SO WITH a police force on the verge of bankruptcy, the Middle Eastern
crime problem was an explosion waiting to go off. I had observed the
beginnings of Asian organised crime whilst at the Drug Squad and later at
the National Crime Authority where I worked on two task forces, one of
which was on Chinese organised crime. When I look back on the influence of
Chinese organised crime in Australia, I see a gradual but sustained trend,
not one of high peaks in terms of activity or incidents, but one of a well
planned criminal enterprise that attracts little attention. It’s there
but you can’t always see it.
It probably took twenty years for the Chinese to become a dominant
force in crime in this city. But Middle Eastern crime has taken less than
ten years. So pervasive is their influence on organised crime that rival
ethnic groups, with the exception of the Asian gangs, have been squeezed
out or made extinct. The only other crime group to have survived intact
are the bikies, although the bikies these days have legitimised many of
their operations and now make as much money from legal means as they do
illegally. In many ways they have adopted US Mafia methods of legitimate
businesses shrouding their illegal operations.
With no organised crime function, no gang unit except for the
South-East Asian Strike Force, the New South Wales Police turned against
every convention known to Western policing in dealing with organised crime
groups. In effect the Lebanese crime gangs were handed the keys to Sydney.
The most influential of the Middle Eastern crime groups are the Muslim
males of Telopea Street, Bankstown, known as the Telopea Street Boys. They
and their associates have been involved in numerous murders over the past
five years, many of them unprovoked fatal attacks on young Australian men
for no other reason than that they are “Skips”, as they call
Australians. They have been involved in all manner of crime on a scale we
have never seen before. Ram-raids on expensive stores in the city are
epidemic. The theft of expensive motor vehicles known as car-jacking is
increasing at an alarming rate. This crime involves gangs finding a luxury
motor vehicle parked outside a restaurant or hotel and watching until the
occupants return to drive home. The car is followed, the victims assaulted
at gunpoint, and the vehicle stolen. The vehicles are always around or
above the $100,000 mark and are believed to be taken to warehouses before
being shipped interstate or to the Middle East.
Extortion on inner-city nightclubs is largely unreported because of the
dire consequences of owners reporting these incidents to police. When I
worked at City Central Detectives just before I retired, I was involved in
the initial investigation of one brave nightclub owner in the inner city
who did report this crime. The Lebanese criminals were arrested after a
sting operation. However, I believe that after many violent threats the
owner sold up and now lives interstate. He once had a thriving business
that for a nightclub ran a reputable service, keeping out drugs,
maintaining safety for patrons and co-operating with the police.
The tactics used by the gang were simple. A large number of Middle
Eastern males would enter the club, upwards of twenty at a time. They
would outnumber the security staff and begin assaulting Australian male
patrons, sometimes stabbing them. The incident would be over in minutes
and the gang members would be long gone before police arrived. A few days
later, senior members of the gang, well dressed and business-like, would
approach the club owners and offer to provide protection from similar
incidents for around $2000 to $3000 a week. Many of the owners paid up and
considered it a necessary expense in keeping their business viable. If
they didn’t pay up, or contacted the police, the gangs would wait some
weeks, even months, before returning to the nightclub and extracting a
terrible revenge on the owners, who would pay up or leave. There is
compelling intelligence that in one well-known entertainment precinct in
the city, nearly all the bars, nightclubs and hotels pay protection money
to Middle Eastern crime gangs.
The extent to which Middle Eastern crime gangs have moved into the drug
market is breathtaking. They are now the main suppliers of cocaine in this
city and are now developing markets in south-eastern Queensland and
Victoria. They are major suppliers of heroin in and around the inner city,
south-western Sydney and western Sydney.
What sets the Middle Eastern gangs apart from all other gangs is their
propensity to use violence at any time and for any reason. I thought I
would never see the level and type of violence that I saw with the
South-East Asian gangs in Cabramatta, particularly the 5T, the Four Aces
and Madonna’s Mob, which were a breakaway from the old 5T.But the
violence, although horrific, was almost always local, that is within the
Cabramatta area and almost always against fellow Asians. As a result of
that locally based violent crime it was relatively easy to identify the
culprits and break them up once we were given the resources after the
police revolt of 1999 - 2000.
