Guns and poses: inside the drug lords' deadly world
August 30, 2010
Tonight Four Corners details the activities of powerful organised crime networks in Australia.
A joint Four Corners/Fairfax investigation.
Despite some high-powered investigations and notable successes, police are far from winning the war with the nation's drug barons, writes Nick McKenzie in this special investigation.
There comes a time when a police target senses he is under suspicion. For the businessman and gym junkie Hakan Ayik, 32, the realisation came more than two years ago with a series of short, sharp beeps from his mobile phone while he was waiting for a flight at Sydney Airport.
The beeping was a remote alarm alerting Ayik that he had some unwanted visitors at his Sydney apartment. His phone was connected to a surveillance system at the apartment which had just begun filming a small group of NSW police who, acting on a tip-off about the purchase of a money-counting machine, had decided to make inquiries.
Ayik wasted no time in sending his own investigators to the scene: several bulky and tattooed members of the Comanchero outlaw motorcycle gang. Their appearance brought a premature end to the police operation.
But authorities soon found other ways to take a close look at Ayik and before long he was a main target of one of the most significant investigations into organised crime in this country. Code-named Hoffman, it has spent two years inquiring into a drug dealing network whose tentacles reach throughout Australia, in the NSW Police and prison system, on the nation's docks, and overseas.
The inquiry - detailed on the ABC program Four Corners tonight - has been led by the Australian Crime Commission (ACC) but includes crucial contributions from the NSW and West Australian police, the Australian Federal Police, the NSW Crime Commission and the nation's anti-money laundering agency, AUSTRAC.
It reveals with unprecedented clarity the extent of the threat from organised crime in Australia and highlights the difficulty authorities face in fighting a new breed of borderless criminals.
The old-school gangsters who stay in their patch and deal only with family members or those who speak their own language are dying out.
John Lawler, the chief executive of the ACC, the elite body that fights organised crime, describes "networked groups of organised criminals, across cultural divides, across national and international boundaries … absolutely focused on profit [and] power".
Ayik's story sheds light on the changing battle against organised crime and the technologically savvy and highly mobile modern Australian underworld that is much harder to police and is capable of amassing great wealth with relative ease.
It takes only a quick internet search to realise Ayik is a vain man. A few keystrokes and here he is, grinning and shirtless, draping his gym-sculpted arms over the shoulders of two lingerie-clad Asian women. A photo on a business networking site shows the graduate of James Cook High School in Sydney as an entrepreneur (and director of "multi-capital trading"), wearing a white shirt, dark jacket and sunglasses - one arm raised and a fist clenched in a pose of unbridled confidence.
Then there are travel video clips, available only to Ayik's Facebook friends (a mere 300 or so), depicting him in Dubai, Turkey and Hong Kong, enjoying a helicopter ride, watching the formula one grand prix or firing a semi-automatic pistol at a shooting range.
Perhaps the most telling clip is one that pictures him travelling to Hong Kong with Daux Ngukuru, the sergeant-at-arms of Sydney's notorious Comanchero outlaw bikie gang.
Ayik has also posted a photograph of himself on this trip with Mark Ho, a Chinese gangster linked to the triads. Ho served a prison stint in Australia in 2001 for heroin trafficking before moving back to China.
As well as being a tribute to Ayik's self-regard, these images demonstrate the breadth of the connections of those who operate in today's criminal underworld. Compare this to a decade ago when Australian bikies would have viewed a trip interstate as a big journey. Having a relationship with the triads opens up a wide range of business possibilities, including access to the Chinese factories (legal or otherwise) that manufacture huge amounts of the precursor chemicals needed to make illicit drugs.
A former assistant commissioner of the NSW Police, Clive Small, says the increasing ease with which underworld figures conduct business overseas, where they are extremely difficult to monitor, shows "how organised crime is maturing in Australia and how it's becoming an increasing threat that we have to deal with."
