Qiu Shan-Lian’s move from Brighton to Melbourne backwater shows no glamour in fugitive life
Qiu Shan-Lian went from Brighton fashionista to fugitive, living secretly on Melbourne’s western fringe hoping strangers won’t burst through the door some early morning.
Police & Courts
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The last time the wanted woman was photographed she looked much like what she was supposed to have been — the proprietor of a string of fashion boutiques.
But look closer and the handsome face with its high cheekbones and plump lips has no joy in it.
She gazes warily at the camera, looking tired and worried. There are rings under her eyes.
That picture is now probably at least three years old, meaning Qiu Shan-Lian is now 39. Her life has changed utterly.
The Chinese national and longtime Australian resident no longer runs the Gasp fashion stores and she no longer lives in luxury in Brighton.
She sold the double-storey house for $3.5 million in 2016, apparently after receiving bad news about the future viability of her business, which involved importing stuff from China’s industrial heartland. She then went “off the radar”.
Qiu has gone from fashionista to fugitive, several postcodes and a world away from Brighton, living secretly on Melbourne’s western fringe, hoping strangers will not burst through the door some early morning.
Qiu Shan-Lian is one of 7700 people wanted by Interpol, which issued a “red notice” for her in 2015.
People named in red notices stand to be deported or extradited at the discretion of the country in which they are found.
Qiu’s problem is that Chinese authorities suspect she is involved in drug trafficking. She has lived in Australia since the early 2000s, but some of her former associates have reportedly been arrested in China, where drug traffickers can face the death penalty.
It seems unlikely Australia would deport anyone with the prospect of execution hanging over them but that’s not a chance Qiu is willing to take. So she has effectively sentenced herself to virtual home detention. Whenever she steps outside, she must fear that someone she meets could bring her world crashing down.
Qiu is a living example of the old Chinese curse about “living in interesting times”. So interesting, in her case, that (say well-placed sources) she has had plastic surgery to alter her looks.
Face-altering surgery is an expensive gambit that goes all the way back to the most infamous international fugitive of all, the late Great Train Robber, Ronnie Biggs, who spent big money on a bent surgeon before hiding in Melbourne with his family then fleeing to Brazil, a step ahead of the law.
In Australia, the list of fugitives who have managed to live outside the law for years at a time is short in length but long on drama.
It goes all the way back to the most successful bushranger of a colonial era, Frank Gardiner, who led his gang against an armed escort to rob a shipment of gold at Eugowra Rocks in NSW in 1862.
Gardiner’s bushranger contemporaries — such as Ben Hall, John Gilbert and John O’Meally — were mostly shot or hanged. But Gardiner managed to hide out in north Queensland for two years before being caught.
He served 10 years and was then told to leave Australia, presumably because he had been born overseas (in Scotland). He went to San Francisco and ran a saloon, a feat as unlikely as Ronnie Biggs’s life and crimes a century later.
Some fugitives, like Qiu, stay low key. Others, despite (or because of) their best efforts to stay out of sight, have become legends by playing hide and seek with police for years.
In Australia, the man who made his name under the alias Russell “Mad Dog” Cox is near the top of a list that includes escapee and armed robber “Jockey” Smith, rogue detective Colin Creed, and the so-called “Postcard Bandit”, Brenden Abbott.
Cox, real name Schnitzerling, is now married to his longtime lover and accomplice Helen and living a quiet life in Queensland, mulling over their 11 years on the run after his escape from the “escape proof” Katingal maximum security prison in Sydney in late 1977.
“Jockey” Smith, who managed to train racehorses under the fake name “Tom Cummings” while on the run, was shot dead by a policeman at Creswick in late 1992.
Rogue detective Colin Creed, who shared Cox’s coolness under pressure in more than two years evading the law, is now a cricket statistics expert in Adelaide, having done his time for multiple armed robberies after a policeman on holiday spotted him in Perth in 1983.
Then there’s armed robber Gregory David Roberts, alias “Doc” Smith, who staged a brazen daylight escape from Pentridge Prison in early 1980 then vanished for a decade.
