by Yoni Bashan
Even with this set of connections mapped out and the serial number linking back to Della-Vedova, the Ridgecrop detectives lacked the kind of evidence that could see the army captain placed in a set of handcuffs. They had a good case, but it needed to be better – they needed a confession or an admission of some kind, something to tie Della-Vedova to the actual theft of the weapons. Just because he was the last person to handle them, it didn’t mean that he’d supplied them to Paul Carter, the man who sold them to Taha Abdul-Rahman.
Carter, however, was a different story. The detectives had him on toast. Abdul-Rahman had given a statement naming him as the supplier of the launchers and he was willing to give that evidence in court. This presented an opportunity to the Ridgecrop team. Carter meant nothing to them; he was a middleman. It was the army captain they wanted. In early 2007, officers approached the former Rebels bikie with an offer to work co-operatively with them: wear a wire, record Della-Vedova, give evidence in court, and, in exchange, no charges will proceed.
Carter, a criminal who’d already been to prison and didn’t want to go back, accepted the deal.
On 21 February 2007, he sat down in front of Detective Inspector Neil Tuckerman, the officer in charge of Strike Force Ridgecrop, and told him everything he could remember, casting his mind back six years to when everything began at Long Bay Correctional Centre.
It was visiting day, he said, a Saturday morning in early July 2001. At the time, Carter was about halfway through serving out a sentence for drug supply. When his wife arrived she brought her new business partner and her husband along. It was a meet-and-greet, a chance for the two families to get to know each other. Back then, Carter hadn’t met either Catherine or Dean Taylor and considering the two women were opening a salon together it was seen as good business for everyone to get to know each other.
Carter told Tuckerman that his conversation with Taylor had started out in the usual way, mostly with banter. Taylor then told him about his background in the army and how he’d left on medical grounds, but that his brother-in-law Shane Della-Vedova was still serving.
According to Carter, the conversation then veered into unexpected territory. A question came up about military weapons. Taylor asked if he was interested in buying some rocket launchers, grenades, bulletproof vests and night vision goggles. ‘He offered me other military stuff but I can’t remember it all,’ Carter said. Taylor made it obvious that his brother-in-law could divert these weapons from the army.
Carter told Tuckerman that about two months later he was on work release from prison when Taylor arrived on his doorstep with a shopping list of illegal weapons written on a sheet of paper. At the top of the page were the words ‘10 x 66mm ready to rock’: ten rocket launchers for sale.
‘Dean told me that Shane’s job involved the disposal of rocket launchers after their shelf life had expired,’ Carter said. ‘Shane would write the rocket launchers off as destroyed but actually took them home.’
Carter took the first launcher just before Christmas. He said that Taylor showed up with a black garbage bag and told him the ‘66’ was inside. When he opened the bag, Carter saw a tube about one metre long. It looked like it had been sprayed with an aerosol can.
Taylor denied all this at his criminal trial, telling the court he never had any conversations with Carter about the sale of military weapons at Long Bay Correctional Centre and certainly never handed over a rocket launcher at his house that day. He conceded he had been at the house, and had passed on a bag from Della-Vedova, but was unaware of what was inside it.
With the rocket launcher in his hands, Carter said he began shopping it around to underworld figures to see who might be interested in buying. He called up Milad Sande, a drug dealer he knew, and offered him the weapon for $20,000. Sande was a connected underworld figure, well known and linked to several major organised crime families. Carter thought he’d make a great middleman and cut a deal with him. When Sande picked up the launcher he asked Carter if he could get more. Carter said yes. Within days he had secured a second weapon from Taylor, he told the detectives. But by then Sande had reneged on the deal. He’d already called Carter and asked for his money back on the first launcher – it turned out that whoever Sande was representing wasn’t happy with the weapon once they had seen it. ‘They didn’t realise it was only a single-shot weapon,’ Carter said to Tuckerman.
