16 Queensland Today and Tomorrow

On 24 May 2007, a Bill was introduced into the Queensland Parliament by the State Opposition that was designed to break up organised crime groups and equip law enforcement agencies with the power to arrest them. The Bill’s supporters argued that Brisbane had more crime gangs than did Chicago, and that the proposed legislation would help the state ensure it did not become a haven for organised crime. Many might say it already had.

In the last thirty-five years, the Gold Coast has grown from being a string of small towns to being the sixth-largest city in Australia. In December 2011 the Gold Coast area topped the Queensland list for the number of offences of homicide, armed robbery, unlawful entry, drugs and prostitution.

By the early 1990s, members of international criminal organisations were positioning themselves as potential Mr Bigs in Queensland crime. Some of the earlier newcomers were Japan’s Yakuza, members of which had actually arrived in the early 1980s and invested heavily in real estate and front companies. In 1988 Yamaguchi-gumi members took a mass holiday in the area and, two years later, a group of fourteen gambled away $1 million in four days. Also in 1988 the second-in-command, Masuru Takumi, who had properties on the Gold Coast, was killed in a coffee shop on the fourth floor of the Oriental Hotel in Kobe by members of a breakaway Yamaguchi affiliate, Nakao-kai.

A 1992 report on Asian organised crime put forward the belief it was muscling in on local businesses. This was hardly surprising. The Gold Coast was only an eight-hour flight from Japan, with nothing much in the way of time zones to cross. It was also a convenient point on the drug-smuggling route from South America to Japan. At least half a million Japanese were visiting Queensland annually; the climate is good, and there has, in the past, been a live-and-let-live attitude to gambling and prostitution. There were opportunities there for intimidation of tourist-industry businesses and for money laundering.

Shortly after this report was released, Vietnamese and other South-East Asian organised crime gangs travelled north from Sydney and Melbourne. Initially they were engaged in close-knit family heroin operations, from importation down to street-level dealing, but, as younger members integrated with their Australian criminal counterparts, the bonds have weakened. It was estimated that in 1996, $665 million was sent out of Australia to South-East Asian drug-producing countries. How much of this was money that was made legitimately is quite another matter.

Lebanese gangs from Sydney were also travelling north, and they clashed with Vietnamese gangs from Inala and Goodna, on the outskirts of Brisbane. A shake and shoot out in May 1999, in what was called the Mother’s Day Massacre, left Sun Trung Luu dead on the floor of the lavatory of Inala’s West End Cypriot Club. Two years earlier, the civic centre at Inala was Queensland’s drug-dealing equivalent of the railway station at Sydney’s Cabramatta. Luu had earlier been involved in the savage beating of pawnbroker and, later imprisoned, gun dealer Frank Curr, from whom he and friends had tried to steal a ring in 1998. When Curr protested, he was knocked to the ground. As he was being stripped, he managed to reach the Glock pistol that he was entitled to have in the shop and fired a round. His attackers vanished. Another of the team that attacked Curr was found dead in Ipswich in 1999. He had been bound, beaten, strangled, and then thrown off a cliff with a plastic bag over his head.

Eighteen-year-old Sydney-based Thi Dinh Nguyen, who killed Luu, was found in 2000 with a $100 000 block of white-rock heroin under the passenger seat of his car. He pleaded guilty to Luu’s manslaughter and received nine years, as well as a five-year sentence for the heroin. He claimed there had been a quarrel with Luu and his mates, who had begun to attack his friend. He had fired a shot in an effort to frighten them off but unfortunately it had hit Luu.

By the end of the twentieth century, south-east Queensland was seen as the fastest growing areas for Chinese gangs or triads. In 1994 there had been warnings of an influx of Fukienese. In June 1997 a boatload of 139 well-dressed Chinese illegal immigrants on a vessel with sophisticated navigation equipment was apprehended. It was thought the aim was for the immigrants to pose as tourists, and then find their way into safe houses, such as restaurants and brothels. Recruited by Snakeheads, the Fukienese gangs of people smugglers, the immigrants had paid a deposit of $2000 each for their passage and were to work off the remaining $30 000.

