Blocking Colombian cocaine a cat and mouse game for Australian police, border force
Inside the cat-and-mouse game between cops and cartels to keep cocaine out of Australia
Former undercover detective Vince Hurley still won't share the alias he used while infiltrating cocaine trafficking rings.
For five years, he assumed the role of a cocaine dealer, working up and down the east coast of Australia, gaining the trust of smugglers.
"You lived by your wits to a degree," he says.
"It's not something everyone is suited to. There has to be a degree of naturalness about the individual to be able to portray themselves as someone else."
Vince's undercover skills were tested at an industrial complex on the outskirts of Newcastle.
He was asked by a dealer to climb into the ceiling of his factory where he'd hidden cocaine.
As Vince got his hands on the drugs, the ceiling collapsed.
"I was rolling around on the ground in pain. It was a scene out of Beverly Hills Cop," Vince says of the fall.
"I kid you not, I fell through the roof on my head and all he could say was 'Are the drugs OK?'"
In Vince's final year of undercover work, cocaine detections were 58 kilograms. In the nine months to today, 4.3 tonnes worth of cocaine has been seized.
To understand what's behind this surge in cocaine detections, the ABC's Background Briefing has been granted a behind-the-scenes look at the efforts of people like Vince — authorities tasked with keeping cocaine off Australian streets.
What we've been shown reveals a deadly game of cat and mouse, driven by an explosion of coca production, record levels of consumption and the potential for huge profits.
Explosion in supply
The vast majority of cocaine washing up on Australian shores comes from one country: Colombia. And law enforcement there is battling, cocaine lab by cocaine lab, to stem the flow of the drug beyond their border.
The Anti-narcotics Directorate of the Colombian National Police has sent Background Briefing footage of one of their operations. In the first few frames, around a dozen anti-narcotics officers — dressed more like military than police — pile into a Blackhawk helicopter.
Soon, the camera reveals a muddy-floored cocaine laboratory in the jungle. The scene looks frozen mid-process, giving the impression that whoever was here left quickly. There are white jerry cans and huge blue tubs filled with white liquid scattered everywhere. To one side sits three black homemade stoves.
Labs like this — where pure cocaine is refined — have been busy lately. Not only are they driven by high demand coming from places like Australia, they're also fuelled by rivers of supply.
"In very simple terms, I would say it starts with coca cultivation," says Colombian political scientist Angelica Duran-Martinez. And the explosion in coca cultivation has roots in an old conflict.
It started in the 1960s with farmers in Colombia banding together to fight inequality. Eventually, they formed a guerilla group called Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, or the FARC. They were at war with the Colombian state and funded their insurgency through cocaine trafficking.
Peace talks between the Colombian government and FARC restarted in 2012. Before discussions recommenced, the guerillas demanded the state stop killing coca crops with the herbicide glyphosate, claiming it was harming local residents' health.
In the lull that followed, coca farmers in FARC territories started investing in irrigation and fertiliser. And the coca crops were able to grow to their full productive potential, which takes two years.
When FARC soldiers started de-arming, other armed groups began moving into their former territories and that increased the "push factors" for coca cultivation, according to Professor Duran-Martinez.
In 2016, when the peace agreement was signed, the Colombian government promoted crop substitution programs for coca farmers to encourage them to grow different crops. Ironically, this stimulated production, "with the expectation that people could get some help from the state," says Professor Duran-Martinez.
But many of the crop substitution programs failed, so the farmers who had taken them up went back to growing coca again.
The result of all this is that the amount of land used to grow coca in Colombia has more than tripled over the past decade, and so has the amount of cocaine Colombia supplies the world.
Ports are the weak link
By volume, the most frequent way cocaine enters Australia is by sea.
"About 70 per cent of the globe is covered in water, so it's a natural attraction for the drug traffickers," says former detective Vince Hurley, now a criminologist at Macquarie University.
We met at an industrial site beside the Port of Newcastle.
During his undercover years investigating cocaine trafficking, Vince spent time here and at other ports around Australia.
He says drug syndicates see ports as "ripe for the picking" — especially ports like this one.
"The Port of Newcastle is more of a working port. It's a regional port, therefore wouldn't have the same degree of surveillance that it would in Sydney.
"We're out here now and there's no one around. So anyone could just jump this wire fence here or easily cut the bolt here on the gate.
"Geographically, it's almost in the centre between Brisbane and Melbourne where the bulk of the population is — that is a godsend for organised crime."
In contrast to the lack of activity on land, the water is busy — we watch tugboats guide a huge cargo ship through the mouth of the river.
Vince says this provides cover for criminals.
It makes this entry point suitable for the "hull attachment" method of drug importation.
This involves attaching cocaine to the hulls of ships to circumvent border checks.
Vince can't tell us everything authorities know about this method — that would be giving away operational information. What he does say, paints a dangerous picture of the retrieval process.
