by Yoni Bashan
They kept him on the line with flirty banter, giggling and peppering their conversation with a bit of Arabic. This was uncharted territory for Roberts and Mitchell listening in the background. Both of them only half-expected the ruse to work.
When Taoube asked where they were staying, the women made their move, telling him they were having a party. ‘We’ve got a room at the Novotel,’ one of them said. ‘Why don’t you come over?’ Taoube seemed interested, but sounded skeptical. His answer was yes, but who could be sure? It was after midnight. Mitchell and Roberts put a team together with half a dozen officers and drove to Brighton-Le-Sands to try to find a hotel room.
They hurried through the lobby of the Novotel Hotel and introduced themselves to the duty manager at the front desk. He was an adventurous type, obliging and curious about what they were doing. He gave them two sets of keys and sent them to the top floor where a pair of suites was waiting. Roberts and Mitchell took one room with Jenny and Alam while the rest of the team piled into the second room and blocked off the staircase – the plan was to wait for Taoube to arrive and then spill out into the hallway.
Taoube pulled into the car park in his Mercedes-Benz just after 3:30am. He had already committed yet another armed robbery that night. At the front desk the night manager handed him a key and pointed towards the elevator. Then he reached for the phone. ‘He’s coming up,’ the manager said.
Roberts stood by the door. Mitchell was next to him, waiting by the peephole – he was the only person who knew what Taoube looked like, having arrested him a year earlier. Jenny was behind them, dressed in a bathrobe for effect. When the knock came, Mitchell looked through the sight expecting to see a decoy, someone Taoube had sent up to ensure the invitation wasn’t a trap. But there was Taoube, his face distorted and bulbous, miserable-looking and anxious in the warped view. Mitchell turned to Jenny and gave a thumbs up: it was him.
‘Just a second,’ she called, opening the door a few inches until it caught in the latch. It was just enough of a gap for Taoube to see her and be lulled into a false sense of security. ‘I’ll just unlock it,’ she said, smiling and closing the door. When it opened again … bang! Taoube’s worst nightmare. Guns drawn, muzzles at his head, cops filling the hallway screaming at him to get on the ground. He actually jumped in fright, nearly hitting his head on the ceiling. Later, he told Roberts that some criminals had been looking for him and he’d been relieved to find out it was only cops who’d set the trap.
The arrest was celebrated widely, receiving all kinds of praise from across the organisation. One of the best parts was notifying the investigators who’d been looking for him in relation to his string of armed hold-ups, letting them know where they could find him. When McKay found out what had happened he was delighted, impressed by the ingenuity of it. The job took on a kind of legendary status as word spread through the police force.
But not everyone was pleased with how the operation was handled. When the commander of the Undercover branch learned of the arrest he reported several flagrant breaches to McKay, citing broken protocols and errors of policy. In giving fake names to the two female officers, everyone involved had technically broken some rules.
McKay dealt with the complaint by phone, patiently at first, but these after-the-fact arguments always infuriated him. Of course, the commander had a point, but here was a violent criminal who had been running amok across Sydney, who was now finally off the streets – and yet the hairsplitting about policy had somehow become the priority. Minutes passed with the conversation going nowhere. McKay got bored. He held the phone away from his ear and looked at it.
‘Just fuck off!’ he said, slamming down the receiver. That was the end of it.
But it wasn’t all success stories. There were also disappointments, investigations that aimed high and fell short. Targets who had been to prison and learned from their mistakes, emerging as much smarter criminals. Walid Chami was one of them. An old hand in the drug trade, he’d spent five years inside for his role in the ‘Dice syndicate’, a group of dealers who controlled several drug runs around the inner-western suburbs of Sydney, areas like Marrickville, Canterbury and Hurlstone Park, between 1999 and 2000. Chami was the leader. He used his time inside to study how undercover officers and telephone intercepts had brought him undone. He walked out of prison a much smarter criminal, hardened to police methodology. From there he became something of an untouchable.
