by Malcolm Knox
‘That suggests that methamphetamine use in Queensland is driven by availability,’ she said. In other words, all those little meth labs in Queensland—hundreds more than were being detected—were having an impact on the habits of people who wouldn’t ordinarily take the drug. Supply-side economics were at work. Here was proof that if one drug was cheaper, more abundant and easier to score than other drugs, then users would switch rather than take nothing. Unable to obtain heroin, a smackie wouldn’t just go home and watch TV and have a quiet night; he or she would buy methamphetamine instead.
Queensland law enforcement officials weren’t going to ignore ice. Queensland, after all, had always had a schizophrenic relationship with illicit drugs: under National Party Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen, Queensland was simultaneously the place where the most marijuana was grown and sold, where police were believed to be most corrupted by drug money, and where the criminal penalties were the most draconian. In 2001, Tim Carmody, the Queensland Crime Commissioner, successfully lobbied the state government to raise the maximum jail term for amphetamine trafficking from 20 to 25 years. Paul de Jersey, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, called for amphetamines to be reclassified as Schedule I drugs, alongside what he called the ‘undoubtedly demonic’ heroin, cocaine and LSD. The Chief Judge Administrator, Justice Martin Moynihan, said the rise of amphetamine-related crime in Queensland was ‘horrifying’ him.
‘I have the distinct impression that cannabis is being used less as a first drug of choice in favour of methamphetamines and heroin,’ he said. ‘And if this is true, we’re not going anywhere near winning the war against drugs.’
It was in Victoria, however, that the most sensational stories about ice were hitting the news.
Senior Constable Barry Hills, of the Victorian elite detective squad, spent the winter of 2001 with arguably the state’s worst job. In Ballarat South, a cold part of a cold state, Hills was spending four to five hours a night in a sleeping bag in long, wet grass overlooking the home of a 36-year-old single mother, Jayne Rawlings. Whenever someone came or went—which happened frequently—Hills would photograph them.
Rawlings was under surveillance as part of Operation Sally-port, a Victorian police sting that was to bust the state’s biggest known crystal meth operation. At the Ballarat station, detectives were amassing information on dozens of people, known as ‘primary targets’, ‘secondary targets’ and ‘suppliers’.
Rawlings had been a primary target for some time, even though she had no criminal record. In 1999, she had begun using ice and soon became addicted. By 2001 she was using a gram a day. Rawlings had been a heroin user but the Ballarat trade in the narcotic had been cut off by the same detectives in 1999, when Operation Rickard had snared the prize scalp of Dragan Gnjatovic, 35, known as ‘Bill from Ballarat’. Gnjatovic had headed a syndicate that bought heroin in Deer Park, in Melbourne’s western suburbs, and transported it to Ballarat. Several overdoses drew attention to the heroin glut, and Operation Rickard monitored Gnjatovic’s phone calls for 42 days. In late 1999 police had enough evidence to pounce, and Bill from Ballarat went down for five years. Eight other members of the syndicate also went to jail.
Just as it did elsewhere in Australia, ice slipped neatly into the hole left by heroin. Bill might have left Ballarat, but injecting drug users like Jayne Rawlings were still ready to part with their scant cash for whatever was on the market. She came to the notice of Ballarat police in 2001, and Operation Sallyport detectives obtained a Supreme Court warrant to tape what amounted to around 12 000 phone calls in the ensuing months.
On 6 August 2001, detectives were able to fix a pattern on Rawlings’s habit. Every day she would order ice by phone or text message from two Filipino men. She paid for it with cash deposits into their TAB accounts, then drove to Melbourne to collect it. In the two months during which Constable Hills was lying in the long grass near her house, Rawlings made 60 trips to Melbourne and back, bringing to Ballarat around 400 one-gram deals of ice, selling them for around $350 each. Once they’d reached an evidentiary threshold, Victorian police released Constable Hills from his chilly vigil and arrested Rawlings. Caught, she saved police the forensic nightmare of bringing thousands of phone intercepts to court, and pleaded guilty.
