Scattered (10 page)

By January 2001, Adelaide police said the street scene was fully penetrated by ice. Dr Rachel Humeniuk, a senior researcher with the Drug and Alcohol Services Council, said ice was more popular in South Australia, relative to opiates, cocaine and hallucinogens, than in the eastern states. She noted that the purity was increasing and the price was falling faster in South Australia than elsewhere. Later that year, statistics showed that hospital admissions for amphetamine psychoses had risen in South Australia from 10 to 25 a month. Busts of methamphetamine laboratories shot up from one every two weeks to one every five days, with police predicting further increases.

Meanwhile, Queensland would soon be staking its claim as the nation's ‘ice capital' (a declaration that would actually be made by the
Courier-Mail
newspaper in 2005). As early as 1995, a Gympie man had been arrested after finding a way to accelerate the amphetamine-making process fourfold, using methyl alcohol or acetone and other solvents, including hydrochloric and other acids, iodine and mineral spirits. Dale Francis Drake was one of the first Australian cooks to show how easily the process could be replicated. Queensland Health forensic chemist Peter Vallely (now an adviser to the UN's International Narcotics Board) would say that Dale Francis Drake revolutionised the economics of local methamphetamine production: ‘Before that, criminal elements used cooks and they were looked after as a bit of a prize, but then they were suddenly growing like money trees.'

Drake's laboratory was one of only twelve to be uncovered by police in 1995. Since then, busts of clandestine laboratories, or ‘clan labs' as police called them, had surged in the Sunshine State. By 1998–99, there were 83 lab busts. In 1999–2000 there were 70, and in 2000–2001 there were 138.

In Queensland, though, compared with the other states, the many lab busts were yielding low weights of methamphetamine. That is, Queensland might not really have been the meth capital of the country, but it was certainly the capital of the mini-lab. Cook-ups occurred in boats, motel rooms and car boots. Police couldn't explain why Queensland had this particular characteristic. But it had been around for a while. Back in 1996, Paul Bennett had seen an explosion in the number of small labs, very possibly as a flow-on from Dale Francis Drake.

‘Master cooks were soon in demand because they knew how to extract the maximum amount of pure methamphetamine from these medicines, and were “persuaded” by organised crime groups to cook for them alone.

‘I know a guy who did a runner into the Glass House Mountains north of Brisbane. Some of these bunny backyard cooks had as much know-how and compassion for mankind as Iraq's Chemical Ali, and got it majorly wrong. Not only did they make some toxic shit by using the incorrect ingredients and recipes, but also blew themselves up in the process. When going through certain stages of the cooking or methamphetamine process, buffer substances need to be removed to get the ephedrine. This process involves adding toxic chemicals such as acetone, methanol, ether, different acids, cleaning agents, iodine, red phosphorus, etc. Because some of these cooks had inadequate skills or ingredients or exhaust systems, gases would mix, or envelop a spark, and then KA-BOOM!'

Bennett says that through some ‘working girl' friends of his, he found his ‘own cook. It was someone you'd really want to hang onto.'

One of the reasons for trusting ‘your' cook, he says, was the variation in the products that came out from unknown labs.

‘For a few months there was a batch of pure going around that had many of the big users hallucinating. I was used to seeing opaque-coloured crystals, but now some pinkish and aqua-coloured crystals were rocking up. This batch I'm talking about was a dark orange-red in colour, thick and gooey like tar. (I now know it hadn't been washed properly, a greed for money buzz.) It was best kept under refrigeration . . . because it would start melting, especially in the high temperatures of a Gold Coast summer. Users imagined bugs crawling all over and inside their bodies, inflicting a burning itch. Some of them scratched big sores in themselves. Some tried to burn the bugs off using cigarette lighters. One guy who was off his face poured lighter fluid over himself, then his mate, also under the influence, set him alight . . .'

Dr Michael Dawson, used regularly as an expert witness in methamphetamine court cases, says the biggest downfall for ‘master-cooks' is not incompetence but ego.

‘I was involved in a case which seemed to be going well for the defence until the alleged cook's ego got the better of him,' Dr Dawson says. ‘He was denying it, but then he had to show me, as a chemist, how good he was. It turned out he was so proud of his work, he'd kept records of how he'd made it. Why would you keep records of illegal activity? Only if you're a complete smart-arse.'

