Thieves are so desperate for West Australian gold that one man was recently caught forcing his way into a mine site gold room with an angle grinder – right in front of a hidden WA Police camera.

Despite the gold price hovering above a record $5000 an ounce this year – it’s currently sitting at about $6224 an ounce – a detective on the front line catching gold crooks says their desperation has nothing to do with the market price.

Detective Sergeant Graham Baylor, the officer in charge of the gold stealing detection unit – known colloquially as the “gold squad” – said there was talk about gold possibly hitting $4000 an ounce when he joined the squad a year ago.

It has since blown past that marker, but Baylor said he hadn’t seen a subsequent increase in gold theft.

“That hasn’t increased, but almost it’s very, very regular, in that we do see people coming out and doing it,” he said.

The gold squad was first formed in 1907 and is the last remaining squad of its kind in the world.

Baylor has one of the most unique policing jurisdictions in the world, focused mostly on WA’s Goldfields, but his job has taken him to the Pilbara and Perth.

He also investigates some of the most intriguing crimes, like a forced entry into mine gold rooms where the purified product ends up after being extracted from the rock on site.

During that job, Baylor’s team had a heads-up the crime was about to go down, so they set up cameras to catch the thief in the act. That footage is now shown to miners to encourage them to boost their on-site security.

“He’s basically gone on site at nighttime with an angle grinder, and he’s cut into a gold room. A lot of our work is intelligence-based to get ahead of it,” Baylor said.

“We got a camera put in place so we knew who’s going to go there, and we got some amazing evidence – we use in our presentations – of this guy cutting into a gold room.”

Baylor said most gold-related crime wasn’t actually a heist of refined material, but the theft of equipment embedded with leftover gold from refining processes.

That is then refined in backyard operations.

He cited a recent example, where a six balaclava-clad men stole 800 kilograms worth of material from a shuttered gold mine mill in Coolgardie.

“Eight hundred kilos of gold-bearing material was left in a secure compound to be locked away the following day, and during that night we had a ute that came in, [then] six males in balaclavas came out, took the 800 kilos to a gold processor in town,” Baylor said.

“We were aware of where it was going, and we managed to recover that 800 kilos.”

While the gold price may not be linked to more criminal activity, there is money to be made from stolen gold, and Baylor said organised crime and the drug trade were closely linked to it.

“We do see a massive correlation between the gold trade and the drug trade in town,” he said.

“There is definitely an organised crime element, and some of our bigger ones, like the 800 kilos that we recovered from a processing plant recently, that was alleged members of an outlaw motorcycle gang,” he said.

The gold squad also investigates other crimes that happen on mine sites, including assaults and deaths.

They are also heavily involved in drug detection on WA mine sites.

Drugs – and drug debts – can lead to workers being “stood over” by organised crime figures, which flows on to more issues and potential criminal activity on site.

Another priority – backyard gold-refining operations – pose hazardous risks, given the refining process uses mercury and there is the potential for it to leach into surrounding areas.

The most famous recent example was an operation busted in Kalgoorlie in January last year, where police seized more than 30 tonnes of stolen gold-bearing ore, and the ChemCentre lab had to be called in to help clean up the mercury.

Baylor said the squad also recently busted a syndicate from Perth carrying out illicit processing.

“Again, it was down to intel that we discovered them, and we were able to get into it early and disrupt them enough that they’ve been charged with offences across mine sites as far apart as Merredin and Kambalda,” Baylor said.

The journalist travelled to the Goldfields as a guest of the Chamber of Minerals and Energy WA.

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