The Squad

by Yoni Bashan

  Detective Sergeant Steve Patton’s theory on drug dealers is that they live in a kind of mutual, unspoken understanding with police. There are thousands of them out there in the community, too many for the police to investigate all at once; some of them are known, many of them aren’t. In that sense, they have an advantage – anonymity is longevity. Staying low key means living another day. The dealers that police can’t see, can’t hear, will never be a priority. ‘It’s the ones that shoot each other who go straight to the top of the list,’ Patton tells people, especially drug dealers, but only after he’s caught them.

  That’s how it went down for Mohamad ‘Bruce’ Fahda. Had it not been for the shoot-out with his cousin Blackie, it’s unlikely Patton would have taken an interest in the cocaine sales from his house on Telopea Street.

  In a career spanning two decades, Patton had worked many shooting investigations. But drug jobs were a passion, a recurring motif in his career that had started with the Drug and Organised Crime Strike Force Program of the late 1990s and then the Gangs Squad in the early 2000s. These cases revolved around biker gangs, but drugs were always beneath the surface, each investigation riffing on the same themes of clandestine laboratories, kilogram imports, turf wars and distribution rights. Drug investigations were a faster, more pragmatic way of putting criminals in prison. They were the tax dodging charges that landed Al Capone in Alcatraz. Why spend months working the unsolvable drive-by shooting with no witnesses, and victims who refuse to talk, when you know the guy behind it is running drugs from his apartment?

  A drug job, in Patton’s view, is a world of weak links, its supply chain littered with vulnerabilities – the dealer that gets ripped off, the supplier who doesn’t get his money on time, the runner who gets arrested and wants to make a deal. And the weakest link of all is the customer, the end user that drives it all; they are the flaw built into the business model. They’re sloppy, careless, loose on the phone, often stoned, usually broke. They’re the first to turn informant on arrest, keen to avoid the hassle of court appearances and the burden of a criminal record. It’s true: whatever loyalty a customer might feel towards their supplier will evaporate fast once a deal is offered as questions fly at them about the dealer’s name, the drugs they’re selling, the quantities available and, most importantly, the number of the drug phone, which, once received, paves the way for warrants to be drafted and the line tapping to begin.

  Enter Bruce Fahda.

  Patton set up a surveillance detail on Telopea Street where Bruce was known to be selling, watching as customers approached his parents’ house to buy cocaine by the gram each day. From what Patton could gather, Bruce had two mobile phones: one for text messages and the other for phone calls. He did most of his business on the former, telling customers to meet him at home or at the nearby petrol station. The latter he used for everyday business, social calls and the like; he spoke to his parole officer on this number, identifying his movements and reporting in as required. He had only been out of jail a few months, cut loose after getting caught carrying a gun.

  Bruce didn’t work alone. His business partner was a seventeen-year-old boy who lived in the neighbourhood. Even at such a tender age, he was already known to police as a significant MEOC identity.

  The third target of Patton’s case was Khoder Katrib, twenty-two, a street-dealer since the age of fourteen and a member of the Telopea Street Boys, even though he lived in the separate suburb of Greenacre. Fahda and Katrib were tight. One intelligence report kept on file about them stated that earlier that year, on 8 March 2006, both Katrib and Bruce had walked into the Arab Bank of Australia in Bankstown and tried to deposit $20,080 into Katrib’s account. They had wanted the bank staff to send the money to Lebanon once the deposit was through. But there was a problem with the cash itself. When the bank teller had picked it up, the bundle felt unusually cold. The staff had been trained to watch out for these types of situations – frozen cash, wet bills, cash movements over $10,000. Suspicions were raised. In the end, the boys had walked out and tried their luck later that afternoon at another branch. The same thing happened there. The staff refused to bank the money, believing it to be the proceeds of crime. No charges were laid, and technically nothing illegal had occurred, but both incidents were reported to AUSTRAC – the federal agency that monitors suspicious movements of currency – and stored on law enforcement databases.

