Bringing it Home | 8

I've said this once before. It's not your problem until it's your problem. I think what we've seen in the past is people will see, you know, these organized crime groups having conflict within themselves, and it's okay, that's okay, it's over there, it doesn't affect me. But when you're having these sorts of shootings occurring where it's close to playgrounds or shopping car parks and it is close to you, it is then your problem.

So this is it. This is the end of the line.

You last heard from my colleague News Corp Australia's national correspondent, Stephen Drill back in episode three when he was in a Narco tunnel underneath the US Mexico border. But right now he's standing alone on a road full of multimillion dollar properties where there's one that really stands out.

This house is like it kind of looks like a spaceship. It's it's beautiful.

Stephen's back home in Australia.

I'm in a street in Melbourne. It's the city where I live. You might call this a leafy area. A leafy area is shorthand here in Melbourne for posh. The street is full of very old English trees, and I'm standing in the shade of one, which is good for my lack of hair.

Despite the tree cover, it's still hot out. The sun is fierce in the blue sky. Growing up in Australia myself, I can remember just how hot it gets.

Black Wall, Black Gate. The door set well back just the underground garage here would probably be bigger than my entire house.

The house has white wolves, a home, cinema, a gym, and big glass windows overlooking its private pool.

Now I'm just walking up to the front door.

I mean, this place looks like it's worth ten million dollars, which is exactly what it was bought for just last year by a man police allege is a member of a money laudering syndicate called Long River.

The Long River Operation allegedly laundered hundreds of millions of Ossie dollars.

And I'm just about to knock on the door of this ten million dollar house that is alleged to be the proceeds of crime.

Stephen reaches out, presses the button on the intercom. His heart beats faster.

No answer.

As a journalist doing these jobs, we even know what kind of reaction you'll get on a doorknock like this. What the police are saying is that people living here brought this swanky property with criminal profits.

Nothing. I'll try again, but this.

Time someone answers. I'm Fiona Hamilton and from The Times, The Sunday Times and News Corp Australia. This is the final episode of Cocaine Inc. Episode eight, bringing it Home.

So far in this series, I've been to Columbia and Mexico looking at where the cocaine business starts in the coca plantations and how the drug is exported. Fiona went to the Netherlands, where ports like Rotterdam act as distribution hubs for this global industry. David was in Northwest England looking at the retail arm of the business, the street level dealers. Then he followed the money trailed to Dubai, which led to a maze of different companies dealing in

Hi, my name's Stephen Drill, journalist. I just was wondering if the place has been seized by the police or what's happening with it now.

I just wanted to touch base. Are you the owner of the property?

Okay, so I don't have permission to record, meaning you're not going to hear the conversation. I can't see the person I'm speaking to, but it's a woman. I guess she's in her thirties.

She sounds weary.

I try explaining how the Federal Police have just rated twelve high street money exchange stores across the country and are saying this house is linked to them. They're calling it the most significant money laundering investigation in Australia's history.

The police allege the.

Company operated a bit like a bank, providing a system for customers to transfer money in and out of the country. Only, according to police, some of the customers will organize criminals and their money.

Hundreds of millions allegedly.

Came from cyber scamps and what the cops call trafficking illicit goods, which would be the kind of business we followed around the world in this series. At the front door of the ten million dollar.

House, the woman I'm talking to seems to hesitate, and a man takes over the conversation. He doesn't say who he is. When I ask, he says, they don't know anything about police rates. They've just moved in and they're only tenants, he says. The owners aren't at home right now, so they can't talk. Puzzled and disappointed, I say thanks and walk back out.

But something's nagging at me. So there's someone living in there.

Now, let's go and see what else there is here.

I'll just come knock on the neighbor's door.

Now, this might seem weird trying to talk to the neighbors, but as a journalist, I've lost track of the number of stories I've got just by knocking on doors. Does anybody else in the neighborhood know something anything? When you're working on a story like this, you never know what tiny bit of information might be the missing piece that helps you solve the puzzle. And I want to know how this house might be caught up in the Long River Syndicate. So I try some neighbors doors.

The dog is certainly home there, but it's a little white fuck your dog. Nothing too scary, which can happen sometimes on door knocks.

But I'll keep moving.

Because all I know is what the federal police are saying, that the Long River Syndicate provide organized crime a way to move their money here without it being traced by the authorities. Money that could have come from allegedly trafficking, A list of goods which could be drugged, like cocaine. Now, the house immediately next door, she has a some string tied around the gates.

