Assistant Commissioner Bob Hill and Commander Mick Frewen are traditional cops battling non-traditional crime. They are proving that in law enforcement old dogs can learn new tricks.
Which is why they are overseeing the biggest shake-up in serious crime investigation in 20 years.
Assistant Commissioner Bob Hill.Credit:Joe Armao
If what they are doing had been proposed five years ago, it would have been the plot for a Marvel superhero comic.
Hill makes it clear the old ways of “a hunch, then a crunch followed by a lunch” are well and truly over.
It is pointless to run around kicking down doors when crimes are planned from overseas safe-houses, instructions issued through encrypted devices and the proceeds laundered via fake identities purchased on the Dark Web.
Hill and Frewen have overseen a “root and branch” examination of how Victoria’s Crime Command works and are rolling out a new strategy, based more on software than hard interrogations.
The most significant change relates to cyber-crime. Crooks no longer need to meet face to face, deals can be done without cash and state and international borders are about as relevant as a 30-year-old atlas.
This means some traditional crime squads have been closed or reduced, replaced by the Cyber Crime Division, the first of its kind in Australia. We now also have a Crypto Currency Unit, which sounds like something out of a Star Wars remake.
The international police sting operation Ironside monitored organised crime activities by intercepting encrypted messages through the An0m app.
It was a stunning success that left many police staggered at the size and sophistication of organised crime. Ironside involved 12,000 encrypted phones connected to 300 criminal syndicates in 100 countries, including 1100 phones in Australia.
Police used the An0m app to monitor criminals such as Hakan Ayik.Credit:Jo Gay
In three years, police trapped 27 million messages from crooks but say the An0m app was only one of many and related to just 5 per cent of organised crime communications.
“You can order your drugs from the couch for contactless delivery. It can be delivered by courier services, Uber or Australia Post. Their systems are as effective as Bunnings and Harvey Norman. Soon they will have drone deliveries, as we have already seen in prisons,” says Frewen.
“Increasingly we are working in a virtual world. You can’t touch a Bitcoin.
“Ironside showed organised crime figures that have relocated overseas are still pulling the levers locally through encrypted communications. We need to get ahead of the curve.”
An0m shows the movie model of competing crime gangs fighting to control drug and vice markets is false. “Rivals can be in conflict at one point then work together. They can leverage against each other’s strengths and weaknesses,” Frewen says.
When Tony Mokbel imported 550 kilos of ephedrine he didn’t keep the lot but offered other drug dealers barrels of the stuff at the perfectly reasonable price of $500,000.
Ethnically-based crime gangs will deal with gangs from different cultural backgrounds on the basis that money speaks all languages. A Muslim crew will work with an Italian Catholic gang moving drugs smuggled from the wharves by Australian-born dockworkers produced in a factory in Communist China.
Not only do police need to change the way they enforce the law, governments need to review the statute book itself. The Victoria Crimes Act came into existence in 1958, designed to deal with offences committed within the state, where there is a crime scene and a local victim.
Hill says there are two types of cyber crime – computer-enhanced methods to commit traditional crimes and a second class of new offences that have been created within the cyber world.
Take the worst crime on the books: murder. The Ironside investigation intercepted encrypted messages from crime bosses living overseas ordering Melbourne hit teams to kill rivals. In several cases police grabbed the would-be killers before the attack. “Ironside saved lives,” says Hill.
Police have 47 different proposals before the government to adapt and introduce laws for the new world.
First there is the multibillion-dollar illegal industry of automated online scams that attempt to fool hundreds of thousands of people around the world every day to part with their banking details.
Hill says Australian police receive 164 complaints of cyber crimes every day, “or one every 10 minutes. And that will be under-reported. Many people don’t call the police.”
Take money laundering. The typical model was to roll up at a place such as a racetrack or casino with a suitcase full of illicit cash and then wash it through a series of bets. Now it can be done without leaving your home.
On the Dark Web criminals can purchase the identities of former foreign students who still have bank accounts in Australia. Using money mules, money can be deposited in ATMs then withdrawn anywhere in the world. “The extent of money laundering is staggering,” adds Hill. Police in Melbourne recently arrested four men and a woman in connection with a syndicate that allegedly moved $62 million using this method.
