‘We’ve got to have each other’s backs’: Traders band as machete-wielding gang sweep smoke shops

Masked intruders have carried out four more terrifying tobacco robberies amid a surge in gang smoke heists ordered by older criminals. Now traders are banding together to stave off thefts.

Machete-wielding thugs carried out four more terrifying tobacco robberies on Monday amid a surge in gang smoke heists ordered by older criminals.

Traders are banding together on social media to alert one another to when gangs are on the rampage and targeting multiple businesses in a short space of time.

In the first of Monday’s raids, a group of young males — one brandishing a machete — jumped the counter of a tobacco store on Clayton Rd, Clayton, at 6.15am and stole cigarettes.

The bandits then fled but came back soon after and stole more cigarettes.

The same gang is suspected of two other similar hold-ups later in the morning.

One was at a supermarket on Huntingdale Rd, Oakleigh, and the other at a milk bar on Haverbrack Drive, Mulgrave.

No one was physically injured in any of the raids.

The offenders were seen leaving both the supermarket and milk bar robberies in a blue Mercedes.

The IGA store in Murrumbeena was one of many hit by cigarette thefts. Picture: David Crosling

Those thefts followed two other similar offences on Saturday morning.

Five masked intruders, one armed with a machete, robbed the Mount Waverley IGA in Stephensons Rd and assaulted a customer in the process.

Another IGA, in Murrumbeena, was hit later in the morning by the same teenage crew, who allegedly used a black Mercedes stolen from the northwestern suburb of Hillside.

Ritchies-IGA chief executive Fred Harrison said store operators had formed a WhatsApp group to warn each another if gangs were sweeping through the suburbs.

“We’ve got to try and have each other’s backs,” Mr Harrison said.

He said the options were limited because of the high cost of engaging security guards and the risk posed by a confrontation with multiple armed offenders.

“Not when they’ve got machetes and there’s six of them,” Mr Harrison said.

The Herald Sun revealed last week that young offenders were increasingly carrying out cigarette robberies, burglaries and ram-raids commissioned by older offenders.

A recent police operation found youths aged 12 to 17 had been involved in 140 of those crimes.

They were allegedly paid small sums to snatch products police allege were later sold out of two Melbourne tobacco shops.

Most were targets of Operation Trinity, in which police have zeroed-in on teenagers carrying out widespread night-time aggravated burglaries through the southern and eastern suburbs.

The increasing rate of tobacco store thefts is the latest dire consequence of Melbourne’s rampant illicit smoke sector.

More than 50 businesses have been torched across the city since March last year as rival crime syndicates slug it out for control of the outlaw trade.