By Perry Duffin
Astronomical cocaine prices have made Australia irresistible for the world’s most powerful drug cartels, groups with industrial-scale supply lines, nation-sized GDPs and arsenals of weapons. Blood is already being spilled here to secure the market.
Australians pay among the highest prices in the world for cocaine, at $250 to $400 a gram – only two Gulf states with death penalties for drug crimes fetch slightly higher prices.
AFP Assistant Commissioner Kirsty Schofield has warned the most dangerous global crime groups are partnering, and fighting, to supply Australia with cocaine.Credit: Kate Geraghty
The market is so valuable that the most bitter enemies in Australia’s underworld have joined forces and sent buyers to the jungles of Colombia and hitmen to Bondi while foreign cartels send their own emissaries here.
“The OMCG [bikies] only ever did domestic stuff; it’s not the case now, no one is staying in their lane,” Australian Federal Police Assistant Commissioner Kirsty Schofield told this masthead.
“Now the OMCGs send representatives to Colombia to be closer to the source of the cocaine and broker deals to import it to Australia. Other major players, Balkan and Italian organised crime groups do the same because we pay top dollar.”
National cocaine consumption peaked in 2019-20 at about 5.6 tonnes, according to wastewater analysis, the best measure of Australia’s drug habits. There had been fewer seizures that year, but the AFP had, secretly, spent that time infiltrating global crime groups with the fake encrypted AN0M app.
The intelligence gathered in that time saw seizures of cocaine double to 4.7 tonnes in 2020-21 as unwitting criminals realised police around the world were monitoring them in real time.
The revelation of AN0M, dubbed Operation Ironside internally, sent drug syndicates into a panic – importations dropped through 2022 and cocaine consumption hit a record low in August that year.
The price of a kilogram of cocaine, during that drought for dealers, hit record figures above $450,000/kg. One report shocked the AFP that a kilo of cocaine was worth $600,000 .
“These syndicates deliberately directed their sellers to take advantage of high prices in Australia,” Schofield said.
“These are global, global syndicates. They have the money to fund real, proper warfare.”
A Belgian yacht carrying 500kg of South American cocaine was intercepted in Solomon Islands, bound for Australia in 2018. Global and domestic crime syndicates are co-operating to capture Australia’s premium cocaine prices.Credit:
The biggest players in the world, from the feared Italian ’Ndragheta to Mexican cartels, Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation, have operatives in Australia to work with domestic distributors.
Schofield said the dealing is done 24/7, usually through encrypted apps, often involving outlaw motorcycle gang members who have relocated to safe havens.
The flood has been intercepted at the border, and the AFP seized 5.1 tonnes of cocaine in Australia in the last six months of 2022.
Jalisco New Generation Cartel show off their military hardware in a video posted online.
A further 1.5 tonnes of cocaine, bound for Australia, has been seized offshore in the same time from syndicates so desperate to sell in Australia that they are shipping the drug before even securing a buyer.
The combined haul for the year, 8.9 tonnes, is a record for the past five years.
Schofield and other agents were photographed in Manly, in 1994, with black duffle bags containing 95 kilograms of cocaine pulled from the boot of an old Mercedes. The agents hold a hessian bag that reads “PRODUCT OF COLOMBIA”.
AFP officers including Kirsty Schofield, now assistant commissioner, seize 95kg of cocaine from a 1970s Mercedes on January 27, 1994.Credit:
It was a simpler time in Australia’s underworld, when bikies dealt weed and speed, Golden Triangle gangs peddled heroin, and only Colombians braved the border with cocaine taped to their bodies.
Schofield said the crossover between the groups, domestically and globally, is profitable but causes tensions when money or product is lost or seized.
Sydney is witnessing increasingly bloody and public score-settling as a result, she added. Cocaine kingpin Alen Moradian, in late June, was executed by unknown gunmen in the basement car park of his Bondi Junction bachelor pad.
Alen Moradian was fatally shot in Bondi Junction in late June. He was linked to the Comanchero OMCG which has a controlling presence in the domestic drug trade.Credit: Kate Geraghty, News Corp
Moradian was linked to numerous crime groups, including the Comanchero OMCG and The Commission, a “consortium” of criminals who seek to control the price and distribution of cocaine in Sydney.
The Commission appears to be a purely domestic operation, using threats and violence to set and hold the premium price Australians pay for cocaine.
Moradian’s killers remain on the run and the motive for his murder is not yet known, but it is one of many public shootings linked to the drug trade in Sydney in recent months.
“The public violence is next level,” Schofield said. “I don’t know if the community has been desensitised by what we see in other countries, but it’s really scary that it’s being imported along with the drugs.”
Two alleged plots to import 460kg and 850kg of Colombian cocaine were detected in Western Australia last week, with the AFP investigating whether one syndicate had flown distributors out for the job.
A French and Swiss national were allegedly flown to Australia to distribute 460kg of Colombian cocaine last week, the AFP alleges.Credit: AFP
Schofield recently toured the cocaine labs in Colombia, a country with 120 police missing in action and politics marred by narcoterrorism.
She was driven around Mexico under protection of officers who scanned the roads with high-calibre machine guns on their utes.
Internally, police are frustrated by the glamorous reputation offered to cocaine. “There’s no woke coke,” they say when syndicates dump chemicals in the Amazon, or when tourists are kidnapped and killed in Mexico.
Schofield personally disdains the idea that it’s OK for drug dealers to shoot each other because stray bullets don’t discriminate.
In Sydney, a nurse was injured in early 2021 when a bullet hit Auburn hospital. Later that year, children ran for safety as a bullet struck their daycare wall. Both were stray bullets from gangland attacks.
“These guys make so much money, they move into the wealthy suburbs – one import gets you a house without a mortgage in the eastern suburbs,” Schofield says. “It’s someone else’s problem until it isn’t.”
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