Inside Cocaine Inc.

Published Jun 21, 2024, 6:00 PM

Investigative journalist Stephen Drill joins Andrew Rule to outline his new podcast series examining the tangled web of the international drug trade.

Get more information about the investigation at: https://www.cocaineinc.com.au/

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It's the phenomenal wealth generated in places of phenomenal poverty leads to these grotesque situations where nothing's impossible, anything can be bought, anybody can be brought.

She expects him to say, oh, yeah, yeah, drugs bad, don't do it, and he's like, nah, I had a lot of fun.

What we've got now is a giant version of the American prohibition experiment of the nineteen twenties, which created the modern mafia. I'm Andrew rule is his love and crimes. Today we have the pleasure and the privilege of talking to my longtime colleague Stephen Drill. Stephen, I've been away researching various things out of the way places overseas, such as Albania.

It's a good place to go where there are.

Many large, shiny mercedes.

And very wealthy people there.

Yes, I would think so poverty cheek by jail with wealth.

What have you said previously? Behind every fortune is a crime?

I didn't make that up. That was somebody else's claims. Oh no, it's from literature. It has been said before, behind every great fortune, it's a crime. And I suspect that in some countries. You see that in every glossy hotel or every casino casino. I think so. I think that's true. But while I've been over there, you know, just basically hanging around and watching, You've been here busy doing stuff.

I've been chipping away for the last twelve months on a.

Podcast, chipping away for twelve months, and this podcast is about cocaine.

It is about cocaine. I've teamed up with two reporters from the Time, so the Times and the Sunday Times. They're very separate newspapers, even though they're in the same building on the same floor. It's a law in the UK that can't be edited by the same people. So Times in Sunday Times very pre eminent publications, and we've all worked together. We've gone to six countries, traveled fifty thousand kilometers to look at the aids of the cocaine trade. We've gone from Colombia where it's grown, all the way over to England where we've spoken to people who've been caught in the crossfire, and we've gone to Jubai, and then we've actually ended up right back here in Australia to where the money is allegedly launded.

And even on a global scale. Australia's part in this is significant? Is that true?

Australia's part is extremely significant in this, Andrew.

You're not just exaggerating relevant, No, I'm not.

No, No, actually no, I genuinely am not. Like, it's surprising how important Australia has become in the global cocaine trade. And that's because of one thing.

We pay too much for it, pay way too much over it.

And not only do we pay too much for it, we love paying too much for it. People here are like, you know what, I've got some coke. I've got a bag of coke on. I'm posh because I can afford to go and spend three hundred dollars to put this stuff up my nose. Okay, So excellent marketing it is. Isn't it to waste money? I can afford to waste money. It's it's it's like buying a Lamborghini.

Or lighting your cigar with a one hundred dollar note.

Yeah, pretty much, you know, or destroying your life. And it's funny. Everyone I talked to who's sort of my age about this, I've done this podcast and cocaine, they're like they have a story about a bloke who's blown up his marriage because he's done too much cocaine.

Everyone knows somebody.

Everyone knows somebody. I was in the I was in the Quantus lounge out the other day because I was coming back from Sydney and I just randomly got talking to this bloke.

And Sydney's the place to hear those stories.

Sydney is, but it's in Melbourne.

Of course it is. But I've got a question where someone has done a very stupid thing. I'd say a Christmas party or some event where they've played up and out of character. You'd think done something really rash and silly and sexist and predatory. But how do you think sometimes it's because they're under the influence.

Of the Colombian marching powder.

Think, Yeah, I'm just asking.

I would think that there's two parts to that question. One is they're stupid and they should have done it. But also, if you're my age, if you've had too many beers, you kind of just fall asleep, Whereas if you're still up and about in a position where you can be a bit stupid and a bit predatory, or then you probably may have had some chemical assistance as well.

I see I've resigned to spend more time with my family because there was a sadness at the Christmas party or whatever that could be it.

There's lots of potential reasons, but theoretically it might be theoretically a reason why some blokes who should know better, and sadly it's usually blokes get caught in those situations they do.

Now, tell me what you've found out about the cocaine trade. That is going to shock and amaze me and shock and amaze our listeners.

