by Yoni Bashan
Meanwhile Strike Force Torpy, Wakeham and Adams’s investigation, continued with negotiations at Lithgow Correctional Centre. While the Ridgecrop detectives were figuring out how the launchers went missing, the Torpy case worked on getting more weapons back.
By now Darwiche had engaged the services of John Doris, the same shrewd barrister who had dissected the police case at his trial over the Lawford Street murders. With Doris’s entry into the discussions, Darwiche’s original manifesto got a slight tweaking. Realising the potential value of what he was hiding, Darwiche’s reasonable and realistic conditions, which he had first given to Wakeham and Nagle, had now been usurped by a series of unrealistic and non-negotiable ultimatums. At the very top of this list was a request for a royal pardon to be considered, one that would commute his sentence and give him an eventual release. Darwiche knew that quashing the sentence entirely was never going to happen. But commuting his sentence was achievable, he thought; he could do twenty-five years and then leave the country for good, he said. He even vowed to tear up his passport as a guarantee he would never come back.
McKay, still leading the negotiations, thought the idea was insane. A royal pardon was never going to happen. Darwiche wasn’t some political prisoner jailed for his subversive views. He was a twice-convicted murderer, someone who, in the eyes of the law, was still a very serious threat to the community.
McKay told him that everything was on the table, but if he wanted a royal pardon then he would have to hand back more weapons. It was the only way to win favour with the NSW attorney-general, the person who could lobby the governor-general to sign a Royal Prerogative of Mercy.
At this, Darwiche agreed to make another handover, offering McKay twenty kilograms of Powergel explosives if he wanted it. These were commercial-grade ‘busters’, pudgy salami sticks that could blast holes in quarries and mines. Used correctly they could probably flatten half a city block. Darwiche said he had fourteen of them ready to go and could get another 400 kilograms by Christmas. They weren’t rocket launchers, but McKay still jumped at the offer. It was also a tidy opportunity for the joint investigation team to try to track the hiding place of these explosives. Chances were they were hidden with the rest of his arsenal. But, already, this had proven to be surprisingly difficult.
All of Darwiche’s contact with the outside world was closely monitored in prison. The exception to this were his face-to-face meetings with his brother Mohamed in the prison visiting area. These conversations were recorded through a listening device, but were almost always drowned out by the ambient noise of banging on the table and crying children. Mohamed was excellent at outsmarting law enforcement efforts to track him. During one meeting with McKay he slid a piece of paper across the table with four licence plate numbers written down, each one belonging to a different AFP surveillance car that had been following him that day.
The Powergel explosives were handed back to police on 17 October 2006. McKay did the pickup, arriving at a predetermined rendezvous point where fourteen ‘busters’ were handed over with a reel of bright red detonator cord. It was another low-key affair, one with barely any security and no Bomb Squad in tow, though McKay had called them for advice on the way out. In a brief chat to the on-call supervisor, he explained what was going on and asked for any advice on handling the explosive sticks. The supervisor kicked up a fuss, urging him to abort, insisting it was too dangerous.
McKay laughed. ‘I’ll ring you back when I’ve got it,’ he said. Then he hung up and kept driving.
The next day, Darwiche was escorted from Lithgow Correctional Centre to a police station a short drive away. His barrister, John Doris, was waiting for him along with Wakeham and Adams. They had come to take a statement from Darwiche, capitalising on his hope of having a royal pardon considered. The other reason for the meeting was to mentally prepare Darwiche for his upcoming sentence. Wakeham didn’t want these negotiations destroyed by what was coming. He anticipated the judge was likely going to hand down life sentences for the Lawford Street murders. Darwiche said he’d accept the sentences, so long as his lawyers could at least meet with the attorney-general and make his case for a royal pardon.
In the spirit of co-operation and still acting in good faith, Darwiche spoke even more openly and candidly during this meeting, revealing key details for the first time about how many rocket launchers he’d bought, what he had done with them, and how he’d gone about getting them in the first place. These were important admissions. He told the detectives he’d bought six rocket launchers towards the end of 2003 at the height of his war with the Razzak family. He refused to name his contact, but said they were people with links to the army. As for the launchers themselves, he said he’d sold most of them to a person by the name of Mohamed Ali Elomar, a man well known to authorities as the leader of a Sydney-based terrorist cell. It was Elomar who had been charged in 2005, one year earlier, after being overheard on a phone call throwing out ideas to blow up Sydney’s Lucas Heights nuclear reactor and possibly the NSW Parliament building on Macquarie Street. In one call Elomar was overheard by the cops listening in as he talked about a worldwide war against Muslims, saying that ‘we should do something about it over here’.
A letter from John Doris arrived on Ken McKay’s desk one week later and was forwarded up through the NSW Police Force’s chain of command, not stopping until it had reached the commissioner’s office. The document was a contract of sorts, a formal agreement that summarised the promises made between Darwiche and the detectives over their recent meetings. Among them was a pledge from Darwiche that he would accept the life sentences to be handed down against him; that he would continue to collaborate with police to deliver more weapons; and that he would give evidence in future court proceedings against the people involved with the rocket launchers, if required.