Stuck with two rocket launchers, Carter wrapped both the weapons in plastic and left them in his garage. Months passed. He didn’t hear anything. One New Year’s Day rolled into another. Suddenly it was August 2003. Carter couldn’t remember the reason why, but he told Tuckerman that he’d decided to contact Taha Abdul-Rahman, another old criminal contact, who expressed interest and said he’d find a buyer. Deals between them soon followed.
The first launcher was traded for $15,000 on 30 September 2003 (Abdul-Rahman’s cut was $1000). A month later another seven rocket launchers followed, this time moving directly from Della-Vedova to Carter. Taylor was bypassed because by then, two years on, he was mostly out of the picture; he’d been caught up in a messy divorce with his wife, Della-Vedova’s sister Catherine, and had fallen out of touch with everyone. Carter told Tuckerman that the payment for the seven weapons was in a box that Abdul-Rahman handed over, roughly $70,000. In Abdul-Rahman’s account of the deal, it was $50,000.
This was something of a minor inconsistency, but it goes to the difficulty of determining the absolute truth of the matter. But there were other more important contradictions between their statements. For example, Adnan Darwiche had told Wakeham and Adams that he had bought six rocket launchers and then sold five to the Sydney terror-cell leader Mohamed Ali Elomar. Assuming this was true, it would have left one launcher remaining in his possession, and that would have been the one he had traded with police as a goodwill gesture. Except, there was one problem. Carter and Abdul-Rahman might have contradicted each other on the money, but they were in agreement about the weapons sold to Darwiche. According to both men, Darwiche had bought eight rocket launchers in total, not six – one at first, and then seven afterwards. If Darwiche was telling the truth about having sold five weapons to Elomar, then basic maths would suggest he had three launchers left and had only given one back to police. This meant at least another two were still out there in his control.
On 27 March 2007, Carter was wired up with a listening device and sent in to interact with both Dean Taylor and Shane Della-Vedova, neither of whom he had seen for years. The meeting was timed to capitalise on recent headlines revealing that a cache of rocket launchers had been stolen from the army, sold into the underworld, and that an investigation was continuing to find the culprits behind the mess. These media revelations presented an opportunity for the Ridgecrop detectives; it was a good excuse for their informant – Paul Carter – to call a meeting and, with any luck, get incriminating statements from Della-Vedova and Dean Taylor on a tape recorder.
Carter was told to call Della-Vedova and ask him to set up a three-way meeting with Taylor. His cover story was to accuse Taylor of mouthing off at the pub about the rocket launchers after getting cut out of their lucrative deal. This, of course, was all a fabrication.
On the drive out to Taylor’s house, Carter pretended to be nervous. He told Della-Vedova: ‘I told youse from the start, he’s the weakest link, this bloke.’
They arrived a few minutes later and walked up a gravel path towards the front door. Taylor was surprised to see them.
‘I just wanted to talk to you,’ Carter began before launching into a string of accusations, telling Taylor that word had filtered back through the hairdressing salon that he’d been ‘down at the pub’ telling people about the rocket launchers Della-Vedova had stolen.
Taylor couldn’t understand what Carter was talking about. He said he hadn’t been to any pub in years, didn’t drink alcohol, and had barely left the house in recent times. More importantly, he hadn’t breathed a word about Carter or the rocket launchers; as far as he knew there
was only one weapon he’d seen and it was the device he’d been duped into handing over.
‘I gave up all this shit,’ Taylor said.
Carter called him a liar.
‘Mate, it’s you that’s been down there,’ he said. ‘The information, you’re the only one who knows.’
But why, Taylor asked, would he want to spread rumours that would implicate himself? ‘As if I want me fucking arse in a fucking sling!’ he said.
Della-Vedova could see the situation escalating. He tried to calm things down and said they had only turned up on his doorstep because of the newspaper articles and television coverage.
‘Mate, my fucking heart stopped when that fucking showed up,’ Taylor said.
Carter nodded. ‘Tell me about it.’
Della-Vedova said, ‘You’re not the only one.’
The arguing continued, with Taylor and Carter at a stalemate. Taylor said his new wife would get suspicious if they kept talking for too long.