  It was Detective Aaron Phillips who had typed up the warrant application for Bruce’s drug phone. He’d done the checks and discovered that it was registered to John Daoud, a fictional identity living on Fredrick Street in Campsie. The tap on Bruce’s phone meant the Strike Force Kirban team had a back door into his whole operation. From what they could gather by intercepting his calls and texts, Bruce had a customer base of about fifty regulars. Police followed some of these people from his door after they’d done a deal, and then arrested them, a tactic known as a ‘takeaway’, a routine move to seize drugs and glean intelligence.

  It’s almost standard for a drug investigation to pick up a celebrity buyer within the general mix of customers. Usually it’s a football player, sometimes it’s an actor. Occasionally it’s a politician. In Bruce Fahda’s case it was a high-profile employee of the NSW Attorney-General’s Department. She was a personality known to the public, especially the Muslim community, and was a fixture on radio and television. Newspapers devoted lengthy column space to profiles about her after she was nominated to win a prestigious state award: NSW Young Australian of the Year. Her name was Iktimal Hage-Ali.

  She was twenty-three years old and striking, ambitious and beautiful, a western Sydney success story: a rising star in political circles. A mentor to young people, she cut through the hackneyed stereotypes – the dour sheikh, the old-world preacher, the silent, burqa-clad woman. When the Grand Mufti of Australia gave a speech at Lakemba mosque in October 2006 comparing immodestly dressed women to ‘uncovered meat’, Hage-Ali had been one of the first to lambaste him, branding his view as primitive and casting herself as the new voice of young Muslims. She rejected his message and said most of her peers felt the same, calling his views ‘garbage’ in a newspaper interview. She was a fresh take on a misunderstood religion. In Hage-Ali, the public saw the meeting point between the respected Muslim, the sharp feminist, the political mover and the proud Australian; a woman who sipped champagne, loved beach barbecues, backed a footy team and didn’t wear a hijab. When Prime Minister John Howard set up a Muslim advisory group following the Cronulla Riots, the London bombings, and the Skaf gang rape trials – all of which had been flashpoints in an ongoing, racially charged debate about Islam in Australia – he invited Hage-Ali to join as one of twelve representatives from the Muslim community, making her the youngest person in the room by at least a decade. Around the same time, news broke that she was a NSW finalist for the Young Australian of the Year Award and was firming as a frontrunner for the national title, an accolade that would put her name alongside luminaries such as swimming legend Ian Thorpe and the army general, now Governor-General, Peter Cosgrove.

  But all of this jarred with the profile emerging during Patton’s investigation of Bruce Fahda. As it turned out Hage-Ali and Bruce were old friends. Her coded text messages to him were among the first to be read by investigators when their interception of his phone began. ‘I’d return the dress if I were you, babe,’ she wrote. ‘No good … first dress was heaps better.’

  Even though it seemed Hage-Ali was living a double life – her private world at war with her public persona – neither Patton nor Phillips paid much attention to her cocaine purchases. They weren’t interested in arresting end users and, even if they were, she appeared to be buying only very minor amounts from Bruce – half a gram, a gram tops. At times she wasn’t even buying cocaine but actually getting it for free.

  She had been a classmate of Bruce’s at Greenacre Public School, a more innocent time for both of them. Back when they were in Year Three, Bruce had cast a vote to help Hage-Ali get
nominated onto the school’s Student Representative Council.

  It was only when they moved to high school that their pathways went in opposite directions. By the age of twenty-two, Hage-Ali was well known and mixing in important government circles. She sat on community boards, had been elected to prestigious government posts, and journalists wanted to include her opinions in newspaper articles. Around Punchbowl, few could believe how far she had come.

  She had become prominent; Bruce had become infamous. By twenty-two, he’d been shot at, jailed and placed on parole. The only profile he’d attained was with police, his mugshot photo revealing a man with stubble on his chin, a receding hairline and a perennial smirk on his face. ‘May carry firearm,’ stated one of his police database warnings. ‘Has threatened to kill police,’ said another. When officers approached him it was usually with one hand floating near their capsicum spray.

