The Squad

by Yoni Bashan

With that side of the equation settled, they moved to the more complicated phase of their mission: dealing with Canberra’s bloated, slow-moving bureaucracy. In order to release the rocket launcher for use in an undercover operation the detectives needed the blessing of several state and federal government departments and high-ranking officials, a process that soon became bogged down in tricky legalities and obscure jurisdictional protocols that defied common sense. One of these rules said that a rocket launcher couldn’t be released for a state-based investigation because it, technically, was Commonwealth equipment.

  As these kinks were ironed out, politicians and top Defence brass were assured that nothing was going to go wrong. Briefings for this operation went all the way to the top of every department: the chief of defence, Angus Houston; the defence minister, Brendan Nelson; even the prime minister, John Howard, was kept informed of the matter. The rocket launcher would be completely deactivated, the detectives said; even if it somehow got lost, it would be inoperable, nothing more than a powerful-looking ornament.

  Every step of the operation demanded signatures and assurances in writing. Each time a hurdle was cleared another would come up. Just as the weapon was cleared for release, someone demanded it be test-fired to ensure it definitely didn’t work. Just when they thought the final sign-off had been given, another signature was suddenly required.

  As these backroom processes played out, the street asset at the centre of the mission’s success started becoming wary. He was back on drugs, paranoid about getting caught out, and had become a constant liability; the delays had given him too much time to mull over the risks and he was threatening to pull out of the deal. Wakeham and Adams assured him he would be kept safe, but his wavering had made everyone nervous.

  Tensions also simmered in the police ranks. One night Wakeham sat with McKay by the fax machine waiting for a final signature from one of their superiors. Several minutes had already passed. McKay looked at his watch; the delay was infuriating him. He picked up the phone and demanded to know what the hold-up was. He couldn’t understand all the hysteria over the operation; the launcher had already been made inert. A fierce doorstop it may have been, but a deadly threat? Hardly.

  His boss, the assistant commissioner, answered the phone and said he was having second thoughts.

  ‘Just fucking sign it!’ McKay said. ‘It’s a piece of metal!’

  The signature came through a few minutes later, but within days the operation was put to bed. The asset’s behaviour and drug use had made him too erratic for the pressures of an undercover operation. McKay decided it wasn’t worth the risk. Wakeham and Adams hated to admit it, but they felt the same way. Within a few months both officers left the Middle Eastern Organised Crime Squad, transferring to Local Area Commands, mostly for personal reasons. Adams had grown weary of major organised crime investigations. He’d seen enough death to last him a few lifetimes. He went to a rural command for a while and then retired in 2010.

  Wakeham still works as a detective sergeant in the NSW Police Force and is now a team leader himself at a busy command somewhere in metropolitan Sydney. He and Adams were belatedly recognised with commendations for their effort recovering one of the state’s missing rocket launchers. The certificates arrived nearly a decade after the weapon was handed to McKay on 30 September 2006. Nagle’s acknowledgement was lost in the mail. At the time of writing, she was yet to receive any recognition for her involvement in Strike Force Torpy.

  The only other clues to the whereabouts of the nine remaining rocket launchers stolen from the army emerged during Operation Pendennis, the landmark terrorism investigation that culminated with arrests in November 2005. The cell was led by the now-imprisoned Mohamed Ali Elomar, who had allegedly bought five launchers from Darwiche in 2003.

  One indication of their possible hiding spot emerged during a police raid on the home of Victorian man Aimen Joud, which happened on the same day that Elomar was arrested. Joud was part of a Victorian cell working within the same terrorist conspiracy as Elomar. Analysts trawling through Joud’s computer found a document containing explicit instructions on how to cache weapons for long-term storage. It recommended using a stormwater pipe with slip-on caps and various other solvents, epoxy and PVC cement to seal the tube, which would allow the safe storage of a weapon for many years. Raids conducted on Sydney members of the same terror network uncovered a completed pipe that had been assembled according to these instructions. Investigators opened the pipe but found no weapon inside.