What we've done in the podcast is really look at the business of cocaine, so we're trying to not so much have a view of whether it's right or wrong. We're not saying legalize it, We're not saying, you know, ban it. We're just wondering did the war on drugs kind of work? And when you start looking at the business side of things, you realize it's going to be a very difficult thing for anyone to stop. Because the markup from Colombia to here in Australia, it's a sixty four million percent markup.

Sixty four million percent markt at the base point.

When it's a coca leaf in Colombia, it's worth about point zero zero zero nine of a cent here, that's for a gram. Here in Australia, you can pay up to five hundred dollars for a gramm of cocaine depending on the purity. And the purity in Australia on the streets it ranges from twenty two percent pure cocaine in the gram you're getting to sixty percent and that's about it. So it's been cut with all sorts of random stuff like love amasole, which is a worm killer in chickens and cattle, but it looks like cocaine. So it's popular as a cutting agent, but.

Not something I'd want to put into my body.

No, But when you're trying to be posh and thinking you're fantastic and you're showing off to your friends about how much money you have because you can go and buy cocaine, well perhaps you don't care.

Interesting the history of it. It's not as new drug as a lot of us imagine, although it's you know, its popularity in the last twenty five years has exploded, I guess. But I can recall as a very young reporter talking to old time crooks. So I'm talking about the nineteen eighties talking to people who were around during World War Two and these old guys that had spent you know, they run robbers and all the rest of it. Very old time Ozzie crooks. And they talked about back in the old days in the forties and fifties grouse snow ten bobbago.

Or yeah, yeah, So we're still in Australia.

It was the forties. The crooks, crooks in those days call it snow and they used to use it. And I think it goes all the way back to World War One, when World War One veterans returned from the trenches of Europe with cocaine habits. It had been given to them to keep going, keep them awake, keep them up, keep them brave, painkiller whatever. And so there were men returning in nineteen ninety nineteen twenty with cocaine habits.

That's a problem.

And if one of the earliest references you'll see in Australia is to people being charged over it in around nineteen twenty, amazing a one hundred years ago has been around for a while.

I mean people in Colombia have been eating the coca leaves just for thousands of years. To sort of as an appetite supressant and for medicinal purposes. I meant, but having one or two coca leaves is different to the supercharged stuff today. But it's interesting to know that it is going been there for a while. I mean, Coca Cola itself was said to have had cocaine in it once. That's the sort of theory. And that was taken out and it wasn't. Sherlock Holmes and the snuff boxes, is that not cocaine?

Probably?

So, yeah, it's nothing new under the sun. But what is new is that the biking gangs, the crime gangs, they've got so much better. And it's this thing on the desk. It's a mobile phone. Because twenty years ago in Colombia, if you wanted to try and move a quilo of cocaine, how do you do that? How do you talk to someone in Australia about that? But now you're not moving a kilo, you're moving a ton, you're moving one hundred tons and you want to talk to someone in Australia, Well you've got a message app, you can do it.

Ok. How are the big operators moving the stuff? I mean obviously ships, but yeah, bits and pieces, so there's some aeroplanes.

