by Yoni Bashan
Then he hit something. He tugged at it, a bag, and pulled it to the surface: it was 900 MDMA tablets. He put his hand back in and found a loaded 9-millimetre Luger pistol, then $50,000 in cash, then a taser, and then, best of all, a package heavy with ice crystals tinged a pinkish colour, worth about $100,000. Jeffcoat looked back at Ayshow on the side of the road. A minute earlier he’d been laughing. Now he looked broken.
He pleaded guilty to his charges and was handed one of, if not the, highest sentences ever given out as a result of a MEOCS TAG investigation: a minimum eight years on the bottom with a maximum fourteen years on the top. No one else had achieved that kind of result. And it had all been from a hunch on an intercepted phone call.
CHAPTER NINE
A FATEFUL MEETING
BASS HILL, SATURDAY, 14 MARCH 2009
Mohammed ‘Blackie’ Fahda hated service stations. They reminded him of the one at Punchbowl where his brother, Ahmad, had been murdered back in 2003. This one at Bass Hill where he was standing waiting for a friend, a meeting about a drug deal, was no different. To ease his nerves he’d had a few bumps of cocaine before leaving the house and brought a gun with him too, but that was normal; ever since his release from prison about seven months earlier he’d been walking around strapped for protection.
The man he was meeting, ‘David’ (a pseudonym), had been one of the people Fahda had met inside the segregation wing of Silverwater prison – the naughty boy wing, as David called it. Fahda had found himself there after he was stabbed eight times by two inmates during his stint, an assault that left him with knife wounds to his head, neck and body. When the guards asked, Blackie said he’d done it himself.
This had all taken place after his charges over the Titanic Café shooting were dismissed back in March 2007. He had walked free from court, but was pinched again a few months later and thrown into prison on remand. It was a short stay, just a few months, but evidently a tough period for him.
David pulled into the car park and got out of his car. He was a big man, muscly, with tattoos on his shoulder. Recently released from jail himself, he’d called Blackie with a proposition that he didn’t want to talk about over the phone, something about drugs. They arranged to meet at the Subway restaurant on the Hume Highway at Bass Hill, which shared a car park with the United Petroleum service station, a Turkish restaurant and a discount chemist all in the same complex.
They had only just started talking when Fahda caught sight of someone emerging from the Turkish restaurant on the other side of the car park. He was a large man with a big stomach, balding and heavily bearded, a person who stood out instantly. David noticed an immediate change in Fahda’s demeanour. It was obvious the men had a history.
‘Who’s that?’ David asked. ‘Is there a problem?’
Fahda said nothing. He brushed past David and walked towards the bearded man, meeting him in the middle of the car park. They had never met, had never even seen each other, yet somehow the penny had just dropped for them both. The bearded man spoke first.
‘Is your name Mohammed Fahda?’ he asked.
Fahda nodded.
‘I’m Abdul Darwiche,’ he said.
To Fahda this was no coincidence. This was fate, the hand of god himself. For years he had been promising to avenge his brother Ahmad’s murder, which he still firmly believed had been orchestrated by Adnan Darwiche, despite the fact he had been acquitted by a jury of soliciting the muder. Fahda had tried and failed to shoot a member of the Darwiche family at the Titanic Café in Bankstown two and a half years earlier. Now, his thirst for payback still not settled, Fahda saw his destiny before him: he had a gun, he was in front of a Darwiche and, of all the places, he was standing in a petrol station, just like the one where his own brother had been slain.
David was standing next to Fahda’s silver Honda CRV and watched as Fahda turned around from the centre of the car park and walked quickly back to where they had been standing.
As he got closer he started speaking to David, warning him. ‘Walk away,’ he said. ‘Get away, walk away.’
‘What do you mean?’ David asked. ‘Where are we going?’
Fahda said nothing as he jumped into the driver’s seat of his Honda. Across the car park, where Abdul had been standing, a group of women and children emerged from the Turkish restaurant. Abdul shouted out to them to get back inside. There was an urgency to his voice that his wife, Lisa, couldn’t comprehend at first. A few moments earlier everything had been fine; they’d paid for lunch and planned to head home for the afternoon. Now, seemingly from nowhere, he was telling her to get back inside.
