Andrew Rule: Gun stealing spree raises uneasy questions

Guns are being stolen across Victoria at an alarming rate and rumours are swirling that leaks from police may be to blame.

An alarming number of guns are being stolen in Victoria in targeted raids.

Jim Mason isn’t his real name but it’s close. Jim is a keen sporting shooter — a good one. He has won trophies at state and national level for clay target shooting.

Five years ago this month, he injured his back at work in the building trades and recovered at his Mornington Peninsula home for a few weeks. The first time he went for a walk, someone must have been watching. In the hour he was out, his house was broken into.

The thieves weren’t everyday opportunists. They knew exactly what they were doing. After quietly forcing a rear sliding door, they went straight to the gun safe bolted inside the wardrobe in the master bedroom, expertly opened it and took his prized Miroku competition shotgun and two rifles.

Nothing else was touched or taken, including a laptop computer sitting in the open. It was clearly a targeted raid. No fingerprints. No clues. No cars parked suspiciously close by.

Jim Mason got his insurance money but was uneasy about the circumstances.

The custom-fitted wooden stock on the prized Miroku shotgun was still intact when it was recovered.

Soon after, another shooter who lives nearby had his safe burgled, losing seven firearms.

Then another, who lost four. They compared notes with each other then with the Peninsula’s biggest gun dealership, which handled most of the insurance claims and kept track of thefts.

The dealer told them there were 26 similar break-ins on the Peninsula in a relatively short time. But the thefts were not all linked to shooters from one club or one sport: some were field and game shooters, some were clay target shooters, some were pistol shooters, some were rifle target shooters, others were deer or pig hunters. Bottom line: not all 26 appeared on one database — except the police firearms registry.

Mason says he and his friends do not have stickers on their vehicles indicating they are shooters and never reveal their hobby on social media.

In one case, a veteran shooter in Dromana had his safe broken into and his shotgun taken on a long weekend. The same night, in the same suburb, his son had his safe ransacked and lost several firearms.

Same surname, same suburb, same day — the odds against that “coincidence” were a million to one. It had to be inside information that gave the thieves a shopping list of addresses.

After Tony Mokbel’s Lawyer X-inspired court win, the last thing Victoria Police needs is another scandal.

Last month, Mason’s competition shotgun turned up in a police raid in the northern suburbs.

A diligent police officer identified the gun and called Mason. The good news was that the custom-fitted wooden stock hadn’t been butchered. The bad news was that the barrels had been sawn off — something he likens to “drawing a moustache on the Mona Lisa.”

With new barrels, the gun will make a comeback to clay target shoots. But that doesn’t ease Mason’s suspicions about firearms registry leaks.

When he mentioned this to the helpful officer, the lawman seemed uncomfortable about it, saying he had raised the issue with senior officers and had been told to leave it alone. This could mean that internal investigators are on the case — or that the force is wary of more bad news in a year that’s full of it.

After the Lawyer X debacle and Tony Mokbel’s court win and the promise of more, the force will hardly want a gun-trafficking scandal. But the fact is that rumours of leaks from either police members or public servants have been around for years.

Such leaks would be gold for organised crime groups like outlaw motorcycle gangs, who traffic guns as well as drugs. It is naive to imagine they are not constantly trying to groom, blackmail or intimidate a potential source inside the system.

If police internal investigators can’t nail the source of targeted gun thefts then the National Crime Authority, the Federal Police or the security services ought to — because it is a weapon supply line that could arm terrorists as well as run-of-the-mill robbers, drug dealers and potential killers. Cop killers, even.

One troubling aspect is that it doesn’t seem only one district is affected. A couple of years ago, an airline pilot on a Surf Coast farmlet had his gun safe raided in a way that reeked of inside information.

As reported by this column at the time, the thieves knew exactly where to go — and what they were after. They opened a side door into the mostly unused garage then stepped over three cases of valuable wine to reach the steel safe fixed to the wall.

The safe had a hardened padlock fitted through two lugs — one welded to the door and the other to the rim of the safe. They must have brought heavy-duty bolt cutters, given they left no metal filings of the sort made by a portable side grinder. They took the five guns — and the broken lock, a sign of someone clued up about not leaving clues.

The owner still wonders about the timing of the theft. The family has lived on the small property just outside a large coastal town for many years. It’s not a working livestock farm like those deep in the country further from Geelong, where firearms are the norm.

Thieves could go to a dozen farmlets in this semi-suburban pony club belt without finding a gun safe. Which is why the family wonders what triggered the highly specific theft by a well-informed intruder.

What intrigues them is that the theft happened soon after police came to inspect the safe — the only inspection they have had in more than 20 years.

The more the owners think about the theft following the inspection, the less they think it was coincidence. Again, nothing about them or their vehicles suggests they might own guns. They do not belong to associations or clubs.

The fact that thieves often target farms close to urban areas — stealing chainsaws, motorbikes, pumps and sometimes guns — does not convince them theirs was just another random raid. Nothing else was taken at all, not even the cases of Grange Hermitage.

There is another possible explanation: that the information came from a gun dealer, or that watchers sit off gun shops noting customers come and go to their cars, then follow them home. Or if they had a contact in the motor registration field, they could then get an address.

The thing about organised crime is exactly that: it’s organised.

Victoria Police has had its problems with rogue officers who were stooges for outlaw motorcycle gangs. When Ken Lay was chief commissioner, a policeman was caught leaking to the Hells Angels. In fact, the rogue officer lived with a biker’s daughter, a case of sleeping with the enemy.

In a force with 20,000 members and plenty of public servants, it would be naive to think that wouldn’t happen again.

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