by Yoni Bashan
Ajaj pleaded guilty to the drive-by shooting targeting the drug dealer known as Wayne, and was handed a suspended sentence over the crime. He was frank about his reasons for committing the shooting, telling a court-appointed psychologist that he too had been acting under duress at the time of the shooting. ‘My cousin is just a scary bloke man,’ he said. ‘If you don’t do what he says he can send anyone to you. He sent someone to shoot his own brother. I thought, what could he do to me?’
Still a well-known Middle Eastern organised crime identity, Ajaj – recognisable by a large ‘MEOC’ tattoo on his neck – is regularly stopped and questioned by MEOCS officers. A man on a lucky streak, he survived three shotgun wounds to his legs in 2012, an attempted murder in 2013 and then a serious motorcycle accident in 2014 which briefly crippled him. His most recent police charges, a matter that revolved around the kneecapping of a drug dealer at Yagoona, were dropped in 2015 due to a lack of supporting evidence.
CHAPTER EIGHT
MEOCS TAG: THE INFORMANTS
Confidential informants were the lifeblood of MEOCS TAG, the cogs that kept the engines turning. Almost every TAG investigation could trace its way back to a tip-off from a source. The vast majority of these informants were criminals and came in two distinct classes: ‘street assets’ and ‘rollovers’.
Street assets worked in the field and got paid for their intelligence, receiving modest cash bonuses ranging from $20 to $50 depending on the quality of their information. This money was signed off and paid out from the carefully managed MEOCS ‘sustenance fund’, a pool of cash that could be dipped into quickly and approved for use by the TAG’s commander. But many rewards payments, particularly the larger kind, were slow to be released. Their approval was left to a committee panel – the Reward Evaluation Advisory Committee – that only met once a month, so if a member of this panel was sick, or if a decision wasn’t reached, it would take at least another four weeks for the matter to be addressed. Sometimes these rewards would be left in limbo for half a year, or even longer, creating tensions between sources and their handlers. For some TAG officers, these delays prompted threats and killed off relationships and trust.
Rollovers were the other class of informant. Many were in prison and turned grass for several reasons, mostly to get bail or a reduction on their sentence. Remand centres became cultivation yards, a place where officers could quietly make an offer. Unlike a street asset’s, a rollover’s information tended to be one-off, or specific to their case.
Within a few months of its formation, MEOCS TAG had amassed more informants, or ‘gigs’ as they’re known in cop speak, than any other command across the entire NSW Police Force. The figures are rough, but the widely quoted statistic is that MEOCS TAG controlled fifty-six per cent of all registered informants used across the NSW State Crime Command – that’s twenty-two officers controlling about half the sources used by 900 detectives across ten crime squads.
Most informants were highly unreliable, dangerous and difficult to manage. Too conspicuous to take to a coffee shop, they usually met with detectives in secluded parks, and were given a pat-down on arrival. This was standard. When picking up a source, officers sometimes arrived with their guns out, or on their lap in the car, for the added protection – you never knew if the whole meeting was a setup. Some informants were so spaced out on drugs that the meetings were cancelled. Occasionally they made outlandish requests – one guy asked for a large upfront cash payment to get his teeth fixed, a request that was flatly denied.
Turning informant quickly became a hallmark of Middle Eastern organised crime, a distinguishing feature right up there with hot-headedness and extreme violence. As a general rule, no one was considered ‘unrollable’, not even the staunchest MEOC figures. There were no limits to this treachery. Family members turned on each other to save themselves. The Squad, at one point, had two brothers on its books secretly informing on each other. Even those who professed the most implacable hatred of police, the ones who threatened the harshest punishments for any associates caught collaborating, would inevitably offer to make a deal. In one instance, a major organised crime identity, was signed up as a registered source over a trivial driving offence – he’d been caught for the third time on a disqualified licence and simply didn’t want to risk being thrown back in prison.
Cultivating sources was an artform in itself. The most successful method was to hold a charge over a criminal, even a minor offence, and use it as leverage to work a deal – it’s a process that happens in police stations every day across the city. Mostly it takes place uneventfully, but occasionally, as was the case in May 2008, things don’t always go as expected.
