The Squad

by Yoni Bashan

  They arranged their next buy for 15 March 2007, a Wednesday afternoon. The scene was the IGA supermarket on Rosetti Street at Wetherill Park with Adney and Spice in the command car, Jeffries watching from the surveillance vehicle, tactical police on standby, and the undercover officer mic’d up and breathing slowly as a car pulled up alongside him.

  Hormis Baytoon stepped out of the passenger seat and walked around the bonnet. Hayati Cevik stayed in the driver’s seat. In the back was Ano Edison, another member of their crew; he’d also turned up to a couple of earlier deals. Baytoon took the cash from the undercover and started counting it, flicking fast through chunky layers of twenty, fifty and hundred dollar notes to make sure all $28,000 was there. When he neared the end of the bundle he turned back to his car and shouted out to Edison. ‘Bring it to him, cuz!’

  The front seat rolled forward and Edison stepped out, a Nike hat over his head and a shotgun in his hands. It was rusted and sawn off, its barrel hanging open like it had been freshly loaded. He snapped the weapon shut and moved fast around the bonnet. The undercover saw the gun and threw his hands up, surrendering and talking fast like he had been trained.

  ‘Oh god, this is just like what happened to me that time in Wagga Wagga,’ he said, weaving in a distress code.

  All Edison heard was babble, but the tactical team and undercover supervisor heard the code word. Officers swarmed through the car park, running hard at the vehicle and firing gas canisters through the windshield as Baytoon dived back into Cevik’s car with the money.

  Adney saw none of this from his command car. He’d grabbed his radio and authorised the assault team to move the moment Brian Jeffries, his primary eye, sighted the shotgun and said the words, ‘Gun, gun, gun!’ Seconds passed, and then Jeffries came back over the radio: ‘Shots fired!’

  To Adney, it sounded like the undercover officer had been shot, possibly killed. He braced for the worst as the results of the arrest were radioed through: all targets arrested. The undercover officer, who’d been taken down too for dramatic effect, had been placed into a police car uninjured – the only shots fired had been the ferret rounds let off by the tactical team, which filled Cevik’s car with smoke.

  The situation still ranks among one of the more tense moments in recent policing history – a gunpoint robbery of an undercover officer. For MEOCS TAG, the Tapiola case marked the first of many high-risk operations and near misses to follow.

  By 2007, the end of its first year in operation, the MEOCS Target Action Group had reached a tempo that dwarfed any other command in the NSW Police Force. Search warrants were the benchmark of this achievement. Not a week went by without at least one house, sometimes more, getting raided for drugs and weapons; these were fast, high-impact and dangerous jobs where on paper the risk was known, but in practice they were fluid and vague. The sudden appearance of a shotgun during the arrest phase of Strike Force Tapiola was proof of that.

  Every shift in the TAG office had great potential to become a shoot-out. Catastrophes lurked and disasters loomed. The targets hated police and walked around armed with weapons. With a nose full of cocaine, anything was possible. To survive, officers found it best to compartmentalise the risk, worry about it later and hug the kids a bit tighter at night.

  Close calls became something of a theme during 2007. Tapiola was one case, but there were others, the jobs rooted in memory by address and suburb. Everyone who worked there then remembers Kay Street, Guildford – the time when officers bashed down the door of an active drug lab and inhaled plumes of toxic smoke spilling out. The warrant was supposed to be a quick raid to recover some drugs, but no one was aware of the cooking going on inside the premises. Medical teams arrived and faces were flushed, but the follow up was hopeless. Dave Roberts broke open the door and copped most of the fumes. No one ever told him or any other officer what they had inhaled that day. They spent years wondering whether cancer, or some other disease, would suddenly manifest in their bodies.

  Hydrae Street, Revesby was another one they all remembered, a raid on a drug den. It happened on 7 August 2007. Roberts had heard there were bags of cannabis and ice on the premises, mounds of the stuff. Like most TAG jobs, the warrant moved quickly. He got the information that afternoon and by nightfall he had a team forming up around the property ready to move. The owner of the house, 22-year-old Riad Taha, was already under investigation, a person of interest in a kidnapping.