Others accused of ice-related crimes were not so compliant. Mohammed Kerbatieh was, by 2001, exactly the kind of person the detectives of Operation Sallyport were endeavouring to keep ice away from.
Upon his release from a Queensland jail in 2000, Kerbatieh had moved to Victoria. He was introduced to crystal methamphetamine and, throwing away all of the good resolutions he had made in prison, he became a regular user. His hot-headed tendencies worsened immediately and dramatically. Ice, his lawyer would later tell a court, ‘took away his sense of feeling and conscience’.
Kerbatieh smoked methamphetamine on the night of 23 September 2001. He was a big shot, a single man with some cash and charisma—at least in his own mind. He went for a late-night walk around Coburg, where he lived. Some time after midnight, he approached two teenage girls walking home from Coburg train station. He began big-noting himself, saying he was a drug dealer and asking if they’d like anything. The girls said no. He persuaded one of them, a fifteen-year-old known in the courts as ‘C’, to walk with him to Moreland train station, where he said he had to drop off some drugs.
As they walked, he asked her if she ever took drugs and if she was a virgin. He grabbed her and kissed her on the mouth, then asked her if she wanted him to be her boyfriend. C, terrified, said she already had a boyfriend. Kerbatieh said she needn’t panic, because he had a gun on him and ‘nobody will hurt you’.
Kerbatieh told C that he needed to phone a friend. Too scared to run away, she stood by while he pretended to make a call on his mobile phone. After the fake conversation, Kerbatieh told C that the drop-off had been changed to the parklands near the closed-down Coburg High School.
When they got there, he told her to sit on his jacket. As she sat, he pinned her to the ground and said, ‘I’m your worst nightmare.’ He said he would kill her if she didn’t do what he wanted.
C began to cry, and wet her pants. She tried to yell out, but Kerbatieh pulled her skivvy over her mouth and slapped her on the face, lying on top of her, grabbing and switching off her mobile phone. He proceeded to rape her with his fingers and his penis—C could not be sure how many times he penetrated her—and then forced her to touch his testicles.
‘Now you have to say this,’ he said. ‘Listen. Say, “I love you, Sam, I want to have sex with you”.’
C, shaking with fear, did what he wanted.
‘Now say, “I am a whore”.’
Kerbatieh masturbated throughout, finally forcing her to tongue-kiss him and pose for him ‘doggy style’. As he ejaculated, he instructed her to ‘look at me come’.
Kerbatieh dressed himself. As he got ready to stroll off into the night, he told C that he would kill her if she reported the incident.
She managed to find a taxi home. Shortly afterwards, she went to a police station, where a medical examination showed clear evidence that she had been assaulted.
Three nights later, again shortly after midnight, another fifteen-year-old girl, ‘S’, was at a pool hall in Fawkner with some friends. Kerbatieh hovered near the group. When S’s friends left, he moved in and chatted her up, saying he was a drug dealer and inviting her to come and help him finish off a deal. S refused, saying she was fifteen and didn’t take drugs. Kerbatieh changed tack, saying he had to meet a girl at a nearby train station—apparently the girl was in trouble after arguing with her boyfriend.
As lame as his story sounds, S agreed to go with him. He was brimming with self-confidence. He seemed like an important kind of guy, and something about him warned her not to say no to him.
They walked to the station, and Kerbatieh bragged about being a trained kickboxer, and an ecstasy and cocaine dealer.
‘You want a fake ID? Driver’s licence? I always get them for und
erage girls, no worries,’ he said.
At the station, they smoked cigarettes and waited for the phantom girl, then walked back towards the Fawkner pool hall. Kerbatieh persuaded S to take a shortcut through a hole in a fence at the back of a building. He had prepared the ground, where a mattress was lying under cover. He sat S on the mattress and asked if he could kiss her. She refused. Eventually he appeared to give up, saying he would call his brother to come and drive her home.
A car arrived with two men in it, taking S and Kerbatieh to the Drums Hotel in Coburg. As soon as she could, S said she had to go home. Freezing cold, she didn’t want Kerbatieh to walk with her, but he insisted. Seeing how cold she was, he said he would borrow a jacket for her from his friend’s house nearby.