He says the new strategy is to be flexible in both actions and thinking, with a new strategy division instructed to look for different problems.
This includes trying to turn poachers into gamekeepers. “We are thinking of running Hackathons,” says Frewen, the aim being to hire the best hackers to defend systems against local and international cyber extortionists.
Police want the legislative power and the expertise to take on cyber crooks in their own space by creating undercover profiles, taking over accounts and freezing funds.
The old lesson at Detective Training School that every contact leaves a trace is more apt now than ever, but instead of a fingerprint on a doorknob it is likely to be a digital footprint on a computer.
The flexibility includes the capacity to quickly set up single-purpose taskforces to target an urgent crime crisis, such as Operation Lipton, which involved 50 police investigating the disappearance and murder of Adelaide concreter Kerry Giakoumis, a young man who drove to Melbourne to help renovate the Thomastown Hells Angels clubhouse in Lipton Drive.
Missing Adelaide man Kerry Giakoumis. Credit:Victoria Police
He was last seen on June 10 last year. “We believe we now know who did it, and now it is a matter of collecting admissible evidence to lay charges,” says Hill.
As crooks no longer work within borders – “the Murray River doesn’t exist”, says Frewen – Victoria Police now work joint operations with Australian Federal Police and the Australian Crime Intelligence Commission.
Part of the review on how serious crime is investigated in Victoria resulted in establishing the Illicit Firearms Squad. “This is about supply reduction. We work upstream of the crime to try and find where the firearm used in the crime originally came from,” Hill says.
Since the 1996 Port Arthur Massacre nearly 750,000 guns have been handed in during amnesties around Australia.
In Victoria 800 have been handed in during the first three months of the latest amnesty and in the last year police have found 770 illicit firearms and hundreds of registered guns that have been seized as part of criminal investigations, including family violence.
One newish law has been a game changer – Firearms Prohibition Orders – with more than 1000 issued on serious crooks. The powerful law allows police to search associates, safe houses, cars and bikie clubhouses looking for guns.
Assistant Commissioner Bob Hill, Detective Superintendent Peter Brigham (middle) and Detective Inspector Mick Daly with a cache of seized firearmsCredit:Simon Schluter
The next step being seriously considered by the state government, following a review by a panel of former judges, is powerful criminal association rules that would include banning bikies from wearing outlaw colours in public.
In 2015 Victoria introduced unlawful association laws, bragging: “These new laws will ensure our state is well-prepared to deal with the forms of organised crime facing us.”
But there were so many exceptions – such as meeting for family, business, political, industrial and educational reasons – that not one such order has ever been issued.
Crime investigators will continue to rely on science, with the Forensic Science Services Department now the biggest in the Southern Hemisphere.
Recently, some knucklehead in Docklands let loose with a high-powered rifle, with a bullet discovered embedded in a building wall near police headquarters. Using the bullet’s entry point they were able to reverse the trajectory, finding the exact apartment from which the shot was allegedly fired.
Advances in DNA have allowed police to solve a series of cold case murders and sex crimes, with more detectives now assigned to the Sex Crimes Cold Case Unit to examine the Freezer Files – thousands of exhibits frozen from crimes in the 1980s that may provide DNA matches to offenders.
The Crime Department, like every area of policing, has been stretched by COVID, with detectives who normally only form a line at a bar after lunch joining uniform and specialist police at ugly demonstrations.
Hill says police have been talking to counterparts in Scotland, England and continental Europe to prepare for the crime trends when Victoria opens up. They expect a spike in alcohol-fuelled violence, drug-related crime, armed robberies and shootings. With people leaving home, house burglaries are likely to rise.
“Crooks who have been working from home will be back on the streets,” says Frewen. “There will be more contacts [between police and the public] and every contact is with someone potentially COVID-positive.”
Eight Echo bikie taskforce detectives were forced into 14 days’ isolation after arresting a COVID-positive suspect. As Frewen says: “Police will not be asking their partner ‘have you got your gun’ but ‘are you double vaccinated?’.”
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