Well, the Americans spending a lot of money to support the Columbian police to try and stop cocaine coming into America. It's a tough job, but one thing in the advantage for the Americans, unlike Mexico, the land the geography between Colombia and Mexico that you can't drive it. There's no way to get it through. You have to get the stuff out through the water. There's no roads between Columbia and Mexico that the mountains are too high, so that gives a police a chance to stop it coming out on vessels from the north of Colombia and the Caribbean Sea. So pretty much it's as hard a border as you could possibly get. But what's happened with the cocaine trade is they've gone, well, we can't go over it, we can't go under we'll have to go through it. So they've gone over the hills into Brazil, and a lot of the cocaine now is going through that direction, and that's something they call the Southern Cone, which is a very boring way of saying that going through Argentina. So it's going down the Pirana and now forgive me if you've got some Spanish speakers listening if I've pronounced that incorrectly. But it goes out through the Piranha River, which is about four thousand miles, and that it goes into Uruguay and comes out through Argentina as well, So it's coming through every other possible which way. It's like putting a piece of wood in front tap while the water is just going to get around the piece of wood. And the difference is now, in twenty sixteen, we used to have aerial spraying crop spraying of cocaine plants in Columbia. Now that changed. The government said, look, we're worried about harming local people and giving them cancer because the chemicals aren't great, so let's stop it. That has meant that the amount of coca plants growing has at least doubled, if not trebled, since twenty sixteen. And also the FARC, which is FARC I'm not swearing on this podcast, is the revolutionary forces in Colombia did a peace deal with the Colombian government in about twenty fifteen twenty sixteen, and what that meant was they sort of stopped They called it narco terrorism. They stopped fighting with the Colombian government. But it's also meant there's no go areas in Colombia where the government troops just won't go. The fark soldiers actually controllers areas, which has meant, well, there's more chance of no one having eyes on those coca plants, and the crops have got bigger. But what it's also done is it's created a bit more of an open market because once the revolutionary forces stopped being so dominant and having to fight and having to sell the cocaine to fund their terrorism in Columbia, well, other jokers have gone into the trade. And your friends in Albania where you just went to, they managed to get some plane chickets to Bogata and they've set up shop there. They're going out and they're taking a lot of drugs through Ecuador as well. So there's a new smuggling route out through Ecuador, which previously was relatively stable. And last year we saw pictures on the television of armed gangs going into a live TV studio and shooting people live on air, and the president was assassinated.

Yes, it's the phenomenal wealth generated in places of phenomenal property leads to these grotesque situations where nothing's impossible, anything can be bought, anybody can be brought, Prostitution goes through the roof, everything goes.

Yeah. But and what I find frustrating is that the same people who will take their cocaine on the weekend, they'll sit there and brag about it. They show off to their friends, They'll be proud to pay three hundred dollars because they're so posh. Their choices are causing this violence. They are the demand that is causing the supply.

Very true. One often suspects that there's a bit of winking and nodding around the place that a lot of people who you know talk about cocaine being bad news and the way we are really but we're genuine in their private life. They're not nearly as critical I would some lawyers, judges, judges, Yeah, maybe some agents, oh, I think so real. Also, the drug dealers aren't stupid, they've gone where the cash is. And now sports people they there has been some reports in the paper about some professional sports people. They do get drug tested more often than the rest of the community. It's not fattening.

I don't know how true that is that I think people sometimes if they were super controlled, if they didn't drink alcohol with it, maybe it's not fattening, but I think a lot of people would get on the beers and then get on the gear.

It is the perfect jockey drug because jockeys cannot eat, you know, they're starving themselves for a living, and they would love to eat, and they'd love to drink and they can't, so they can't. They're not even drinking water. A lot of them are not even water. They're drinking tiny little bits of water. They ride dehydrated, which is why they're often you know, angry well and make mistakes. Yeah, yeah, they do. That's why sometimes you see mistakes made. And so it's an ideal drug for particularly jockeys for that. For that reason, maybe even let's say racing car drivers, small guys who've got to stay light. Money is not a real problem.

For them, but they could get away with it. And also cocaine does in th coome out of your system a little bit more quickly than most other drugs.

Yeah, so it suits some lifestyles. It sort of suits them as a substitute for the more conventional mind altering substances like be it one and someone.

And I also see all the stats now about kids aren't drinking as much, and that just means they're getting off their heads on other spect So I'm going to mate who works for a brewering company, is like, what's going on with these kids?

They're not drinking anymore, and.

It's because they're doing drugs. You know. I spoke to someone else who had young children and at a private school, and thirteen year olds are on all sorts of other substances, and it's only going to get more and more common. It becomes a really tough one. What do we do. Do we just throw our hands in the air and say that's it, we let all drugs through through the door.

Well, I don't know.

I'm not of that view because a the crime groups aren't going to just go, oh yeah, what we're Cocaine's legal. Now, I'm going to stop selling this and making you know, three hundred dollars a gram. I'll go onto something else. It's less profitable. I doubt that's going to happen. And if they do, they'll go onto something else like fentanyl, which is cheap to make and even more.

