A houseboat.

The terrifying, law-breaking Hells Angels have hired a houseboat. For their biggest annual party. Because it makes them feel safe. It’s Friday, February 17, 2017. 11am. Stinking hot day. Jet-fuel shimmer coming off the roads. There are 40-odd gang members here, just standing around. Lifers and fresh blood. Presidents. Sergeants-at-Arms. Treasurers. Lots of denim and leather. Lots of bull-necks and gold chains.

Life’s good. The boat has red leather seating. A spa. There’s cold beer. Music’s pumping. Another 60 guys are on the way. This all on the Murray River in touristy Mildura, just over the NSW border. Mildura because the cops are a bit softer, apparently. Plus a party on water is harder to raid. The Hells angels want privacy. They want peace.

Then a convoy pulls up.

Six cops step out wearing t-shirts and cargo shorts. They have guns at their hips. They photograph the boat and the men onboard, writing down names. Someone cuts the music. Soon, the dick-swinging turns to humiliation as the officers, polite as parking rangers, announce they’re members of Strike Force Raptor, the militarised unit of the NSW Gangs Squad.

Bikies hate Raptor.

Its signature tactics have upended modern gang structures, shrunk membership, and leveraged so much pressure on leadership figures that, in one case, a bikie walked into a police station and tearfully handed in his colours, begging to be left alone.

You’ve seen them on TV — angle-grinding their way into clubhouses, knocking doors off their hinges, lining up gang members so their noses touch the pavement; all very high-octane, but just a glimpse of the job.

It’s how the squad gets to these arrests, with novel tactics created just for the bikies, that makes Raptor unusual.

Backed up by their Victorian counterparts, the Raptor officers order the bikies off the houseboat.

“You can’t touch us, you’re from NSW,” says one of the Hells Angels, pointing out that, yes, Mildura is in Victoria, just beyond Raptor’s jurisdiction.

Except the bikies have it all wrong.

The Murray River on which their houseboat floats is technically in Raptor territory, courtesy of a dusty old piece of legislation about tidal boundaries and high-water marks that few people know about.

This is the essence of Raptor’s work. Its officers have perfected the use of antique laws and fine print against their targets.

They’ve boarded up clubhouses using forgotten laws drafted in the ‘40s to police the sly-grog trade; they’ve taken laws intended for the ‘Razor Gangs’ of East Sydney nearly 100 years ago and tweaked them to stop gang members meeting in public; and they’ve resurrected obscure search powers from the ‘70s to make surprise raids incredibly easy, a fact that’s made storing guns, if you're a criminal, incredibly hard.

It’s all long-game policing, a throwback to Eliot Ness and the Untouchables, the famed agents of Prohibition-era Chicago who pioneered fresh angles and plays against their targets.

Which is what Raptor’s attempting now in Mildura. As the Hells Angels stand their ground, refusing to get off the houseboat, an officer spies their motorbikes illegally parked on a nature strip.

He snaps 35 photographs and writes 35 parking tickets while the negotiations continue.

Small fry, maybe, but who likes a parking ticket?

A Hells Angel cries foul and complains about the jurisdictional niggle, but it’s no use.

“I’m also a sworn officer in Victoria,” the Raptor cop says, pointing to a little-known fact about Raptor staff, which is that nearly all of them have been deputised as special constables in Queensland, Victoria and the ACT.

The reason goes back to an incident a few years ago where some bikies zipped across the Victorian border and spun a burnout on the other side, taunting their Raptor pursuers, who couldn’t cross over and fine them.

The next time it happened, the bikies got a nasty surprise.

This back-and-forth goes on a while. The negotiations move into their second hour and the Hells Angels won’t budge.

An officer gets creative. He calls the boat’s hire company and learns it’s licensed to hold only 12 people, making forcible ejection a legal option.

The Riot Squad’s put on standby. ”Walk off or be physically removed,” the bikies are told, a threat that seems to resonate with gang elders, who know Raptor and have been dealing with its officers for years and want to avoid a big scene and more trouble later.

They relent and stand down their boys, ordering everyone off the boat, per the instructions.

But it’s still just the start of their problems.

Over the next 12 hours the Hells Angels are rounded up around town, pulled over for speeding, or forgetting their P-plates, or refusing to wear a helmet.