In 1994 the National Crime Authority’s strategic intelligence unit, which examines emerging trends in organised crime, was asked to look at the possible impact of the Russian mafiya. It reported there was no major threat, but warned authorities to keep watch, as it appeared the Organisatsiya was examining ways of establishing itself in Australia. Initially the mafiya saw the Gold Coast as a place for rest and recuperation, where there was usually a truce between factions, and a man and his family could live safely.

Not so. On 24 July 2000 41-year-old former KGB colonel Gennadi Bernovski, regarded as the local head of the mafiya, was killed by one or more frogmen who emerged from a canal as he emerged from his residence in Sir Bruce Small Boulevard, Benowa, to empty the trash. He was shot five times with a .32 automatic; allegedly by his former partner, Oleg Kouzmine, who swam away. Bernovski and Kouzmine had a small distribution company in West Burleigh, but Bernovski was also thought to have been handling—or, rather, mishandling—substantial money given to him by other Russians to invest. Nearly $1 million was missing at the time of his death, including $400 000 of Kouzmine’s money. Bernovski was said to have been a regular and unsuccessful player at the local casino.

After his funeral, a wake was held at Spargo’s restaurant in Southport but, significantly, said the police, Kouzmine was not there. He left Australia three days after being questioned by the police and returned to Russia, where, he later claimed, he was arrested and held for some eight months over the killing before being released. In 2001 he wrote complaining that there was an arrest warrant against him in Queensland which prevented him from returning to Australia to see his wife, who had remained in Queensland with their two children and acquired a new partner.

The next year, fraudsman Dmitri Kisseler, who was believed to be linked to the mafiya, escaped when he was serving five years in Queensland for fraud and set up an e-Bay swindle in South Australia. He was said to have used 115 different names to take $31 000 from his victims, who had sent him money for a variety of electronic goods, from memory sticks to computers. This time he was sentenced to twenty-seven months, which was not the end of his troubles. Quite apart from warrants outstanding in New South Wales and Queensland, he was wanted by the Russian authorities over a $500 000 scam.

One of the more curious East European crime stories came out in February 2002 when Polish immigrant Eryk Sokolowski received a maximum sentence of six years. He had been working as a gardener cum handyman when he stole from his employer, Ian Daw, paintings and jewels valued at around $2 million, and sailed away in Daw’s boat, The North Point, from Sovereign Island. He later said the engine failed—the boat may have gone down in the waters off northern New South Wales—and that, after drifting in rough weather, he escaped in a dinghy. At his trial he had a fantastic story to tell the court, which was not challenged by the prosecution. Sokolowski claimed he had been discharged from the Polish army for refusing to shoot civilians, developed a cocaine habit and, to pay off a US$4000 debt, had become a courier for the Polish mafia. Scheduled to collect a cargo of $2 million worth of cocaine in South America, he had reneged and had been pursued by the Polish mafia to Australia, where they still harassed him.

The police unravelled a Russian phishing scam in 2004, when two men, one a 21-year-old Moscow-born Sydney resident, and the other a 22-year-old Southport man, formerly from Belarus, were arrested. The Sydney man, said the police, was ‘about to remove $10,000 from a personal account, and had earlier taken $8000 from a personal account’.

The men had apparently used a trojan to capture keystrokes and then access their victims’ bank accounts. The ‘former Muscovite’ had opened eleven bank accounts—nine on the Gold Coast and two in Sydney. The scammers would use internet chat rooms to find fellow Russians living in Australia. Then they would ask the victims if they would set up bank accounts for them into which they would deposit money. This enabled the scammer to have a clean account.

But by this time things had moved on, and there were real fears that Russian criminals were into money laundering, drug trafficking, prostitution, people smuggling, credit card fraud and racketeering. Two years earlier, a couple of Gold Coast-based Russians, charged with a $1.5 million extortion scam, had been given bail and never seen again—at least, not in Australia.