Deadly as yes, that's right, fental wick and stuff it's an interesting thing. Now you've told us the production's gone up, the prices are high at the same time, and this is forced out of South America along various routes. It finds its natural level, it finds its way to the surface, it gets it finds its sway to the markets.

So it also doesn't go directly from South America to Sydney. What will happen is it will go all over the place. It will pinball around the world in a way to try and evade authorities. Because if they see a ship coming straight from South America, from Ecuador or from Columbia, they're going to go, hang on, let's go and check this out. But say it's been to Canada. Say it's been to Hong Kong. So it's been to France, so it's been to China.

Well not as obvious.

It's not as obvious. And those ships, they can go from a beatersz quite easily, because that's how the global trade does work.

I mean, if it's the same ship, it's traceable, of course, but if it's offloading somewhere, then you put it on the one that originates in Canada, which it looks in an innocent origin port of origin. You need to get on the one that's the innocent, relatively innocent port of origin.

You've got someone on the inside. You know which containers are going to be checked exactly. Not because if we did that, if we su checked every single container that came into the ports of Sydney or Melbourne.

We'd find a lot of tobacco.

We would find a lot of tobacco. We would, but we'd never get our kids Christmas presents because they'd all be sitting on the dock.

Is that a bad thing? I kind of like Cama.

The kids toys are pretty cheap there, especially good for other children's birthday parties. So it just wouldn't work. When you look at the tobacco. They're finding ten million cigarettes a week in Melbourne alone. And I can go down to my local milk bar and I'm not saying where I live. I can go down to a milk bar which may be near my house or not, and they're behind the counter. They're everywhere.

Of course, yes, so we can't. And when governments produced figures health departments saying that smoking is almost extinct because no one's smoking anymore, because there's not much excise because they're not selling it. But the reality is there's plenty of people smoking, but they're all smoking the cheap stuff. The jop and the imputs well. It just shows you how deluded authorities can be, particularly if they want to be.

Fifty seven dollars for a pack of smokes. It's going to really encourage alternative markets.

I would have thought so. The great law of unexpected outcomes, you know, the unintended unintended consequences is far better phrase.

Speaking of unintended consequences. One of the problems with the drug trade is you may not even be a drug user, but it's not far from your door. And we spoke to Tim Edwards, whose daughter Ali, she was murdered outside a pub on Christmas Eve in the UK. She went outside for a cigarette and it's Christmas Eve in the UK. It's pretty cold. She's out there.

Having a drink.

And in the UK on Christmas Eve, if you're in your twenties, you're at the pub. It is one of the best nights of the year. Everyone's out and about. There was a young fellow there by the name of Connor Schapman. He's been found guilty, he's been in jailed for forty eight years for this. He turns up at that pub, the Wallersley Pub in the world and opens fire with a machine gun. Why did he do this Because somebody had wrapped up his mate the day before. Oh so he wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed. And because of that, our family's lost a loved one, twenty six year old girl who is no longer with us. And these are the things that we sort of forget about the drug trader, is that you can be a victim. Even there's two surfers in Perth a couple of weeks in Perth, boys in Mexico. In Mexico, they got murdered by people linked to the cartels because they were victims of a robbery and they tried to well we don't know exactly the circumstances, but they have been shot by people connected to the cartels.

Of course, terrible business.

There is real problems with the cocaine trade, and I think people probably forget, you know, their choices do have consequences, not just for them.

Now you've already released three episodes of this most excellent series. You've got a total of eight.

What is the fourth one fourth episode is called the pineapple Trader. It's about a beller called Pete Costa.

Yeah in the Netherlands. Sounds like a Dutch.

Name, yeah it is, but Pete is is pineapple in Dutch. So he was the pineapple guy from Costa Rica because he always kept going there and that became his nickname. But he was not just bringing pineapples back in the actually being containers. He was also bringing back cocaine. Was he He was making a fair bit of money about this, and he was he was kind of I like sort of oil or water. He just sort of slid through everywhere and no one seemed to notice him as he built his empire. But then he got a bit angry. Someone had ripped him off into property deal to the tune of about one hundred million dollars, and it started a bit of a dispute, and mister Costa then thought it was a good idea to set up a torture chamber. So he went to some lengths. He got a shipping container, buried it underground, covered the whole thing in plastic, and had a dentist chair all set up ready to go. And next to the dentist chair was scalpels and hammers and drills ready to go. So he's now serving some time for that, but.

