by Yoni Bashan
He has since been released on parole and gone on to reinvent himself as a cage fighter, telling a newspaper in 2016 of his struggle to find contenders, based on his reputation: ‘I have had heaps of fights lined up, but they all pulled out after Googling me.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
GANGS OF AUBURN
Late one night in the spring of 2009 the glass entry to Auburn Base Hospital slid open to reveal Manih Zaoud at the entrance. A nurse took one look at him and rushed over with a stretcher. His arms were draped around two friends and he was staggering inside with a gunshot wound to his chest.
Within minutes, two local officers had arrived at the hospital – standard protocol states that police get called for anyone presenting with gunshot wounds. They stood at Zaoud’s bedside once he was out of surgery, under no false illusions that he would actually speak to them. Barely into his twenties, Zaoud was a member of one of Auburn’s most prominent families and was, along with his brothers, a senior figure of the Muslim Brotherhood Movement. They were a street crew dominating in the area, one that acted as a feeder group to the Bandidos outlaw motorcycle gang, providing fresh blood to its ranks. When the officers asked Zaoud what had happened, he just shook his head; another unco-operative victim.
This had become a common theme in Auburn. Gunshots rang out, people got hurt, and no one saw anything. Problems were sorted in-house, handled between families. Officers would turn up to the hospital and hear the same excuse each time: ‘I was jogging in a park and I just felt something sting my leg. Didn’t see anything.’
By 2009, Auburn had become a classic MEOC enclave swarming with gang activity, much like the no-go zone of Telopea Street, Punchbowl, had been before it. Union Road was notorious, a street where police had to abide by a separate set of operating procedures. Police cars had been smashed with rocks. House bricks and full cans of soft drink were thrown from behind the walls of houses. Officers were told not to drive along the street without heavy backup.
Two streets over was Pine Road, home of the Dib family. Their house had been shot up almost as many times as it had been raided. An ugly brick wall had been built around it to keep the bullets out. They had two sons, both influential characters in the area. One of them, Mahmoud Dib, was a senior member of the Bandidos Parramatta Chapter, its sergeant-at-arms no less.
Over the years, several gangs had planted their flag over the area, but in 2009 it was the Bandidos who carried the numbers. The suburb was a cauldron of hostility and mixed allegiances: there were members of the gang living alongside freshly recruited members of Notorious, the street crew founded by Michael Ibrahim. There were Hells Angels living on Norval Street and Comancheros on Albert Street. Added to this powderkeg were several prominent crime families: the Hamzys lived in Auburn, as did the Kalaches.
The result was an area that led an evolutionary trend sweeping through Sydney’s underworld: the union of Middle Eastern criminals and outlaw motorcycle gangs. Jacked up on steroids and unfazed about squeezing a trigger, Middle Eastern criminals were the perfect recruits for gangs trying to bolster their numbers. They were reckless hotheads who taunted rivals and didn’t suffer the consequences. A gang stacked with Middle Eastern crime figures was a gang at war with something. They picked fights and wrested back drug turf. But they came with perks, acting like ambassadors to local crime families that controlled territory and wielded power. Eventually, someone put two and two together: the gangs had the drugs and the families had the turf. Combining both was a marriage of convenience, much like what the institution was first created for, a merger designed to set down roots, increase business opportunities, grab land and maximise wealth. And that’s what happened: the gangs got their territory and, in return, the families got an army.
The Muslim Brotherhood Movement (MBM) worked within this environment, recruiting from a pool of impressionable young people who worked out in the gyms and hung out in cafés. The four Zaoud brothers were the shotcallers of this crew, their central meeting place a converted pool hall on Auburn’s Cumberland Road, the Rolling 8-Ball café. MEOCS detectives and local police had kept this café under close surveillance since it opened, about a month before Manih Zaoud was shot on 7 September. The site had previously been known as the House of Pain gym and owned by the Kalache family. Police intelligence suggested the café was a front, its name a not-so-subtle hint at the trade taking place inside – an eight-ball being the street reference to one-eighth of an ounce of cocaine, or 3.5 grams. When the café was raided in the same year it opened, a bag of ecstasy pills was discovered behind the counter. The owner of the pills, however, was not identified.
