How NSW police stopped second wave of Asian crime gangs in their tracks

Gangsters of the now defunct 5T openly dealt heroin, brazenly carried guns and machetes on the streets and murdered a NSW MP who dared to speak out against them, recalls Crime Editor Mark Morri.

The mere thought of a second wave of Asian organised crime gangs getting a major foothold back in Sydney is terrifying because not so long ago a Vietnamese street gang called the 5T openly dealt heroin, carried guns and machetes in public and assassinated a member of parliament who dared to speak out against them.

Tri Minh Tran was just 13 when he became leader of the 5T based in Cabramatta in the 90s made up of disaffected teenage refugees from Vietnam. The cops underestimated him, and by the age of 16 he was suspected of two murders, multiple shootings and stabbings as he and his gang wiped out the opposition to take control the streets of southwest Sydney. It was like the wild west with public place shootings in the hundreds every year.

Most police saw teenage street gangs as hooligans who broke street lights and went joy-riding in stolen cars.

Tri Minh Tran was only 13-years-old when he became leader of the 5T gang.

Then State MP John Newman publicly called out the gang for drug dealing and ended up shot outside his Cabramatta home in 1994. The next year someone shot Tran dead but his gang and others flourished till the late 90s.

Thank God the cops of 2024 are not taking any chances and making the same mistakes made back then — dismantling an emerging generation of Sydney Vietnamese crime gangs by Strikeforce Lupin.

MP John Newman was killed in 1994 after publicly calling out the gang for drug dealing.

5T gang leader Tri Minh Tran with his son.

The young men have seen the huge money being made in the drug trade and were allegedly stepping up their manufacturing of meth, and one was caught with heroin, the stock in trade of the old Asian crime gangs. The have shed names like the old gangs 5T, 9Banana boys, the Cowboys and Chin Choi so police can’t identify them.

Members of the 5T gang in 1995. Leader Tri Minh Tran (third from left) and Minh Nguyen (right) were killed during a gang power struggle.

But still the warning signs were there just like with Tran, with inter-gang rivalry and violence used to try and wrestle control of southwest Sydney which flared early this year in Fairfield and Cabramatta with a large number of young gangsters — Australians born of Vietnamese origins — who were muscling up against each other. If not checked one syndicate would have emerged dominant.

If not for Task Force Lupin that new, powerful crime syndicate could easily be on Sydney’s streets which we all know ends with more bullets flying and bodies in the street.

Mark Morri is Crime Editor at The Daily Telegraph

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Originally published as How NSW police stopped second wave of Asian crime gangs in their tracks