All over a property deal. We'll have a property deal.

And he'd managed to sort of keep things professional for a long time, but when it came to the crunch, he got a bit a bit greedy. And we don't know how many people lost their fingers or their thumbs or their toes in that torture chamber, but it was very well set up.

That very spooky. That that's episode four. What's episode five?

Episode five ninety testing my memory? Episode five we go look it up. Episode five we go to Dubai where we're chasing the money. So follow the money, Follow the money because another thing that's sort of it's great to make money out of cocaine, but what you have to do is actually try and get rid of it, and you can't just go and pop it in a bank. So there was a guy called called Abdullah al Falasi who's in jail for nine years as we speak. He decided to actually get cash, wrap it up in plastic, chuck it in suitcases and get them perhaps naive or naive young women who were beauty sell on staff in the pandemic in the UK and just pop them on a plane to Dubai for a few days, all expenses page and you get three thousand dollars cash And all you have to do was jump on a business class flight with seven bags filled with pounds up to four and a half million pounds per trip.

Is that right? Carry money?

Carry money? They moved at least one hundred million pounds this way over a couple of years until it got wound up.

And they just say nothing to declare that to be that.

No, you could declare it because in Jubai, you know, five million pounds is just it's just walking around money there.

So if you went to the there's no problem taking turn up.

With a piece of paper saying this is money from our gold trading business, and declare it. Then you get it gets counted, so they have actual counting machines.

At the airport, and then what would happen.

Then they give you a piece of paper and declare it clean, and you go and pop it in the.

Bank, in the bank, in the bank.

That's wonderful, all good, And you might just be paying off some friends who have been dealing cocaine or supplying you with that cocaine from Dubai and also Dubai has become a bit of a haven for criminals, so scaleyways go there, Australian Australian Scaley wags. Yes, there's been a fellow called Angelo Pandelli who's on our most Wanted list, who has bought a property over there. It's currently being gutted and rebuilt on the Palm Mirror, that sort of fancy man made island that you can see from the sky, and they're kind of it's a good place to live, I would imagine, because they're like who bedroom houses.

Good in its way. Yeah, I mean, it's like the Truman Show dropped into a desert where people in long white headdresses drive rain drovers and may well run over you.

Yeah, but it's a weird place. You can't just go and walk around.

On the street because if they run over you, they don't care because no one's going to prosecute them.

There's perhaps one rule for the locals and one rule for the It is bad.

I think if you're the second cousin could run over you without any problems.

Possibly, Yes, Well, you know, there's there's other stories about there I can think of, which I may not mention. But yeah, so there's lots of cash there and that's where they're doing the deals as well. It's become an international cocaine hub.

Is it okay? And that's just the a moral nature.

Of well, I think they're just interested in trying to get some money in and from their point of view, they're like, well, we're not having the drugs here because it's very expensive and difficult to find drugs in Jubai's probably it's hard to find a beer.

Yeah, they're sort of becoming the Switzerland of the Middle East. You know, Yeah, we don't care how you making money, but we we'll mind it for you.

Mind for you.

We've got some lovely hotel suite to stay in when you come here to handle it.

And then they've also got fair bit of gold trading. There's a gold souk in Dubai whether you can go and trade anything, and one of our colleagues went under color and spoke to a trader there and said, I want to buy one hundred and eight thousand pounds worth of gold, and there's an audio recording of it. He's like, well, just between us, the money came from crime, do you care? And the local gold trader who we've given a new name in the podcast to protect him, and he goes, yeah, I don't care wherever it comes from, just go for it. So that's where the money sort of rolls up. And then eventually it's got to get back into Australia and moved around the world again to eat.

So they're turning dirty cash into gold.

Dirty cash into gold, and then you can take it in your.

Bags portable and anonymous.

Anonymous melts it down, so could company, or you can melt it down into jewelry, wear it, wear it. So what if you're wearing.