To Deb Wallace, the Commander of MEOCS, the MBM were a ragtag bunch, a disorganised rabble, poorly led and lacking a hierarchy or any sense of discipline. They stood for nothing. Even the gang’s name was a rip-off, stolen from a political movement based in the Middle East. But even though it lacked a direction, the shooting of Manih Zaoud presented a challenge for law enforcement. As a figurehead of the street gang, the expectation was that Zaoud would recover from his injuries and then mount a reprisal attack on the man who had shot him. It’s an old adage at MEOCS, one of many: today’s victim is tomorrow’s shooter. The priority was to prevent more violence.
The case fell to Detective Senior Sergeant Paul O’Neill, a team leader in the TAG office. O’Neill was a natural at procuring informants, one of the best. He studied Arabic in his spare time and was someone who could keep criminals talking for hours until they were admitting things even he was surprised to hear: how powerless they felt on the streets; the arrogance of young gang members; the lack of respect for the older generation.
O’Neill had street assets all over Auburn – ‘the hood mail’ as it was known around the office – and within a few phone calls he knew everything he needed to know about the Zaoud shooting. It was over a car, a deal that went sour. Zaoud had been the buyer. Negotiations broke down and, for reasons best known to the seller – another MEOC identity in the area – a gun was pulled and pointed at Zaoud. He took one in the chest while the man standing next to him came under fire, emerging uninjured. That man was Rabii Kalache, one of the strongmen of Auburn, barely a year out of prison after fifteen years in maximum security. O’Neill could see this was still going to be a big problem. Shooting Manih Zaoud was one thing, but taking on a Kalache was probably worse.
The gunman went underground almost immediately; even he knew he was in trouble. He was a marked man and everyone in Auburn knew it. O’Neill went into damage control to try to find him, visiting his friends and relatives. O’Neill didn’t want to arrest him, he wanted to warn him – there was a duty of care at play. Sure, the gunman had shot a man but the need to prevent a homicide took precedence.
Most of the man’s relatives slammed the door in O’Neill’s face. They didn’t trust the police at the best of times. Behind the scenes he worked the phones trying to get in contact with the gunman, calling around, looking for phone numbers, trying to reach people who could get a message to him in hiding. Squad cars were stationed outside his family’s home to ensure the people inside didn’t become collateral damage. Within a day more intelligence had come through about the retribution: the gun that would be used in the attack was being hidden in a house on Cumberland Road, across the road from the Rolling 8-Ball café. An emergency search warrant followed to search the house in the late afternoon of 9 September, a move that risked raising the ire of the local community – it was the middle of Ramadan and the execution was slated for 6pm, right smack in the middle of the time families would be breaking their fast.
For O’Neill and his superiors, the imperative to move was strong: wait until the morning and the gun could be gone. Informants were suggesting it could even be used that night. By 6pm he was standing outside a home owned by the Hadife family, a premises rated low risk on intelligence databases for any kind of assault. There were only a few reports on file for the people living inside. They were clean. A young man living there had once put hi
s feet up on a train carriage seat – that was the extent of their criminality. Across the road, more officers were preparing to raid the Rolling 8-Ball café. Above them was a PolAir chopper with a camera rolling in case the scenes got wild, which they soon did.
The café, rated as a medium risk of violence, was an easy search carried out with no issues. It was the Hadife family property which became an unlikely scene of violence. Members of the household raged against officers at their door for executing their warrant during Ramadan. A punch was thrown, cutting a senior constable’s forehead open. A woman jumped on another officer’s back. In the chaos a pulse of capsicum spray ricocheted and hit O’Neill near the eyes, turning his face a deep shade of orange.
