Scattered (29 page)

The number of customs detections of methamphetamine in all forms was flat at around 70 per year until 2001. From there, annual detections were 203, 215, 141, 206 and 423 by 2006. With crystal methamphetamine, the number rose most dramatically in 2001 and 2002 and then hit a plateau. Purity varied hugely, from less than 1 per cent up to 86 per cent.

The number of arrests for methamphetamine offences showed a similar trend, rising steeply from 15 per 100 000 population in 1996 to 51 in 2001, then maintaining a plateau in the forties until 2006.

National detections of clandestine labs, which were around 50 a year before the advent of crystal meth, hit 200 a year by 2001, rose steadily to 358 by 2004, and then flattened somewhat, numbering 380 in 2005 and 390 in 2006. The overwhelming majority, each year, were methamphetamine labs in Queensland.

Police arrests and seizures for amphetamines, numbering fewer than 4000 at the start of the ice decade, hit 10 000 by 2006.

How, and where, was this law enforcement taking place?

The biggest lab bust in these years was offshore. In 2004, the AFP's Operation Outrigger culminated in a raid on a warehouse outside Suva, Fiji, which shut down the largest lab ever found in the southern hemisphere. AFP and Fijian police found 1000 kilograms of precursor chemicals, and said the superlab had the potential to produce 500 kilograms of ice in a week.

State police departments were now addressing the clandestine laboratory problem specifically. In 2005 and 2006, NSW police found 55 methamphetamine labs, mostly on residential properties, but the labs being found were bigger and more efficient than in previous years. There had been a fear of ‘mum and dad' operations posing a health threat to the inhabitants of houses—in 2003 half of lab detections were small operations inside family homes, requiring little more hardware than a hotplate and a few orange juice bottles. But by 2005–06, only two of the 55 detected labs were ‘box labs' in the backs of cars; the others ranged up in size to major pill-pressing operations, one producing 28 kilograms of meth that was 60 per cent pure, valued at more than $2 million. In Victoria and Queensland, the number of lab seizures in the same period was up to four times greater than in New South Wales.

Aside from the challenge of cutting down supply, police were also concerned by lab accidents. On 20 December 2002, a meth lab in Bolton Point, Newcastle, had been raided after neighbours reported nasty-smelling fumes, and a six-month-old baby living next door had to be hospitalised after inhaling the chemicals. In July 2003, a St Marys man died from his burns when the flammable solvents from his meth lab caught fire in his home unit.

Some meth cooks saved themselves out of pure luck. In 2003, a 39-year-old cook phoned police when, after inhaling fumes, he began to think his lab was about to blow up. On 29 November 2002, Sydney meth cook Abdel Alameddine was serving home detention for driving offences when he was visited by a parole officer who found evidence of a meth-making operation. When the parole officer called police, Alameddine raced to his shed, where his lab was set up, and tried to smoke as much ice as he could before the police came. His butane lighter sparked an explosion in the shed, there was a fire, and Alameddine staggered out. He would be in hospital for three months and had to wear a burns suit for two years. A psychologist told the Court of Criminal Appeal that Alameddine was ‘in the bottom of the borderline mentally retarded region'.

In 2006, a national police database was set up in a similar vein to Project STOP. The National Clandestine Laboratory Database would identify and track meth cooks who moved between states. It would also log and disseminate information about seizures of precursor chemicals, equipment and recipes, and alert police across borders to new trends in production methods.

State police had been conducting training programs for their officers, to avert the consequences which might result should unprepared police stumble upon a meth lab that was emitting toxic fumes or about to explode. Peter Vallely, a Queensland forensic chemist, followed an American training model and actually cooked methamphetamine in front of police to show them how everyday kitchens could be turned into meth labs. Vallely was also investigating how meth cooks could stay ahead of legislative changes. As he said, ‘The scientific literature I use to understand these processes and identify where the next one is coming from is exactly the same literature I would use if I was a crook thinking, well I can't buy that precursor, how can I make it . . . we could be sitting side by side in the uni library thumbing through the same journal.'

But Vallely also predicted that the restriction of pseudoephedrine supply would push meth-making away from the ‘
Beavis and Butt-Head
element' towards the domain of serious organised crime.

