The third and final successful boarding of the fourteen-day patrol occurs on day nine, 25 May 2016, when Darwin intercepts an al-Mansour dhow flying an Iranian flag. There is great excitement as all on board feel that the ship could hit the magic tonne of heroin. With 890 kilograms already collected that means they need just another 110 kilograms. At 9 a.m. Lieutenant Kelly leads a pumped-up black boarding team over to the suspect dhow and after checking the dhow’s credentials a search is soon authorised.
On Darwin’s bridge the officer of the watch manoeuvres the ship relative to the dhow as it turns into wind to land (‘recover’) the helicopter that was used to locate the suspect vessel.
‘Bingo!’ About sixty kilograms of heroin are found hidden in the first of the dhow’s nine fuel tanks. Boarding teams change out as they prepare for an ‘all-nighter’ and, they hope, another fifty kilograms of smack to pass the tonne mark. Sadly, the sixty kilograms are all there is, so Darwin will have to be content with a huge total of about 952 kilograms of the illicit drug, worth more than $800 million. That is almost enough cash to buy a new frigate to replace the ageing Darwin.
Morale on board has received a boost after the skipper announced an extra day’s shore leave in the tropical paradise of the Seychelles, meaning that most of the ship’s company should get time off the ship and a good rest.
Hodgkinson says his time on boarding-party duty in Darwin has given him a deep appreciation of just how good life is in Australia. ‘These men are honestly on the edge of survival and they are trying to make money for their families so they can eat. They have no grand aims of achieving anything more than surviving and providing.’
The final phase of the illicit cargo’s long journey south from the valleys of Afghanistan through Pakistan and Iran and down the Indian Ocean takes place on the flight deck at the stern of the frigate. It isn’t every day that you get to see, touch and walk around a half a billion dollars worth of heroin. Most people can relate to a million dollars, so with each bag containing an estimated one million dollars’ worth of the drug it is not difficult for the Sydney-based crew to equate the drugs with a Ferrari or a two-bedroom apartment in the harbour city.
For Agent Paul Lerza the field of one-kilogram bags of heroin spread across the flight deck is the highlight of his latest deployment on an Australian navy ship hunting narcotics smugglers. The sheer volume of the booty from the successful boardings is staggering. Surveying the haul, he says he knows US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) agents who would not see such a quantity of heroin during their entire careers.
‘Any DEA agent would love to see this much heroin,’ he says as he poses for photographs among the bags of drugs.
As Darwin’s XO, Tina Brown supervises the display and disposal of the drugs. The ship’s crew is allowed onto an area above the flight deck to see the fruits of their hard labour.
Numerous photos are taken to record the massive haul for posterity, with the odd personal shot, including one of Commander Phill Henry with a broad smile. Then it is time to clear the decks so that the disposal team can get to work disposing of the drugs over the stern of the ship.
The bags, which carry a variety of labels including ‘new gold’, ‘niaz’, ‘Siddique’ and ‘see shell’, are carried to a table located next to the modified plastic wheelie bin renamed the ‘Goonganator’ after Chief Petty Officer Andrew ‘Goonga’ Sims’ latest modifications.
Fortunately, it is not too hot for the disposal team, who are clad from top to toe in plastic ‘hazmat’ suits with respirators and goggles to protect them from the illicit powder. Each bag is cut open and the contents emptied into the bin where water jets suck it down and wash it out of the bottom and into the sea below. The drugs leave a slight caramel coloured stain in the ship’s wake as they mix with the seawater. The plastic bags and other wrappings are stored and disposed of later and do not go into the ocean.
It takes many hours for the team to get rid of the heroin. As each bag dissolves in the sea that means about a million dollars less for the terrorists and criminals behind the evil trade and fewer caps of smack on the streets of London or New York.
Even the most junior sailors on board Darwin take great pride in the fact that the months of hard slog and the sacrifices of their loved ones back at home have had a tangible impact. They also know that somewhere in the world there is a syndicate of criminals who will be deeply unhappy that such a huge chunk of ill-gotten cash is literally dissolving in their wake.