S waited outside while Kerbatieh went into a house in Bell Street, Coburg, which he said was his friend’s. In fact it was his own. When he didn’t re-emerge, she followed him inside. Saying he was looking for a coat, he led her into a bedroom, where he pretended to try several times to call a friend who would drive her home.
Kerbatieh was charming and gentlemanly throughout. In spite of her better instincts, S had allowed him to make her feel safe. At 31, he was sixteen years her senior and powerfully built. In the house he offered her what he said was ecstasy; she refused again. Then, after taking what were more likely tranquillisers or barbiturates, Kerbatieh fell asleep. S didn’t know he’d been taking ice, but now that his high had worn off, he only wanted to pass out. S was happy that he had.
S slept too, but when she woke him at daybreak Kerbatieh’s mood was altogether changed. He was dishevelled, snarling and aggressive. He said he didn’t know how she’d come to be with him, and accused her of stealing $20 000 from a suitcase in his room. He said he was calling a friend over to help him find the $20 000; he handcuffed S in the bedroom, tying her feet with black cotton strips.
As she cried, he slapped her and told her to be quiet. He kept slapping and swearing at her as she resisted his efforts to take off her belt. He removed the cotton bindings and took off her clothes, saying he wanted her to feel ashamed. After stripping and re-cuffing her, he asked if she’d ever ‘sucked a dick before’. S said no. Kerbatieh pulled down his pants, but was unable to get an erection. He blamed the drugs he was taking, and stormed out of the bedroom.
He soon came back, having worked up an erection for himself. He also brought a carving knife and fork from the kitchen. He forced his penis into S’s mouth with the knife at her throat. Then he penetrated her vagina with his tongue, the handle of the carving fork, and finally his penis, demanding that she say, ‘I want you to fuck me like a slut, fuck my tight vagina, oh, I love your big dick.’ He said he was ejaculating inside her, but she needn’t worry because he ‘couldn’t have children’.
He repeated more sexual assaults throughout the morning, finally saying: ‘I don’t know if I can trust you. Maybe I should just kill you instead.’
He let her get dressed, however, and leave his house, warning her again not to go to the police. He said he couldn’t afford to get into trouble, as he had previously been jailed for killing three men.
He let S go, and at first she was too frightened of Kerbatieh to tell any authorities. She did tell some friends, however, and two months later S was ready to give a statement to the Victorian police.
This was not soon enough to save Kerbatieh’s third victim, a sixteen-year-old codenamed ‘E’. By this point Kerbatieh was locked in a death spiral of ice use, taking the drug several times a day, staying up for as long as he could, crashing into deep sleep, waking again with a paranoia and depression that could only be relieved by taking more crystal meth. He had to live with his terrible past—not merely what he had done in recent days, but the way he had treated Runda, his wife, and their child back in Queensland. Then there was the time he had spent in jail. He had every reason to want to block out his history, to avoid coming face to face with himself.
It was obvious to anyone but himself that Kerbatieh was delusional by this time. He believed his encounters with S and C had involved consensual sex, and he was fully swept up in the stories he had told them about being a professional kickboxer and wealthy drug dealer.
A fortnight after his assaults on S, Kerbatieh approached E as she was walking to a tram stop in Sydney Road, Coburg. It was 7.45 am and she was on her way to school, wearing her uniform and carrying her school bag. Kerbatieh struck up a conversation, asking where Hawthorn Street was. This was the street where S lived.
As they talked, Kerbatieh’s mobile phone rang. He had an animated (though quite possibly faked) conversation, ending with him saying, ‘How am I meant to pick up $15 000—with my bare hands?’
E was wary of the 31-year-old at first, and asked if she had seen him before. Kerbatieh made up a story about boxing with a friend of her brother.
‘What’s your brother look like?’ Kerbatieh asked.
When E described her brother, Kerbatieh said, ‘Yeah, yeah, I know him.’
E, believing he was an adult acquaintance of her brother, saw no harm in showing Kerbatieh the way to Hawthorn Street, a few blocks away. He had another conversation about the $15 000, after which he told the schoolgirl that he would give her $200 if she helped him and his sister collect the money from Bell Street. E declined, but continued walking with him towards Bell Street. Kerbatieh was following his usual modus operandi.
