These kids have been given a few hundred bucks to steal a car and go to ex or wire address that they're given with a tin of petrol or similar accelerant and set fire to places. And that is a recipe for disaster. This is very scary stuff. This is not you know, a couple of fourteen year olds pinching grandma's holden on a Saturday night and driving it down to the fish and chip shop. This is organized violence.
I'm Andrew Ruhle was his life and crimes. It's high time we had a good look at the burning issue of young people offending. Now, young people have always offended. You know, years ago there were bodgies and witches. Before that, there were alaricans in the streets of Collingwood and Fitzroy and in Sydney, same thing. All the way back into the nineteenth century, we had young people who became bush rangers.
You know, Neck Kelly was arrested the first time when he was sixteen running around with an older bushranger armed. Robert called Harry Power. There is nothing new about young people being violent offenders. And so when we see houses being invaded by young people, armed and dangerous, it is truly shocking, and it genuinely worries us for good reason. But it's not right to think that something like that has never happened before. It's just a variation on a theme.
Having said that we have got an apparent wave of youth crime, it might be demographics. I can recall back in the seventies when there were gangs of skinheads and sharpies so called, roaming around Melbourne, roaming around the big country centers, you know, places of More Sale, Bendigo, Ballarat, all those places. They all had mobs of skins heads and sharpies and so on who caused trouble. They would drink,
they would fight, they would assault girls. There was a lot of stuff happening in those days which actually died out in the decades afterwards, probably because those kids were part of a baby boom. The kids in the seventies were part of the post war baby boom, and so there was a big number of them, and so you'd see it. You know, Ringwood sharps would come in on the train, the broad Meadow sharps would come in on
the train. There are a lot of them in a way, of teenagers in the next generation, and so I think it's just sheered numbers and demographics do alter it, which is relevant to what we're doing, because now we have a bit of a bubble in Victoria at least, and probably in other cities where we have young people who've come from other countries as toddlers or babies or youngsters, and of course those who have been born here soon
after their parents got here. A lot of these people have come from war torn countries, from the Middle East and from Africa. They've come either directly as refugees or indirectly as people fleeing dangerous places where bad things have happened to them. And it makes sense in a bad way. It makes sense that the children of those war torn generations can be more disturbed and people who take more dangerous risks and so on and so forth than others.
You see for that reason apparent rise in the number of violent robberies and home invasions and car thefts associated with particular ethnic gangs. There is no doubt that if you talk to people who work in youth justice centers in basically the juvenile prison system. As we record this, one of the big stories of the day is that guards at one of Victoria's New Youth Training Prisons Cherry Creek. Down there, Weerribee guards have been injured badly by two
violent inmates. Apparently these two inmates have attacked several guards and put a couple of them in hospital, including a female guard. Now, this is the sort of incident or incidents that makes people very worried. It makes people's blood boil. It greatly upsets those whose job it is to work
in those institutions. It rightly concerns all of us because if the system is not well organized enough to lock these people up so that they can't hurt others, the system is not really fulfilling its function, it's not really doing its job. And I think that worries a lot of people. I certainly know someone who has worked for many years inside that justice system, inside the youth training places.
He in fact, as a person who used to work for this company once, and when he left here many years ago, he went into the youth training centers and he says that they are shocking places full of very violent young men, and that there's sort of a gang mentality in those places. So you've got on one side, you've got the African kids, and on other side, you've got Islanders and somewhere else, you've got the Middle Eastern kids, and then you've got the sort of Ossie skips and
Aboriginal kids. So you've got at least four approximate groups of gangs, all hating each other and fighting each other and all the rest of it, and even worse, attacking in some cases the adults who were there to look after them and to watch them and guard them. Where's
all this heading. Well, we currently have what has been called a crisis where young people are being put back on the street rather than being sent youth training places that possibly are over full or the judiciary is not keen to send people there because they see it really as just a training ground for criminality. Which is an
interesting point. But we have a situation where teenagers, violent teenagers, thieves, robbers, bash artists are getting back on the streets dozens and dozens of times they've been bailed out, so they get arrested, they get picked up, they get bail and they go
and reoffend. Now, in our paper there of Son, we have run examples of people who have offended in the hundreds of times, hundreds of times, and apparently it would appear very rarely behind bars and mostly are on the street with bail, and that is a situation that is apparently escalating and is upsetting a lot of people. One aspect of this, and it's gone largely unnoticed, I think, is that these sort of kids who are violent, they
have very poor perceptions of consequences for their actions. They are the perfect people to be exploited by older, more cunning criminals, and the older, more cunning criminals pay them relatively small amounts of money to do crimes on their behalf, to steal the cars, or to go and hold up
businesses or whatever it might be. And so we have a situation where in this year we've had a series of bombings and arsenal attacks which police know have been committed by underage people, by people under the age of seventeen fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. People in this age group have been sent out, undoubtedly by older criminals who are getting their orders in some cases from the Middle East from
master criminals elsewhere. These kids have been given a few hundred bucks to steal a car and go to ex or wire address that they're given with a tin of petrol or similar accelerant and set fire to places, and that is a recipe for disaster because fires where petrol is used can easily become like bomb sites. Petrol can explode, it can spray people and burn them. It can cause
massive fire bombs. If it gets into a place that's got say leaking gas or something like that, the gas can then ignite and you've got a terrible situation where innocent people could be blown up and burnt because of the actions of lunatic teenagers being pushed into the front line by evil criminals. Now this year we've had a series of things. One was at the Furlong Club out in Thornbury. Now, people were still cleaning up late at night after a function at the Furlong Club. This is
after midnight one night when the fire bomb exploded. Only dumb luck stopped those workers from being incinerated. And that's a tragedy that would have turned two or three young teenage torches into murderers. But if they knew that, the kids that had the petrol bombs and the cigarette lighters and the getaway car, the stolen car, they didn't really care. They're young, they're dumb, and they do stuff for kicks and for a few hundred bucks before dawn that morning.