  The only other hint emerged during the criminal trials of Mirsad Mulahalilovic and Omar Baladjam, both of whom were members of the Sydney cell and were targets in the same operation. In the four days leading up to their arrests, both were seen by surveillance operatives in Sydney moving a set of PVC pipes between two vehicles – four pipes in total. It was never determined what was inside the pipes. Their whereabouts remains unknown.

  Today, there are still nine stolen rocket launchers missing somewhere in the community.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  TELOPEA STREET

  PUNCHBOWL, 2006

  Telopea Street: the days of open-air drug dealing are over, but the vestiges of the old era remain. Cocaine is still available. So is ice. But if you want to buy them there’s an implicit discretion, a text message or call in advance. The days of turning up in a car and buying through the window are long gone. That was the 1990s. Back then, Telopea Street was like a supermarket. If you wanted cocaine or heroin you stopped at the house with the palm tree out the front; a runner would come to your window and hand you a film canister – black for heroin, clear for cocaine. If you wanted cannabis it was the house with the carport, a few doors up.

  Telopea Street in the late 1990s was a no-go zone for police: it was 500 straight metres of single-storey brick and fibro, a place where a squad car was once shot at and the local gang, the Telopea Street Boys, ruled. On one infamous night sometime in the late 1990s, Shadi Derbas, a pioneer of the local drug trade, noticed two officers in a police car creeping through on patrol and expelled them, using a loudspeaker to order them out. The scene was caught on videotape. Derbas is still around between stints in prison. For a while his bedroom was encased in steel to keep out the bullets from drive-by shootings.

  These were the badlands. This was the street where in October 1998 fourteen-year-old Edward Lee had been stabbed in the chest on his way to a birthday party, a crime that resonated across the community and became a symbol of the anarchy taking hold of the area. Other murders also found their way back to here, including the death of Anita Vrzina – she was killed in a drive-by shooting, an attack that police said was targeting her partner, a witness to the Edward Lee murder. The man responsible for Edward Lee’s death, Mustapha Dib, was a leader of the Telopea Street Boys. He served nine years for the crime. Then he served a few more over Anita Vrzina’s death until his conviction for that murder was quashed on appeal in 2015. A panel of judges found that an eyewitness’s account naming Dib as the shooter was unreliable.

  By 2006 the street had undergone something of a transformation. The Telopea Street Boys were a spent force. The street runners had been arrested and the masterminds locked up. Undercover police had put covert cameras on telephone poles and the roofs of houses to record the buying taking place. They got council permission to lop down trees so that they could have uninterrupted views of more than 400 cars that turned up to score each day. After that, Telopea Street had faded back into obscurity, becoming like any other stretch of road in the rabbit warren of Punchbowl. Then Blackie Fahda showed up and police took notice again.

  Mohammed ‘Blackie’ Fahda, a nineteen-year-old with tattoos and a distinctive mullet that went to his shoulders, had come down to Telopea Street to have it out with his cousin Mohamad ‘Bruce’ Fahda. It was 17 July 2006. Tensions between Blackie and Bruce had gone back some years, but when they came together on that day they went off like a match strike to a tinderbox. Shots were fired on both sides, there was a gunfight in the
middle of the road. It was only luck that no one was injured. In the aftermath, Bruce and members of his crew – seven men in total, remnants of the Telopea Street Boys – drove out in a convoy looking for Blackie, each wearing bulletproof vests, their cars loaded with an arsenal of weapons – handguns, a Mac-10, an automatic shotgun. They didn’t find Blackie that night, but the match pieces had been set. As one informant told police: ‘Everyone in the area knows that the war is going to happen and is just waiting for it to start.’ Blackie’s shoot-out with his cousin wasn’t just a bold move. It was a declaration of war, one that could expect a swift response.

  The genesis for all this had been the murder of Blackie’s older brother, Ahmad Fahda, back in October 2003. People called Ahmad ‘the shark’ because of his standover tactics. ‘He’ll take a bite out of you,’ that’s what people said. He died in an ambush, his 25-year-old body taking twenty bullets from two Glock pistols as he was standing outside the AP Service Station in Punchbowl a short walk from Telopea Street. Ahmad’s death sent sixteen-year-old Blackie into a depression spiral. He had bouts of uncontrollable rage. He quit school, drank until he blacked out and snorted up to seven grams of cocaine each day. His weight fluctuated from 80 kilograms to 110 kilograms and back again. Psychologists call this a ‘severe grief reaction’. It wasn’t the first time Blackie had been faced with violence in his family. When he was eight his father had nearly killed his mother during a domestic dispute, stabbing her at least three times in the neck with a carving knife and breaking a frying pan on the back of her head.

