It was a brazen job offer made to underworld bosses: if you need to get drugs or tobacco into Australia, I’m your guy.
The offer came from what police call a “trusted insider” and what crooks call “doors”; people who work in industries that move goods and people across borders and help criminal syndicates pierce holes in border security to bring drugs and tobacco onshore.
Australian Border Force assistant commissioner James Watson.Credit: Penny Stephens
Doors, and the service they provide, have become instrumental to various flourishing criminal syndicates in Australia, including prominent ones run by imprisoned boss George Marrogi and exiled gangland kingpin Kazem “Kaz” Hamad.
“Because of their deep knowledge of the supply chain, they will often go out to market and say, ‘I know how to use this’,” said Australian Border Force assistant commissioner James Watson on how doors offer their services to criminal syndicates.
Their specialist skill set means they are highly sought after. And the profits they help deliver are the fuel that keeps Melbourne’s underworld war burning.
“They’ll try to sell their knowledge,” Watson told this masthead.
“We are detecting more now than we’ve ever detected, and we’re still seeing the incredible, incredible demand for consumption.”
Piercing Australia’s border is big business and syndicates pay top dollar for specialist crooks who know the intricacies of logistics systems – and how to breach them.
Insiders can be anybody operating within the logistics chain and work in various ways. They’re drivers, brokers, or moving agents. They can assist syndicates in identifying shipping channels that could be exploited, change package addresses, or tap airport workers to help them smuggle.
Their actions are designed to obfuscate and muddy the waters. They might subtly change an address to redirect a package to a different destination. Law enforcement sources say some of them are creative and resourceful.
The Port of Melbourne is a major logistics hub in the southern hemisphere, where much illicit material enters Australia.Credit: Joe Armao
ABF Superintendent Kelly-anne Parish this month said Operation Jetengine had made several referrals to federal police regarding people linked to airport insiders.
But the story of insiders and how police realised they had penetrated so deeply into the architecture of illicit trafficking begins a few years ago.
During the Operations Ironside busts in June 2021, police gained access to – and monitored – an encrypted communications channel.
“Ironside was the impetus for a lot of things,” AFP Commander Raegan Stewart said.
“Having access to the Anon platform, that encrypted platform, really gave us insight to how the syndicates work together and, more importantly, who they use to move their drugs in an out.
“That’s when we really realise how much they’re relying on these trusted insiders, these doors.”
Stewart said authorities identified about 70 insiders embedded within various logistics enterprises nationwide.
That number surprised her and prompted law enforcement partners to double down on Operation Centinel, a taskforce established in 2020. Since March 2022, it has nabbed 42 alleged offenders and resulted in 66 charges. The AFP says it has seized $20.96 million.
‘They could be recruited to go into a particular position by a syndicate or it could be an infiltration directly from a criminal syndicates.’
AFP Commander Raegan Stewart
The AFP is still figuring out how doors are recruited and by what means they inveigle their way into influential stages in the logistics chain.
“They could just be recruiters as in, ‘I’m offering you more money than what you’re earning’,” Stewart said.
“On the other hand, they could be blackmailed. They could actually owe money to a syndicate.
“They could be recruited to go into a particular position by a syndicate or it could be an infiltration directly from a criminal syndicates.”
The targeted approach has lead to a string of exposures and arrests. In February, six people were arrested in Melbourne as part of Operation Tyres, including transport and freight industry workers.
The door implicated in the bust was associated with the Haddara criminal syndicate.
In another bust, a person with access to Home Affairs cargo and freight forwarding systems had facilitated the import of illegal firearms and weapons by “piggybacking” onto a legitimate importation.
Police discovered two handguns, three long-arm firearms, six grenades, various firearms parts and an extensive assortment of ammunition.
Even authorities whose job it is to find insiders are not immune.
In April, a secret corruption inquiry probed claims that the ABF’s most sensitive division had been infiltrated by a criminal syndicate – raising fresh concerns about large-scale traffickers exploiting law enforcement weaknesses.
Among the inquiry’s damning discoveries was evidence that a burner mobile phone was passed to a senior official in Border Force’s Human Source Unit by associates of Noureddean Jamal, a convicted drug supplier whose brother is in jail for terrorism offences.
John Silvester lifts the lid on Australia’s criminal underworld. Subscribers can sign up to receive his Naked City newsletter every Thursday.