The Australian Federal Police know exactly who Shulman is. They don’t wish to talk about him either, saying: “The AFP does not discuss matters of intelligence.”

A News Corp investigation can reveal that Shulman, 28, a joint Australian-Israeli passport holder, is banged up in a Hong Kong prison for five years, having pleaded guilty last year to laundering millions in gold bars, silver grain and diamonds on behalf of a world-wide guns, drugs and assassination empire.

Shulman’s life journey has so far been extraordinary: after completing high school in Perth, he fought for Israel’s fiercest counter-terror squad, and then moved to Hong Kong to become the black-money man for the notorious “private security” outfit, Southern Ace Ltd.

Southern Ace was headed by a South African, Edgar van Tonder, and Paul Calder Le Roux, a South African-Australian dual citizen who lived in Perth and Sydney with a wife and child before moving to Manila and remarrying.

Le Roux is regarded as among the worst criminals on the planet. According to US prosecutors, he shifted weapons, cocaine and meth across the globe, ran African insurrections, and carried out contract killings for spare change from his Manila headquarters.

US federal agents secretly detained Le Roux in September 2012 and have since had him under close protection in New York, using him on entrapment stings against former colleagues and employees.

It seems probable that Shulman, arrested five months prior to Le Roux, shopped his boss to the US authorities. And he had good reason to do so.

Shulman was looking at a much more serious crime than laundering money: it appears he was also storing 24 tonnes of ammonia nitrate explosive – used with such devastating effect in Bali, in 2002 – for Le Roux in a Hong Kong warehouse.

LE ROUX has attracted international attention for his exploits, after a US agent – referencing the notorious imprisoned Russian arms dealer – described him to the New York Times as “Viktor Bout on steroids”.

Until now, Shulman has stayed out of the picture. Born in Zimbabwe, Shulman spent two years in Israel as a small boy and then moved to Perth, where his parents lived separate lives.

After leaving Guildford Grammar, he worked at Nando’s and in 2004 won most improved player for the Perth-Bayswater Rugby Union Club’s Under 19s team. Yet players — and even the coach — claim little recollection of him.

Shulman identified as Jewish and at 19 headed for Israel, hearing the same call of so many young people to their ideological homeland. In 2006, he enlisted with the Israeli Defense Forces in the hope of joining Duvdevan, the secretive counter-terror unit.

Duvdevan runs surveillance on Palestinian strongholds, its elite soldiers often wearing Arab disguise and going deep into enemy suburbs to infiltrate, kidnap, demolish and assassinate.

Shulman was accepted to train for Duvdevan just as the 2006 Lebanon War broke out and he was sent to learn on the job, fighting Hezbollah.

Garret Machine, a US citizen who runs a private security firm in Miami, was in Duvdevan, or Unit 217, when Shulman joined the team. “He was a combat soldier in the unit, I can definitely confirm that,” Machine told News Corp.

“There are people in the unit from the UK, Australia, US, Canada, all over the western world. Duvdevan is a very desirable unit to get into. It’s a unit where you’re guaranteed to see some action. That’s what people want to do. They want to be there.”

Duvdevan sent Shulman on counter-terror operations in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and the border nations.

“He was just another guy in the unit,” said Machine. “Everyone there is elite in that they made it that far, especially coming from outside the country. That says a lot about somebody. It takes a lot to come from abroad and end up there.

“Nothing really stood out one way or another about him, other than that he was obviously an Australian. He was a good guy.”

In 2007, Shulman suffered knee damage and was discharged, but requested to return to service and was redrafted in 2008. He ran a small-arms course and took part in the Gaza War, after which he was honourably discharged in 2009.

The bonds formed in the unit are famously strong – and Garret Machine said the friendships led young vets into the high-paying world of private security companies.

“The Israeli industrial military complex is exported all over the world, and is probably only second to the United States,” said Machine. “They’re training people everywhere; they’re providing protection everywhere.”

Everywhere from wars in Africa to protecting the powerful in the Middle East, South Africa and the Philippines, to guarding celebs in LA.

“It’s who you know,” said Machine. “He knew people from the unit that are involved in security. Like we all did.”

One of them was his former Duvdevan commander, Daniel Fadlon, who — along with two other Israeli comrades, Yoav Hen, Omer Gavish — is also imprisoned in Hong Kong on related swindling convictions.

Sentenced in May last year, Shulman’s lawyer argued that Fadlon told his client he’d be working in hotel security for $US5000 a month, but Garret Machine doubts an ex-Duvedan specialist would work for such low pay.