By 2010 there was speculation that the Gold Coast had become the hub of Australian-based Russian crime, with one of the prime rackets being the Russian-bride scam, in which men put down money for non-existent girls whom they thought had fallen in love with them. This scam had been running for years. In August 2002 Sid Collins, founding president of the Outlaws and member of the Black Uhlans OMCG, who ten years earlier had survived after being shot at point-blank range by Chopper Read, disappeared. He had apparently gone to the Gold Coast, to collect money that was owed him. He was reported missing by his son on 1 September 2002 and his XR8 ute was found the next day, more than 100 kilometres away, near Tabulam, west of Casino, on the New South Wales north coast. Collins’ body has never been found and his bank accounts remained untouched. At the time of his presumed death, he was not only running a Russian mail-order bride business but was regularly visiting China. Again, Collins’s accounting methods may have been lax. For form’s sake, Read, who had constantly badmouthed Collins, was briefly questioned about the disappearance.

It is not only Russian criminals who have made money out of lonely hearts; there has been a sharp increase in the number of victims of online romance scams. In 2006 they accounted for about 8 per cent of advance-fee fraud losses, compared with 76 per cent today, making it the fastest-growing type of scam in Queensland. One of the most serious examples was that of a 56-year-old Gold Coast woman who lost more than $40 000 by sending money to a 57-year-old-man in Britain. He had befriended her, and conned her into paying his travel and medical bills.

Before 2000, there was a significant Romanian presence in organised crime in Queensland, with gangs—one said to consist of up to a hundred former secret police—involved in counterfeiting and in drug trafficking, particularly in high-purity methamphetamines. In March 2007 cocaine that was said to have 84 per cent purity was seized in a series of raids on the Sunshine and Gold Coasts, as well as in Brisbane, Ipswich and Logan.

Romanian organised crime covers the full spectrum of criminal activity, including the trafficking of heroin and other drugs, and other profitable enterprises including car thefts, shoplifting on a grand scale, fraud, gambling and prostitution. Car re-birthing is also high on these criminals’ agenda.

One Mrs Big was the Romanian-born Nana Puscas, who, in the 1990s, was sentenced to a maximum of twenty years for trafficking in heroin; then the longest sentence for drug offences imposed in the state. Using a local park as a drop zone, she and her de facto Constantin Francisc Onea, who ran the Blue Danube restaurant in Southport, headed a ring that sold 211 grams of ‘the dead’, as she called heroin, with a street value of $600 000. Ms Puscas was back in the news in July 2010 when she was arrested on more drug charges, having been involved in an interstate racket, this time with another Romanian, Nicolae Tufis, alleged to be her New South Wales supplier. In her bedroom was found $140 000, along with 325 grams of heroin hidden in a camera case. In December 2012 Tufis, having pleaded guilty, received seven years.

Rather smaller fry, but still men who had earned between $30 000 and $50 000 for their parts in an international card-skimming operation on the Gold Coast, were two more Romanians, Mircea Fluter and Alexandru Stroia, from Mermaid Beach. They were stopped while driving a car owned by Russian alleged crime figure Vitali Roesch. The prosecution accepted Fluter and Stroia were mere foot soldiers, and they received maximum sentences of four and three years respectively. But if foot soldiers can make this sort of money, what can the generals make? One answer is that in 2009 up to $15 million was taken from ATMs on the Gold Coast by card-skimming gangs, often from Russia, Bulgaria and Romania. More recently, in April 2012, homegrown talent in the form of alleged members of the so-called Buzz Saw Bandits were arrested in connection with attacks with heavy-duty concrete cutters on ATM machines and safes. Three men were charged with armed robbery in company and with burglaries along the Gold Coast.

In the first seven months of 2011, there were nearly sixty armed robberies on the Gold Coast, and from May to July, there were five shootings. Anna Bligh, the Queensland Premier, commented:

We have some issues with crime on the Gold Coast that potentially involves gangs and organized crime. It is a big tourist city and that means that, like some other places, it can often attract undesirable elements.

