Clive Small and Tom Gilling are the authors of the bestselling Smack Express: How organised crime got hooked on drugs and Blood Money: Bikies, terrorists and Middle Eastern gangs.

Betrayed

The Shocking Story of Two Undercover Cops

By Clive Small, Tom Gilling

Allen & Unwin

Copyright © 2010 Clive Small and Tom Gilling
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74175-963-1

Contents

Preface,
Acknowledgements,
About the authors,
1 Beginnings,
2 Joe goes undercover,
3 The Lebanese connection,
4 Lawrie Russell and Garry Page,
5 Garry Raff and John Visser,
6 The finished article,
7 Partners,
8 Kings Cross,
9 Craig Haeusler,
10 Mackay,
11 Brisbane,
12 Out of control,
13 Back in Sydney,
14 Charged,
15 Shame,
16 Unprotected witness,
17 Dismissal,
18 ‘Kill Robbie’,
19 Reform,
20 A new start,
Appendix 1 Joe’s working list of drugs, street names and prices, circa 1996,
Appendix 2 Wood Royal Commission recommendations regarding the use of undercover operatives,

CHAPTER 1

Beginnings

There is nothing inside or outside the two-storey house in Sydney’s west that identifies its owners as former members of the New South Wales Police. The plaques and academy photos that once hung proudly at Joe’s parents’ home have long since been taken down. Even within the family, their time in the police force is never spoken about. The careers of two undercover cops who put several dangerous criminals and a handful of drug-dealing detectives behind bars are now, in Joe’s words, nothing more than a ‘bad memory’.

If he happened to bump into one of his old underworld contacts, it’s unlikely they would recognise him. Joe has become used to denying the person he was, even to himself. He would look them in the eye and tell them they were mistaken, and in the end they would believe him. In any case, Joe looks nothing like the person he was: the flashy drug dealer, the gym junkie with three gold hoops in each ear and a diamond stud. Gone is the long braided hair, the colourful suits, the jewellery, the expensive car. Joe has lost 30 kilos and shuffles about most days in a tracksuit and thongs.

A photograph on the fridge shows him posing beside champion bodybuilder Ronnie Coleman, an eight-time Mr Olympia. Joe works out every morning in his home gym, but without the steroids that messed with his mind and wrecked his kidneys. His upper body is covered in tattoos. He still radiates a kind of menace, even wearing thongs and pushing a pram.

The change in Jessie’s appearance is less obvious. To the neighbours and the people she meets when she is out shopping, Jessie is just a mum with young twins to look after. She doesn’t want them to think anything else.

Life for Joe and Jessie looks comfortable enough but they have struggled to cope with what happened to them. As undercover cops they survived on instinct and ability, with little of the experience that would have equipped them to handle the psychological pressures of the job. It wasn’t just criminals they had to deceive but friends, and even family. Nobody told them how hard it would be to live with the lies they had told while working undercover. Lies they told, lies they had to tell, both to protect themselves and each other, have never been forgiven.

People they know — like the plumber who has convinced himself that Joe is a bikie — will read their story without realising it is about them. Most of the criminals they helped put in jail have now been released. Some of them might recognise Joe and Jessie, but not as the people they are now — a young married couple in Sydney’s western suburbs with kids, a car and a mortgage.

This was not the future Joe’s conservative Muslim parents imagined for their son when they migrated to Australia in 1973, although their own lives had been far from easy. As children and later as young adults, Joe’s father and mother were caught up in the chaos that shaped Lebanon and Palestine in the decades after the Second World War. Joe’s father (we will call him Mohammad) was born in Tripoli, Lebanon, in 1940, the second of nine children. The family were practising Muslims. Mohammad’s father worked as a butcher while his mother looked after the children. It was a hard life but Mohammad did well at school. After completing the equivalent of Year 12 he worked at various jobs, eventually becoming a teacher’s aide at a primary school.

Like many other Lebanese Muslims of his generation, Mohammad had grown up with a strong sympathy for the Palestinians, many of whom had been driven out of Israel to an uncertain future as refugees in neighbouring countries. As a young man Mohammad took a passionate interest in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and became a political activist against what he saw as Israeli aggression.

Joe’s mother (we will call her Salma) was born into a Muslim family in Palestine in 1946, the eldest of five children. Her father worked as a policeman for the British government that would administer the country for another two years. When the first Arab–Israeli war broke out on the termination of the Mandate on 15 May 1948 the family was forced out of their home. For several years they lived in a refugee camp near Ramallah on the central West Bank of Palestine before being allowed to migrate to Lebanon.

Jobs and money were scarce for Palestinian immigrants and, along with thousands of other families, they struggled to survive. As Salma recalls, ‘My father was a good man, but he never recovered from losing his job, his home, and his country. I think he died of a broken heart.’

