The Squad

by Yoni Bashan

  One day in April a new voice was overheard on one of the intercepted phone lines. It was familiar to many in law enforcement – articulate and relaxed with a slight Middle Eastern accent.

  As a standard procedure, the phone number underwent a subscriber check, a process that threw up several red flags. Firstly, it was subscribed to a Stacy Ridggio living in Casula, NSW, and follow-up checks revealed the name was a fake; Ms Ridggio didn’t exist. That was red flag #1. Next, the cell site data was pulled up, revealing that each of the calls were passing through Lithgow 2, a phone tower covering the Lithgow Correctional Centre. That was red flag #2. The clincher came in a follow-up call: the ACC’s target, whose phone was being intercepted, referred to the man as ‘Bassam’– red flag #3.

  The ACC analyst took the information to her bosses and showed them the call charge records, an itemised list of the date, time and length of each conversation linked to the phone number. They were astounded – hundreds of calls each day going to Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide. It was almost too many for a single person to make. By this point the ACC officials had accepted that Bassam Hamzy was the person most likely to be using the phone. An investigator familiar with his voice had already listened back to the recorded conversations and confirmed the belief that it was him. But how was this possible? How was he even keeping the battery charged? The STG-IP was supposed to be an isolated maximum-security facility. Most inmates were lucky to have a toaster and yet here was Hamzy with a personal phone line to the outside world.

  In late April 2007 an email landed in Memmolo’s inbox from an official at the ACC, asking him to come in for a meeting. There’d been a development in one of their cases they wanted to discuss, the official said. Memmolo had spent three years on secondment there and knew the staff well, everyone from the analysts to the translators to the surveillance branch. The only reason he’d left the ACC was to come work at MEOCS with Ken McKay.

  Strike Force Skelton was still very much active and Memmolo and his team were chipping away at their investigation into the Kalache family – but after nearly three months they were struggling to get traction. There were a few leads, a couple of bits and pieces, but nothing to the standard of what McKay was looking for; in his mind the case was churning through resources and he’d already signalled to Memmolo that it was probably time to move on. In that sense, the ACC’s timing was perfect.

  At a briefing room in the commission’s Sydney office Memmolo was given a rundown about Operation Tutoko, their ongoing investigation into the Finks, and informed about the developments with Bassam Hamzy. So the rumours were true, Memmolo thought. The officials showed him the charge records of the inmate’s phone activity, the hundreds of calls between the inmate and certain high-profile criminal characters. These weren’t social calls either, they said; Hamzy appeared to have his hands deep in several unfolding plots to shoot people, and plans to either buy, sell or act as a middleman in a number of wholesale drug deals, too many to keep track of at once. The job was getting too big, the ACC officials said, and was outside their charter. They didn’t have the capacity to investigate these fast-moving crimes. Their plan was to inform corrective services officials so they could remove the phone immediately. Unless, they said to Memmolo, you want to take the job over to MEOCS?

  Memmolo didn’t need any time to think about it. Were they kidding? That smuggled phone was a honeypot of intelligence. It was a chance for law enforcement to eavesdrop on the best organised crime figures in the country and get in front of mass movements of drugs. The potential in that phone dwarfed the fact-finding mission of the Kalache investigation. Some of the biggest names in the underworld would be calling Hamzy and talking to him at length over that line in the false belief it was untapped and secure. Would he take over the job? Of course he’d take over the job!

  The next step was to convince the Commissioner of Corrective Services NSW to let Hamzy keep the phone. All it would take was one ramp search of his cell and it’d be gone forever – either seized by guards or flushed down the toilet, the latter being more likely. The commissioner, Ron Woodham, was a tough old screw who hated Hamzy almost as much as Hamzy hated him. Both men were locked in a legal stoush over Hamzy’s incarceration at Supermax – he was personally suing Woodham for leaving him too long in isolation, denying him basic privileges, namely visitors, and violating his human rights.

