Before the navy had begun seizing narcotics, the hierarchy had taken steps to ensure that sailors could safely dispose of the high-value contraband by donning protective suits and pouring it over the side of the ship. That was fine for ‘small’ quantities – a hundred kilograms here and there – but the biggest haul was the game-changer. Now, with more than a tonne of heroin to get rid of, there had to be a better method.
Navy learnt the hard way on the eve of Anzac Day in 2014.
As Darwin’s then chief boatswain (‘buffer’), Chief Petty Officer Neil Lacey, explained, ‘The hash wasn’t too bad because it’s pretty moist. It’s very hard to breathe it in. You get it on your hands, it stinks, and that’s about the end of it. But with the heroin being so pure, because it hadn’t been cut at this stage, as soon as you open the bag and ditch it, it just forms into a dust. If we were doing more than twelve knots then it would end up on the flight deck. There’d be dust everywhere, so it was very hard.’
The chain of custody is vital when it comes to narcotics. The drugs have to be recorded, weighed, photographed and tested prior to disposal.
As Darwin’s then XO, it was one of James Lawless’s jobs to process the drugs once they had left the dhow. He and two navy divers set about cutting open and shaking out more than 1000 bags of coarse powder in the desperate forty-five-degree heat. It took more than six hours standing on the steaming steel deck plates in full protective equipment including an S10 respirator (a military grade gas mask), disposable plastic overalls, gloves and boots. Dehydration and dizziness were the constant companions of the disposers as they proceeded to dissolve almost $1 billion worth of high-grade heroin in the Indian Ocean.
‘We took the bags of powder to the flight deck where they were cut open with a knife and emptied into the turbulence created by the ship’s propeller,’ Lawless recalls. ‘Unfortunately, a by-product was that occasionally the powder would get thrown up and coat us and the flight deck. It wasn’t always visible and was like a fine dusting of icing sugar. I went to the front of the flight deck to get some water and took off my mask and ingested the powder.’
After showering and changing his clothes Lawless went to the wardroom for lunch and a chat with the dive team officer who had also been on drug disposal duty.
‘I was a bit light headed and asked him how he was feeling. He said, “Fine,” and that we are just highly dehydrated,’ he says. ‘I was sitting there by myself and the engineer came and sat next to me and I remember just looking at him and grabbing his beard and making a “grr” sound at him. That is a bit out of character for me and for most XOs. There was a knock at the door and the buffer was there and he said my eyes were just pinpricks. He couldn’t get any sense out of me.’
Neil Lacey says that Lawless was definitely not himself. ‘We were supposed to do a Dawn Service for Anzac Day,’ he recalls. ‘And being the buffer, I have to talk to the XO fairly often in regards to ceremonial things. So I went to see him after they’d been ditching the heroin all day. I remember knocking on the wardroom door and he [Lawless] basically floated through the doorway and I thought he’d been on the piss, originally – and then I noticed that his pupils were just about gone.
‘I said to him, “Are you all right?” and he just made a joke and floated back into the wardroom. So I went down and said to the doc, “You might want to check out the XO.” And the next thing, we saw him in the chiefs’ mess having a urine test and [it] went off the scale for heroin. He was away with the fairies for about thirty-six hours.’
Before taking the urine test Lawless had looked in a mirror and realised something was seriously wrong. When he began stroking a female officer’s face and saying something weird and totally out of character, his shipmates also twigged that he wasn’t well and accompanied him to the sick bay.
During his thirteen-year navy career, the former Canberra boy and ADFA graduate had never acted so strangely. ‘The doctor said I had tested positive to opiates. I was incredibly tired and dozed off for the rest of the day. I was escorted to dinner and restricted until lunch time the next day.’
Fortunately, the ship’s doctor had all the necessary remedies on board, including Narcan, in case the effects had to be reversed. It was not needed. According to Terry Morrison, the ship’s doctor said Lawless’s ingestion of heroin was a relatively minor dose, similar to the effects from a large dose of Panadeine Forte.