‘The lack of access to pseudoephedrine, in my humble opinion, is going to reduce the number of (cooks) . . . a lot of these people are flat out writing their own name. They don't have the capacity to import it . . . or the money links, and they don't have the skill set to use some of the classical techniques.'

By February 2007, there was a new development, when NSW police proudly unveiled their ‘clan lab truck', a high-tech vehicle containing decontamination and air-monitoring equipment, protective suits and breathing apparatus. Costing $250 000, the truck would be able to go into dangerous environments and protect police from injury. It would not, in itself, increase the number of detections, but it could reduce the cost and the peril of dismantling the labs.

At the Australian border, the biggest haul since the Anna Zhang/Tony Tu arrests was a 125-kilogram seizure in October 2004. Three Chinese nationals were charged after the ice was found inside candles in a shipping container unloaded from the Maltese-flagged container ship
Kota Sejati
at Port Botany on 9 October. The vessel had arrived from China. Custom officials found 624 hollowed-out candles, each containing 200 grams of the drug.

As public awareness of ice surged in 2005, so did the pace and profile of police operations. Keen to publicise their all-out endeavour against the drug, police across the nation released detailed reports of their operations. Here is a timeline illustrating arrests and seizures from 2005 to 2007:

January 2005: Joint Asian Crime Group detectives arrested four Chinese men in Sydney for importing 9 kilograms of ice.

January 2005: A Sydney man was arrested on a luxury boat on the Parramatta River after police found an ice laboratory on properties bordering the Hawkesbury River. They said the lab could make $15 million worth of ice.

February 2005: A man from Annandale, Sydney, was arrested and charged over an ice lab in Castle Hill, where 10 kilograms of the finished product were also found.

February 2005: A 45-year-old man, believed to be one of the biggest ice smugglers in the world, was arrested at Sydney Airport on his way to an address in Rooty Hill. He was wanted in the United States over a massive trans-Pacific importation racket. (Busts involving hundreds of kilograms of ice were carried out in China and Thailand in mid-2006, indicating that Australian ice was still a mixture of imported and locally made product.)

February 2005: A Melbourne company director, Scott McConnell, was convicted and fined for supplying ice pipes, the first such conviction since the Victorian government banned them in 2004.

May 2005: A Melbourne tobacconist was arrested when 2066 banned ice pipes were found behind a counter and in a back room of his shop.

June 2005: Hong Kong authorities arrested a man carrying 560 grams of ice as he prepared to board a flight to Cairns. The drugs were taped to his legs.

December 2005: Police arrested four middle-aged Melbourne men for possession of an undisclosed amount of ice and 8800 ecstasy tablets.

February 2006: Police arrested three Sydney men after a 6-metre Stingray speedboat was delivered from Canada containing 46 kilograms of ice. The ringleader, coffee shop manager Si Tanh Ho, would be sentenced to 25 years in jail.

April 2006: Chadi Sultan, from Warrawong, NSW, was arrested and charged with supplying a commercial quantity— three eightballs—of ice to an undercover police officer.

April 2006: A Qantas flight attendant from Bondi, 35-year-old Anthony William Dow, was charged with trafficking one to two kilograms of ice. Prosecutors said he used his position as a flight attendant to avoid security detectors. He was sacked by Qantas and jailed.

April 2006: Victorian real estate agents stumbled across a meth lab when they went to a house to evict the tenant, 31-year-old Peter Edward Laughton, for failing to pay the rent. Laughton claimed he'd been trying to make diesel fuel.

April 2006: Tasmanian police intercepted $500 000 worth of methamphetamine carried by a woman who was flying into Hobart from Sydney. It was Tasmania's first major ice haul.

April 2006: Federal police arrested seven men after raiding a lab in a rainforest outside Murwillumbah, northern New South Wales.

May 2006: Two US navy sailors and a Canadian national, who tried to smuggle eleven kilograms of methamphetamine into Australia aboard an American warship, were jailed for up to fourteen years. The ringleader, Daniel Christopher Maio, 36, had tried to bring the drugs from Manila into Townsville on the USS
Boxer
. Maio flew ahead to Australia while his colleague Andrew Lester Labanon, 39, stashed the drugs in dirty laundry which he brought ashore. They put the drugs into a car, hiding them among children's toys, planning to drive to Brisbane, but were pulled up by AFP officers in a dramatic arrest at a Townsville service station.