  Following his brother’s death, Blackie sat up each night clutching a gun, checking the doors and windows of the family’s home to keep guard against more attacks. He was convinced that whoever killed his brother would come for his family next. Homicide detectives lay the blame with Adnan Darwiche and two members of his crew – Ramzi Aouad and Naseam El-Zeyat. Both were charged with Ahmad’s murder. Darwiche went on trial for ordering Fahda’s assassination, the victim’s close ties to the Razzak family a possible motive. Darwiche was acquitted while Aouad and El-Zeyat had their convictions quashed on appeal. To Blackie, it didn’t matter what the courts ruled; he was convinced that Darwiche had ordered his brother’s death. As far as he was concerned, Adnan Darwiche was the source of all his problems.

  Unable to get to him while he was in prison serving life sentences for the Lawford Street murders, Blackie’s mission became a manhunt to get anyone even remotely linked to Ahmad’s murder. No one was spared in this campaign. The first victim was Bassam Said who turned up at Canterbury Hospital one night clutching a gunshot wound – he’d been the guy who had driven Ahmad Fahda to the petrol station where the attack had taken place. Then there was Tony Haddad, the professional conman, who was badly beaten up in the days after the murder merely because he’d planned to meet Fahda on the day of his death. Even Blackie’s own family members weren’t spared. A close relative was kidnapped and tortured; not only was he considered to be too close with Adnan Darwiche, it was suspected that he’d helped set up Ahmad on the day of his slaying.

  To police, the acrimony between Blackie and Bruce was another extension of this conflict. Bruce and members of the Telopea Street Boys had aligned themselves with Adnan Darwiche in the drug trade, creating bad blood between the two Fahda cousins. With open warfare looming, everyone watched and waited as Blackie and Bruce circled each other, trying to see which cousin could find the other first.

  This hunting peaked on 30 July 2006, a Sunday night, nearly two weeks after the cousins’ gunfight on Telopea Street. Blackie had been given a tip-off that Adnan Darwiche’s younger brother, Michael, would be sitting inside the Titanic Café in Bankstown. This was to be the sweet revenge he’d been waiting for.

  His car stopped at the edge of Raymond Street, its engine left idling as Blackie stepped out, walked along the footpath and approached the entrance to the café. It was busy inside; a fog of noise and competing aromas hit him as he walked through the door – scented tobacco from the shisha pipes, charred meat from the grill, burnt dough from the wood-fire oven. He scanned the room and spotted a table where associates of Darwiche sat around like mafia dons, sipping black coffee. There was no sign of Michael.

  With a gun tucked into the back of his pants, Blackie made his way over to the table. If he couldn’t shoot Michael, his plan was to shoot one of his allies – it all sent the same message. When he got to the table an argument started. ‘What are you doing here? Get the fuck out!’ Other customers turned around to observe the fracas. Blackie wouldn’t budge. He reached for his gun and fired once at the man closest to him, Bilal Fatrouni, hitting him in leg. The bullet sent him to the floor.

  Amid the rush to help Fatrouni and the frantic shouts for an ambulance, Blackie slipped out of the restaurant and back to the car waiting at the corner, disappearing into the night.

  Blackie went into hiding that night, lying low as gunmen circled for him. A carload of men pulled up outside his mother’s house in Birrong with plans to shoot it up. There was talk of a contract out on his life. At Liverpool Hospital, where Fatrouni was taken, his associates stood outside armed with pistols, on edge for battle.

  Local police found it all too complex to manage. They didn’t understand the history. The Darwiche-Razzak feuds, the warring that led to the murders on Lawford Street and even Ahmad Fahda’s murder, were still fresh in everyone’s minds. Police feared that the shooting of Fatrouni at the Titanic Café threatened to repeat that bloody history. For these reasons, the case was sent to MEOCS CI, the Squad’s criminal investigation branch.