Demerit points get slashed and fines pile up. A few pack up and leave town, fearing they might lose their licences, and by morning even more have followed.

The gang’s ‘National Run’, the big mandatory event for which both the Hells Angels and Raptor had all come to Mildura in the first place, gets cancelled due to falling numbers.

“Most of these guys are in gangs but they drive trucks on the side and need their licences,” a Raptor officer involved in the Mildura operation tells me.

Why all this effort to cancel a bike ride? Because Raptor is all about crushing the bikies’ spirit, their reason for being, wherever they get the opportunity.

Not just for the fun of it, but because the showmanship is a powerful and insidious recruiting tool that can lead to allegations ranging from murder or attempted murder, to drug supply, drive-by shootings, kidnappings, standover and or home invasions.

Obviously not all bikies are involved in this level of criminality. For those who are - and but there have been a lot - Raptor’s arrest figures tell the story.

Whatever glamour the bikies used to have, it’s fading, and Raptor is taking it.

Today, being an outlaw is no longer romantic. It’s just tedious.

Here’s what the bikies are up against. Years ago a police officer was raiding a house in Bexley and happened upon 12 railway detonators, the kind that explode on impact to signal oncoming trains in thick fog.

The homeowner was arrested and taken to the station for processing. The only problem was the officer, still a bit new, hadn’t seen a railway detonator before and didn’t know which law had been broken.

Did they count as explosives? It was 3am and he wasn’t sure. No one at the station knew the answer.

Suddenly his computer screen locked and the document was taken over remotely. When the screen unfroze a minute later there were characters on the page that weren’t there before.

The blank spaces were full, all typed out by his commander, David Adney, awake and somehow solving the problem from home in the middle of the night.

This is standard for Adney. He once turned up unannounced at Windsor Police Station at 2am to pass around caffeinated energy drinks to his team—they’d just made big arrests in a multi-tentacled drug investigation and had a long night of paperwork ahead.

Then there was the time in Bankstown where an undercover cop was trying to buy $50 worth of cannabis, but the dealer turned up with 50 ecstasy pills by mistake, worth about $2000, which the officer couldn’t afford.

Hearing this back at the office, Adney raced to an ATM, pulled out some cash, then raced back to the office, marked down each bill, then rushed out to Bankstown to deliver the money.

The resulting buy helped seal the syndicate’s fate—instead of small-time pot dealing, the dealer and his bosses went down for commercial ecstasy supply, an offence worth seven years in prison.

A workaholic, Detective Chief Inspector David Adney has for eight years been the commander of Strike Force Raptor, its architect and fine-tuner of tactics.

This is a man with absolute convictions about community safety; a man who believes women should feel safe walking home at night; a man who doesn’t accept gangs should exist.

And so it seems only reasonable that he’s a nemesis to his targets, gang leader’s like Mark Buddle, the former boss of the Comanchero, or Shane ‘Kiwi’ Martin, the former southern region president of the Rebels.

Loathing of his unit runs high. The words “Fuck Raptor” are often found spray painted on clubhouses once they’ve been raided.

A Rebels Sergeant-at-Arms even got an elaborate tattoo of a Raptor cop on his knees, styled as a pig, with a gun jammed in his mouth.

Adney’s not fussed by this acrimony. You’ll never hear him ridicule or disrespect a bikie, but he takes a dim view of their ethos – the outlaw lifestyle, the “one percenters” as they call themselves; the self-aggrandising notion that society’s basic laws don’t apply to them.

His solution has been to throw every piece of legislation he can at the bikies, literally any law available, even the Fisheries Act if he has to — whatever it takes to correct their behaviour.

And if this sounds like punishment or payback, it’s not. It’s more like helicopter parenting.

Small examples: if a bikie owns a restaurant with extra tables on the footpath, Raptor will organise hefty fines to clean up their act; if they’re not paying tax, Raptor will turn up with a garnishee notice; and if their clubhouse is missing a fire extinguisher, or the stairways are blocked, or the building isn’t up to code in some way, it’ll be shut down using the black-letter laws of the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act.

