The coastal NSW hotspot that became a prime target of world’s most fearsome drug bosses

It was a crisp January morning when two drug cartel divers, dressed in full black wetsuits and hoods, plunged into the black water of the Hunter River and motored quietly toward a freighter in the Newcastle Harbour using spy-like submersibles.

Cartel masters were commanding the Norwegian divers dubbed “AquaMan” and “Norse Diver” through a group chat cheerfully titled “Finding Nemo” to haul kilograms of drugs ashore to feed Australia’s ravenous cocaine appetite.

Johan-Martinius Halvorsen was caught after trying to retrieve kilograms of cocaine hidden on the hull of a ship in Newcastle harbour.Credit: Stephen Kiprilis

It was a deal worth millions, and no expense had been spared. However, such missions are dangerous; another cartel diver had drowned in the same harbour months earlier.

A Herald investigation can reveal the world’s most fearsome drug bosses are moving their product via an oceanic superhighway that runs directly into the Port of Newcastle, the world’s largest coal port.

Experts say sneaking drugs into the busy port could be a “perfect crime”, but at least three major plots have come undone in Newcastle in recent years, and the details have now floated to the surface.

So it was with the 2023 operation involving the 228-metre red and black bulk carrier Stalo, flying the Cypriot flag, waiting to berth in Newcastle, according to agreed court documents in one case from November.

The bulk carrier Stalo had 80 kilograms of cocaine hidden in the sea chest on its hull when it sailed into Newcastle in January 2023.

A keen-eyed ferry master had spotted the divers swimming in the harbour in the early hours of January 25. More critically, an anonymous caller had two days earlier used an electronic voice generator to warn police about a drug shipment.

“The ship Stalo will be entering [the] port of Newcastle with drugs located in the bulwark,” the voice chanted the message to a police answering machine.

Police got there first. They entered the water near Carrington and dived eight metres down below the Stalo’s red hull. They found the sea chest with six waterproof duffle bags wrapped in plastic. There were 82 kilograms of 80 per cent pure cocaine located inside.

The divers, refusing to reply to the ferry master’s calls, swam to the shore and clambered up, dropping diving equipment as they fled.

Police swooped, arresting the men before they could flee Newcastle. Their underwater scooters were found lashed to a pylon under a wharf nearby.

Details of the case emerged in documents after one of the divers, Norwegian Johan-Martinius Halvorsen, pleaded guilty to attempting to possess the cocaine in Newcastle District Court late last year.

Halvorsen had flown into Australia from Bali less than a week earlier.

At 1pm on January 23, the same day police received their warning, Halvorsen and a second man, who the Herald has chosen not to identify for legal reasons, were standing on Blacksmiths Beach, half an hour’s drive south.

According to the police fact sheet, they told one curious local they were “ice divers”. The $54,000 submersible craft on the sand and the thousands of dollars of wetsuits and diving equipment had been bought urgently with cash and credit cards just days earlier.

Halvorsen and his associate jetted 300 metres out from the shore using their high-tech submersibles as perplexed lifesavers watched on.

The next morning, at 5am, the Stalo cruised into Newcastle and berthed.

“It arrives today so we do it tonight in the harbour,” one message in the Finding Nemo group read.

‘It’s almost the perfect crime’

The anonymous tip to police likely came from a rival criminal gang, former NSW Detective Superintendent Vince Hurley, now a leading criminologist at Macquarie University, told the Herald.

Criminologist and retired senior detective Vincent Hurley.Credit: Rhett Wyman

Dr Hurley, who spent years undercover and investigating organised crime, said there is not a single country or authority around the world capable of inspecting the ships coming in to their ports.

“With 12 billion tonnes of shipping moved around the world, we are talking thousands and thousands of cargo ships that are just specks in the ocean,” Dr Hurley said.

“It’s not unusual to see dozens of ships anchored off NSW, north and south Coast, waiting to unload their cargo.”

Even if drugs are found on ships, he added, prosecutions are difficult.

“The ship could be flying the Panamanian flag, owned by a Russian cartel, crewed by Vietnamese – so if drugs are found welded to the hull, who do you prosecute?” Hurley said.

“You have to be able to prove that those individuals knew that those drugs were there. It’s almost the perfect crime.”

Australian Border Force is the lead agency in detecting drug importations on the 2200 ships that arrive in Newcastle each year, bolstered with ABF’s X-ray machines, detector dogs and surveillance. But it’s the busiest port on the east coast, and cartels are looking to beat the system.

“It’s clear from what we’re seeing and hearing around the world that organised crime groups are using [ship hull concealments] more and more,” Acting ABF Commander Graeme Campbell told the Herald.

“Australia is a hugely attractive market for transnational serious organised criminal syndicates looking to import illegal drugs, and it is safe to say it will be well into the future.”

The ABF recently unveiled underwater drones that it has been using to detect anomalies on ship hulls.

They are operating across the country.

‘These boys were cannon fodder’

The body of Bruno Borges Martins was discovered as the sun rose on a frigid May morning, noticed floating in the deep waters of the Port of Newcastle by Border Force officials sent to inspect a shipload of toasted soybean meal from Argentina.

