The Squad

by Yoni Bashan

  Bassam Darwiche called Hamzy while the police were still moving between the apartment and the garage. He was shocked by their arrival, but didn’t put two and two together. ‘The coppers rocked up to Johnny’s house to talk to him and they just walked in,’ he said, leaving Hamzy on the line to hear the officers question each of the men. Each one gave a false name and was subjected to a search. The cops found $8000 in Atkinson’s pants, money that he said had come from gambling winnings. It was removed and then given back to him later.

  Ironically, the only person arrested that night was Baroutas himself. Once his warrant became apparent, he was handcuffed and escorted to one of the police cars, effectively saving him from any further punishment. He refused to say what was going on inside the apartment but appeared at ease about being arrested, even volunteering some information to the officers that if they searched his bedroom they would find a homemade sub-machine gun on the top shelf of a wardrobe.

  Far from being suspicious, Hamzy boasted about what happened in his conversations the following afternoon. He was amazed at the coincidence, telling someone, ‘The fuckin’ detectives and that fuckin’ rocked up at the house!’ By the time he got the smuggled phone back from Wiperi across the corridor that afternoon he’d already moved on from Bassam Darwiche and Baroutas and had turned his mind back to drug supply, preparing to arrange his biggest deal yet. Through his supplier, he’d bought nearly one kilogram of crystal meth for $191,000, a massive deal that was done almost entirely on loan and needed immediate buyers.

  All evening he worked the phones. Some buyers expressed interest and then backed out because of the pricing. Others said yes, but couldn’t get the money for weeks. Left holding the can, Hamzy appeared to be in some trouble; it was too much debt to carry. In the end, Con Bodiotis, Hamzy’s regular buyer, did Hamzy a solid deal and took the bulk of it from him. Not long after, his phone stopped working.

  On the morning of 11 June, the day that the drugs were delivered and the money changed hands, prison officers decided to raid Hamzy’s prison cell. It was a spontaneous search, routine in the jail system. The guards were unaware of the ongoing Skelton investigation and no phone was located. The Skelton detectives figured Hamzy must have flushed it down the toilet, rather than secrete it somewhere. Had he hidden it internally, they would have heard his voice again over the intercepted telephone line some time later. But from that day forward, there were no more outgoing calls to his number.

  Even though the prison guards’ impromptu search of Hamzy’s cell effectively stopped the ongoing investigation, the Skelton team were actually experiencing a modicum of relief that it was over. It was a blessing of sorts: partly because of the drugs and shootings that Hamzy was co-ordinating, but mainly because of the sheer volume of calls he’d been making since they had started listening. Detectives counted a total of 19,523 calls over the six-week period, many of which, by the time Hamzy had flushed the phone, were still in a backlog that hadn’t yet been heard or transcribed.

  With the phone gone, the investigation entered a new phase. The days of capturing the calls, keeping up with the new crimes and scrambling to conduct surveillance operations were over. Those pressures had been tough on some officers; one had already quit the investigation from the stress of consistently listening to Hamzy’s calls. Now, with this breathing space, the officers had time to work slowly and methodically to build their case against Hamzy and the slew of others involved in his empire.

  In the weeks that followed every crime that had been recorded over the phone was chased up for corroborating evidence. Virgin Blue flight manifestos were gathered along with hotel bookings and cell tower records, which were used to place people at various crime scenes. About three weeks after Hamzy’s phone was disconnected, OS1’s truck was stopped and searched on the Hume Highway at Casula as he was making another delivery. Having lost his phone contact with Hamzy, he was now taking directions from other family members outside. The cops thought it was most likely that he was dealing with Hamzy’s dad, Khaled, though it was difficult to say so with any certainty. In the back of OS1’s truck, police found 142 grams of cocaine packaged in five small freezer bags. The arrest marked the end of his courier work for the Hamzy family. He was granted bail, but he’d become too hot.

