It loaded down that suv so low that it pushed the springs right down.
It was totally overloaded. They had left it with.
Eight live rounds in the magazine and a semi automatic rifle, which is a cardinal's sin of gun handling. Other cartridges that have been taken were nine millimeter pistol ammunition. They took lots of it from his place. None came back, not one round. All these nine millimeter pistol ammunition had vanished. I'm andrew rule, is this life and crimes. Funny things happen out there in the world of policing, particularly when police are asked to do extra things like seas firearms
and ammunition, and sometimes they have to do this. It happens when maybe a licensed shooter has died and they've got to go out and pick up their guns and ammunition, or it happens when a licensed shooter gets into some sort of trouble with the law and they've got to go out and pick.
Up the stuff.
And it often happens that police are raiding are suspects premises and they might find guns or ammunition not properly locked up, and they might find guns and ammunition which is not kept securely in a safe as it should be by law, and therefore naturally they seize it. And so there are a lot of reasons for police. Victoria police and every other police force in the country two have to from time to time sees firearms and ammunition.
And that's a good thing.
However, there's always a butt, and the butt is this there is I would suggest a disturbing undercurrent discernible in Victoria. One keeps hearing stories of legitimate licensed shooters who have a grievance against one particular branch of the police force, if not more. But the particular branch of the police use force they have a grievance against is the licensing and Registration branch, which has headquarters in Collingwood, where there is a police Property office and where along with all
sorts of other property, firearms and ammunition is stored are seized. Now, it would appear some would say that the organization of the branch is so chaotic that firearms and ammunition get lost in the system. They get lost forever, and it is alleged by some people that they vanish that firearms and ammunition, particularly ammunition, because that's so anonymous there's quite a lot of it that it just disappears like twenty
cent pieces down the back of the couch. All of this brings us to a fresh example, and that is the example which is the subject of a story which I had reascent published in the Sunday Herald Sun.
And that is the.
Story of a man called Sam Mahfood. And Sam is a man now in his seventies. He came to this country in nineteen sixty eight when he was about nineteen years old. He came from Syria. When he got here, he couldn't speak much English, but he was a very good mechanic. He'd done his apprenticeship in Syria. He was a very able mechanic, clearly a capable hard working man, because he got jobs at General Motors Holden and later on at the Ford Motor Factory and other places garages
or whatever. And he was promoted into positions of trust where he would be running a division at the Motoruka assembly plant. And he really became quite a trusted, practical mechanical engineer. And Sam was able to marry I think possibly his childhood sweetheart, and he had quite a big bunch of kids and they all grew up and had more kids, and really Sam Mafud and his wife Vicki are one of the great success stories of post war migration in Australia. Now, Sam, like a lot of other people,
had a hobby. Some people play bowls, some played golf, some ride bikes, some go fishing.
Many go fishing.
But Sam was always a fan of target shooting. And he started out as many people from Europe and the Middle East do. He was keen on shotguns and he transferred from the idea of hunting live game to shooting at clay targets and he did that and he got quite good at it. Then he took on rifle shooting, and as he got more spare time in middle age, he took up pistol shooting as well. So he was a prolific target shooter in all disciplines of firearms, or
most disciplines of firearms. And in fact he's a collector. He's got everything from air rifles and air pistols all the way through to quite heavy caliber sporting rifles and heavy caliber handguns which he uses for club target shooting. This is what he does, this is what he likes doing. He's also been a guy that's owned Broad Acres. He had a pretty big property up in the Heathcote which has recently been sold, which is relevant to our story.
And he's also got a property up closer to Ballarat where he lives in retirement with his wife Vicki, and his biggest hobby, of course, is to go to the local target shooting venues and shoot targets. But then a strange thing happened to Sam Muffoot, respectable grandfather, back in the year of twenty twenty one, during COVID, he decided that he would sell his large block of land which is up past Heathcot and it's open country, bit scrubby, lots of fox and rabbits and all.
That sort of stuff that he used to shoot.
