Deadline: Mark Buddle’s North Cyprus bust a warning to bikie in hiding
He’s a hothead bikie, who reputedly sprayed bullets around Melbourne, but he’d be sweating them now after his clubmate was nabbed in Europe.
Andrew Rule
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Mark Buttler and Andrew Rule with the latest crime buzz.
Hasan he got some drama
Comanchero hothead Hasan Topal reputedly sprayed plenty of bullets around Melbourne a few years back but he would be excused for sweating them at the moment.
Topal would be closely watching recent developments to do with his powerful Sydney clubmate, Mark Buddle.
Buddle, like Topal, fled to Europe with various law enforcement arms wanting to talk about, among other things, the 2010 murder of a security guard in Sydney.
The stakes are high and Buddle is in the fight of his life to stay in North Cyprus as Australian police try to ship him home in bracelets.
There are reports his latest tactic was to tie the knot with a local woman in a real-life “Married At First Sight” bid to dodge deportation.
Topal must be observing all this with some anxiety.
The Victorian homicide squad would love to ask him some questions about his (allegedly) woeful attempts to turn hitman back in 2017.
That career move resulted in the deaths of Muhammed Yucel at Keysborough and Zabi Ezedyar at Narre Warren, both innocent men shot in bungled hits that police believe were intended for Mongol-linked characters.
Topal is also suspected of a swag of other gun attacks, including on dangerous people from the outlaw motorcycle gang fraternity.
In the back of Topal’s mind might be what he did or didn’t say on the AN0M app, a supposedly surveillance-proof invention he helped promote to other organised crime figures, not knowing it was a “wooden horse” operation mounted by international law enforcement agencies.
Operation Ironside detectives have already rounded up hundreds of people worldwide, many of them Comanchero, as a result of conversations on AN0M.
One of those is Topal’s brother Muhammed, who’s facing 21 charges including trafficking a commercial quantity of cocaine and ice. An arrest that must make family gatherings interesting.
Drones drop drugs while dummies doze?
Crooks are big on using new technology. Prison authorities not so much.
This is why crooks continue to fly drones over prisons to drop contraband, but authorities apparently haven’t managed to catch on to the jamming equipment used to keep drones clear of aircraft flight paths.
Just last week Victorian police alleged that Omer Sahingoz, 40, had used a drone to drop drugs into Barwon, the state’s most secure prison.
Old mate Sahingoz is allegedly a frequent flyer in every sense, as he was also charged with doing a drone drop of four packages over a Western Australian detention centre in January last year, three months after his Barwon escapade.
Have drone, will travel.
He was apprehended with his at Perth Airport.
At Barwon, staff beat prisoners to the “airmail”. They found tobacco, methamphetamines and other illicit drugs. Also a pocket knife, three screwdrivers, a micro SD card, a USB holder and a GPS device.
Last week, another aerial smuggler was nailed for using a drone to deliver wire cutters and other tools, as well as money, cellphones and tobacco, for his “inside men” to trade behind bars. That was in Texas, USA, where crooks are catching on.
On Christmas Day, 2019, an officer spotted a drone over an exercise yard of the Capricornia Correctional Centre in central Queensland.
A prisoner caught a package of contraband but it was confiscated and the centre put into lockdown. A second package was dropped on the same spot shortly afterwards.
Next day, the prisoner who caught the first package started to behave in an “elevated manner”, telling staff he had swallowed an unknown substance. Like the drone, he was as high as a kite.
All very amusing, but it wouldn’t be if the bad guys flew weapons or poisons over the wall.
But here’s the thing: in restricted airspace near airports, drone software is automatically jammed.
We know this because a filmmaker friend using a drone for aerial shots at a provincial racecourse last Friday was puzzled that her camera drone would fly near the winning post — but not further down the straight.
The film crew soon twigged that most of that particular racetrack is under an aircraft flight path — and so magic software automatically stops drones flying.
When contraband smuggled by drone enables an escape by armed prisoners, no doubt something similar will finally be done.
Echo recruitment going gangbusters
The ECHO taskforce has been operating for just over a decade now
with much success.
But the unit’s impact has not been confined to taking on bikies, middle-eastern organised crime syndicates and street gangs.
Echo, to use a footy term, appears to have become something of a “destination club” within the heavyweight crime squads.
The homicide and various armed robbery iterations have traditionally been glamour workplaces at crime HQ but Deadline hears that younger detective prospects are now also queuing to patch up with Echo.
The main attraction?
The official line is that it is interesting work with a good mix of proactive and reactive investigations. Meaning the investigators either kick down doors before the bad guys commit their latest outrage — or kick them down after the crime is committed. What’s not to like?
Vested interest: rumour goes ballistic
One of the hottest pieces of gangland gossip at the moment surrounds the shooting ambush on Sam “The Punisher” Abdulrahim after a funeral in Fawkner last month.
The talk among some on the mean streets is that the professional fighter and former Mongol bikie was saved because he was wearing a bulletproof vest when a shooter opened fire on him from close range as he sat in his $300,000 Mercedes G-wagon.
Police say there is no truth to the ballistic vest rumour.
“He must be a wolverine,” one sceptical underworld observer muttered last week. Another observer with a long memory recalls Mark “Chopper” Read borrowing a bulletproof vest from armed robbery squad detectives before he killed Sammy “The Turk” Ozerkam with a sawn-off .410 shotgun outside Bojangles nightclub in St Kilda in days of old.
The shooting of that Sammy embarrassed the police but not Read.
Fight fans of the latter-day Sammy, meanwhile, can speculate whether the apparently bulletproof Punisher will get back in the ring. He can obviously absorb body shots.
Slow learners
Road imbeciles don’t come much more stupid than a pair of novice drivers picked up by police recently.
One was an L-plater spotted driving through the middle of Colac one evening last week.
Police tried to pull him over so he turned his Falcon’s lights off and planted the foot, hitting 143 km/h in a 60km/h zone.
The pursuit was called off but police got the Ford’s rego and, naturally, a 20-year-old man was picked up at home later that night.
He’s copped a swag of charges, including reckless conduct endangering life.
A few days earlier, an 18-year-old L-plater was intercepted driving a Commodore in Melton.
The Bonnie Brook teen had only got the car back from an impound yard a few months before after a previous run-in with the law.
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