Eight days later the Ridgecrop detectives knocked on Taylor’s front door, handing him a warrant to search his property and putting him in handcuffs. At the same time, a separate team appeared on Della-Vedova’s doorstep at his house in Wattle Grove. They drove him back to Surry Hills Police Station where he was introduced to Detective Inspector Neil Tuckerman, who sat him down for an interview. Della-Vedova made admissions immediately, offering lengthy and emotional explanations about why he stole the weapons and the rationale behind it. He also gave candid demonstrations of how to use the rocket launcher when asked by Tuckerman; he had brought one into the room in a sealed evidence bag.
The army captain’s version of what had happened put the whole situation down to an innocent mistake, a stuff-up of almighty proportions. He said it all started with a routine assignment to destroy some rocket launchers at the ammunition depository in the town of Muswellbrook. The weapons were nearing their use-by date of twelve years. He took them up in a purpose-built trunk and, once at the depository, made a courtesy offer to destroy any additional weapons for the depot staff. It was just something you did, he said to Tuckerman. As it turned out, the depot was housing a few surplus rocket warheads, the same kind Della-Vedova had brought with him to destroy.
On the ammunition range he set up the demolitions required, blew up each of the expired launchers, and then hopped on the truck for the drive back to Sydney. It was only when he returned to Holsworthy Barracks that he realised he had somehow completely forgotten to destroy the rocket launchers he’d taken up with him. They were still sitting in the back of his truck. The only warheads he’d blown up were the ones given to him by the depot staff.
The rest of the story played out in the same way as most downward spirals: he panicked and tried to cover his tracks. He hid the weapons away, spray painting them and removing their external markings. He dismissed any thoughts of admitting to the mistake. All he could think about was how, if he owned up to it, he’d be ruled out of a promotion he was angling for, to be an ammunition technician to the Special Air Service Regiment.
With the weapons hidden, Della-Vedova considered several options, including burying them in a remote location. But in the end, as he told Tuckerman, he took the weapons home to his garage in the same plastic trunk they were stored in and set about trying to quietly sell them to a collector, figuring they could pass as trophies, a centrepiece in an enthusiast’s gun cabinet, or something to show off to friends. ‘I thought they would be gone, as I said, in somebody’s bloody trophy cabinet, sitting in their shed somewhere out in the middle of [the] boonies by some cow cocky or someone who maybe wanted the damned thing for his trophy cabinet,’ Della-Vedova said. ‘Never in my deepest regrets and fears would I think that they would come back because of some fools, and some idiots linked to terrorists and shit like that. And that’s the truth. I just stuffed up.’
It spiralled from there with Carter’s arrival into the frame. He walked into the salon one morning while Della-Vedova and Taylor were doing renovation work. By then he already knew Taylor, but hadn’t met Della-Vedova. The conversation between the three men eventually worked its way around to the rocket launchers and Carter offered to get rid of them.
‘It just compounded,’ he told Tuckerman. ‘I was like, what am I going to do with these damn things and then it just … How it come about – it was mentioned or whatever. It just come about – and I was stupid enough to do it.’
Tuckerman asked how much money he made off the sale of each launcher. Della-Vedova said it was virtually nothing. He’d been ripped off, he said, receiving only about $5000 for all ten of the weapons he sold, so $50,000 in total.
Tuckerman was surprised. ‘If we had received information that it was seventy thousand dollars … you’d remember that?’ he asked, referring to the amount quoted by Carter in his statement.
Della-Vedova almost laughed. He assured Tuckerman the money he made was nowhere near as good as that.
The interview went on like this for another two hours. At one point Tuckerman held up the launcher that had been brought to the police station in a sealed bag and asked Della-Vedova to briefly identify its components. Della-Vedova took the weapon and explained its mechanics, how the firing worked and the propulsion it created to send the warhead flying. As he spoke, Tuckerman listened and then abruptly cut him off, asking him what would happen if the device was used on a car or a group of people.