It doesn't look like you can come into that one. Hell from there, I just pressed the doorbell, see if anyone comes out.

Do you understand why I think the effort is worth it, spending hours in the hot sun knocking on strangers doors. I need to take you back a few days to when I got a call from a source.

This call was unusual. The source said something was going to happen.

I can't tell you too much about it, but they.

Wouldn't say what.

They just said to be free on a certain day, so I knew it was going to be big. In the meantime, I waited, I kept looking at the cocaine business, which seems to be on a bull run.

In the almost thirty years I've been in law enforcement and intelligence, I haven't seen the scale of cocaine that we've seen consistently hitting our shores in the last twelve to twenty four months before in my career.

This is Matt Rippon, Deputy CEO Intelligence at the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission or ACIC.

The main reason is because of the profit margin to be made. There are a lot of logistics and arrangements that need to be made between uplift from the style of coca leaf in Columbia, for example, to make it all the way to the streets of Sydney or Melbourne, etc. So it's a real global enterprise.

We're talking in Matt's headquarters. It's a hard place to find. There's no marking on the bill. Security is tight inside these walls. Law enforcement spy and criminals. They access messages, monitor the movement of people and cocaine.

The law enforcement actually been really successful in recent years in seizing some really large consignments of cocaine. You may recall one point eight ton of cocaine was actually seized in Peru.

One point eight tons.

I do some mental calculations, as I learned at the port in Cardagena back in episode three, the value of cocaine changes depending on where it is in the global supply chain. In Peru, where it was seized, that one point eight tons might have been worth around five million US dollars. Wholesale, it's almost four million pounds or seven and a half million is STI dollars. While the time it's trafficked all the way to Australia and sold by the gram on the streets of Sydney or Melbourne.

That value rises by a lot.

It could be worth more than three quarters of a billion dollars US over six hundred million pounds or one point two billion Ousie dollars. Another way of looking at it is that much cocaine would be enough to supply every user in Australia for six months.

That seizure was actually linked to one of the highest level threats to this country. So attached to that syndicate, you had another one point one ton of cocaine that came into New South Wales from Panama.

When he talks about high level threats to the country. Matt means it much of Australia's cocaine import are thought to be linked to an international cartel known as the Kinahans, the Irish cocaine cowboys, who are currently thought to be in the United Arab Emirates. The Kinahans are being investigated around the world, including over links to the Islamic militant

Buzz of today, the Kinahan transnational criminal organization joins the ranks of Italy's Camorra, Mexico's Los Zetas, Japan's Yakaza, and Russia's Thieves and Law Also as of today, the result of these sanctions, these individuals are immediately served from the US financial system and any assets brought property under US jurisdiction are immediate blocked.

At this moment, the Kinahans the suspective of hiding out in Dubai, where David was in the last episode. Together, these different interlinked criminal groups represent a huge international challenge to any single police.

Force in twenty twenty three. In February, you had two back to back large cocaine importations, three hundred kilo importation off the coast of Western Australia, and then you had three point two ton seased in New Zealand.

That's a lot of money in one shipment. That's billions of dollars of street value.

It is billions of dollars. And the interesting thing here is that because of the profit margin that can be made from coca leaf all the way through to finished product on the ground, they can afford to lose a particular consignment. It's not a good outcome for them, but they actually factor in losses into their business model like any good company structure would.

Fact In Rotterdam, where Fiona was in episode four of this series, research suggests authorities sees just over half of all drug shipments. Other law enforcement people I speak to say the average might be less. Roughly one in four cocaine shipments is picked up. Either way, the cocaine traffickers still make a profit, although that doesn't stop them lashing out when a shipment is lost.

Good morning, first of breaking Years, and we are three hours into a gangland man hunt in Sydney.

A man executed in Sydney.

A bloody gang war has caused more than twenty deaths in recent years.

Another man hunt is under way tonight after the daylight shooting of a former biking.

Sparked by a dispute over a missing shipment of cocaine, now thought to have been seized by the Federal police.

A man has been shocked dead in a front yard at Fairfield Heights in Sydney's Tit for Tat gangland war.

Organized crime groups act like a genuinely global business, but what we're seeing in the environment that's been somewhat different, particularly in the last three to five years, has been collaboration across organized crime groups that traditionally wouldn't work together.

That complicated supply chain where cocaine can travel through several different countries, passing between different criminal groups who are now working together. That's a strength of the modern drug operation. The person who's ultimately in charge is not exposed.

He or she is like the.

