The Squad

by Yoni Bashan

  On 18 May 2008, OS1 arrived in Melbourne with 370 grams of ice destined for Imran Allouche, a local dealer with a drug habit of his own. Allouche lived in the suburb of Fawkner on the outskirts of the city. Like the Bodiotis deal, OS1 drove to Allouche’s house so he could examine the crystal meth and hand over the cash. Both men took a seat in his bedroom while the ice was weighed and a sample cooked with water. Allouche had been around a while and could tell just by looking at the bag that the product had been jumped. It was already a mix of crystals and powder before he’d even touched it, probably more powder than crystals. He told OS1 he wasn’t happy with the way it looked. When OS1 called Hamzy to discuss their options even he conceded that Allouche was being ripped off.

  ‘It’s been jumped to the max, bro,’ he said. Hamzy asked who’d touched the drugs before the delivery. OS1 said it’d been only himself and Ghassan. Allouche, standing there listening, said he no longer wanted the product at all, which put Hamzy in a bind. He really needed to sell it to make good on his own debts.

  ‘I don’t know how much the car is going to cost you to repair,’ Hamzy said, speaking in code, trying to be accommodating. The ‘car’ was the bag of ice. The ‘repair’ was whatever their new sale price would be. ‘I don’t want to put no pressure on you. If I tell you I want this much for the car and the car gives you headaches … all I can do is penalise the auctioneers and next time make it up to you,’ he said.

  Allouche said he would take the drugs, but only if Hamzy agreed to a much better price. Their original deal was for $120,000. After several minutes of negotiation and a few mathematical calculations, the two men agreed to a new price of $6700 per 28 grams, or a total of $87,100 for thirteen ounces. Hamzy did all the calculations in his head.

  Allouche took the drugs on loan and began selling it off in chunks to his downline suppliers. When they paid him, he’d pay Hamzy – this was the standard supply routine. He had two main customers: ‘Wayne’ and ‘Harry’ (both pseudonyms), dealers working independently of each other. They, in turn, took the drugs on loan and promised to pay Allouche once they’d sold their share. In this way the supply chain relied on numerous compounding consignments, meaning that it would only take one broken link to ruin everything.

  Four days later Hamzy called his cousin Omar Ajaj to ask him a favour. The money he was expecting from Allouche hadn’t arrived and too much time had elapsed. He was starting to lose face. Allouche had insisted that it wasn’t his fault: his buyers had refused to pay up their share and he himself had been left out of pocket.

  Normally, Hamzy would just punish Allouche. He would have known of these risks when he signed up for the drugs. But in this case, Hamzy saw him as a potentially useful ally, someone who could assist him with handguns and other weapons for the B4L gang he was creating. Hamzy wanted these types of cross-border connections, so shooting Allouche was not in his best interests, he thought. Instead, he told Allouche that he would take on the debts himself and use his own men to collect the money. He instructed Ajaj to fly to Melbourne, meet with Allouche, and then call him immediately. ‘You’re gonna sit him down and I’m gonna work out everyone that owes him money, and then we’re gonna go and pick up all the money,’ he said. ‘We’re not gonna let him pick it up, we just want addresses, names, everything.’

  The next afternoon, Ajaj stepped off a Virgin Blue flight with two henchmen, Hamed Ajaj – his cousin, another member of Hamzy’s extended family – and Abdulgini Klink, a young friend, aged eighteen, who lived in the Auburn area. Hamzy asked Ajaj several times whether his sidekicks were up to the task. The people they were looking for had guns, Hamzy said. ‘So if your boys are not one hundred per cent, I don’t want you going.’

  Ajaj assured him they were fine.

  The trio were collected at Tullamarine airport by Khaled Chkhaidem, Allouche’s right-hand man. They dropped off their bags at the Novotel Hotel on Collins Street, in the heart of the city, and then drove to Allouche’s house in Fawkner on the outskirts. They walked in to find a stash of guns on show, ready for them to take their pick. Ajaj called Hamzy and described each one. ‘There’s a short nine. It’s wonderful,’ he said. Another was a 0.40-calibre. ‘Like, you know, the one the police carry.’

  The plan was to visit the drug dealer known as Wayne first and try to collect the money amicably. He owed the most money, $45,000, and Allouche already had his address. If he didn’t pay up, the back-up plan was to shoot his house. Harry, the second dealer, owed Allouche about half as much as Wayne but his address had been harder to track down. Calls were being made to pinpoint his location and Hamzy had decided he wanted him kidnapped.

