Deadline: Melbourne’s insatiable appetite for cheap smokes

Melburnians are hooked on cheap smokes, with an estimated 1200 shops selling illegal tobacco — and with a bootleg pack costing about $25 less than the heavily-taxed variety, it’s no surprise.

Andrew Rule and Mark Buttler with the latest crime buzz.

Durry flurry

Victoria’s notorious illicit tobacco trade is a dangerously crowded market.

It is estimated there are now more than 1200 of the outlaw shops on our streets, generating the kind of fierce competition that has resulted in the wave of firebombings carried out by those wanting a slice of the pie, or maybe all of it.

And when smokers can pick up a bootleg pack for around $22 or pay north of $50 for the taxed variety, it’s no surprise shops are springing up across the city.

Former Australian Federal Police officer Rohan Pike has counted 22 illicit tobacco and vape stores in the Chapel St area alone, where another shop went up in flames last Thursday.

One of the latest stores firebombed, this time on Chapel St in Prahran, last week. Picture: David Crosling

The man who helped set up the Australian Border Force anti-illegal tobacco unit says the high density of outlets makes it no surprise that a shop had been torched.

He said he knew exactly which stores were selling illegal tobacco and that they must all be profitable, despite their proliferation.

“They’re paying top-dollar rents,” he says.

Mr Pike agreed with comments last week by Ritchies-IGA chief executive Fred Harrison that the legal smoke sector would be gone in five years, leaving all tobacco under outlaw control.

“It’s heading that way unless something major happens soon.”

Mr Pike said the number of legal operators meant that there is a combined total of at least 30 tobacco outlets around the Chapel St strip.

Contrary to Government health propaganda, he said, it was clear more people than ever were smoking, largely because of the easy availability of cigarettes from illicit sources.

So much for wiping out smoking with high taxes.

Kerosene and corruption

It’s 45 years this week since a shameful episode in Australian criminal history that reflects badly on certain politicians, police and legal figures.

It makes the current “tobacco war” look like a picnic — that is, until a family gets incinerated in an apartment above an illicit store run by middle eastern crooks being stood over by other middle eastern crooks.

On the night of June 9, 1979, the Ghost Train in Sydney’s Luna Park burned to the ground, killing six children and the young father of two of them.

Despite an immediate and effective cover-up by Sydney’s cabal of corrupt cops, it was clear to insiders that the murderous fire was an act of arson — not caused by the “electrical fault” that bent officer Det. Insp. Doug Knight unblinkingly fabricated as “evidence” for an intimidated coroner.

Those in the know knew from the start that the Ghost Train fire stank to high heaven of kerosene and corruption, and nothing has changed.

Firemen at scene of Ghost Train ride fire that killed seven people at Luna Park in Sydney.

The aftermath of the fire.

Like the disappearance (and undoubted murder) of anti-development activist Juanita Nielsen in 1975 at a meeting at the Carousel nightclub in Kings Cross, the fire was linked to Machiavellian sex industry figure Abe “Mr Sin” Saffron, blackmailer and briber of those in authority.

Nielsen opposed development in Kings Cross by developer Frank Theeman, an associate and suspected “front” for Saffron, who owned the Carousel and many other shady dives — brothels, bars, nightclubs and “hot sheet” hotels used for prostitution and production of secret photographs and films used to blackmail influential clients.

Saffron, a glorified pimp in business and a sadistic sexual pervert in brothel bedrooms, had form for organising arsons before and after the Luna Park atrocity. But he was rarely charged and never convicted of any serious offences until the federal tax office nailed him after a drawn-out process that stretched from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, when he finally served jail.

be Saffron in the 1950s.

Saffron exploited his hold over key politicians and senior police during the premiership of Liberal Sir Robert Askin and equivalent Labor heavyweight Neville Wran, who between them dominated the period from 1965 to 1986.

Both “Slippery Sam” Askin (former illegal SP bookmaker) and “Nifty Nev” Wran (former Bill Waterhouse bookie’s clerk) died as multi-millionaires, leaving fortunes a hundred times more than their annual salaries. That fact has intrigued some people — but not their defenders.