In the latter part of 2007 intelligence had come in to the TAG office suggesting Chami was heading up a new syndicate in the same area of inner-western Sydney. It was a slick enterprise with a team of runners working in shifts from 10am to 10pm, delivering cocaine direct to the customers’ doorsteps. One trick his dealers pulled was to ride around with a water bottle stored in the passenger well of their car for emergencies – if they were pulled over by police they could swallow the drugs and avoid any charges.
Chami became the principal target of Strike Force Stoneware, a TAG investigation run by five detectives. Within three months they’d mapped the syndicate’s hierarchy and placed Chami at the head. He had a run manager beneath him and four dealers below that, among them a seventeen-year-old boy.
A tracking device planted on a car uncovered a safe house at Revesby and the syndicate’s dealing patterns, which allowed undercover operatives to move in and start buying. They stuck with small amounts, grams of cocaine. Lab testing had the coke coming back with purity levels as low as seven per cent pure on some days. It was nasty stuff. Each buy gave the Stoneware team more promising evidence on most of the players, but not enough on Chami. He remained elusive, rarely on the phones and never near the drugs. His hands were clean. There was little evidence linking him to what was going on. There was talk of introducing an undercover detective, but it never worked out. The case became sluggish as the months progressed, chewing up staff and resources – buy money, listening devices, lost hours of transcribing – with nothing new against Chami to show for it.
For these reasons, a decision was made to start wrapping up the investigation. The detectives couldn’t continue chasing Chami forever. They got moving on 8 December 2007, pulling over a run car and arresting two street dealers inside, one of whom was the seventeen-year-old boy working for the syndicate. He’d done as instructed, swallowing the balloons of cocaine using the bottled water to avoid being caught with the product. The situation produced a tricky legal quagmire for police. Because he was a minor, they needed his parents’ permission to legally allow doctors to administer a laxative at the hospital. Thankfully, the parents agreed.
The unenviable job of collecting the balloons was left to Ryan Jeffcoat, a TAG detective who’d cut open his arm during the arrest. He’d punched a hole in the run car’s window, sending blood everywhere.
Jeffcoat stood outside the bathroom at the hospital with a bandage around his arm. Inside was the kid with a bedpan. Next to Jeffcoat were two colleagues, Nick Glover and Paul O’Neill.
Jeffcoat thought the bandage around his arm gave him a free pass from going anywhere near the bedpan, but he was mistaken. When he asked who would have to do the dirty work, O’Neill and Glover gave him a knowing look.
‘Highest registered number, bro,’ one of them said, a reference to the shield number given to every officer who joins the NSW Police Force – the higher the number, the more junior the officer, the shorter the straw. Most unenviable tasks are settled in this way.
‘Oh what?’ Jeffcoat said. His number was highest.
The kid laughed as Jeffcoat went through his bedpan. It was full because of the laxative and Jeffcoat dry-retched the whole time, his hand going in to the knuckles.
The hope had been that Chami would hear about the arrests and somehow expose himself – maybe pick up the deliveries or deal directly with the customers, or even get on the phone and try to hire new people – but it never happened. Instead he did nothing. It was like he had nothing to do with the syndicate in the first place; and maybe he didn’t. A month later,
Glover and Jeffcoat knocked on the door of his apartment in Erskineville on a whim, hoping to find something – a drug ledger, a packet of cocaine … anything.
Chami answered the door stark naked, slurring his words and clearly high on something. Glover and Jeffcoat stood in the doorway – they’d arrived under the guise of a noise complaint and didn’t have a search warrant but Chami let them inside and invited them to go for their lives with a search, which they did, turning up nothing.
With few options left they charged him with breaching his bail. The result was a quick court hearing a few days later, a Section 9 bond with no conviction recorded and he walked free immediately. The case against him was shelved after that.
The next time Chami emerged was in 2010 when he was shot at a park in Greenacre, getting injured but surviving the attack. After that he moved to Western Australia where intelligence linked him to a new chapter of the Rock Machine, an outlaw motorcycle gang prominent in the United States. Apparently he was attempting to bring the gang to Australia.
