AFP crimes including bikies, drug trafficking, sex and slave trading that dominated 2022
From cyber hacks to slave trading, child abuse to drug peddling bikie gangsters, these are the top 12 crimes the Australian Federal Police have busted wide open.
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Cyber hackers, kidnappers, slave traders, terrorists and drug trafficking outlaw motorcycle gangsters made the annual top 12 hit list of sensitive Australian Federal Police operations.
Many of the disturbing “dirty dozen” cases from 2021-22 were not necessarily high profile.
But they were cited by the AFP as trending public threats. Most originated overseas but were uncovered here.
“Crime originating offshore, like illicit drug production, child exploitation, extremism and cybercrime, can affect the quality of life of Australians at home,” AFP Commissioner Reece Kershaw told the Senate in reviewing operations for the year.
THE AFP CASE FILES
OPERATION ETONBURY
The counter terrorism and foreign interference threat to Australia is seen as “enduring, increasingly complex and diversified”. Religiously motivated violence in the form of Islamic extremism remains the predominant terrorist threat.
The Etonbury operation concluded “the number of individuals who adhere to a violent extremist ideology continues to increase and spread across the country”.
The threat now involves an increasing prevalence of youth inspired by violent extremist ideologies through online. The AFP has also noted encryption and secure messaging apps use was increasing which “may make detection of preparations for attacks more difficult”.
The AFP worked with domestic and foreign law enforcement and intelligence partners including ASIO to this year thwart a terror plot by a NSW man suspected of being a member of Islamic State and plotting an attack on law enforcement and community leaders. The matter is still before the courts.
OPERATION IASION
Targeted phishing scams where emails and SMS messages impersonated banks and phone providers continued to convince victims to release personal information such as passwords and credit card numbers. AFP Cybercrime Operations received information about suspicious website registrations suspected of being used to phish “hundreds of thousands” of customers in Australia. An offender did manage to obtain victims’ personal information, which was used to access telephone and bank accounts and create new accounts without their knowledge. An online database with details of more than 20,000 Australian victims was identified with the offender managing to siphon more than $100,000 from the victims. Two people were arrested. The AFP now has the ongoing Operation Pallidus and Operation Guardian looking at the Medibank Private and Optus ransomware crisis.
OPERATION BLETSOE
In November 2021, Simon Fleming was arrested and charged with six NSW state-based offences following a siege in Windang, near Wollongong. The 40-year-old man armed himself with numerous firearms, a fake improvised explosive device, cable ties and a folding knife before walking to an intersection. The man allegedly fired a number of shots at vehicles and pedestrians before taking hostages in a nearby dive shop. Local police successfully negotiated the hostages’ release. During the negotiations, the offender expressed anti-government sentiments. In February 2022, the same man was charged with an additional offence of engaging in an act of terrorism. A search of his home found devices and multiple files, including the man’s manifesto, which was consistent with ideologically motivated violent extremist sentiments. A Nazi flag and white supremacist material was seized. The matter is still before the courts.
OPERATION BASILISK
Operation Basilisk is an ongoing task force-led operation into overseas crime syndicates targeting Australia for drugs trafficking – notably from Colombia. The AFP cited the estimated economic cost to Australian taxpayers – measured via the loss of quality of life for Australians who use illicit substances, based on premature mortality, criminal justice costs and healthcare costs – as more than $14.9 billion.
“This harm is increasing, with ongoing growth in the level of drug-related deaths and hospitalisations recorded in Australia,” the AFP concluded. During the year, the potential for three tonnes of cocaine reaching Australia was thwarted through one joint operation with Colombian paramilitary forces.
OPERATION ROSENDAEL-DRIMNAGH
On 16 January 2021, the AFP High Risk Terrorist Offender (HRTO) team arrested and charged a 26-year-old NSW man with three counts of contravening a control order. It was alleged he failed to comply with a condition of the control order by accessing material online that supported executions, beheadings and torture. The man had only just been released from custody in NSW after completing 14 months’ imprisonment for two counts of associating with a terrorist organisation, Islamic State. Following ongoing analysis of previously seized devices, on 17 March 2021 the AFP charged the man with an additional six breaches. On 11 April 2022, the man was sentenced to two years and three months’ jail.
OPERATION ROSENDAEL-MEDIJA
On 30 April 2022, the NSW HRTO team arrested and charged a NSW man for allegedly breaching a control order when he failed to notify the AFP that he was undertaking paid work. The man was arrested and charged with one count of contravening a control order under section 104.27 of the Criminal Code. Earlier in February 2018, the man was sentenced to four years and nine months’ imprisonment for his 2013 travel to Syria and involvement with members of an insurgent group whose intention was to remove Syrian President Bashar al-Assad from power. He was convicted of engaging in hostile activity in a foreign state and in July 2021 control orders were placed against him just ahead of his release from jail. The matter remains before the courts.
OPERATION IRONSIDE-REGA
Ironside has been the AFP’s biggest ever operation. It began in 2018 and in 2021-22 alone it saw more than 140 people arrested and $1.4 million in cash seized. The genesis of the program was the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the AFP together monitoring the ANOM encrypted app. The REGA operation targeted a crime syndicate with outlaw motorcycle gang links involved in drug importation, trafficking and money laundering. The AFP identified a ‘Lone-Wolf’ OMCG member as a key member of this syndicate and in June 2021 a property near Cessnock was raided where cash was discovered behind a shed wall in 49 vacuum-sealed bags, each estimated to contain $100,000. Police also seized two vehicles, two motorcycles and a number of designer handbags and watches. The alleged offender was charged with money laundering offences. During 2021–22, the NSW Supreme Court made forfeiture orders over the $4.9 million in cash seized during the operation. The investigation resulted in 11 further arrests and the seizure of more than 700 kilograms of methamphetamine.
