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AUSTRALIA - Melbourne heaved an almost palpable sigh of relief when baby-faced thug Carl Williams confessed to killing four gangland rivals several weeks ago. His conviction brought to a halt a war that has left as many as 27 men dead, some of them executed in the most
public of places.
The heads of two major gangs dealing in a drug trade with a turnover in the tens of millions of dollars were now dead or about to spend the rest of their lives in jail. Many of their senior henchmen, hit-men and corrupt cops had gone down with them.
But amid the ruins of Melbourne's underworld turf war, police surveyed the damage and saw harbingers of more evil to come.
"This is entrenched crime we're dealing with," Victorian Police Deputy Commissioner Simon Overton said. "We know that it never goes away."
In the following fortnight, the tentacles of Melbourne's underworld reached out and plucked one of Canberra's most senior politicians from his pedestal: Shadow Attorney-General Kelvin Thomson fell on his sword after it was revealed he had six years previously written a reference to help a man called Tony Mokbel gain a liquor licence.
Mokbel was a close associate of Williams and long a prominent denizen of Victoria's underworld, charged with contracting the killing of Lewis Moran, the patriarch of a rival crime family. Already with a criminal record, Mokbel is now also on the run from a 12-year jail sentence for cocaine trafficking.
In Canberra the reality of Overton's message is now being surveyed by the parliamentary joint committee on the Australian Crime Commission. Its fledgling inquiry into the future impact of serious and organised crime on Australian society is revealing an entirely new criminal milieu, embracing the old, mafia-style families; new ethnic gangs; outlaw motorcycle clubs; informal networks forming and dissolving according to need; overlapping and sometimes competing associations with terror groups; and local opportunists expanding into any vacuums that open.
There is a chilling sophistication, utilising complex business and legal structures, globalised operating and trading, internet and IT skills and equipment, and intricate crossovers between legal and illicit dealings. Computer encryption and the ability to commit crimes in one state or country from a base in a third jurisdiction is thwarting law agencies struggling to keep pace.
Organised crime permeates the continent, from major cities such as Melbourne and Sydney to rural Australia. It corrupts bureaucrats and police, and threatens in its worst form to undermine key economic sectors.
Such is the litany unveiled in the submissions received by the inquiry so far.
"From the outset it needs to be appreciated that organised crime is a business and that those in the business of organised crime are in it for the money," the South Australian Police submission said.
"Organised crime operates as any business providing goods and services to its client base, using raw materials - such as in drug manufacture - and drawing on the expertise of its own ranks to provide services, deliver products and manage business practices.
"Unlike legitimate business it is not regulated, competition is not fair, its products are not subject to quality control and there is no legislated protection for the consumers of its products."
Submissions to the inquiry span the often international range of organised crime: illicit drugs, firearms, smuggling and trafficking in humans, sex slavery, paedophilia, financial crime, vehicle theft, fraud, counterfeiting, intellectual property theft, money laundering, cybercrime, art and cultural theft, wildlife smuggling and - at an even more threatening level - fears in the United States of smuggling of nuclear materials and technology.
Underlying these are the traditional fields of organised crime - violence, murder, robbery, extortion, prostitution and the like.
Australia's relative geographic isolation is no longer any protection. Computers and the internet have locked crime gangs here into a globalised underworld that is as sophisticated and as flexible as the most successful legitimate corporate trading, using all of the financial, communication, legal and IT tools available to boardrooms around the world.
Security and law agencies are already alarmed at the potential for organised crime and terror groups to permeate weakened Pacific island states and use them as a base foroperations in Australia, New Zealand and Asia.
Established crime organisations are strengthening and expanding their operations.
Crime has also thrived on its own diaspora. European, US and Canadian law agencies report the same trends as Australian authorities, frequently built on ethnic divides that open connections around the globe. Among them are criminal networks rising out of Asia, the Middle East, the Balkans and Africa.
Middle Eastern gangs are moving out from their strongholds in Sydney and Melbourne to new opportunities in Queensland, including drug trafficking, property crime and vehicle re-birthing. Thugs of Middle Eastern background are also becoming more prominent in outlaw motorcycle clubs.