Funny how the crook's always like that heavy gold stuff?

Heavy gold stuff. I mean, what if you have a really fancy necklace that maybe you know, four or five ounces, or maybe you get a killer of it, or maybe you did heavy rings or all sorts of stuff. You can probably walk through the airport with half a million dollars worth.

Of funny what crooks gather. Heavy jewelry is one of the things, but reptile fish in the paintings, all sorts of funny things.

It's a bit. Yeah, your art is a big way to launder money as well. And there's also a bit.

Of old one like collectible one.

Yeah, collectible one, and then if it gets smashed you can claim it on insurance smashed or perhaps drunk.

You never know, so I don't want to test your memory too much. But what would episode six be?

Episode six is also injured bias. We had a couple episodes there and then we end up coming back into Australia.

Where we the Times guys came here too.

I did that one, so we all sort of we separated the jobs out and I went and knocked on a door at a house in Melbourne which was accused of being the process of crime, and had a very lengthy chat with one of the people there who said they weren't money Launders. They were driving a four hundred thousand dollars Mercedes because they were doing big business. And you can't drive around in a day or a Toyota because it wouldn't you wouldn't look the part.

Well let's you know, look look at the state agents they do.

I don't know how they afford those cars though.

But they see it as part of the image. Well, you know, they take the view. Clients don't want to use somebody who's not successful enough to look successful. It's part of the psychologists.

Are terrible though. That's yeah, you have bad taste.

Yeah they look like spiffs.

Yeah, it can be. So that's where we've wound up. We followed the whole thing, the cash, all the way around the.

World, and how was the reception when you're knocked on that door?

They it was a bit frosty to start with. They said, hang on, we're not involved in it anyway. And I went okay, So went not on the neighbor's door and I said, have you seen anyone move in the last few months. They're like, no, that's the same people. So I went back and asked again. I go, oh, they say, you haven't moved. What's happening And they said, look, we're not We're not directly involved, but we've got some relatives were involved, and they sort of they were able to detail, sort of in quite a large amount of depth, why the police were wrong about their assertions. And that's still a matter that's going through the courts as we speak. Probably later in the year they might come back on.

But this has all to do with laundering money.

Laundering money, that's the allegations.

Waundering money is a big thing isn't it really around the world. And when it comes to mainly drug money, really by large, drug money is well, not not exclusively, but that's the big one.

It's where the problem is as well, because if you end up with cash, if you're trying to run a business, say a restaurant, that might be an obvious way to launder some cash. How do you know how many people came in that day for a meal? You say you might have ten customers, you might say there was five hundred. If they all pay cash, maybe that's really who came in. But if you're opening up a legitimate restaurant next door to one that's been used for money.

Laundering motels the same, how does that work? Well, it does not fair. I mean they'll rack it up in the Riverina and this will have happened across the world. It's not unique to anywhere. But the mafia money from in those days, cannabis buy a motel in countrytown, put a patsy manager in and the reality is the motel might run it forty percent occupancy. It's just just viable nearly, but when the mafia r on it, you know suddenly it's because they throwing they're throwing money in the till it's fake. Just not washing the sheets anymore, because you know they're not actually getting people through the door. They just make it.

Look as if it is.

Of course, the book profits twelve months later. Oh my god, they've doubled their income. It's wonderful. And then they can put it on the market and sell it for an inflated price to some poor person who's then going to go broke. They do the double, and then the new person goes broke because it's you, having retired from your job and you said, let's move to the country and buy this beautiful hotel. And then guess what, you sell it because you broke, and they buy it back and do it all again.

That's genius, just perpetual motion, one born every minute. Yes, but that would happen if you had someone from the city. Not realizing.

Our friend Tony mog Bell owned something like seventeen boutiques at some station. He would have a Patsy boutique shops all sorts of things, but often clothes, and he put a Patsy in and said, you know, you can have a salary, you can do what you like. But when I say we sell a business. We sell a business, and I think really what happened was he be running money through the till when.

He's selling the businesses to himself as well.

I don't know, it'd be all different reasons why he'd do certain things, but he would buy things like that and establish them as false fronts. And you know that's what drug people do when they put a lot of money to play around with.