June 2006: Australian police were involved in busting a converted shampoo factory in Malaysia, a superlab using a new recipe of common industrial chemicals capable of making 60 kilograms of ice a day. Netting 500 kilograms of finished crystal meth, it was believed to be the biggest lab bust in south-east Asia.

June 2006: A man and woman in Prospect, western Sydney, were arrested in possession of 170 grams of methamphetamine.

June 2006: Two million pseudoephedrine tablets were discovered inside a shipping container filled with Indonesian furniture. Customs X-rays had picked up 139 boxes of Sudafed and Actafed behind the furniture in the dock at Port Botany. The seizure led to four arrests in Australia and two in Indonesia.

July 2006: A Sydney couple, trying to avoid a police car which had spotted them speeding on the Anzac Bridge, rammed a taxi, ran red lights and drove at two police officers. The couple were arrested with bags of ice and were evidently under the influence of the drug.

August 2006: An Irish backpacker was jailed for thirteen years for dealing and manufacturing ice. ‘Irish' Paul McCormick, 40, lived in a million-dollar Sydney waterfront home, drove a gold Range Rover, wore a Rolex and used a yacht to entertain visiting family members. Police had found drugs and firearms in a flat McCormick rented, as well as a recipe for ice written on a beer coaster in his Alexander Street, Balmain home. He dealt drugs by cruising from bar to bar at night, supplying lower-level dealers locally and in Queensland.

October 2006: The NSW police commissioner, Ken Moroney, said ice was the biggest problem facing police. ‘The physical and mental manifestations of this drug are absolutely horrific,' Moroney said. ‘It has the potential to destroy generations.' NSW police announced they would rewrite their training manuals to teach officers how to deal with amphetamine-intoxicated people.

October 2006: A Melbourne policeman who sold drugs through Sexpo exhibits while on leave from Victoria Police's sex offence and child abuse unit was one of six people arrested in drug raids. Paul Anthony Hatzakortzian, 36, was charged with 80 drug offences, including selling ice through Sexpo, which was attended by his prostitute partner, Suzanne Choppin, 44.

October 2006: Enough explosives to blow up several houses were seized from a home in Salisbury North, Adelaide, along with more than 100 ice pipes.

October 2006: An Ipswich, Queensland pharmacist was charged with trafficking pseudoephedrine in violation of Project STOP. He was the thirty-fourth person arrested on similar charges since the beginning of the project.

October 2006: Kylie Green, a nineteen-year-old pregnant Wollongong woman, was caught at home with bags of ice, cash, firearms and ammunition. Neighbours had alerted police to the large number of people visiting the house for only short periods of time.

October 2006: NSW police seized more than two kilograms of ice in a raid on a car in the Sydney CBD and from flats in Bondi and Maroubra. Two men were charged.

October 2006: In the space of one week, NSW south coast police seized more than $250 000 worth of ice in three different seizures.

November 2006: Police shut down two ice labs at Doonside, in western Sydney, charging a man who rented the premises.

March 2007: Victorian police, raiding a clandestine lab in Geelong, used Tasers to subdue an ice-using manufacturer who charged them with a baseball bat. Six other labs were raided on the same day.

April 2007: Another raid on tobacconists in Melbourne uncovered 925 ice pipes.

April 2007: A 37-year-old Melbourne man was charged over Australia's biggest haul of a key amphetamine ingredient: 125 kilograms of phenylacetic acid found at a Thomastown factory.

May 2007: Police and customs officials broke open a temporary ice lab in a hotel in Hurstville, southern Sydney, arresting two Chinese nationals and impounding laboratory equipment and 25 litres of precursor chemicals.

May 2007: Danny Nguyen, 25, of Yagoona in western Sydney, was a learner driver pulled over in Riverwood. Police found almost a kilogram of ice in shoe boxes in the boot, another bag in Nguyen's pocket, and a pipe in the passenger-side door pocket.

June 2007: After arresting fugitive crime boss Tony Mokbel in Greece, Victorian police raided 22 Melbourne homes, arresting fourteen people involved in ‘The Company', a methamphetamine-manufacturing operation that had funded Mokbel.

August–September 2007: NSW and federal police busted two large meth syndicates in Queanbeyan and Canberra, arresting ten men and seizing more than a million dollars' worth of the drug.