  Back at the MEOCS office in Sydney, the Skelton officers scrambled to establish where this apparent shooting and kidnapping were going to take place. They were listening live to each call but all they had to work with were the nicknames Wayne and Harry. Firmer details about their locations and the timings of each hit weren’t being discussed over the line, and if they were, those calls were getting lost in the deluge already being monitored. The job of translating each call had already put the detectives behind on what was happening, like watching a live sporting event on television with a few minutes of delay, sometimes more. With the little information they had there wasn’t much they could do except keep listening, keep reading the translated transcripts, and hope for someone to slip up and drop a key detail over the line.

  About 9:35pm on 24 May, Ajaj called Hamzy and gave him an update on the situation. He was ready to go to Wayne’s address but still had had no luck finding Harry. ‘All right,’ Hamzy said. ‘Go to this … go to this fuckin’ Aussie cocksucker’s house.’

  Wayne, aged twenty-one, wasn’t around when Ajaj and the others arrived at his family’s home in Meadow Heights, a suburb of low incomes, high crime and fibro homes with cars parked on the front lawns. Wayne’s parents answered the door, telling Ajaj that he wasn’t home and there was nothing to pay. No one owed anyone any money. An argument broke out and Ajaj walked away, unsure what to do.

  ‘He’s a liar, hey?’ Hamzy said when Ajaj called him, riling himself up for a response. He told Ajaj to ‘go bang the house’ with a shooting.

  ‘Spray the house?’ Ajaj asked.

  ‘Yeah, go and empty everything on the house. Stay in the car and fuckin’ do it and then burn the car,’ Hamzy said.

  Allouche hadn’t joined Ajaj and the others when they visited Wayne’s parents. He was nervous about the Sydney crew. They’d flown down and were running around picking fights with people when these disputes could be solved much more diplomatically, he thought. Shooting houses and kidnapping people, he said in one phone call to Hamzy, was an unnecessary extreme. In Melbourne, money can take a little longer to kick back up the food chain, he said. He pleaded for more time to broker a peaceful solution.

  There was one guy, he said, a mutual friend, who could go and talk to Wayne’s family to straighten this all out. ‘He can get the money off them, because he knows his dad,’ he said. Hamzy wasn’t interested. He wanted to make a point and flex his muscle.

  ‘You got to scare them,’ Hamzy told Allouche. ‘After I spray, we’ll send your mate there and he’ll say, “Listen, this is the first warning. The second warning is gonna be the actual people.” All right? So spray, then send your mate to them.’

  By now it was after 11pm and Allouche was becoming more desperate to avoid a shooting. He knew that drive-by shootings were common in Sydney, but in Melbourne the drug business was very different. Shooting a house, he said, would send everything out of hand.

  ‘Don’t give a fuck if they get out of hand, bro,’ Hamzy said, assuring Allouche that he had a powerful ally on his side. ‘We were born for things to get out of hand, bro … We are Arabs. We are Muslims. We love war … If he wants to know who I am, tell him go and google Bassam Hamzy on the internet.’

  An hour later, a few minutes after midnight, a white ute with its lights switched off and four men inside slowly turned into Wayne’s street
and stopped near his house. His parents were in the living room, watching television. They heard noises outside but weren’t sure what it was – they didn’t realise twelve bullets had just been fired at their home. Witnesses heard gunfire and a car tearing off at high speed. Bullet casings from a Glock pistol – the kind used by police – and another handgun, a .45-calibre, were found on the road outside.

  Ajaj and the others flew back to Sydney the next afternoon and waited another week to return and deal with the drug dealer known as Harry. By then, he had been in regular contact with Hamzy by phone, negotiating a payment plan for the $20,000 he owed. Harry assured him the payment would follow; he just needed more time.

  Hamzy was open to negotiation and flexible about payment. He put it to Harry that he could pay off his debt by handing over his BMW, worth $5000, pay the remaining $15,000 a week later, and then continue furnishing the remaining $50,000 loan owed on the car.