And he decided that it was time to sell it because presumably he'd owned it for a couple of decades and had gone up in value. And he spread the word that he wanted to sell it. And one of the people he told was a female state agent. Now whether this person was a registered state agent or not does not matter. This person said to Sam, yes, Sam, I know you. I think I can sell your block, your farm, and you know I'll do it for X amount of commission, a percentage, whatever it might be. And
he said, yes, that's very good to this lady. And he knew her because he used to go target shooting with her brother. So brothers were keen target shooters, and that's how they knew each other. And so this woman adds Sam's block to her list of properties for sale, but she doesn't actually sell it. She doesn't come up with a buyer in the matter of weeks, and Sam meanwhile, has found a buyer himself.
Elsewhere.
He found another buyer, possibly through another agent, don't know, but he sold the place to someone else. And when the first agent heard about this, she was not happy, and she came to Sam and said, look, you owe me the price of the commission because I've lost the opportunity to sell it. Whereas you told me that I could sell it, and now I can't because you've sold it, and you owe me three hundred dollars or something something like that, a bit over nine grand in commission. And
Sam said, no, you didn't sell it. I don't know you anything, but seeing as you're upset, I'm going to give you half. I'll give you four and a half thousand dollars just to go away and leave me alone. She said no, She said, you know, sort of buy your bum basically, and she said there'll be repercussions. I'll fix you up, or words to that effect. And what that woman did, and this is an indictment on the
way that our system can be abused pipulated. She went to broad Meadows Police station, now not the Ballarat up where Sam lives. She went to broad Meadows and she went in there and saw a sergeant and a policewoman, two police officers, and she said, I want an AVO, an apprehended violence order against Sama Mafood. His real name
is Samir sm Mafood. And she spelled it out to them who he was, where he lived, the whole thing, and she said, i want this apprehended violence order because I've had a disagreement with him, and I know that he's got guns and ammunition and so forth, and I'm scared that there'll be a problem that he might try and intimidate me or frighten me, and I need this AVO. And the police, God bless them, they just wrote it
out as if it was a raffle ticket. They wrote out in a v O and handed it over, and she was very happy because she knew that as soon as they communicated the fact of the AVO to their counterparts at Ballarat, which is the relevant police station where Sam and his wife live, she knew that state agent
who's basically trying to punish him over money. She knows that those police will be obligated under the regulations to check Sam's firearm status on the database and it'll come up that he's a shooter, license shooter and he's got x y Z guns, quite a lot of guns, probably more than twenty actually, because he shoots in so many different disciplines and he's a licensed collector. It's nothing sinister about it. And he's got a lot of ammunition. So
the Ballarat police of course do this. It's routine, they have to do it. So Ballarat Police, I think, might have got it. This is where it gets cloudy. They might have got one or two police from nearby Balan, which is sort of the play where Sam and his wife lives, might be between Ballarat and the land, let's say. And so they put together a bit of a mixed bag of police to go out and seize the firearms and the ammunition, and it would appear that what happened
was they go out to the property. The front gate is locked. The house is about five hundred meters in from the front gate. They haven't made an appointment to meet Sam or get the gate unlocked, and I think somebody sat there with the two police cars while I think two or the other police jump over the fence or jump over the gate, climb over it and walk up to the house. Now this is not strictly dimensional or necessarily even legal. I think probably what they're sposed to do.
At least, it would be very.
Good manners and good policy for police to make an appointment and then have a gate open for them and then.
Go up there. So they walk up to the house.
Now Sam's not there, he's shopping in Ballarat or somewhere, and missus Mafood, Sam's wife, who I think actually possibly has a serious illness. She's lying down on her bed in her bedroom having arrest as she's entitled to do it at the age of seventy odd and she's got
two little grandkids there, just young kids. I think one was six or seven and one was a bit older, and they've run into their grandmother saying, Grannie, Grannie, there's these men knocking on the window and they've got guns and they say they're the police, and she's quite perturbed. She gets up. She opens the front door and asks them to come in, which they don't do, which is fine, And they said we're here to see Sam, a licensed her about his firearms, etc. She said, well, he's not
here and we'll ring him. So she wrings sam'sy's come home, come home.
The police are here.
