NSW Assistant Commissioner Stuart Smith says crime families still reign Sydney’s south west

Asian Triads may be gone but crime families run Sydney’s south west, and a top cop explains how the two worlds operate.

Thirty years ago, more than a dozen gangs fought openly on Sydney’s streets to control Australia’s national drug distribution market.

At that time it was mostly heroin and was largely controlled by Asian Triads from the then nondescript multicultural suburb of Cabramatta, in Sydney’s south west.

For Stuart Smith, a then young undercover officer, it was a wild beat.

Then in the late 1990s and early 2000s police deployed a tactic pioneered by the New York Police Department that has today left the suburb the vibrant cosmopolitan capital many know only for its award-winning restaurants.

Now under restructuring announced last month by Police Commissioner Karen Webb, Assistant Commissioner Smith has been posted back to the district, this time as head of the South Western Metropolitan Region.

Assistant Commissioner Stuart Smith is returning to the Cabramatta district. Picture: NCA NewsWire /Gaye Gerard

The Triads have largely gone but he now faces a new criminal cohort but then like now, he warns they will be shut down.

“I remember full well what the place was like but I’m a bit surprised now how gentrified it is, I can’t believe how cosmopolitan it has become out here, it’s wonderful to see and I’m glad being in the job long enough to see the transition,” he said yesterday of Cabramatta.

“We’ve still got our issues in South West Metropolitan Region and by that I mean the Alameddine and Hamzy families are at it, which is generally over the drug trade and making money …. but it is not like it was back then.”

In his time as a junior undercover officer, Asian Triads notably with Vietnamese origins ran the streets with drugs and racketeering and interstate drug distribution

The violence that came with that as gangs fought for turf, Mr Smith remembers well.

“It was terrible,” he recalled.

Mourners gather for the funeral service of murdered 5T gang leader Tri Minh Tran at Liverpool cemetery in 1995, shot dead in a Cabramatta block of units.

“When I was there in the 1990s I could hear the AK-47s at night time, it was a pretty wild time to be a Detective in the joint I can tell you. People would be in shock, the number of shootings and murders and a lot was being done by these groups … they were bringing in a form of violence that Australia did not necessarily understand because we’d been through integration of other ethnic groups migrating to Australia, who brought problems with them, then it settled and they became business like, more community connected, including several Middle Eastern families who brought brown heroin with them, which was in opposition to Cabramatta … the Vietnamese represented a single violent capable street connected large distribution network for Chinese heroin, the Golden Triangle stuff and in a way it’s not indifferent to what’s going on at the moment.”

A gangland style killing outside the Meekong Club, Cabramatta, in 1996.

He said police could not take all the credit, it was links with community and local councils that made the difference then, modelling off the New York experience of “broken windows theory”, the targeting of minor crimes to help create an atmosphere of lawful order while improving the public amenity of our community.

“We have never been backward in a very proactive policing model and a very connected one with community which is clearly evident out here. We learnt a lot out of the experience of Cabramatta. That experience was everything had to pull in the one direction, the experience certainly was reflected in New York with the broken windows strategy, it got so bad that every party whether government agency, police and community all had to pull together to break the back of Cabramatta. It did and it certainly is not (what it is) today, it is a primary flourishing tourism location for the city.”

Mr Smith declined to go into detail about the crime families he has to tackle in his command, the Alameddine clan known to have more than 300 family associates in the network, some 80 of which have already been arrested over various offences.

But he warned the deadly feud between it and the Hamzy family, which had been going on for two years and involved shootings, kidnappings and murders, would not be tolerated by the police and certainly not by the community.

“We have a few things going, Operation Hawk was established in October, 2021 and is disrupting the street level activity of criminal groups in South West Metropolitan Region. We are always though, wary that there will be those others waiting in the wings to take over the illicit drug trade,” he said.