“Doc” used contacts in academic and union circles to get to New Zealand via Perth and finally to India, running contraband for years before being arrested in Germany in 1990.
Roberts would become famous for writing the semi-biographical novel Shantaram, a huge bestseller.
Which is a happy ending compared with the fate of Brenden Abbott, who’s serving a long sentence in maximum security in Queensland, paying the price for ingenious escapes with prisoners who weren’t as smart as he is.
The big fugitive story of our time is that of Tony Mokbel, whose disappearing trick in mid-2006 is like something from a caper movie.
While hiding in a house at Bonnie Doon, Mokbel got associates to set up an audacious exit from Australia using a yacht trucked to Western Australia and modified so he could hide in a secret compartment when it set sail across the Indian Ocean.
Mokbel’s exploit has been dissected many times but one part is still obscured by defamation laws.
That was when international investigators shadowed his lover, Danielle McGuire, in Italy, believing she would lead them to Mokbel.
Undercover police were intrigued to see the pregnant McGuire openly meet another woman — in fact an Australian actress with a taste for the high life — in a big hotel.
The pair were roughly the same age, size, shape and hair colour but dressed differently.
It was only afterwards that the watchers realised that when the two women had gone to the bathroom together, they must have switched clothes. Only one woman came back to the table, wearing the McGuire clothes over a well-padded belly.
Unaware, the spies continued watching the “pregnant” one for some time, which allowed the real McGuire to slip from the hotel by a side exit then find her way, unobserved, to a rendezvous in Greece with the father of her unborn baby.
It wasn’t McGuire who brought Mokbel undone. It was a gutsy member of his trusted inner circle, dubbed “the musician”, motivated to take a stand against drug dealing because a family member had become addicted.
His conscience had the added incentive of a large reward and a new identity.
In the end, crime figures who rule by fear and intimidation have to expect betrayal because they win enemies on both sides of the law.
Comanchero bikie Hasan Topal, who left Melbourne for Turkey in 2019 and hasn’t returned, is a good example of someone reaping the consequences of his actions.
Police are keen to talk to Topal about two bungled killings in 2017 (in which innocent men died instead of intended targets) and a series of other shootings, all related to outlaw bikie gangs.
Criminals, such as the intended victims of those murders, would doubtless also love to find the former male model, whose photogenic face was caught on a security camera in August 2017 when he smashed a beer glass into his head during a savage brawl in a Canberra strip club.
Topal, who once seemed to have the world at his feet, will spend what should be the best years of his life looking over his shoulder. His best hope is that the good guys bag him before the bad ones do.
Topal is not the only turkey stuck in Turkey.
International drug lord Hasan Ayik is also a long way from his Sydney underworld haunts after being linked to the Ironside operation which has trapped hundreds of criminals worldwide, many of them Comanchero bikies.
Ayik’s biggest problem is that fellow criminals might shoot him for promoting the encrypted AN0M communications app.
Any notion that the fugitive life is glamorous vanished when details of the miserable lives led by Malcolm Naden and “Stocco and Son” while hiding from the law in the backblocks.
The overpowering memory of those who arrested each of them is that they stank so much.
Naden, wanted for the killing of two young women, hid in the bush near Dubbo in 2005 and dodged arrest until 2012 after shooting a policeman in the shoulder near Gloucester, hundreds of kilometres away.
Gino Stocco and his son Mark fell into what became an eight-year crime spree culminating in their killing a man “minding” a cannabis crop with them in 2015. They then made the tactical error of shooting at police near Wagga Wagga.
Once that happened, the Stoccos lasted less than two weeks before police nailed them.
There’s a lesson there for the man who is probably Australia’s most wanted.
His name is Graham Gene Potter. He is a killer and has spent more than a decade on the run — that’s if he’s still alive.
The 61-year-old has been wanted since 2010, when he failed to front court on murder conspiracy charges.
Police may not be Potter’s only problem. He spent years working for Mafia figures with reasons to make him disappear permanently.
That is, of course, if another sort of reptile didn’t get him in the Queensland swamp near where he was last seen.
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