by Yoni Bashan
As a result of these changes, most police commands across New South Wales saw a significant drop in the number of raids being carried out. Approval times blew out from hours to days, to sometimes weeks, which impacted severely on some cases. There were instances where detectives would arrive at a house only to find the evidence they had been seeking wasn’t there anymore. Too much time had elapsed – the guns or the drugs they’d been told about on Monday had been moved by Friday. At the time of writing, the Force is still adjusting to this overhaul of search warrant procedures.
What was certain was that the raid at Cairds Avenue, Bankstown, had marked a monumental shift, one from which the NSW Police Force would never return. If its lasting legacy is a safer environment for officers, then few can argue with that.
EPILOGUE
The years after the death of Crews saw a rise in gun crime, public place shootings and an even stronger synergy between Middle Eastern criminals and outlaw motorcycle gangs. By 2012 the Squad’s work had become enmeshed with that of the Gangs Squad, both sharing crossover targets and strike forces as biker gangs increased their recruitment of MEOC figures.
As a result, gangs went to war, dominating headlines and prompting numerous investigations. Strike Force Felix worked the Hells Angels City Chapter in their war with the Nomads. Then came Strike Force Kinnarra, a Gangs Squad investigation staffed with MEOCS detectives. These cases were both the same old story: two gangs, a turf dispute, a series of shootings too hard to solve, and the perpetrators eventually in prison for drug offences.
Newspaper headlines depicted Sydney as being awash with illegal firearms, either imported from overseas or stolen from legitimate owners. Crackdowns followed, weapons were seized, and the price of guns soared. The economics seemed reasonable enough: it was basic supply and demand.
In response, arms dealers got creative, recruiting backyard machinists to manufacture their own weapons capable of holding extended magazines and shooting on automatic fire. For some this became a big business.
Take, for example, the case of Paul Francis. A 55-year-old fitter and turner, Francis had previously held a firearms licence, had no criminal record and lived in a house at Greystanes with a shed out the back. Inside the shed was an industrial-sized lathe that he used to make handguns and rifles, beautifully crafted weapons fitted with spotting scopes, tactical lights and front grips. It was clear Francis took pride in his work.
‘I built this from scratch,’ he told two undercover officers from Strike Force Centre who were posing as enthusiasts. They had met him over the internet, contacting him seemingly out of nowhere. Francis later fired one of the guns in front of them to show that it worked. It was a tense moment for everyone involved, including the backup police team listening nearby; had they known shots would be fired they would probably not have sent in undercover officers. Three months later when MEOCS detectives arrived with a search warrant, Francis fainted. He pleaded guilty to his charges and was sentenced to less than four years in prison.
The Squad’s ten-year anniversary fell on 1 May 2016, and in the decade since its formation there has been little adjustment to its underlying mission statement. While the problem of Middle Eastern organised crime is no longer treated with the same urgency as it once might have garnered, it continues to be a principal driver of specialist police work. Not much has changed since 2006.
The number of MEOC targets operating in the community hasn’t decreased. Some first cropped up on police running sheets during the late 1990s and are still carrying on their criminal tradecraft. Others are new names, second-generation criminals, up-and-comers lured by the wealth promised through the drug game or the sense of identity and belonging provided by gang membership. In that sense, even less has changed, though more broadly the face of ethnic-based crime, particularly Asian crime, has undergone an evolution.
Asian organised crime once operated under the banner of large gangs. These were groups with names like Big Circle, 14K and Singh Ma. It has since abandoned this structure and corporatised itself into smaller, sleeker groups. Ex-members of these crews still operate in the world of organised crime but are no longer confined by cultural barriers. They work with criminals outside their ethnic circle to achieve their aims. The result has been a far more sophisticated and discreet form of crime, focused less on petty drug runs, turf, distribution and extortion of businesses, and more on large-scale drug importations that, when successful, deliver multimillion-dollar profits. Any violence carried out is also discreet. Houses don’t get shot up, and people don’t get publicly slain – they simply vanish, their names going into a special file at the Homicide Squad marked ‘missing, presumed dead’.
