Middle Eastern gang puts crazy price on two cops’ heads
EXCLUSIVE: An assassin was being recruited to execute two senior cops as an organised crime gang tried to protect its lucrative national car rebirthing operation, it can now be sensationally revealed. NEW POLICE TAPE PODCAST
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An assassin was being recruited to execute two senior cops as an organised crime gang tried to protect its lucrative national car rebirthing operation, it can now be sensationally revealed.
The going rate for the kill was just $88,000 for the heads of two NSW officers on the task force investigating the group.
The former boss of the state’s Drug Squad, Nick Bingham, has revealed a gang of Middle Eastern crooks took out the contract, with police only learning of the plot by accident when a Queensland criminal wanted to cut a deal to save his own skin.
LISTEN NOW: Hear Nick Bingham on everything from criminals’ threats to the moment a police listening device was mistaken for a bomb. WARNING: STRONG LANGUAGE
“There was a threat picked up by the Queensland Police just by sheer chance,” Bingham told True Crime Australia in the latest Police Tape podcast episode.
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“They had locked up an armed robber in Queensland who had some information that he was using to try and get a better deal for himself with the Queensland Police and detailed a contract out on members of the group I was working with.
“There were about six of us on a task force called Transplant looking into a group stealing a large number of expensive vehicles and rebirthing them. It was a funny amount, $88,000, to kill the head of the task force, who was a detective sergeant, and whoever was with him at the time. It was a little bit scary.”
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The group being targeted by the task force were considered hardened Middle Eastern criminals rebirthing hundreds of high-end vehicles, and, while it seemed a bizarre execution amount and rather small to kill two police officers, the threat was taken seriously.
“So we got quite cautious and took our firearms home, and we actually started looking under the cars because these people were high-end criminals and they had a capacity to use sophisticated methods of possibly blowing up a car,’’ Bingham said.
The would-be assassins were never positively identified, but a well-placed visit put paid to the direct threat.
Two of NSW Police Force’s most senior detectives, who were known for their “tough reputations” and were not part of the task force, were sent to talk to the key Middle Eastern figures suspected of being behind the bounty.
They were warned police were on to them and of the consequences should anything happen. After a few months police were a little more relaxed.
Bingham said, in some ways, having a bounty on their heads was part and parcel of the job, and it wasn’t that unusual for cops to be threatened.
“I recall when we interviewed a suspect over a number of armed robberies, we were in the interview room, and I made a comment in relation to him — which I can’t recall what it was, but it was fairly innocuous — and I could actually see him burr up,’’ the retired officer said.
At one stage, Bingham thought the man was going to jump across the interview table and attack him.
Whatever he said had stirred the prisoner up, and despite being in a police station and a closed interview room, Bingham said the tension was palpable. They had intelligence reports that showed the suspect had a hatred of police and he was considered extremely violent.
“If he goes out he wants to go out in a blaze of glory, and he wants to commit suicide by cop. So he was going to try and kill the cops and get taken out at the same time,’’ Bingham said of the intel.
As the case went to court, the offender decided to change his plea to guilty because the evidence was so stacked against him he was certain to be convicted.
But outside court, the man’s lawyer accosted Bingham with a message from his client, who was furious and blamed the police officer for the fact he was going to spend the next 10 to 12 years in jail.
“I did something I’d never done before because, you know, I’m not that type of cop that goes around threatening people and never have done that, that’s not my style. I was never a good enough fighter to do that,’’ Bingham told Police Tape, attempting to make light of the situation.
“But when the barrister threatened me I said, ‘You can just go back to your client and tell him if he ever comes after me or my family I’ll put a bullet in his head’.
“The barrister was quite taken aback by that and said, ‘You can’t say that’, and I said, ‘I just did and I need you to take that back to your client’.”
Generally, he said, most crooks were too preoccupied with their own plight to take revenge, and he believed that most criminals if treated reasonably were unlikely to seek it.
“There are a couple that I do have concerns with, but I guess that’s the nature of the beast, as the saying goes,” he said.
“I’ve been pretty fair my whole career as a police officer and I’ve always treated people fairly well regardless of how bad they are, whether they’re murderers, whether they’re drug traffickers, whether they’re rapists, and I’ve never really gotten people that off-side apart from that armed robber that made that threat through his barrister.’’