  Bruce and Hage-Ali had rarely crossed paths during their teenage years and beyond, except a couple of times at Punchbowl train station. By then Bruce was already street-hardened. When they bumped into each other he’d walk with her and act as a shield, protecting her against the deadbeats who hung out at the station and cat-called after her. They wouldn’t dare do that while he was with her.

  Beyond the train station, they went their separate ways again – Bruce to prison and Hage-Ali to university. As adults, they were only reunited by chance through an old primary school friend, Gordon, who suggested the three of them catch up for coffee in the winter of 2006. It was like old times: joking around and reminiscing, then giving each other dot-point highlights of their last decade. They stayed in touch this time and met again for coffee without Gordon, the conversation becoming deeper, for Hage-Ali especially. She was struggling with the pitfalls of success, the gossip and envy, troubles with her parents. Cocaine, she confided, had been a solace. There was a world of expectation on her shoulders, she said. And everyone was doing it – just take a stroll through any bathroom in a Kings Cross nightclub. As she told Bruce, ‘All you can hear is the percussion of all the women sniffing.’

  Bruce told her cocaine was a dirty drug. He warned her to stay away from it, but at the same time, and after a bit of convincing, conceded that he knew where to get her some. A few hours later, her green BMW appeared at the petrol station around the corner from his house on Telopea Street. Bruce walked up to the window and dropped a rock of cocaine onto the passenger seat. A free sample, he said. It was half a gram.

  From then on he became her dealer, taking up to four calls a week from her. Patton and Phillips monitored these calls, but they still weren’t of much interest; she was still just an end user to them. It was Bruce Fahda they wanted.

  It was around this time that a tip-off came into the Target Action Group that demanded immediate action. Dave Roberts had learned that a machine gun and a sawn-off shotgun were being hidden beneath 1 Telopea Street, an empty investment property across the road from Bruce Fahda’s property.

  The owners had been trying to rent out the house for months without success. Each time the house was opened for a viewing, a dozen men would stand outside the property and make it seem like a very unattractive place to live. These men, naturally, had an interest in keeping it empty – it had become their very own makeshift weapons storage facility. The owners had tried everything to lease out the property, even lowering the rent substantially. They came to police in tears.

  The TAG office’s work rarely overlapped with the MEOCS CI team’s, but this case was an exception and the matter was compounded by sensitivity. Normally Roberts would have just put a team together and stormed the property that afternoon, but that wasn’t possible while Patton’s case was running. Everything had to be handled delicately. Mick Ryan had asked local commanders to keep their officers away from Telopea Street while the investigation into Bruce Fahda played out. The last thing either he or Patton wanted was for Bruce to get spooked and change his phone number because he’d seen a police car on the block. A raid, therefore, was out of the question – everyone would know the street was under surveillance. On the other hand, leaving the guns alone wasn’t possible either – wait too long and they might be sold, or used in a crime.

  Roberts went to Dave Adney, his commander at the TAG, to try to gin up a solution. He explained the background. They needed a way to get the guns out of the property without revealing to anyone that Telopea Street was being closely monitored. A covert removal was tossed up, but rejected – it was dangerous and risked tipping off everybody in the same way; suspicions would be levelled at police if the guns disappeared.

  Adney’s other plan was experimental and elaborate. Something similar had never been tested before, but he figured if it was done correctly it might stand a chance at success. Instead of going in covert, Adney’s idea was to go in overt. He wanted to create a scene: lots of noise and spectacle, something that would work as a diversion. Adney wanted screeching cars, wailing sirens, cops running down the road; the more attention the better.

  Adney’s plan was to stage a mock pursuit through the streets of Punchbowl, a fake car chase that would end on Telopea Street and draw every curious resident out of their house. With the chase as a cover, they would be able to extract the guns in full view of everybody.