"It would be at night and you'd have to contend with the current of the river, the water temperature, the size of the drugs strapped to the hull, what it was wrapped in and how they actually physically get it onto the wharf and then out of the port."
Last year, a Brazilian diver died while trying to retrieve around 50 kilograms of cocaine attached to the hull of an Argentinian ship docked at Port of Newcastle.
In January this year, a port worker in Newcastle potentially stumbled on a major crime in progress.
He was heading up Newcastle Harbour a few hours before dawn when he spotted a couple of unusual shapes in the water. "I shone a light on them [and] it was two people swimming across the harbour in what looked like diving gear," the port worker said.
"I called out to them to check if they were OK. They froze for a moment, then swam away."
The port worker called to see if there were any diving operations happening in the harbour, but nobody was aware of anything. "Later that day, I realised something big was going down," he said.
What the port worker did not know was that authorities allege they were aware of what these divers were up to.
They had advance intelligence that a ship called the Stalo was carrying illicit cargo, so police escorted the ship into the harbour, set up a surveillance operation and waited.
Later that same day, two Norwegian nationals were dramatically arrested in front of the NBN Television station on the harbour foreshore.
Police would later allege that the divers were part of an international crime syndicate and that they were attempting to retrieve 82 kilograms of cocaine attached to the hull of the Stalo.
The battle to keep cocaine out
Border Force is on the front line of Australia's battle with cocaine syndicates.
It granted Background Briefing a behind-the-scenes tour of Port Botany to show us what its efforts look like and the sheer scale of what it's up against.
Mal Nimmo is a Border Force commander with a long career in law enforcement.
As a drug dog unit boards a cargo ship to search for cocaine, he shares an alarming statistic.
The amount of cocaine detected by Border Force has more than doubled in nine months.
"Unfortunately, the demand for drugs in this country is quite high, that's not a particular secret. And particularly with cocaine, the prices that can be obtained here drive that activity."
Mal says Border Force's job is made more difficult because cocaine traffickers are getting smarter and more sophisticated with moving their product.
There's the "mother-daughter" method where criminals drop cocaine over the side of the boat at sea for another smaller vessel to pick up.
And there are the "hull attachments", which Vince Hurley said was a problem at Newcastle.
In an attempt to combat these methods, Border Force is now using scuba divers and remote-operated underwater vessels to check ships coming into Australian ports.
But Mal says the most challenging method to police is drugs smuggled inside shipping containers.
He says the ship beside us has around 5,400 containers on board.
Thousands of ships like this enter Australia every year. That's millions of containers.
"I don't think anybody pretends that we check every container," Mal says. "It's an intel and risk-based assessment that is conducted on each ship, in each container."
Border Force uses a mix of old and new technology to check containers for cocaine.
Drug detector dogs fly across ships, sniffing nooks and crannies.
Containers deemed to be of interest are taken on trucks to a container examination facility — a giant X-ray machine — where they're screened for anomalies.
It's hard to know whether increased detections are a result of better policing or increased importation attempts, but Mal puts it down to good intel.
"Improvements in information sharing between law enforcement agencies, in Australia and overseas, helps us become better at finding these drugs."
Border Force's jurisdiction ends at ports like these — but the shipping containers go out into the community, and sometimes the drugs with them.
'That's all we can do'
On a highway north of Newcastle Port, there's a private shipping container yard sandwiched between a Bunnings and a bus stop. Inside a tall barbed-wire fence, 20-foot containers in an array of grey and primary colours run east-west along gravel rows.
Privately owned shipping container yards like this are often unremarkable. Relegated to industrial zones near waterways or suburban outskirts, these storage facilities are the kinds of places people drive by and overlook.
They are also beyond the purview of Border Force. And, once a container is through the port, unless there is specific intelligence about it that law enforcement authorities are privy to, the container and its contents have made it into the community.
The site office of the container yard on Newcastle's outskirts is a converted grey container with a sliding glass door. In this tiny office, a worker tells Background Briefing that container owners must sign a declaration "to say there's been no dangerous goods, chemicals or anything like that stored in the container" before the yard will accept their shipment.
Asked if they just accept that at face value, the worker is matter-of-fact: "That's all we can do," he says.
'Permeates like a cancer'
Hurley recognises that cocaine use is prevalent in Australia and that overall rates of addiction and overdose are low.
But he says stopping cocaine at the border is more important than we think.
"The cocaine trade in Australia is so lucrative that it brings with it the massive risks that undermine the whole notion of the rule of law and policing within Australia.
"The cartels have so much money, it is easy for them to throw hundreds of thousands of dollars at an individual to make what may seem a one-off decision.
"Once it gets into the criminal justice system, once there's the compromising of the courts, for example, then it just permeates like a cancer."
Credits
Reporters: Tynan King and Mayeta Clark
Photographer: Jack Fisher and Gerald Bermudez
Executive producer: Fanou Filali
Editor: Annika Blau
Digital producer: Sam Nichols