‘It’s a Fahda!’ he shouted to her. She looked across the car park and saw a car: inside it was a man with a black mullet. He reached over to the glove compartment and pulled out something that looked like a gun. The kids were running around between the cars, unaware of the imminent danger taking shape. Lisa bundled them inside the Subway restaurant with Abdul’s sister-in-law and rushed to the front counter, telling the attendant to call the police.
Witnesses saw Fahda and Darwiche in a stalemate. Both men were in their cars at the exit to the car park, Darwiche’s Mitsubishi Triton 4WD in front. Fahda emerged from his car and started walking towards Darwiche’s car, pulling a gun from the front of his pants. At Darwiche’s passenger side door he started firing through the window, laughing according to some witnesses, and squeezing the trigger, only stopping when the magazine was empty. Twelve cartridge cases lay in the driveway.
At the sound of the gunfire, Lisa ran into the car park from the Subway restaurant, just in time to see her husband’s car rolling forward off the driveway. Fahda’s car could be seen disappearing down Miller Road, a side street running perpendicular to the Hume Highway. Darwiche’s car had picked up a good speed and it looked at first as if he was trying to escape the gunshots. Lisa watched as it continued across the road, hurtling over a median strip, another lane of traffic and then crashing into a tree where it finally stopped. A man rushed over to feel Darwiche’s neck for a pulse. Lisa was there too, trying to get inside the car to her husband; his door was jammed shut by the tree. The man said he could feel a heartbeat and Lisa screamed for an ambulance, waving one down on arrival a few minutes later. Police swarmed on the area, blocking off several road lanes with traffic cones and crime scene tape. Officers were given frantic explanations about what happened.
Inside the Subway restaurant, Constable Melina Jeffrey, an officer from Bankstown Local Area Command, rushed to get pieces of paper and pens to the children, asking them to write down and draw what they had seen. The kids had surrounded her, all talking and yelling at the same time. ‘He had a gun,’ said one child. ‘He was laughing when he was shooting my dad,’ said another. A series of sad drawings were handed back to her a few minutes later, each one depicting a stick figure holding a gun. In one picture, an arrow pointed from the gun to a sentence written in a child’s handwriting: ‘I am a bad man.’
The investigation kicked into full swing as more police arrived. A crime scene officer lifted fingerprints from Abdul Darwiche’s car as well as from the fridge in the service station, where Blackie Fahda had been looking for an ice cream earlier while waiting for David to arrive. Another officer photographed and bagged the cartridge casings found in the car park driveway. Uniformed officers took statements from people who had been at the service station filling their cars up with petrol, a worker in the discount chemist stocking toilet paper in the window, and waitstaff in the Turkish restaurant who’d just finished serving the Darwiche family.
At 4:09pm, roughly forty minutes after the shooting, the NSW Police Force issued a press release with anodyne details about what had happened. ‘A number of shots were discharged in the vicinity of Miller Road, hitting a male driver,’ the release said. ‘Emergency services attended and a deceased male was located. Police would like to speak with the occupants of a silver Honda CRV seen driving in a northerly direction on Miller Road shortly after the incident.’
> The press release seemed to mask the significance of what had happened, but, more importantly, it said nothing about who was involved. The gravity of the situation became slightly clearer when Detective Inspector Ian Pryde, the crime manager at Bankstown Police Station, told a radio station that evening: ‘I would call for calm.’
Within an hour of the news breaking, dozens of men converged on the crime scene with some trying to break through the police cordon. Abdul Darwiche’s body was still inside his car, which was covered with a tarpaulin. His brothers – Albert, Michael and Mohamed – had been taken to the Banksia Motel a few metres away for a briefing with police. By then, CCTV footage from the service station had been given to the cops: it showed images of an unshaven man with a distinctive black mullet milling about in the area of the car park in the minutes leading up to the attack. An officer took a photograph of the CCTV footage and showed it to several colleagues on his phone – the man was immediately recognised as Mohammed ‘Blackie’ Fahda. Only two weeks earlier, two officers had pointed capsicum spray in his direction as he approached them with his chest out, aggressively, after having his car pulled over in Lakemba.