Not long afterwards he was charged by the Australian Federal Police with four other men over a conspiracy to import large amounts of drugs from Tanzania. When the case went to court, a magistrate found the officers had moved too early. The evidence suggested there was something suspicious in the behaviour of the five men, but the evidence didn’t quite stack up. Reluctantly, the magistrate let the case go. Chami, once again, slipped away.
CHAPTER SEVEN
ALL IN THE FAMILY
Just before Christmas 2007, Angelo ‘Ange’ Memmolo, the detective inspector in charge of Team 3 at MEOCS CI, walked into Ken McKay’s office and shut the door behind him. Memmolo’s team was just coming off a job and McKay wanted to sound him out for a fresh investigation, an ambitious new assignment for his twelve-man crew: McKay asked Memmolo to build a case against the Kalache family.
Over the years, countless intelligence profiles, reports and informant-generated tip-offs had given the Kalaches a reputation as one of the most entrenched organised crime families in Sydney. They were a clan of twelve – six brothers and four sisters plus the parents – immigrants from Lebanon who had fled the civil crisis in the 1970s and settled in Auburn. Police attention had mainly focused on the brothers – Nasser, Gadir, Bilal, Khaled, Rabii and Hassan.
Nasser, the eldest brother in his late forties, was considered by police to be the frontman. Fewer people had been the subject of more intense surveillance and intelligence profiling over the years, his police file spilling over with details of his extensive family network, his psychological profile, his business ventures, and cars he was known to drive. One report noted his awareness of police techniques and his unorthodox style of violence. As of 2007 his only stint in prison had been during the early 1990s over an incident where a teenager was doused in petrol outside a hotel and set on fire. He emerged a handful of years later, starting up tow truck companies, a money-lending business and a debt-collecting agency. Since then his rap sheet had been filled with words like ‘charges dismissed’ or ‘withdrawn’. There was also a pizza shop that detectives watched with great interest. It had unusual opening hours and a low customer base, but used several delivery vans, each one with a catchy decal on the back window: ‘Drivers wanted, enquire at your nearest outlet.’ Detectives noted these ads with suspicion – the business, as one intelligence report said, only had one outlet.
Rabii Kalache, the middle brother, had been jailed along with Nasser over the burning of that teenage boy in the 1990s, except his sentence was far longer: a minimum fifteen years with most of it spent in maximum security. He went inside aged nineteen, when two-cent coins were still in circulation, and he came out in 2007 to a new era: the internet, smartphones, hybrid cars. In prison he was kept in isolation and classified ‘Extreme High Risk’ on account of his family’s name. He was punished for bad behaviour and had a year added over a stabbing. Life inside became an endurance test against the four walls, a contest to stave off insanity.
The youngest brother, Hassan, was still in prison serving a 22-year sentence for a shooting murder in July 2000 – what had caused the altercation between him and the victim, Wassim Chehade, was never fully established. In the hours after the murder, Hassan had driven from Sydney to Melbourne and planned to disappear overseas. Short on funds, he lay low with an uncle and convinced his girlfriend, based in Sydney, to bring 200 ecstasy pills south of the border for him to sell. He was arrested eleven days later, before he could step onto a plane. During sentencing he expressed some regret, but little remorse, about what had happened. Intercepted phone calls to his girlfriend were tendered during the hearings, providing further insight into his mindset at the time. He told her: ‘The hustler had to do what he had to do.’
McKay’s rationale for the job was simple: Nasser’s name was not only at the top of the MEOCS Most Wanted List, but he was also at the centre of three separate strike force investigations. Not only that, his brother Gadir was listed directly beneath him on the same register. And now with Rabii fresh out of prison after a fifteen-year stint, McKay wanted someone to take a look at them.
‘So, what do you think?’ he said to Memmolo. As well as work colleagues the two men were friends, the kind who argued often and robustly.
‘Fuck,’ Memmolo said, thinking about it for a moment. ‘I’m happy to do it, but they’re a tough crew.’
McKay was prepared to give him a blank cheque. ‘What would you need?’ he asked.
‘A bigger team for sure.’