“They’re not getting away with all the crimes they were once committing,” says Adney, who doesn’t grant interviews and generally dislikes media attention of any kind, and is only taking part in this piece because of significant cajoling from his peers.

Within Raptor this tactic has been given a name: ‘Consequence-based Policing’.

It’s a kind of carrot-stick approach that kicks in during turf wars and flare-ups of gang activity. Because no matter how you cut it, Raptor’s 55 staff can’t constantly be outside every single clubhouse, which means gangs have to be triaged according to priority.

Bikies who shoot houses or intimidate people or stir up a turf war get Raptor’s full attention. Those who behave are left alone – they can pick up milk without having their car pulled over, or watch Sons of Anarchy without police interrupting. Most bikies view this type of policing as harassment.

It works like this: say a man with gang affiliations is raping a prostitute, but the prostitute won’t cooperate with police, which makes the case extremely difficult to solve — what can Raptor do about that?

“We launch consequences,” says Detective Chief Inspector Darren Beeche, the man in charge of Raptor’s tactical teams and highway patrol unit.

“We can bring immense pressure on particular gangs and individuals if they step outside of community expectations.”

The prostitute story is a real example, and typical of Raptor’s work. The guy in question happened to own a restaurant, so Raptor paid him a visit and identified a bunch of paper breaches in a matter of minutes.

There were exit signs missing from the doorways and more basic rules he’d ignored. Within an hour, he was holding $13,000 in fines.

Next, they descended on his gang associates, stopping cars, raiding houses, handing out infringements for speeding and minor seatbelt infractions, each person told quite openly their goonish mate had brought this upon them.

“We make the whole gang pay,” says Beeche. “It’s like football training — one person stuffs up, so everybody does push-ups.”

In best-case scenarios, gang members get caught off-guard during these interactions.

They’re arrested for holding a gun, or carrying drugs, which puts them in jail for a while and disrupts their chapter hierarchies.

Whole crews have been dismantled this way, like the Rebels’ Morriset chapter, which no longer exists because Raptor officers suspected its president of molesting a 14-year-old girl (he was found not guilty of the crime, but the arrest and trial took him offline and crippled his club).

Similarly, when a Comanchero placed a bomb outside a Milperra hotel, apparently because the staff refused his gang service, it led to a round-up of chapter bosses on drug supply charges that, until the bomb was placed, hadn’t been receiving much attention.

So you can see how bikies can be their own worst enemies at times, attracting attention when it could be avoided, even though most insist that Raptor’s tradecraft — targeting club members who sometimes haven’t done anything wrong — is unfair and discriminatory.

Do the bikies have a point here? Is it OK to punish everyone for the sins of the few?

If you're in Raptor, the answer is, frankly, yes: why expect anything less if you don a one-percenter patch that literally advertises your unwillingness to abide by the law?

And there’s no denying these tactics actually work, too. A former chapter president who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity cited Raptor as the sole reason why he ‘patched out’ of his club.

“It did make my life very hard,” he said of the targeting. “They were polite, but they’d come around and just do checks on you, 20 visits a month. At the end of the day, they won. They got their way. My kids got sick of it. The neighbours would ask about it. They’d think I was a bad person.”

And obviously this very deliberate type of targeting is only a part of what Raptor does. They also do the big-ticket stuff: drug investigations, bikie murders, attempted murders, drive-by shootings, kidnappings, et cetera — but solving these won’t ever be enough to break up a gang with hundreds of members, or thousands of members.

Grudgingly, bikies are adapting to this hyper-attentive status quo. In June, members of the Bandidos and Lone Wolf brawled up at Tweed Heads on State of Origin night.

It was a turf thing: a Bandido from Sydney moved into the area and invited friends down from the Gold Coast to watch the game. They chose the Seagulls Club on Gollan Drive, in Lone Wolf territory, prompting a fistfight in front of families and threats of more violence to follow.

A Raptor officer, working elsewhere on two other gangs, drove up the coast to mediate.

“We’re down in Newcastle doing the Finks and Nomads, but we’re quite happy to come up here and focus on you guys,” the officer said. Soon after, the gang leaders brokered a truce in a phone call. The feuding just wasn’t worth the threat of Raptor.

► PART ONE ► PART TWO ► PART THREE ► PART FOUR