Lawmakers, guns and money
The Australian – Jack the Insider Blog, 13 January 2012
Naturally politicians are happy to proclaim the Howard Government’s gun buy-back scheme a stunning success and boast that Australia’s streets and homes are safer for it.
The murder rate in NSW is the lowest in living memory. Suicide deaths by firearm have declined by more than half since 1996.
Yet our homicide and suicide rates had been in decline well before the gun buy-back scheme was introduced. Meanwhile, the rates of assault remain sky high. What we can deduce is that advances in emergency medical treatment have transformed potential acts of murder into mere violent assaults.
More than half a billion dollars were spent in the gun buy-back scheme as law abiding gun owners were stripped of their rifles and pump action shotguns but if recent events in Sydney’s south-western suburbs are anything to go by, guns are more prevalent among criminals than ever before.
It’s no surprise to learn that blanket prohibition policy often comes with unintended consequences. It is no different with firearms than it is with drugs or as the Americans found with the Volstead Act and the prohibition of alcohol.
After World War I, many members of the first AIF were simply demobbed and told to go home. In many cases they took their side arms and rifles with them.
In the years immediately following the war, there was an epidemic of murder and violent crime involving firearms. The New South Wales government acted in 1924, increasing penalties for possession of unregistered firearms. Those caught faced a mandatory minimum 12 month prison sentence.
The policy worked to the point of reducing firearm violence but criminal elements simply put down their guns and reached for their razors; riot and affray with opposing gangs slashing each other to ribbons with straight razors became the order of the day.
It was the genesis of organised crime in Australia.
Those criminals who wanted to stay ahead of the pack continued to use firearms. A year in the slammer was no deterrent for a man like John Frederick “Chow” Hayes. Hayes was the top of the heap as far as standovermen went. He bashed and murdered his way to the top of the Sydney crime scene in the 1920s and remained there for thirty years.
Prosecutors who tried to bring Hayes to account often found that witnesses would mysteriously fail to appear in court.
In 1954, Hayes was convicted of the murder of another standoverman, Bobby Lee. Hayes was sentenced to hang but the sentence was commuted to life in prison after the NSW Labor Government took the death penalty off the books.
In Victoria, during the Painter and Docker wars of the 1970s, the Homicide Squad routinely travelled around criminal haunts, tapping “gunnies” on the shoulder. Violence generally flared up around the scheduled election of office bearers for the union and the ‘homies’ decided the best prophylactic measure was to pull up the combatants and take their guns before the bullets started flying.
It wasn’t entirely successful as the murders of union stalwarts, Jack “Putty Nose” Nicholls, Pat Shannon and Alfred “The Ferret” Nelson and a list of other Painter and Docker luminaries would attest.
These were perhaps the final days of an Australian criminal class as such. While vestiges of it remain, the criminal class has undergone a rapid change in identity; change predicated on vertical integration across the old class barriers, driven by illicit drugs and the huge profits they bring.
Chow Hayes witnessed it at first hand while concluding his life sentence. The new crooks with whom he shared prison cells had long hair, smoked funny cigarettes, listened to loud music and had no respect for an old villain like him.
Ten years before he had been the most feared man in prison. Now these young upstarts would harass and harangue him. He never took a backward step and so his last years in prison were characterised by a lot of vicious brawling with the new kids on the cell block.
After his release, Hayes left prison a lot older, no wiser but a little lighter; a rather large chunk of his right ear had been removed leaving an almost perfect set of the dental records of one of his attackers.
Hayes bemoaned the new burgeoning criminal enterprises associated with narcotics but he was the King Canute of crime. Times had changed and drug trafficking was the new big thing.
Drug prohibition would go on to enrich the new breed of criminals as never before. In time, organised criminal networks developed and flourished.
Restrictions on gun ownership in Australia, enacted in 1996 have not brought organised crime to heel. Rather it has added a new string to its bow and made it more lethal than ever before.
Most of the illicit firearms are smuggled into the country. The weapons are generally sourced from the United States, Mexico and the Middle East. The usual rule of thumb on the detection and seizure of contraband by Customs amounting to 10 per cent of the total applies here.
According to intelligence from a number of law enforcement agencies, the outlaw motorcycle gangs are at the hub of firearms trafficking in Australia. One might think that the import of motorcycle parts would be a red light for Customs but the sheer volume of goods arriving in the country makes detection rare.
The face of OMCGs has changed dramatically over the last 15 years. These gangs had previously spouted a white supremacy ideology but numbers had been shrinking. By the early 1990s, the Hells Angels had only one chapter in Sydney and membership was down to a few grey beard die-hards.
The Nomads were the first to make the change, opening up membership to Lebanese and Islander members. The gang’s numbers flourished and they reached out for more territory. Soon all OMCGs followed suit creating a nexus between organised ethnic crime gangs.
With burgeoning memberships and new chapters popping up here and there, the OMCGs started stepping on each other’s toes, leading to violent turf wars. The usual indicators are fire bombings of tattoo parlours, violent extortion events in nightclubs and you guessed it, drive by shootings.
One dirty secret not much discussed in the media is that firearms and other weaponry have found their way from Australian Defence Force arsenals into the hands of criminals.
In 2007, Sydney hosted the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-Operation forum. Barricades were put up around the CBD and large parts of the city were no-go areas for Sydneysiders. Many viewed the security as excessive.
The Chaser comedy crew made a name for themselves by breaching the security zone in a motorcade. What is not commonly known is that police and intelligence services were on high levels of alert because eight rocket propelled grenades lifted from ADF stores had found their way into the hands of criminals via a member of the Bandidos motorcycle gang. One had been seized by police and it was known that at least one other RPG was in the hands of a Lebanese crime gang in Sydney.
There is no suggestion that outlaw motorcycle gangs are responsible for the spate of drive-by shootings in Sydney in recent times but it is highly likely that the firearms used in these incidents have passed through the hands of members of the OMCGs at one time or another.
But this explanation too is overly simplistic. Organised crime gangs in Australia, including the OMCGs, enter into alliances of convenience and be it drugs, firearms or even the nasty and incredibly lucrative business of fauna smuggling, it is not a matter of groups acting in isolation.
The buy-back scheme and the restrictions placed on gun ownership in this country were driven by gutsy politics from Prime Minister John Howard. Let’s not forget the moral courage of Howard’s deputy, Tim Fischer who eyeballed his own constituency and refused to back down.
But now, some 18 years later, that courage appears to be misplaced. The people who had been forced to give their guns up were never a threat to social order. Meanwhile prohibition has created yet another branch of profit for those who use guns without conscience or hindrance.
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