They came in one car – Nick Glover, Dave Roberts, Ryan Jeffcoat – and arrived on a mission to talk. Their target was a man picked up twice for drug possession, crystal meth each time, and the plan was to surprise him with an unannounced visit and an offer. He was well connected, stuck in a jam with charges over his head, and he was considered to be a prime candidate for recruiting as a confidential source.
His house was an austere-looking fibro on Ashcroft Street at Georges Hall, a suburb near Bankstown Airport. Several security cameras pointed at the front door. Glover, Roberts and Jeffcoat walked up the driveway. By this time, Jeffcoat’s role in the TAG office had stepped up dramatically. A year earlier he was a trainee detective picking drug balloons out of a bedpan. Now he’d become formidable: juggling informants, personally generating at least one, sometimes two raids a month. He’d won an award for ‘outstanding proactive operational performance’ and had become a loveable character in the TAG office, a ballsy detective who sent Christmas cards to criminals he’d put in jail with messages like, ‘Thinking of you … love, the Coat.’ This brand of humour was lost on some. When a colleague once asked how he’d managed to procure so many informants, Jeffcoat kidded that he just pulled their names out of a communal ‘gig bag’ each morning that anyone could use. Of course, there was no such thing as a ‘gig bag’, but that didn’t stop the officer putting in a complaint – apparently Jeffcoat had been ‘hogging the gig bag’ and all its informants.
Back at Georges Hall, Jeffcoat walked around the side of the house while Roberts knocked at the front door and listened for movement inside. He knocked again a few seconds later, bringing someone to the door who opened it up just a crack. It was enough for a stench of chemicals to seep out and hit Roberts in the face. He jammed his foot in the gap and asked to be let inside. The man seemed flustered and said the person he wanted wasn’t home.
Around the side of the house Jeffcoat moved carefully towards a large window that gave him a full view of the interior. He could see two men moving between the kitchen and the lounge room, one of them holding a frying pan with thick, white sludge inside it. He was pouring the liquid into a big red bucket sitting next to a bottle of methylated spirits. Jeffcoat’s eyes widened; he’d seen this in his clandestine laboratory training course.
‘They’re doing a cook!’ he shouted towards the street. At the sound of his yelling, Roberts and Glover barged through the door and wrestled the man on the other side into a narrow corridor where a second man joined in the struggle. Arms were wrenched and bodies thrown into the wall. Jeffcoat watched as the third man hurried towards the kitchen with the frying pan and stuck it under the tap, filling it with water and creating plumes of smoke. Most of the sludge was gone by the time Roberts and Glover made it to the kitchen and had all three men in handcuffs.
It took two days for the Drug Squad’s Chemical Operations Unit to decontaminate the house. They moved through the property with a forensic chemist inspecting the seized items: a twenty-litre drum of methylated spirits, a measuring cylinder, a bowl containing the remains of a white, lumpy liquid. The chemist said the men were attempting a pseudoephedrine extraction, a process used to make methamphetamines like speed and ice.
While most of the sludge had gone down the sink, the cops managed to recover the bulk of it. As it coursed through the drain,
the liquid solidified with water and became trapped in the S-bend, allowing the Chemical Operations Unit to dismantle the pipe and let the TAG officers seize it as evidence. The prospective source was never cultivated, but the three men inside the house – Jehad Taha, who answered the door; Gehad Alameddine, the man with the frying pan; and Taha Eldarwich, who caused a ruckus in the hallway – pleaded guilty to their charges. Taha and Alameddine were given less than a year behind bars, but Eldarwich walked away with a good behaviour bond. One of the trio, after being released from prison, called Dave Roberts and thanked him, saying the arrest had given him a shake-up – he was done with crime.