Clad in a black wetsuit and with a rope around his waist, Martins was only metres from what he had lost his life diving for a 54-kilogram package of cocaine, which was wrapped in a silver tarpaulin and secreted in a sea chest magnetised to the hull of the ship.

Martins and his compatriot, Jhoni Da Silva, had been smuggled into Australia from Indonesia on a ship captained by James Blake Blee, for the sole purpose of retrieving the drugs from the hull of the Areti Gr Majuro bulk carrier in Newcastle.

Blee spent thousands of dollars at businesses across Newcastle, kitting them out for the mission in April 2022, according to a police fact sheet released after Blee’s sentencing.

James Blee smuggled two Brazilian narco-divers into Australia and outfitted them with gear ahead of an ill-fated dive that cost one man his life in search of cocaine.

But it was dawning on Blee how ill-prepared the Brazilians – who he described as “cannon fodder” – were.

They had never used a rebreather, a technical piece of equipment favoured by drug importers because it, unlike scuba diving, does not produce bubbles – so they turned to YouTube.

The water was icy at midnight when the cartel recruits dove in at Stockton for the 50-minute underwater scooter trip toward the Areti.

Jhoni Da Silva, a Brazilian diver accused of a cocaine plot in which his compatriot died while using a rebreather in Newcastle Harbour.Credit: NSW Police

Da Silva returned alone, with two Seabob scooters and one package of cocaine, begging Blee to help him find his missing friend.

Thinking Martins must be “lost, dead or pinched”, Blee did several futile laps of the nearby Kooragang Island as the sun rose, according to the fact sheet.

“They were good boys, enthusiastic good boys,” Blee told investigators in an hours-long interview seen by this masthead.

In November, Blee was sentenced to a seven-and-a-half-year non-parole period for drug importation and people smuggling but was initially charged with manslaughter over Martins’ death.

Instead, that charge was dropped, and he pleaded guilty to drug smuggling late last year as a court document revealed the foiled diving plot in full.

Da Silva has never been found but likely fled the country before the net closed.

4Devils and AN0M

“Good news, I have a diving team,” 4 Devils told a chat of six people across the world in early 2021.

Police allege that 4 Devils was actually Julian Lee, a Bondi personal trainer and husband to an Instagram famous pole dancer.

The group chat was allegedly discussing importing cocaine to Newcastle from South America in May 2021, police say.

“How deep [do] they [the divers] have to dive?” Lee allegedly asked during one conversation, which took place on AN0M, an encrypted communications app secretly controlled by the FBI in a global organised crime sting that led to hundreds of arrests around the world.

“Also, how many trips back and forth will they need to do? Also, is it OK for a smaller boat to approach the tanker? Will it look suspicious?”

Julian Lee (pictured with his wife) is accused of using AN0M, a fake encrypted app, to organise a crew of divers to retrieve cocaine in the harbour in 2021.

Police allege that Lee and his co-accused, Comanchero Maher Aouli, were involved in an audacious plot to import cocaine from Latin America’s busiest port, Brazil’s Santos, to Newcastle. All 171 kilograms of cocaine was to be attached to the outside of the Ouro de Brasil, a legitimate tanker transporting juice from the South American nation.

The alleged plot came unstuck when Belgian customs officials in Ghent allegedly discovered the drugs in a sea chest attached to the boat’s hull, court documents obtained by this masthead say.

Both Lee and Aouli were charged with conspiracy to import a commercial volume of cocaine in 2021. They were among those swept up in the AN0M sting, with Lee on bail for another cocaine supply charge at the time of his arrest.

Lee was in November granted bail on a $1.6 million surety on his fourth attempt to gain conditional freedom.

Both men are fighting the charges and are set to go to trial this year.

‘Natural evolution’

People caught in the cocaine supply chains, like Blee and Halvorsen, have told police they were offered six figures for their varying roles.

“If I was in South America and someone from a cartel offered me $300,000 to weld something to the hull of a ship … that would be really tempting,” Dr Hurley said.

“For a young person like the one who drowned, it would have been worth the risk.

“Cartels have got an infinite amount of money, and the human life is just, ‘oh well, just another individual.’”

Cartels first took to the waves in the 1980s by strapping massive engines to speed boats to outrun the coastguard as they imported cocaine from Central America into the US.

The money was so good the cartels built dozens of “narco-subs”, submersibles able to sneak tonnes of cocaine ashore.

Massive ships, in the modern era, only require a handful of crew to operate as automation and satellites take the helm.

With fewer witnesses and more sea traffic, bulk carriers have become the “natural evolution” for drug runners, Dr Hurley said.

For the ABF, the ships and the dive crews are just another vector through which drug traffickers hope to reach the world’s most desirable market.

“ Drug trafficking organisations are global, and the syndicates have demonstrated their ability to move divers around the world to facilitate the placement and removal of the drugs,” ABF Commander Campbell said.

“We have been increasing our presence and undertaking operational activity in regional areas to respond to those threats.”

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