If you want to piss off local police, deal drugs and call your business cartel.
They wheeled the fridge out, shifted that out of the way, and there was a secret wall, secret door, whatever you want to call it, and there was the entire stash of cocaine.
It all seems very sons of anarchy, doesn't it. Just sort of the small town with their crew of family miscreants going about the place doing miscreant things. While Andrew's away on assignment. It's Johnny Burton, producer of the show, stepping in again as host. But with me today we have two of the finest crime reporters and the entire Herald's unused for that being Mark Butler and Reagan Hodge, and we're here to talk about the story of Josh Eddie.
Who he is, what he did, and how he became undone. So start off Mark, who is young Josh.
Josh Eddie is a former member of the Mongols. He grew up mostly in the town of Cobram, up on the Murray. He was known to be trouble, left school early, did a lot of different jobs, but probably wouldn't stand out as the kind of guy who would bring organized
crime to a country center like his. So in twenty nineteen, and I'm not sure whether he was with one of the feeder clubs prior to this, but in twenty nineteen he joins the Mongols, and obviously that's good for making connections in the world of organized crime, and clearly the Mongols see him as a conduit for selling drugs in a reasonably large market through the north of the state. I think some of these activities extended down to a chuker further south and drugs were being moved into state.
There was evidence of activity extending to Queensland and a major bust of a ten kilo shipment heading to Perth involving these guys. So Eddie sets himself up. Suddenly he's got a lot of money. He's running a business called Cartel, which was basically a car wash we get your car details cleaning up in more ways than one. So he's cruising around town in a real fancy late model Mercedes. He's got the chunky jewelry. He's running this business called cartel.
Some of the local folk have some most intimidating experiences with people wearing cartel hoodies. It starts to get to the local police they think we really need to do something about this. A detective sergeant called Marcus Boyd from up there, a local detective sergeant who was experienced in dealing with organized crime entities previously contacts the Echo Task Force, the Echo Task Forces, the Anti Organized Chronlin Task Force in Melbourne, yep. And they go from there.
And for those who aren't familiar with Cobram, it's up on the Murray River. Population of just under six thousand. It's really a small country town.
So let's just go through that. So you've got Josh, she's got his cartel, which you know, a great name. It's like Flowers by Irene from the Simpsons or something really in terms of a thing. They've got the hoodies. They're going around the locals of Cobram and making them feel a little bit upset about the world a little bit. And is this by intimidation or are they going into various businesses, you know, making them an off that they can't refuse. So there were a few.
Dust ups around Cobram, and they occurred in some of the takeaway joints by some people wearing the cartel merchandise. So they would advertise their hoodies, T shirts all that sort of gear with the cartel merch and he'd have a handful of people getting around town wearing them after a few incidents of little bust ups, nothing major, but
they were just little confrontations around town. That was one element to the police starting to raise their eyebrows at this crew who were growing and growing in this small country town.
If you want to piss off local police, deal drugs and call your business cartel, I mean, it's really provocative branding which they probably would not be inclined to ignore.
And also that point that you made before about driving around in a flashy Mercedes, Now I'm really going to understand you're a country lad somewhat. I'm also from the country, and I have to say, in my childhood, I did not necessarily see a whole bunch of late model Mercedes sticking around with the chains and everything, so I might have stuck out a little bit.
It did, And there's some photographs still on the Carteil website which isn't in an operation anymore, but it shows two really fancy Mercedes being washed and featured in this promotional video, which is quite well done, to be honest, but Cobram, it's it's not really home to many Mercedes, and it's not AMG's no, no, it's not and.
Not somebody with an apparently a fairly limited history of employment over the previous decade.
Wondering where the chains have come from.
Probably Eddie's biggest mistake was underestimating these local coppers. Marcus Boyd decides we're going to do something about this. He contacts Echo. Echo already have something of an interest in Eddie because Eddie is present when a man called Fardi Dab is shot by Australian Federal Police officers out of Greenvale in the early hours of September twelve, nine eight. So it's a serious matter. He shot at the cops and then they shot at him.
He missed and they didn't.
They were in a car with cloned plates, so it was evidence of high level activity.
You know.
He was somebody that they were going to watch have an interest in.
So Joshua has got Carte is his main business, but obviously he's got other business interests not necessarily above board, and he's not alone in that is. He's got some friends and family.
He's got numerous family members.
His father David is involved, his sister is involved, other relatives are involved. It was quite a network of people, associates, gophers. It was probably a large scale trafficking venture, which would be commonplace in Melbourne, but isn't so common in these sort of places.
So that's one of the questions. We've got stories and some of your reporting has the dad going off to places on long drug runs and all sorts of shenanigans going up and down highways. Why are they doing this all in Cobram.
Well, they thought it was a good place to set up business. You're away from the big smoke or the detectives in Melbourne or Sydney. It's a bit of a channel in between those two cities. They would think being out in Cobram, they've only got a handful of coppers that can probably fly under the radar, a bit that proved to be not true in the end. But there was a channel that isn't along the Hume, but it's
a back highway. I'm not too sure which highway it is, but they call it the Smuggler's route and it is a off broadway sort of highway. There's no traffic cameras. Obviously, the coppers set themselves up on the Hume for sort of drug runs, but they would use the smugglers route the back way to move drugs out of Cobram up to Sydney.
