The Squad

by Yoni Bashan

  In 1996 the television program A Current Affair took a film crew to Villawood to spend time at the local housing estate. A local gang known as the Villawood Bronx Boys had apparently hijacked the premises and turned it into a hive of drug activity. Among their key members was Gehad Arja, who was interviewed at length by journalist Mike Munro and made a point of showing Munro how the housing estate was rotting with neglect. That’s why the local kids were taking up crime, he said. There were football fields with no goalposts, basketball courts with no hoops. The kids were bored, he said. ‘They put up basketball courts for us, they take them down. They put up a football field, they take it away. They put up the swings, they take them away,’ he told Munro. ‘What do you expect little kids to do? What do you expect us to do?’

  Villawood and Fairfield were Assyrian territory, areas with their own brand of extremely violent disputes and turf wars. On one side were the Bronx Boys, based in Villawood. Their rivals were the Fairfield-based Assyrian Kings, a gang whose members had been linked to the murder of a police officer in 1995 and then, much later, Dimitri Debaz, the Bronx Boys’ leader. Debaz’s killers, Raymond Youmaran and Raphael Joseph, had fled into hiding as an intense campaign of retribution played out to try to find them. People were kidnapped and tortured in a bid to pry information on the killers’ whereabouts: a man was left in a burning car with his kneecaps shot out; another was found with his face sliced open and a caustic liquid poured onto his neck. A homemade bomb filled with nails was detonated outside the Youmaran family home and police who examined the device said that if someone had been standing nearby they would have been shredded to pieces.

  Three months after starting his investigation into Gehad Arja, O’Neill had the necessary paperwork to put a covert camera somewhere near the Alcoomie Street property. This would solve his problem of how to run surveillance on the premises without getting burned by neighbours. His goal was to try to watch some of the people who he had overheard calling Arja and arranging to meet with him at his parents’ property. These meetings had all the makings of drug transactions: a car would turn up, stay a few minutes, then disappear.

  There was something about the house that had made O’Neill sit up and take notice. But as he felt his instincts gathering pace, he was coming up against an alternative force from Mick Ryan, the TAG commander. Ryan was growing impatient with the Gradwell investigation. Now into its third month, there had still been no firm evidence of any cocaine supply and while O’Neill had his suspicions, good ones, he had little else. In the meantime, the case was swallowing up staff and costing too much money in overtime. Installing cameras and listening to telephone intercepts were straining the TAG’s budget and Ryan knew that to persist would mean months of investment. He gave O’Neill a couple more weeks and said that if he didn’t get a result soon, or some type of stronger indication of supply to work with, the case would be shut down.

  Within a few months of his conversation with Mick Ryan, O’Neill had added two new people to his target list in addition to Gehad Arja. They were his older brother, Jamel Arja, and his cousin, Toufic Arja, both of whom he suspected either brought the cocaine to the Alcoomie Street property to sell to customers, or cut up the product and packaged it in the shed at the back of the house.

  Mick Ryan still grew tired of the case and came to a compromise with O’Neill. In his view, an investigation like Strike Force Gradwell needed a full-time contingent of detectives, and a lot more of them to get the job done.

  In late 2011, under an agreement between Ryan, the Squad’s commander Deb Wallace, and Detective Inspector Mark Jones, a deal was reached to have Strike Force Gradwell moved from the TAG office up to the CI floor. Mark Jones was happy to absorb the project. His team was just coming off the final stage of another matter, Strike Force Caramana, which had made phenomenal seizures – ten kilograms of methamphetamine, four kilograms of pseudoephedrine and nine million black market cigarettes – and were interested in adopting an investigation that was already up and running.

  The decision boosted O’Neill’s team, taking it from four detectives to a team of sixteen. A year later, Strike Force Gradwell was still going and had ballooned into a long-term investigation that required extensive electronic surveillance and a beefed-up staff to manage it. Detectives jokingly renamed the case ‘Strike Force Gradual’ because it had taken so long to hit its stride. Over twelve months O’Neill had placed listening devices outside the Alcoomie Street property and into a shed at the back of the house where he suspected Arja had been packaging the cocaine. He had mounted operations to put tracking devices on cars, upgraded the camera equipment that had already been installed, and eventually identified the core members of Arja’s syndicate and their modus operandi.