THE END GAME
19
Catch and release
While billions of dollars worth of narcotics are dissolved in the Indian Ocean, the dhows that smuggle the illict cargo simply sail off into the sunset and the traffickers escape prosecution.
‘At the moment there is a limited avenue for a legal finish for the smugglers,’ Phill Henry explains. ‘Effectively, we seize whatever it is, the weapons or the drugs, and the boat is left to go on its way because the ability to conduct a court case is difficult.’
This so-called ‘catch and release’ policy generates a deep frustration about the inability to prosecute smugglers caught in international waters. That frustration goes right to the top of the United Nations Global Office of Drugs and Crime.
The head of the office’s Global Maritime Crime Division, Alan Cole, is confident what the next step needs to be. Cole spent twenty years in the Royal Navy on frigates and submarines before retraining as a barrister. His last job in the British navy was legal adviser to the Combined Maritime Forces in Bahrain, before he joined the United Nations.
I interview him in the Seychelles during the piracy conference in May 2016, and Cole is in furious agreement with other speakers and attendees when he says, ‘It’s a great pity that we’re throwing the drugs in the sea in most cases and letting the vessel go on its way. We really want to see what we call a “legal finish”, the same as we’ve done with piracy, where we bring the vessel in, prosecute the individuals, confiscate the vessel and put the guys in prison, because it does have a massive deterrent effect.’
He knows that would require specific international agreements and complex legal arrangements, but he believes it is possible. ‘You find a country that’s volunteering to do the work – and we’ve got three in this region that have offered to do it and are doing it, Tanzania, Seychelles and Sri Lanka. It [would] then be for the government of Australia to look at whether it’s prepared to enter into an agreement with them to transfer drugs traffickers in to be prosecuted. We have a dhow here in Seychelles which was detained two weeks ago. On it was a crew of twelve Iranians. They’re up in prison currently waiting for trial and I saw them yesterday. The captain of that vessel, this is the third time he’s been stopped.’
Everyone at the conference is pleased about the capture of the dhow, which had been boarded in international waters twice before by Darwin. Both times, the drugs had been disposed of overboard and the captain set free.
‘It’s only the third time that it’s actually ended up with him being in prison,’ Cole says. ‘And that’s what we need to see, because clearly throwing the drugs in the sea, the guy just goes back and gets more.’
The third time, Darwin again located the dhow but did not board it.
‘We shadowed the dhow prior to its entry into Seychelles territorial waters and provided its position to the local authorities,’ Phill Henry explains later. ‘The arrest and interception was all local authorities. We played no part in that. In essence, we shadowed the dhow that looked like it might be heading to Seychelles and let them know it was coming.’
The Seychelles Coast Guard was then able to board the dhow inside territorial waters and they found a hundred kilograms of heroin. This enabled the Seychelles government to reach a ‘legal finish’ by making arrests that would lead to the prosecution and likely conviction of an experienced and well-known drug smuggler.
Henry is very pleased about Darwin’s role in facilitating the possibility of a smuggling conviction in the Seychelles. �
�That is the one thing that is lacking at the moment.’
Says Cole, ‘It would be great if Australia could go the last short distance and see if we can get these [narcotics] cases transferred into Seychelles, Tanzania, Kenya, some other suitable location. We can ensure that they’re tried, prosecuted and serve their prison sentence just as we did with some Somali pirates.’
Three other narcotics smuggling test cases are underway – two in Tanzania and one in Sri Lanka. ‘But they’re all domestic arrests, they haven’t been arrested by the navies on the high seas.’
The smuggling crew imprisoned in the Seychelles would get up to twenty years if convicted, he says. ‘For some of them, it means they won’t ever leave Seychelles prison. It’s a hundred kilos of heroin. You wouldn’t get much less if you got convicted in Melbourne.’