  ‘I don’t want to get nasty,’ Hamzy warned, ‘I just want my money.’ Harry made a counter-offer: what if, in exchange for an extra week, he paid $25,000 instead of $20,000? Hamzy agreed to the deal, but watched Harry closely, contacting him regularly as the deadline loomed. When it passed and Harry’s phone suddenly became disconnected, Hamzy called in his cousin Omar Ajaj to go take care of the matter. It was just after midnight on 3 June when he asked Ajaj to fly back to Melbourne.

  Ajaj found Harry on a street corner, bundled him into a car and drove him back to his own apartment, where they tied him up and wrapped a blindfold around his head. Ajaj, who had come down with his cousin Hamed, demanded the $25,000 Harry said he would pay Hamzy, plus the BMW. Also brought into the negotiations were Harry’s family members, who were given a deadline of 11am the following morning to come up with the money. ‘If you don’t get the money and car he’s not going to come back,’ Ajaj said to Harry’s brother.

  Harry was kept under guard all night to ensure he couldn’t move, even though he was bound so tightly that his hands turned purple, as Ajaj said in a phone call to Hamzy later that morning. By then they’d changed colour again. ‘His hands turned green,’ Ajaj reported. ‘His mouth smell is foul … I haven’t fed him nothing.’

  ‘Get this motherfucker some food,’ Hamzy responded. ‘In Islam you have to give the captive some food.’

  As the deadline approached Harry’s brother dealt directly with Hamzy by phone, telling him he could come up with $5000, but could get the rest of the money owed in another two weeks. Hamzy wasn’t interested and threats of torture followed; he told Harry’s brother that he’d start cutting off his fingers if the demand wasn’t met.

  Harry’s brother asked for more time. Even though Hamzy took a hard line, he let the negotiations continue past the 11am deadline. By 3:40pm a deal had been reached: $5000 upfront, the rest of the cash in eight weeks, and the BMW thrown in as a bonus.

  ‘He’s gunna continue to pay the finance off on the car,’ Hamzy said to Ajaj, instructing him to stand down.

  By 7:30pm, once the cash and the car’s papers had been brought over to the apartment, Harry was cut loose and handed back to his family. Ajaj drove the BMW back to Sydney.

  In between his calls to shoot up houses and kidnap a drug supplier, Hamzy was still brokering drug deals. In one, sealed just after Wayne’s house was peppered with bullets, he arranged to buy 6.6 kilograms of cannabis from Allouche and Chkhaidem in Melbourne, to be brought back to Sydney by his regular courier OS1. The Skelton detectives had been listening to these discussions and tried to jump ahead of this drug movement. It was an opportunity to follow the truck and capture live evidence that corroborated the conversations on the intercepts.

  On 27 May, as OS1 prepared to head down to Melbourne, the Skelton team mounted an operation to plant a tracking device on his truck. The tracker would act as a safety net if their surveillance detail got burned. Recently, OS1 had wisened up and become adept at spotting a tail. He’d be driving down a highway and suddenly pull a U-turn, or double up on a roundabout to check who did the loop with him. For the operation to track his truck, the Australian Crime Commission loaned out two of its officers to assist, a pair of its best spies who’d been in the surveillance game many years.

  They set up an observation post on Mary Street, Auburn, where OS1 had been told to go before departing for Melbourne. The officers parked on opposite sides of the road, facing each other, their cars stopped next to a reserve at the end of the street. Then, something bizarre happened – a case of unfortunate and incredible timing. As the officers sat around waiting for the truck, two groups of men came together on Mary Street at the precise spot where one of the operatives had parked. A fight broke out, part of a prearranged scrap to settle some sort of feud between them. It played out in front of the operative’s car; his only option to try to stay invisible as the men wrestled before him, throwing punches and grappling with each other all over the road. During the melee one man even rolled across the bonnet of the ACC vehicle. Then guns were drawn, pulled out on both sides. Out of nowhere, a car pulled up and half the men piled inside. Shots were let off in the air as they drove away at high speed.

  The ACC’s surveillance operative was a very neat individual, proud of his ACC car. He’d happened to have cleaned it that morning before heading out to Auburn, which meant that local police could fingerprint the bonnet and identify the man who rolled across the car. Once they had his name, investigators were able to track down the rest of the people involved in the fight. Some were later charged over the incident.