The syndicates involved in these imports, unlike outlaw motorcycle gangs or Middle Eastern street groups, work under no banner. They can be a seemingly random selection of individuals and criminal contacts who come together and then disappear as quickly as they formed once the drugs arrive in the country. ‘You might have someone from the Italian mafia, someone from Lone Wolf, someone from Hells Angels, and an Asian triad all working together to get a couple of hundred kilograms of drug into Australia,’ Scott Cook, the head of the Organised Crime Targeting Squad, told me during an interview. If there was any proof of the changing nature of organised crime it’s the fact that Cook was, until recently, the head of the Asian Crime Squad, which operated alongside the Gangs Squad and MEOCS. Today, it no longer exists. The decision to disband it was not made lightly, but Cook himself told me that there were certain realities at play. ‘There’s no more cultural boundaries,’ he said. While Middle Eastern organised crime has never been strictly governed by cultural boundaries, the issues of culture, religion and ideology have been earmarked as key for the future.
In a conceptual sense, Middle Eastern organised crime resembles a bratty child: it’s loud, kind of stupid, and always seeks attention. The feuds are petty and immature. Its perpetrators revel in notoriety and don’t mind being named in the newspapers, seeing this as a channel of building their own status and reputation; it is, in some ways, an honour to be notorious. But beneath this facade are more meaningful traits: a need to belong, a need to be accepted. This, however, is not confined to criminals in the Middle Eastern community. Warren Gray, a state manager with the Australian Crime Commission, told me that most gang members across the spectrum come from torn family backgrounds and carry sad stories of rejection from childhood. Some have tried out for the army or a state police force in order to find a sense of order, structure and belonging. Criminal histories make such career paths near impossible. ‘One guy told me that he tried out for the army, then the cops,’ Gray explained to me. ‘Both rejected him, so he went and joined a bikie gang.’
Today, however, a new challenge presents itself for law enforcement. Socio-economic factors, technology and geopolitical events taking place overseas are resulting in a new breed of criminal who will forgo the membership of an organised crime group for a different kind of social circle. ‘What we’re seeing now is a whole group not just wanting to join a gang, but wanting to join a radicalised group,’ Deb Wallace told me.
The clearest example of this took place in December 2015 when fifteen-year-old school student Farhad Jabar put on flowing black robes and paced up and down outside the NSW Police Headquarters in Parramatta, before aiming a gun at a civilian staff member, Curtis Cheng, and shooting him point blank in the back of the head. Security officers quickly mobilised at the sound of the gunfire and shot Jabar dead on site. At the time of writing, the investigation into the murder and events leading up to it had established that Jabar was recruited by a group of older and similarly radicalised youths, some of whom had already been under investigation by counter terrorism agencies. Police believe members of this group were responsible for sourcing the firearm and giving it to Jabar, having first obtained it from a well-known Middle Eastern organised crime family – the Merrylands-based Alameddine group, several of whose members had been long-standing figures on the MEOCS radar.
For law enforcement officials the case seemed to prove several key points. Firstly, there were links between the worlds of organised crime and terrorism. Secondly, that perpetrators of extremist violence were not necessarily entrenched criminal targets with long criminal histories (Jabar had been unheard of prior to the shooting). And thirdly, the shooting seemed to confirm police suspicions that religious extremism had become its own type of banner and lure into organised crime, one that could give disaffected, vulnerable people a sense of identity, status, structure and belonging – similar to outlaw motorcycle gangs. The ongoing concern for law enforcement is that future recruits to these gangs will continue to be young and impressionable teenagers. And without established criminal records, or a known profile with police, the challenge of interrupting this new breed of target will increase.
It is for this reason, among many others, that Detective Superintendent Peter McErlain, the current boss of MEOCS, says the Squad must continue to exist. It still has important work to do, and the workload is increasing.