As for the boat, Cole says, ‘Seychelles Government can confiscate it and they’ll probably use it for some purpose but it certainly won’t be going back to what it was doing before.’
He is confident that seizing the vessels has been a major deterrent for piracy. ‘It made a huge difference. The guys were being repeatedly arrested, having their guns thrown in the sea and allowed to go on their way. The same guy was getting picked up again and again and again and eventually we found states to prosecute them and then it stopped.’
When it comes to the narcotics trade, the crews are of little concern to the kingpin, who is living a life of luxury elsewhere in a penthouse or a palatial compound. ‘I don’t think the trafficker really cares. He can soon get some more crew, I suspect.’
It is the combination of losing both the vessel and the captain that would really hurt. ‘The captain will have some value because he’s the guy who can navigate from Iran down to wherever he needs to be, but the vessel is worth a lot of money, and you can’t afford to lose a vessel every time you do a delivery.’
As for the captains, he says, ‘There’s a limited number of people who are going to do something if they think there might be twenty years’ imprisonment ahead.’
The dhow’s master being held in prison in the Seychelles has quite a history, Cole says. ‘He was previously in a prison in Bosaso, arrested by the Somali authorities for illegal fishing off the same vessel, and before that he was a hostage held by Somali pirates in Somalia. Doesn’t speak very good English unfortunately but it’s a fascinating story. So he went to sea in his same dhow, got taken by pirates, held hostage, got released after a couple of years, went back to sea illegally fishing, got taken and put in a prison in Bosaso with the pirates who’d held him as a hostage, who had been captured by that point, got released again and now was caught with a hundred kilos of heroin.’
He says large Nigerian gangs operate in Kenya and Tanzania, handling the onward consignments of heroin and other narcotics. ‘We believe quite a lot of it goes to West Africa but a lot of it also flies out of Kenya into Europe. Addis Ababa airport [in Ethiopia] is very popular as well. Addis airport has one of only two direct flights to South America from Africa, so cocaine comes one way and heroin goes the other way.’ Much of it is ‘body-packed’ by mules, who swallow it.
‘One of the ways in which it can be detected at airports in Africa is by watching men [who go] into the toilet and spend a long time in there,’ says Cole. ‘What they are doing is passing out the drugs that they swallowed – it’s such a long flight that they’ve started to come out the other end – and then re-swallow them.’
At some airports, customs officers approach suspicious characters and smell their breath. If it exudes faecal matter, the officers know they have probably re-swallowed the drug and so pull them aside to be body-searched. There are regular instances both in Africa and elsewhere of packages bursting inside people on aircraft. ‘They are dying horribly.’
He also says, ‘If you make the trade more and more expensive you put the price of heroin up. The worrying thing is that the price of heroin in Europe is extremely low at the moment, which suggests that plenty is getting through.’
Added to that, the purity of the drug is improving. ‘If you’ve got to smuggle something that’s bulky you want it as high purity as possible, cut it later on.’
As for the captain imprisoned in the Seychelles, he says, ‘This guy is now completely written off and he’s never going to go back to Iran if he’s convicted. And a lot of his friends will know that if we’ve caught him three times he must have done it many more times than that. They’re suddenly going to hear he’s in prison for twenty years and they’re going to go to their employer and say, “This was all very good when he was telling us, I’ve been stopped three times by the Australian navy, every time they let me go. But now he’s in prison for twenty years this was never part of the deal.’” Now the message is going out in Sri Lanka, too, in Tanzania and here that they’re getting nicked. That’s a pretty big deterrent.’
Anyone who watches television would have heard of the American crime series NCIS, which stands for Naval Criminal Investigative Service. Few fans have ever met a real NCIS agent. Unlike most of the fictional agents, Agent Paul Lerza had a background not in the US military but in law enforcement, most recently as a US Customs Service criminal investigator, before he joined the NCIS nine years ago.
‘I’m strictly civilian,’ he tells me. ‘There are elements that are in the military within NCIS but by and large we are a civilian agency.’
