Trauma of crime lingers in wake of African gang rampage

The crime spree by young African-born men is a problem Victoria Police is reluctant to name and struggling to contain.

A jewellery store robbery in Toorak, Melbourne.

Lewis Eishold, 57, rolls down the steel shutter where cartons of cigarettes are kept under lock and key and shows the deep gouges left by Pulios Awo, Regan Augustine and Padiet Deng when they hacked at it with machetes in a frenzied, early-morning attack.

It was here, in a back office of a Melbourne suburban newsagent, that three men, two of whom were born in Kenyan refugee camps after their families fled the Sudanese civil war, ambushed Eishold and his workmates in the pre-dawn.

Awo brandished a sawn-off, double-barrelled shotgun. Augustine and Deng wielded long, curved blades. Earlier that night, they had robbed a service station about half an hour away. Now they were in Mount Waverley’s Pinewood Newsagency, at 4.20am, ­demanding smokes and cash.

Eishold was working in the back of the store, preparing to put magazines on their stands when the door burst open. The three armed intruders had their faces partially concealed. The faces of Eishold’s colleagues, forced into the cramped room next to him, were white with terror. His ­account is just one from a spate of crimes committed by young men of African descent across Melbourne in the past 18 months. It’s a problem that Victoria Police is ­reluctant to name and struggling to contain.

Nearly 300 men born in Sudan or South Sudan were arrested in the last financial year, according to Victoria’s Crime Statistics Agency. In raw numbers, it is a small cohort when compared with the 18,770 Australian-born and 658 New Zealanders arrested by police. But compared with 2016 population data, Sudanese or South ­Sudanese-born people are 6.135 times more likely to be arrested than anyone born here.

Victoria Police’s handling of the law and order crisis has sparked a backlash from some Melbourne residents. There was a furore when no ­arrests were made after a brawl ­between youths in St Kilda this month. Only one ­arrest was made from an out-of-control Airbnb party in Werribee where youths attacked police with rocks.

Armed gang members ransack the IMP Jewellery store in Toorak.

Analysis by The Weekend Australian shows many young offenders of African heritage who have come before the courts in the past year have long criminal histories.

Tony Fialides, whose Toorak jewellery store was robbed twice in a year by different groups of African offenders, said he now required customers to push a buzzer outside a security door to enter his shop. “Most jewellery stores have started installing buzzers, actually, since that robbery. I know of very few in Melbourne now that just let people walk in the door,” he said.

Another jewellery store victim was a Syrian refugee who was psychologically transported back to a war zone during an armed robbery on his Coburg jewellery shop.

“The loud destruction of the thick glass door almost made my heart stop out of fear as it reminded me of the sound of bullets that I used to fear might strike my family when we lived in Aleppo,” the Victorian County Court was told.

The jeweller had suffered financially, he now shuts early out of fear and he suffered months of nightmares, distress and panic attacks. “I came to Australia to escape the violence that plagued the streets of Aleppo and to give my family a safer life, but now I am constantly on edge as the attack has triggered memories of the traumatic distress I experienced in Syria,” he remarked.

Mr Eishold returns to his story of that early morning in February, when Awo, armed and menacing, demands his keys. They are in his pocket but he lies, telling Awo the owners of the store have them and he has no access.

“They wanted (to get) into the cigarette counter and the till ... I said ‘No, no access available’ because I would have to go out there and separate myself from the other two blokes and I wasn’t going to do that,” Mr Eishold explains from the small back room where his ordeal unfolded.

“They saw the metal vault and wanted the code. Once again, I just said ‘No, no access available’ and so they said ‘We’re going to leave’. They were polite, actually.”

The robbers talked about destroying computers in the back room to delete all CCTV footage but decided against it. Instead, Avo shot a security camera, which sits above the birthday card display. There is still a hole in the ceiling from where he unloaded one of his twin barrels.

As the three robbers were leaving, one of them turned to Mr Eishold and said something he will never forget: “If you ring the police, we’ll come back and we’ll shoot you.’’

They then drove off into the darkness, Mr Eishold said.

