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A court will formally decide who carried out the shootings but
the handgun is already guilty. It is illegal in Australia on two
counts: it combines a brutally heavy calibre with a short barrel
that makes it easy to hide, a recipe for carnage in criminal
hands. And it is a product of a sinister black market that, like
the drug trade, ran out of control while authorities concentrated
on easier targets.
"A highly concealable heavy hitter" is how one
disgusted licensed gun dealer describes the weapon used to kill
the heroic Melbourne lawyer Brendan Keilar and wound Dutch
backpacker Paul de Waard and dancer Kara Douglas. Overseas, such a
pistol is used by "narcotics agents, undercover cops and
bodyguards", the dealer says. And gangsters, of course.
In Australia only an underworld enforcer or the dangerously
deluded — or both, it seemed last Monday — would carry such a
man killer, more powerful than Victoria Police service revolvers.
 The pistol that blighted so many lives was found at a city
building site soon after the shootings. It is a .40 calibre Llama
Minimax. It is small, relatively light and yet, with its hefty
calibre, all too deadly. Its stubby barrel is not made for
accuracy — to hit targets or hunt — but to blow a hole in
humans at murderously close range.
A few years ago, a handgun like that, or its Chinese
equivalent, would have brought between $1000 and $2000. But the
black market is so turbocharged by drugs, money and paranoia that
it could bring much more now. The word on the underworld rumour
mill is that the city gunman paid $5000 for the murder weapon less
than two weeks ago.
For something that can destroy a life with such awful
efficiency, the Llama is a relatively crude tool. Not quite,
perhaps, the "gangster junk" that purists might label
it, but so poorly thought of by legitimate target shooters that no
dealership sells Llamas in Australia, and few were ever imported
in the past. The murder weapon almost certainly reached Australia
through an underground network as pernicious as the drug trade —
and inextricably entwined with it.
In the dog-eat-dog underworld, drug money and gun violence go
together. Melbourne's underworld war proved that. But last Monday
morning it intruded into the workaday world and innocent blood was
spilled.
The path that ended with death in William Street began at a
factory in northern Spain, the Basque region that has produced
terrorism for decades and cheap pistols for much longer. For most
of the 20th century the area boasted three pistol-making plants,
mostly making copies of American brands Colt and Smith &
Wesson. One factory, run by the Gabilondo Y Cia company, made
pistols at Vitoria until 2003, when it moved to Legutiano under a
new name, Fabrinor.
Arms dealers sell to whoever buys. In 1943, the firm supplied
the Nazis in German-occupied territories with thousands of
specially badged pistols. After the war it found new markets,
including a niche for a two-shot "pistol" disguised as
an office stapler, which authorities feared would be used by
terrorists.
From the mid-1990s until it closed in 2005 the firm was
making 20,000 pistols a year, with 17,000 a year going to the
gun-hungry US. It is almost certainly one of these that shot
Brendan Keilar and the other two victims in Melbourne. So how did
it get here?
While it's possible the pistol was exported to the Philippines
and then smuggled here by light plane or small boats through Papua
New Guinea, Timor or the Pacific Islands, it is far more likely it
came via America. It was probably bought there as part of a job
lot for as little as $US400 ($A470) new or even $US200 second
hand. And it's likely the buyer was fronting for an outlaw bikie
gang with a proven smuggling route all fixed.
Outlaw bikies are known for trafficking amphetamines. But their
link with guns goes back further and runs deeper.
When police raid bikie gangs looking for drugs they do not
always find them, but they usually find firearms. Such as the raid
on a Nomads clubhouse in suburban Thomastown in 2004 when a
policeman accidentally kicked a step, which fell apart to reveal
five handguns.
A raid in country Victoria uncovered a cannon, two machine-guns
and night-vision goggles.
From their beginnings in the US after World War II, the
"one percenter" outlaw gangs fostered an image of
hard-living "cowboys" riding steel horses across a
mythical frontier, guns on hips. A lot of rebel gang members were
ex-military people who knew too much about guns to live without
them. Next step was to trade in them, and so gun-running has also
always been a bikie cash cow.
Australian Hells Angels brought back the recipe for
amphetamines from the US in the 1980s and bikies have dominated
the "speed" trade here since. But guns, the other side
of their business, still have to be imported.
According to underworld sources and former police, the most
common smuggling method is to hide pistols in engine blocks and
mechanical parts imported from the US.
"Bikies are constantly involved with cars and trucks. They
loved bringing in big cars like Cadillacs to restore and drive
around," says a former drug squad policeman. "They would
fill the sump with stripped-down pistols."
Sniffer dogs don't find guns covered in oil. And, hidden in
engine blocks, they are undetected by X-rays. The only way to find
them would be to intercept and strip every engine passing through
every port. Barely one in 20 shipping containers is searched, so
that's unlikely.
Even if systematic searches were done at big ports such as
Melbourne and Sydney, officials might not be as efficient at some
smaller ports around Australia. Such as in Tasmania, for instance,
not just Hobart but sleepy Burnie and Devonport.
