The Sting

Australia's Plot To Crack A Global Drug Empire

Nick McKenzie

• Publisher: Victory Books Digital
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780522861532
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

It was a David and Goliath style battle: Australian investigators up against a global organised crime empire. What seemed like an impossible task resulted in one of the most ambitious investigations in the world, infiltrating international money laundering streams and exposing the global crime bosses in control of the world's drug trade.
The Sting is the never-before-told story of the ongoing efforts of Australia's most secretive and powerful law enforcement agency to topple the new face of organised crime. This is a tech-savvy, billion-dollar empire with tentacles reaching across the world, from outlaw motorcycle gangs to powerful Asian crime syndicates to law and government agencies.
This is not a conventional story of good versus evil. It chronicles criminal, law enforcement and political tactics through the eyes of its major players - the criminal investigators, the international crime bosses, the senator, the drug cook and the investigative journalist - and exposes what many in power don't want the public to know.

Part 1

December 2006 – June 2007

Mike Purchas

Mike Purchas felt the cool morning air dry the sweat running down his forehead as he pounded up the hill. Children were already out tossing balls. He ran past a father struggling to order his children into the back of a car and nodded a greeting.

He was glad he had managed to duck out early, beating the summer heat and finding a little peace before the inevitable chaos. His girlfriend’s relatives would soon be arriving in a frenetic stream, bearing plates piled with spring rolls, prawns and Vietnamese salad, and tailed by screaming small children and their mute teenage siblings.

At least they learnt to shut up as they got older.

His thoughts drifted from how much he missed the snow of a London winter to his police partner, Bruce Bullock. He’d fought the urge to call him that morning but was now reconsidering. He wanted to workshop the tip-off that he and Bullock received prior to knocking off from the Crime Commission on Christmas Eve. But it was Christmas Day, and Bullock wouldn’t appreciate the call. Nor would his wife.

Bugger it. I’ll call him anyway, he thought. The drug stash could be bigger than anything we’ve seized before. And it will get us back in the game, give us leverage with the bosses in Canberra. He’ll understand. It’s not like Christmas is a one-off. For Christ’s sake, Bruce, it comes every year.

Then again, Bullock’s wife would probably stuff him in the turkey if he took a work call over his Christmas lunch. Even if Bullock told her what it was about—how, in a single swoop, they could destroy conventional wisdom about the size of Australia’s drug trade.

As Purchas turned the corner, a child wobbled out in front of him on a new bike, forcing him to leap to the left. He could still move pretty well, despite his sixty years, he thought, turning around to glare at the child, who, absorbed with the task of staying upright, hadn’t noticed him. He wiped the sweat off his forehead with his sleeve and lengthened his stride, feeling pain shoot through his knees.

They’d run some miles, he and ‘Melonhead’. He had given Bullock the nickname when a motorcycle helmet from the United States had to be imported because none in Australia fit his partner’s expansive skull.

Bullock didn’t seem to mind the jibe. Everyone in the office had a name: ‘Good News Glenn’ was a manager who disappeared around bad news; ‘Startrek’ was the intelligence analyst who was often off in space; ‘Turniptop’ referred to a senior investigator whose head looked like it had been dug out of the ground. And he was ‘Skeletor’, thanks to his skinny frame, or ‘Blakey’, in reference to the pommy conductor from the old British comedy On the Buses.

He smiled as he ran, remembering the undercover job when he’d posed as a drug buyer. The crook had looked him up and down suspiciously, before blurting out, ‘Mate, you don’t need cocaine. You need a fuckin’ feed.’ One of the office smart-arses had it printed on a T-shirt.

I should probably leave Bullock alone, he thought. He’s earned his time off. And I owe him one. He had wanted to say something meaningful to Bullock when they knocked off for Christmas leave the day before, but hadn’t. It wasn’t his or Bullock’s style. Emotions weren’t their forte. And anyway, Bullock would know what was on his mind.

It was Bullock who’d revived Purchas’s career when other managers hadn’t wanted to touch him. As usual, it was his mouth that had got him into trouble. He hadn’t been able to contain himself when two female colleagues had asked for time off, mid-investigation. It had hit the courts and the press, and embarrassed his bosses. He grimaced as he recalled the newspaper reports: ‘Mr Purchas berated her about her leave … Mr Purchas said that her children seemed to catch everything that went around …’

He had nothing against women. It was just that they often couldn’t work the hours the job demanded because of kids and school pick-ups and whatever else happened in their lives. He’d also fallen out with male investigators who didn’t share his work ethic. At the Independent Commission Against Corruption in Hong Kong and Sydney, or at the Australian Crime Commission’s predecessor, the National Crime Authority, there was always a long line of the sick, the lame or the lazy. If by chance these staff were in the building, they would be arranging a multicultural breakfast or diversity training. Work was not high on their agenda. And he told them so. He’d never been able to shut up when he spotted laziness. Colleagues, bosses, it didn’t matter.

