Speaker 1: These kids have been given a few hundred bucks to
Speaker 1: steal a car and go to ex or wire address
Speaker 1: that they're given with a tin of petrol or similar
Speaker 1: accelerant and set fire to places. And that is a
Speaker 1: recipe for disaster. This is very scary stuff. This is
Speaker 1: not you know, a couple of fourteen year olds pinching
Speaker 1: grandma's holden on a Saturday night and driving it down
Speaker 1: to the fish and chip shop. This is organized violence.
Speaker 1: I'm Andrew Ruhle was his life and crimes. It's high
Speaker 1: time we had a good look at the burning issue
Speaker 1: of young people offending. Now, young people have always offended.
Speaker 1: You know, years ago there were bodgies and witches. Before that,
Speaker 1: there were alaricans in the streets of Collingwood and Fitzroy
Speaker 1: and in Sydney, same thing. All the way back into
Speaker 1: the nineteenth century, we had young people who became bush rangers.
Speaker 1: You know, Neck Kelly was arrested the first time when
Speaker 1: he was sixteen running around with an older bushranger armed.
Speaker 1: Robert called Harry Power. There is nothing new about young
Speaker 1: people being violent offenders. And so when we see houses
Speaker 1: being invaded by young people, armed and dangerous, it is
Speaker 1: truly shocking, and it genuinely worries us for good reason.
Speaker 1: But it's not right to think that something like that
Speaker 1: has never happened before. It's just a variation on a theme.
Speaker 1: Having said that we have got an apparent wave of
Speaker 1: youth crime, it might be demographics. I can recall back
Speaker 1: in the seventies when there were gangs of skinheads and
Speaker 1: sharpies so called, roaming around Melbourne, roaming around the big
Speaker 1: country centers, you know, places of More Sale, Bendigo, Ballarat,
Speaker 1: all those places. They all had mobs of skins heads
Speaker 1: and sharpies and so on who caused trouble. They would drink,
Speaker 1: they would fight, they would assault girls. There was a
Speaker 1: lot of stuff happening in those days which actually died
Speaker 1: out in the decades afterwards, probably because those kids were
Speaker 1: part of a baby boom. The kids in the seventies
Speaker 1: were part of the post war baby boom, and so
Speaker 1: there was a big number of them, and so you'd
Speaker 1: see it. You know, Ringwood sharps would come in on
Speaker 1: the train, the broad Meadow sharps would come in on
Speaker 1: the train. There are a lot of them in a way,
Speaker 1: of teenagers in the next generation, and so I think
Speaker 1: it's just sheered numbers and demographics do alter it, which
Speaker 1: is relevant to what we're doing, because now we have
Speaker 1: a bit of a bubble in Victoria at least, and
Speaker 1: probably in other cities where we have young people who've
Speaker 1: come from other countries as toddlers or babies or youngsters,
Speaker 1: and of course those who have been born here soon
Speaker 1: after their parents got here. A lot of these people
Speaker 1: have come from war torn countries, from the Middle East
Speaker 1: and from Africa. They've come either directly as refugees or
Speaker 1: indirectly as people fleeing dangerous places where bad things have
Speaker 1: happened to them. And it makes sense in a bad way.
Speaker 1: It makes sense that the children of those war torn
Speaker 1: generations can be more disturbed and people who take more
Speaker 1: dangerous risks and so on and so forth than others.
Speaker 1: You see for that reason apparent rise in the number
Speaker 1: of violent robberies and home invasions and car thefts associated
Speaker 1: with particular ethnic gangs. There is no doubt that if
Speaker 1: you talk to people who work in youth justice centers
Speaker 1: in basically the juvenile prison system. As we record this,
Speaker 1: one of the big stories of the day is that
Speaker 1: guards at one of Victoria's New Youth Training Prisons Cherry Creek.
Speaker 1: Down there, Weerribee guards have been injured badly by two
Speaker 1: violent inmates. Apparently these two inmates have attacked several guards
Speaker 1: and put a couple of them in hospital, including a
Speaker 1: female guard. Now, this is the sort of incident or
Speaker 1: incidents that makes people very worried. It makes people's blood boil.