Well, and we're talking about sixty billion dollars a year just in Australia.

It's a lot of money.

So if you think about that.

Is it enough to square Victoria's debt?

You I think that's about one hundred and eighty billion at the moment. But there's a lot of money being spent and that's got to go somewhere. Some of it would go off shore, probably a lot of it. A lot of it would be spent on perhaps gambling, maybe illegal gambling. There's estimates that for every dollar spent on the legal gambling markets, there is about eight or ten that's spent on the illegal markets, is roughly speaking, even.

In Australian context.

Yeah. So the there's games, remember there's like electronic games, which boggle with my mind why anyone.

Wouldn't do it. I can't believe it. Sometimes eighty times. Yeah.

So there was like when there was about eight million dollars being spent on those e games and there was a couple of young kids got caught. They actually stopped playing to win and they were betting on themselves losing. And when I was discussing that with some organized crime investigators, they told me that, yeah, there's about eighty million dollars being spent on that illegally, it's ten times the size of the level market.

Yeah.

But other than that, yeah, you might buy your own product and you might have a gamble a bit, but the money's got to go somewhere, and that, to me, I think is the real weak point in the trade. If the police can do more to make that really hard to spend money, yes, which they have to a certain extent. They've made it hard to spend money in Australia, but they've meant the crooks went overseas, and.

I think it is hard to spend money in a way that can't be traced easily.

But we love tapping our cards now, so it's a little bit harder to actually make up some hairdresser appointments if they weren't there.

Yeah, look, it's the eldest thing in the world. You know, years ago when there were corrupt police getting cash payments, often significant cash payments in relation to their salaries. I remember one of them being interviewed about it, very sad man because he'd been caught, and he said, in the end, what did I do? You know, a lot of some nice suits, some very nice shoes, and I'd go to the races and bet on horses. But apart from it, I couldn't go and buy you a good bye car, buy good cars. I couldn't get first class tickets around the world or any of that stuff, because it's obvious. So okay, I'll go to the races wearing a nice suit and nice shoes, and the following week, I wear a different cuitain different shoes, and I bet on horses and mostly lose because you mostly do it. And you know, cat paying cash at restaurants. He says, you can go out and have a good meal and pay the cash. But even that leaves you a bit exposed. If you know anybody's once, anybody's watching.

Yeah, if you bring your mates along as.

Well, I've got the hang on how does he thought that.

We did actually interview or if you don't know. Hamilton of The Times interviewed a corrupt doc worker in the Netherlands and he'd done some time for it. He'd been sort of helping drug syndicates for about twenty years move their drugs.

He was adore as adore and.

Then she asked him at the end of the interview, will so was it worth it?

What do you think? You know?

And you had twenty years where you had to light to your life, and you know, you ended up spending the money on prostitutes and drugs and all sorts of other things. And she expects him to say, oh, yeah, yeah, drugs are bad, don't do it, and he's like, nah, I had a lot of fun. So you know, for some people, I think they're happy to live that life and they want to be be living moment to moment, but it does come at a cost. And like, if you've got any sense of trying to not get caught, then yeah, you can't really spend the money very obviously.

No, it's an intriguing thing, isn't it. Any form of prohibition creates these markets, and what we've got now is a giant version of the American prohibition experiment of the nineteen twenties a hundred years ago, which created essentially the modern mafia, the Five Families of New York, and they used to cheat each other with onions and tomatoes, lemons, you know, and stand over other Italian families or whatever. But after prohibition they became these massive international crime cartels. Prohibition did it for them. And what we've got now is not just American alcohol prohibition. What we've got now is a global prohibition of certain drugs which has created a global market. It's massive.

And then if you look at Mexico, they had elections there on Dune the secondest a few weeks ago. Sixty two politicians were murdered in the lead up to that election.

That is just that frightening.

It's just a fraction that they announced the war on drugs in two thousand and six. There's been at least four hundred and forty thousand murders. There's one hundred and ten thousand people missing. Oh it's just so the body's never found.