The Middle Eastern cycle of violence is not local. It can occur on the
central coast, around Cronulla, Bondi, Darling Harbour, Five Dock, Redfern,
Paddington, anywhere in Sydney. Unlike their Vietnamese counterparts, they
roam the city and are not confined to either Cabramatta or Chinatown. And
even more alarming is that the violence is directed mainly against young
Australian men and women. There is a clear and definite link between
violent attacks on our young men and women being racial as well as
criminal. Quite often when taking statements from young men attacked by
groups of Lebanese males around Darling Harbour, a common theme has been
the racially motivated violence against the victims simply because they
are Australian.
I wonder whether the inventors of the racial hatred laws introduced
during the golden years of multiculturalism ever took into account that
we, the silent majority, would be the target of racial violence and
hatred. I don’t remember any charges being laid in conjunction with the
gang rapes of south-western Sydney in 2001, where race was clearly an
issue and race was used to humiliate the victims. But then, unbelievably,
a publicly-funded document produced by the Anti-Discrimination Board
called “The Race for Headlines” was circulated, and it sought not only
to cover up race as a motive for the rapes, but to criticise any accurate
media reporting on this matter as racially biased. It worries many
operational police that organisations like the Anti-Discrimination Board,
the Privacy Council and the Civil Liberties Council have become
unaccountable and push agendas that don’t represent the values that this
great country was built on.
MANY OF YOU would have heard of the horrific problems in France with
the outbreak of unprecedented crimes amongst an estimated five million
Muslim immigrants. Middle Eastern males now make up 45,000 of the 90,000
inmates in French prisons. There are no-go areas in Paris for police and
citizens alike. The rule of law has broken down so badly that when police
went to one of these areas recently to round up three Islamic terrorists,
they went in armoured vehicles, with heavy weaponry and over 1000 armed
officers, just to arrest a few suspects. Why did it need such numbers?
Because the threat of terrorist reprisal was minimal compared to the
anticipated revolt by thousands of Middle Eastern and North African
residents who have no respect for the rule of law in France and consider
intrusions by police and authority a declaration of war.
The problems in Paris in Muslim communities are being replicated here
in Sydney at an alarming rate. Paris has seen an explosion of rapes
committed by Middle Eastern males on French women in the past fifteen
years. The rapes are almost identical to those in Sydney. They are not
only committed for sexual gratification but also with deep racial
undertones along with threats of violence and retribution. What is more
alarming is the identical reaction by some sections of the media and
criminologists in France of downplaying the significance of race as an
issue and even ganging up on those people who try to draw attention to the
widening gulf between Middle Eastern youth and the rest of French society.
That is what we are seeing here. The usual suspects come out of their
institutions and libraries to downplay and even cover up the growing
problem of Middle Eastern crime. Why? My opinion, for what it’s worth,
is that these same social engineers have attempted to redefine our
society. They have experimented with all manner of institutions, from
prisons to mental institutions and recently to policing.
Some of the problems we now see with policing are the result of Peter
Ryan’s dream of restructuring and retraining police. The Police Academy
was changed from a police training college into a university teaching
social sciences and very little else. Constantly I would see young police
emerge from the academy with a view that as police officers they were
counsellors, psychologists, marriage guidance experts, social workers and
advocates for social change but with almost no skills in street policing.
Their training had placed not only them in danger, but also their
workmates and the community.
Policing is about enforcing the rule of law. It has never been about
analysing every offender for the root causes of crime. That is not our
job. The police enforce the law and protect the community regardless of
race, colour or religion. What we have seen in south-west Sydney is ethnic
communities being policed selectively. The implications for this are
frightening when you look at Paris. They had selective policing of a
particular community, which as a result is now out of control.
In February 2001 when I appeared before the Cabramatta inquiry, I gave
evidence which at the time was controversial and attracted the usual
claque of ratbags, lunatics from the ABC and their associates at the
Sydney Morning Herald as well as that fruit loop Mike Carlton from 2UE. I
said that this city is going to be torn apart by gang warfare the likes of
which we have never seen before. In 2003 I was finally proven right, but I
take no comfort from that. However, the criticism I received was
unprecedented. I was a nutter, a liar, a racist, a disgruntled detective
— but I was right. The critics still refuse to concede that we have a
problem. They are still clinging to the multicultural theme. To highlight
the problems with Middle Eastern communities in this city is to threaten
to tear down the multicultural facade.
< back
1 | 2
| 3 | 4
next > |