But while, as with crime in any country, when it comes to profit the word is drugs, some of the more traditional methods of making illegal money persist. By 2004 wildlife smuggling had become a new black market of organised global smuggling, ranking after only weapons and drug smuggling in profitability, and carrying much less in the way of sentences for those unlucky enough to be caught.

When Gregory John Comans flew in from Singapore in September 2004, he was chosen for a customs search. Concealed on him, under several layers of clothing, was a purpose-built vest with twenty pockets containing cigarette packets. Inside the packets were nineteen baby coloured pythons, an exotic species worth big bucks in Australian markets. Appropriately, on Friday 13 October 2006, Comans was sentenced to three years’ jail, with a three-month non-parole period and a five-year good behaviour bond of $2500. Had he been carrying the equivalent in drugs, his sentence would have been double, if not treble, that.

The same day that Comans flew into Brisbane, customs officers also discovered and seized fifty-two bird eggs from another passenger. A coordinated customs operation culminated in raids in Ballina, New South Wales, and Wundowie, Western Australia, which turned up large quantities of exotic birds and eggs. The next day, 1000 birds were found at properties near Bendigo, Victoria, some of which were illegally imported exotics, and further north a large number of birds, including exotic parrots and macaws, were discovered at Mudgeeraba, on the Gold Coast. The birds were worth a million dollars on the black market.

Another form of homegrown organised crime that is still big business is cattle rustling, bringing in the thieves over $2 million a year. It is such big business that the police have created a special Stock Squad.

In 2008 it was estimated that of nearly one hundred major organised crime groups operating throughout Australia, eighteen were Queensland-based. Of the thirty-two considered ‘high risk’, three came from Queensland. Most were homegrown talent but some overseas groups still included Triads, Russians, Romanians and Yakuza, as well as some representatives of the old Italian Mafia. OMCGs are considered to be at the heart of drug distribution but one ex-police officer believes that, in general, they are being used by smarter people and that it is only club officers who share in the proceeds. The rank-and-file members are simply used for heavy lifting. Crime in Brisbane itself now operates as a loose coalition, as it did in the 1960s and 1970s in Sydney when the East Coast Milieu held control. Individuals and groups will come together either for a one-off job or for short periods of time. There is none of the cohesion seen in Sydney and Melbourne in recent years.

On 29 May 2011 Detective Senior Constable Damian Leeding died after being shot in the face at close range when he and a female colleague attended a triple-0 call about a robbery and taking of hostages at the Pacific Pines Tavern, about 21 kilometres north of Surfers Paradise. Robbers had stormed the premises shortly before closing time, and were holding hostage two staff and four patrons. Two of the suspects were caught in nearby parkland. This event was just part of a spate of armed robberies and killings on the Gold Coast. At the time, a stolen gun, such as a Glock 9mm, could be procured in around two hours for about $2000.

Leeding’s family eventually agreed that his life support machine be turned off. Two days after his death, it was announced that a new squad was being formed to target violent crime. The police then launched Operation Seymour, a month-long crackdown on violent crime on the glitter strip. A fortnight later, a man was shot in the shoulder when two suspected bikers invaded his home at Wongawallan, where he kept an illegal drug lab in the garage; John Eriquez and Christopher Martin were charged. In June, in another home invasion, four masked men said to be from Sydney, raided the home of a Gilston man, Kane Cook. He shot one of the invaders, George Gioiello, in the leg; his femoral artery was severed and he died in the street, 50 metres away. When Cook was charged with manslaughter, his veteran lawyer Bill Potts said, ‘he is the real victim’. The police said they suspected drugs were involved. The following month, Colin Lutherborrow was shot and killed, and his body left on Hooker Boulevard, between the Gold Coast Highway and Bermuda Street.

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Those who thought that the Fitzgerald Inquiry had cleaned out all corruption in the state’s police forces would have been disappointed, showing that hope rarely triumphs over experience. There will always be rotten apples in the barrel; the best that can be hoped for is that the whole barrel is not full of rotten fruit. For a time in the late 1990s, it looked as though the latter might be the case.