Awo, Augustine and Deng never got the chance to return. They were arrested shortly after at a nearby 7/11 store. Their attack on the Pinewood Newsagency had been part of a crime spree spanning nearly 20km, starting with a petrol station in Narre Warren.

Police told Mr Eishold and the shop’s owners, Dennis Skantzos and Nick Diamantopoulos, that the men would probably get six to 10 years’ jail. Instead, they each pleaded guilty and received a heavily reduced sentence. Awo, 22, got three years and will be eligible for parole before the end of this year. Augustine, 19, and Deng, 19, were sentenced to three years in youth detention.

Mr Eishold learned of the sentencing from The Weekend Australian. He was disappointed at the outcome. “We don’t want to be critical but we’ve heard nothing from the police since the robbery ... this is the first time we’ve heard about (the sentencing).”

The newsagent said his experience at the sharp end of violent youth crime had left him anxious about working nights and more suspicious of customers and passers-by. “Any car that comes by, we look twice because you just don’t know ... they might be banged up, but their cousins and friends are all active and you still hear about robberies nearby all the time,” he said.

Youths clash at Highpoint Shopping Centre at Maribyrnong.

“Every time you walk down the street, drive down the street, and you see a person of different colour, you do think twice ... but we employ some darker-skinned people here, we have migrants from all walks of life coming into this store; we don’t want to think about it like that.”

Victoria Police believed they had collared the worst of the African youth gangs, with the notorious Apex gang disbanded and its leaders imprisoned. However, this month has seen a series of violent incidents involving African offenders, including a vicious attack against an unsuspecting police officer on Boxing Day and clashes on St Kilda’s foreshore.

Both of the robberies of Mr Fialides’s jewellery store were violent, and both involved guns, but it was the second attack, on January 14, that saw IMP Jewellery’s manager, Stevan Morrow, hit on the head with the butt of a young man’s weapon when he refused to open the safe. The store also has a CCTV camera outside the shop so Mr Fialides and his staff can see whether anyone suspicious is hanging about nearby and he has installed bulletproof glass.

One 16-year-old boy involved in a January 14 robbery of IMP Jewellery was sentenced to three years in youth detention after pleading guilty and narrowly avoiding referral to an adult court. Three other youths, aged between 16 and 17, escaped detention and were given youth supervision orders that require them to go to school and play sport.

Mr Fialides said this week’s comments by Victoria Police Superintendent Therese Fitzgerald downplaying the prominence of African youth gangs highlighted the problems with the force’s approach.

“I think you’d have to be fairly clueless to say something like that,” he said. “I think everyone is getting a free ride these days but there does appear to be an over-representation in this particular group regarding crime.”

The jewellery store owner said he did not know what should be done to tackle the wider problem with African youth crime but touched on his own story as a migrant, not too dissimilar from some of the young men now filling up courts. “I came out as a five-year-old with a funny Greek name. I had a hard time at school and all that. But my family is here, we’ve worked hard and done well. We love Australia.”

The message from police has been mixed. At the start of this week, a superintendent declared that African youth crime did not pose a specific problem. Acting Chief Commissioner Shane Patton has since said there was a problem and police were determined to address it.

Federal Liberal MP Jason Wood, chairman of the joint migration committee, has called on Malcolm Turnbull to revisit the idea of a joint taskforce between immigration officials and state and federal police to target youth gangs in Victoria.

“Early intervention is the best way to stop these gangs ... the creation of the Home Affairs Department led by Peter Dutton seems to me like a perfect time to do it,” he said.

Mr Wood, a former policemen who recently met with officials from the FBI and London’s Metropolitan Police, also proposes cancelling the visas of 16- to 18-year-olds who seriously injure other people and deporting all foreign-born criminals over 18 convicted of serious crimes.

The police have to win the trust of Melbourne’s African communities and that, according to a 2015 research paper by the Scanlon Foundation, is at a critically low ebb.

Richard Deng from the South Sudanese Community Association, who met Victoria Police yesterday, said young criminals were damaging his Sudanese community. “We are not happy about this and we do not accept crime ... I want Victoria Police to know we want to work with them.”