Romanian gangs are extending their long-established involvement in drug trafficking, especially the supply and distribution of heroin imported through Sydney and Melbourne. Law agencies also report a growing Romanian diversification into other fields.
Outlaw motorcycle clubs continue to expand and diversify, building local operations as well as using global connections. Australian officials say the gangs play a significant role in the production and distribution of amphetamines and cannabis, with a growing presence in the cocaine market. Other activities reportedly include fraud, identity crime, property offences, firearms, extortion and crimes involving extreme violence.
All are evolving into a new era of sophisticated and borderless crime. Western Australia's Corruption and Crime Commission further says that crime groups that used to operate independently - and often in competition with each other - now increasingly work in collaboration across state borders, "not unlike legitimate businesses".
"This increased level of complexity and sophistication has increased the threat of organised crime and made successful investigation and prosecution more difficult," the commission's submission said.
South Australian police warn of increased use of corruption, counter-surveillance and criminal intelligence networks by organised crime, and confirm its evolution into new forms. New ethnic groups are emerging - potentially in conflict with existing players - moving out from existing areas of expertise to new fields as they merge into Australian society.
Their submission warns of further new developments: "There is a current trend of evolution from traditional groups ... towards more fluid, flexible and diverse entrepreneurial networks that come together for particular activities and then go about their own business until it is in their interests to come together again."
The recent sale of rocket launchers stolen from the Australian Army to alleged terrorists pointed to a further frightening potential: the linkage of organised crime to terror cells. Court documents have outlined alleged connections between the underworld and suspected terror cells, including trade in drugs and firearms.
Australian Strategic Policy Institute researcher Anthony Bergin warned that crime-terror alliances may even form in areas such as bomb-making, procuring weapons, identity theft and fraudulent documentation. Other analysts predict that co-operation might spill over into competition as terrorists try to elbow into crime gangs' turf to finance their operations.
Technology is fast becoming a weapon for all. Submissions to the inquiry report the growing use of computers and the internet in such areas as identity theft and fraud, counterfeiting, the merging of legal and illicit business and trade, crime networking, intelligence and counter-intelligence.
Among the key tools will be communications technology such as encrypted email, voice-over internet protocol and new mobile phone enhancements. Crime gangs may even try to become telecommunications carriers in their own right, enabling them to further secure illicit dealings from police phone-tapping.
Queensland police report at least one crime network using voice-over protocol (VoIP) to thwart investigators, enhanced by the fact that providers are all based overseas, with legal and jurisdictional problems over their legal definition and the technology itself, based on data packages passing through a system operated by a third party.
Technology will also help the transfer and laundering of money. New payment systems such as internet banking and mobile payments are, authorities warn, increasingly prone to "degradation, infiltration and subsequent criminal activity". Associated with this is a rise in the use of experts - lawyers, accountants and IT professionals.
Paedophile rings have also leapt on technology, using networking websites such as MySpace to contact children. The Queensland Crime and Misconduct Commission says paedophiles routinely use the internet to search, trade, obtain and distribute child pornography, particularly through peer-to-peer networks.
Advanced encryption technology protects them from police. The commission's submission warns: "The introduction of Microsoft's Vista operating systems with in-built 256 byte hard drive encryption will further frustrate law enforcement efforts."
Organised crime is also moving into counterfeit software, CDs and DVDs. Although there is no clear evidence yet of crime gangs illegally copying them in Australia, overseas gangs are heavily involved.
Researcher Alex Malik quotes an International Federation of Phonographic report estimating that organised crime is involved in up to 70 per cent of piracy cases.
British authorities report that pirated DVDs are funding drug trafficking, lured by huge profits. The markup for 1kg of heroin is 200 per cent, Malik's submission says. The markup for pirated CDs and DVDs is 800 per cent.
And the piracy of software illustrates the broader sophistication of organised crime. Malik quotes senior Southeast Asian Microsoft executive Katharine Bostik's assessment that piracy is increasingly linked to large multinational syndicates.
"They are often split into business units which operate across borders and defy easy detection," Bostik reported. "Where enforcement action is taken against business units in one country, the remainder of the syndicate re-routes the product through other countries, or even absorbs the loss directly before re-starting the operation [there]."
Big crime is now big business.