They want to see your guns and stuff. So Sam comes home. He opens the front gate and drives in and this allows the police sort are left at the gate with the cars to bring in two police cars, two SUVs, one blue one on one white one. As I understand it now, the numbers of police and things are a little bit cloudy here. But the truth is that when Sam gets there and it all settles itself, what he finds is two police cars and three police officers.
Sam calls one of them the detective. Now this would suggest that this person was wearing casual clothes, not uniform. He thinks the other two were uniform police because I think they had on the sort of black gear. That's the way Sam saw it. Sam might be wrong. Sam might be right, but as he told the story to me, and he has no reason to change it or make it up, because who cares. He calls one of these officers, the detective, and the other two and as he sees it,
the person he calls the detective was in charge. He was running the show. And Sam thought, this is unusual. Usually they don't send detectives out to pick up firearms or ammunition. He knows this from other members of the target club. Usually it's this uniform job. And he said, how come detective came? How come you're here? And the detectives said to him, oh, I shouldn't be here, but I got roped into it because there weren't enough people at the station. Now was he saying Ballarat station? Was
he saying the land station? I don't know for sure. I don't know who that person was. I don't know if that person was a detective or was just some other guy and playing clothes.
I do not know.
But what we do know is this. There were three police, three male police with all the you know, they've got guns, they got the full equipment belt, and they've got the body cameras. Body cam which is interesting and will prove probably very interesting in future if this court, which it may, well, they demand Sam's key's for his gun safes. Now, Sam's a little old bloke. He's in his seventies. He's small. I won't say he's frail, but you know he's not
twenty five years old. He's seventy something. He says that the one he calls the detective was quite bumptious, quite rude, quite brusque, and the other two, in fact, were quite polite and quite pleasant. And he thought quite embarrassed at the way the detective treated Sam. Sam thought the detective treated him badly and was rude to him and borderline racist. Sam is a Syrian by birth. He's Middle Eastern. He has a thick accent.
He's English.
He is sort of semi broken. It's quite good, but it's broken. He didn't learn it to leave us twenty years old. So the one he calls the detective push into the bedroom, he says, he opens the safe with the key, and he reaches into the safe and pulls stuff out. Now this makes Sam unhappy because he said, well, he should be asking me to do that. He should ask me for this firearm. Or this, firearm ors whatever from a list that he's printed out, and then I would hand them to him as he asked for them,
which is the procedure. But this bloke just went there and started to help himself. And Sam, not that he's overly suspicious, but he didn't trust this process because he thought, well, apart from anything else, they could plant something in the safe. If you let somebody into the safe ahead of you, you don't know what they might do. They might be able to plant something incriminating in the safe and cause
trouble for you, and that wouldn't be good. So Sam was quite agitated by this, and he made his point to them without being rude or anything, and said, you're not doing this the right way. You didn't ring me, you didn't make an appointment handling this stuff without me handing it to you. And what I do want you to do is to write down what it is you're taking, because what Sam had was, apart from a big safe full of guns, he had two other saves full of ammunition.
And I'm talking large safes and large amounts of ammunition. Because Sam is one of these guys, it's became a borderline o possessive hobby. And I've seen guys like this. We've all seen them, guys that play golf for ride
bikes or something. They cannot help themselves. They go and buy a better putter, they buy a better driver, They buy you five dozen really high class balls because they're four dollars off, and they end up with a shed full of gear that really they don't need at all, They only need some of it, but they can't stop themselves collecting the stuff. And Sam had spent most of his adult life going to sports shops, gun shops, and gun shows, where if he saw or a bargain in
the way of ammunition, he would buy it. And he thought his attitude was, well, if I can buy it cheaply, I can split it up with my friends at the gun clubs, and you know, it's a good thing to have. And the price of ammunition goes up continually year on year. If I can buy it cheaply, I'm ahead of the game. And God bless him, that's his business, what he does with his own money, and what he'd done with a
lot of it. He'd bought probably forty or fifty thousand dollars worth of ammo over, you know, probably two or three decades, so it's not out of the way. But it's a lot of ammo. And there are cartons of this ammo, and it's big and it's heavy, there's lots of it. For all that, it wouldn't be hard to count by the packet, wouldn't be hard to open a cart on and say, well, this is obviously twenty packets of forty rounds each, that's eight hundred or whatever it
might be. They didn't do that, Samsung, please count it out. And the detective said to him, I haven't got time for that. We haven't got time. Just loaded up and he ordered the other two police, who were looking quite embarrassed about this. They didn't really think it was a great idea because they know SEMs just a nice old culture, and it all smelt.