Chief executive, safe inside their boardroom, while different groups from different countries handle all the actual work.

But listening to.

Matt, I learned that this is also a weakness because the longer the chain becomes, the more weak links it contains, meaning more opportunities for law enforcement to find those links and break them. The day comes when my source had told me something big is going to happen. Before dawn, hundreds of Australian Federal Police officers launch raids across the country.

Niha Wa Shu Gary Hardgrave. For almost twelve years, I was an elected representative in the Australian government five years as a minister, including in immigration. As of twenty twenty two, I'm joining the board of Shunxiang Currency Exchange the further overseas.

And getting a former Australian government minister like Gary Hardgrave to promote it would have seemed a real seal of approval to the.

Chang Jiang Currency Exchange to Australia.

Chang Yang is Mandarin Chinese, it translates as Long River.

The Australian government has strong oversight, but shun Xiang Currency Exchange has an even higher level of reliability, with water tight security processes in place to guarantee the safety of your facts.

There's no suggestion Gary Hardgrave, the former government minister, knew anything about what was allegedly going on at Changing. He's not been accused of any wrongdoing and would later say he'd cut all ties with the company and had no day to day involvement in its operations. But this morning, looking at the scale of the police operation, the cops walking out carrying computers and stacks of paperwork, it became clear this really was as big a deal as my source had promised.

This is the most significant and complex AFP led money laundring investigation in the nation's history.

This is Australian Federal Police Assistant Commissioner Stephen Demeadow speaking at a press conference following the raids in October twenty twenty three. I'm sitting among the press pack, frantically typing to get down his work.

The AFP alleges the chang Jing Currency Exchange is a front for a mining laundering syndicate that transfers dirty money for large criminal enterprises.

The police allege Changjang transferred over ten billion Aussie dollars just over the past three years. That's over five billion pounds or nearly seven billion US dollars. Most of that was legal, the cops say, but they also allege criminals were allowed to move money in and out of the country by mixing it in with the legal transactions. In this way, the Federal Police allege around two hundred and twenty nine million Aussie dollars was laundered, money from what police call a serious violent.

Act money laundering is not a victimless crime, and.

Also money from trafficking illicit goods.

Even after more than twenty years in law enforcement and as a former law myself. The amount of money allegedly laundered still surprised me.

The police call it an industrial scale operation. Seven people were arrested in the raids. Some could face life imprisonment, the cops say, although the accused insist they're innocent. According to the cops, they'd been living the high life. I keep typing taking it all in as the press conference continues.

By eating at Australia's most extravagant restaurants, drank wine and saki values and the tens of thousands of dollars, traveled on private jets and drove vehicles purchased for almost four hundred thousand dollars. One alleged offender lived in a home worth more than ten million dollars.

That's the ten million dollar house, the one with the gleaming white walls that looks something like a spaceship where we started this episode.

Hi, how are you going?

My I's Steve on the journalists.

So, now that I know my source is correct and this is a big deal, I want to know more about this alleged money laundering operation.

Hi.

My name's Stephen Drell. I'm a journalist.

I just was wondering if the place has been seized by the police, or what's happening with it now. I just wanted to touch base. Are you the owner of the property?

When the people inside so they can't help because they're

Just wanted to talk about your neighbors.

Have you near people moved in recently? So I got chatting to a neighbor.

Is there new tenants in the house or same people? But there's no there has there been any removal trucks or no removal trucks that's from the same people there.

Yeah, appreciate it.

It's hard to hear on the audio what the neighbor says, but he's just told me he hasn't seen anybody moving in recently, no removal trucks. Wondering about that, I stand in the shade of a tree, get my phone out and reread news reports of the police rate. Now I'm just going back through the news articles because I think I may have missed a trick here. I know that there was a husband and wife who were arrested, so I'm just going through now and checking which of the

Perhaps weren't genants.

But were actually the people accused of being involved in this money laundering syndicate. According to the police charge sheets which were tended in court, the couple who bought this house a part of what the police are calling the Long River money laundering syndicate. That syndicate was named after the chain of Shining money exchange officers that were raided last October. Investigators have traced millions going into the bank

War on drugs.

I mean times have changed the AFP, we don't focus on commodity with matured our approach.

Kirsty Schofield is the Australian Federal Police Assistant Commissioner in charge of the Forces Crime Command, meaning she oversaw the investigation into alleged money laundering by the chang Xiang Currency Exchange. In person, she's all smiles, tan skin. She could be an Aussie surfer, but that hides an inner toughness. As a detective, she worked CANi terrorism, an organized crime we caught up after the chang Xiang police raids, but it's

It's much bigger than a commodity.