The night that the Furlong Club was burnt, they set fire. The same crew the police believe set fire to another venue at top ms Town, which is just a few kilometers away. There were three other fire bombings at suburban venues in the same hectic two weeks in February this year. Now, the El Nutherira venue in mill Park was hit twice in six days. The security camera footage that the police retrieved from that shows young thugs armed with military style weapons.
Can you believe this? They've got like military weapons, dragging a security guard from his car and holding him down at gunpoint while they burned the place. Now, this is very scary stuff. This is not you know, a couple of fourteen year olds pinching grandma's holden on a Saturday night and driving it down to the fish and chip shop. This is organized violence of the type that we associate with the Middle East and with you know, Soweto. It's
very ugly, very dangerous, very bad. In these cases, arsonist as young as fourteine were speeding around suburban Melbourne in stolen cars. They're carrying petrol bombs and weapons. They paid very little to do this, but that doesn't lessen the consequences and the possible consequences of their actions. We all know that young people, particularly young males, have lousy impulse control, very poor grasp of potential consequences of their actions, from
the sports field to the battlefield to the street. Too often it's teenagers who take the biggest risks. It's a well known fact throughout history. In fact, the history of crime is full of examples. I mentioned Ned Kelly before. Ned Kelly running around with Harry Power as a teenager, his first arrest comes. He's virtually Harry Power's apprentice until Power gets arrested. Kelly ends up taking over and becoming
an adult bushranger arm Rubber himself. Another example from popular culture is Billy the Kid, where there's a new series on television called Billy the Kid. It's highly stylized, highly dramatized. It's not a faithful historical reenactment of anything particular, but it is based loosely on a real person who did exist, and that person was a kid. His name was Henry McCarty, also known as William Bonnie. He stabbed a man in a bar at twelve years old, he spent his teenage
years stealing and gambling. He committed his first murder at seventeen,
before his own predictably violent death at twenty two. Now, Billy the Kid has been immortalized in film and song and become part of popular culture, you know, knocking on Heaven's door, etc. Not everybody gets Bob Dylan singing songs about them, but that sort of behavior, stabbing someone at twelve, living dangerously, murdering people before you're old enough to vote, that is exactly the template that a lot of kids in Melbourne, in Victoria and in Australia are following, and
it seems to be a growing phenomenon. Currently, there seems to be a cohort of people, for whatever reason, who are inciting each other to do this and are being incited by others to do this sort of stuff. Billy the Kid, Billy McCarty is just one of the countless young offenders who went knocking on Heaven's door, and for what for easy money, for the sick pleasure of hurting fellow humans, for the empty applause and shallow admiration of fools,
unfair weather friends. True. I just read that because that is a paragraph I wrote in a story, worry about this very subject. But there's no doubt that a lot of kids do this stuff for kicks. They might get paid by somebody, they might steal something that they can sell, but deep down they're doing it for thrills kicks. One of the most addictive drugs of all is adrenaline. So such his life for the young and the reckless while
it lasts. But if they don't end up deadl like Billy and ned Kelly and a lot more, they end up buried in concrete and steel cells, serving huge sentences, like the older criminals who were sucked in and spat out by the underworld wars. If these kids don't pull up in time, jail or death is the most likely prospect when they get to be adult offenders. They're being treated too leniently at this level. Some would say they've
been let go on the streets. They've been shown that they can offend and offend an offend and rarely be locked up for it, and until it's too late, because when they get to twenty twenty one, twenty two, whatever, and they do a serious crime, suddenly they'll be in front of a judge and jury who say there's no more chances for you, Sonny Jim. You are going in the big house for a long time, and that is
when they'll realize they've wrecked their life. An example of how those sort of kids can turn into adult criminals is this. We can't name names here because what happened in children's courts can never be revealed. But in twenty thirteen, three teenagers well known to police embarked on a series
of terrifying robberies on pokey venues across Melbourne. The jam's sawn off, shot and a pistol in the faces of terrified customers and staff, and then they'd grabbed the money because they're pretty well informed about where the money was, and then they'd run outside jumping a stolen cart waiting with a getaway driver and they head off at terrible high speeds up to one hundred and eighty kilometers an hour.