  Several strokes of good luck followed. On one day, detectives were listening to one of Gehad Arja’s phone calls when they heard what appeared to be a ringing sound coming from his pocket, revealing for the first time that he had a second number – a covert phone, as it’s known – that he used strictly for his cocaine supply business. The discovery, while small and a bit late to the case, led to the unravelling of Arja’s modus operandi. On his second phone, he spoke freely about his transactions.

  Arja had his own style of dealing cocaine, one that was different to most of the other suppliers that the detectives had encountered. Every four to six weeks he would pull up outside his customers’ homes and hand over a box with a brand-new mobile phone inside, a phone they could use to call him. It would only have one number programmed in its memory – Arja’s number – which similarly changed every four to six weeks. He worked with a small group of clients, no more than ten people at a time, all of whom were buying several ounces of cocaine, big amounts that cost tens of thousands of dollars. Arja used a code when they spoke, a cipher he’d invented to throw off anyone listening – ‘ounces’ were referred to as ‘sticks’, the street name used to describe a $20 deal of cannabis. For a while, as a result of this code, there were some on O’Neill’s team who became convinced the Arjas were supplying sticks of cannabis, rather than cocaine. With Arja’s covert phone being intercepted and the listening devices in place, the case began to gather the kind of momentum that started making arrests seem possible in the near future. The audio had given them vital intelligence about where the cocaine was being stored, the names of Arja’s biggest customers, the cutting agents he was using to dilute his cocaine, and other useful pieces of intelligence, like his plans to buy a pill press and potentially expand their operations.

  But there were setbacks as well – technical problems that stood to jeopardise the entire investigation. In early 2011 the covert camera filming the drug deals outside the house on Alcoomie Street lost its feed, so a support team was dispatched to try to fix the problem. As they worked on the camera as discreetly as possible, Jamel Arja, Gehad’s older brother, watched them from across the street, leaning against a car and casually smoking a cigarette.

  Something must have twigged in his mind that the work was unusual. A few minutes after the feed was restored, O’Neill watched as an unfamiliar car drove past with a ladder attached to its roof. It appeared to slow down just past the camera, which then wobbled about a minute later and abruptly stopped working again. Pieces of the camera were later found in a park nearby.

  A sardonic Gehad Arja turned up to Surry Hills Police Station a month later with a barrister in tow and a tracking device in his hand that had been found on his car. This was his way of letting the police know that he was aware of their investigation. Two uniformed officers met him in the station foyer, took the tracking device, said thank you, and then walked away without saying much more – O’Neill was watching Arja with a surveillance team nearby.

  With both the camera and the tracking device uncovered it appeared the case was finished. Arja was well and truly aware that he was being watched by detectives; why else would he turn up at a police station to personally hand back a tracking device?

  But one thing working in O’Nei
ll’s favour was Arja’s sense of arrogance. The warning signs were there for him to take, but he refused to believe the cops had his syndicate worked out. The camera had been found outside the Alcoomie Street property and, in Arja’s mind, that meant the police didn’t know about his safe house, his covert phone, his routine drop-offs and his secret codes. Let them raid the property, he must have thought. It’s a front! What are they going to find? Spoons? Bowls? Trace elements of cocaine?

  O’Neill knew that raiding the house on Alcoomie Street would amount to a waste of time, but he also knew that Arja was expecting the house to be searched; if it didn’t happen, he would query why.

  When officers arrived on 10 August 2011 they were welcomed inside and shown around, getting a tour of each room, the kitchen and even the shed at the back of the property where the Arjas routinely diluted their product. Both Gehad and Jamel cooperated fully during the search, addressing the officers as ‘sir’ and ‘gentlemen’ and answering all their questions. Gehad still claimed he was living at the property and showed officers his bedroom, which had no clothes in the cupboard.

