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  At one point Stephens was told that money spent on his protection would be deducted from any final payment but the police department will not take into account that he was partially responsible for recovering far more than the $500,000 he claims he was promised.

  Assets recovered from Operation Phalanx include the $371,500 cash, a large country property, several vehicles, $50,000 in toys and $30,000 in clothes. He even handed over cash provided by Higgs to buy chemicals.

  Higgs and several of the main players in the syndicate pleaded guilty, largely because they knew that Stephens was prepared to give evidence. Lawyers involved in the case said the guilty pleas saved millions that would have been spent in protracted trials.

  The irony is that the more effective the police operation is, the more expensive it becomes. If Higgs had not been successfully targeted by the drug squad then the force would not have to find the money to protect and pay for E2/92. While the court system was able to save millions because of the guilty pleas, the police still get left with the bills.

  Serving police would be disciplined if they were to express their frustration over the treatment of their star witness, but ex-detectives are not forced to remain silent.

  ‘I am disgusted with what they have done to him,’ Ian Tolson said.

  ‘He has been treated as if he was expendable. He put it on the line on a daily basis. He was in daily contact with the drug squad for more than three years. As far as I am concerned he was an unpaid employee of the police department and they have a duty to him and his family.’

  Sharon Stone resigned from the force in August, 1998, largely because she was disillusioned with a department she felt had failed to be just to a man who had done more than anyone could reasonably ask.

  They have reneged on a moral obligation. They have used him up. I feel there is some personal jealousy involved. At least one senior officer has said he would end up getting more than he (the senior officer) gets paid.’

  ‘If he hadn’t given evidence for seven weeks at the committal there would have been a contested trial which would have cost a fortune. They won’t take that into account.

  ‘What they have done is just unfair and they can’t or won’t see that.’

  The former Premier, Jeff Kennett, promised to investigate the case but lost government before he received answers from senior police. Senior ministers in the Bracks government were also aware of the case. But no-one has actually done anything.

  Stephens and his wife were in Melbourne for all of March 2000 – even though they were advised by fax by the witness security unit not to come.

  Senior protection police say they would prefer the couple remained out of the country for their own safety but, sick of waiting, the pair decided to stay until the deal was done.

  Stephens says negotiations were protracted and perverse. ‘Each time we got close they changed the offer. We had meeting after meeting. I want to settle this and get on with what is left of our lives.

  They sit in their offices playing with our futures. We are hanging by a thread. I just don’t know why it all went sour. I did what they asked and now I am treated like the enemy.’

  Stephens became so frustrated he talked of walking into a police station and trying to take hostages. He said he was promised $500,000, offered $400,000, then $350,000. He accepted in the end, he says, because he had no choice.

  It may seem like a big lump sum but, he says, he and his wife were earning more than $150,000 a year before he became a police witness. And Australian dollars shrink alarmingly in many other countries.

  He says members of the drug squad have attempted to help him, including one detective who has lent him $10,000 and later $5000 just to survive overseas.

  ‘The irony is that he has been investigated by his own department for lending me the money when I needed it, while the official channels have done nothing for us.’

  Throughout the world, police recognise there is only one way to judge the effectiveness of a drug operation. To check the price and purity of drugs on the street after a gang is smashed. When Higgs was operating, speed on the street was sold around five percent pure. After his arrest the purity dropped to between one and three percent, effectively halving supply.

  Police who know what really happened say Stephens is a hero who has done more than any other Australian citizen to destroy a major drug syndicate. They say he and his family were manipulated so he was forced to give evidence and then squeezed to save dollars because he was no longer of value.

  On 7 April, Julie and Ross Stephens flew out of Melbourne. They have lost their home, their country, their jobs, their future and their faith in the criminal justice system.

  The same day the Victoria Police released a statement on E2/92 in response to media inquiries. It said, in part:

  The Victoria Police Force has invested a substantial six-figure sum of money into protecting this witness, relocating his family overseas, supporting and caring for them for almost four years.

  The witness gave evidence that helped put behind bars some of the most notorious criminals in Victoria. Police did not force the witness to give evidence in this case.

  The force has absolute confidence in the effectiveness and integrity of its witness protection program and the way the person was protected throughout the case. The witness was not enticed to give evidence with any promise of a reward.

  ‘It is important to note that the witness has told police of the family’s total satisfaction with the operation of the Victoria Police witness protection unit.’

  Meanwhile, Higgs was in the medium security Fulham Prison near Sale – waiting for his release on 30 January, 2003.

  He has passed on a message through contacts to Stephens.

  ‘No hard feelings.’

  A confidential report into Higgs’s drug operation admits police need a ‘reliable informer’ to tackle the syndicate. Then along came E2/92.

  CHAPTER 10

  Men in Black Hats

  As Bui saw it he had no choice but to stay and be executed on the heroin charge. If he gave evidence about the syndicate in Australia it might save his life by keeping him in an Australian jail – but all his family in the United States would be murdered.

  AT 12.46am on 20 April, 1996, a United States citizen about to head overseas walked into the North America Shop, a duty free store at the Tom Bradley Terminal inside the frantically busy Los Angeles Airport.

