Australian crime groups form unholy alliance

ORGANISED crime clans have formed collectives for the most extensive multi-layered crime plots ever levelled against Australia as CHARLES MIRANDA reports.

Lygon Street East Brunswick.

EXCLUSIVE

There was nothing particularly extraordinary about the table of largely middle-aged men enjoying bowls of pasta at the Italian restaurant on Lygon Street in Melbourne.

The undercover Victorian Police officers watching them recognised some as the biggest old school names in Australian organised crime, suspected to be behind murders, extortions, money laundering and serious drug trafficking.

There was a core of eight from Melbourne and Sydney including a notorious crime family patriarch but others on the periphery and all seemingly working toward a single purpose, to make a mass shipment of narcotics through a coded conversation about setting up a construction firm in Queensland.

But the full significance of that gathering was not realised till much later after the Australian Federal Police pulled together the surveillance and intelligence reports from other police forces across the country.

The once unthinkable was clearly now happening.

Lygon Street East Brunswick.

Crime clans and gangs, white collar and blue collar, once competitors in the underbelly of Australian society for decades were forming alliances of mutual assistance, effectively pooling resources to create new whole-of-enterprise entities.

And apparently it didn’t stop there with further investigations and issuing of Interpol “blue notice” intelligence gather only reports pointing to clear alliances now stretching across the world, in Colombia, Central America, South Africa, South East Asia, China, India and Europe notably Spain, the Netherlands and the Balkans.

According to intelligence reports seen by News Corp Australia, links have now been made to crimes figures across the globe all with a single-minded purpose to send drugs and or launder money through Australia.

Loose affiliations are not new but the extent today has shocked senior law enforcers spoken to by News Corp Australia.

Working in with that one Sydney-Melbourne collective, drug trafficking bosses have been identified in Albania and Montenegro, linking with top crime figures in London, money launders running huge operations under the guise of cigarette exporters in Dubai working with a criminal Greek banker in Melbourne and a convicted Turkish criminal in Liverpool in Sydney, a former senior foreign diplomat using his status to move consignments through ports, old-school Italian Mafia figures sharing drug routes and profits, known Dutch and Italian criminal clans from Queensland, Bandidos Outlaw Motorcycle gang in South Australia, Chinese triads, the sophisticated Los Zetas criminal syndicate in Mexico as well as their rival Sinaloa gang, the sons and daughters of old family group NSW immigrants of ultranationalists from the former Yugoslavia, ELN guerillas turned cocaine producers in Colombia, union officials, port officials even a well-known American oil baron.

Facebook image of Khaled Sharrouf.

Various locations, various business fronts and networks but all linked in crime including cocaine, heroin and manufacturing ATS (amphetamine-type stimulants) and much of it destined for Australia.

Notorious Sydney underworld figure Vaso Ulic, wanted on three warrants and living in Montenegro was also now linked to that Italian restaurant meeting; For legal reasons News Corp cannot name linked others, including those associated with now terrorist Khalid Sharrouf.

According to one AFP report, the “poly criminal networks” existed in, total discipline, multifunctional, multi-jurisdictional, were flexible, security conscious with the ability to dispatch “shore parties” across the globe to oversee drug and money laundering deliveries and using criminal resources in foreign nations with ease with most in the compartmentalised criminal enterprise not necessarily knowing the other.

It noted the revenue loss cost to the Federal Government from tax avoidance and money laundering was in the billions of dollars a year.

Australian Border Force chief Roman Quaedvlieg said it has been “nothing short of a phenomena”.

He said convergence of crime groups, particularly from the East Coast criminal milieu, was first noted by the then National Crime Authority in the 1990s but nothing like at today’s level of unison.

“If you are looking at it through an Australian domestic lens there are any number of syndicates either formed and enduring or coming together loosely for a single project that are willing retail buyers of narcotics,” he told News Corp Australia.

Vaso Ulic. Picture: Supplied

“I think it would be a mistake to think there is a single snakehead type figure in the Australian context because whether it is ice or cocaine, meth or whatever the commodity is you will find any number willing participants keen to make a quick buck at the moment.

“That’s just business, that’s just looking at business opportunities. The demarcation line between organised crime groups is so blurry now you can’t for example just dedicate a capability like an Outlaw Motorcycle Gang squad because the bikies are dealing with everybody.”

He added: “Our response in Australia is always now joint on these big jobs, always joint with an array of Commonwealth agencies ABF, AFP, ACIC (Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission) and state and territory cops working together because domestic crime groups now always come together.”

Mr Quaedvlieg’s AFP counterpart Commissioner Andrew Colvin declined to be interviewed but Justice Minister Michael Keenan agreed the crime landscape in Australia had evolved with borderless criminal movements, as he vented his frustration at his Government’s failure to secure State Government backing to target large organised crime cartels with national so-called Unexplained Wealth Regime laws to seize assets of suspected crims.

NSW Government signed on, quick to recognise the significance of coercive power to seize proceeds of crime but other states have held back.

Border Force Australia Commissioner Roman Quaedvlieg. Picture: Jack Tran

“We are still some way of getting that regimen finalised much to my great frustration because it’s been a very time consuming negotiation we have been having with the states,” he said.

“So there is more we can do nationally, we have been doing a good job with it, we’ve sent the AFP out to work alongside state colleagues in ways that has never happened before, we’ve created the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission which brought together the analysts of the Australian Crime Commission with the information sources of CrimTrac.”

Mr Keenan said while all forms of illicit narcotics were a concern so too were guns with a black market stockpile of quarter of a million weapons already in Australia, many in the wrong hands.

ACIC boss Chris Dawson said the linkages between organised crime groups, volume crimes and terrorism were also now being identified.

Minister for Justice, Michael Keenan.

“These linkages include but are not limited to Australians who finance terrorist activities, Australians who leave Australia to support terrorist causes, and who may return to Australia with the intent of inflicting harm on the Australian community, or may be recruited by organised crime groups seeking the specialist skill sets they developed in foreign conflicts,” he told News Corp.

“Australian law enforcement will increasingly look at the evolving challenges posed by the nexus between organised crime and terrorism over the next two years.”

Former top NSW cop and lecturer from Macquarie University’s Department of Security Studies and Criminology Garry Dobson said agencies were now working “hand in glove” together to fight the networks.