And I don't know why people go for holidays see personally, because it's you know, they say, well, if you stick to the good resorts and and so on and so forth, which is fine. But if you've got a place where there are so many willing killers and so many guns and all that stuff, it must spill over into from time times of violence from time to time.

Even accidentally, they're so called no go zones because the crooks like holiday and in the nice sunny spots too, they generally don't shoot people there. It's when you're in the country areas, on the on the farms and those type of places that's it gets done. But I just say this spillover. Last year there was a person and we don't know what trade they were involved in, but they were sitting down at a cafe we right in Mexico City and someone walks up and it's actually pretty clever, which in a macab sense of the word. They walked up as a couple, a man and a woman, and a woman comes up and says, hey, can I ask you for directions or something? And as he's distracted, go shoots in the back of the head. It was very cold, cold and it was all caught on CCTV. And the other thing which Australian needs to guard against his impunity because in Mexico, if you go and shoot somebody, even the killers who kill those Perth surfers, how much time have they spent in jail? How much time will they spend in jail? A lot of the time in Mexico, things just don't get to court, so there isn't any punishment. And that's why we really need to do our best to actually try and take the cash out of these criminals' hands so they don't get too powerful, that politicians aren't influenced by these cartails.

Now, the final cocaine.

Episode that is that is me knocking on that door. The cocaine episode is me going to that's the last, that's the last one. Bring it All home Coming and it's called bringing It Home. And in that episode though, we do speak to Matt Rippon, who is the Deputy CEO of the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, and he says in that episode that in his thirty years of policing, he's never seen more cocaine in Australia. Really, yes, thirty years the worst he's seen it.

And what's the final word on cocaine in Australia.

Well, we talked to Kirsty Schofield as well, she's the Assistant Commissioner at the AFP and she's in charge of Crime Command. And I asked the question, what do we do. Do we just give up? You say, hey, throw our hands in the air and say cocaine is too big, just can't stop it. And she's like, no, no, we have to actually try and keep putting pressure on these criminal groups and making it she says the words hostile, making it hostile, and then to operate, take their cash off and take their cars off them. She said that, you know, there's some people who've complained they don't care about going to jail, but just don't take my house. So they're worried about losing their assets because allegedly some people when they go inside jail, they still may be able to find a mobile phone. So if they need to move drugs, they can probably do it there. And they've got to be a time on their hands, a lot of thinking, a lot of phone calls, send out if you want that messages or perhaps signal messages.

Even in Australia, squeaky clean place that it is. If a prisoner has enough money, probably they can get a few favors done.

They probably can't or what if it's not money, Maybe the money buys them people on the out side of the tail to perhaps go and knock on a few prison guards doors all over the house and say, oh, I know your daughter goes to a zach sat Margaret's How's how's she going?

No one is, And that's the point. So they can knock on your door, then knock.

And it's so easy to find people. You know, you can't you can't stop against that. But if you can take the cash out of the big fish's hands, if you can catch them, then I'd rather see one hundred drug dealers with a million dollars in their pockets than one with a one hundred million dollars in their pocket.

Yes, good point. Where can we find your podcast?

So the best place to go and find it is with a subscription to The Herald's Son. Harold's Son is a great newspaper, the offices of which we are sitting in right now. So jump on that. It's in the Herald Sun app. You can also get it on Spotify and Apple, And on Apple it's on crime x which you can get access to a whole back catalog, which I would argue is better than Netflix of crime podcasts better than Netflix, better than Netflix should be our new matter. I think Netflix is overrated, to be honest, It's just it's struggled in the last few years. So I back in Crime.

X Crime X is it. Thanks and we'll talk to you another day when you have done another series.

All pressures on now, Thanks Roller, Thank.

You, thanks for listening. Life and Crimes is a Sunday Herald Sun production for true crime Australia. Our producer is Johnty Burton. For my columns, features and more, go to Heraldsun dot com dot au forward slash Andrew rule one word. For advertising inquiries, go to news Podcasts sold at news dot com dot au. That is all one word news podcasts sold. And if you want further information about this episode, links are in the description.

Life and Crimes with Andrew Rule

Andrew Rule is one of Australia's most prolific journalists and authors. In Life and Crimes, the Tru 
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