  It was a quirky side story success, but the unexpected melee had meant that the surveillance officers weren’t able to get the tracker on OS1’s vehicle. Instead detectives followed him to Melbourne and spotted him meeting with Chkhaidem. They saw him picking up a large bag and placing it in the back of his truck. Not willing to show their hand, the detectives left OS1 alone. Arresting him would reveal their investigation, they figured. OS1 returned to Sydney and successfully delivered the cannabis on Hamzy’s instructions, avoiding prison for a little while longer.

  Within a day of Harry’s kidnapping in Melbourne, on 4 June, Hamzy took a phone call from Bassam Darwiche, a relative of Adnan Darwiche. He was having a problem and turned to Hamzy for some help. That was the power Hamzy had – in some ways, people saw him as a godfather type. Bassam Darwiche was in Adelaide trying to collect a $12,000 debt owed by a local drug dealer, John Baroutas. Darwiche told Hamzy that he needed some muscle, some people to recover the money and show Baroutas that he meant business. Darwiche asked Hamzy if he knew anyone who could help. He wanted bikies – a Fink, a Hells Angel and a Rebel.

  Hamzy called back an hour later with excitement in his voice. He said ‘Goldie’ was coming, a towering figure and gun-for-hire with tattoos all over his body. His real name was Rodney Atkinson and his reputation for standover preceded him. They called him Goldie because his mouth was filled with gold teeth. ‘He’s a mad, mad soldier,’ Hamzy said to Darwiche.

  They came to an arrangement that once Baroutas had been confronted, Darwiche would take the $12,000 owed to him, but anything else available – cars, cash, drugs – would go to Atkinson. The standover man stepped off a Virgin Blue flight the next evening and headed straight to Baroutas’s townhouse, calling Hamzy along the way. Hamzy asked to be live on the phone while the bashing and torture of Baroutas played out. ‘It’s gonna be a walk in the park,’ he said to Atkinson, as if he was almost slapping his hands together.

  Bassam Darwiche was waiting outside Baroutas’s townhouse for Atkinson with two other men. Getting inside was no problem, and Hamzy was on the line, talking on speaker from prison. He introduced himself to Baroutas and told him he’d assumed control of Darwiche’s debt. Baroutas was shaking and told Hamzy he’d already handed over $8000 in an envelope to the men. Hamzy didn’t care – he was still $4000 short – and he started taunting Baroutas with threats of torture. He spoke about cutting off his fingers, his ears. He told Atkinson to get a knife and put a sock in his mouth so he
couldn’t scream.

  ‘I told you I’m going to compensate myself,’ Hamzy said. Atkinson was standing by, holding the phone to Baroutas’s ear. ‘The minute I give him the go ahead,’ Hamzy said, meaning Atkinson, ‘he’s gonna cut your ears off, do you know that?’

  Baroutas said he could come up with $20,000 by the morning. He had a friend, he said, Sophie, who would be prepared to help him. For Hamzy, that wasn’t good enough either.

  For the Skelton detectives listening live in Sydney it became obvious that Baroutas’s life was in imminent danger. Unlike the previous kidnapping of the drug dealer known as Harry, this time detectives had a name and address where everything was taking place. The issue now, however, was how to intervene without blowing their cover – move in too suddenly and Hamzy would know his calls were being intercepted; how else would the officers have known to suddenly turn up on Baroutas’s doorstep?

  The clock was ticking. Someone at MEOCS HQ pulled up Baroutas’s offender history and scanned it for a possible cover angle. A First Instance Warrant flashed up indicating he was due to be arrested anyway by Adelaide police. The Skelton detectives made a quick phone call to their South Australian counterparts and asked that officers be dispatched to Baroutas’s home. The Hamzy investigation, barely a month old, was still a highly classified matter. These officers weren’t told why they were needed there; just that Baroutas was wanted on an outstanding warrant.

  They found him standing in the driveway to his garage, which connected to his townhouse. He said nothing about the four men sitting in his lounge room upstairs as he handed over his ID.

  Officer Paul Carman studied Baroutas as he paced around in the garage. He looked nervous, Carman thought. Upstairs, the two other officers were inside speaking to the large, tattooed men seated in the apartment. Everything seemed normal – there were no signs of blood on the carpet or upturned furniture; nothing to indicate a kidnapping or home invasion had taken place. There were porn DVDs on the table and a couple of security monitors with a view outside of the road next to the garage; they all would have seen the police cars turning up, the officers thought, which explained why Baroutas was in the garage waiting for them.