But unbeknown to any of them, members of NT Police’s drug squad, conducting an operation codenamed Medina, are listening in.

The following is an unedited extract of the conversation. Full story below the transcript.

How police smashed a $20m drug syndicate

ON A sunny day in early Spring 2019, a truck laden with cargo barrels down the Stuart Highway bound for Darwin, like so many others destined for the Top End capital before flooding severed the vital supply line earlier this year.

On this day, the cargo includes a series of nondescript wooden boxes, dispatched from Adelaide company Bruce Jordan Memorials.

Local Adelaide man, Bruce Jordan, 57, owns the business he founded after selling a similar enterprise inherited from his father and striking out on his own 20 years ago.

It’s honest work and he’s good at it, but it’s only his day job – Jordan is not just a self-employed entrepreneur.

Out the back of his Gillman business, large vacuum-seal bags, sealing machines and tubes of black silicone give a clue to how he spends his moonlight hours.

At his home in Athol Park, police will later find a number of empty green drums and two separate hydroponic setups, more evidence that all is not what it seems for the humble stonemason.

All this equipment is, of course, superfluous to the work of memorialising the dead and, as it turns out, Jordan has another gig, working for a shadowy cabal of big time drug traffickers, known by those they supply with tonnes of cannabis simply as “The Russians”.

And it’s not just tasteful tributes to the dearly departed inside those unassuming wooden boxes now wending their way up the tar black artery that slices through the Red Heart of Australia’s outback.

JOE Carbone is the barrel chested rugby league coach and former officer in charge of NT Police’s Drug and Organised Crime Squad who headed up the investigation into the syndicate that had led Bruce Jordan astray – codenamed Operation Medina.

Anecdotally, he says, there had been rumours floating around about the sophisticated criminal enterprise now known to have imported more than $20m worth of cannabis into the NT since late 2019, over “possibly the last five to 10 years”.

“We have over the years, attempted to try and find a way into or progress an investigation into this group,” he says.

“It just so happened, back in 2019, I suppose, the best way to put it is, what we had is we came up with a better investigation plan to target this particular syndicate.”

Detective Sergeant Carbone says “the biggest thing that we found was we identified how the cannabis was being brought up here”.

“At the same time, we were finding out the distribution methods that they were doing on the ground so there wasn’t any one specific, big light bulb moment,” he says.

“It was literally five to seven to 10 guys just grinding their feet on the ground, doing all that work, and over a period of time we started to work out how it was actually happening.”

But on the day investigators realised Bruce Jordan had dispatched a delivery to Alice Springs and another almost simultaneous shipment to Darwin, Sergeant Carbone says “that’s the thing that cracked everything wide open”.

“He’s obviously employed by the Russians to package and distribute,” he says.

“These (shipments) were fairly specific and done in a manner that, we’d never seen this kind of packaging before, so we’re not saying they were doing this for the whole 10 years or five years but, obviously, this particular methodology was done by those particular guys and the records show that they’d been doing it for far longer than what we’d been watching them.”

IN THE high stakes world of large scale drug dealing, a little cloak and dagger is part of the cost of doing business.

For members of the syndicate targeted by Operation Medina, that meant taking every precaution to hide their activities from the prying eyes of law enforcement, including through the use of uncrackable CIPHR phones and opaque aliases.

Chief lieutenant in the racket, Shannon Wagner, now 43, was known as “Burning”.

In a tragic start to life, the then five-year-old Wagner was forced to help recover the lifeless body of his four-year-old sister after she drowned in the Casuarina pool, and a court would later hear his upbringing was marred by an abusive and alcoholic father, before he ended up in an Adelaide boys’ home.

But after starting work in his teens and turning his hand to plastering, butchery and mine work, Wagner returned to Darwin where he reconnected with his close childhood friend, the now successful businessman, Peter Wellman James.

James offered his old mate a job maintaining cashpoints in one of his ventures, ATM2GO, and a place to stay at a property he owned in Rosebery, where Wagner would count the money coming in.

But before long, James began turning up at Wagner’s new home with extra cash that hadn’t come from his network of ATMs or successful landscaping business, and soon, as Supreme Court Justice Peter Barr would later describe it, he “became entwined with Mr James’ criminal activities”.

It was now Wagner’s job – along with another man currently on the lam interstate, codenamed “Runner” – to collect money owed to the syndicate and oversee drug distribution to members.

Wagner would also arrange for money to be remitted back to the syndicate’s key contact in Adelaide – “The Russian” AKA “MilkMan” – in exchange for more cannabis.

A typical ledger entry from the time, labelled “Outgoing paperwork”, read “06/11/2019 paid Russians $700,000”.

Surveillance devices planted in syndicate members’ cars helped flesh out some of the details of the operation obscured by the extraordinary steps the organisation took to maintain its secrecy.

But Detective Sergeant Joe Carbone says while “we can’t, and we probably never will be able to, crack CIPHR devices”, they do retain one significant vulnerability – user error.

“We were just lucky towards the end, the information we got from CIPHR devices were from unlocked or not secured (phones) so we were lucky enough for that to happen,” he says.

“That happens all the time, as secure as people think their phones are, people are just stupid and these guys are no different to anybody else.

“It’s funny, drug dealers are like anybody else, it’s like any other business, you have good businessmen that are good drug dealers, and you have drug dealers that you know, no matter how many times they’ll try and help them, they’re just no good at it.”

