Years before his death opened a new bloody chapter in the history of Sydney’s underworld, Alen Moradian was instructing his minions to bury $2.7m in a suburban vegetable garden.
The cocaine trafficker feared police were on to him, and wanted to hide the cash. He was right – he was soon charged with drug offences for which he was jailed for a minimum of 10 years.
Soon after his release from prison earlier this year, he again became concerned about a significant sum of money. Police had told him of a multimillion-dollar bounty on his head. And it was Moradian, not piles of cash, who was about to be buried.
In June the flashy gangland figure was gunned down in a car park in Bondi Junction, in Sydney’s affluent eastern suburbs, at 8.30am on a Tuesday morning.
It was the first in a string of shootings that have rocked the city.
The following month, five people were shot in as many days, and New South Wales police announced the amalgamation of various investigations into a single taskforce that is focused on a spate of gun violence they believe could be linked to Moradian’s death.
All of the shootings, police say, are also related to the drug trade.
The deputy commissioner David Hudson claimed he had seen similar violence “many times” in the past two decades, and crime statistics show the number of homicides caused by guns in NSW had fallen.
But the latest shootings seemed to affect the city differently.
Perhaps this was because shootings were occurring during the day. After one recent killing, children were photographed staring at a bloodied corpse while they walked to school.
They were also occurring in suburbs where such gun violence seemed foreign, like Marrickville, not far from Sydney’s CBD, and Bondi Junction, rather than in the city’s west and south-west.
‘Rivalries over something silly’
Multiple sources familiar with organised crime tell Guardian Australia the shootings came amid a global glut of cocaine, and a failed effort by some underworld figures to maintain a cartel in order to keep drug prices as high as possible.
Sydney is Australia’s capital of cocaine use, the Australian Crime and Intelligence Commission’s wastewater monitoring data suggests.
Another law enforcement agency, the NSW crime commission, describes Sydney as “the organised crime hub of Australia”.
Any significant shift in the drug market, as is now occurring, was always likely to result in violence, one former senior investigator says, but it may not explain every shooting.
“There would be a variety of reasons for these shootings,” says the veteran investigator, who is not authorised to speak publicly.
“It wouldn’t be a single thing, and sometimes it can be about rivalries over something silly.
“But it’s not the principals behind these shootings who are the ones pulling the trigger. They are just the ones that can afford to get them done.”
The newly formed NSW police taskforce, Magnus, is investigating the shooting death of Marvin Oraiha in Elizabeth Hills on 22 May and that of Moradian on 27 June.
They’re also investigating the nonfatal shooting of two men at a barber shop in Marrickville on 7 July, a shooting that killed one person and injured two bystanders in Greenacre on 23 July, the wounding of lawyer Mahmoud Abbas on 26 July, and the killing of Ferenc Stemler the following day.
Other than Moradian, none of those killed are considered high-level figures within the underworld.
The supply chain
The majority of significant players in the Australian underworld are based in other countries, with direct connections to cocaine suppliers, the former senior investigator says.
All of Australia’s cocaine comes from outside the country, although local crime groups can sometimes use other substances to cut an imported product which has a high purity to increase their profits.
One of these major offshore players may organise a shipment of a tonne of cocaine directly from a supplier at a price of about $10,000 a kilogram.
It might cost them several times that price again to get the shipment to Australia.
In order to finance this, these players might sell allotments to locally based figures below them on the food chain – such as Moradian.
These local figures will pay significantly more, at about $70,000 a kilogram. But that becomes about $250,000 a kilogram when the allotment is broken down again into one kilogram bricks and sold on to smaller dealers.
Problems inevitably arise if a shipment is intercepted – given those Australian players who have bought an allotment are expected to pay upfront to help finance the cost of the importation.
Sensitivities about prices are pronounced, given everybody within this market is operating with a clear understanding of what their profit margins are, including the need to allow for the possibility of covering the costs of a seizure, the former investigator says.
There are huge networks of people working directly for or with perceived connections to all the major players, from those based offshore to the big fish in Australia, and it is these underlings who are typically the target of violence.
Sometimes these networks themselves are organised crime groups, such as outlaw bikie gangs. Moradian was an associate of the Comanchero.
Just as there is a typical way in which a cocaine importation is arranged in the underworld, there are also typical ways in which gangland executions occur.
Several of the recent shootings fit this pattern, the former investigator says. The crews used for killings have become so specialised that he says it is “almost certain” more than one of the recent shootings was committed by the same crew.
Typically as many as four stolen cars are used: one to drive to and from the scene, one parked nearby that crews can transfer to after the killing, and a third parked further away that’s used as a final getaway vehicle. The earlier two cars are typically torched to remove any evidence. A fourth car is often used by a spotter who monitors the operation.
The guns are usually untraceable, and mobile phones are either not carried, or are “burner” phones which are sometimes left in dumped cars before they are incinerated.
‘Arresting your way out’ or bringing about change
Earlier this week, Det Ch Supt Jason Weinstein, the head of Taskforce Magnus, said his investigators had compiled a list of about 150 lower-level organised crime figures.
Weinstein described the figures as the “labour force of organised crime” across the state, and said police had started dropping in on them.
Police will also be using youth liaison officers to work with community groups in Sydney’s western suburbs, including Polynesian church groups.
Weinstein said organised crime networks used “grooming methodology” towards youths within such community groups to “bring them into the next wave of their labour force”.
“It’s not just about arresting our way out of this,” Weinstein said on Tuesday.
“It’s about trying to get into the young kids, divert them away from being enticed into organised crime or the attraction to the money that may come from that.”
Nicholas Cowdery KC, the state’s former top prosecutor, says expecting police to end the bloodshed is a false hope, and real gains will only be made should governments explore meaningful drug reform. This is a view shared by two former senior law enforcement officials.
“Governments think they will be seen by their electors as being soft on crime,” Cowdery says.
“There could be nothing further from the truth: if there is legalisation or decriminalisation of these drugs, they’re making things very hard for criminals.”
