Former drug trade player tells his story
Article from: The Courier-Mail
Michael Crutcher
April 03, 2009 11:04pm
THIS is a story of Brisbane's grubby underbelly. Its characters are anything but noble - the attractive bikie girl from the rich Camp Hill family, the drug dealer who bound a man in fishing line, and the corrupt cops who were eventually jailed.
And its settings are anything but scrappy - the dealer's headquarters in a flash Spring Hill house and the sophisticated drug lab in a tidy Sandgate home. But there is one uplifting storyline: how a hopeless addict, who knew those characters and those settings, walked out of the underbelly and somehow got himself back into society.
His story starts on his 21st birthday in the late 1990s, when he inherited $50,000 to add to the two cars he had saved for since graduating from a Brisbane private school.
Within 12 months, that money and those cars were gone, burned by a $400-a-day speed habit. His mother was devastated but she couldn't stop her likeable, gentle young man - let's call him Frankie - from being destroyed by a cocktail of amphetamine-type drugs.
Frankie was holding down a job, working late hours in the hospitality industry. That meant he could get up early for his morning ritual - driving more than an hour from Wynnum to Kallangur for his drugs.
If he ran out, his dealer would arrive at his workplace, knock on the back door and hand Frankie a pre-packed syringe.
Frankie would stay late at work with his jaw clenched from the speed. His frying brain would continually prompt him to rearrange the contents of the work freezer or bar fridge.
He would be awake for days at a time, sleeping on his time off when he had poured enough paracetamol and codeine into his body to slow it down. Then he would wake, eat like it was his last supper and resume the madness.
His first jolt came when two dealers who sold to Frankie and his mates turned out to be corrupt cops.
When Frankie and his mates read in the newspaper that Gregory Catton and Peter Reid were police officers, they were shocked and scared. But not scared straight.
By 2003, Frankie had drifted away from his work and into a more convenient job – a delivery driver for a mid-level Brisbane dealer. He had been given a car and he had a clean driver's licence which was worth plenty in the industry.
He had to drive seven days a week but the job had perks – $200 cash and the first half gram of speed thrown in every day.
The day would start at the Spring Hill home which offered CBD views from one side of the house and the backdrop of the Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital from the other.
Frankie would meet his boss there, have a quick hit and then head a few kilometres on the northside to the modest house of a drug czar who supplied Brisbane's mid-level dealers.
The czar was the only person Frankie noticed during his drugged days who was not a user. The czar insisted on business hours only and he did not like being bothered outside those times.
Frankie's boss had a mobile phone that rang 24 hours a day with calls from customers. Frankie would deliver daily to about 20 customers, some in upmarket suburbs like Clayfield and Paddington, others at Newmarket and others as far south as Springwood.
During those trips, Frankie followed his boss's strict edict that he not break the road rules. Police attention was never good for business.
But it was different in the dead of night and Frankie would sometimes spear down the Pacific Motorway at 200km/h for a delivery.
By now he was going without sleep for many days at a time and mixing with a sordid cast of characters.
He would watch at night as paranoid users hid for hours in bushes, wearing night-vision goggles to capture the intruders they were convinced were out to get them.
He would watch as another user flicked on a set of floodlights and mowed his grass at 3am.
He would often collect his boss's standover man – a rough bloke who would scare a statue – as he went about belting the bones of users for debts as little as $100.
Frankie was wary of a serious drug user who wore the stolen uniform of an RACQ roadside mechanic because he thought it was a cloak of legitimacy as he prowled the streets at night.
And he was captivated by the blonde daughter of a Camp Hill millionaire who had the best contacts of anyone Frankie had met. She couldn't squeeze another number into her mobile phone database and it seemed as though she knew most of the illicit drug players in Brisbane.
One night, she phoned Frankie while he was in The Beat nightclub in the Valley. She asked him to get his hands on hydrochloric acid and caustic soda for delivery to Sandgate.
Frankie dashed back to his Alexandra Hills home, picked up the goods and headed for a Sandgate house he had never visited. When he arrived, he wondered if the quiet, harmless-looking place was the right address.
The door opened and Frankie saw an upmarket drug lab that was much classier than some of the amateur kitchens he had seen.
Frankie handed over his $20 worth of acid and caustic soda and received $1000 cash for his work.
That amount of money was regularly available to Frankie and his mates but he noticed that no one ever had material goods. There were no big television sets, no expensive houses, no fancy clothes. Money was spent on drugs and the junkies would do anything to get it.
Frankie was part of an organised gang that went to Pallara in Brisbane's southwest to spend a night knocking down telegraph poles to steal valuable copper.
His car was among the few things owned by anyone in his inner circle, and it brought rewards. On one night, the man in the RACQ uniform borrowed it for an hour. He returned three hours later, handed Frankie $1000 cash and never said a word about where he had been.
On another night, the car almost became Frankie's downfall. He was asked to drive a junkie to an industrial estate, where the junkie was making good money stealing at night and selling the goods the next day.
After breaking into a warehouse, Frankie became concerned by the junkie's erratic behaviour and started to leave. The agitated junkie pushed a gun into Frankie's stomach and told him to stick around.
Frankie started to consider his future because the stakes were rising. He had been warned by the blonde girl that bikie gangs were kidnapping drug cooks, getting them hooked on heroin and forcing them to prepare their supply. Frankie wasn't a cook but he wasn't convinced the bikies would believe him.
And he had contracted hepatitis C – a problem that dogs him today.
But one night in a Darra hotel room made up Frankie's mind.
He was told to wait in the room with his boss's girlfriend and her two children aged under two.
The boss arrived, unlocked the boot of the car and dragged out a frightened man bound from head to toe in fishing line.
The woman went berserk, demanding her partner take the prisoner elsewhere. Frankie doesn't know what happened to the captive but he never saw him again.
And Frankie's mates didn't see him again after that day in 2005. He threw away his mobile phone, returned to his mother and asked if he could try to get his 28-year-old body clean.
After some false starts, help from his doctor and love from his family, Frankie made it.
He now has a high-ranking job in Brisbane's hospitality industry and a girlfriend with whom he plans to start a family. His minor brushes with the law from his junkie years have faded away.
As Frankie sipped coffee in Brisbane this week, he wondered how he made it out while at least three of his schoolmates had been sent to jail – one of them had lost his teeth from his years of methamphetamine abuse.
"It's a tragic thing," Frankie said.
"All of us were from good families. I look back on it and think, how did we get there? How did we become the scourge of society?
"We were putrid junkies. Nothing more. Nothing less.
"If I had really known what those drugs would do to me back when I was 21, I don't reckon I would have touched them.
"All my mates told me speed was a good thing. They said it wasn't addictive. It turned me into a monster. I'm just lucky I got out and I'm lucky I had a place to go to where I could clean myself up.
"If I hadn't, I would be dead by now. No risk at all."
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Courier-Mail
Glad to see you joining up and posting. Copying these articles in every day was pretty nauseating I have to admit... guys, you should check out Terry's blog that he's linked to too. I'm a big fan 
![:\](https://bluelight.org/xf/BL_Images/Orig_Emoji/wrygrin.gif "wry grin :\")