In another Facebook clip Ayik features his $300,000 sports car and his jewel-encrusted watches. The soundtrack is by rap star Akon and is titled Trouble Maker. It includes the line: "I'm that type of guy your daddy won't let you go out [with] cos he thinks I sell drugs …''
The first hint that the choice of this song was no coincidence came when a light plane landed at the wind-swept Jandakot Airport in Perth in March 2008. Waiting on the tarmac were several grim-faced police detectives who were about to give the passengers from NSW a welcome they would not forget.
Several hours later, the plane's cargo - 22 kilograms of methyl amphetamine and about 35,000 ecstasy tablets - was on display at a news conference police called to announce the arrest of the plane's two passengers. The bust was a record seizure for the state police and raised questions about where the drugs had been sourced and by whom.
A later submission by WA Police to the federal parliamentary committee that oversees the ACC was of the view that "Perth's domestic security barriers rarely detect" drug runners who do the bidding of "authoritarian" traffickers. Authorities had confirmed that the plane had made the journey several times before, presumably with a similar cargo. NSW authorities also discovered that one of the men arrested allegedly worked for Ayik.
After the bust, several policing agencies developed a strong interest in Ayik. Police intelligence in NSW noted his unexplained wealth and the view that the Comanchero regarded him as a man who could enrich the club's coffers.
But investigating Ayik would not be easy, partly because of the frequency with which he moved interstate and overseas, in effect hopping from one jurisdiction to the next and using an array of mobile phones. Was there another way to keep track of him?
Making money means moving money, to bank accounts in Australia or overseas.
As police interest in Ayik grew in 2008, the task of ''following the money'' was being carried out by the ACC, the relatively small but powerful agency formed in 2002.
By mid-2008, the ACC was wrapping up a three-year operation that had uncovered at least 300 million narco-dollars being moved overseas, mainly by Vietnamese and Chinese drug syndicates, via four money remitting agencies in Sydney and Melbourne.
The ACC used its ''high-risk funds strategy'', which involves watching suspicious flows of money - moved via the formal and informal banking sector - to uncover the business structures that connect lower-end drug distributors to the higher end, and mostly overseas-based importers. The strategy allows the commission to reach a better estimate of the size of the dirty money trade, which leads to better estimates of the size of the criminal economy.
A confidential federal government report based on the results of the high-risk funds strategy between 2005 and 2008 concluded that drug imports might have ''been underestimated by a significant margin" and that "most organised crime-related activities" in Australia went undetected. In 2008, the then ACC chief, Alastair Milroy, revealed that with the strategy, the ACC had tracked up to $12 billion in drug money going overseas every year.
Much of Operation Hoffman is still under wraps. But it is understood that critical to the inquiry was the formation of a policing coalition of the willing. If Ayik disregarded state and national boundaries - in one online posting he describes his location as Sydney, Hong Kong, China, Bangkok, and Seoul Korea - state and federal agencies needed to work together, which would be no easy task given the deep mistrust among certain policing agencies.
Under the direction of the ACC, police hatched a plan to dismantle parts of the alleged crime network linked to Ayik, who was seen as a fixer who used his associates - Chinese criminals or bikies - to import and move drugs.
The plan's first public manifestation took place in May last year when NSW Police stormed an apartment at Kogarah. They found five automatic pistols, a Thompson sub-machinegun, a Kalashnikov, a military-issue automatic shotgun and three assault rifles. They also found explosives and what appeared to be police-issue bullet-resistant jackets, helmets and uniforms.
The media reported it as a development in the war between the Comanchero and the Hells Angels that had led to a man being bashed to death at Sydney Airport. But there were other links: the man arrested and charged with weapons offences in connection with the raid was Ayik's nephew.
Operation Hoffman reared its head again last September in the Pacific nation of Tonga, when Tongan and New Zealand police announced the discovery of 40 kilograms of liquid methyl amphetamine, or ice, during a raid on the home of a corrupt customs officer. Media described the bust as Tonga's biggest and said the drugs had been bound for another country.