‘But it was but still enough for us to say, “Whoa, we need to analyse this,”’ Morrison says. ‘I’d asked early on, “What sort of precautions do I take? What masks do I take?”’
From the ship he spoke to some people back in Australia to explain the new problem. ‘I described it as the dust – that it covers them with dust. Obviously, I’ve got decontamination stations, but to prevent the dust they said, “You need to put it in the water.” And I said, “Obviously, but how do I do that when there’s a five-to-six-metre drop to the water?”’
So Morrison went to the ship’s engineers and said, ‘I’ve got an engineering challenge for you. I want you to make me some sort of trough that I can pour heroin in to make it wet so that it doesn’t blow back.’
It was Chief Petty Officer Tony Walsh who came up with the original idea for a heroin disposal unit. According to Walsh, James Lawless had eyes ‘like piss holes in the snow’ when he was contaminated, so after his discussion with the boss Walsh went to sleep that night wrestling with the problem in his head.
‘The biggest thing was we had to be able to use what we had on board, which was limited,’ he says. ‘I didn’t want to go wrecking something that was new so I went and asked the buffer if he had a spare wheelie bin, and he said, “Yeah I’ve got this one here,” which I think had all the wheels broken on it, and I said “Oh, that will do.”
‘I managed to get another set of wheels for it and then I used that as basically the main bit and cut the bottom out of it. And then I came up with the idea of how I was going to dispose of it.’
Walsh’s eventual design was inspired by the concept of a water-jet eductor, to mix and dispose of solids and liquids inside a casing. He had the casing in the form of the wheelie bin, and he used galvanised steel tubing with holes drilled into it and fixed to the inside of the bin about thirty centimetres below the top, connected by a fire hose connector to a water supply. He also made a stand to hold it on the stern of the ship.
The creation took an entire day to put together. ‘I welded the pipe so it came out through a plate that was bolted to the inside of the bin and then put another plate on the outside. And then that pipe came to a fitting where the fire main connected to the top of the bin and then to the spray jet inside it.’
Unfortunately, there were no more heroin hauls in the days following so he went to the galley and asked the cooks for some flour to give it a test run.
‘I set it up at the back of the ship and poured a bag of flour down it to see how it would go and it seemed to work all right,’ he says. ‘I had to make a few modifications and just drill some more holes in it in different places and when we did get a bust and they set it up it seemed to work really well.’
Tony Walsh originally named the unit the ‘River Phoenix’ after the American actor who died from a heroin overdose. Later versions came to be called the ‘Garbinator’ and during Darwin’s 2016 deployment the ship’s chippy, Chief Andrew ‘Goonga’ Sims, further modified and improved Walsh’s invention. It then became the ‘Goonganator’.
Whatever it is called, the simple, low-cost solution has been central to the disposal of billions of dollars worth of heroin in the Indian Ocean.
‘The guys who dispose of it said it eliminated the dust factor and two people could operate at once because they could stand on either side and pour the bags in. It all just got rinsed away with the seawater over the back of the ship,’ Walsh says.
The simple invention became well known across the navy after it won a fleet safety award.
‘It was a unique solution to a known problem,’ says Mo
rrison.
Once that was sorted out, the navy wrote a standard operating procedure for disposing of narcotics.
Chief Petty Officer Neil Lacey deployed twice to the Middle East on board Darwin. He regards the 2014–15 trip as the most rewarding experience of his thirty-one-year navy career and not just because of the record drugs haul.
It is his job as the ‘buffer’ to liaise between the executive department sailors, including the boatswains, combat systems operators and communicators, and the command team, namely the XO and CO. Lacey says that navy sailors today do not deploy as often as their predecessors did, so having the opportunity to work with a group of young people who had never been at sea for seven months before was fantastic.
‘They’re all unsure of the future,’ he says. ‘They’re scared of the unknown – and then as the deployment progresses you notice [that] they’ve got confidence, they’re more interested in what they’re doing and they’re basically doing the job they joined up to do. If the ship can work well together and you’ve got that teamwork and everyone’s got trust in each other, then you can overcome basically anything, I think. Some of those boardings went for twenty-plus hours through all conditions, through the night, and unless you can rely on each other you just wouldn’t be able to achieve it.’
