Pong Su incident: Inside one of Victoria’s most notorious drug busts, 20 years on
Inside the frantic, adrenaline-fuelled chase as federal agents battled technology, bad weather and language barriers to pull off one of Australia’s most notorious drug busts.
Geelong
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The sound of a roaring swell, waves almost three metres high, drowns out the noise of a small motor as a dinghy races towards a rocky shore.
Two men are speeding towards a secluded beach at Boggaley Creek, near Lorne.
The weather bureau has issued a strong wind warning.
The pair can barely make out the shore in the faintest of moonlight on a cloudy night.
Tomorrow, April 16, 2003 will be a full moon, but only one of them would see it.
There, on that inky-black night, the stage was set for the biggest drugs bust in the Surf Coast’s history.
OPERATION SORBET
Large-scale transnational drug trafficking is not the first thing that comes to mind when one pictures the Surf Coast.
Idyllic beaches, tourist hotspots.
Twenty years ago Geelong and the Surf Coast were the staging ground for one of the country’s most infamous drug busts.
Federal agents battled technology, language barriers, school holiday traffic and the weather to bust a syndicate smuggling 125kg of Golden Triangle heroin into the country, an estimated street-value upwards of $160m.
But before it was synonymous with the name Pong Su, before a captivating chase up Australia’s east coast, before it almost caused a diplomatic incident, it was a regional story. Front page of the Addy, tucked away on page 11 of the Herald Sun.
Detective Superintendent Celeste Johnston was a constable in 2003, when the Australian Federal Police received intelligence that the shore party for a major drug shipment had arrived in Australia.
“It all happened very, very quickly,” Detective Supt. Johnston told the Geelong Advertiser.
The case snowballed, something new appearing “at every turn”.
‘COMMUNICATIONS WERE ALMOST NOTHING’
It was school holidays, the week before Easter. Amid the tourists and families making their way down the Great Ocean Road, were three men on a mission.
The trio had recently arrived in Australia, at least one on a dubious passport, and had begun to make regular trips from Melbourne to Geelong and the Surf Coast.
Three men among the holiday traffic with dozens of federal agents on their tails, watching, listening in.
Acting on a tip off, Australian Federal Police had been surveilling three recent arrivals to Australia – Kiam Fah Teng, a Malaysian, Yau Kim Lam, an apparent Chinese national, and Chin Kwang Lee, whose origin was unclear.
Surveilling the three men was not a simple task; this was the day before wireless and smartphones.
“The technology was vastly different to what we have now,” Detective Supt Johnston said.
“It wasn’t a situation where we could get live capturing, and live assessments of their conversations.
From wire taps, federal agents were fed piecemeal elements of the scheme, but also faced difficulties with translation.
Due to the sensitive nature of the investigation, options for translators were limited and the men sometimes used specific dialects – and it being Easter holidays didn’t make things easier.
“It was challenging to try and maintain real time assessments of what was going on,” Supt Johnston said. “Everything was a little bit postponed.”
“We couldn’t even identify part of it at the time … there were a lot of gaps in what we were listening to.”
The full extent of the conversations wouldn’t become clear until agents began sifting through a mountain of evidence and a court brief was being compiled.
“Identifying someone who was qualified to provide those translations provided a lot of help, but that was quite some time down the track,” Supt Johnston said.
The further down the coast men went, the harder surveillance got.
“We didn’t have the radio network coverage for our teams,” Supt Johnston said.
“We didn’t have mobile phone coverage and the two satellite phones that we had actually couldn’t connect to the satellite network due to the terrible weather over those couple of days.
“Communications were almost nothing down there.”
Co-ordinating such a massive effort was a monumental task, as dozens of federal agents descended on the Surf Coast, working in shifts.
Away from the hustle and bustle of the city, another problem presented itself – the need to maintain surveillance while remaining unnoticed.
“There’s very little traffic at certain hours of the night when they were driving,” Supt Johnston said.