  Strike Force Kirban, as the investigation into the shooting of Fatrouni became known, was picked up by Mick Ryan and thrown to Steve Patton, a detective sergeant on his team. Patton had transferred into MEOCS from Strike Force Enogerra, the investigation launched into the Cronulla Riots. His last case had been a stabbing that had occurred during the riots in the suburb of Woolooware, a young man out on a date. When McKay was given MEOCS, he told Patton to come as well.

  Strike Force Kirban was his first assignment, a tricky case with dual objectives: its first task was to solve the Fatrouni shooting. Its second and more immediate priority was to prevent an outbreak of war – MEOCS informants were insisting that more violence was about to blow up.

  In Patton’s mind, the best way to end the feuding was to get Blackie off the streets. There was little doubt he was behind the shooting at the Titanic Café, as a number of informants were suggesting, but the evidence was weak. Patton wanted to breathe life into the case but the scene gave him little: there was no CCTV footage of the incident, the weapon hadn’t been located, and the dozen or so witnesses who saw what happened wouldn’t talk. Even the victim, Fatrouni, wasn’t saying a word. A man with his own rapsheet, each time Patton asked Fatrouni for a statement he politely refused. It wasn’t that Fatrouni was being obstructive; he just didn’t want the hassle. In phone calls and visits to his house, Fatrouni continued giving Patton the same response until the detective broke things down in more sobering terms. In a last-ditch effort Patton said that, without a statement, Blackie would walk. It would be as though the shooting never happened. ‘You need to do the right thing,’ he said to Fatrouni, ‘because we’ve got nothing.’ Somehow, this tactic seemed to resonate.

  A couple of days later, Patton walked into Mick Ryan’s office. It was glass-walled with corkboards, one of the few perks given to MEOCS team leaders. In his hand was a witness statement that ran for several pages and had Fatrouni’s name at the top: he’d finally agreed to go on paper. There was no motive supplied, but his statement named his assailant as one Mohammed ‘Blackie’ Fahda, which was good enough to get him off the street. Patton said he was ready to move and make an arrest, but it was Ryan’s call as detective inspector to approve.

  ‘You need to get more,’ Ryan said. He’d worked scores of gangland shootings and had seen what could often happen to victims in the witness box. Some recanted, others were paid off and made sensational ass
ertions about police coercion. Besides, he said, Fatrouni was a gangland figure; a good lawyer would shred his statement to pieces.

  Patton thought that keeping Blackie on the streets was an invitation for trouble. It was too much of a risk; he was either going to attack again or end up dead himself. And, he told Ryan, the investigation was going nowhere. ‘Let’s get him off the street and see what happens. Either the brief will get better or it won’t, but right now it’s going nowhere,’ Patton said.

  Ryan was unconvinced. He wanted to keep Blackie in the field and see where he could lead them. Follow him around a bit longer and keep listening to his phone calls, Ryan said.

  ‘Fine,’ Patton said. ‘We’ll do it your way.’

  Two weeks later, with the case still having gone no further, Blackie was arrested on the front lawn of his home at Kingsgrove and taken back to Hurstville Police Station. Patton and his primary detective, Aaron Phillips, spent the afternoon grilling him, throwing out questions and pressure-testing his denials. According to Blackie’s statement, he was nowhere near the Titanic Café on the night of the shooting. After four hours, Patton and Phillips laid two charges over the shooting and took him into custody.

  With Blackie off the streets and no longer a threat, Patton prepared to move on to the next stage of the Kirban investigation.

  But the victory with Blackie was short-lived. Not long after his arrest, Fatrouni recanted on his evidence. It all played out just as Mick Ryan had forewarned. At the committal hearing, Fatrouni got into the witness box and denied everything in his statement, telling Sutherland Local Court that he had no idea who shot him and that he had been coerced into going on paper by the two detectives in charge of the matter – Patton and Phillips. The remarks crippled the case. It was tossed out of court that day and Blackie walked free for a while longer.

  By then, however, Strike Force Kirban had evolved into a new investigation. Blackie had only been one side of the equation. The other had become his cousin, the cocaine dealer: Mohamad ‘Bruce’ Fahda.