McErlain told me that when the Squad first started the vast majority of crime was geographically concentrated in southwestern Sydney, almost as though an invisible border had been created from Burwood to Greystanes down to Green Valley and back to Lakemba, making it easy for officers to find their targets and monitor their movements. But the situation has changed. Investigations are taking officers into regional parts of NSW where drug labs have been set up in difficult-to-reach locations. Cases are multi-jurisdictional, requiring the co-operation of police in Queensland or Western Australia, the Australian Federal Police, the Australian Taxation Office and even partner agencies overseas. The Squad has closer working relations with ASIO and the Counter Terrorism Squad; it’s a new and fluid area of complexity, both sides exchanging intelligence on targets.
But if there’s one area that constantly being improved and sharpened it’s the co-operation and support of the Middle Eastern community. Ever since the Squad started, it has weathered accusations of racial bias and unfair profiling, a charge its officers have worked constantly to annul. At a corporate level this was always rebuffed – the Squad targeted criminals, not ordinary members of the community. But on the streets that didn’t wash. Officers had to find their own way of dealing with the race card, or what Ken McKay would term the ‘Ace of Race’.
Generally the community supports the work that MEOCS is doing, McErlain told me, who receives feedback through various channels – mainly community leaders and victims of crime. For some, the MEOCS brand has become a source of comfort rather than threat. But this mission remains a work in progress.
In July 2015, mourners gathered at Rookwood Cemetary for the funeral of Hedi Ayoub. Ayoub’s coffin was wrapped in black plastic, and it had white bricks placed on each corner. Dozens of men packed together around the open gravesite, standing, crouching, jostling each other for space, some holding telephones and filming. Mohammad Hoblos, a religious leader of the Muslim community spoke to the mourners, his speaking style a mix of Koranic philosophy and street slang. Using words like ‘mad’ and ‘hectic’, it was a fresh take on the speeches of traditional religious preachers. Hoblos told them he was frustrated that funeral attendance had become trendy, a place to be seen.
‘I’m starting to see a lot of regular faces at this place,’ he told the gathering. He asked them what they had learned since their last visit, and why they bothered to even show up.
Ayoub, twenty-two, a body builder, had been shot dead in a children’s playground at Punchbowl during daylight hours. His body was found bullet-ridden and slumped against a tree, another victim of apparent gang activity in southwestern Sydney’s Middle Eastern community.
There had been several other funerals just like this one, Hoblos told the crowd, each one attracting large numbers of young men, many of whom show up for the voyeurism, to film the grave and post it online later in a kind of perfunctory attempt to appear virtuous. Few people, he said, were actually heeding the messages from the funerals they had come to witness: that life is precious; that material wealth, and their aspirations for it – a thin reference to the promises of gang life – were meaningless.
‘What good is a house to this brother?’ Hoblos said, pointing to Ayoub’s casket. He was exasperated and nearly shouting. ‘What good is all the money in the world to this brother? What good is an AMG or a Lambo? What use is that to him? What good is a six-foot-two blonde?
‘It’s of no benefit now – granite bench tops, timber bench tops, ensuite, not ensuite, is it a double-storey, is it a split level … this is of no benefit.’ He clapped his hands together as if cleaning dust from them.
The crowd was silent, most of the men looked down sullenly, as if in shame.
‘It’s all a dream,’ Hoblos said. ‘And to believe in the dream you have to be asleep.
‘My brothers, life is not a joke. You could be living in a mansion, [but] this is where you’re coming. This is the real home,’ he said, pointing back at the grave. ‘No ensuites here. No granite benchtops here. No women in there, brother. You’re alone. That’s the reality of life, here in this hole. When are we going to change our life? Do you not see what’s happening in the community?’
But even as he spoke, Hoblos noticed some in the crowd were growing weary, already bored and checking their phones.
For them, this was all routine. People in the game get killed – it’s a fact. You show up at the funeral, pay your respects, grab some lunch with the boys and then it’s back to the dream, or the chase for it anyway. It takes a jolt to the system to interrupt this cycle, to wake up. Hoblos said death is one way, but there are others.
A strong hand at home is one. A brush with the law is another.
