteen minutes away. After a while they learned to leave him alone; he never went down.

  His next move was to Kings Cross, back when it was still a seedy red-light district. It had all the familiar types: the spruiker, the pimp, the whore, the addict. Everyone knew Adams, trusted him. These were the Royal Commission days when cops in Kings Cross were viewed as especially corrupt. And that might have been the case, but everyone knew Adams, trusted him. He emerged as an emissary, a cop who was clean but shook hands with everyone and wasn’t judgemental. If you needed help, advice, someone to talk to off record, you went to see Adams.

  But he was also an ideas man and a thinker, a former undercover detective who never got tired of working up cover stories and angles. In Wakeham and Nagle, he saw a younger version of himself and gave them a loose rein.

  Their first trip to visit Adnan Darwiche at Lithgow Correctional Centre was on 30 August 2006, a Wednesday morning. They drove out alone, telling no one where they were going. Despite Adams’s trust in them, they knew that asking his permission would have meant weeks waiting for legal advice and a half-dozen committee meetings to get a decision, which would have invariably been ‘no’.

  So they just went, figuring out their strategy as towns drifted by along the Great Western Highway. Experience told them both to make no promises, but that was if Darwiche spoke at all. What if he went berserk? What if he attacked them? Backed into a corner and facing a double life sentence, Wakeham thought an assault charge would have meant nothing to him.

  The interview room was cramped, a table and few chairs taking up most of the space. A guard brought Darwiche in and removed his handcuffs. He pulled out a chair, sat down and said nothing.

  Nearly three years in prison had made him only slightly leaner than before his arrest. He still looked vaguely threatening, thick-necked and solid even in a loose orange jumpsuit. His beard was long again, grown out as a show of piety. And there was a brooding, caged-bear quality to him.

  There had already been one police investigation into Adnan Darwiche during his time in custody. A few months after his arrest in August 2004, Taskforce Gain detectives had learned he was trying to corrupt a prison guard to help him escape from prison, asking questions of the officer about how a breakout might be possible. The officer showed a tentative interest in helping and agreed to come up with some examples: passageways and blind spots. Really, the officer was taking notes the whole time and passing them back to detectives. They monitored the situation under Strike Force Mansell and wired up the prison guard to get Darwiche recorded on tape. Somehow Darwiche got spooked at the last minute, and mysteriously told the officer he was no longer interested in escaping.

  ‘I’ll take my chances at court,’ he said. By the time Wakeham and Nagle arrived to meet him his plan had fallen through – the jury had found him guilty of two murders, an attempted murder, and a violent home invasion dating back to 2001 that had left a member of the Razzak family partially paralysed. He was weeks away from being sentenced, so in Wakeham’s and Nagle’s minds the timing was right for a deal.

  ‘Adnan, I believe you know who we are,’ Wakeham said.

  And then it came, several tantalising, candid and off-record admissions. Yes, he had rocket launchers. Sure, they were hidden somewhere. True, they had come from a ‘government agency’ and, sure, he could hand them back to authorities, along with any other weapons at his fingertips: hand grenades, plastic explosives, detonators.

  ‘I’ll give you so much information you’ll be the next police commissioner,’ he said.

  Wakeham and Nagle were stunned, nodding along like this was all no big deal, but punching the air inside, hands slightly shaking under the table.

  Of course, this was all just a teaser. Darwiche had a lot more information to give them, but there’d be conditions attached, he said. He wanted to be moved out of isolation in Lithgow’s maximum-security wing and back into the general population where he could have privileges restored. He also had a personal request: in the event that his mother passed away, he wanted to attend the funeral, or at least say goodbye to her body at the morgue.

  As he had decided with Nagle in the car, Wakeham made no promises. Those were the kinds of requests that would have to be approved by the chain of command, he said.

  Back at the MEOCS office later that day, he typed furiously, the keyboard whirring at his desk as he prepared the paperwork to start a formal investigation into Darwiche’s claims. Even though the information from the meeting was vague – Darwiche had been careful not to specify where the launchers were hidden or how many he was holding – there was a palpable excitement about what they’d been told.

  Ultimately it was McKay’s decision whether or not to push ahead and cut a deal. Anyone could sit in a room and make those kinds of promises. At best, Darwiche was telling the truth and willing to give back what he had in his possession. But it could also be a pack of lies, a play to sell police a dud in exchange for prison privileges, or, at worst, a setup to lure them into a remote location for an ambush. McKay said he wanted proof.

  He joined Wakeham and Nagle for their next meeting with Darwiche a week later, commandeering the negotiations and putting his influence on the table. He had a direct line to well-placed individuals in the NSW government, most notably the police minister, Carl Scully. Middle Eastern organised crime was the hot-button topic of the moment and Scully regularly bypassed the commissioner to speak directly with McKay over the phone.

  The atmosphere changed with McKay in the room. With the Squad’s commander involved, it would have become obvious to Darwiche how seriously the police were taking the matter. Darwiche played this to his advantage, billing himself as a keeper of secrets and making cryptic suggestions about what he could do for authorities.

  ‘You wouldn’t have any idea what really goes on out there,’ he said to McKay, who’d seen this sort of front before and was already bored with the mindgames. He pulled out a sheet of paper from his pocket and laid it out flat on the table in front of Darwiche. On the paper were pictures of various rocket launchers. Darwiche examined the photos and then stopped at the M72, pointing at it. ‘That one,’ he said.

  McKay’s offer was simple: since Darwiche’s arrest, the NSW Crime Commission had been hounding him over a proceeds of crime forfeiture worth $50,000, a payment the commissi
on considered that he owed to the state of NSW from his time as a drug dealer. McKay said in exchange for a rocket launcher, he would have the debt wiped.

  Darwiche was intrigued, but said he wanted a guarantee of immunity; no secret charges coming to bite either him or his younger brother Mohamed, who he would get to help him, once they had met their end of the bargain.

  McKay agreed to this arrangement, formalising this promise on 15 September under Controlled Operation 06/365, a document broad enough and vague enough to allow both Darwiche and his younger brother to purchase and possess virtually any conceivable weapon that could be fired or detonated ‘from persons whose identity is yet to be established’.

  Two weeks later, it was Mohamed Darwiche who rang McKay while he was enjoying an afternoon beer at the Cronulla Hotel. Even with ongoing scrutiny of Darwiche and his family – eavesdropping on his prison phone calls, placing listening devices in the jail’s visiting areas, surveillance on his brother – Mohamed and another man were still able to deliver the rocket launcher to McKay at the townhouse on Stacey Street without revealing where the rest were hidden – or who was handling them.

  The only person missing that day as the first rocket launcher was recovered was Jenny Nagle. She had already stepped on an overseas flight booked months in advance, a reward for seeing through the Lawford Street shootings to their bitter finality. The nine-month murder trial had been its own kind of prison for Nagle, a physically exhausting routine that left her burned out and, at one stage, needing a short stay in hospital. Her bosses in management had let her down, leaving her dispirited about the work, which she loved. As the plane took off she sank into her seat and looked out the window, watching as Sydney was gently cast off beneath her, deciding there and then to quit the NSW Police Force entirely.

  The recovery of the M72 launcher sent police and national security agencies scrambling for answers. High-level briefings were sought. Questions were fired off in all directions, but the two at the forefront of everyone’s mind were: how had the launchers gone missing, and who had supplied them to Darwiche. A task force comprising Australian Federal Police, the NSW Crime Commission and detectives attached to the NSW Terrorism Investigations Squad set out to address these pressing unknowns. It was given the code name Strike Force Ridgecrop. Suddenly, finding rocket launchers was back in fashion again, and everyone wanted a piece of the glory.