So these guys would probably think, you know, they're operating on encrypted apps, They've got very elaborate hiding places for their drugs and money. They're fairly well organized. They're probably thinking that this isn't the kind of enterprise that the local police are going to be able to deal with. They probably thought they were going to be operating for a long time under the radar.
And it all seems very signs of anarchy, doesn't it The sort of the small town the crew of family miscreants going about the doing miscreant things.
And having not actually seen that show. But there is your no you report on Barkis and you have not seen I know another none of us.
But if you want.
Reagan to watch Sons of Anarchary email in ass But the drug market in the Golden Valley and all along the Murray River border is it's huge. It extends all the way up to Mildura. And yeah, the drug issue in regional Victoria, not just along the Murray, is quite significant.
There's money to be made in all of these towns, I mean, and you could go further north into Finley and Hay and all these places.
They're not tiny towns.
Pretty much every country town, regional country center you'll go to, there'll be people wanting to buy drugs.
There's good money to be made.
And we kind of mentioned some of these runs that they went on. Can you describe one of those how they panned out?
So there was an infamous one I think we can say now from David Eddie, so Josh's dad who left cop from forty eight hours later he's back in Cobram. But that included a drive to Townsville, a drug drop into the Gold Coast, another drop into Sydney and then back it sounds south to Cobram, so I think it's nearly five thousand kilometers in forty eight hours, so it's a very very efficient drug drop.
You think he was sticking to the speed limit on that one, Reagan or no doubt, No doubt at all.
But it was one that sort of blew the police away once they realized how far had actually gone in such a short amount of time. I'm not too sure there were too many rest stops along the way. We'll never know that, but that would be the beginning of the end for Cartel.
So we've got Cartel, and we've got mister Reading, and we've got mister Edie's family, and we've got a bunch of annoyed townsfolk, and we've got a couple of local coppers that are keeping their eye on them. And as you mentioned before, Echo is taking an interest what happens next.
They meet and they set up in operation, set out a strategy, a plan for how this is going to operate.
So the way it's going to operate is.
For the local police to keep an eye on things. Any contact to be had with them is to be through them. These people, some of these people, you know, contact with the police would not be unexpected to them, while Echo remain in the shadows and just watch, listen, watch get what evidence they can, because you're dealing with people at the top of this syndicate who if they find out Echo are involved, then they'll just shut up shop. And what they wanted was to stay in business. Well,
evidence is accumulated. So they looked at them from I think it was up to a year and got a lot of evidence. They intercepted a bloke had just left Cartel with one hundred and ninety five grams of cocaine.
They did a drug deal.
With one of the syndicate's gophers, and undercover did a two hundred and twenty four gram deal with him. We saw a lot of things as they put this thing together.
One bit of tangible evidence that the police could tell us about recently was that they were pretty much sitting opposite Cartel over the road. There were a couple of detectives watching yep, and they noticed a car go in to the car detailing.
Joint, which would usually take.
A couple of hours to get your car detailed, I'm assuming, but this car went in and out within fifteen or so minutes, and they thought something dodgy was going on. So that was one bit of intelligence that the detectives could share with us.
Not a turbosh, then, I don't think. So you've got the two local detectives they're kind of overtly keeping an eye out on Cartel, and then you've got Echo, who are very much under the radar doing what they do to collect the information they need, and then it all comes to a head.
It all comes to a head in the early hours of a really cold winter morning. David Eddie on his way back from Townsville, that really long five thousand kilometer drop. He's coming back into Cobram on the bridge connecting Cobram and Baruga and police pull him over. It was a routine traffic stop is what they called it. And they breath O David Eddie and they've got a search warrant for his car and they just take him out. They rip open the car and where the air bag is
on the left passenger side, they lifted that out. There's no air bag, but there was a gun and a stack of cash in there. Eddie was arrested. The coppers on the street get on the phone to the other detectives and it's time to go. So they've executed five search warrants at the early hours of the morning all around Corpram and they needed to get it done really really quickly so that no one could dispose of any
evidence or run away or hide their gear. So two three four in the morning the AFP as well working with the Victorian detectives and they just raid five houses and businesses around Colbram.
Was cartel on the list as well? Or was it all houses?
They were mainly houses. David Eddie's house, the family house was the main one. And it was a really interesting story that the detectives told us a couple of weeks ago, which we wrote about in middle of July, that the Victorian detectives were searching the house and they couldn't really find anything, no evidence of a drug sort of stash
or a drug making area. And the federal police just said, all right, hang on, look up there in the corner, look over there to your left, look there behind the wall, and sure enough, the pieces started coming together, and behind the fridge they found a They wheeled the fridge out, shifted that out of the way, and there was a secret wall, secret door, whatever you want to call it, and there was the entire stash of cocaine.
Right, so that's kind of very Day of the Jack, or really pressed the button you have seen the Day of the Jack, I'll have you made. Unfortunately not if you would like. Reagan too watched over. So that's astonishing.