The buffer’s job on a warship is incredibly diverse, ranging from knowing whether there are enough life jackets to ensuring there are adequate weapons.
‘There is also a lot of stuff that we had to do on the fly,’ he says. ‘Like – when you come across six tonnes of drugs, how do you get it out of the boat and back on board the ship? The first bust we had was a couple of hundred kilos and trying to haul that up the side of the ship in mail bags was fairly hard work in the conditions.’
With experience in port services where cranes are crucial, he realised that the davit used for launching and retrieving the ship’s RHIBs could lift the cargo nets containing the narcotics. But the drugs also had to be weighed.
‘Weighing each individual bag on a set of bathroom scales just wasn’t effective, so on the next port visit we got this digital scale which we attached to the crane, and then it was just a matter of lifting the drugs out in the cargo nets, deducting the weight of the net and, bang, weighing done. So, you weren’t ginning around in the heat trying to get an accurate weight. Thinking outside the square came into it a fair bit.’
The buffer is required to do a lot of organising to bring the team together to launch and recover boats; weapons training, including live shoots; providing numbers and training for boarding parties; force protection; and moving the ship in and out of harbour.
‘You have to be able to talk to different regulators throughout the ship to get personnel from other departments and train them all to do the jobs of the Seaman Department,’ he says. ‘It takes organisational skills and being able to get on with people. If you can’t do those two things, then yeah, you struggle.’
Lacey found there was great sense of satisfaction involved in holding a $600,000 bag of heroin that was worth more than his house and watching it go over the side. ‘Oh well, that’s $600,000 you [terrorists] are not going to get, that’s not going to find its way to the streets of New York, London or Sydney, and someone’s kids are not going to be whacking all their money on this and ending up dead.’
Around this time, they had also started noticing more unusual types of vessels sailing on the smack track. The dhow from which they removed the record heroin haul on 23 and 24 April was about double the size of the smaller ‘jelbut’, or trading and fishing dhows, that they were used to seeing. This one was a ‘sambuq’, or large cargo dhow.
‘So that opened up another Pandora’s Box,’ says Morrison.
He says it was only by sheer happenstance that Darwin was the ship to snare the record haul. The Canadians had provided intelligence that the dhow was on its way down the smack track. They would have conducted the boarding themselves, but tragically they had lost a sailor overnight in Tanzania.
‘They stopped and went into mourning, to remember their shipmate who had passed away ashore,’ Morrison recalls. ‘They were just off the coast, so they got the intelligence and they passed it to us. So we went up and intercepted that guy. And we probably wouldn’t have intercepted him normally but [because] we had the intelligence that they’d given us we went, “Let’s look at this one.”’
The Australians boarded the dhow immediately, overnight, off the coast of Africa. ‘We were obviously well outside territorial waters on the high seas and well within our legal rights to do what we did.’
The heroin was packed into bags that were supposed to be carrying powdered cement, hidden underneath concrete in one area of the dhow. ‘My boarding team were able to go down and look underneath, and they saw something sticking up that got them interested and they went and looked and found the heroin.’
The drugs had been packed in one-kilogram bags labelled as either coffee or rice, bound in bundles, wrapped up together and stashed in other bags that were hidden underneath pieces of concrete. Other typical hiding places include kitchen areas or underneath and inside the hull.
‘That’s part of our intel that we pass on – where we find it and how we find it and that sort of thing, so places for others to look at.’
Then there are the chain-of-evidence requirements.
‘As soon as I discover it, I have to prove it. I do a test on it and then I pass that back. I get permission to seize from the CTF commander … CTF 150 has got thirty-odd countries involved [which is] part of the reason why we don’t bring them on and prosecute. There’s a whole bunch of things I have to go back to do. If I find something then I can request permission to test it and seize it and then bring it back on board. Then we weigh it, we put it straight into our torpedo magazine on an Adelaide Class and I then obviously keep the key until I’m ready for permission to dispose of it. I had to get permission to dispose as well.’