Mohammad and Salma met in the streets of Tripoli in 1960 and married a few months later. In 1961, at the age of twenty-one, Mohammad became an intelligence operative for the Egyptian government which, as the major regional power, recruited agents from all over the Middle East. Since 1958 Syria and Egypt had been merged as the United Arab Republic, but the union collapsed in 1961 after a military coup in Syria. The following year Mohammad secretly entered Syria to meet with members of the deposed Syrian government in an attempt to identify plotters based in Egypt. In Syria he was arrested and beaten before being released. Mohammad was lucky — the Syrian agents had nothing on him and saw no reason to hold him. He never returned to Syria but continued to work on covert operations in Egypt and Lebanon.

In 1964 Mohammad went to work for the Lebanese government, becoming a field operative for the mokhabarat — the secret police. The job guaranteed a modest income and a degree of protection from the government, but it came with its own risks: if his job became known or if the regime changed, his entire family would be in danger. In order to protect his parents and family, Mohammad never told them what he did. As far as they knew he simply worked for the government. They did not ask questions.

Mohammad’s work took him to Jordan, Iraq and Egypt. He always worked with male partners and carried a gun. In 1965, as Mohammad and two fellow agents left a cabaret club in Beirut, a man stepped from the crowd and pulled a handgun. As bystanders panicked and ran, the man fired at Mohammad and his colleagues from a distance of only five metres. The hit was so quick that none of them had time to draw their weapons. Mohammad escaped unhurt but both his companions were shot in the chest — one fatally. The killer was of Arabic appearance, about thirty-five years old, and wearing western clothes. After firing five shots, he calmly turned around and disappeared into the crowd. It was a political assassination: the agents discovered later that their covers had been blown.

This was the only time a direct attempt was made on Mohammad’s life, but as an undercover agent in one of the most corrupt and unstable regions in the world he knew that the threat of assassination was ever-present.

Mohammad and others spent five months on the surveillance of a spy working in Beirut for the Israeli government. The spy, who was masquerading as an Arab businessman, was gathering street-level intelligence about attitudes towards the government as well as fomenting unrest where possible. On several occasions he caught a boat to Cyprus and was followed all the way to Israel. Surveillance stopped at the Israeli border — the risks of operating inside Israel were too great. Just before the spy was arrested, his apartment was searched. The searchers found false passports and forged papers supporting his cover story, as well as notes of intelligence he had gathered and reported back to his handlers. He was detained and interrogated before being returned to Israel as part of a political deal.

By the early 1970s Lebanon was sliding towards the civil war that would eventually erupt in 1975, bringing with it the collapse of law and order. Mohammad knew that in the faction-ridden world of Lebanese politics his work with the secret police put him in extreme danger, and that if he was arrested, his family would pay the price. He wanted to get out but his employment prospects looked bleak. His years with the mokhabarat had given him skills that were of little use except, perhaps, in the murky Lebanese underworld of crime and corruption.

Mere survival was a constant struggle in a once-prosperous country that was now critically short of doctors and decent hospitals. By now Mohammad’s wife had given birth to ten children — including two sets of twins — eight of whom had died before the age of two. The children were born in the family apartment with the help of a self-taught midwife who lived in the same block. Mohammad realised that the only future for his family lay outside Lebanon.

A few years earlier one of Mohammad’s sisters had migrated with her family to Australia and settled in Melbourne. One of Salma’s brothers had also migrated to Australia, settling in Sydney. Both seemed to love their adopted country, a place where hard work was rewarded and families were free to live without the constant fear of war. Mohammad applied for his family to join them but the process was arduous and there were seemingly interminable bureaucratic delays both in Lebanon and Australia.

In late 1973 permission was suddenly granted for Mohammad and his family to emigrate. But there was a problem. Joe, who was born on 25 June 1973, was not included on the migration papers. His mother had only fallen pregnant with Joe after the application had been submitted. His parents were terrified that if they tried to change their application to include Joe, their permission to enter Australia might be revoked and the whole process would have to start again. Worse, they feared that with civil war looming any delay might cost them the only chance they had to leave Lebanon. In the end they felt they had no choice but to leave baby Joe behind with relatives. As soon as the rest of the family was safely in Australia, they would make arrangements for Joe to join them.

The family — Mohammad, Salma and their two daughters — settled in Sydney’s south-west in what was then a small and close-knit Muslim-Arabic community. They were happy to be in Australia but Salma was tormented by guilt at having left her only son behind. Her one comfort was the knowledge that their relatives back in Lebanon would look after him.

It took nearly a year to obtain the necessary documents for Joe. Mohammad and Salma now faced the biggest obstacle of all: collecting Joe from Lebanon and bringing him to Australia. Because Mohammad had been a member of the secret police it was far too risky for either Mohammad or Salma to fetch him in person, but who else could they trust? By chance a member of their extended family in Sydney was preparing to visit relatives in Lebanon. He asked if there was anything he could bring back for them. ‘The only thing I need, God willing, is my baby,’ Salma remembers saying.

In Lebanon, the relative tracked down the one-year-old baby Joe. Mohammad and Salma had given him all the official papers but leaving the country with someone else’s baby was no easy task, and nor was getting the child into Australia. Meanwhile, Salma waited and prayed. She had already suffered the loss of eight children; being separated from Joe was almost more than she could bear. She and Mohammad knew the flight he was booked on but they hardly dared hope that Joe was on his way to Australia. At the sight of their baby being carried through the arrivals gate, both parents were overcome with emotion. Reunited at last, Salma vowed never to abandon her son again.