  At a meeting over tea and sandwiches, Woodham told Memmolo and McKay that it pained him to let Hamzy keep the phone. The fact he had the device at all was something of an embarrassment. But on the other hand, he said, listening to Hamzy’s calls could lift the lid on an incredible amount of criminality. In the end he gave them the green light they sought. The only rider attached was that if any threats were picked up against either himself or his staff then they had to be reported immediately.

  Of course, both officers agreed.

  Outside of the Skelton team at MEOCS and a few high-ranking police brass, Woodham was one of the few law enforcement officials who’d been made aware of the phone. Even the prison guards at the STG-IP at Lithgow were kept in the dark about it.

  It took two days to complete an affidavit for a tribunal judge. Detective Senior Constable Ian Wright, an investigator on Memmolo’s team, filled out the paperwork, cramming in every last detail known about Hamzy and his phone to get the intercept approved.

  On 1 May 2008, around 3pm, the first calls coming to and from Hamzy’s phone were intercepted at listening posts in the MEOCS office. Unlike at the ACC, the police staff who were listening were not bilingual in English and Arabic, so translators were put on standby to decipher the calls.

  Within minutes, however, there was a serious problem. The number of calls being picked up by the intercept was far in excess of what the small team of eavesdroppers and translators could manage. They were inundated with phone calls, back-to-back conversations that were out of context and coded. Each one had to be transcribed, translated and sometimes deciphered of codes making vague references to places, people, drug quantities and shootings Hamzy wanted carried out. ‘Green like the colour you’re wearing,’ they heard in one call. ‘Get a toy’ was another code. As these calls were dissected, more piled up in the background, creating a backlog of conversations that had to be played back later. Trying to keep up and listen to the conversations live became impossible. It was like running on a treadmill that wouldn’t stop speeding up.

  What quickly became clear was that Hamzy had a small army of men at his disposal outside prison, seemingly willing to do his bidding; somehow, even from jail, Hamzy held power over these people. With a phone call he could dispatch a person to drive from Sydney to Melbourne, find a gun, have someone kidnapped, or even carry out a shooting. This all became apparent within the initial batch of recorded phone calls when detectives overheard what sounded like a plot to harm someone who had seemingly done wrong by Hamzy’s standards. As the notional head of his family, Hamzy saw himself as somewhat of a mafia figure, a respected don who needed to dole out face-saving discipline when necessary to maintain order.

  ‘In the mafia,’ Hamzy said, ‘if you disrespect the head of the family they cut your fuckin’ head off.’

  Detectives continued listening to the calls, trying to piece together who the intended target of this ire would be. Soon, the pieces fell into place: he was organising a kneecapping of his younger brother, Haysam.

  It was a matter of discipline, Hamzy said. Haysam had been secretly undercutting the family in their drug supply business, sourcing his own drugs and then selling them at an inflated cost to regular customers. Buyers were being ripped off and the family was losing face. ‘If he gets away with it, everyone is gunna think they can get away with it,’ Hamzy said over the phone.

  The Skelton detectives couldn’t believe what they were hearing – admissions of a drug syndicate, family members implicated, a possible lead on the supplier, and plans to shoot his own brother. It was this sort of intelligence that detectives worked for months, sometimes
years, to uncover.

  In a bizarre way, Hamzy even tried to be scrupulous about what he was doing and claim the moral high ground. He didn’t want his little brother killed, he said, but he had to be hurt. His instructions to his henchmen were specific: the shooting had to be carried out with a .22-calibre gun, a ‘two-two’ as he called it, which would fire a bullet small enough to cause searing pain, but not permanent damage. A second condition was that it had to be in the leg. The third and final condition was that Haysam would have to present himself to the gunman rather than be chased around.

  He spent all of that day, the first of the phone being intercepted by police, trying to organise the hit, making dozens of phone calls and micromanaging the process. He needed a gun, a getaway vehicle – preferably a motorbike – and a hitman to carry out the deed. In between pulling these various levers came the pleading calls from his family members who had learned of the plot. They wanted the shooting called off.

  ‘Listen, shut the fuck up,’ he said to his brother Ghassan, who was given the job of sourcing the firearm. ‘Don’t question me,’ he threatened, ‘or I swear to God I’ll shoot you too.’