A post on social media called for residents to gather at the scene. ‘Kefeirs raiding brother’s house, everyone get down hier!!’ the message said, using the slang word to refer to non-Muslims. About 200 people appeared, threatening to push through the perimeter created by police officers. Bottles were thrown, but no injuries were noted. Eventually, after a few hours, the crowd dispersed with the help of local leaders who called for calm.
The next day O’Neill received a phone call directly from Ken McKay asking for a report into the incident. McKay had approved the warrant, but wanted to know the reasons for the flare up. The media had taken an interest in the story and some community representatives were suggesting heavy-handedness by police. It was the Ramadan aspect that everyone was interested in, creating a hot button question for debate: should the police have raided a house while families were breaking their fast? Most commentators said yes and applauded the police for their actions.
Some said no, arguing that the move was disrespectful. It was the kind of scenario that might have been canvassed back in 2006 when MEOCS officers attended the North Cronulla Surf Club for lectures on cultural sensitivities. What most critics overlooked was the fact that inside the backroom of the Hadife property was a stolen firearm, a dirty gun that had been doing the rounds of the underworld since it had gone missing in 2003.
McKay, the newly appointed Director of Organised Crime and former MEOCS commander, was happy to speak about this thorny issue on camera. To him, it was an open-and-shut case. At a press conference, he responded stridently to the claims that police had acted insensitively. ‘A lot of people like to use excuses for their behaviour,’ he told reporters. ‘There’s a way to solve that: don’t commit crime. This is New South Wales. We have laws in this state we must all abide by and these people have to abide by the same laws.’
With the gun out of play and the risk of retribution cooling, O’Neill’s team shifted away from the reprisal attack and refocused their efforts on Rabii Kalache. This was MEOCS methodology in action: you pick up a case, you mine it for new targets and then you plough forward into the next job. Over the course of the Zaoud investigation a wealth of information had come to light suggesting Rabii Kalache had been involved in significant movements of cocaine since his release from prison, buying ounces at a time in deals worth thousands of dollars.
The Kalaches were still considered high-profile, influential and sought-after players on the MEOCS radar. While Strike Force Skelton hadn’t been successful in building a brief on any of the brothers, some of them had still been put in jail as a result of peripheral operations. Nasser Kalache, for example, had been given a four-year prison term in 2009 over a series of mortgage frauds dating back to 2003. Another brother, Bilal, was arrested at the family’s Chester Hill pizza shop, Nasr’s Gourmet Kitchen. He was wanted on outstanding warrants at the time, minor traffic matters, his arrest planned as a mini-sting.
It began with the arrival of Detective Vlad Mijok, in plain clothes, coming through the front door of the pizza shop. He approached the counter looking like any ordinary customer, but his true motive was to try to sight Bilal inside. The officers didn’t know if he would be inside or not, so the effort was something of a gamble.
Standing near the back door, in case Bilal did a runner, were Detectives Dave Roberts and Tom Howes. They had planned everything with Mijok in advance. After a few minutes, Roberts called Mijok on his mobile.
‘Did you get the special?’ he asked, a coded question. It had been agreed between the officers that if Mijok said yes then it would signal that Bilal was in the shop. Mijok kept Roberts on the line until he saw Bilal moving around the back of the pizzeria and then said yes, he’d ordered the special, which prompted all three detectives to swarm at the same time.
Bilal was a professional boxer who had fought on the undercard of an Anthony Mundine fight. His arrest turned into a struggle and ended up on the footpath outside the shop, requiring all three officers to manhandle him to the ground. A search of his pockets turned up $5000 in cash. In his underwear were nine foil packets of heroin. Later, he would plead guilty to supply charges. As he was being led to the police car, an old man working in the pizza shop’s kitchen ran outside. He was holding the pizza that Mijok had ordered; he wanted to know if any of the officers still wanted it.
