Firebombs, casual labour and encrypted apps: The terrifying efficiency of Big Crime

Organised crime is the underbelly of organised business that uses the same principles to succeed. Find a market, dominate the market, then find new markets.

The difference is that legitimate businesses don’t firebomb their opposition or abduct reluctant customers until they see the error of their ways.

Many violent crimes are not reported and police regularly deal with abductions where no one is prepared to talk.

One bikie-related target was found in hospital after he went missing. He was apparently suffering from a severe bout of amnesia as he had no idea how he got there or the circumstances which left him minus a couple of toes.

As Big Crime is Big Business, Naked City is releasing the Australian Organised Crime end of financial year report. And business is booming.

Gangsters are not burdened with usual business expenses. They don’t own offices, don’t indulge in payroll tax, GST, advertising campaigns or staff Christmas parties. HR is a Heroin Rip-Off, while multiskilling requires being able to drive a stolen car while throwing a Molotov cocktail at a cocktail bar. The redundancy program involves a bullet in the back of the head.

Crime bosses, like multinationals, know the advantage of working offshore, which is why many reside in the Middle East, using encrypted apps to recruit willing teenagers to firebomb businesses and abduct competition.

As a courier driver takes pictures to prove parcel delivery, junior foot-soldiers must film their crime to be paid. Borrowing from the McDonald’s model, crooks use young, casual (and cheap) employees for hands-on work.

Gangsters know their business model is transferable, and it is wise to invest in multiple markets.

Illicit drugs is the river of gold because Australians can’t get enough of stuff like cocaine and are usually prepared to pay through the nose to put it up their noses.

World production is at record rates and where a seizure of kilos once made headlines we now talk in tonnes.

It arrives on commercial ships, containers and ocean-going yachts. Staging points include poorly patrolled Pacific nations where it is picked up in purpose-built submarines.

Amphetamine-based drugs, originally expected to be shipped into Australia, have seeped out into the local Fijian community resulting in an HIV epidemic due to needle sharing.

Police say the wholesale cocaine price has plunged from $350,000 a kilo to as low as $100,000 and while the retail price still remains around $350 a gram it is expected to drop, making it more available to potential users.

In his book, Drug Traffic – Narcotics and Organised Crime in Australia, Dr Alfred McCoy wrote: “Australia has had a demonstrated capacity for consuming vast quantities of drugs of all kinds, both legal and illegal drugs ... Sydney and Melbourne sustained a substantial traffic in illicit narcotics during the 1920s and during the 1930s Australia enjoyed the dubious distinction of being the heaviest per-capita consumer of heroin and cocaine in the English-speaking world.

‘A survey of Australia’s problem over a century leads to the conclusion that any drug, legal or illicit, will find a clientele.’

“ … A survey of Australia’s problem over a century leads to the conclusion that any drug, legal or illicit, which is on the market, will find a clientele.”

The crooks moved into illicit tobacco – a market created by a massive government excise supposedly designed to reduce smoking but simply a revenue grab.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics reports that in 2025, illicit tobacco made up 80 per cent of nicotine consumption. Cheaper prices have increased demand with the ABS stating nicotine use jumped by almost 40 per cent from 2017 to 2025, with most of the increase occurring since 2021.

Legitimate tobacconists are making staff redundant and billion-dollar cigarette companies are threatening to abandon Australia.

Think about this for a moment. Organised crime will have forced multinational outfits to surrender a lucrative field. This is classic cartel stuff – saturate a region with cheap products until you are the only one left. And this is only the beginning.

The main gang, run by the mysterious Kaz Hamad, who is presently incarcerated in Iraq, have flooded the market and use arson as a weapon to keep the shop owners in line.

In the next move to dominate – legal shops are being firebombed with a message, pay protection, stock our product or shutdown.

The state government talks a tough game on illicit tobacco but talk – like Hamad’s illegal cigarettes – is cheap.

In 2017, there were 200 such shops in Victoria and now there are 1400.