Daily inspections of the torpedo magazine were required to ensure the right conditions were maintained, including the temperature.
‘The sailor would come and knock on my door and say, “Sir, I need to do my torpedo magazine,” and I’d go, “Yeah, no worries,” so I’d go down and open it up and stand there while he checked it all and no way I could maintain full custody of it. The last thing I want is for someone to try to take some of the drugs! I was making sure that we had it all the time. So that was the big one.’
Darwin’s next haul came from a huge cargo dhow that was carrying fifteen cars. During a seventeen-hour boarding conducted on 11 and 12 May, the boarding parties seized another huge haul of 449 kilograms of heroin. Once again, they had boarded almost as soon as they found the dhow. But it was a difficult one, Morrison says, because the vessel was so big that he was concerned about how long it would take. ‘We had to talk to the crew a lot, which gave us indications of where it was.’
It was only through questioning the crew throughout the operation that they were able to search in the right spots. ‘This [dhow] in particular was just massive – it’s just huge.’
The bigger the dhow, the greater the risk, especially in a tricky sea state, for the boarding parties who clamber up by means of a Jacob’s ladder.
‘Tricky sea states can be a reason for me to say, “No, not doing it.” I didn’t have to do that but I’m pretty sure, pretty confident that my command chain would have supported that assessment,’ Morrison says.
Fortunately, he never had any of his boarding party members drop into the water. ‘I had one girl drop about a foot into the boat. She started to climb up and it was backwards and she went “No!” and she came back down. I saw that she didn’t have the upper body strength with all the weapons and [gear] and it was one of those difficult ones too because of the high freeboard. On the radio I said, “Leave her off, take her off.” I only wanted the guys or girls with the good upper body strength. So she didn’t get into that boarding, we rotated her out.’
He says the safet
y of his own people is paramount. ‘There’s no use doing this and losing people over narcotics,’ he says. ‘So the safety of people is number one. It’s a priority and that stops some people doing it. You have to stretch yourself a little bit to get the success. You can’t be overly conservative all the time – if you are, you’re not going to do it. So, there’s an element of risk that you have to take but it’s all managed risk and I think through my experience [at sea and with training] that I’m reasonably good at understanding and managing that risk and not pushing people beyond. You’ve got to push them, but not beyond safety.’
May 2014 continued to be eventful. On 18 May, a twelve-and-a-half-hour boarding of a dhow resulted in the seizure of a further five kilograms of heroin. The next two days would provide a large bounty, 786 kilograms of hashish found during their longest boarding – twenty-two hours on 19 and 20 May.
‘We found the 786 kilograms in the first hour we searched,’ he says. ‘But we ended up looking more because we had further intelligence that there was more than just hashish. They were talking about East Africa and Tanzania, where we knew the heroin goes to, so we had to make a conclusive search to make sure there wasn’t any heroin. And that was just [from] talking to the crew. Some of the crew were saying they were going to Tanzania. Another was just going, “No, we’re going to Yemen.” Something’s not right here – so that was one of our tripwires but we found this fairly quickly.’
Their last haul – and the really big one as far as hashish was concerned – came on the evening of 28 June 2014 when Darwin detected a dhow and after shadowing it overnight conducted a boarding on 29 June. That was the search that resulted in the seizure of a record 6248 kilograms of hashish.
Morrison says, ‘There were six tonnes of hash – and that one was very well concealed. It took us twelve hours.’
The hash was packed into 315 bags, each containing twenty kilograms of the drug. The sacks were stashed in a secret area underneath the hull, in the bilge areas. At first all they saw were floorboards. ‘The guys went in and they could crawl in underneath and it was wood all the way along. They pop out the other side and they go, “Well there’s nothing here.” Then one of the guys stuck like a rod in through a hole, stuck it in and pulled it out, and there was hash on it. “Something’s interesting underneath!”’
The Smack Track Page 11