Senior bikies’ ploy to stop lower-ranking members helping police

Senior bikies are ordering lower-ranked members to use only a handful of lawyers, sparking “significant concerns” over the way some barristers operate.

Detective Inspector Graham Banks from Echo Taskforce. Picture: Sarah Matray

Senior bikies are ordering lower-ranked members to use only their nominated lawyers to stop them helping police, a top anti-gangs investigator says.

Echo taskforce head Graham Banks told the Sunday Herald Sun he had “significant concerns” about the way some legal figures in the organised crime sphere were conducting themselves.

Insp Banks said gang members facing charges who were capable of implicating senior figures were frequently ordered to engage only the boss’s legal representatives.

He said this single point of contact gave the bikie leaders a degree of control of those they had ordered to commit crimes.

Insp Banks said the members were told to produce their record of interview as a starting point to proving they are not a “dog” by giving information to police, he said.

“When a person chooses to change solicitor, a balloon goes up. That person puts themself at risk,” Insp Banks said.

Police intercept members of a motorcycle gang as they leave their clubhouse. Picture: Andrew Henshaw

“I have significant concerns about the way a number of barristers operate. Increasingly, we’re seeing criminal lawyers enabling these crime groups by being the single point of contact.”

Insp. Banks said the outlaw motorcycle gang and Middle-eastern organised crime figures investigated by his squad were becoming increasingly sophisticated in their money-laundering and use of technology.

He said bikies were the “clubhouse leaders” in exploiting technology to do business and avoid detection.

Insp Banks said there was an increasing tendency for senior gang figures to settle overseas in countries without extradition arrangements with Australia.

From there, they would remotely operate their criminal empires to orchestrate major drug importations and crimes of violence.

Organised crime bosses were dealt a major blow last year when police, among them Echo detectives, made a massive swoop off the back of infiltration of the AN0M encrypted app used by criminals in the mistaken belief it was surveillance-proof.

Comanchero watched by police leave for their OMCG run. Picture: David Crosling

But even with the bust made, there was a mountain of work to do sifting through what the bikies thought were clandestine communications.

“You’re still left with a multi-year investigation,” Insp Banks said.

Some seismic shifts in the OMCG world are being closely watched by Echo.

Insp Banks said the split in the Mongols outfit, which has seen Toby Mitchell and other key members banished, was not motivated by some of the reasons publicly aired.

“Our assessment is we see it as a restructure of business aligned to serious and organised crime. That’s what drove these decisions,” he said.

Insp Banks said

He said the Comanchero had been severely weakened by the AN0M breakthrough, the arrest of supremo Mick Murray and the shooting of aspiring president Tarek Zahed.

Bikie boss Mick Murray arrested over gangland murder. Police swooped on the Comanchero boss in a dramatic pre-dawn raid at Nitro Gym. Picture: Tony Gough

This had left a leadership vacuum in an organisation which had a lack of potential successors.

“They are struggling to form a leadership. They didn’t have a ministry,” Insp Banks said.

The Hells Angels would, as always, remain big players in the bikie world, he predicted.

Echo is marking its first 10 years, beginning as a crime-fighting “start-up” after Victoria Police dropped the ball on OMCG enforcement.

Assistant Commissioner Bob Hill said its achievements had been extraordinary.

“The results have been well documented in terms of arrests, charges, prosecutions and seizures, however some of the work that goes on in the background, that the community does not always hear about, is equally impressive,” he said.

“The intelligence capture and the profiles they have built relating to these organised crime groups and their members have been crucial to how we police these entities right across the organisation.”