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Crimes and punishments

OFFENDER AA, FROM SUDAN, AND OFFENDER AB, FROM KENYA

• Sentenced: November 27. County Court of Victoria

• Guilty plea to one charge each of armed robbery (maximum possible sentence 25 years) and car theft (maximum possible sentence 10 years).

• Offender AA, aged 18: 3 years youth detention

• Offender AB, aged 21: 18 months non parole

The pair robbed a service station on July 7, 2017. Offender AA was armed with a hammer, another co-accused with a machete. The attendant, who fled to a storeroom, was so distressed he was unable to return to work for three weeks. Offender AA, who arrived in Australia as a refugee aged five, had previously been charged with affray, behave in a riotous manner, three aggravated burglary charges, five charges of intentionally causing injury, reckless conduct endangering life, car theft, armed robbery, attempted armed robbery, unlawful assault and breach of a Youth Attendance Order. Offender AB was sentenced to 18 months in an adult jail. He had previously been charged with assault, theft, breach of bail, refusing a police breath test, affray and multiple counts of recklessly cause injury.

OFFENDER AE, FROM SUDAN

• Sentenced: September 22, 2017. County Court of Victoria.

• Guilty plea to theft (maximum possible sentence 10 years), armed robbery (maximum possible sentence 25 years), attempted armed robbery (maximum possible sentence 20 years) and reckless conduct endangering life (maximum possible sentence 10 years).

• Offender AE, aged 19

• Theft: two months’ youth detention

• Armed robbery: 18 months in youth detention

• Attempted armed robbery: 16 months’ youth detention

• Reckless conduct endangering life: 8 months in youth detention

• Total: 23 months in youth detention

On November 14, 2016, Offender AE and two others entered a jeweller’s store in Lalor carrying crowbars. Two smashed cabinets and grabbed jewellery. Less than two hours later, the group approached a tobacco supply shop and demanded the owner open the safe. They were chased away. Offender AE had five appearances before the Children’s Court before this, including on charges of theft, affray and unlawful assault.

Rocks litter the street in Werribee after being thrown at police. Picture: Nicole Garmston

OFFENDER AF, FROM SUDAN

• Sentenced: March 22, 2017. County Court of Victoria.

• Guilty plea to three charges of intentionally causing injury (maximum possible sentence 10 years), one charge of armed robbery (maximum possible sentence 25 years), and two summary charges of unlawful assault (maximum possible sentence 3 months)

• Offender AF, aged 23:

• Charge 1 of intentionally causing injury: 9 months

• Charge 2 of intentionally causing injury: 9 months

• Charge 3 of intentionally causing injury: 9 months

• Armed robbery: 2 years • Summary charge of unlawful assault: 1 month

• Summary charge of unlawful assault: 1 month

• Total: 2 years 9 months

On February 13, 2016, on High Street at Preston, Offender AF kicked a man in the back of the head and kept attacking him and his uncle. Offender AF then punched a bystander and spat in the face of the uncle. Offender AF attacked another bystander and punched a council member. He then robbed a nearby pharmacy of about $1000. Offender AF had previously been charged with robbery, assaulting police, escaping custody, theft, common assault, attempted aggravated burglary, resisting police, and recklessly causing injury.

OFFENDER AG, WHOSE MOTHER IS SUDANESE BUT HE WAS BORN IN A KENYAN REFUGEE CAMP

• Sentenced: March 22, 2017. County Court of Victoria.

• Guilty plea to one charge of theft (maximum possible sentence 10 years) and one charge of affray (maximum possible sentence 5 years)

• Offender AG, aged 21 years:

• Theft: Convicted and fined $100

• Affray: 188 days and Community Correction Order for 12 months

On July 30, 2015, Offender AG met former friends with whom he had had a falling out. Offender AG stole a 30cm-long knife from a nearby Woolworths and confronted the group. Offender AG stabbed one of the men in the leg. One of the men threw a baseball bat at Offender AG, and he responded by picking it up and running with the knife and bat towards the group. He had 15 prior convictions, including affray, recklessly cause injury, receiving stolen goods, possessing cannabis, and contravening bail. Offender AG had also previously pulled a knife on police while drunk.