  Hamzy vowed not to sleep until the job had been completed. In a separate call a bit later, once tempers had cooled, Ghassan tried again to appeal to his brother’s reason – this was family, Ghassan said. Surely there was another way to work things out?

  Hamzy was unmoved. ‘I don’t give a fuck, Ghassan. I don’t give a fuck who he is, bro. No one fucks with me, bro.’

  It appeared that people rarely said no to Hamzy, but still it was proving difficult to secure a gunman, even with a slew of loyal footsoldiers at his disposal. Whenever someone learned the target was Hamzy’s own brother Haysam, they backed out. Take, for instance, Ahmed Diab, a trusted friend and significant MEOCS identity. He turned the job down almost immediately. Mustapha ‘Wak’ Assoum, another lackey, managed to secure the .22 but then backflipped and refused to supply the gun to the triggerman when he heard the target was Haysam. Quite boldly, he too tried to talk Hamzy out of his plan, without success.

  The only person willing to take the contract was Hamzy’s cousin Mohammed Hamze. At first he’d been asked to find a suitable gunman, but by 8:55pm, with options running out, he accepted the job himself at Hamzy’s request.

  Three minutes later, in between his calls with Mohammed, Hamzy’s phone rang. It was Haysam, angry and full of bravado. He’d learned of the plot to shoot him and laughed off his brother’s demand to present himself for the punishment. He said the shooter could come to the 7/11 in Burwood where he was waiting. ‘Let ’em come shoot me,’ Haysam said. ‘I’m fuckin’ waiting. See ya. I’m waiting here for ya.’

  The rest of the night played out with a wild goose chase. One minute Haysam was at a 7/11 in Burwood, the next he was driving off in a car, saying he was on his way to Progress Park – never turning up, of course. After several hours he switched off his phone to ignore his brother’s calls, laying low until the morning.

  Hamzy wasn’t the bluffing type. If he made a threat, he followed through. The fact that Haysam hadn’t been shot yet left him fuming in his prison cell and he had stayed up all night stewing about it; he’d told people his brother would be punished and now feared that he looked inept – like a ‘dog weak cunt’ – because he hadn’t lived up to the commitment. To save face he upped the ante, telling anyone who asked that Haysam would now not just be kneecapped, but killed for his insolence. A source of solace was that he knew his brother had bail obligations. It meant he could easily be found: ‘At the end of the day I know where he signs on … If he doesn’t come and face the music I’m going to be waiting for him in front of the cop shop,’ he said during a recorded call to one of Haysam’s friends who was working with Hamzy to try to find Haysam.

  As these threats continued to fly and it became clear the problem wouldn’t go away, Haysam disregarded his bail conditions, booked a plane ticket and flew out of the country. When he returned a week later he was arrested at the airport and thrown in jail for breaching his bail conditions. The police had taken out a warrant for his arrest while he was gone. While it wasn’t ideal, he was technically safer in jail than on the streets of Auburn, his brother unable to get to him as easily.

  By then, Hamzy had already moved on from trying to have his brother killed and was putting the bulk of his attention back into the drug trade. In the underworld, they didn’t rank much higher than Hamzy, and as a drug supplier he had the money and clout to source huge amounts of virtually any type of product. He bought cannabis by the kilogram and ice by the bagful, the crystals sparkling and pure, virtually untouched by cutting agents, coming almost straight from the manufacturer, barely changing hands. Detectives overheard him calling his brother Ghassan in the midst of one of these deals. His instructions were to take half a kilogram of ice from the family’s supplier and, using their dedicated courier, get it down to Melbourne where a buyer was waiting. It was a lucrative deal, worth about $120,000.

  Reluctantly, Ghassan went along with it.