Heavy rain began falling just after 7pm as Albert and Michael Darwiche approached the police cordon. An officer wearing a raincoat noted their names in the crime scene log and then lifted the police tape high enough so they could duck underneath it. They were ushered towards their brother Abdul’s body, still inside his Mitsubishi Triton. Afterwards they walked back to the Banksia Motel where the rest of the immediate Darwiche family were waiting with police.
Senior officers, having been alerted to the shooting, had gathered with the family to find out why Abdul had been killed. Why now, they wondered. Why like this? What motive was there for his slaying? Their expectation was for a full-scale war to erupt, and complicating matters were the long-standing tensions between the Darwiche family and the police as an organisation.
Abdul’s brothers had little information to give them. They had no idea why he’d been targeted so suddenly, and in such a random location. Their fear was the attack had been planned, meaning the assailants might target them, or their young families, next.
Ken McKay was in the motel that evening, listening to the Darwiche family’s concerns. He had come to the scene not as the commander of MEOCS but in his new role as the director of organised crime for the NSW Police Force, a position that oversaw not one but six major crime squads, including MEOCS.
McKay’s replacement at MEOCS was Detective Superintendent Deborah ‘Deb’ Wallace, a radiant and breezy personality, a commander who wore heels and bright suits to the office. She had been responsible for dismantling the big Asian street gangs of the mid 1990s, crews like 5T that dominated and fuelled the heroin boom. Top gang figures took a shine to her; she had an ability to charm and disarm with a soft word, a sly wink, and earned herself a nickname from them: ‘the Smiling Assassin’.
After McKay was promoted, Wallace had had some reservations about applying for his vacant position at MEOCS. For starters, she’d never worked with Middle Eastern gangs. It was also a male-dominated environment. McKay had left the Squad with a folk-hero status and Wallace was unsure if she was the right fit to fill those shoes.
This is what she told David Hudson, the commander of the State Crime Command, when she asked if he thought she was capable of doing the job. A number of others had already been suggested for the position, experienced hands with the backing of deputy commissioners but with little background in organised crime. Ultimately it was Hudson’s decision and he didn’t rate any of the suggestions made to him so far – but he considered Wallace one of his most experienced superintendents. Breaking up gangs had been at the centre of her career; they weren’t Middle Eastern, but the adjustment would be swift. Hudson’s answer chased away any doubts in her mind. ‘If you want MEOCS, you’ve got it,’ he said to her.
Wallace began her tenure on 2 December 2008 – three months before Abdul Darwiche’s murder – and was immediately struck by the stark cultural differences between the Asian and Middle Eastern crime figures.
The Vietnamese gang members she’d busted had tended to be first-generation criminals. They had come to Australia speaking no English and possessing few skills. The drug dealing and standover was a short-term solution, a way out of poverty. It was never a vocation and they were remarkably philosophical about their circumstances – they didn’t blame the police or the system for their criminality. Instead, and this was often repeated to Wallace, they saw their paths playing out in a fatalistic way: either they would be killed, imprisoned or, if they were lucky, grow up and grow out of crime altogether.
The Middle Eastern criminals Wallace was seeing seemed to come at crime from a different mindset. They were stuck in a bleak cycle. Crime wasn’t a way out of poverty but rather a career and a trade skill, something handed down from one generation to the next. There were whole families of criminals, parents and children; the kids were Australian-born, had access to schooling, spoke fluent English and, theoretically, had bright futures in front of them. They had opportunities for apprenticeships, TAFE courses and university degrees, and yet these first-world advantages were being routinely squandered, whether by the lure of fast money, or as the result of poor parenting or peer pressure – or maybe all three, Wallace could never be sure. Very few targets appeared to grow up and grow out, as the Vietnamese crims had done, or evolve like the Chinese, who went from stabbings and standover in Chinatown to commercial drug importations; their sophisticated ventures were so slick and well organised that most went largely undetected. In Middle Eastern organised crime Wallace saw flashbacks to that early 1990s era. Petty disputes were still being settled via shootings in public places as well as violence that was so public and obvious that it drew the attention of police. This had gone on for at least a decade. The time for change was due, but by the end of 2008 when she took over the job as MEOCS commander, it still hadn’t come and wasn’t even close.