With the family together at last, Joe’s parents could turn their thoughts to establishing themselves in their new country. Both found jobs in local factories and after five years they had saved enough money to buy the house they still live in today. As well as two older sisters, Joe now had a younger sister and brother born in Australia. His mother gave up work to look after the family. After fifteen years working in factories, Mohammad left to set up his own business, trading goods within the Arabic community — a job from which he has only recently retired.

Raised in the Bankstown area, Joe went to a local public school and mixed with a group of Lebanese youths, mostly Muslims, that included future gang leaders Adnan Darwiche and Abdul Razzak, their brothers and cousins. Among a wider network of friends was another future criminal, Michael Kanaan. Between them, these three would be responsible for much of the violence that swept across south-west Sydney during the late 1990s and early 2000s — an orgy of murder and intimidation that, for a while, the police seemed powerless to stop.

Like others his age, Joe felt the pressure to join the emerging gangs. At the same time he admired his father, whom he knew as a ‘policeman in Lebanon’, and wanted to be like him. In his late teens, as he completed his schooling, Joe worked part time as a shop assistant, store security guard and model. He watched some of his friends heading down the road to crime and saw their contempt for the police. He also witnessed the other side: police treating young Muslim men as if they were criminals simply for being Muslim. Joe saw the hostility this engendered. He witnessed Muslim women and young girls being treated with disrespect. It was a destructive cycle and perhaps, Joe thought, he could do something about it.

In 1992, at the age of eighteen, he joined the New South Wales Police. Later that year he was sworn in as a probationary constable. At the time there were precious few practising Muslims in the New South Wales Police. Joe’s family and many in the broader Lebanese Muslim community were proud of him, not only for his own achievement but also for the respect he had brought to the community. Joe recalls the day of the swearing-in as ‘the happiest of my life’, but in the years to come the confidence he had in his chosen career was to prove horribly misplaced.

For the next three years Joe worked the streets of Wetherill Park and Fairfield in Sydney’s south-west. For a period he was assigned to the locally created Special Operations Group, which was set up primarily to target the Vietnamese street gangs and heroin markets of Cabramatta. Joe walked the streets in casual clothes, talking to drug dealers, gathering intelligence and evidence, and identifying possible targets for police swoops. It was during this period that his potential as an undercover operative first came to the notice of his superiors. In mid-1995 Joe was approached by then Detective Inspector Steve Matthews, chief of detectives at Fairfield local area command and a highly experienced drug investigator. Matthews recalls: ‘I had seen him work the streets and he was pretty good. He had that ability to mix easily and talk to the crooks. I thought he would make a good undercover operative so I made a few phone calls.’

Joe was interested and appeared before a selection panel of undercover experts who assessed him as suitable for the Drug Enforcement Agency’s undercover unit, which had overall responsibility for undercover operations throughout the New South Wales Police Force. The decision to centralise undercover operations with the DEA acknowledged the fact that undercover operations in New South Wales had begun as a response to the explosion in drug use in the late 1960s. For years the DEA’s effective ownership of undercover policing had put it largely beyond the reach of detectives investigating other areas of crime. This exclusivity led to the ad hoc growth of undercover units during the 1980s and 1990s. Neither training nor supervision was standardised and it was only in 1988 that specialist training for undercover police was introduced. Although drugs remained the priority of the DEA’s undercover unit, it would also undertake investigations into homicide, armed robbery and major property theft.

Joe’s interview panel included Detective Michael Drury, who, as an undercover cop a decade earlier, had been shot through a window and seriously wounded while standing in the kitchen of his Chatswood home. The shooter was the Melbourne hitman Christopher Dale Flannery, who later was murdered on the orders of organised crime ‘godfathers’ Lennie McPherson and George Freeman.

Another member of the panel was Detective Paul Jones, who, four years later, as a detective superintendent at Crime Agencies, led strike forces Portville and Scottsville in a clean-up of the street gangs, violence and heroin markets of Cabramatta. Between 1999 and mid-2001 these two strike forces made around one hundred arrests and laid more than one hundred and sixty charges, including six of murder, eight of conspiracy to murder and thirty-one of firearms possession, together with numerous others relating to drug supply and possession.

The interview panel was not easy on its subjects. They began by questioning Joe about his life before he joined the police, looking for ways his background could be built into a cover story. They also questioned him in detail about his experiences as a police officer in order to determine whether his career so far might already have compromised a future role in undercover work. Among the questions Joe was asked were: how well known was he in criminal circles as a police officer? What exposure had he had to major criminals? What capacity had he demonstrated to be able to act under pressure? Was he able to think quickly on his feet? His answers to all these questions enabled the interview panel to assess his suitability to work undercover.

(Continues…)Excerpted from Betrayed by Clive Small, Tom Gilling. Copyright © 2010 Clive Small and Tom Gilling. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
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