Strike Force Leaburn: From Brewarrina plane robbery to charging Peter Ritson and Felicity Fraser over cocaine importation conspiracy
How a police strike force set up to investigate a bizarre plane robbery in 2000 morphed into chasing conspiracies into importing cocaine worth hundreds of millions of dollars nearly two decades later.
Newcastle
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There are few gotcha moments when detectives monitor crooks’ phones – more like trolling through endless hours of conversations and text messages in the hope of uncovering one possible golden titbit of evidence.
Enter the crew from Strike Force Leaburn – the reinvestigation into a bizarre armed robbery of a “bank plane” in the far western NSW town of Brewarrina.
It was 20 days into the new millennium when a pair of masked gunmen raced onto the tarmac and pointed shotguns at the pilot and couriers during what police would later discover was a cunningly and brilliantly planned scheme.
Albeit for one significant oversight – the information about the amount of cash on-board was out by 24 hours.
Instead of the more than $500,000 due to be on board on January 21, 2000, the crew hit the job on January 20 and escaped with just over $1000.
However disastrous the outcome, the job was meticulous and has attracted the reluctant respect of cops in the years since: From the location in Brewarrina, after the PA-31 Navajo Chieftain had already landed and taken off at Mudgee, Coonabarabran, Coonamble and Walgett. to the fact that the bandits had planned to take the plane with them and had built a makeshift airstrip on a lonely road about 40km out of town where they would rendezvous with at least one other person to make their getaway.
When the plane wouldn’t start, both gunmen jumped back into the Holden Commodore, stolen months earlier from western Sydney, and still made their way out to the meeting point before the car was torched and they disappeared into the dusty air.
Some 17 years later and Strike Force Leaburn was launched and quickly identified several persons of interest.
It included chasing up a clever piece of detective work from years previous, where a single $50 note known to have been on the plane when it was robbed turned up as part of a payment of board in Brewarrina just days after the stick-up.
The guy who used the note, which was identified because of a unique scribble on it, was identified and later ruled out as a suspect.
And this game of detective cat and mouse continued on.
More persons of interest were identified and needed to be investigated before they could be ruled out.
Sometimes that occurred quickly. Other times, it needed more investigative work.
And that is where a bloke called Peter Ritson enters the frame.
Ritson is a bit of an enigma. A phantom if you will.
He has a limited criminal history since about 2004 – when he was aged 40 – and includes aggravated break and enter, possessing a prohibited weapon without a permit and possessing a shortened firearm without authority.
But it is what Strike Force Leaburn detectives discover during the phone taps on Ritson that begins to appear to be one of those golden titbit moments.
Are they hearing this correctly? That there are plans afoot for a significant importation of cocaine from South America.
From a cold case review on an interesting but unsuccessful holdup to the importation of over a tonne of the drug from Ecuador with an estimated street value of over $400m.
And so their focus moved onto Ritson, and then to his bookkeeper Felicity Fraser, a well-known person in certain circles of the Upper Hunter town of Scone.
Fraser was known as a doting mother and horse lover, who bred Melbourne Cup-winning horse Shocking and was a popular figure across the horsey circles of the region.
But she was living a double life – helping her boss organise what they believed were going to be significant shipments of cocaine for a criminal syndicate which remains murky.
Over a couple of years, Ritson and Fraser conspired to import four shipments.
The first three were supposed to be inside shipments of teak, with 100kg of cocaine expected in the first delivery, 200kg in the second and 250kg in the third.
However, all three shipments arrived on Australian shores without any drugs on board.
Ritson and Fraser even broke up the teak on one of the shipments thinking they would find cocaine inside.
They never did.
And a fourth shipment, supposed to be carrying 500kg of cocaine within zeolite, never arrived in Australia at all.
After years of building up a brief on the pair, Strike Force Leaburn detectives swooped in February 2022, arresting Fraser in Scone’s central business district and Ritson nearby.
Search warrants were executed on Fraser’s family home in nearby Moobi while a second raid was done on a house in Scone.
The arrests shocked the region – especially that of Fraser. Both pleaded guilty to conspiracy to import cocaine, although the amounts were changed.
A sentencing hearing for her in 2023 mentioned the shame she now felt for falling into the conspiracy with her boss, who had employed her to do bookwork only to discover the business was just a front for the cocaine importation.
“I must say at the end of all the evidence and submissions it still remains somewhat of a mystery how a woman of Miss Fraser’s background character and morals became knowingly involved in plans to import large quantities of this prohibited drug and maintain this involvement for three years,” Newcastle District Court Judge Peter McGrath said.
He later added: “I’m satisfied that Miss Fraser herself is so chastened by her experience of arrest, charging and imprisonment, for the public humiliation and denunciation and the effect of what she has done on herself and her family, that she will not offend again, either in a light manner, or indeed in any other manner.”
Judge McGrath gave Fraser a 33 per cent discount in sentencing, bringing what would have been a maximum 15 year sentence down to nine-and-a-half years.
With time already served, she will be eligible for parole in August 2027.
As for Ritson, the phantom told his sentencing hearing that he would do it again if it meant he needed to put food on the table.
He was sentenced to a maximum ten-and-a-half years with a non-parole period of seven years.
Ritson won’t be eligible for parole until March 2029.
As for the plane robbery, it remains unsolved and although every case remains open, the investigation has exhausted all avenues of inquiry and it is not active.
But it doesn’t mean new information may not become available over the fullness of time.
“We do believe they were privy to some type of confidential information about the significant amount of money that was due to be on that plane,” commander of the state’s robbery and serious crime squad, Det Supt Joseph Douehli said.
“They just got the wrong day.”
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