  With the drug courier out of play and Hamzy without a phone, Memmolo’s team decided to revisit one of their earlier tip-offs, one that was peripheral to the Hamzy investigation and had been put on the back burner. This was the intelligence gleaned about the cocaine wholesalers and their safe house on Carmen Street, Bankstown, which came to them way back at the very start of the investigation when the Skelton case was solely focused on the Kalache family. Observations of the address suggested these wholesalers were storing and packaging the drugs on the premises for downline supply. And as an informant had suggested, they were moving big amounts – half-kilogram blocks of cocaine at a time.

  On 12 August 2008, a team of MEOCS officers stationed outside the safe house watched as an Audi turned up. A man got out and disappeared into the house, staying there for about ten minutes before leaving with something in his hands. Detectives followed the Audi closely for a few minutes and then radioed for uniformed police to pull it over. As officers approached the car on foot, the driver freaked out and hit the accelerator, reversing fast into a police car parked behind him, and then speeding off past a second police car that had been blocking the road. He narrowly missed Angelo Memmolo, the Skelton co-ordinator, and Phil Linkenbagh, another detective on his team. Both had their guns trained on the driver as he took off. A few minutes later they raided the safe house on Carmen Street and found fourteen grams of cocaine, nearly 100 grams of pseudoephedrine and $188,150 in cash. It appeared that their timing was off – had they gone in earlier, or while the man was inside, the drug seizures were likely to have been far higher. This was later confirmed when Memmolo learned the driver had a brick of cocaine in the Audi’s console, along with a gun, which explained why he was so determined to escape.

  That much cocaine, plus a gun, aggravated by driving at police, could put a man away for ten years.

  Khaled Hamzy took a seat in front of his son Bassam in the visiting rooms at Lithgow Correctional Centre. It was 28 August 2008. The Skelton detectives had been told the visit was happening and had planted a listening device in advance to record the conversation. Khaled had been banned from visiting his son since his release on parole three years earlier on account of his conviction for heroin supply. Recently, this ban had been lifted. Both men were in good spirits and settled in for a long catch-up.

  ‘I got you undies,’ Khaled said. Previously, Bassam had complained about the standards of prison underwear. They were small and uncomfortable, never fitting him properly. Tired of arguing with the guards, he had stopped wearing them altogether. His father put the issue down to his expensive taste.

  ‘Oh, you just wear Valentino, Boss, and whatever is the name?’ he joked.

  Their talk soon turned to more serious matters, namely their ongoing plans to lease a factory. On the listening device this came across as sounding like more of a social club, one with card tables, a snooker table and lounge chairs. In reality, it was to be a Brothers 4 Life clubhouse. Bassam had counted about sixty people who would help fund the lease with weekly payments but, to be on the safe side, he told his father they should only count half that number. ‘Thirty people paying thirty dollars is nine hundred dollars a week rent,’ he said.

  Khaled said he would wait for Bassam to send him further details and addresses to inspect, factories around the Auburn and Bankstown areas.

  They didn’t speak openly about the drugs they’d been moving, but Bassam’s mood became bitter and angry as the topic circled some of the people they had been dealing with – those who had undercut their supplies and skimmed off the top. Bassam complained that his father had been too lenient with several people who had lied, and urged him to take a stronger hand. The softly-softly stance would affect the family’s
honour, he said. ‘People are laughing at us, Dad,’ Bassam said. ‘If this is not affecting your honour, I don’t know what’s going to affect your honour. I can’t work like this. How can you work like this? You leave a question mark on everything.’

  His father listened but said nothing as Bassam worked himself into a lather, listing several people – family members and others – who had lapsed in their responsibilities. Bassam vowed to get to these people. In jail, he said, feelings of anger don’t dissipate over time; in fact, he continued, jail provides the time to come up with imaginative methods of getting square. One that he fantasised about was taking a knife and puncturing a person’s ears, then putting acid in their eyes, cutting out their tongue and severing their spinal cord. It would leave them, he said, unable to hear, see, talk or move. They’ll have to rely on someone for the rest of their lives. ‘And every day they will be thinking I have done this to them,’ he said.