Aside from this type of proactive work, the rest of 2008 in the MEOCS TAG office was taken up by several complex strike force investigations, each one rolling on from the last and all connected through the players involved. The genesis for these investigations had been the work of Strike Force Tapiola, the undercover drug investigation that had started in Castle Hill and ended in spectacular fashion at the IGA in Wetherill Park. Tapiola had unmasked several high-level Assyrian crime figures, prompting a new investigation, Strike Force Kialoa, which narrowed the sights even further on this facet of the underworld.
The Kialoa targets were real pieces of work. One of them – a man who was suspected of a break-and-enter in Bankstown and a carjacking in Granville, and who was wanted by the Kialoa team for commercial drug supply – had managed to get the home phone number of a MEOCS TAG sergeant and rang his wife repeatedly, threatening to rape her. The criminal was finally tracked to the Grandstand Motel in Warwick Farm where officers stormed into a room to bring him under arrest. He was brought out with several bruises and a face full of capsicum spray – the official report of the matter noted he had ‘resisted arrest’.
Jeffcoat had been one of several detectives assigned to the Kialoa investigation, a case that steered him to a new informant who guided him towards a drug supplier no one at MEOCS had ever heard of, a man who hadn’t previously been noted on any police watch lists. The result was a new investigation into an offshoot syndicate, one that sold ice and ecstasy across a sizeable chunk of the NSW coastline, from Wollongong to Sydney and further up to Newcastle. This was how it happened at MEOCS – jobs never finished, they just kept rolling onto the next one, and the one after that. Strike Force Tapiola opened the door to Kialoa, and Kialoa opened the door to Cartella.
The Cartella investigation centred on an unusual cast of characters: there was a former biochemist who’d left a high-paying job to start cooking methamphetamines; a Wollongong businessman aged in his fifties; and the man who sat above everyone, Adeson ‘Eddie’ Ayshow, a 33-year-old man billed as an upline supplier who was virtually unknown to police. He’d been convicted of a kidnapping three years earlier, but there was nothing on file linking him to the drug trade. He became the investigation’s number one target.
Surveillance of Ayshow led to a house on Ryan Street in the Wollongong suburb of Balgownie. It was hidden down a long driveway and owned by the businessman, Peter Conridge, who had been buying off Ayshow for some time but, from what Jeffcoat had gathered, had paired up with the biochemist and begun tinkering with the manufacturing side of the drug business. When officers crashed through his roller door garage they found a bottle of clear effervescing liquid inside – the first stage of a cook taking place. Conridge would end up serving an eighteen-month jail term because of the warrant, taking him out of the investigative frame.
These liquids could be extremely volatile, posing a huge danger not just to the criminals handling them, but also to police. It wasn’t unheard of for houses to catch fire and people to be killed due to unstable clan labs bursting into flames. Not long before the raid at Balgownie, MEOCS TAG officers raided the home of a drug cook in Guildford, seizing an unknown liquid inside his house. The liquid was sent to the Division of Analytical Laboratories for standard testing procedures where it turned out to be hypophosphorous acid, another precursor chemical used to make drugs like speed. It’s also an extremely dangerous compound. When the research staff poured a small amount of it into a beaker, alarms started going off and the lab had to be evacuated. The search had uncovered twenty litres of the stuff.
Getting to Ayshow took more time than the Conridge side of the investigation. The Cartella investigation was a strike force of just two detectives – Ryan Jeffcoat and Tom Howes. Progress was slow. Ayshow was a difficult criminal and by July 2008, five months after Cartella had formed, they were no closer to catching him in the act of a big supply. Months were lost on stakeouts, listening posts and close surveillance of his movements.
But then came the break.
Jeffcoat was back at the office one night listening to Ayshow’s calls when a conversation was picked up between him and a buyer in Newcastle. ‘Meet at the Twins,’ Jeffcoat heard him say. It was code for the twin Caltex service stations on the M1, just north of the Wyong turn-off. It had to be a drop-off, Jeffcoat thought. Why else would Ayshow drive two hours up to Newcastle and then two hours back to Sydney? When TAG commander Dave Adney listened back to the recording he felt the same way and put together an operation.