In return, the police were asked to agree to seven undertakings, among them being that they would write to the attorney-general in support of a submission to commute Darwiche’s sentence, and that they would move Darwiche to the main prison at Lithgow Correctional Centre once his assistance had been provided.
The document was hand-delivered to the police minister’s office a few days later and then forwarded to the attorney-general, Bob Debus. His reply, emailed to John Doris on 7 November, seemed to offer nothing concrete and only stalled Darwiche for an answer. If anything it hinted strongly that more weapons would have to be returned for any kind of undertaking to be signed off. Debus wrote:
It would be appropriate for me to consider as part of the application for the Royal Prerogative of Mercy, not only the extent of the applicant’s co-operation, but also the quality and timeliness of that co-operation. It is important that I point out that I expect your client will not withhold information which might put the public safety at risk. Indeed, it is in your client’s interests to maintain his cooperation because, as I have stated, its quality and timeliness are relevant to my decision.
When Darwiche read the letter he was sure he was being screwed. In his mind, all of his good-faith gestures had been for nothing. He’d given police a rocket launcher and fourteen sticks of Powergel and what did they want? More. What had he been given? Zilch. It was to be the beginning of the end of his co-operation. Two months had passed since the negotiations with police had started. At this point, his two life sentences had been sealed in court. And as a final insult, he’d been moved from Lithgow Correctional Centre to Goulburn’s Supermax prison, the famous jail-within-a-jail, the most secure facility in the southern hemisphere.
At his last meeting with Adams and Wakeham, he made it clear that he wouldn’t be tempted by any more deals. Their notes from the day tell the story:
Adnan Darwiche stated if police could not provide him with some form of guarantee that his sentence would be reduced to somewhere in the vicinity of twenty years then he was not prepared to assist any further. Police advised him that what he wanted was simply not possible and that the current arrangements with the attorney-general
was the best that he could expect. Adnan Darwiche then told police that he could not assist anyway. He stated that he had made the relevant enquiries with his supplier of the rocket launchers and was unable to obtain them.
It was a disappointing end to a stellar few months. With Darwiche bowing out of the negotiations, Wakeham and Adams turned back to the few leads they still had in the hope of recovering the rocket launchers without him. This was no time to be giving up, they thought. There were still mounds of intelligence files and intercepted phone calls to transcribe and pick apart.
Around this time it had also become apparent that the joint investigation, Strike Force Ridgecrop, had amassed a few of its own promising leads. Efforts to trace back the rocket warhead’s serial number were continuing. Paperwork was being pulled. Another angle the joint investigation had been working on was the identity of a mysterious person known as ‘Taha’, whose name had come up on an intercepted phone call. It could have been a first name, a last name, or even a nickname. It could have been a dead end; no one knew. But finding ‘Taha’ was pivotal – the Ridgecrop detectives believed he was somehow linked to the rocket launchers.
His name had been mentioned in a call about a month earlier, around the time John Doris’s letter had arrived on Ken McKay’s desk. The AFP had given up following Mohamed Darwiche in their cars but they were still tapping his mobile phone, listening to the calls between him and his older brother, Abdul, a tow truck driver with a tough reputation in the Middle Eastern community. Neither of them were under investigation for any crimes but they were considered by police to be the gateway to the launchers. During one of their calls, detectives overheard them planning to meet ‘Taha’ who, just by the way they spoke about him, sounded like he might be important. Efforts were made to follow Mohamed to the meeting and monitor his movements using a police helicopter, but heavy rain grounded both the aircraft and, coincidentally, one of Abdul’s tow trucks as well, which forced both men to cancel the meeting. Plans to reschedule it never eventuated and the lead got away from police – the name ‘Taha’, however, stuck with them.
One person who knew more about Taha was Khaled ‘Crazy’ Taleb, the star witness in Darwiche’s trial and former right-hand man. He had already been working with the NSW Crime Commission for several months, feeding them information about Darwiche and others in the underworld in exchange for his indemnity, one of the most generous pacts with a criminal ever signed off by the NSW government. Hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent on Taleb – relocation, allowances, rental payments, flights for his family from Lebanon to Australia, as well as visas so they could stay in the country. He was to be paid a weekly stipend of $721 for four years. The commission even bought him a boat so he could go fishing, but only on the condition that he pay for the fuel.
Among the many details he had already told the NSW Crime Commission about Darwiche – from their discussions about Islam to how they melted down handguns used to shoot people – emerged a story about an arms dealer who shopped guns around in the boot of his car. Taleb used to buy off him regularly. He was twenty-seven, married with a kid, and living in the southwestern suburb of Leumeah. His full name was Taha Abdul-Rahman.
Taleb told the commission that sometime in October 2003 he got a phone call from Taha Abdul-Rahman asking if he and Darwiche wanted a weapon of a different kind, something heavier and fit for a real battle. Within a couple of days, after a few short meetings, they cut their first deal for a rocket launcher: Darwiche paid $15,000 for it. A few weeks later they met again at a townhouse in Eagle Vale, where six more launchers were packed in two black garbage bags, a deal worth $55,000.