It was around this time that another tectonic movement took place within the Squad: David Adney was leaving his role as TAG commander. He took a job as a crime manager working at Kogarah Police Station in the hope of enjoying the slower pace of suburban police life. It didn’t last long. Within a few months, following a fatal brawl between members of the Comancheros and Hells Angels outlaw motorcycle gangs in the arrivals hall at Sydney’s domestic airport, he was back in charge of another discrete unit at the State Crime Command, Strike Force Raptor; it was a proactive division of the Gangs Squad that in many ways was modelled on the work of MEOCS TAG and its predecessor at Task Force Gain.
Into Adney’s place stepped Mick Ryan, the veteran investigator who gave the Squad’s induction speech on the day it formed. He transferred into the role after a brief hiatus working at the Child Abuse and Sex Crimes Squad where he dealt with horrific and sadistic criminality, much worse than anything he’d encountered in the realm of organised crime. For that reason alone, he was glad to be back.
Ryan was a different style of detective to Adney. The way Ryan saw things, the TAG office needed to be a training ground for the CI teams on Level Three, an incubator where detectives could be cultivated for long-term investigations. In Ryan’s mind, there had been too many short-term missions and not enough syndicate-busting strike forces. Over the subsequent months, Ryan steered his team in that direction.
On the afternoon of Abdul Darwiche’s murder, Wallace received a phone call from David Hudson, the commander of the State Crime Command. He wanted to know what strategy was in place to prevent any further shootings. The murder itself, and locating Mohammed ‘Blackie’ Fahda, was a job for the Homicide Squad, but the job of preventing what was expected to be further bloodshed between the Darwiche and Fahda families fell squarely with MEOCS, he said.
In response to the call, Wallace ordered the formation of a rapid, proactive strike force that would essentially be a surveillance operation on the Darwiche family, a watch-and-see to intercept any poten
tial attack of retribution. The MEOCS experience and incoming intelligence suggested the Darwiche family would have to stage a reprisal attack. Not to do so, some officers strongly believed, would result in a loss of face in the community.
As it stood, the Darwiche family’s relationship with the police was already strained. Adnan’s war with the Razzaks had brought them under intense scrutiny: their cars had been stopped and their homes had been raided on account of the feuding. Abdul Darwiche himself had his own potted history with the law. In 2005 he was charged alongside his brother Adnan with the attempted murder of Farouk ‘Frank’ Razzak at a house in Punchbowl. Farouk, the Razzak family’s patriarch, had seen two men standing under a street light holding military-style rifles across the road from his house just before a volley of shots was fired towards him. In court, defence lawyers picked apart Farouk’s evidence that he’d seen Adnan and Abdul holding the weapons, identifying inconsistencies that painted him as a liar. Abdul was acquitted by the jury in 2005 but Adnan was convicted in a separate trial a year later. The big difference between the two cases was the evidence of Khaled ‘Crazy’ Taleb, who by the time Adnan went on trial had been signed up as a star police witness – none of Taleb’s evidence was heard during Abdul’s trial and some police believe this is the reason he was acquitted. They continued their investigations into him in the years that followed.
He was placed under investigation for drug supply and in 2007 was refused a tow truck driver’s certificate based on a MEOCS assessment of his character. The assessment, written by Mick Ryan, said that Abdul had assumed his brother Adnan’s place in maintaining ‘drug distribution networks in the south west of Sydney’ and was seeking the tow truck driver’s certificate to ‘legitimise his activities’.