  They drove fast into his driveway, speeding down the side of the house towards the back door. A second team waited at the front, in case anyone tried to run.

  Taha saw them coming from the back. He was smoking a cigarette when the car pulled up and four cops jumped out. One was Roberts, hefting up a battering ram. Taha’s eyes widened. He flicked away the cigarette and hurried inside, slamming the door behind him as Roberts got close. A moment later the door was flung open and officers spilled inside screaming, ‘Police! Get down on the ground!’

  The TAG objective was to contain the situation, get everyone on the floor and ask questions later. They turned right into the living room, dodging a coffee table and lounge chairs. On the table was a bong, its cone packed with cannabis. A man on a couch stood up and adopted a fighting stance. In the struggle that followed, his head went through a gyprock wall, right next to a money counting machine.

  Taha was still at large, running through the house. Its rooms were connected in a circuit and he was heading towards the laundry when Detective Peter Butcher spotted him. A former Bulldogs front-rower, Butcher brought him down in a dive-tackle that ended right next to the washing machine. When Butcher looked inside the machine he found a Colt .45 handgun wrapped in a towel, its serial number was scratched off. To everyone standing there it looked as though Taha was heading for the gun – why else was he running to the laundry, they asked.

  Taha denied all knowledge of the gun during his interview at Bankstown Police Station. The place was just a flophouse, he told detectives Alan Walsh and Nick Glover, somewhere to take his girlfriend and smoke some weed after work. Taking her home wasn’t an option, he said. ‘It’s very disrespectful to my parents.’

  Walsh and Glover weren’t buying it. So far he’d told them he didn’t own the house, had no idea about the gun, and definitely had no idea about drugs that were found in the bedroom. In a locked safe was a half-kilogram of cannabis and five ounces of crystal methamphetamine, or ice, worth about $40,000 alone. Taha’s fingerprints had been found inside the safe. The money counter as well.

  Yes, yes, fine, Taha said, but he still had no idea how the prints got there. It was the same story with the rest of the evidence. If the place was a flophouse, the detectives asked him, why was there a doctor’s note in the kitchen with his name on it, a set of keys in his possession that worked on the front door, and letters in his car addressed to the property?

  ‘I wouldn’t have a clue,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what was in the place, mate.’

  It was a short interview, fourteen minutes, but the case ran long. Two years later it was still going, dragging out as Taha denied his charges and won small victories along the way. The jury was deadlocked on the gun possession charge due to the lack of evidence and the charge was dismissed. It was the same old story – without fingerprints or DNA linking him to the weapon, ‘exclusive possession’ as it was known, anyone could have put the gun in the washing machine. In the end he was convicted for the drugs in the safe and on charges of using the house as a drug den. He was out of prison within fourteen months.

  The risks went beyond search warrants. Every facet of the TAG detectives’ work seemed to edge them closer to a shoot-out, the blue of the flame – their fingers passing close to the tip each time. After Hydrae Street came a vehicle stop, a routine late-night patrol. At the wheel was Vlad Mijok, another detective in the TAG office. Dave Roberts sat next to him. In the back was Tom Howes, a gun-recruit who had been handpicked to join the TAG office.

  As the detectives cruised the M5 motorway, a pack of Co
manchero bikies came into view, roaring past them in formation and weaving in and out of traffic. Their leader was riding up front in a West Coast Choppers jumper. Without a radar it was impossible to tell how fast the bikies were travelling, but based on the speeds recorded in their own car, trying to keep up with them, Roberts estimated it was somewhere in the neighbourhood of 150km/h.

  The Comancheros veered off the highway onto Bexley Road, ignoring the sirens. The next seven minutes were a steady pursuit. Petrol stations and parks zoomed by. Calls for backup went unanswered, the radio operator apologising each time as Roberts unsuccessfully repeated his requests for assistance. The Comancheros were in the middle of a turf war with the Hells Angels over a patch of southern Sydney and, in that climate, backup was necessary. Members on both sides were aggressive and armed up for protection.