Very dangerous process, but they got away with a series of these robberies, pretty big robberies on pretty big venues and until they were caught by the Armed Crime Squad, which ran an operation called Operation Dark Knight that was in late in twenty thirteen October and November the Operation Dark Knight targeted five particular robberies of gaming venues, four in the Western suburbs and one was in Mulgrave. There
were four in just thirty three days. Significantly, the guns and the getaway car were provided by an older, experienced Middle Eastern organized crime figure who we can't name at this point, who told his teenage underlings which targets to hit and when during that month of madness. That series netted the mastermind a lot of stolen cash for a minimum of risk to himself. But of course the kids,
the teenagers did get caught. They did get banged up, but not for long, not for the sort of sentences they would have got if they were a few years older, and it set them firmly on the way to becoming seasoned career criminals themselves. The experience of being caught and locked up briefly for less than a year, I think
didn't have the necessary effect. To read the police reports from Operation Dark Knight, and I quote the armed robberies in question targeted lucrative venues reasonably expected to be holding large sums of cash. It could also be reasonably expected these venues would contain large numbers of patrons and staff, particularly the elderly. The commission of these armed robberies involved
a high level of planning and preparation. It entailed the sourcing of a stolen motor vehicle, stolen registration plates, and a stolen firearm shotgun. Most clothing worn by the offenders was either destroyed or disposed of. Although police were unable to identify any particular safe house, it became evident that offenders were utilizing a secure location to store the stolen motor vehicle, firearms, and stolen cash. That is code for this was being run by older crooks and highly organized.
The victims were mostly elderly and were quote ordered down on the ground by masked men with a shotgun pointed directly in their faces. Many of those victims have suffered severe psychological distress and trauma as a result. Many report that these offenses have impacted on the way they now lived their lives, forcing them to stay at home. In other words, listeners, The robbers were not some Alarican kids
lair rising on a Saturday night. They were taking part in clinically planned, traumatizing, potentially fatal crimes, and yet it seemed to frustrate a police that when are arrested and charged with the most serious crimes short of homicide and rape. You know, these sort of vicious arm robberies. They're the crimes that fall just below homicide and rape. The offenders were treated like school kids caught shoplifting. That's how it
seemed to some of the police. In the end. As I said before, two of these young offenders walked from court on a basis they'd already done two hundred and thirty five days on remand by the time they offered guilty please. Police were angered by this, not surprisingly, and one a police officer wrote these words. One could argue that the element of punishment has not been achieved. It could be argued that neither child has been held accountable
for their actions. Fast forward to twenty twenty four, that's eleven years later. The PostScript to Operation Dark Knight is that two of those three teenage criminals have gone on to become quite serious players in what we now call the Tobacco War. Unlike long deck criminals from history, these now frightening young adults can't be named because of the tough rules governing under age court proceedings in the recent past.
But Anyone familiar with the rise of Middle Eastern crime in Australia will know their surnames, and you would have to have been under a rock not to realize that Middle Eastern crime has taken off in the last decade. One of this pair is now a feared and wealthy gangland figure implicated in high level drug trafficking and crimes of violence. Detectives have noted during previous interactions his eagerness to learn everything he can about their tactics and their
methods of investigation. The other one of this pair is a suspected drug dealer, a money launderer who has in the past made gaudy displays of his unexplained wealth on social medium and so on. That was until his enemies put a big price on his increasingly isolated head and he was forced to move out of the aseratis and into the shadows. Meanwhile, the crime convey a belt which produced these two grinds on throwing up fresh pawns for older crooks to exploit the way they were every week
in Victoria. It's young offenders who've rushed to the front line in the war over Melbourne's elicit tobacco industry, burning smoke shops or carrying out ram raids to steal goods that their masters, their criminal masters will then on sell. These are the guys that are the fagans of crime, and we probably need Fagan laws to specifically target older crooks who use younger crooks to do their bidding and basically just teaching them what to do so that they're
creating a whole raft of new criminals. The price of this sort of crime apprenticeship is that it sets them on the long wrong road, often for life. When they're young, these useful idiots are paid, often only a few hundred dollars to blow up businesses and miskilling or injuring innocent people. Of course, it's not only these arsonal attacks. In the tobacco wars, there have been cases of teens drawn into attempted hits and doing terrifying drive by shootings that overwhelmingly
in danger innocent lives. Quite a lot of people in Melbourne, Sydney, but especially Sydney have been hurt by indiscriminate shooting with semi automatic weapons. Meanwhile, their criminal bosses know that if the kids are court it's odds on that they'll get bail. Automatically because of their tender years, which makes prison only a remote possibility for many of them, until the day comes when they turn eighteen and find themselves a long way from the bleeding hearts and the revolver doors down
at the children's Court. It's only then that it will be too late to dodge the consequences of their wasted youth. 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 you go a