And the judge who sentenced Shulman didn’t believe a word of it. He considered Shulman played the most “significant and pivotal role” of all the Israelis.

BASED in the Philippines, describing himself as a student tourist, Shulman entered Hong Kong on 21 occasions between January 2010 and April 2012.

Calling himself “Justin Collins”, Shulman set up 10 companies that were connected to Southern Ace and Le Roux, who used them to wash his dirty cash.

Shulman’s role as a trusted lieutenant was to buy and store hundreds of one-kilogram gold bars on Le Roux’s behalf. He bought two houses that were used solely to store the gold, gems and silver, under 24-hour watch, in safes.

Shulman alone held the keys to the safes. Fadlon, Hen and Gavish, along with other foreigners who rotated in and out of Hong Kong, were given gold-guarding duties.

Shulman kept another apartment in Kowloon’s Laguna City for his numerous visits to Hong Kong. The choice of address showed he kept a low profile with the expat crowd. Laguna is a huge complex, occupied mostly by Chinese.

In the two-year period he was in and out of Hong Kong, Shulman was paid AUD$500,000 into his personal accounts. This was most likely his wages – far beyond the $5000 monthly pay he claimed to earn.

Shulman was prosecuted for laundering of 342 ingots worth $25 million, along with five kilos of silver grain and diamonds, in a scam a Hong Kong judge described as “very sophisticated in its nature”.

“It also involved a high degree of planning (such as) the setting-up by Shulman of a total of at least 10 Hong Kong companies (and) the opening of nine company bank accounts to facilitate the withdrawal and transfer of the black money,” said the judge.

“In order to clothe the black money to give it a legitimate appearance, the monies were withdrawn from the accounts and converted into gold bars and diamonds.”

The court heard Shulman was on the payroll of La Plata Trading, which UN arms investigators had identified as Le Roux’s Manila-based company.

In 2009, a merchant vessel owned by La Plata Trading was searched by customs officials in the Philippines’ port of Mariveles after it arrived displaying no flag. It was found to be carrying $2m in Indonesian-made Pindad SS1-V1 assault rifles.

The ship’s British captain, Bruce Jones, said the vessel had stopped in Indonesia to collect crates of weapons, loaded with the assistance of Indonesian soldiers.

Jones, who sought witness protection to testify but was never given it, was shot dead in a motorbike drive-by in Angeles City, north of Manila, in September 2010, just as crewmembers began facing trial.

Le Roux was never named in association with the gun shipment or the drive-by, but he had good reason to silence Jones.

Like Shulman, Le Roux was originally from Zimbabwe. It is not known whether their links went back to Australia’s southern African diaspora, or if they met through the Duvdevan network.

In 2008, Le Roux paid a lobbyist $14 million to persuade US lawmakers to ease sanctions against Robert Mugabe, who from 2000 had been running white farmers off their lands.

Le Roux wanted to pay Mugabe to lease back the farmlands he had stolen – an idea that ran so contrary to the spirit of the sanctions that it raised the attention of US authorities.

Then came the UN report, which said Southern Ace was established in Hong Kong in 2007 on the pretext of importing and exporting logging trucks. It named Le Roux, aged about 42, as “the actual owner” of Southern Ace.

It accused him of “egregious violation of the arms embargo” in Somalia across 2009 and 2011, providing Kalashnikovs, anti-aircraft guns and grenade launchers to a 220-strong local militia.

They were commanded by Zimbabwean mercenaries and sent into battle against Al Shabab Islamic extremists – a rare instance where Le Roux’s and the US Government’s interests aligned.

The UN also claimed that Le Roux’s company was involved in “the cultivation of hallucinogenic plants, including opium, cocoa and cannabis, initially at the Southern Ace compound” in Somalia.

Shulman was deep in Le Roux’s world, playing the crucial role of rolling his money around – and was meanwhile improving his financial skills by taking an online commerce course through Perth’s Curtin Uni.

The Organised Crime and Triad Bureau in Hong Kong declined to reveal what led them to arrest Shulman in April 2012. So did the AFP, and Hong Kong-based Australian barrister, Richard Turnbull, who prosecuted Shulman and the other Israelis on the government’s behalf.

Le Roux’s activities were coming under intense scrutiny. The US knew he was shipping arms and drugs and wanted him, and his network, out of business.

Shulman may have been able to help them, and himself.

WHEN Shulman was arrested, police seized the keys he held to the two houses and two safes where the gold bars, silver and diamonds were stored in locked rooms.