The government says the tobacco cops have cancelled 13 retail tobacco licences, failing to add the overwhelming majority of illicit shops are unlicensed. Not one of those have been closed.

Hamad outsourced the December 2024 firebombing of a Melbourne synagogue, an act of terrorism motivated not by ideology but profit.

The business model of fires, threats and disruption has moved into nightclubs, restaurants, bars, luxury car yards and gyms. Today a bomb-Alaska in an icecream shop involves not sorbet and meringue but a jerrycan and a wick.

Excise on spirits has opened a grey market with the ATO finding an excise hole tax of $767 million, equivalent to 19 million bottles of vodka.

And no one speaks of organised-crime-controlled Thai massage shops infecting every suburban shopping strip, providing happy endings for everyone except the oppressed workers.

Serious crooks live off opportunities. To recover debts through the courts is lengthy and expensive. It is easier to send bikies in their gang colours to request the disputed funds – and if there is an unexplained fire ... well, you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette.

None of this should come as a surprise as we were warned more than 60 years ago where we were heading.

During the market murders involving the Italian organised crime group, the Honoured Society, the state government ordered a review by US Mafia-buster John T. Cusack. In his report dated August 11, 1964, he wrote that, if left unchecked, organised crime would use “large cash reserves and strong-arm tactics” to create monopolies in “labour racketeering, alcohol distribution, nightclubs and taverns” and “building and road construction companies”.

He recommended establishing an extortion squad, to target known criminals who used intimidation to take influential positions in business (does this sound familiar?) and a criminal intelligence division to get in front of the game.

He wrote, “A program of developing and utilising criminals and legitimate informants must be pursued,” adding, “an undercover group of trained police officers should be maintained to penetrate organised crime groups”.

The infiltration of the Big Build by crooks may well be Victoria’s largest political scandal and yet calls for a royal commission have been rebutted on laughable grounds.

When barrister Nicola Gobbo was disclosed as a police double agent the government lost its marbles, its marble bag and the marble ring. It formed a Royal Commission into the Management of Police Informants that cost $100 million and charged no one.

But in the botched Big Build where drug traffickers find it more lucrative to work as traffic controllers, Al Capone is a Stop/Go, or I’ll Kill You Warden, and the Kray brothers are employed as human resource officers, there is apparently no need for a royal commission.

Premier Jacinta Allan wrote in The Age that such commissions rarely get to the baddies. “If the goal is another report, another royal commission will deliver one.” So what was the Gobbo commission all about?

The golden rule in politics is never start a royal commission unless you know what the findings will be. In the Big Build the rule is don’t start a royal commission because you know how ugly the findings will be.

Premier Allan, says people with information should go to the police. The police say many of those with information are too frightened to come forward because they fear they will be targeted.

Why is it that reporters such as our Nick McKenzie get more leaks than a hot mineral spring? Because they offer sources anonymity.

The Gobbo commission cut the legs off police using its greatest weapon – human sources because snitches provide the inside story.

To avoid another Gobbo saga police now have to sign up informers telling them their identity may be disclosed.

Before the CFMEU was the Builders’ Labourers Federation that used corruption and intimidation to receive kickbacks from builders and developers to ensure trouble-free sites.

In a 1981 police investigation that exposed the rorts, resulting in a royal commission, Detective Inspector Rick Murphy wrote: “No signed statements supporting the allegations have been obtained. All interviews have been conducted on an informal basis with the understanding that the information will remain confidential.”

Post Gobbo that information would not have been obtained.

Then there are the new disclosure laws. Police must provide everything, relevant and irrelevant, to the defence. This has doubled the time it takes to provide a brief of evidence, blowing out court dates and increasing the number of those charged who will be granted bail due to hearing delays.

Cases are being abandoned because secret sources of information would be exposed in open court.

So which is the more heinous crime? Using Gobbo to tell tales or spending billions of taxpayers’ money to feather the golden nests of organised crime?