That was one of the reasons he liked Bullock so much. He was a born detective who fearlessly spoke his mind, among the best he’d worked with in almost forty years. And they shared the same mad work ethic, despite Bullock having children. Each morning over the past twelve months, he’d called Bullock from his car at 6.00 a.m. to plan the day’s operations in Melbourne and Sydney. They’d canvass everything: phone interceptions, secret cameras, star-chamber hearings, arrests, charges, rollovers. 6.00 a.m. every single day. He should have mentioned something to Bullock when they had knocked off …

Bullock had saved him from the office dead in 2005 by putting him in control of the Sydney end of Operation Gordian, the Crime Commission’s biggest money laundering investigation since the agency’s inception in 2003. Bullock had largely conceived the operation and was running the Melbourne end of the probe.

They were a perfect fit. They spurned office politics and the lazy or obsequious. As operations managers, they were tolerated by the senior executive only because they produced. And produced.

Gordian had exceeded all expectations, uncovering twenty-one drug syndicates moving $300 million to Asia through several small Vietnamese-run money-remitting companies in Sydney and Melbourne. All in just eighteen months.

The investigation had ripped up the manual on chasing the proceeds of crime. Instead of the usual retrospective tracing of a paper trail, they followed the tainted cash as they would a package of drugs. The result had been almost a hundred arrests, including dozens for money laundering, and the seizure of half a billion dollars’ worth of drugs.

Bullock led a team of the commission’s best investigators from Melbourne, and as the commission’s Sydney-based operations manager, Purchas had coordinated a team of elite analysts. The pair had achieved an extraordinarily rare thing in Australian law enforcement: breaking down the inflexible, military-like hierarchy and getting staff in different states to work together over borders. No one called him boss. Just Mike. Or Skeletor.

Bullock called him Gordian’s ‘helicopter’, because of the way his team in Sydney provided a broad overview of the project’s operations while Bullock and his Melbourne investigators ran things on the ground. They bounced off each other continuously, always bluntly, sometimes explosively, but with the same aim in mind. They wanted results, wanted their work to have meaning. And they loved the game. That meant hating, despising, loathing the idea of a crook walking away from them. Which is why he and Bullock remained unsatisfied when Gordian wound up. They knew the real story

As the arrest phase had unfolded over the previous six months, the commission bosses, along with their political masters in Canberra, began briefing the media about one of Australia’s most successful anti-drug and money laundering operations. But a week ago, during a routine traffic stop, uniformed Victorian police had discovered 340 litres of pure liquid ecstasy, enough to make $50 million worth of high-grade gear, in the back of a white HiAce van. The man at the wheel was a runner for a syndicate that Operation Gordian was meant to have wiped out.

Since then, intelligence had flowed in suggesting the drugs in the van were part of much bigger shipments stored along Australia’s east coast. Searching for them was like looking for the proverbial needle. But their existence would prove what he and Bullock had suspected for months: of the two hundred or so suspects they had interviewed in the course of Gordian, almost none of these bottom feeders knew who they were really working for. They were all low- to middle-tier runners and money movers, and their arrests and the corresponding drug seizures had barely dented the drug supply. The bosses controlling the flow of heroin, ecstasy, ice and cocaine into Australia and internationally were still unknown, untouched and undisturbed.

He and Bullock wanted to find a way to extend Gordian so they could not only cast a wider net over suspicious money flows, but also find a way to track them once they had left Australia. The money marching offshore was not only money lost from Australia’s economy; it was almost certainly financing fresh drug imports. It meant a new round of addicts pumping shit into themselves and ending up in hospital beds or crawling through the windows of other people’s houses. And drug dealers shooting each other wherever they could get a clean shot: at football clinics, in pubs and on suburban streets. Melbourne’s gangland war claimed more than twenty lives in just a few years and was one of the rare times the battle to control the drug market was fought in public.

Purchas slowed his pace to a walk as he turned the corner and neared the front of his girlfriend Huong’s house, complete with neo-Georgian columns that had never really fit the bushy, gumtree-dotted suburb.

She glared at him as he walked through the door. ‘The turkey, Mike!’

He felt himself grinning meekly. Bullock was right. For a supposedly feared senior police officer, he was remarkably adept at following orders at home. Huong wasn’t shy about giving them. A successful lawyer, she was tough, uncompromising, and fiercely independent and protective of her own space. But it worked for them: she was spontaneous; he was fastidious. They were both quick-tongued. ‘The little princess,’ he would call her, but not before bracing for a withering riposte.

He was quietly looking forward to being swamped by her relatives, people who treasured family and l...