  It took another five months before the bulk of the phone calls and text messages, stray pieces of evidence and loose strands of intelligence had been dissected and analysed by the Skelton team. Finally on 4 December 2008 they were at the point where arrests could be made. By then they had been left astounded by the calls, impressed even – not just at the criminality, but also by the workings and abilities of Bassam Hamzy’s brain. Sure, he was a criminal, a thug and a murderer, but what became apparent was his unexpected knack with numbers and his ability to make fast calculations on cumulative deals that he could parlay off each other in a way most well-educated people would struggle to visualise in their minds. Every drug transaction, every gram he controlled, every dollar that changed hands, every phone number he called, was being stored in his memory without a single digit written down. He added interest and calculated complex sums on the fly, factoring his sums according to purity levels, wholesale weights, and street values, along with projected earnings on deals that hadn’t happened yet. What was even more astounding was the speed with which he worked. In six weeks he’d personally trafficked more than $1.5 million worth of drugs. Had the ACC never picked up on that telephone call between Bassam Hamzy and a member of the Finks outlaw motorcycle gang who was under investigation, or drawn the links to establish that Bassam had a phone, who knows what would have followed, given another month or more.

  The ensuing Skelton arrest phase involved sixteen raids across Sydney and Melbourne, an operation that took in more than 140 officers. They formed up in teams outside each house and then burst inside with warrants to search the properties and make arrests.

  At a house in Merrylands officers found an inactive clandestine methamphetamine laboratory. At a unit in Greenacre they recovered a machine pistol. At Condell Park, a chunky freezer bag, fat with ecstasy tablets, was seized. And at the Hamzy family’s home on Albert Street, Auburn, they found 152 grams of ice.

  Thirteen people were swept up in the raids, including Bassam’s father, his brother Ghassan, and his cousin Khaled Hamze. The family’s drug courier, OS1, was already out on bail, but he was arrested for a second time, along with several other cousins, friends and associates who had been caught assisting the Hamzy family along the way. Compiling briefs of evidence against so many people – twenty-two all up – for such a vast number of offences – 143 in total – resulted in some targets going months, sometimes years, before they were charged. They included people like Omar Ajaj and Rodney ‘Goldie’ Atkinson, both of whom were under investigation over kidnappings: Ajaj in Melbourne; Atkinson in Adelaide. They were passed over during the initial phase of the arrests, along with Mohammed Hamze, who was under investigation for drug supply and accepting a contract to shoot Haysam Hamzy. The priority, at least during that initial phase of arrests, was nailing Bassam Hamzy.

  His arrest took place on 5 December, a day after the raids. Memmolo led six officers from the Skelton team into Goulburn’s Supermax prison where Hamzy had been transferred in advance. He was waiting for them in a holding cage outside his cell and had a copy of that day’s newspaper in his hands. He held it up for them to see, his smiling mugshot splashed across the front page. He was delighted by the attention.

  Six months had passed since his mobile phone had been disconnected, so the search was mostly procedural – the likelihood of finding any documents or evidence, particularly after he had been moved from Lithgow, was low. The only items of any relevance were newspaper clippings of cars and factories, along with articles that Hamzy had been saving.

  With shackles on his wrists and ankles he was taken by armed convoy to Goulburn Police Station, a helicopter flying overhead watching out for any potential ambush.

  He made no admissions during his interview, the whole thing lasting just eighteen minutes. The detectives had prepared some charges, but not all of them. The drive-by shooting targeting Wayne, the drug dealer, would only come later. It was the same with the kidnappings of Harry in Melbourne and John Baroutas in South Australia. The evidence was still being collected and analysed for everyone involved in these crimes. The only response detectives Richard Howe and Stephen Hunt were able to elicit from Hamzy was a series of belligerent attacks on Corrective Services Commissioner Ron Woodham. They were still embroiled in their legal battle over Hamzy’s incarceration conditions at the time.

  ‘Tell the commissioner to eat my shit,’ Hamzy said. He gave the same response to most of the other questions.