It also helped that after he was caught, Wagner sang like a canary.

He received a 50 per cent discount on what would have been a 14-year prison sentence in September last year for an early guilty plea, along with information “such as to expose you to a serious risk of personal harm for a considerable period of time”.

IT’S September 2019 and Scott MacFarlane has a problem.

What began as a professional relationship with a customer at his Coolalinga ATV dealership has taken a darker turn — for some time now, Peter Wellman James has been supplying him with cocaine.

MacFarlane started taking the drug as self-medication for an old back injury but had since become addicted and is now in the hole to James for more than $60,000.

“Mr James was a larger than life character and you ended up spending a lot of time working on his boat,” Supreme Court Justice Peter Barr would later remark.

“While on the boat, he offered you cocaine in the same way as another friend might have offered you a beer, he always had a stash of cocaine concealed in one of the cupboards on the boat.”

So when James handed MacFarlane a CIPHR phone and explained he would now be working for him, storing and transporting large quantities of cannabis, he found himself in an uncomfortable position.

“It’s not a problem, you do it all the time,” James told MacFarlane over his protestations.

“Do that and I’ll wipe the debt.”

In April 2020, MacFarlane collected two wooden boxes shipped to Darwin from Adelaide by Bruce Jordan Memorials and dropped the green metal drums inside off at addresses in Darwin, including at Runner’s place in Bees Creek.

As before, MacFarlane tried to refuse any part in the drug smuggling racket but James had insisted.

“You owe me,” he said.

“It’s nothing, all you gotta do is pick it up and drop it off. You can’t get done for it, you don’t know anything about it.”

But what frightened MacFarlane most about James was his repeated insinuations that he had “people on the inside” a reference Justice Barr would later interpret as being to “corrupt police informants”.

“I can destroy your business, I can destroy everything,” he threatened.

“How do you think I get away with this? I’ve got blokes on the inside.”

DETECTIVE Sergeant Joe Carbone says Peter Wellman James, a lifelong Territorian, knows a lot of people, “so he would know police officers and police officers know him”.

“I’m not going to say that we didn’t have concerns, of course we did,” he says.

“We did stuff like, we changed his name, he was never spoken of as Peter Wellman James, never, for 15 months.

“So it wasn’t out there that we were actually investigating this guy and we had to do it that way because – not that we didn’t trust anybody – but we just couldn’t afford for him to have any inclination of what was going on or else we would have never even gotten close to him.”

But while not ruling it out, Sergeant Carbone is sceptical about whether James really had the high level connections he claimed, saying “I’m sure police officers know him, not knowing what (he was up to)”.

“Him telling these other people he’s got people on the inside – can’t confirm that he has, can’t confirm that he doesn’t – but me, I think that’s a whole lot of bulls*** that keeps him well above them and keeps them under control,” he says.

“I mean we’re talking about drug dealers and that sort of stuff, they live in a completely different f***in’ reality mate, so they think that he’s f***in’, the Godfather, or some f***in’ thing.

“It’s almost ridiculous but it’s credible for them because they can see him talking to police officers, they know he’s Facebook friends with police officers – we know that he’s Facebook friends with police officers.”

FOR Joe Carbone, Peter Wellman James – codename “Hippy” but known to his customers as “The Gardener” – is a master manipulator.

“He would have been a great businessman, he’d have been a great cop, he’d probably have been a good footballer,” Sergeant Carbone says.

“Whatever he put his mind to, he’d probably do well, he just chose the wrong profession I suppose.

“I can guarantee you from listening to him, if he actually f***ing done the work he was supposed to do he’d be a multi-millionaire.”

Sergeant Carbone says after years of chasing crooks, he’s learnt a thing or two about the personality types on the other side of the thin blue line.

“They have an addictive personality, so they get hooked on drugs – I’m not saying they’re (addicts) but they get hooked on that persona, and that’s what they want to be, so he wanted to be the man about town and he was,” he says.

“You know, they’re having parties on yachts, he’s got a cruiser, some sort of 26ft cruiser that’s parked in Cullen Bay. He’d go out and have those Florida beach party sort of get-togethers. That’s just the high life.”

When police finally got a look inside the swanky property James called home, paid for with a combination of legitimate and ill-gotten gains, they found what investigators would dub the “Pablo Escobar room”.

“He’s got a what-do-they-call-it, escape room,” Sergeant Carbone says.

“So he can go down into his cupboard … climb up the ladder, it takes you outside out into the gym.

“We were hoping that there was going to be millions and millions of dollars down there, but no.”

Bruce Jordan was jailed for nine years after pleading guilty in the Supreme Court to supplying commercial quantities of cannabis to Peter James, Shannon Wagner and various others.

Shannon Wagner was handed a total effective sentence of 12 years after also pleading guilty to commercial cannabis supply as well as conspiring with Peter James to supply the drug and handling $1.5m in the commission of an offence.

Scott MacFarlane pleaded guilty to five counts of commercial cannabis supply and was jailed for three years, to be suspended after nine months.

Peter Wellman James has pleaded guilty to commercial drug supply, conspiracy and dealing with property in the commission of an offence and will face a sentencing hearing in the Supreme Court on April 14.

The Runner remains on the run, while MilkMan and the rest of the Russians are also yet to be brought to justice.