OPERATION KIPPAGE
This operation began in 2017 when the Australian Border Force (ABF) referred a matter to the AFP-led Criminal Assets Confiscation Taskforce regarding illegitimate labour-hire intermediaries supplying workers to vegetable-packing sheds in Cardinia, south east of Melbourne.
Conspirators were suspected of deriving unlawful monies from the arrangement, while workers were underpaid over a 10-year period. Those behind the scheme attempted to distance themselves from the criminality by cycling through different company names, often with ‘straw’ directors (people who agree to be named as a director on paper but do not take part in the business), in a ‘phoenixing’ pattern of behaviour.
The labour-hire company would recruit workers by word of mouth, pay in cash and maintain minimum or non-existent records of payment. It would send a bulk invoice to the farmer, who would transfer money into a bank account, from which the money would then be withdrawn in cash. This arrangement enabled the company to make a substantial profit by avoiding its responsibilities to pay minimum wage to its workers. Cambodian Sarith Kit, 48, was convicted and sentenced to six months jail while Giuseppe Viazzarri, Australia’s largest grower of asparagus and broccolini, was convicted of breaching the Migration Act and fined $60,000.
OPERATION FUJI
Telephone calls made by prisoners are recorded and can be listened to by prison staff unless they are between a prisoner and their lawyer, which is covered by legal privilege. One Melbourne organised crime figure thought he had found a way to avoid having his calls overheard as he directed his syndicate from prison. In August 2021, Malaysian authorities detected 400 kilograms of methamphetamine addressed to a company in Melbourne. Inquiries by AFP linked the importation to an organised crime syndicate whose underworld heavyweight crime boss George Marrogi was in Barwon Prison, having been convicted of the murder of drug dealer Kadir Ors. In December 2021, the AFP identified a mobile phone that was used by a criminal associate of Marrogi. He had registered the number with corrections authorities as that of his lawyer. This meant that calls to the phone would not be listened to by authorities. However, interception of the associate’s phone revealed that the prisoner was directing his syndicate’s criminal activities through his associate. In February 2022, as a result of conversations intercepted between the prisoner and his associate, Operation Fuji investigators were able to provide the ABF with intelligence resulting in the detection of 56 kilograms of methamphetamine and 13 kilograms of heroin. Investigators also learned of threats against criminal rivals and in April search warrants were executed on a home and other properties linked to Marrogi.
OPERATION TELCHAR
This operation began in August 2013 after a self-report by Australian global strategic engineering and project managers Sinclair Knight Merz Pty Ltd to the AFP Northern Command Fraud and Anti-Corruption Team. The company disclosed it had, through its South-East Asian subsidiaries, made illegitimate payments to foreign public officials to secure World Bank and Asian Development Bank financed loan projects in Vietnam and the Philippines. Inquiries established that Sinclair Knight Merz Pty Ltd had offered over $1 million in bribes to foreign public officials and had paid over $460,000 over a 12-year period to obtain or retain business in the form of large engineering and construction contracts. Telchar led to the first contested foreign bribery trial. After three years of court process, in May 2021 the offending company entered a plea of guilty to three foreign bribery offences and was sentenced in the NSW Supreme Court with fines totalling $1.47 million imposed. The Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions has appealed the leniency of this decision.
OPERATION TATSUTA
Tatsua commenced in February 2020 after South Australian public servant Ian Ralph Schapel returned to Australia from travel to South-East Asia. ABF officers examined his electronic devices and found child abuse material. The AFP later executed a search warrant at his home and uncovered more than 50,000 files of child abuse material held on numerous electronic devices. From these files 55 incidents were identified where Schapel had directed and live streamed the sexual abuse of 13 separate victims in the Philippines. In April 2020, he was arrested and charged with 50 offences. On 3 August 2022 he appeared in court and received 15 years’ jail. But the case was far from over. After extensive analysis by victim identification specialists and investigators, information relating to the victims in the Philippines was referred to the Philippines internet Crimes Against Children Centre. Authorities in the Philippines executed multiple search warrants to rescue 15 children and arrest five offenders.
OPERATION CUPOLA
Although slavery is a concept many people associate with another time, the AFP has found it continues. In 2015 authorities were told a Tamil Indian national had been admitted to Melbourne hospital with severe malnourishment (he weighed just 40kg), diabetes and gangrene of the feet and hands. The woman aged in her 50s reported that she had been employed to provide live-in domestic help to a family eight years earlier but had received no payment and had not been permitted to leave the home. During her time she had hot water poured over her, was kicked and slapped, hit in the head with a frozen chicken and pushed down stairs as she worked 23 hours a day. In 2016 a couple in their fifties Kandasamy and Kumuthini Kannan were each charged with one count of possessing a slave and one count of keeping a slave. In 2017 they were committed to stand trial and in 2021 they were both convicted by a jury. Those convictions are now the subject of appeals. One member of the couple was sentenced to eight years’ jail for her part in the offending. The other was sentenced to six years.
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