  Bassam Hamzy sacked his solicitors and represented himself in court, switching between pleas of guilty and not guilty that delayed the outcome of his case by about five years. His proceedings, at times, alternated between novel and farcical. He called his own witnesses, tried his hand at obscure legal defences, and mounted sensational arguments for why he should receive a lighter sentence for his crimes – claiming, for instance, that he was involved in a secret deal with a law enforcement agency that had given him the green light to supply drugs and raise money for his family. The full details of this alleged deal, which was rejected by the judge, have been suppressed and cannot be printed.

  Having eventually learned that prosecutors weren’t going to seek a life sentence for his crimes, Hamzy agreed to plead guilty to all his charges of commercial drug supply, kidnapping and shooting. There were also fraud offences – he’d been charged with using credit card numbers stolen from Melbourne to book flights for his henchmen and to buy t-shirts for his B4L gang. He used his sentencing hearings to mount the argument that his horrible conditions of incarceration, largely spent in isolation, warranted a reduced prison term. He told the court about 22-hour days in lockdown, his months spent alone without anyone to talk to. He described the tortured sounds of his fellow inmates going mad with desperation; how they set fire to their cells, fastened their lips together with paperclips in protest at their conditions, and bashed their heads against the walls in failed attempts at suicide.

  To support his argument he tendered studies showing the long-term effects of isolation on inmates. He even called prisoners from Supermax to give evidence about their experiences in jail: one was Carl Little, an armed robber who had been moved to Supermax after brutally bashing and murdering a prison officer; another was Dudley Aslett, a violent rapist serving thirty years. One of the more unusual moments came when Hamzy subpoenaed the prison’s superintendent, Mick Reid, cross-examining him in the witness box and pressing him on how he had denied Hamzy visits and phone calls.

  ‘Every single phone number I’ve tried to put on has been refused,’ Bassam Hamzy asked him in court, referring to a list of authorised phone numbers, ‘except for my aunty, which is one aunty. Do you accept that, Mr Reid?’

  ‘Again,’ Mick Reid replied from the witness box, ‘I’m not sure of the numbers but I know it’s not many – but yes.’

  ‘It’s no big secret that there’s a great animosity towards me from the powers that be, correct?’

  ‘All your applications go through a certain channel, I would agree with that, yes.’

  The courtroom acted as a strange and ironic leveller bet
ween the two men; the inmate suddenly, for a few brief minutes, had clawed back some control. The judge accepted Hamzy’s argument that he had served a substantial portion of his prison time in ‘oppressive conditions’ that had affected his psychological health. But this ultimately had little impact on his sentence, which was handed down on 10 May 2013, and amounted to another twenty-one years in prison. It will make him eligible for parole in June 2035.

  As a footnote to the hearings, Hamzy revealed that he had reconciled his differences with younger brother Haysam, whom he had attempted to kneecap and then kill in 2007. He said Haysam had since named one of his sons after him, telling the court this was proof that their relationship had improved.

  Bassam’s father, Khaled Hamzy, received a seven-year prison sentence for his role in the supply syndicate, as did OS1, the drug courier and truck driver who had turned informant on the group, receiving a discount on his sentence in exchange for his co-operation. Bassam’s younger brother Ghassan Amoun was sentenced to a minimum term of six years and seven months for his role in the syndicate, his sentence partly mitigated by his harsh family upbringing and a professed fear of his older brother, both arguments put forward by his legal team. His earliest date for parole was set at August 2016.

  Mohammed Hamze, the cousin recruited to carry out the kneecapping of Haysam Hamzy, pleaded guilty to four counts of drug supply and received a minimum six-year prison term, but was found not guilty over the plot to shoot Haysam. He successfully argued that he never intended to carry out the crime, and only said he would do it because he was afraid of his cousin. This was an argument used by several others arrested by the Skelton detectives, including Omar Ajaj, who escaped a charge over the kidnapping of Harry, the drug dealer in Melbourne. Harry refused to co-operate with police, and detectives were, therefore, unable to proceed with the matter. Omar’s cousin Hamed was let off for the same reason.