Wakeham and Adams took this information and ran with it, trawling through Darwiche’s old intelligence archives and telephone intercept transcripts to find links between him and the arms dealer known as Taha Abdul-Rahman. These transcripts had been gathered years earlier, around the time of the Lawford Street murders. Anyone listening back then would have struggled to pick up on the true nature of the discussions; most were in code, droning on endlessly about car parts, tyres and tubing. But now, with the code broken, these exchanges conveyed a whole new meaning. In one call Darwiche asked for an ‘instruction manual’. In another, the words ‘fifty-five thousand dollar discount’ were used. At the time, this meant nothing – instruction manual? Discount?
‘It’s one hundred per cent,’ Darwiche had said on the intercepted phone call.
‘I’ll get everything ready,’ Abdul-Rahman had replied.
Wakeham and Adams studied these conversations and saw the makings of a case against Abdul-Rahman staring back at them. A statement from Taleb plus the coded conversations would be enough evidence to satisfy a magistrate to approve a search warrant on Abdul-Rahman’s house in Leumeah. With any luck, a rocket launcher would be sitting inside. McKay lit up with excitement when Adams briefed him on the plan. They were back in the game.
The only catch was Taleb, who wanted more money in exchange for his evidence about the rocket launchers. By now he’d learned to work the system and had realised his value to police. It’s not known how much he was eventually offered, or whether he was paid, but such was the willingness to keep him satisfied that both the NSW Crime Commission and the AFP agreed to stump up the money together.
On 15 December, a team of officers surrounded Taha Abdul-Rahman’s property and knocked on the front door. He was given two pieces of paper: a search warrant in one hand and a summons to appear before the NSW Crime Commission in the other. Rather than arresting him, the investigators were compelling him to appear before one of the commission’s secret hearings, a star chamber inquisition where refusing to answer questions, or lying, can land a person in prison for two years. As he was escorted to the CBD for the hearing, members of the joint investigation team went room by room, rifling through desks, scrutinising documents and examining his garage. They seized his computer hard drive and downloaded the lot to be analysed in the search for any evidence that linked him to the rocket launchers. It had been more than three years since Abdul-Rahman had allegedly sold the weapons to Darwiche, so any hope of finding evidence in his house was something of a long shot.
In the end they found nothing tying him back to the launchers, but they did walk away with thirty rounds of ammunition, $7000 cash, numerous mobile phones, some banking records, and pictures of mutilated soldiers downloaded off the internet. In policing terms, that wasn’t particularly fruitful, but the raid itself and the experience at the NSW Crime Commission had done wonders for the investigation. This was Adams’s hope from the beginning. If the warrant didn’t yield any evidence then at least it could act as a smokescreen, a cage rattler that might scare Abdul-Rahman into talking about the weapons.
In a phone call the next day, recorded by police, detectives got the incriminating, corroborating evidence they were looking for: ‘They fucked me, bro … about those things that fly … that dick [Khaled Taleb] has spoken, man.’
Charges followed within weeks. At first Abdul-Rahman said nothing, but not long after he agreed to make full admissions to the Ridgecrop team, telling them everything – from how much he had made out of each launcher to where the meetings with Darwiche had taken place. Of course, the most important piece of information Abdul-Rahman could give them was how he came to get the weapons in the first place, a story that, by this stage, had already been partially pieced together. Using the serial number left on the rocket fuse, detectives had embarked on a paper trail that led from filing cabinets in Sydney to a mysterious ADF facility near the small town of Muswellbrook, a six-hour drive away, where military weapons go to get destroyed.
It was there that the paper trail ended.
On paper, Shane Malcolm Della-Vedova, a career soldier and technical expert, was the kind of serviceman that would have made Australians proud. He was an honourable man who’d spent twenty-eight of his forty-six years with the Australian Defence Force, reaching the rank of captain and serving in foreign war zones. His service record was
impeccable, not a blemish. He’d been an infantry soldier, then an ‘ammo tech’, the kind of weapons expert who delivered awesome firepower to combat troops and showed them how to use it. If an improvised explosive device was found on the battlefield, it was Della-Vedova’s job to do away with it. There wasn’t a working component in a rocket launcher, or any other piece of army weaponry, that Della-Vedova wasn’t intimately familiar with.
Once Della-Vedova was identified, the Ridgecrop team had a strong lead on the source of the stolen weapons. He was the man who’d last signed out the launchers and handled them. The trail ended with him and picked up again with Taha Abdul-Rahman. But, as Abdul-Rahman told them, he’d never met Della-Vedova and had no idea who he was. His source in the supply chain was a different person altogether, a middleman who sat on the border of the real world and the underworld – his wife and kids on one side and criminal connections on the other. He was a former Rebels bikie; his name was Paul Carter.
The Ridgecrop team started digging into Carter, pulling up his profile and working backwards through his friends and family to figure out his links to Della-Vedova. It was all in the family: Carter’s wife, Kathleen, had gone into business with Della-Vedova’s sister, Catherine Taylor. The two families were close. Their kids played at each other’s houses, the two women were opening a hairdressing salon together, and Catherine’s husband, Dean Taylor, had a distinguished career in the army. At some point Dean Taylor introduced Carter to his brother-in-law, Shane Della-Vedova.