‘OK, you’ve got it,’ McKay said.
And, just like that, Memmolo had his own mini-squad at his fingertips, Strike Force Skelton: a team of twelve plus another eight officers on loan, each one with their own specialty. There was a Drug Squad officer who knew the name of every major supplier in southwestern Sydney; a Gangs Squad detective who knew the big shots of Auburn; a Fraud Squad officer who could unpick Byzantine company structures; and an officer from the Robbery and Serious Crime Squad who’d already been building a brief on Nasser. Their plan was to work slowly and take their time to gradually build up an intelligence profile on each member of the family. It was a fact-finding mission to pick apart their financial arrangements, property holdings and sources of income, and look for evidence of illegality. Detectives call this a ‘cold start’ – the type of case that hasn’t got an informant in the camp or a back channel of information.
When the case launched two months later it kicked off as a slow-moving proactive job, in many ways mirroring the work done by the TAG detectives. Low-level players were rounded up – drug dealers, shonks, strongmen; anyone loosely linked or vaguely affiliated with the Kalache family – and leaned on for information. The COPS database was filled with varying grades of intelligence about what each of the six Kalache brothers were up to, but the information was old. Memmolo needed something new.
All kinds of useful leads emerged during this period, even tips that had nothing to do with the original purpose of the investigation. One informant told detectives about a drug syndicate in Bankstown, based on Carmen Street, that was moving half kilograms of cocaine, huge amounts worth $125,000. Because it fell outside the immediate investigation and had nothing to do with the Kalache family, it was put on the back burner for later.
But, more pertinently, information had come in about Hassan Kalache, the youngest brother in the family, which was somewhat surprising given he was being housed in isolation at unit 5.1 of Lithgow Correctional Centre, a segregated section of the prison known as the STG-IP, or Security Threat Group Intervention Program. This is where gang leaders and influential inmates are taken to break up their powerbase. They spend most of their days in isolation, each one locked down in a cell with a caged yard opening up out the back where they can feel the air against their skin and see the sky through a small steel cage. On the other side of their cell doors is an empty corridor, patrolled only occasionally by guards; they mostly keep tabs on the facility through CCTV cameras. Still, even in this realm of intens
e isolation, alliances can be made through the wiring of the cage yards and 15-millimetre cracks at the bottom of each cell door. And in late 2007, one of the alliances rumoured to be forming was between Hassan Kalache and another inmate, Bassam Hamzy.
A former resident of the Supermax prison in Goulburn, one of the most secure jail facilities in the southern hemisphere, Hamzy was what corrective services officials termed an ‘Extreme High Risk’ prisoner, one who was both influential and manipulative. Memmolo had heard rumours through street intelligence that Hamzy had smuggled a phone into the prison, or that he had access to one, but he didn’t take them seriously. The STG-IP was a place where inmates were strip-searched and had their food X-rayed every day. The idea that Hamzy had a phone inside one of the country’s most secure facilities outside of Supermax was, in Memmolo’s mind, basically laughable.
In the background to the Skelton case, the Australian Crime Commission (ACC) was running an unrelated investigation into a drug run between Sydney and Adelaide owned by the Finks outlaw motorcycle gang.
The ACC is not a police force and therefore has no enforcement arm. Its investigators do not make arrests or go on street patrols like ordinary cops. Their focus is high-level organised crime, from transnational drug rings to sex trafficking. Its offices around the country are staffed with surveillance officers, analysts, technical experts and source handlers with informants in every state. Its biggest advantage over ordinary police forces has always been its coercive powers – its agents can summon people to give evidence about a crime and those who refuse to co-operate face imprisonment. These hearings usually generate valuable intelligence which gets disseminated to state police forces for their interest and follow-up.
Several months of taps on phones belonging to the Finks had revealed its members were routinely sending kilograms of cannabis between NSW and South Australia; truckloads were dispatched along the Mallee, Sturt and Hume Highways for the fifteen-hour journey. The commission had nearly fifty phones ‘off’, or under interception, almost all of them belonging to members of the gang.