It is a global business and we really do look at it as a whole business.

We just don't target the drugs.

Where this is relevant is the idea of accountants. Kirsty says, there are professional criminal groups out there who provide a service to other crime gains, helping them process their profits, moving money in and out of countries and taking a cut in the process.

We look at the finances.

We actually try to disrupt the whole business model. We look at the key enablers of what constitutes their business structures. We make it hostile onshore and offshore wherever they're operating.

So, yeah, you're saying it's asrupting the business.

I mean that comes to the next point of are necessarily trying to arrest everybody? Is that the most effective way of curbing the drug businesses and the drug trade.

I don't think we can arrest our way out of this at all. So we are really focused on targeting those people that when we take them out, it has a significant impact on their ability to run a business. Who is it that moves their money? We take their money, We take the money in the profit out of the crime. Who is it that they really for their logistics? And you'll find there'll be a key person across several organized crime groups that helps with logistics, and we'll target that person.

Kirsty's saying this reminds me of a line from an old movie called Wall Street about a young stockbroker who wants to make his fortune in New York during the nineteen eighties.

Money never sleeps, Paw.

Just meet eight hundred thousand Hong Kong Gold.

It's been wired to you.

Money never sleeps. That's Gordon Gecko played by Michael Douglas in the movie. The young broker starts making money, only it corrupts him. It becomes like the money is in charge. He can never stop. Kirsty says, the same is true of those working in the illegal business world.

They do not stop. They are twenty four to seven.

They conduct multiple business deals at the one time, and they are motified by money, greed and ego and that drives them.

It's power that's led to more conflict.

That's right. It's all over money.

You know.

They want to control certain parts of the business, so the conflict is generally associated with that. What's happening now is people are getting caught in the crossfire. They no longer do that sort of business away from public attention. They're more comfortable to do it in the public arena.

When we've send dead bodies in Sydney streets where kids are walking past, that's right. So it's coming to people's doorsteps now.

Yeah, and I've said this once before, it's not your problem until it's your problem. I think what we've seen in the past is people will see, you know, these organized crime groups having conflict within themselves, and it's okay, that's okay, it's over there, it doesn't affect me. But when you're having these sorts of shootings occurring where it's close to playgrounds or shopping car parks and it is close to you, it is then your problem.

And what would you say to say someone who's taking cocaine this week, candid insat Sydney or London, because it's happening.

I mean, we can't pretend that it's not.

Just don't do it. Sometimes I feel that just forces on deads. I find that one of the complicated factors is how do we explain to those taking drugs of reasons not to do it because they feel it's part of their life.

Where do you stop and what do the police just say up?

Do we give up? Do we just let this go? Or how do you actually keep trying to fight against the criminal organizations?

The option to give up is not there. I mean, what would it look like if we did give up? What does it mean for the world. There's all these other part of society doing the right thing. There's just such an inequity in it. And is it hard, yes it is? Is it worth it? Definitely? It's not just about arresting somebody. That's old policing mentality. It's very different. We look for different ways to do business. We look at all forms of disruption make it hostile for them to operate wherever they are.

In the world.

After speaking to Kirsty, that idea stays with me. The police are looking for different ways to do business, because the old way of doing business by simply trying to arrest the people selling the drugs, isn't working. Standing outside that ten million dollar house, I decide to go back, determined to find out who owns it. I'll reach out and try the intercom again. The man answers again, I don't have permission to record the conversation. But this time

He says, no, but they are relatives.

You can't say where his relatives are right at this moment that does say that police phrase came as is shocked to them all. The man says his relatives are innocent of what police say about them, their entrepreneurs, successful business people. He says, is international politics involved, maybe some racism because the people who have been arrested have Chinese heritage, and the charges are not proven. He starts talking about how the police announced having seized are four hundred thousand

He keeps coming back.

To the point that his relatives were just business people, and the police don't understand the business. Eventually, the conversation comes to an end. I go to turn away. Then somehow the door opens. The man I've been talking to from outside the house is standing there, looking surprised, like maybe he pressed the wrong button on the intercom and didn't mean for the front door to open. We're face to face. I reach out and shake his hand, and I believe.

What he's told me that he's not one of the people allegedly involved in this money laundy operation, meaning he's just like so many people we've met during this investigation, and innocent who's paid the cost of an alleged criminal business operation that spans entire countries. This man was left holding the baby. He says, he'll pass my name and number onto his relatives.