Head office is in Quantico, Virginia, but he works out of an office in Bahrain called the Middle East Field Office.
‘Within that is the Transnational Organised Crime Unit and we see its mission as counter-narcotics and counter-terrorism,’ he explains. ‘So we’re kind of dual-hatted. We’re looking at it from a criminal violation [perspective] as we are criminal investigators but we also do see the impact and believe that there is funding of terrorism involved.’
In mid-2016 Lerza is nearing the end of his two-year posting. He has only deployed on Australian ships and his time in Darwin is his third at sea, with five successful boardings under his belt. From his perspective nothing is more important than ensuring the chain of evidence in narcotics operations is unbroken.
He approaches each boarding as if executing a search warrant. ‘We look at “articulable facts”. That gets us to “probable cause” and those are just legal standards that we’re looking at, our levels of suspicion. And so very quickly we can go from “reasonable suspicion” to “probable cause” and it’s looking at … the totality of circumstances when you’re on the boat.’
NCIS agents work closely with a combined research and intelligence-sharing agency known as the Regional Narcotics Interagency Fusion Cell, but once on board, he says it is still hit or miss. ‘We just had three seizures. Two of the dhow masters would not speak even after we found and confronted them with the drugs – just, “I don’t know, I don’t know.”’
A vital link in the chain is a reliable interpreter, or ‘terp’. After the boarding party secures the dhow and corrals the crew, a RHIB goes back to the ship and collects Lerza and his terp. On this patrol, the terp is a Baluch, living in the United States, and as well as interpreting he throws some light on the mainly Baluchi skippers and crews. He cannot be identified for security reasons.
‘They are poor people, fisherman,’ he confirms. ‘People use them for drug [transportation], they don’t come themselves or appear on the sea. Sometimes they use them one time, the second time the master doesn’t want to go, they tell him, “Oh yeah, you already got some money, you need to go again.”’
The payments vary. ‘Each one we ask, and everybody says different. They might get like $1000 average, for each person on the boat. There is a difference on the amount of the drugs. There’s a lesser [amount of] $500 they might get. I think the most they get is like $1000 if they succeed.’
This is a lot of money. ‘Oh yeah, because one time we were asking some people, they were saying, “Okay, if I go to fish it’s three months or two months I’m on the sea, I come back, I don’t make enough m
oney.”’
The terp grew up in the region but says that does not mean he can figure out who is telling the truth. ‘I cannot judge them – there’s nothing written on their forehead. I can’t tell if they are lying or telling the truth. The one thing that they never tell you is, “I have drugs.” The master would say, “No, I don’t have drugs,” until we find it. Most of the time after we find something they start cooperating. They tell their story, where they got it, how, where they are going to take it. Other than that, they don’t. One load of drugs, they pass, they’re good for six months. No need to come out to sea.’
The crews always say they are fishermen, even when there are tell-tale signs including that their nets have not been used. Mingling with real fishing dhows also provides cover.
‘Then they do it so quickly. They don’t really talk like those real fishermen [who] don’t know where they got [the drugs] on board and where they’re taking it, because they do this job very secretly,’ says the interpreter. ‘Sometimes I said, “Why you don’t tell us, it’s not yours, it’s the owner? They can make money and then you are suffering in the sea, so why are you not telling? When we get over here, you know we’re searching everything.” He said, “Because we take an oath, we swear we never talk until they find it on their own.” So when we find it alone that’s okay.’
Baluchistan is the size of Germany and the interpreter is well versed in the politics of the troubled region. With other routes closing up, it has become a vital waypoint for smuggling.
Lerza and his terp endure the same hardships as the navy boarding party members. They risk their necks boarding RHIBs and dhows in rough seas and spend many hours on board the suspect vessel before returning to the frigate. Once back on board Darwin the drugs are tested and Paul Lerza sends samples to the US DEA for analysis. First up, they determine whether a sample actually is narcotics.
The Smack Track Page 22