  The raid was mostly for show. No charges were laid, but some evidence was seized – bowls, cups, spoons, digital scales, fingerprints and DNA swabs. As the police cars pulled out of the driveway the Arjas waved to the officers and told them to come back any time. A month later, the detectives came back for real. They started at Gehad’s house, arresting him and then using his phone to send a text message to his cousin Toufic. He was at his workshop in Condell Park when the message came through: ‘Someone wants to see you, how long?’ He responded, indicating he would pick up some cocaine and meet the buyer at his workshop. Officers followed him to the safe house, a two-storey home in Bass Hill, and then arrested him when he returned to the workshop. He was carrying two bags of cocaine at the time.

  When O’Neill and a team of officers raided the safe house that day it was mostly empty; he suspected that the bulk of the product had just been sold. Had the investigation moved a bit earlier, it’s likely that more cocaine would have been seized, resulting in greater sentences. All three men pleaded guilty to their charges and were out of prison within four years, which was less time than what was given to Rabii Kalache, who had been caught with a fraction of what the Arjas had supplied. O’Neill calculated that over the nine months they were under investigation, the Arjas trafficked 5.89 kilograms of cocaine.

  One reason for the low sentence was their lack of any criminal record. While the trio had been moving kilos of cocaine, which should have attracted a much longer prison term, on paper they looked like cleanskins, first-time offenders when they went before the judge. Today, all three men are no longer in prison.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  SIGNAL ONE

  It takes a tragedy to make a change. After the death of Roni Levi on Bondi Beach in 1997, the cops introduced capsicum spray to their toolkit. The fatal shootings of two policeman at Crescent Head in 1995 saw them replace their revolvers with Glocks. The Lawford Street murders brought in Task Force Gain, a reaction to an out-of-control problem with Middle Eastern organised crime in southwestern Sydney. And Cairds Avenue, Bankstown, a low-risk raid to interrupt a drug deal, would change the face of modern-day search warrants across the NSW Police Force.

  And yet it began like so many other search warrants that had come before it at MEOCS: a routine tip-off from a cultivated informant. Dave Roberts had arrested the source years earlier, and on the morning of 8 September 2010 Roberts reached out to try to glean some intelligence. About anything – that’s how the TAG detectives worked. By midday Roberts was at the wheel of an unmarked police car and the informant was sitting in the back seat next to Detective Richard McNally who was taking down notes of what the source was saying. A deal would be going down that night: six ounces (170 grams) of cocaine, a Bankstown unit block, the whole thing worth $45,600.

  Roberts turned into Cairds Avenue, Bankstown, and slowed down near a cream-brick building on the corner with Carmen Street. ‘That’s it,’ the informant said, pointing at the building. It was about four storeys high and full of apartments. Roberts studied its facade. It didn’t have the bleak look of a drug complex, like the towers of Redfern or Waterloo. There were no broken windows or shattered intercoms. Instead there were street-facing balconies, a neat lawn and a landscaped garden. It seemed like an unlikely spot to be moving such a large amount of cocaine – Bankstown Police Station was only a short walk around the corner.

  In his notebook, Detective McNally wrote down details about the dealer, an Asian-looking man, aged in his mid-fifties. His nickname was ‘Miagi’ and his deals worked like so: buyers and sellers were invited to his basement car park and placed in separate garages. Miagi played the middleman, working out prices, providing the location, and taking a cut from each sale.

  What kind of buyers are we talking about? Roberts asked.

  Serious criminals, the source said. A member of the Kalache family had been to the garage. So had members of the Hamze family.

  The source had been the upline, selling to Miagi. Two nights earlier, he had bought two ounces of cocaine, low-grade junk, barely worth the asking price of $4500. To the source’s surprise, not only did Miagi pay for it, he wanted more – another six ounces as soon as possible, which was very suspicious.

  Roberts asked why.

  The source explained that it meant Miagi was either working with the cops or about to rip off the drugs. Why else was he prepared to pay so much money for such a large amount of terrible cocaine?

  Roberts saw his point. What about guns? he asked. Have you seen any guns? Does Miagi carry?

  No, the source said, nothing like that. The question came up a few more times and the answer was always the same. McNally wrote down the word ‘Gun’ in his notepad and struck a line underneath it to emphasise that the question had been asked.