  As the bikies approached the border of Rockdale, the next suburb, their leader turned off into Watkin Street and finally pulled over by the side of the road. Around them was a quaint suburb hedged by busy intersections and a commercial district. To the north were houses, churches and a kindergarten. To the south was a train station, glass buildings, banks and coffee shops. The remaining bikies circled the block, parked a short distance behind and watched their leader’s interaction with the cops.

  Roberts kept a hand near his gun as he approached the rider. He was already off his bike, a Harley Davidson. He had a bumbag slung across his shoulder and a cloth mask covering his face, the jaw replaced with a rictus of bones and sharp teeth. He took off the mask and handed over his licence without any trouble. Roberts looked at the name: Joshua Tutawake Johns, twenty years old. He had an uncanny resemblance to Sonny Bill Williams, the football player.

  Back at the car, Mijok called the radio operator and waited for any intelligence reports to be read out. There were five on Johns, the operator said, warnings and intelligence summaries about gang links and gun possession. Roberts listened over Mijok’s shoulder and then walked back to the bikie where Howes had been standing guard. Johns seemed to know what was coming. When Roberts told him he was going to be searched for weapons, Johns replied: ‘No, you’re not.’ Roberts saw the bikie reach into his pants and pull out a handgun, the weapon flashing past both himself and Howes as Johns threw out his arm.

  Johns hesitated for a moment, giving both officers a chance to snap to their holsters. By the time they had their Glocks out he was already sprinting towards the corner of Fredrick Street. The gun was still in his hand and it swung out as he took the corner, the barrel shaking and aimed back at them. Roberts considered the options as he aimed at Johns – was he about to shoot? Was it just a threat? He had a split second to decide and then fired twice at the moving target – blau! blau! – both shots missing as Johns ran down Fredrick Street.

  Roberts and Howes chased him hard along the footpath, guns at their side. His arm bounced up every few seconds seemingly in a threat to point the weapon back at them again. People walking out of a 7/11 convenience store and lining up at a pizza shop watched them all running down Frederick Street with guns in their hands. Someone called Triple 0 to report the shooting. As Johns reached the train station, he rounded a second corner, turning right into an alleyway of cars and apartment blocks. By the time Roberts and Howes got there he’d vanished into the backstreet.

  Within minutes, the full force of the law arrived. Ten minutes earlier they were nowhere for backup. Now a police helicopter was hovering overhead, illuminating the street with a spotlight. Patrol cars clogged up the road and more were arriving, the radio operator struggling to communicate with them all. Riot Squad officers and sniffer dogs went on a manhunt, finding Johns’s facemask and leather jacket behind a parked truck in the alley. His handgun, a Chinese-made Norinco loaded with thirteen bullets, was there as well, fingerprints all over it.

  Dave Adney came up to the police station that night. He was on annual leave but there was no way he couldn’t be there. For Johns to have pulled a gun, as Roberts and Howes described, was a big deal. It’s rare that an officer will fire shots on the job; some cops go their entire career without pulling out their gun. When it happens, it means the danger is extreme. At the station, routine protocols kicked in. All three officers involved in the chase were separated and told not to speak to each other. Roberts’s gun was seized. This was all standard stuff, but the process still made everyone feel like they’d done something wrong. Earlier, in the seconds after the shots had been fired, an officer got on the radio to remind everyone about their obligations under the organisation’s newly enforced Critical Incident Guidelines. They didn’t ask whether anyone was injured.

  Roberts and Howes were back at work the next day figuring it was pointless to dwell on what happened. Joshua Johns was still at large, but intelligence had come in suggesting fellow gang members were hiding him. McKay called Mick Hawi to end the standoff, arranging to meet him at a café in Brighton-Le-Sands. Hawi, president of the Comanchero gang, was a big man with neatly cut hair and gold rings on each hand. He symbolised the modern-day bikie boss: designer suits, big house, a civil manner with police. It didn’t make sense to him to have the police offside, and McKay felt the same – the way he saw things, both sides could be useful to each other. But at this meeting, McKay laid down the law. Pulling a gun on a cop was a big no-no, he told Hawi. If Johns didn’t show his face, the Comancheros would pay for it – clubhouse raids, vehicle stops, gang members locked up for minor offences. He said life would become very uncomfortable for the Comancheros of Sydney.