  Hamzy used the phone through the night. By day the phone stayed with Tekotia Wiperi, a New Zealand-born inmate housed across the corridor from Hamzy’s cell. Wiperi was a huge man, angry and aggressive, a Muslim-convert serving out the last few months of a thirteen-year sentence. Imprisoned for armed robberies, he’d joined a prison gang while inside and changed his name to Abu Bakr. His calls were social mostly, to his family and a girlfriend back in New Zealand. At 3pm each day he would tie the phone to a thin, metal disc using a piece of dental floss and then slide it across the corridor and under the 15-millimetre gap at the bottom of Hamzy’s cell door, where it stayed with him until the following morning. Detectives adjusted their shifts to work around the phone’s schedule. It was worth the effort; Hamzy was running the device hot, averaging about 460 calls a day. At times he told people that he had to put the phone down for a minute because it needed to cool and was burning his ear.

  Memmolo could only speculate how the phone had got inside the prison in the first place, but he suspected it had been smuggled into the jail internally by an inmate transferred from a minimum-security centre, where contraband phones, steroids and other drugs are routinely found. As for charging the battery, the suspicion was that Hamzy had a cord, but not a wall plug. As long as he was prepared to throw the bare wires into the socket, the phone’s battery would continually replenish.

  When he was still a teenager, Bassam Hamzy had put one of his cousins in a bathtub, filled it with water and scored him with a clothes iron. Afterwards he cracked his cousin’s leg with a stick, breaking a bone. It was all to punish him for stealing some money from one of their aunt’s houses. Sadistic back then, these actions are a snapshot of his early years, long before he walked a pathway to murder.

  Over time, Bassam Hamzy had come to be an archetypal criminal figure, a mastermind with superior abilities. As he prepared to enter the prison system in 2000, a psychologist warned of his abilities in scheming and influence, his veneer of charm. ‘A guiding principle for him may be to outwit others, exploiting them before they exploit him,’ she noted.

  Never the strongest or toughest man in prison, he showed a capacity for bending people to his will – he could tame dangerous people and psychopaths to act on his behalf. It was behind the walls of Goulburn Supermax prison, the impenetrable fortress, where he developed his notoriety, allegedly amassing a small army of Islamic converts, each one shaving their heads, growing out their beards and kneeling before him to kiss his hand.

  Prison life had turned him into a devout Muslim. He taught himself to read and write in Arabic, he listened to Koranic tapes and studied religious texts, and encouraged other inmates to do the same regardless of their colour or creed. Prison authorities watched with concern as Anglo-Saxon and Indigenous inmates began reciting the Koran each day and praying loudly to Allah from their cells, demonstrating their piety by sleeping on concrete and rejecting television. When money began mysteriously turning
up in inmates’ accounts, officers took action, moving Hamzy to a different prison and accusing him of orchestrating an escape plot. He has always denied that this was the case, telling whoever will listen that the charges were trumped up by the commissioner, Ron Woodham, due to personal issues between them. His next stop after Supermax was Lithgow’s segregated unit, where he had somehow managed to procure the smuggled mobile phone enabling his sphere of influence to extend outside of prison.

  Bassam was the complicated middle child of the Hamzy family, a clan of cousins and extended family that set down roots in southwestern Sydney with the arrival of his father, Khaled. A soldier in the Lebanese Army, Khaled, like many other of his compatriots, left Lebanon for Australia during the early 1970s, just prior to the outbreak of the country’s civil crisis. At the time, he had been living in the foothills of Mount Lebanon, near the port city of Tripoli, and had just married his wife, Lola. They came to Sydney, where he had previously spent some time as a younger man, and settled in a house on Albert Street, Auburn, ready to start a family. First was a boy, Mejid, then a girl, Mejida. In 1979 Bassam was born, followed by the twins, Ghassan and Haysam, eight years later.

  Life was stable in those early years. The kids were enrolled in school and Khaled began a short working life. But a car accident threw everything into doubt, forcing him out of work and into a long period of recuperation where the family lived off a large compensation payout. In 1989 he bounced back and took up part-time work as a leather cutter. Soon after he started a company with a friend exporting powdered milk to Lebanon, a short-lived venture that ended two years later with a police raid and charges of supplying heroin in kilogram quantities. It was 1992. Bassam was eleven. His father was given a thirteen-year prison term.