Speaker 1: It greatly upsets those whose job it is to work
Speaker 1: in those institutions. It rightly concerns all of us because
Speaker 1: if the system is not well organized enough to lock
Speaker 1: these people up so that they can't hurt others, the
Speaker 1: system is not really fulfilling its function, it's not really
Speaker 1: doing its job. And I think that worries a lot
Speaker 1: of people. I certainly know someone who has worked for
Speaker 1: many years inside that justice system, inside the youth training places.
Speaker 1: He in fact, as a person who used to work
Speaker 1: for this company once, and when he left here many
Speaker 1: years ago, he went into the youth training centers and
Speaker 1: he says that they are shocking places full of very
Speaker 1: violent young men, and that there's sort of a gang
Speaker 1: mentality in those places. So you've got on one side,
Speaker 1: you've got the African kids, and on other side, you've
Speaker 1: got Islanders and somewhere else, you've got the Middle Eastern kids,
Speaker 1: and then you've got the sort of Ossie skips and
Speaker 1: Aboriginal kids. So you've got at least four approximate groups
Speaker 1: of gangs, all hating each other and fighting each other
Speaker 1: and all the rest of it, and even worse, attacking
Speaker 1: in some cases the adults who were there to look
Speaker 1: after them and to watch them and guard them. Where's
Speaker 1: all this heading. Well, we currently have what has been
Speaker 1: called a crisis where young people are being put back
Speaker 1: on the street rather than being sent youth training places
Speaker 1: that possibly are over full or the judiciary is not
Speaker 1: keen to send people there because they see it really
Speaker 1: as just a training ground for criminality. Which is an
Speaker 1: interesting point. But we have a situation where teenagers, violent teenagers, thieves, robbers,
Speaker 1: bash artists are getting back on the streets dozens and
Speaker 1: dozens of times they've been bailed out, so they get arrested,
Speaker 1: they get picked up, they get bail and they go
Speaker 1: and reoffend. Now, in our paper there of Son, we
Speaker 1: have run examples of people who have offended in the
Speaker 1: hundreds of times, hundreds of times, and apparently it would
Speaker 1: appear very rarely behind bars and mostly are on the
Speaker 1: street with bail, and that is a situation that is
Speaker 1: apparently escalating and is upsetting a lot of people. One
Speaker 1: aspect of this, and it's gone largely unnoticed, I think,
Speaker 1: is that these sort of kids who are violent, they
Speaker 1: have very poor perceptions of consequences for their actions. They
Speaker 1: are the perfect people to be exploited by older, more
Speaker 1: cunning criminals, and the older, more cunning criminals pay them
Speaker 1: relatively small amounts of money to do crimes on their behalf,
Speaker 1: to steal the cars, or to go and hold up
Speaker 1: businesses or whatever it might be. And so we have
Speaker 1: a situation where in this year we've had a series
Speaker 1: of bombings and arsenal attacks which police know have been
Speaker 1: committed by underage people, by people under the age of
Speaker 1: seventeen fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. People in this age group have
Speaker 1: been sent out, undoubtedly by older criminals who are getting
Speaker 1: their orders in some cases from the Middle East from
Speaker 1: master criminals elsewhere. These kids have been given a few
Speaker 1: hundred bucks to steal a car and go to ex
Speaker 1: or wire address that they're given with a tin of
Speaker 1: petrol or similar accelerant and set fire to places, and
Speaker 1: that is a recipe for disaster because fires where petrol
Speaker 1: is used can easily become like bomb sites. Petrol can explode,
Speaker 1: it can spray people and burn them. It can cause
Speaker 1: massive fire bombs. If it gets into a place that's
Speaker 1: got say leaking gas or something like that, the gas
Speaker 1: can then ignite and you've got a terrible situation where
Speaker 1: innocent people could be blown up and burnt because of
Speaker 1: the actions of lunatic teenagers being pushed into the front
Speaker 1: line by evil criminals. Now this year we've had a
Speaker 1: series of things. One was at the Furlong Club out
Speaker 1: in Thornbury. Now, people were still cleaning up late at
Speaker 1: night after a function at the Furlong Club. This is
Speaker 1: after midnight one night when the fire bomb exploded. Only
Speaker 1: dumb luck stopped those workers from being incinerated. And that's
Speaker 1: a tragedy that would have turned two or three young
Speaker 1: teenage torches into murderers. But if they knew that, the
Speaker 1: kids that had the petrol bombs and the cigarette lighters
Speaker 1: and the getaway car, the stolen car, they didn't really care.