Hen, Gavish and Fadlon – not yet arrested – sprang to action, using heavy-duty metal cutting equipment to liberate the booty from the two safes.

They were observed on CCTV carrying heavy sacks from the village houses. They sold 181 gold bars, wired the money to The Philippines (presumably to Le Roux) and were arrested with the remaining 161 bars.

In early Hong Kong news reports, and in judges’ remarks, there are repeated references to the Israelis being arrested over the gold bars – and for storing 24 tonnes of ammonia nitrate.

But no one was ever charged in relation to any bomb material, including Shulman. It never appeared on charge sheets.

Shulman, in pleas to the Hong Kong High Court, blamed Daniel Fadlon for leading him astray by organising the laundering job.

His lawyer, Laurence Poots, talked of the “strong sense of brotherhood and bonding” of men who served in Duvdevan. “In this context, it’s easy to understand how Mr Shulman trusted Fadlon, a senior NCO he held in high regard. He believed Fadlon to be a man of high morals.”

Those bonds formed in Duvdevan were not as strong as supposed. Shulman, the ringleader of the scam, turned on Fadlon.

It is unusual that Australian authorities, Hong Kong police, prosecutors and defence lawyers point-blank refuse to discuss Shulman, even though his case is closed.

Upon arrest, Shulman would have received visits from Australian and most likely Israeli consular officials. Did he propose some horse-trading over Le Roux’s explosives?

If the mantra of all criminal investigations is to “follow the money”, Shulman had it all: Le Roux’s phone numbers, emails, bank accounts, company details, addresses, contacts, friends – everything an investigator needed.

This information was also the last tradable asset in his possession.

The Americans would have been very interested in Shulman. If they were able to persuade Hong Kong authorities to make the explosives’ charges disappear, they could also give Shulman powerful incentive to cooperate.

LE ROUX must have been worried when Shulman and the others were arrested. It seems he cleared out of the Philippines and took himself to Africa.

Le Roux’s next big job was organising passage of a yacht, the JeReVe, that sailed from Ecuador in August 2012, with two men aboard, bound for Australia, loaded with 200kg of cocaine.

US and Australian authorities were monitoring the yacht when it suddenly went missing. In late September 2012, it was found jammed on a remote reef off Tonga, with a sole Slovakian dead on board and a whole lot of coke in the hulls.

The man was so badly decomposed his cause of death was never established. As to what happened to the second crewmember, authorities don’t know or aren’t saying.

Le Roux was arrested in a secret mission by US Drug Enforcement Administration officials in Liberia, west Africa, in September 2012, over the Australian cocaine venture.

He was taken to a New York jail and handed to the world’s most powerful prosecutor, the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara.

Bharara has enormous authority to lean across the world and drag foreign crime figures to Manhattan and, if it suits, to offer deals in return for dismantling the empires they created.

Le Roux, charged over the Tongan yacht, has to this day had his name suppressed from the US court system.

His cooperation led to the arrest in late 2013 in Thailand of Joseph “Rambo” Hunter, a dangerous rogue former US special forces sniper who’d worked as Le Roux’s head of security for years.

From his secret location in New York, Le Roux was able to convince Hunter he was still in business but needed to lay low – no doubt partly because of Shulman’s arrest, and because of the failed cocaine shipment to Australia.

Le Roux – now controlled by US agents – persuaded Hunter that he was in business with a Colombian cartel that was organising a cocaine shipment to the US.

Hunter put together a team of US and European ex-soldiers to escort the cargo. And Le Roux offered him some “bonus” assassination work.

Le Roux told Hunter that a boat captain who had provided the yacht had betrayed him to an undercover DEA agent. Le Roux offered Hunter $US200,000 and $500,000 to kill both. Hunter accepted.

The Colombians were US undercover agents who recorded the meetings – which also revealed Hunter discussing previous rent-a-kills he had conducted for Le Roux. Hunter and his team were arrested and taken to New York, where Hunter’s matter is still being finalised.

The morality of the deals Bharara strikes with masterminds such as Le Roux, in order to round up lesser players, is contentious in the US.

New York prosecutors defended the deal with Le Roux, stating in court documents (where he is referred to as protected witness CW-1): “The government’s use of a cooperating witness with a violent criminal history is, in fact, commonplace in sting operations targeting narcotics and violent crimes.”

As for Shulman, whom character witnesses said was “of positively good character”, he must be hoping his Hong Kong cell is a secure one indeed. Though Le Roux will likely be locked away for decades, he has shown his reach is a long one.

paul.toohey@news.com.au