  A few days later Johns appeared at Hurstville Police Station with Hawi and a solicitor at his side. He joked about what happened during his interview, telling Roberts he’d heard the bullets whizzing past his head.

  But he disputed the most serious charge he was facing – that he pointed the gun at the detectives. He repeated this during his pretrial hearings a few months later, telling the court that he carried the gun for protection – his newly purchased Harley Davidson was his ‘pride and joy’ and he feared it could be carjacked.

  In his version of what happened he never pulled out a gun at all. Instead – and even the judge found this recollection dubious – he left the weapon in his pants the whole time. When Roberts had said he’d be searched, Johns told the court that he’d pointed to the ground and shouted, ‘There’s Tom Cruise!’ to buy himself a few seconds, sprinting away as the officers tried to catch a glimpse of the Hollywood actor. As for carrying the weapon, Johns said he threw it into a spot where police would easily find it and had never aimed the gun back at Roberts and Howes during the chase.

  Unfortunately, the true merits of this story never had a chance to be properly tested by a jury because just as his trial was due to begin the crown prosecutor representing the police secretly accepted a plea deal from Johns’s lawyers, a move that would see Johns confess to the gun possession charge, but not the more serious offences of pulling out a gun or aiming it at police that would have attracted a higher sentence. Roberts, Howes and Mijok were dead against this move, but the wheels had already been put in motion without their knowledge. They were only told about it at court – the paperwork had been finalised. As a result, Johns was sentenced to a year and eight months in prison, a sentence that was calculated on the gun possession charge alone.

  From that day forward, neither Roberts nor Howes ever left the office without a bulletproof vest.

  One of the more memorable arrests for the TAG office from 2007 revolved around a serial offender by the name of Hussein Taoube, a wily fugitive who’d made robberies his forte. His targets were mum and dad convenience stores, soft targets with few security cameras that could be easily held up with a knife. He did enough of them that he even coined a passable opening catchphrase: ‘Don’t do anything stupid!’

  For a brief period, Taoube became notorious. He’d become skilled at lying low, had eight warrants out for his arrest, and officers across several commands were coming up empty trying to find him. At MEOCS he’d earned his way into fifth
spot on the Squad’s Most Wanted List, somehow surpassing some of the biggest names in organised crime.

  The job of finding him had been tasked to the MEOCS Uniform branch who sat outside his parents’ house and searched cheap motels looking for him. While this was happening he carried out another two robberies, both with a knife: one in Tempe and another in the CBD. The need to catch him increased.

  The mere fact he was still committing crime while also being the subject of a manhunt became something of an embarrassment. With the Uniform branch struggling, Roberts and Mitchell – the Breaker Brothers – offered to take over the search, figuring they might succeed where others had failed. One advantage they had was Taoube’s mobile phone number, which they had managed to get, somehow.

  It was Taoube’s private line, a number he’d handed out only to a trusted few. In the Bourne movies that would be enough to triangulate a location, but at MEOCS that kind of technology wasn’t available. Instead, they came up with a cover story, a plan to end the chase and make him come to them. Policing might be a world of policy and rules, but tricking a fugitive into handing himself in is not one of them. Their idea, devastatingly simple and slightly unorthodox, was to grab a couple of women, book a hotel room, and invite Taoube to a cocaine party.

  There weren’t many women working in the office that night and generally they formed a small contingent in the TAG office. Samantha Alam and ‘Jenny’ (a pseudonym) were both officers in the MEOCS Uniform branch and agreed to play starring roles in the plot, casting themselves as the honeytraps to lure Taoube to police. Their cover story was to tell the fugitive that he’d given them his number while out in a city bar. Intelligence had recently placed him around the Hilton Hotel a week earlier, which gave the cover some plausibility. With the phone on speaker and mood music playing in the background, Jenny and Alam started dialling. Text messages had already gone back and forth to get the conversation going.