  He picked up four cartons of Marlboro cigarettes and took $65 from his pocket to pay. He was lucky. Not only were the cigarettes much less than the retail price, but he was presented with two black baseball caps emblazoned with a red M on the front.

  It was part of a special promotion. From 1 June, 1995, and 30 June the following year one hundred and fifty thousand of the caps were produced for duty-free outlets within the United States and on its borders with Canada and Mexico.

  When he bought the cigarettes the traveller had to produce his boarding pass as confirmation. It showed he was heading to Hong Kong on Cathay Pacific flight 881 from Los Angeles. His allocated seat was 55B.

  The man, Nguyen Hoa Ngoc, was not alone. In 55A, the seat next to him, was Bui Quang Thuan, twenty-three, who was to continue on to Australia on family business. Bui’s elder brother, another United States citizen, had already flown from Hong Kong to Australia a week earlier.

  The brothers were on the way to Melbourne to kidnap and kill a man in Melbourne they had never met. It was nothing personal, just business.

  The elder brother, Bui Tai Huu, twenty-seven, was not worried if the kidnap plot turned sour. He was a cold-blooded international hitman with prior convictions in the United States for manslaughter, drive-by shootings, and other violent crimes in San Francisco. His bosses knew he could be trusted to follow orders without question. In an organisation that required specialists he had developed his own niche. He was the executioner.

  The Executioner had already visited Australia twice on business earlier in 1996. Both times he was
involved in moving hundreds of thousands of dollars of drug money to Hong Kong.

  He had a passport made out in a false name and in January had flown to Melbourne from Hong Kong, then travelled to Sydney, where he stayed for a week at the luxury Furama Hotel in Darling Harbour. At the busy ground floor reception desk he filled in his registration giving his address as Eastondale Avenue, Long Beach.

  A few days later he was to meet his syndicate boss, Truong Hong Phuc, who had flown in from Hong Kong. Together they were able to collect $365,000 cash in the next three weeks. A further $214,000 was also transferred to Hong Kong and US accounts controlled by the group – known as ‘The Brotherhood.’

  Police were to find that Truong went to a house in Sydney with a suitcase containing $250,000 in cash. A few days earlier he arrived with a plastic, Grace Brothers bag. It contained $50,000.

  TRADITIONAL Australian gangsters tend to be territorial. They may dominate a street, a suburb or even part of a city, but they rarely go beyond the borders where they were brought up. Some have become huge shoplifters in Europe or bar owners and drug dealers in Asia, but few have had the organisational skills or the contacts to control international syndicates.

  But there are networks in Australia that are part of crime conglomerates with branches around the world. Organisations that can develop a business strategy in London to target heroin addicts in Bourke Street or King’s Cross. Men who can decide from an office in Hong Kong to kidnap a man in suburban Melbourne because a woman who made a fortune in Russia would not launder the organisation’s drug funds.

  By contrast, policing is hampered by being geographically based. Local police worry about crime trends in their suburbs, while senior police remain concerned about state-wide problems. There are ten main law enforcement bodies in Australia, each with its own problems and priorities. Police officers have power only in their own jurisdiction – outside their own area they are just tourists.

  But an examination of The Brotherhood exposes classic organised crime aided by modern technology and also shows the problem that traditional policing has in combating international crime syndicates that ignore national boundaries.

  The size of The Brotherhood will never be known, nor whether Truong, forty-one, was its undisputed international leader. But what can be established is that virtually anywhere in the world where there was a Vietnamese community Truong, or ‘Brother Phuc’, as he was known, had real power. People did what he asked – almost without exception.

  When he was in Australia, he ran up a phone bill of $6000 in just four weeks. He made calls to Hong Kong, the United States, Iceland, Russia, England and Canada.

  Bui, the executioner with a huge tattoo of a dragon on his back, made calls to Britain, Hong Kong, Macau, Hawaii and Vietnam during the same time. For police, Brother Phuc was difficult to track. He would ‘ask’ Vietnamese people he knew to transfer money to accounts in Hong Kong – nearly always around $9000, just under the amount checked by law enforcement authorities. They would be paid $1000 for their trouble.

  He would give them money to buy mobile phones to be registered under their names. He would then take them so he could pass messages throughout the world without police knowing he was behind the calls.

  Brother Phuc ran his network from his small house in London although the drug syndicate operated out of an office in Hong Kong. His syndicate was alleged to be behind the massive importation of heroin into Australia, including a shipment worth $25 million smuggled in to Sydney in specially-designed metre-high pottery vases and a $4 million shipment inside Buddha statues and children’s clothing.

  Truong was small, polite and, in his own way, quite charming. He could afford to be pleasant because people seemed to always do what he wanted.

  On 9 March, 1996, Truong turned up at a twenty-first birthday party in the Sydney suburb of Belmore. He was introduced to a couple he had never met and was told they were going to Vietnam the next day. He peeled off $10,000 in $50 notes from a wad held together by rubber bands. He asked the couple to take the money to his mother who was on holiday in Vietnam from England. They agreed without hesitation.

  ‘Brother Phuc’ then peeled off another $100 note and gave it to the couple’s baby boy.