PHOTO SECTION
The house at 5 Lawford Street, Greenacre, where Ziad ‘Ziggy’ Razzak and Mervat ‘Melissa’ Nemra were murdered on 14 October 2003. They were killed when gunmen fired ninety-nine bullets at the house. Police later determined that seventy-five rounds struck or penetrated the front wall, windows and awnings of the property.
A mugshot photograph of Ziad ‘Ziggy’ Razzak. He and his brother Gehad were former drug runners for Adnan ‘Eddie’ Darwiche during the late 1990s. Both fell out with him and went on to start their own syndicate based at Hurstville.
A rare mugshot photograph of Adnan ‘Eddie’ Darwiche, the man serving twin life sentences over the Lawford Street murders. It was Darwiche’s on-and-off feud with the Razzak family between 1998 and 2003 that became pivotal to the formation of Task Force Gain.
Ali Abdul-Razzak (pictured) married Adnan Darwiche’s sister, Khadije, in 1990. Following years of abuse, their divorce was confirmed under Islamic law in 2002. According to police, this abusive marriage was one of several key factors driving the animosity between Adnan Darwiche and the Razzak family. Ali was murdered outside Lakemba Mosque on 29 August 2003. Adnan was charged over the murder, but the jury was deadlocked on a verdict and he was later discharged.
Dave ‘Robbo’ Roberts, one of the most feared and respected detectives to work at the Middle Eastern Organised Crime Squad. A keen fighter, he took up professional boxing while off-duty from police work.
MEOCS TAG Detective Ryan Jeffcoat arresting Telopea Street kingpin Shadi Derbas, a pioneer of the local drug trade, on 23 November 2008. (Gordon McComiskie/Newspix)
Detective Inspector Mick Ryan, best known by the nickname ‘Dirty Harry’, scrutinising a piece of bagged evidence found during a search of Telopea Street in March 2000. Ryan was one of several experts on organised crime recruited to MEOCS CI in its earliest days. In 2009, he was the commander of the Squad’s Target Action Group. (Noel Kessel/Newspix)
Detective Senior Constable Mark Wakeham standing proudly with the M72 rocket launcher that he and his colleagues secretly recovered from Adnan Darwiche in September 2006 as part of Strike Force Torpy. The MEOCS detectives had entered into confidential negotiations with Darwiche over the weapon while he awaited sentence over the 2003 Lawfo
rd Street murders.
A close-up of the rocket launcher, a ‘white whale’ that most cops thought would never be found. Helpfully printed on the far right-hand side of the rocket launcher are instructions and small illustrations to assist anyone trying to arm it for use.
Ken ‘Slasher’ McKay, the inaugural commander of MEOCS. McKay was a man of the old school, a problem solver who ran his Squad like a football team – combining strategy with flair. He landed the position after commanding the police response to the Cronulla Riots, and was in charge from May 2006 until December 2008. (Marc McCormack/Newspix)
Telopea Street, Punchbowl, was a no-go zone for police during the late 1990s. (Marc McCormack/Newspix)
Mohamad ‘Bruce’ Fahda was a primary target of Strike Force Kirban, an investigation into drug supply on Telopea Street, Punchbowl. Already on parole, he was found guilty of drug supply and sentenced to a minimum twenty-two months in prison. The investigation was prompted by a shoot-out between Fahda and his cousin Mohammed ‘Blackie’ Fahda.
A mugshot photograph of Bassam Hamzy, the criminal mastermind who led a drug empire from his segregated, maximum security cell at Lithgow Correctional Centre.
Detective Inspector Angelo Memmolo, the team leader at MEOCS Criminal Investigation (CI) who led the enormous investigation into Bassam Hamzy and his family. (Stephen Cooper/Newspix)
The Hungarian-made handgun found in a washing machine by MEOCS TAG detectives at a drug den linked to crime figure Riad Taha.
The shotgun (TOP) used by Ano Edison to rip off $28,000 in police buy-money (CENTRE) from an undercover operative during a controlled operation to buy 2000 MDMA pills. A still from a covert police camera (ABOVE) shows tactical police surrounding the getaway car.