Most of the MEOCS TAG office wasn’t working that week. The reasons varied – some officers were on annual leave, others had been seconded to assist with the drudgework of World Youth Week, the international Catholic event that brought the Pope to Sydney. Jeffcoat and Howes were the only two detectives rostered on that night, having used the Cartella investigation as an excuse to avoid the convergence of half a million young Catholic pilgrims descending on Sydney.
Adney slipped on a set of headphones and told both detectives to run surveillance on Ayshow’s house at Mount Pritchard, half an hour’s drive away from MEOCS HQ. It was a quaint property located on Elizabeth Drive, an arterial road and trucking route busy with traffic at all hours of the night. The house was newly renovated with bushes running alongside its western border, where Jeffcoat took up an observation position in the dark. From there, lying on his stomach, he had a good view of the front door. He’d tried watching the house from his car, but the traffic was obstructing his view.
A car pulled up and a man stepped out holding a bag. He walked to the front door, knocked, and then walked back to his car and drove off without the bag he was holding. When Ayshow walked outside a few minutes later, Jeffcoat saw him shoving items inside the bag and placing it into a compartment beneath the boot lining of his Ford Falcon. Then, because every Jeffcoat story needs a twist, Ayshow walked over to the bushes, unzipped his pants and started peeing – the stream of urine landing about three feet away from Jeffcoat who was lying perfectly still.
Once in his car, Ayshow started driving north towards Newcastle with Howes following in his unmarked car close behind.
Jeffcoat ran back to his car and started the engine, pulling out fast to try to catch up with them, running red lights, cutting off cars and weaving at speed through the highway traffic. About fifteen minutes passed before he finally spotted Ayshow’s Falcon with Howes’s vehicle tailing him.
The plan was to have the local police pull over the Falcon on a basic traffic violation and search it for any drugs. The detectives wanted a safety net, a means of preserving their investigation – if the uniformed officers searched the car and didn’t find anything then Ayshow would probably keep driving and think nothing of it. It wouldn’t occur to him that he had been stopped because he was at the centre of a months-long Middle Eastern Organised Crime Squad investigation.
Jeffcoat radioed Fairfield Local Area Command and described the Ford Falcon, telling them it was heading north along Smithfield Road and needed to be searched thoroughly.
Marked police cars appeared in the rear-view mirror a few minutes later and both Howes and Jeffcoat took that as their cue to pull back. They both parked in a side street, got into one car and waited for a phone call from the local Fairfield officers to report the results of their search; they didn’t want to be anywhere near the scene while it was playing out.
<
br /> On Smithfield Road nearby, a local constable appeared at Ayshow’s window and told him he had a tail-light out. That might sound like a lazy cop cliché, but it was true – one of the bulbs had genuinely busted. Ayshow stepped out of the car and watched as two officers went through the vehicle, finding seven ecstasy tablets and a bit of cocaine in the front seat – a small amount of powder, barely enough for a bucks party.
The officers called Jeffcoat. He was positive there would be a substantial amount of drugs in the car – there had to be; there was no way Ayshow, an upline supplier, was driving from Sydney to Newcastle with only seven ecstasy tablets and a small bag of coke. He told them to keep looking.
The officers called him back a few minutes later to report the same result; no further drugs. By then another two marked cars from Fairfield had turned up at the scene and Ayshow was getting suspicious; even he thought the attention – three police cars for a broken tail-light – was a bit unusual. The whole idea of discretion looked like it was on the edge of backfiring.
A decision had to be made quickly. If Jeffcoat and Howes called off the search, then Ayshow would very likely disappear. The balloon was up, they thought. They said to hell with it and drove to the scene, introducing themselves as plain-clothed officers from Fairfield Police Station. Ayshow rolled his eyes. More cops. It was a gamble, but there was no going back now. If Jeffcoat’s hunch was wrong and there were no drugs in the car then months of police work would be as good as gone – Ayshow would throw away his phone and probably go offline for good. Jeffcoat went to the boot of the car and lifted the lining, reaching in deep and fishing around to try to find the items he’d seen Ayshow place there back at his house. Crevices were probed and compartments checked. He plunged his hand into the wheel well and found nothing except black soot.