‘It would be terrible,’ Della-Vedova said softly.
Before the interview ended, Della-Vedova said that years earlier he’d given some thought to coming clean and working with the police. The idea had eaten him up inside. ‘I thought maybe that I could come and say something or do something about it,’ he said. But the big reason he didn’t was Carter. In the back of his mind he wondered whether by agreeing to some kind of formal co-operation with the authorities he’d be putting his family at risk. ‘Sydney’s a nasty place,’ he said. ‘I thought about it so many times and worried over it. But in the end I didn’t, did I? You know, and that’s … Honestly, sir, I didn’t do it, you know? I’m here now talking to you. I fucked up.’
Shane Della-Vedova pleaded guilty to one count of possessing a prohibited weapon and one count of theft of Commonwealth property when his case went to court in 2007. During sentencing, the judge hearing Della-Vedova’s matter cast serious doubt on most of his story, particularly his claims that the rocket launchers had come into his possession through oversight, and that he had only made $5000 from the sale of each weapon. Della-Vedova’s thoughts, or hopes, that the launchers would end up in ‘some cow-cockies’ trophy cabinet’ were also ‘wholly unbelievable’, the judge remarked. The former army captain was sentenced to seven years in prison for the crimes and lost an appeal in 2009. Today he is out on parole.
Taha Abdul-Rahman, who pleaded guilty to buying prohibited weapons without authority and receiving stolen Defence goods, received a maximum sentence of three and a half years in prison.
Dean Taylor, who argued that he had been set up by Paul Carter and went to trial alleging that he had nothing to do with the sale of the rocket launchers, was found not guilty on all charges of supplying the weapons, the jury taking just two hours to reach the verdict. He wiped away tears as they delivered their decision. He left court telling the waiting media only that he was glad to be going home.
Paul Carter, who was given the code name ‘Harrington’ by the police, received a full indemnity for his co-operation with their investigation. In 2009 he was sent back to prison after being convicted of drug supply offences and was caught in yet another sting not long after his release, this time an undercover drug operation, according to a February 2016 report in the Sydney Morning Herald. At the time of writing, Carter was awaiting a decision on whether he would be deported to the United Kingdom, where he was born.
In April 2007, not long after the arrests, Wakeham and Adams were pulled off Strike Force Torpy and put in charge of new cases. The way McKay saw it, their investigation was over; the MEOCS brie
f had been to work on Darwiche and he was out of the picture. The Della-Vedova side of the equation was a matter for the army or counter terror police.
Of course, neither Wakeham nor Adams saw it that way. In their minds, there were still too many loose ends; the intelligence suggested Darwiche still had one, possibly two, rocket launchers hidden somewhere in Sydney. For months they had been thrashing out methods to try and track them down, ways of outsmarting the inmate to get the weapons back without his co-operation. Neither of them could walk away from that. It was during one of their long drives to visit the inmate at Lithgow that they’d coined a new way of recovering the devices. When they ran the concept past McKay he thought it was worthwhile and provided the green light. It was kept top secret and given the codename Strike Force Seawater. It revolved around Adnan’s older brother, Abdul. He was an authority figure in the family and was the most likely to know where the stash of weapons would be hidden. The plan went like this: if Wakeham and Adams could get a rocket launcher from the army, make it inert, and then discreetly sell it back to Abdul, they could follow it to its hiding spot which, most probably, would be the in the same place as the rest of the missing rocket launchers. All they needed to make it work was an informant, an Abdul-Rahman-type figure, someone who could approach Abdul Darwiche with an offer to sell a rocket launcher without twigging any fears that he was being caught in a setup.
The guy they had in mind was a drug dealer who had recently decided to quit the business, selling his run for $70,000 and committing himself to a fresh start. The proceeds of the sale had kept him going for a few months, but the demands of an expensive lifestyle and a difficult girlfriend soon left him cashless and looking for ways to make money again. Becoming a police asset wasn’t what he had in mind, but he reluctantly accepted Wakeham and Adams’s offer.