With Nasser and Bilal locked up, and with Hassan Kalache still completing a 22-year sentence for murder, the opportunity to pursue a fourth Kalache brother on drug supply charges was something O’Neill found irresistible. Rabii’s methodology was similar to many drug suppliers’: he threw away his phone every two weeks and subscribed his new numbers with fake identities. A separate police squad had already been listening to Rabii’s phone calls and passed their intelligence to O’Neill, propelling his case forward and expediting the arrest. When that day came six months later, in February 2010, Rabii was relaxed and easy about the vehicle stop that saw him pulled over in a Nissan X-Trail along Cumberland road, Auburn. Cops pulled two mobile phones from his pockets along with six keys to a South Granville townhouse that had been under surveillance for months. Rabii insisted he didn’t live there, but O’Neill didn’t buy it; the Foxtel account was registered in the name of his wife. A surveillance detail had also captured him coming and going from the premises.
At the townhouse, O’Neill and his team moved through each room until they reached the bedroom upstairs. In a TV cabinet was a handgun and eighty-two rounds of ammunition. There were Medicare and student cards in Rabii’s name along with tidy bundles of cash, which were counted back at the station and totalled $135,555. The gun alone would have been enough to send Rabii back to prison, but O’Neill got his big break in the wardrobe, finding just under 150 grams of cocaine packed into resealable freezer bags. Sent for lab testing, the purity was revealed to be as high as sixty-seven per cent. Good gear, O’Neill thought, barely any jump, which meant Rabii’s supplier was probably close to the importer. Tests on one of the freezer bags gave the detective his next lead, a latent fingerprint belonging to a man living in Villawood. His name was Gehad Arja – barely any intelligence, few prior convictions. On paper, a nobody. His only brush with the law had been a drug supply charge he’d been acquitted of nearly a decade earlier after selling something to an undercover officer in Queensland. Apart from that, he was clean. O’Neill hadn’t heard of him.
Informants told a different story about Arja, talking him up as one of the biggest movers of cocaine in southwestern Sydney, an upline guy with a strictly business approach and a very low profile – he dealt to a small, trusted circle of people, drove an average-looking car, lived in an ordinary-looking house, avoided conflict, and spoke very politely to people over the phone.
If anyone had a complaint, they could contact him directly. It was said he was moving up to a kilogram of cocaine a week, an astronomical amount – something in the vicinity of $250,000 worth of product. With a fingerprint on a bag, O’Neill had found his next case – he had gone from a shooting to a drug arrest and now he was on the precipice of the rarefied atmosphere of the upline supplier.
The investigation into Arja started from scratch, a cold start. There were no sources in his group, no one who could introduce an undercover agent, and no one who could wear a body wire to record a conversation. That
meant months of work, minimum, but the rewards of success stood to be great. An informant put the challenge to O’Neill in these terms: ‘You will never get him. He’s too good.’
The investigation – Strike Force Gradwell – was launched in June 2010, sending O’Neill and his team deep into the backstreets of Villawood, the suburb where Arja’s operation appeared to be based. Aside from a fingerprint on a drug package, they had his address – a house on Alcoomie Street – and a phone number, both of which had been pulled from standard government databases. From what it looked like, he wasn’t trying to hide from anyone. Soon O’Neill was tapping into Arja’s phone calls, getting bombarded with hours of useless chatter about family affairs and events for the kids. Everything about these conversations suggested he was nothing more than an ordinary father as opposed to the cocaine king of the southwestern suburbs. It was only when O’Neill and his team started looking closer at the house on Alcoomie Street that a few anomalies emerged.
For a start, it belonged to Arja’s parents; he didn’t live there, even though he’d listed it as his residence. Surveillance was a tricky task. The house was located on a street of eyeballs, a part of Villawood known as the Bronx, which had deteriorated into back blocks of long-term unemployment and generational welfare. The street itself felt like an old village: residents were distantly related and nosey about each other’s affairs. Anything unfamiliar – a new face, a new car – came under close examination. That might sound like good old-fashioned community vigilance, but for police on observation it was a nightmare; you couldn’t put a plainclothes cop anywhere near Alcoomie Street without someone walking over to ask a few questions.