They never call walking away.

I think that was extraordinary, and at the same time, it was very ordinary. Face to face, we were just two people standing in the doorway of a house not far from where I live. After spending months on this investigation,

Very ordinary.

He could be any house on any street near where I live, or you do.

So.

Looking back over this entire series, we have Fionna David and I got to.

Well.

Following the money from Colombia to Mexico, the Netherlands, the UK, to the UA and Australia. We found a complex and sophisticated, multi billion dollar operation and.

It's only getting stronger. If Pablo Escobar, the Colombian drug lord, helped create the modern cocaine industry and.

He lead Colombian police unit killed Pablo Escobar in a shootout.

Then his death in a shootout in nineteen ninety three certainly didn't kill it.

Columbian authorities say its message to other drug lords is to surrender or.

You will be killed.

In fact, production expanded in the years after and is now at record highs, with.

People living in our two countries Australia and the UK, the top two highest cocaine users in the world. In Colombia, I saw how government policy of trying to stop the industry by cracking down on cocaine supply just isn't working.

When alas May let I arrive at their cinic, I create so much, but I.

Am the only people who really lose out are the farmers and the cops send to enforce this policy, who don't always come back.

And I say to May that forgive them.

In Mexico, I learned its demand that drives the cocaine business.

I'm down here here in a Naco tunnel.

We're about eighty minutes from the Mexican border, and to be honest, it's just quite frightening.

There's some timber today with a drug multiplying in value as it moves through each stage of the supply chain.

In the port of Rotterdam, the cocaine industry is now so vast it uses the same shipping containers as any other global business would to move its product. The industry corrupts everything it touches.

We have a big problem in the bort of Rotterdam with cocaine.

From port workers to gang leaders who have no regulator to turn to, so end up building themselves a torture chamber to adjudicate their business disputes.

Sounds like what the fuck a torture sellers.

In Merseyside, the same violence spills out onto the streets where cocaine is bought and sold, with vival gangs at war and innocent people suffer.

I'd never go on there because you know what's from the wood church.

I met other people prayed on because of their innocence or naivety.

I couldn't believe how much it was.

He became cash mules.

And I thought, what the fuck have I got myself into?

Carrying money over international boarders, exploiting differences between countries' regulations in Dubai while undercover. Some of the money might be for like drugs in the UK. I learned how that money can be traded through gold or through different accounting structures.

Actually said al Filaci on there, but it's clearly him, He's clearly him.

And then at home in Melbourne I found with police alage some of the profits of the money lauding operation are spent on a house that looks like a spaceship. And Mitt Kirsty, the Federal Police Assistant commissioner, who said, I think we.

Can risk our way out of this at all.

If that is true, what can we do instead. Maybe it's about looking at the cocaine problem differently in the way we've approached in this series. As a business, it's just a commodity that has to go from H tob By following the money, law enforcement can find new ways to disrupt the cocaine industry and its kingpins.

We actually try to disrupt the whole business model. We look at the k enablers of what it constitutes a business structures.

By learning how each link in the supply chain works, you can identify its weaknesses but also its strengths. It's not good enough to tackle it within state borders. Governments and countries need to work together.

We know there's no easy answers, but we also know from personal experience of covering these crimes and those impacted by them, that governments have spent billions over the decades on the drug war and they're still not winning.

Only omadors be sure.

And you shall love it early.

We need school of gospel.

At the scene where she was killed, Ellie's family came to lay flowers for a woman they so deeply loved.

Those running the cocaine business are as dynamic, roofless and motivated as any successful capitalist, able to respond at speed to market pressures in a way that government agencies and lawmakers simply can't. And fundamentally, the demand for what they're selling cocaine isn't going anywhere. So maybe dealing with cocaine ing on these terms like a business, like the business it is, we can find a new approach.

This is not a video game, this is real life. You go to a fucking pupmar Christmas Eve with a machine gules if it was someone going there with a baseball bat and have a grievance with someone. That's standards. That happens every weekend. But you go somewhere with the machine matter when it is you go on, it's kill someone.

Cocaine Inc. Was a joint investigation from The Times, The Sunday Times and News Corp Australia. The reporters were David Collins, Steven Drill and me Fiona Hamilton. The series was produced by Sam Chanterassak, with additional production by Andrea tz Evanson. The executive producers were Will Row and Dan Box. Audio production and editing was by Jasper Leak, original music by Tom Birchall, Social and video by Kissie Bray, Sho Burrow,