Whatever the reason for Queensland's reputation as a cook-up capital, the consequences were extreme. In 2002 the Queensland Premier, Peter Beattie, said that recreational drug users, particularly young men on amphetamines, had contributed to a 400 per cent increase in the number of people avoiding trial due to mental illness. Bob Aldred, the chief executive of the Queensland Alcohol and Drug Foundation, would say in 2005 that: ‘If I had to make the awful choice I would prefer my son or daughter to be on heroin rather than amphetamines. Although heroin has the chance of mortality, you can usually keep them alive until you get them off the heroin. With amphetamines your psychosis can become a chronic psychosis. Then you have a lifetime illness and that person is going to be a major problem for the rest of their lives.'

Aldred said some parents would score the drug for their child rather than let them wander the streets. ‘You see a lot in this game but when a parent phones I just go to water,' he said.

At the same time, Jane Fischer, a researcher from the Queensland Alcohol and Drug Research and Education Centre at Queensland University, said an unprecedented 28 per cent of ecstasy users were smoking ice as well, even when they didn't name ice as their drug of first choice.

‘That suggests that methamphetamine use in Queensland is driven by availability,' she said. In other words, all those little meth labs in Queensland—hundreds more than were being detected—were having an impact on the habits of people who wouldn't ordinarily take the drug. Supply-side economics were at work. Here was proof that if one drug was cheaper, more abundant and easier to score than other drugs, then users would switch rather than take nothing. Unable to obtain heroin, a smackie wouldn't just go home and watch TV and have a quiet night; he or she would buy methamphetamine instead.

Queensland law enforcement officials weren't going to ignore ice. Queensland, after all, had always had a schizophrenic relationship with illicit drugs: under National Party Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen, Queensland was simultaneously the place where the most marijuana was grown and sold, where police were believed to be most corrupted by drug money, and where the criminal penalties were the most draconian. In 2001, Tim Carmody, the Queensland Crime Commissioner, successfully lobbied the state government to raise the maximum jail term for amphetamine trafficking from 20 to 25 years. Paul de Jersey, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, called for amphetamines to be reclassified as Schedule I drugs, alongside what he called the ‘undoubtedly demonic' heroin, cocaine and LSD. The Chief Judge Administrator, Justice Martin Moynihan, said the rise of amphetamine-related crime in Queensland was ‘horrifying' him.

‘I have the distinct impression that cannabis is being used less as a first drug of choice in favour of methamphetamines and heroin,' he said. ‘And if this is true, we're not going anywhere near winning the war against drugs.'

It was in Victoria, however, that the most sensational stories about ice were hitting the news.

Senior Constable Barry Hills, of the Victorian elite detective squad, spent the winter of 2001 with arguably the state's worst job. In Ballarat South, a cold part of a cold state, Hills was spending four to five hours a night in a sleeping bag in long, wet grass overlooking the home of a 36-year-old single mother, Jayne Rawlings. Whenever someone came or went—which happened frequently—Hills would photograph them.

Rawlings was under surveillance as part of Operation Sally-port, a Victorian police sting that was to bust the state's biggest known crystal meth operation. At the Ballarat station, detectives were amassing information on dozens of people, known as ‘primary targets', ‘secondary targets' and ‘suppliers'.

Rawlings had been a primary target for some time, even though she had no criminal record. In 1999, she had begun using ice and soon became addicted. By 2001 she was using a gram a day. Rawlings had been a heroin user but the Ballarat trade in the narcotic had been cut off by the same detectives in 1999, when Operation Rickard had snared the prize scalp of Dragan Gnjatovic, 35, known as ‘Bill from Ballarat'. Gnjatovic had headed a syndicate that bought heroin in Deer Park, in Melbourne's western suburbs, and transported it to Ballarat. Several overdoses drew attention to the heroin glut, and Operation Rickard monitored Gnjatovic's phone calls for 42 days. In late 1999 police had enough evidence to pounce, and Bill from Ballarat went down for five years. Eight other members of the syndicate also went to jail.