An obscure “historical researcher” has written a strangely trenchant defence of Askin published by an obscure publishing house regarded by mainstream publishers as a step up from a vanity press. The author of this “cleanskin Askin” effort has never had another book published and might not bother the scorer again.

The charming and charismatic Wran had more friends and admirers than Askin and they came out of trees to defend their “Nifty” when he was named as a useful Saffron contact in a controversial ABC investigation of the Ghost Train fire in 2021.

The front page of The Sun on Monday June 11, 1979.

There has been no shortage of apologists defending Wran and his questionable connections. They still have their knickers in a knot about Nifty.

The same sort of energy has not been applied to the real story of who organised the lethal Ghost Train torching so a company controlled by Saffron could take over the coveted harbourside site at Milsons Point.

Surely, in 2024, there would be no official reluctance about exposing what really happened? Surely, 21st century Sydney is better than in the bad old days?

Sadly, it appears not. In April 2021, weeks after the searing ABC programme “Exposed” threw light in dark places, requests for a new inquest were referred to police so the fire could be reinvestigated.

That was three years and three months ago. In that time, it seems not a word has been but hardly a word seems to have been uttered about it since. Even the oddly silent ABC seems resigned to letting sleeping dogs keep on lying.

No comment

The Liberal Party has understandably been making hay over the official failure to deport foreign-born criminals.

The deportation is the kind of shemozzle their political opponents would be cashing in on big-time if the boot was on the other foot.

Last week, however, the Libs were very measured when asked about one deadly Mafia figure who is set to be banished when his prison sentence expires.

Deadline would never suggest the party’s restraint was anything to do with its decision to let this fellow stay when he was set to get the boot years ago, following lobbying and donations from the gunman’s family connections.

Hard quiz

There has been plenty of questioning lately of expert and eyewitness evidence in the Robert Farquharson murder case.

Farquharson is doing a long prison term over the deaths of his three sons after he drove them into a dam near Winchelsea on Father’s Day, 2005.

He wants out and his supporters argue there are flaws in the prosecution case which convicted him, relating to technical evidence about cars submerged in water.

The most potentially intriguing aspect raised, some would say, are alleged similarities with the crash in which three off-duty SAS troopers drowned after driving off a causeway at speed while returning to the Swan Island base near Queenscliff in 2007.

Robert Farquharson outside Geelong Magistrates’ court.

But almost forgotten in all this is another element relating to Farquharson’s claims that the tragedy was an accident — one that never made it to trial because lie detector test results are inadmissable in Australian courts.

Farquharson requested the polygraph to clear his name in the crash’s aftermath. He got his wish. But, for what it’s worth, he failed badly — a fact largely ignored in the recent wave of publicity.

Though polygraphs are not the final word in guilt or innocence, they have been used by Victoria Police as an investigation tool to screen suspects to decide which are worthy of deeper investigation.

Polygraph results are allowed in United States courts alongside more traditional forms of evidence.

Home run for the defence?

Many things from The Simpsons have ended up becoming reality over the years.

The latest is a juror’s Homer-style snoozing in court, which has led to the overturning of a man’s conviction for a serious assault in Frankston.

Simpsons fans will recall a drooling Homer nodding off during a criminal trial while wearing glasses with open eyes painted on them.

Now, the Supreme Court has ruled the juror’s inattentiveness meant the verdict against Hayden Doyle should not stand and he has been granted the right to appeal.

Mr Doyle was accused of assaulting Alex Van Steveren after they had been in separate groups on a night out at the Deck Bar.

He is alleged to have approached Mr Van Steveren’s wife around 2.30am and was ejected by security soon after.

When the Van Staverens left soon after, Alex Van Steveren was struck, fell and suffered a fractured skull.

Mr Doyle hotly contests the assault claim. He’ll get another chance to beat the charge after it was found a juror in his earlier trial was asleep “on and off” for about 20 minutes while a witness testified.