Hey cats, it’s four o’clock in the morning … Here we are in Harlem. Everybody’s here but the police, and they’ll be here any minute. It’s hiiiiiigh time.
– Fats Waller, ‘The Reefer Song’
As a diminutive drug dealer Tony Mokbel knew that when it came to hard-to-get imports size mattered. Mokbel would tout ‘I don’t do small things’ and reckoned he could smuggle an elephant past customs. He never actually pirated in a pachyderm but one of his bolder drug shipments came close.
In his busy August of 2001, Mokbel used two shipping containers to import 2930 kilograms – over 2.9 tonnes – of cannabis resin. The total weight of the drugs was just below that of a full size Asian elephant, which can grow to between three and five tonnes. The illegal hashish booty looked like thousands of dark brown oversized stock cubes and had been wrapped to look like a shipment of coffee.
Marijuana is a mix of flowers, leaves and small stems of cannabis. Hashish – or resin – by contrast comes from a sap-like substance stored in the flowers of the female plant. Hash can be four times as potent as marijuana and its superior strength is reflected in a much higher onsale value. Mokbel’s motherlode would have been worth $147 million on the street.
He had arranged for the Afghan hashish to be smuggled from the Middle East to Melbourne using false shipping documents piggybacking on the name of a reputable importing company. His half-kilogram blocks of resin were wrapped in plastic then an outer layer of brown and gold foil stamped with a distinctive gold logo and Finnish coffee label markings. The documents stated the shipping containers held 27 tonnes of black marble tiles. While the description was technically true, the unmentioned elephant in the room was the 2.9 tonnes of hashish wrapped in coffee bags hidden away under false floors in the containers.
Mokbel’s general on the job was Jessie Franco, thirty-seven, who had recruited four helpers of his own as an unloading crew. A middling crim, Franco had no gun licence when he was nabbed eleven years earlier with an unregistered .22-calibre handgun and bullets. The weapon and ammunition were found in his girlfriend’s handbag and Franco maintained, though few believed him, that he was chivalrously taking the rap for his gun-toting girl.
The year before the hashish job Franco assaulted a cop who was playing for a rival team in the Essendon District Football League. After Senior-Constable Morris tried to break up an onfield scuffle involving Franco and others, Franco approached him, king-hit Morris, who did not see it coming, and said, ‘Take that, you fuck.’ Morris felt his jaw break. The assault charge that followed resulted in a twelve-month suspended sentence – no jail time.
For Mokbel’s jumbo drop Franco had organised himself a prepaid mobile phone in the fake – if not entirely incredible – name of Tony Fontano, and another for one of his crew. As the drugs travelled across the globe toward Melbourne Franco used the phones to call his crew and the scheme’s shadowy organisers.
Helping Franco were a pizza cook, Paul Pratico, thirty-eight, Robert Cetrangolo, thirty-six, and David Ciampoli, forty-six, as well as Tony ‘the Croat’ Crnac, a thirty-nine-year-old shop steward in Victoria’s colourful building and construction industry. The two shipping containers found their way to a workyard in the industrial suburb of Campbellfield where, under cover of night, the five rugged-up middle-aged European-Australians set to work on them like a colony of ants.
Crnac knew the owners of the yard from the largely Croatian Melbourne Knights soccer club, the Croatian Club in Footscray, and the building industry. He was the first to arrive at the yard, getting to the gates at 11 pm to meet the two trucks carrying the containers. He was familiar with the yard and knew the owners kept a spare set of keys hidden on the premises.
As Crnac signed for the delivery, detectives settled in for an action-packed night using cameras to secretly record the crew’s movements. When midnight approached Franco and Cetrangolo arrived in borrowed utes and Ciampoli and Pratico in hired removalist trucks. For three hours the crew lugged crates full of tiles into the yard with the Croat driving a forklift to stack them. Rugged up in gloves and a beanie Franco used a spanner to unbolt the specially constructed false floor of the first container. He prised up the planks with a crowbar and passed them out to the other workers. As the boards came up the heady sweet stench of the cannabis resin dispersed into the cold early morning air.