In February 1998 former Whitsunday officer Damon Kirkpatrick was jailed for eight years for his involvement with a North Queensland drug ring. In Mackay, He pleaded guilty to trafficking in a dangerous drug, official corruption, breaking and entering a watch-house, and stealing marijuana plants. He had gone into partnership with a service-station operator, Peter Crossley, who received six years.

That same year, Gold Coast Detective Sergeant John Swift, head of the casino crime and break-and-enter squads, was another who fell from grace, when he received five-and-a-half years for corruption and perjury. He had agreed to provide protection to a man he believed to be a major cocaine dealer, for an initial $10 000 for six months and then $1000 a month after that. Another officer in trouble was former Gold Coast detective Carl Gibson, who received four years for passing on information about a police investigation to a drug dealer for a fee of $3500.

One of the most amazing series of blunders and misconduct by officers was at Morningside, where they allowed themselves to be duped into thinking convicted murderer Lee Owen Henderson, who had killed a mother and raped her daughter, could help with their crime clear-up rate. As a result, one sergeant is alleged to have set up a joint phone betting account with Henderson and accepted almost $8000 from him—but never asked where the money came from. Henderson was also given his own locker in the police station and was allowed to go out unsupervised for lunch.

In 2009 the CMC began Operation Tesco, an inquiry into allegations that three officers on the Gold Coast had inappropriate associations with criminals, and were involved in drug use, misuse of confidential police information and accepting gratuities. It soon emerged that there were long-term problems in an environment where there was drug and alcohol abuse by some police officers and a marked reluctance to report suspected police misconduct. Whistleblowers could expect to be punished by their fellow officers. One was given a tin of dog food as a ‘secret Santa’ present.

The investigation found that free-drink cards were given out to police in nightclubs frequented by members of outlaw motorcycle gangs, and police were leaking information to them. One officer had given a reference to an ex-stripper and yet another had, as a cadet, lied about her medical history of depression and shock treatment for mental problems.

But, at the end of the eighteen-month investigation, only one serving and one former officer faced criminal charges, and six were others to be disciplined. There was, said John Allen, counsel assisting the commission, no evidence of endemic corruption.

However, in the years 2010–11 thirty Gold Coast officers were subject to internal discipline. One was dismissed for theft from a social club and eight others resigned. They had been charged with a variety of offences, including fraud, perjury, supplying drugs, sexual misconduct with a witness, and forgery.

Criminal lawyer Michael McMillan said that, following the CMC investigation, the police had lost a lot of their power and were no longer feared. ‘They’re not nabbing the crooks as swiftly as they used to and many are getting away with all their crimes. The courtrooms are empty, we used to go until 5 p.m. every day, now it’s a busy day if we are there until midday. Temporary helicopters and taskforces won’t fix this, permanent resources and more power will.’

In January 2012 a new gifts and benefits policy was introduced. It prohibited officers accepting free or discounted drinks, or free or discounted entry to licensed premises.

Today the main strands of transnational organised crime in the state are illegal smuggling of people, the trafficking of drugs and dealing in illicit goods. The main strands of national organised crime are identity theft, money laundering and trafficking in amphetamine-type stimulants.

There has, however, also been a rise in youth violence, and the number of youth gangs in such areas as the Gold Coast and Western Brisbane. Gangs such as Butch Lesbian Soldiers, Village People and FLC have been compared with gang cultures in areas like Los Angeles and Moscow.

Nonetheless, Police Commissioner Bob Atkinson denies any suggestion of a strong gang presence, saying that Brisbane does not have crime gangs similar to those in America:

There are some relatively small groups of youths who mimic the dress and other paraphernalia of such gangs, but there is no evidence to support the assertion that there are widespread organised criminal gangs operating in Queensland. There are groups of mainly young males who band together and become involved in criminal behaviour, but they are quite different from the criminal gangs that operate in the US.

Today he may be right. At present, these do appear to be pale local imitations of America’s Crips and Bloods, complete with colours and distinctive tattoos. But what is the saying? From little acorns …