Behind the fridge was a button and it was like you'd see in the movies. It slowly opened this wall and it opened what they'd previously heard been called the medicine cabinet. So they'd been listening to the phone calls for the past few years and references to the medicine the cabinet. Go grab it from the medicine cabinet, put it back in the medicine cabinet. And once they've moved this fridge and opened up the secret wall, there's the
infamous medicine cabinet that they'd heard so much about. And that was the pinnacle of it for those detectives. And it was still the early hours of the morning, like in the middle of the night really, which.
Is quite unusual.
Usually raids would occur six in the morning, just as people are waking up unsuspecting.
But this one they had to move really quickly. Yeah, right, And presumably as soon as they see the medicine cabinet and all of its various unguents and powders, they say, thank you very much, son, you're nicked pretty much. And who did they take away in cuffs?
So David Eddie was arrested on the bridge connecting Cobraum and Baruga. They arrested Josh's sister, so David's daughter, Jade Josh was also arrested that night. Slash early morning, and I think a handful of his associates as well.
And Josh is sent away and has gone up in front of a judge and no longer walking the street.
I think he's what did he get nine nine and a bit years, nine and six months, nine and six months, So he'll be away for a little while longer.
At the time of recording.
But the raids and subsequent charges and had a big flow on effect for the Mongols that he was a part of, and we'll.
Talk about where that sets us up in the future. But these raids, they didn't happen like last week or something. There's been a while since the day happened.
Yes, there has been a bit of time passed since the raids. I think they were in twenty nineteen.
They were twenty twenty one, so we've had to wait to fully cover this until Josh Eddie went through the courts, which was some months ago.
We were lucky enough that Marcus Boyd from Cobram had a chat to us I think in the middle of June, and Kieran Duret from the Echo Task Force as well had a little conversation with us to shed some light on the good work those two did so we published that story in the Herald Sun in July.
So Josh is away and some of his associates are still away. Where does that leave us, you know, nature of bores, a vacuum doesn't sort of mean that these one percent motorcycle gangs are not still in central Victoria nor the Victoria. Pretty much all of these country towns tell us about that. Who are the players in these markets? Where are they and what are they doing?
Well, there's a long history of omcg's operating out of country areas. The Bandidos just further down the river were for many years enmeshed in Atchuka. They were patched over some years ago to the Mongols. Their national president was from Achuka at that point. That with the Banditos president, that is it is an important area for bikey gangs up on the river.
And that's just so they can run drugs in and out of the state.
Well regarded as strategically important. The Finks have a presence in Country Victoria.
They're up at Wodonga.
They had a cracker getting into Gippsland set up a chapter near Bansdale. Although the police in a similar probably in a similar not quite at the same level as the Cobram job. Ended up putting a stop to that. As one of them said, we canceled their East Gippsland visas.
Ballarat, Bendigo have.
Have always had, have traditionally had BIKEI presence.
There are a couple of big jobs earlier in twenty twenty five involving Mildur and Kolak, a couple of big drug busts. I know the Hell's Angels were caught up in at least one of them. But yeah, the country areas are really popular for the oemcgs. As we spoke about before, there is still quite a large market for drugs in the regional areas. Some of these places aren't just tiny country towns. There are some heavily populated areas still in Country Victoria, so there is quite a fair market.
A place like Ballarat is important and I think the Bandidos have had two national runs there in recent years. That probably says something. At one of those runs, the sergeant at arms he got shot outside the clubhouse after some kind of argument broke out. Bendigo has always had the rebels fairly strong, although I think police have done a lot of work on them over the years. And I think they've had to pull their heads in a little bit.
So that's the bigger picture. But in terms of the Mongols, with mister Eddie going away, what did that mean for them specifically.
Well, we're not sure why this happened, but police believe that what happened up at Cobram and happened to the Eddy Syndicate basically caused a fracture in the Mongols which resulted in some senior members being asked to leave the club. Toby Mitchell, Mark Bellcilly, the late Sam Abel Rahim, Jason Addison, very senior people, well known people all left the gang in that period. Now I couldn't actually say why that happened.
It'd be opened to speculation that maybe the failure of what went on up there caused this fracture, would have caused a lot of trouble for their networks, I would imagine, or somebody was operating outside the structures of the gang. And if you're with the Mongols, the people at the top of the tree want to get a lick of the icy pole and they don't appreciate people having a side hustle. Now I'm not saying that's the case, but we don't know what the reason was.
It's also not a good look when your syndicate is busted and you've been all over the news for the best part of five years. It's not a good look for your outlaw motorcycle gang. So they would have had every right to be a bit pissed off with the Eddie Citicutt who brought them all into the spotlight.
I think they probably would have become aware that maybe there were some mistakes made.
Will probably naming it Cartel was potentially one of the first ones you would see, one of the biggest. And on that note, WHI shall get you the streaming link to Sons of Anarchy and we shall thank you both for coming on today. Thank you Mark, Thank you Reagan. Andrew will be back next week.
Not Life and Crimes, Thanks Jobete, 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 Slag 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.