Despite the illegality of their venture Pratico was taking no chances with occupational health and safety and wore an orange safety vest. To vary the look he wore a blue baseball cap and had a black balaclava in his pocket. He backed his truck up to the first container while the Croat set about dismantling the floor in the second. At 4 am, when half the first container’s hashish had been loaded into Pratico’s truck, the AFP officers swooped.
The federal agents moved through the yard loudly announcing who they were and informing the removalists they were under arrest. Cetrangolo did a runner, throwing off his work gloves as he went. He was grabbed by police as he reached the corner of the yard. Franco did a bolt too and was also grabbed by the feds. The Croat had just finished a casual cigarette and was in the second container using a crowbar to lever up the floorboards when the police landed, catching him red-handed and cornered. The other two hid but were soon uncovered. Ciampoli was found hiding between two stacks of metal and Pratico lying on the roof of a shipping container.
All five claimed they were just there to lug tiles in the cause of an honest middle-of-the-night’s work. They said their virtuous plans went pear-shaped when cunning and cruel criminals stepped in and took advantage of their work ethic. The workers claimed the job went bad when Mokbel materialised waving his handgun around and threatening the men’s families unless they lifted the boards and unloaded the dope.
‘The instructions were very clear,’ Franco said. ‘This was a threat and I had no intentions of doing anything but cooperate from that point on.’
The Croat backed up Franco’s story. ‘He said “Things have changed, you are doing this now, and just do what we say,”’ Crnac said.
The story opened the way for the workers to argue that they acted firstly in ignorance then under duress, and so were guilty of no crime. It is possible, as Franco claimed, he met with Mokbel in the carpark of a nearby McDonald’s before unloading began. But it would have been out of character for Mokbel to have risked the direct involvement of going to the yard. The video or human surveillance of the federal agents also saw no ‘sixth or seventh man’ enter the yard at any stage.
Franco’s crew fingered Mokbel and alleged crim Pasquale Barbaro as the organisers of the massive import. Police believed the scheme’s shadowy financiers were Mokbel and the Morans. The closest authorities got to the senior organisers of the import was prosecuting a Mokbel mate we will call for legal reasons ‘Lucky’, who was acquitted.
Both vengeful and vain, Mokbel would not have forgiven Franco for implicating him but would have been relieved he forgot Tony’s surname and flattered by his description. Franco told authorities Barbaro was at the yard that night as well as ‘a well-built man of Turkish or Lebanese appearance’ known to Franco only as ‘Tony’.
Pratico’s version was that he did some tile unloading for which he was to be paid in tiles but a football injury from the weekend flared up and he went to rest in a vehicle forcing him to miss all the floorboard-prising action. Pratico said that when police arrived, he hid on the top of a container at the front of the yard, because he felt that the tiles might have been stolen. But authorities couldn’t help wondering why, if Franco’s crew were just there for the tiles, they hadn’t loaded any into their vehicles. Or why they had put the forklift away once the tiles were dumped on the ground.
Franco’s crew had also left a few clues indicating this was not a legit job. They had been very keen, in the case of a bust, not to be linked to their hired vehicles or the phones inside them. Franco had parked away from the yard in a nearby Kmart carpark and after he was arrested police located his car key in his sock. Ciampoli ditched his truck key near his hidey-hole but it too was found by police.
Their precautions and stories of duress helped them little in the end. The court did not mollycoddle the five men, handing out stiff jail terms to the crew hired to shift tiles and transport the bags of hash. ‘Organisers of criminal operations on a scale like this cannot succeed without underlings like you to perform their dirty work,’ the judge said. Franco was ultimately sentenced to seven years with a minimum of four. His crew – Pratico, Crnac, Cetrangolo and Ciampoli – all copped five and half years with a minimum of three.
The five men were never the primary targets of the AFP’s surveillance. The feds were much more interested in the scheme’s puppeteer. Mokbel’s drones had just wandered into the police gaze because they were working the high-risk end of the drug tycoon’s game. And when dawn broke on their moonlit mischief, they realised they had ended up on the other side of the bars to Tony.