  THE small and elegant Ha Que Thi Mai is an international success story. A woman who runs and owns her own businesses around the world, she had made it big from her base in Russia where she was living with a former Soviet intelligence officer. In 1993 her son, Le Anh Tuan, migrated from Russia to Australia. Her Russion lover unravelled after the abduction and murder. His relationship with Ha broke down and when he was brought to Melbourne from Moscow for the committal hearing he was clearly mentally distressed. From the witness box of the Magistrate’s Court he gave the startling evidence that he was a Russian Tsar with the real name was ‘Prince Bigdash’. He said he spoke seven languages, had studied law and medicine and if anyone commented on the weather it was a KGB code to make him operational.

  He was excused from giving further evidence.

  Ha was an entrepreneur, an investment broker with a PhD in economics, and involved in the high fashion world. Independent police investigations have shown she would feature in any Australian rich list if her assets were publicly known.

  Brother Phuc would not have needed to see a balance sheet to know Ha was wealthy. She was to spend about a month in the Regent Hotel and another month at the Hyatt in 1996. Being rich was to become a fatal liability for her eldest son.

  The trouble was, an international businesswoman would be a handy ally for The Brotherhood. The theory being that she could move money out of the country, and drugs, in through her clothing business.

  Brother Phuc went to see Ha in the Regent Hotel on 16 March, 1996. He proposed a partnership to import clothing. He believed it would be an offer too good to refuse.

  At the meeting Brother Phuc said the real deal was to import drugs and Ha was later to tell police she refused the proposition immediately. He told her to think about it for a few days and not to dismiss it out of hand.

  At the meeting Truong made a cryptic and, ultimately, blood-chilling comment. He said that if Ha was difficult that the ‘consequences for her family would not be good.’

  For hundreds of years Asian organised crime groups have demanded compliance from others with a single threat: fail us and we will kidnap and kill your eldest child. It created fear in enemies and blood loyalty from subordinates who knew their-own families were not beyond reach.

  What was going through Truong’s mind as he boarded the Cathay Pacific flight CX 104 to Hong Kong three days after the meeting will never be known. He might have believed he could force a partnership on the rich businesswoman, or he might already have been considering extortion.

  Certainly, he already had details on Ha’s son, including his address in Glen Waverley and his movements in Melbourne.

  When Truong landed in Hong Kong he rang Ha for an answer. He didn’t like what he heard. Stung by the rebuff, he demanded $400,000 as compensation for her stubbornness.

  The threat didn’t go away. On 23 March Ha was visited again by a female associate of The Brotherhood, and told to pay the money. Five days later her son, Le, received a fax at his home for his mother from the ‘Happy Excel International’ in Hong Kong. It was an unlisted fax number but Brother Phuc had no problems obtaining it. The document contained details on how the money should be transferred in $100,000 lots to four accounts in the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank.

  On the same day a Melbourne man arrived at Tullamarine on a Qantas flight from Saigon. He would soon learn that he had been selected to be the driver of the kidnap team.

  Within a week police seized heroin valued at $3 million in Canberra. The package contained the address of the ‘Happy Excel International Limited.’

  By 10 April The Brotherhood was losing patience and the woman left a letter at the Regent for Ha. ‘Sister Mai. I went to your place and waited from 3.30 for a few hours and you have not returned yet. You hav
e told me to come to your place to pick up the money to give the other man but you did not phone me for the entire evening … I have wasted too much time. Whenever you return phone me immediately, I have no more time to wait for you.’

  Ha instructed her son to withdraw $20,000 to give to an agent for Brother Phuc. But it was like tossing a fish finger to a circling shark.

  THE KIDNAP victim, Le Anh Tuan, twenty-one, was born in Hanoi in 1977 and moved to Russia with his family after he finished primary school. He lived in a rented home in Moscow and, because his mother was already making money through her businesses, he was educated at home by a private tutor. He went to Moscow University to study linguistics before he decided to migrate to Australia.

  He married as a teenager and fathered a daughter but the relationship broke up by the time he was twenty. In early 1996 Le was unemployed but had plans to use some of his mother’s money to set up a clothing business. His girlfriend was expecting a baby boy when he was abducted. He was dead by the time the baby was born.

  Late in April a woman went to visit Le at his Glen Waverley home and asked him and his pregnant girlfriend to go to Hong Kong for a business deal, but his mother told him she feared it was a trap to abduct him. But The Brotherhod could reach out, virtually anywhere in the world. Later, Le found that a spare key he kept in a rice container had gone missing.

  It was never found.

  If Le feared he could be the target of a kidnap plot he did nothing to protect himself. If he had gone to the police at this time it might have been enough to frighten off the circling vultures, but by the time police were aware of what was happening, it was already too late.

  Around 11am on 29 April, Le went to his new house in Fiona Court to allow an electrician to install new light fittings. The tradesman didn’t turn up so Le went back to his Regal Court home to ring him. Just over an hour later a neighbour looked out his bedroom window to see two Asian men chasing a third down the street. A green car reversed up the street and the man was bundled into the boot before the car sped off.