Wrong to them.
According to Sam's thoughts about them, he thought they were embarrassed. They carry it out and placed in one of the SUVs. There is so much ammunition here, listeners, two big broad high safes full of ammunition that it loaded down that suv so low that it pushed the springs right down so that it was nearly bellying onto the tires.
It was totally overloaded.
They needed a one ton Newt and they're loading it into an suv. That gets a bit sad if it's got half a ton in the back, and it was sad.
It was overloaded.
And eventually they've loaded everything up, including SEM's firearms, which are right full shotguns, pistols. There's more than twenty all up, twenty something and they put them sort of in where the passenger seat would fold down, and they've put all the ammunition behind it. And then they've driven away. But they've written down the guns. You know, here's one Savage twenty two, here's one Ruga two two three, whatever it might be. But they haven't noted the ammunition. They haven't
counted the ammunition. They've merely written on the receipt ammunition various. Now, that covers a lot of ground. That is like calling World War II an international incident. They leave, As far as we know, they go to Ballarat. As far as we know, they unloaded at Ballarat Police station. But how can we be sure. We don't know if they went straight there, We don't know if they went somewhere else first. We just don't know. No one knows it would appear,
except possibly whoever drove that car. Now, not even all three of the police might know, because they had two cars, so at least one of them drives the other one. Possibly two of them drive the other one, and one drives the one with the ammunition. So at best we can say that one of those police knows where he took the ammunition and the guns. We believe it to be the beller at police station. If they diverted at any stage along the way, we don't know, and it's
probably impossible to prove. What happens next is Sam takes the bogus avo, this AVO that should never have been written out. It's clearly obtained by someone who is ap plausible liar, essentially in order to punish him for daring not to pay her the commission she thought she was owed. It's an abuse of process at the very least, and it possibly involves Perge. Really if she's sworn falsely to this, a magistrate finds within a matter of days or weeks when it gets to court that the AVO is rubbish.
It's a piece of junk. It should never have been drawn up, it shouldn't have been acted on, and essentially metaphorically speaking, the magistrate tears it up, so Sam Mahfoud is vindicated. It should never have been acted on. He's happy that that's been torn up, but he's unhappy that he's guns and his ammunition are.
Still with the police. Now.
As far as we know, the guns and ammunition did not leave Ballarat and go to the Police Property Office in Melbourne, in Collingwood. As far as we know, I've been told that by a Ballarat police officer who should know, and I would suggest there's no reason to obscure the truth. I'd see no reason to do it. So, as far as anyone knows, including Sam, his firearms and his ammunition were deposited either all of them or most of them.
At ball At police station.
He was told that they were put in some sort of storeroom thing where every time police at the station wanted to get it, you know, reams of paper or spare, uniforms of god knows what, that they were standing on the guns and walking through.
Them and all the rest of it.
And he believes that to be true because when the AVO is torn up and when Sam says, well, I've got to get my property back now, and they call him in and said, yep. He goes in there to pick up the guns and they hand them over, and he said, they're scratched. They've been on the floor, they're all scratched, they're knocked about.
The sites have all.
Been kicked around so that they're crooked, they're no longer sighted correctly. And not only that, and this made him particularly agitated. He said, clearly some of them had been used, and he knows this because he checked, being a very careful shooter who does the right thing for safety. He removed magazines from his rifles and he said, look at this.