He boasted to E that he was a well-known drug dealer and lit a joint, offering her a puff, which she refused. They had been walking for more than fifteen minutes when Kerbatieh said he knew a shortcut down a lane to the back fence of the house where he had to pick up the money. As with S, he was only luring E to his own house.
When they arrived at the back of his property, E declined his offer to go inside with him. After a while he came out with a stick, brandishing it at her, and pulled her through the hole in the fence. E resisted him, saying he had to let her go to school, but he forced her into the back part of the house, a bedroom with an unmade bed. E tried to leave, but Kerbatieh grappled her down and put his hand over her mouth. E was so scared she wet her pants, but she kept fighting him. She managed to get out of the house and back up the lane towards Bell Street. She was so panicked that when she dropped her bag along the way, she kept running without looking back.
On Bell Street she found a woman and told her that a man had tried to rape her. They went to the local police station where E made her complaint. Police executed a search warrant on Kerbatieh’s house and found several items, including the black cotton strips with which, they would later learn, Kerbatieh had tied up his second victim, S.
At his trial in early 2003, Kerbatieh accepted that he had been with the three girls, but in the case of S he argued the sex had been consensual, and with C and E he said that he had rejected them after they had ‘cockteased’ him. He was a disruptive and wily defendant, often sacking his lawyers and even calling for his trial to be aborted when the jury heard of his untruthful boasts that he had killed three men, which he said would prejudice them against him.
The issue of Kerbatieh’s crystal methamphetamine use came up after he was examined by a psychologist, Warren Simmonds. Kerbatieh had been taking ice solidly for six months leading up to the rapes. He had no prior record of sexual assault. He said that the ice had changed him, heightening his sexual urges and lowering his ability to control them. He wanted his ice use to be treated as a mitigation of what he had done, and as evidence that, once he was off the drug, he had a good chance of rehabilitation. Judges in the trial and appeal courts rejected this. Legally, although his crystal methamphetamine use might have had this effect on him, he had been taking it for long enough to be aware of its effects and was able, in Judge Jim Duggan’s words, to ‘take it or leave it’. Kerbatieh knew that ice made him horny, and he wasn’t so addicted that he had no power to choose whether or not to take it.
Kerbatieh’s ice intoxication, while undoubtedly a true precursor to his crimes, was not severe enough to get
him off the legal hook. He was found guilty of eighteen separate charges and sentenced to 22 years in jail.
By 2001, Rebecca McKetin and the researchers at NDARC believed that old-fashioned amphetamine sulphate had been more or less totally replaced in Australia by methamphetamine, whether in powder, paste or crystalline form. Users, health workers and police reported that what was still called speed was, in fact, methamphetamine. There was still some confusion, among users at least, as to what ‘ice’ was. Some thought ice was speed mixed with heroin; others that it was a completely different drug. What generated these misperceptions was partly dealer marketing-talk, but also a registering of the different effects of the more potent form. ‘Chemically,’ NDARC’s 2001 Drug Trends report said,
amphetamine and methamphetamine are closely related. Both exert their effects indirectly by stimulating the release of peripheral and central monoamines (principally dopamine, noradrenaline, adrenaline and serotonin), and both have psychomotor, cardiovascular, anorexogenic and hyperthermic properties . . . Compared to amphetamine, methamphetamine has proportionally greater central stimulatory effects than peripheral circulatory actions . . . and is a more potent form with stronger subjective effects.
The subjective effects of methamphetamine are, as we have seen, both consistent and variable. Principally, a person uses meth because it induces feelings of extreme wellbeing, power and self-confidence. But that extremity can tip over into the kind of reckless sense of invulnerability and grandiosity exhibited by Mohammed Kerbatieh. As use continues, methamphetamine can also induce the flipside of all that wellbeing, in the form of paranoia, insomnia, anxiety and depression. And when the negatives reach the extreme end of the spectrum, the paranoia can tip over into acts of senseless violence.