Just as it did elsewhere in Australia, ice slipped neatly into the hole left by heroin. Bill might have left Ballarat, but injecting drug users like Jayne Rawlings were still ready to part with their scant cash for whatever was on the market. She came to the notice of Ballarat police in 2001, and Operation Sallyport detectives obtained a Supreme Court warrant to tape what amounted to around 12 000 phone calls in the ensuing months.

On 6 August 2001, detectives were able to fix a pattern on Rawlings's habit. Every day she would order ice by phone or text message from two Filipino men. She paid for it with cash deposits into their TAB accounts, then drove to Melbourne to collect it. In the two months during which Constable Hills was lying in the long grass near her house, Rawlings made 60 trips to Melbourne and back, bringing to Ballarat around 400 one-gram deals of ice, selling them for around $350 each. Once they'd reached an evidentiary threshold, Victorian police released Constable Hills from his chilly vigil and arrested Rawlings. Caught, she saved police the forensic nightmare of bringing thousands of phone intercepts to court, and pleaded guilty.

Others accused of ice-related crimes were not so compliant. Mohammed Kerbatieh was, by 2001, exactly the kind of person the detectives of Operation Sallyport were endeavouring to keep ice away from.

Upon his release from a Queensland jail in 2000, Kerbatieh had moved to Victoria. He was introduced to crystal methamphetamine and, throwing away all of the good resolutions he had made in prison, he became a regular user. His hot-headed tendencies worsened immediately and dramatically. Ice, his lawyer would later tell a court, ‘took away his sense of feeling and conscience'.

Kerbatieh smoked methamphetamine on the night of 23 September 2001. He was a big shot, a single man with some cash and charisma—at least in his own mind. He went for a late-night walk around Coburg, where he lived. Some time after midnight, he approached two teenage girls walking home from Coburg train station. He began big-noting himself, saying he was a drug dealer and asking if they'd like anything. The girls said no. He persuaded one of them, a fifteen-year-old known in the courts as ‘C', to walk with him to Moreland train station, where he said he had to drop off some drugs.

As they walked, he asked her if she ever took drugs and if she was a virgin. He grabbed her and kissed her on the mouth, then asked her if she wanted him to be her boyfriend. C, terrified, said she already had a boyfriend. Kerbatieh said she needn't panic, because he had a gun on him and ‘nobody will hurt you'.

Kerbatieh told C that he needed to phone a friend. Too scared to run away, she stood by while he pretended to make a call on his mobile phone. After the fake conversation, Kerbatieh told C that the drop-off had been changed to the parklands near the closed-down Coburg High School.

When they got there, he told her to sit on his jacket. As she sat, he pinned her to the ground and said, ‘I'm your worst nightmare.' He said he would kill her if she didn't do what he wanted.

C began to cry, and wet her pants. She tried to yell out, but Kerbatieh pulled her skivvy over her mouth and slapped her on the face, lying on top of her, grabbing and switching off her mobile phone. He proceeded to rape her with his fingers and his penis—C could not be sure how many times he penetrated her—and then forced her to touch his testicles.

‘Now you have to say this,' he said. ‘Listen. Say, “I love you, Sam, I want to have sex with you”.'

C, shaking with fear, did what he wanted.

‘Now say, “I am a whore”.'

Kerbatieh masturbated throughout, finally forcing her to tongue-kiss him and pose for him ‘doggy style'. As he ejaculated, he instructed her to ‘look at me come'.

Kerbatieh dressed himself. As he got ready to stroll off into the night, he told C that he would kill her if she reported the incident.

She managed to find a taxi home. Shortly afterwards, she went to a police station, where a medical examination showed clear evidence that she had been assaulted.

Three nights later, again shortly after midnight, another fifteen-year-old girl, ‘S', was at a pool hall in Fawkner with some friends. Kerbatieh hovered near the group. When S's friends left, he moved in and chatted her up, saying he was a drug dealer and inviting her to come and help him finish off a deal. S refused, saying she was fifteen and didn't take drugs. Kerbatieh changed tack, saying he had to meet a girl at a nearby train station—apparently the girl was in trouble after arguing with her boyfriend.

As lame as his story sounds, S agreed to go with him. He was brimming with self-confidence. He seemed like an important kind of guy, and something about him warned her not to say no to him.