  He and Roberts went to work immediately. They borrowed a bombed-out ‘stripper car’ from an obliging car dealer and signed up two undercover officers to play the driver and passenger. They were cast as joyriding thieves who’d stolen the car, each one styled in a bad haircut and tattered clothes to appear as pathetic as possible.

  The plan was put into motion on Friday, 29 September, a steamy morning that began with the usual din of traffic from Punchbowl Road. Jet-fuel seemed to evaporate off the roads, a faint smell of diesel in the air.

  Suddenly, there was a squeal of tyres, and a bombed-out car accelerated hard into Telopea Street, fish-tailing from Koala Road, with half a dozen police cars chasing it down. Sirens blared and wheels lost traction. Residents peered out their windows and saw a police helicopter circling low overhead.

  It was over in a matter of seconds. The car lost control coming out of the fish tail and hit a kerb, mounting the footpath and nearly crashing into the front fence of the house on the corner: 1 Telopea Street. The driver jumped out and disappeared down the side of the house, leaving his companion in the car.

  All at once came the sound of more screeching tyres, doors opening and boots hitting the ground. An officer threw open the passenger side door of the ‘stripper car’ and wrenched out the undercover officer, pushing his face into the ground and cuffing his hands, all part of the script. The driver was dragged from his hiding spot shortly after and frog-marched back onto the street. The officers who caught him emerged carrying a pump-action shotgun with them. It was wrapped in a towel and found in a crawl space where the driver had attempted to hide. To everyone watching, the weapon looked like an incidental find, an accidental bonus that had come with the arrest.

  Everything had gone exactly as planned.

  But the real test was back at MEOCS HQ, where Patton and Phillips were waiting for movement on Bruce Fahda’s phone line. They were trying to gauge his reaction to the mock pursuit: if his line went dead then it meant the operation had failed and blown the Kirban investigation. If it was active, then it meant everything had worked as planned.

  His phone stayed silent for the rest of that day and they waited nervously for a result. The break came the following morning when intercepted text messages showed he was back in business, telling customers to either meet him at his house or the petrol station around the corner.

  Three weeks later, Patton was in the office one night when Phillips asked him to come over and take a look at something. They had a training day scheduled the next morning at North Cronulla Surf Club, a mandatory cultural awareness event for all MEOCS staff. For McKay this was again about the battle for hearts and minds, a way to engage with the Middle Eastern community and get some perspective from its leaders.
The speakers were organised by the NSW Police Force’s Education and Training Command, which had no input or knowledge of ongoing investigations. Phillips had the speaker list in front of him. One of them was a young man who had risen to prominence as a youth representative in the aftermath of the Cronulla Riots. He’d been an advocate for a non-violent response to the riots, emerging as a mentor to troubled young people by channelling them into boxing instruction and religious study.

  But it was another speaker on the list that Phillips wanted to show Patton. He tapped a finger against the name: Iktimal Hage-Ali.

  Patton’s immediate thought was to have her pulled from the speaking program. Since the investigation started he’d been watching her buying habits and was beginning to suspect a change in her behaviour. Her text messages said things like ‘have an order for half’ and ‘friend didn’t like it’. Patton had seen this kind of thing before – the sample comes in for free, there’s no ‘friend’ at all, and the whole exchange is just a ruse to get some free cocaine. On the other hand, Patton thought Hage-Ali might be supplying. The texts were suggestive, but unclear. He couldn’t be sure.

  Regardless, he didn’t think it was appropriate that she give a lecture to police when she’d come up on the periphery of a Middle Eastern Organised Crime investigation, which was the precise topic she was due to speak about in the morning. He called McKay.

  ‘Boss, it’s above my pay scale, but this girl you’ve got speaking tomorrow has been coming up on our intercepts,’ he said.

  McKay was stunned. It didn’t make sense.

  ‘What do you mean?’ he asked.

  ‘I mean, this speaker is one of our targets!’

  ‘Well, how the fuck did this happen!’ he said, nearly shouting. McKay found it hard not to be impressed by the coincidence.