What was not revealed was that Australian authorities suspected Ayik had planned to import the drugs to this country. It is understood that within his network is a host of maritime industry insiders capable of helping smuggle contraband past customs.
Operation Hoffman is just one of several big police probes in the past five years that has discovered serious corruption on the waterfront. A Federal Police investigation into a massive shipment of ecstasy in 2008 found at least three figures working in the maritime industry in Melbourne who were aiding a drug syndicate. NSW authorities believe a crew of dock workers in Sydney has aided drug imports for at least six years.
Late last year, the breadth of Ayik's connections was again revealed when NSW Police charged one of their civilian employees - who had access to sensitive police intelligence detailing the work of several agencies, including Operation Hoffman - with stealing files that were later leaked to Comanchero associates of Ayik.
NSW Police sources regard the leaks as one of the most serious alleged corruption cases in five years, partly because of the risk they posed to undercover police operatives.
Ayik's online postings reveal a man apparently unfazed by these arrests, planning his 31st birthday party in Hong Kong and posting a new photo on his Facebook profile: a shot of his muscular, gym-buffed chest.
In February it was the turn of WA police, who arrested another of Ayik's contacts, the new president of Perth's Comanchero, Steven Milenkovski, over his alleged role in trafficking about seven kilograms of ice from NSW to Perth.
Two months later, NSW Police raided drug labs in Sydney, seized 10 kilograms of ice and several weapons, and arrested four men, including two of Ayik's Facebook friends. By now, police had Ayik marked as a key figure in a crime syndicate that had imported, and was still capable of importing, large quantities of ice, heroin, ecstasy and amphetamines. The net was closing in.
Three weeks ago, NSW Police pulled over a car in central Sydney and seized 24 kilograms of heroin. Arrested were Ayik's brother and his business partner, another Chinese national. NSW detectives believed they now had enough to charge Ayik.
But he was nowhere to be found. His Facebook site was closed and his MySpace page became temporarily unavailable. About a fortnight ago, NSW Police issued an arrest warrant for Ayik for alleged drug trafficking. At the time of writing, Ayik was on the run.
The heroin bust was the last in a long list of operations, including at least seven multimillion-dollar drug busts that brought Operation Hoffman to an end. But those in law enforcement aware of its impact are not celebrating.
As a single operation, it is an extraordinary success, not least because it has extended the usual ''make a bust and move on'' mentality of traditional policing and harnessed the resources of several agencies to uncover an entire crime network. But it also provides a measure of the reach of a typical modern crime network and serves as a reminder that the demand for drugs in Australia is fuelling a thriving, multibillion-dollar illicit market, especially in amphetamines, ecstasy and cocaine.
A Labor senator, Steve Hutchins - who chairs the ACC's parliamentary committee - tells Four Corners tonight the fact that big drug busts have little effect on the supply and price of drugs should serve as a wake-up call. He said that if all the drug hauls had no effect on supply and the street price, ''then clearly we are not winning that war [on drug trafficking]''.
A former detective inspector, Jim O'Brien, who once headed Victoria's drug squad and the elite Victoria Police's Purana taskforce, says: "You'd have to be kidding yourself if you thought you were getting any more than probably 10 or 15 per cent [of drugs] off the street."
Privately, many senior police concede that long-term multi-agency inquiries with the scope and reach of Hoffman remain exceptions to the rule. Among senior police across Australia, there is a consensus that the ACC is badly under-resourced given the challenges it faces. Ayik's syndicate is just one of many similar outfits in Australia. Policing agencies in Sydney have recently updated a list of about 150 active and often overlapping crime figures they believe need to be targeted. That is in NSW alone.
Sydney Morning Herald
For those who miss it, the episode of Four Corners is on tonight and will be available on ABC iView for a while.