One of the magazines had eight bullets in it. Someone obviously had taken that rifle out shooting somewhere or give it a few test shots or whatever, and used it. And they'd left it with eight live rounds in the magazine and a semi automatic rifle, which is a cardinal's sin of gun handling. You just don't do that, and if you were a private in the army, you would
get into a lot of trouble for doing that. It's a punishable offense in the armed forces to do stuff like that, and I think probably in the police force. You know, if you return with your side arm and you're handed around with bullets in the magazine and haven't properly cleared it. I think that would be a breach of regulations, and so it should be. But when Sam gets his guns back, they've been used in a used and one of them's been left loaded. He's deeply unhappy
about that. But he's more unhappy about this. The ammunition they'd handed over. This included many thousands of rounds of twenty two ammunition, between twenty and thirty thousand rounds. Twenty two is the little bullets. You can buy them in big blocks of five thousand rounds, and he said there was between twenty and thirty thousand rounds.
He got some of that back.
Other bullets that had been taken, other cartridges that have been taken were nine millimeter pistol ammunition. They took lots of it from his place. None came back, not one round. All these nine millimeter pistol ammunition had vanished. Other pistol rounds had gone in the raid, the so called raid. Three point fifty seven caliber pistol ammunition I think forty five ACP. They call it forty five colt, which is a heavy caliber round for handgun and thirty eight special
which used to be used. I think when police had the thirty eight revolvers back in the day in Victoria, they could use the thirty eight special ammunition. Interesting because perhaps some police somewhere might have come across a thirty eight revolver here and there and very interesting forty caliber semi automatic pistol ammunition. Now forty caliber semi automatic pistl ammunition fits the Victorian police issue side arm, that is the Smith and Wesson. I think it's a six steen
shot semi automatic pistol. It's a very efficient, well thought of side arm for military and.
Police use, etc. Etc.
And it takes the forty caliber round. And I am told on good authority that that round is hard for civilians to buy in Victoria. There's not a lot of it about. The police obviously use that caliber for their side arms. People in security industry and so forth, they said it's not much fun having forty caliber pistols because you can't get the amma for whatever reason. Now Sam had some, He had forty caliber, but it didn't come back either. So when he gets his ammunition back, he's
lost a fair bit of twenty two's. He's lost all the nine milk, and he's lost significant amounts of all these other pistol rounds. One of the things he did get back, this is funny. One of the things he did get back was all his own reloads. Now, Sam's one of those shooting enthusiasts who to save money, and because he's an enthusiast, he reloads his own ammunition. Is it something that I know? When I was young on a farm, relatives of mine would reload their own fox
loads to shoot foxes and so forth. It was a way to save money. If around was worth a dollar to buy, they could make it up with gunpowder and a projectile for maybe a third of the cost or something like that. So it's a cost saving measure. Sam had lots and lots of reloads that he'd done himself. Those are regarded by shooters as sort of perhaps inferior to factory loads, or at least not as consistent as
factory loads. And the fact of the matter was that Sam got back all his reloads, but he didn't get back nearly all his factory loads, the nice, shiny, clean factory bullets, most of them didn't come back. Sam says, he claims that he's lost something like sixty thousand rounds of ammunition. Now, whether it's forty eight or fifty three or fifty nine or sixty five thousand doesn't matter. It is a shed load. It is a ute.
Load of ammunition that he's lost.
And one of the points he makes about this, he's a couple of good points here. One is this that when he finds he brought all this stuff home, he was assisted by a friendly Ballarat policeman. I think it was probably the district firearms officer helped him move this stuff back home because it's quite heavy and Sam's a little old bloke, and so this kindly policeman who might have felt a bit sorry for him, helped him unload, then take it inside and lock it up. And Sam said,
look at that. There's the two safes where the ammunition came out of. And the firearms officer said, oh yeah, and Sam said they were both full. But now look all the stuff that he got back fitted in less than one safe. He could fit it all in one
safe and there was still some room. He lost about two thirds by volume of his cartridges of his bullets, and that is a big loss financially, It's interesting because Sam wasn't selling bullets on the black market, and so what it's worth on the black market doesn't matter the Sam. What matters to Sam is that if he wants to buy replacements, he's now got a gun by replacement ammunition for top dollar rather than use the stuff he'd bought
cheaply in the past. But the black market price is relevant here because if it is possible that any of that ammunition leaked onto the street, leaked onto the black market, it is worth a phenomenal amount and bullets that might be worth in bulk forty thousand dollars. When it's sitting in a license shooter's safe out on the streets of the northern suburbs of Melbourne or the western suburbs of Sydney, or wherever else, there are people who want to buy it.