“Quite some distance needed to be maintained from them to avoid being identified and compromising what was going on.”
DEAD DROP
Then they lost them in the backgrounds behind Wye River, the night of the drop.
“There was a lot of movement and following (the suspects) down, up and around Deans Marsh Road and around the Boggaley Creek area,” Supt Johnston said.
“Unfortunately we just didn’t have the comms or the intel at that point in time. The priority was maintaining the coverage of the vehicles and the actual beach drop, when that rubber dinghy that came ashore wasn’t captured.”
Early the next morning, the Toyota Tarrago police had been following was identified in the carpark of Lorne’s Grand Pacific Hotel, with 50kg of 90-per-cent-pure heroin in the boot.
Teng and Lee were swiftly arrested nearby at Scotchman’s Reserve on Lorne’s foreshore.
With suspects in custody, the AFP put hell to leather.
The beach was searched for drugs and under a suspicious pile of kelp, federal agents came across the corpse of an unknown man. One of two men to come ashore in a partially inflated dinghy that night, his identity has never been confirmed. An autopsy confirmed he drowned.
The other man to come ashore, Ta Sa Wong had scuttled into the scrub and hid as police swarmed the beach.
Hungry and terrified, he was later found and arrested on April 17.
Meanwhile, around 2pm, police radios were crackling to life with reports of cars hurtling down the Princes Hwy at of speeds of up to 160km/h. They were quickly revealed to be unmarked police cars.
Armed officers surrounded a car in Mercer St and arrested a man at gunpoint, the third arrest.
But it wasn’t Lam, it was an innocent man – a retiree named Peter Van Lierop, on his way to an auction at Brougham St.
He had parked his car next to a suspect, likely Lam, at Western Beach and was released that evening. On May 17 the AFP would formally apologise for the arrest, stating it had been a “fluid situation”.
Lam would later be arrested on the Princes Hwy at Altona, and it was revealed he was moments from fleeing the country having booked a flight.
‘PONG SU WHO?’
By the time dozens of plainclothes federal agents were arresting drug couriers on the foreshore, it was just yet another curiosity for locals.
Residents in Lorne and Wye River had noticed a ship loitering off the coast earlier in the week, with one local who spoke to the Geelong Advertiser describing it as looking “shifty” as it loitered about 500m off shore, another said it had anchored one kilometre off Point Sturt.
Federal agents made the connection around 10am, and soon the ship was being watched.
“No one was aware of our investigation or presence in the area,” she said.
“It wasn’t fed through to us that there was this big suspicious ship off the coast, and it wasn’t actually identified or the link wasn’t made, until after the arrests.
The ship would be hunted as it moved into Tasmanian waters through Bass Strait, and then up the coast.
The four arrests were just the beginning of the story of the Pong Su. Five days riding on adrenaline, followed by months of work to prepare for a prosecution.
The evidence against Teng, Lee, Wong and Lam was overwhelming, with each translation that was returned only confirming their guilt. They all plead guilty.
For Supt Johnston, the “gravity” of the case is what she remembers most.
“It was bigger than Ben Hur,” she said.
“It took us all by surprise – at every turn something presented another challenge but also another opportunity.
“It was a learning curve for all AFP, Victoria Police, for the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions.”
For a case that began on a dreary week on the Surf Coast, it only got bigger and bigger.
The entire crew would be arrested and charged by April 21, the case having 34 defendants at one point. Four would stay for trial.
Another 75kg of Pong Su heroin was discovered in May, bringing the total to 125kg with the remaining 25kg of the shipment believed to have been lost at sea.
The Pong Su incident put the AFP into the spotlight, and set the stage for more inter-agency co-operation. In 2016 a similar “mothership” operation was busted.
It’s fair to say it made waves, as the region found itself at the centre of a tale of international intrigue, the backdrop for one of the most notorious drug busts in Australian history.
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