  By now it was nearly 1:30pm. Roberts dropped the source off on a street corner not far from Cairds Avenue and started driving with McNally back to MEOCS HQ. He called Mick Ryan, the TAG commander, on the way and walked him through the source’s information: a drug deal that night, six ounces of coke, $45,600 in play.

  ‘It can probably be done today,’ Roberts said to Ryan, referring to a raid. ‘Strike while the iron’s hot.’ He wanted to move that night and catch Miagi with the drugs and cash. Move too late and you run the risk of losing both, he said.

  Ryan agreed, but he generally didn’t like night raids and tried to avoid them; better they be done in the daytime, he thought. But in this case he agreed with Roberts; it was better to move sooner rather than later. Besides, he thought, Miagi wasn’t a raging Middle Eastern criminal with a gun strapped to his ankle. He was a middle-aged Asian male who, according to the informant, didn’t carry a firearm. Having a source in play was also reassuring – it meant the team would get live updates on the movements of people, the arrival of drugs, and any surprise appearance of weapons. With that in mind, Ryan gave his approval to move ahead.

  When they got back to the office, McNally pulled up a chair at his computer and started searching the COPS intelligence database for reports about the unit block at 41–43 Cairds Avenue. He wanted something to corroborate the source’s information – if drug dealing was a regular occurrence in the building’s basement car park then hopefully someone would have already made a complaint about it. And he was in luck. A week earlier a report had been filed by a Bankstown police officer, Toni McNeice, who had taken a call about drug sales in the building’s basement. McNally called her for a briefing.

  McNeice said that she’d been working at the front counter of the police station when a caller said that Middle Eastern men were turning up to the car park and buying drugs from an Asian man. They didn’t know much more about this dealer except that he lived in the building and owned a Toyota Camry.

  McNally got the phone number of the person who’d made the complaint. They were also a resident of the unit block, and he spoke to them at length about the situation
. They told him about the building’s structure, how it was a confusing series of dual entries, staircases and towers – and how people who didn’t live there could find it easy to get disorientated. The dealer himself, the man McNally knew as Miagi, was described as a ‘friendly neighbour’.

  Meanwhile, Roberts started pulling a team together. The time was approaching 3pm. He liked to use the same entry team for each of his raids; big guys who were trusted and always on game. He soon realised that Nick Glover, one of the regular detectives who was usually the first man through the door each time, had a family commitment – he would have to be replaced.

  Roberts looked around the office and spotted the newest recruit, William Crews. He was barely three weeks into the Squad but already he’d fit in fast. Everyone called him ‘Crewsy’. He’d just walked in off a nightshift installing a tracking device on a car out in Villawood, a Toyota Camry belonging to Gehad Arja, a target from one of Paul O’Neill’s investigations. Roberts asked if he’d be interested in taking Glover’s spot on the entry team and, as a sweetener, he offered Crews the position of case officer for the job, meaning he’d be in charge of running the warrant on the ground. Running a case had been something Crews had been trying to do since the first day he’d joined the Squad. In a sense, leading a warrant was a rite of passage, something symbolic. O’Neill had tried to give him the same chance a week earlier when a job to recover some stolen guns had come up, but the informant fell through and the job went with it. The raid at Cairds Avenue, Bankstown, was a chance for Crews to redeem himself and get some runs on the board.

  The story of Crews’s entry to MEOCS was in some ways an anomaly. Positions in the TAG office were rare and generally they went to officers already working in the Squad’s Uniform section. Working in Uniform was like being in a vetting system; it was a feeder group where officers could be tried out and then scouted to progress up the line to the TAG office if they had proven their mettle. Paul O’Neill had joined in this way. So had Ryan Jeffcoat, Vlad Mijok and many others. Beat cops working in police stations who applied for TAG positions were generally ranked as outsiders and told to apply for a Uniform spot first like everybody else. William Crews, one of these outsiders, barely twenty-six years old and not even three years out of the police academy, was an exception to this unofficial rule. He had come to his interview at MEOCS highly recommended – and, in a rare move, he’d been asked to apply.