Some of those pistol rounds, particularly particularly nine milk, because it can be used in many of the common semi automatic pistols and can also be used in machine pistols and sub machine guns. It's a universal round, very common and therefore greatly sought after by the bad guys who have got nine millimeter weapons and that stuff could bring whatever somebody wants to pay for it.
Because if you're a.
Drug baron or a tobacco war king making fifty grand a week or one hundred grand a week, or God only knows lots of money illicit money, you don't care if a box of bullets cost you fifty bucks or one hundred bucks or five hundred bucks. It doesn't matter to you because you just want the bullets. Because you don't actually need ten thousand bullets you're a crook. You probably want fifty at best, because you want two magazines full, and you might shoot a few off at a tree
somewhere to make sure you know what you're doing. And otherwise you don't need big numbers. You just need some bullets to do the dirty work that you're going to do to stand over somebody by shooting at their house, breaking their windows, shooting up their cars, or indeed to use the illicit weapon as a weapon to injure or kill somebody. You don't need big numbers of bullets to do that. In so price is no object. And this
is one of the dark sides of this story. If any of those bullets, any of this ammunition, found its way on the street. It is going to go to the very people that are the most dangerous people in the community. That is, armed criminals, the sort of people who are not only shooting each other, but may well shoot innocent people by accident when they're trying to shoot other crooks, or they might use it against police. They
might use it against police. So the culpability of any police, and we're not saying this happened, but the culpability of any police who leak seized ammunition back on the black market is very high because it could be used against themselves or against their own colleagues. And if I'm a copper and mildurer and I've seized a moment, I've sold it to some blog behind a pub somewhere and that ends up in the streets of Northcote, it could get one of my own police colleagues killed. That is very
bad news. And that is the suspicion here. The suspicion is that some seized weapons in some cases not in this case, and seized ammunition could find its way back onto the black market. Now, Sam Mafud deeply unhappy. He briefed a law firm in Melbourne. That law firms drawn up legal documents in order to take the Victoria Police in the state of Victoria to court over the missing ammunition. And they're claiming you certain things. They want damages and
they want exemplary damages and the whole catastrophe. Now, it would seem to me, as an amateur bush lawyer, that they probably have a reasonably strong case despite the fact that this has been reported to Iback, and Iback, in its wisdom, handed it back to the police and said, well, you investigate it yourself. And apparently it's been investigated internally.
And I think it was another neighboring police station, so it's Ballarat, that's the one in the gun here, So it's been another police station in the general area has been asked to look at it. And you know, whether that was Balan or Jealong or Sumbury or something, I'm not sure. But the point is that police investigating police is never a great look, even if it is kosher, even if it is sincere, and even if they're trying, it doesn't look good. The net result of this does
not look good. It doesn't look good at all. It looks as if it's been put in the not to be solved basket. It's been put into that basket marked nothing to see here, please move on, and that is not a great thing. The official response to Sam's claims is that there's nothing in them, that they've investigated and found nothing wrong, and that basically they are denying that it's true. Now Interestingly, no one in the police force
at any level is calling Sam Mafood a liar. No one has come out and said he tells untruth, he's telling porkies, he's just trying to leverage this against us. No one has made that allegation about him. They don't
want to call him a liar. One of the problems the police force has if this goes to court is this that when they say we handed back all the bullets that we took, all the ammunition we took Sam's lawyer, is this going to say, how do you know you refused to count it, you didn't count it, You don't know how much ammunition you took, and you don't really know how much you gave back.
Thanks for listening.
Life and Crimes is a Sunday Herald Sun production for True Crime Australia. Our producer is Johnty Burton for my columns, features and more. Go to Heroldsun dot com dot au, forward slash, Andrew rule one word. For advertising inquiries, go to news podcasts sold at news dot com dot au. That is all one word news podcasts sold And if you want further information about this episode, links are in the description Can I Go