The Rise of Middle Eastern Crime in Australia

This is a speech by a retired police office from Australia . It is about the rise of crime amongst the Muslims. But the disturbing part is that the criminals are protected by the entire community of Muslims and it seems the government is completely helpless to address this problem. When governments fail to protect their citizens, the citizens rise to take the law into their own hands. The result is civil war. This alarming trend is what will happen in all countries where Muslim immigration is left unchecked. It is truly troubling and scary.

by Tim Priest

2005/12/26

I BELIEVE that the rise of Middle Eastern organised crime in Sydney will have an impact on society unlike anything we have ever seen.

In the early 1980s, as a young detective I was attached to the Drug Squad at the old CIB. I remember executing a search warrant at Croydon, where we found nearly a pound of heroin. I know that now sounds very familiar; however, what set this heroin apart was that it was Beaker Valley Heroin, markedly different from any heroin I had seen. Number Four heroin from the golden triangle of South-East Asia is nearly always off-white, almost pure diamorphine. This heroin was almost brown.

But more remarkable were the occupants of the house. They were very recent arrivals from Lebanon, and from the moment we entered the premises, we wrestled and fought with the male occupants, were abused and spat at by the women and children, and our search took five times longer because of the impediments placed before us by the occupants, including the women hiding heroin in baby nappies and on themselves and refusing to be searched by policewomen because of religious beliefs. We had never encountered these problems before.

As was the case in those days, we arrested every adult and teenager who had hampered our search. When it came to court, they were represented by Legal Aid, of course, who claimed that these people were innocent of the minor charges of public disorder and hindering police, because they were recent arrivals from a country where people have an historical hatred towards police, and that they also had poor communications skills and that the police had not executed the warrant in a manner that was acceptable to the Muslim occupants.

The magistrate, well known to police as one who convicted fewer than one in ten offenders brought before him during his term at Burwood local court, threw the matter out, siding with the occupants and condemning the police. I remember thinking, thank heavens we don’t run into many Lebanese drug dealers.

In 1994 I was stationed at Redfern. A well known Lebanese family who lived not far from the old Redfern Police Academy were terrorising the locals with random assaults, drug dealing, robberies and violent anti-social behaviour. When some young police from Redfern told me about them, curiosity got the better of me and I asked them to show me the street they lived in. Despite the misgivings of the young police, I eventually saw this family and the presence they had in the immediate area. As we drove away in our marked police car, a half-brick bounced on the roof of the vehicle. The driver kept going.

I said, “What are you doing, they’ve just hit the car with a house brick!”

The young constable said, “Oh, they always do that when we drive past.”

The police were either too scared or too lazy to do anything about it. The damage bill on police cars became costly and these street terrorists grew stronger and the police became purely defensive. You see, the Police Royal Commission was about to start and the police retreated inside themselves knowing that the judicial system considered them easy targets. The police did not want to get hurt or attract Internal Affairs complaints.

Call me stupid, call me a dinosaur, but I made sure that day that at least one person in the group that threw the brick was arrested. I began by approaching the group just as that magistrate had lectured me and the other police involved in the Croydon search warrant. I simply asked who threw the brick. I was greeted with abuse and threats. I then reverted to the old ways of policing. I grabbed the nearest male and convinced him that it was he who had thrown the brick. His brave mates did nothing. By the time we arrived at the police station, this young fool had become compliant, apologetic and so afraid that he kept crying.

You may not agree with what I did, but I paraded this goose around the police station for all the young police to see what they had become frightened of. For some months after that, police routinely rounded up the family whenever it was warranted.

However, some years later, with a change of Police Commander and the advent of duty officers under Peter Ryan, the family got back on top and within months had murdered a young Australian man who had wandered into their area drunk. They had set up a caravan where they sold drugs twenty-four hours a day. They tied up half the police station with Internal Affairs complaints ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous, but under Peter Ryan, these complaints were always treated seriously.

In effect, this family had taken control of Redfern. Senior police did their best to limit police action against them, fearing an avalanche of IA complaints that would count against the Commander at Peter Ryan’s next Op Crime Review.

I hope the examples I have just used don’t give the impression that I am a racist or a bully. The point I want to make from the start is that policing has never been rocket science. It is about human dynamics, street psychology, experience, a little bit of theatre and a substantial quantity of common sense. Sure, forensics and the advances of DNA, rapid fingerprint identification and electronic eavesdropping have taken policing to a new level of sophistication, but ultimately, when an offender is identified by whatever means, scientific or otherwise, it all comes down to the interaction between the investigator and the offender during the arrest and interview process. Violent and abusive offenders do not respect the law or those who enforce it. But they do respect the old-style cop who doesn’t take a backward step and can’t be intimidated. When they encounter cops like that, they fold quickly — there is rarely much behind the veneer of bravado.

In 1996 with the arrival of Peter Ryan, and the continued public humiliation of the New South Wales Police through the Wood Royal Commission, a chain of events began that have affected the police so deeply and so completely that, as far as ensuring community safety is concerned, I fear it will take at least a generation to regain the lost ground.

IT WAS ABOUT 1995 to 1996 that the emergence of Middle Eastern crime groups was first observed in New South Wales. Before then they had been largely known for individual acts of anti-social behaviour and loose family structures involved in heroin importation and supply as well as motor vehicle theft and conversion. The one crime that did appear organised before this period was insurance fraud, usually motor vehicle accidents and arson. Because these crimes were largely victimless, they were dealt with by insurance companies and police involvement was limited. But from these insurance scams, a generation of young criminals emerged to become engaged in more sophisticated crimes, such as extortion, armed robbery, organised narcotics importation and supply, gun running, organised factory and warehouse break-ins, car theft and conversion on a massive scale including the exporting of stolen luxury vehicles to Lebanon and other Middle Eastern countries.

As the police began to gather and act on intelligence on these emerging Middle Eastern gangs the first of the series of events took place. The New South Wales Police was restructured under Peter Ryan. Crime Intelligence, the eyes and ears of all police forces throughout the world, was dismantled overnight and a British-style intelligence unit was created. The formation of this unit and its functions has been best described by Dr Richard Basham — as a library stocking outdated books. The new Crime Intelligence and Information Section became completely reactive. It received crime intelligence from the field and stored it. Almost no relevant intelligence was ever dispensed to operational police from 1997 until I left in 2002. It was a disgrace.

One of the fundamental problems that arose out of the new intelligence structure was that it no longer had a field capacity or a target development capacity. With the old BCI there were field teams that were assigned to look into emerging trends. Vietnamese, Romanian and Hong Kong Chinese groups were all targeted after intelligence grew on their activities. When the alarm bells went off over growing intelligence concerns about a new or current crime group, covert operations were mounted.

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