Underworld lore has it that most new black market pistols
arrive in Melbourne from the south, across Bass Strait. If
"the Territory" is the Deep North, Tasmania is the Deep
South. Before the Port Arthur massacre in 1996, Tasmania was one
of four states and territories with much laxer gun laws — and
enforcement — than in more heavily populated Victoria and NSW.
A sparse population scattered over a large area of wilderness,
a tradition of hunting and fishing and a rural-based economy meant
it had more in common with outback Queensland or the Northern
Territory than with Victoria. Gun use there reflected that — at
all levels of society. In a place where many people are related or
connected, gun enthusiasts include police, prison and Customs
officers as well as farmers, fishermen and forestry workers, some
of whom resented the post-Port Arthur laws that demanded they hand
in certain weapons. Not all did, hiding guns and creating a cache
of "orphan" (unregistered) guns that became part of a
black market linking some former mainstream shooters with
underworld elements.
Enter the bikies. Tasmania offers cheap land in isolated
areas, yet is only a short plane trip or boat ride from Melbourne.
Inevitably bikie gangs such as the Coffin Cheaters and the Black
Uhlans saw it as a good place to do things away from prying eyes.
Rural solitude is ideal for producing amphetamines and dealing in
cannabis and guns. With the state's small population, low
employment and depressed wages, the bikies and their associates
exert influence with both muscle and money.
It is widely known in underworld and police circles that large
groups of bikies ride the Spirit of Tasmania back and forth
regularly, and not to take the fresh air. Vehicles and luggage are
not routinely searched and, in any case, the bikies are skilled
hands at building caches for drugs and guns into vehicles.
In theory, guns should be no easier to import to Tasmania's
ports than those on the mainland. Anecdotally, they are. One
reason is that until the 2001 terrorist attacks, US Navy ships
regularly called into Hobart (and Fremantle) en route to the
Middle East.
Authorities either deny or ignore it for diplomatic reasons,
but it is a fact that US sailors routinely smuggled in large
numbers of handguns, easily done because they do not have to clear
Customs. There is proof this also happened in Melbourne, and every
reason to think it still happens in any port where US war ships
call for rest and recreation.
On November 12, 1998, for instance, the huge aircraft carrier
USS Abraham Lincoln anchored in the Derwent River and most of its
5500 sailors came ashore over five days. One group carried a
wooden crate through the rudimentary "beach guard" on
Princes Wharf, hailed a taxi and went to a nightclub for a
pre-arranged meeting. Inside were 40 new Colt .45 calibre
semi-automatic pistols, a favourite US military sidearm.
Not only lethal handguns, these were prized collectors' items
commanding a premium that made the crate of 40 worth more than
$100,000 on the black market. Today, they would be worth up to
three times as much, an indication of how the black market has
been inflated by drug money, and the alarming penchant of
nightclub poseurs to carry "a piece".
Although smuggling guns is an easy way for American sailors
(and soldiers) to raise local currency, the aircraft carrier crew
was not after money this time. As part of a pre-arranged plan, it
swapped the crate of pistols for another crate. This held a
breeding pair of young Tasmanian devils, trapped to order a few
days before near Richmond, east of Hobart. Americans are
fascinated by the animals because of the popularity of the Warner
Bros cartoon character Taz. The devils were smuggled on board the
ship. And the pistols? Almost all of them were taken to the
mainland and sold covertly, not all to active criminals.
A former policeman, posted to the Melbourne docks to protect US
ships from anti-nuclear protesters in the mid-1980s, recalls
several of his colleagues swapping their police jackets for new
pistols taken from the ship's armoury.
"The first time I went was for the USS
Sterett. For some
reason the crew were mad on collecting jackets everywhere they
went. Obviously the armoury officer had done a deal with the
sailors, because they would take your jacket, then direct you to
the armoury guy and he would give you the pistol," the former
policeman told The Sunday Age.
"The funny thing was that every time a (US) warship came
into port after that, cops would be running around collecting
jackets to swap for pistols. They must have got dozens. From
memory they were nine-millimetre Berettas."
US Navy ships have visited Australian ports only rarely since
September 11, 2001. But plenty of cruise ships and freighters do,
and dozens of them visit Tasmania's ports. Somehow, somewhere,
illegal handguns are flowing in unchecked, according to underworld
and police sources.
In Melbourne's northern suburbs, underground dealers have boxes
full of American-made handguns: Colts, Rugers and Smith &
Wessons, in calibres from .22 to .45. Most sell for about $5000
each, but $20,000 will get five, allowing a cashed-up buyer to
sell four to others and keep one "for nothing". Those
willing to take the risk can drive them to Sydney, where they
bring up to $8000 each.
The most favoured pistols are the most concealable: like the
lives of most of those who buy them, they are nasty, brutish and
short. And every one that ends up on the streets, under a car seat
or stuck down the back of someone's jeans is only a heartbeat away
from repeating the horror of what happened in Melbourne last
Monday.
Perhaps those who buy them should know that when
Christopher
Wayne Hudson gave himself up after two days on the run, his left
wrist was cut to the bone.
Regrets; he's had a few.
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