Speaker 1: They're young, they're dumb, and they do stuff for kicks
Speaker 1: and for a few hundred bucks before dawn that morning.
Speaker 1: The night that the Furlong Club was burnt, they set fire.
Speaker 1: The same crew the police believe set fire to another
Speaker 1: venue at top ms Town, which is just a few
Speaker 1: kilometers away. There were three other fire bombings at suburban
Speaker 1: venues in the same hectic two weeks in February this year. Now,
Speaker 1: the El Nutherira venue in mill Park was hit twice
Speaker 1: in six days. The security camera footage that the police
Speaker 1: retrieved from that shows young thugs armed with military style weapons.
Speaker 1: Can you believe this? They've got like military weapons, dragging
Speaker 1: a security guard from his car and holding him down
Speaker 1: at gunpoint while they burned the place. Now, this is
Speaker 1: very scary stuff. This is not you know, a couple
Speaker 1: of fourteen year olds pinching grandma's holden on a Saturday
Speaker 1: night and driving it down to the fish and chip shop.
Speaker 1: This is organized violence of the type that we associate
Speaker 1: with the Middle East and with you know, Soweto. It's
Speaker 1: very ugly, very dangerous, very bad. In these cases, arsonist
Speaker 1: as young as fourteine were speeding around suburban Melbourne in
Speaker 1: stolen cars. They're carrying petrol bombs and weapons. They paid
Speaker 1: very little to do this, but that doesn't lessen the
Speaker 1: consequences and the possible consequences of their actions. We all
Speaker 1: know that young people, particularly young males, have lousy impulse control,
Speaker 1: very poor grasp of potential consequences of their actions, from
Speaker 1: the sports field to the battlefield to the street. Too
Speaker 1: often it's teenagers who take the biggest risks. It's a
Speaker 1: well known fact throughout history. In fact, the history of
Speaker 1: crime is full of examples. I mentioned Ned Kelly before.
Speaker 1: Ned Kelly running around with Harry Power as a teenager,
Speaker 1: his first arrest comes. He's virtually Harry Power's apprentice until
Speaker 1: Power gets arrested. Kelly ends up taking over and becoming
Speaker 1: an adult bushranger arm Rubber himself. Another example from popular
Speaker 1: culture is Billy the Kid, where there's a new series
Speaker 1: on television called Billy the Kid. It's highly stylized, highly dramatized.
Speaker 1: It's not a faithful historical reenactment of anything particular, but
Speaker 1: it is based loosely on a real person who did exist,
Speaker 1: and that person was a kid. His name was Henry McCarty,
Speaker 1: also known as William Bonnie. He stabbed a man in
Speaker 1: a bar at twelve years old, he spent his teenage
Speaker 1: years stealing and gambling. He committed his first murder at seventeen,
Speaker 1: before his own predictably violent death at twenty two. Now,
Speaker 1: Billy the Kid has been immortalized in film and song
Speaker 1: and become part of popular culture, you know, knocking on
Speaker 1: Heaven's door, etc. Not everybody gets Bob Dylan singing songs
Speaker 1: about them, but that sort of behavior, stabbing someone at twelve,
Speaker 1: living dangerously, murdering people before you're old enough to vote,
Speaker 1: that is exactly the template that a lot of kids
Speaker 1: in Melbourne, in Victoria and in Australia are following, and
Speaker 1: it seems to be a growing phenomenon. Currently, there seems
Speaker 1: to be a cohort of people, for whatever reason, who
Speaker 1: are inciting each other to do this and are being
Speaker 1: incited by others to do this sort of stuff. Billy
Speaker 1: the Kid, Billy McCarty is just one of the countless
Speaker 1: young offenders who went knocking on Heaven's door, and for
Speaker 1: what for easy money, for the sick pleasure of hurting
Speaker 1: fellow humans, for the empty applause and shallow admiration of fools,
Speaker 1: unfair weather friends. True. I just read that because that
Speaker 1: is a paragraph I wrote in a story, worry about
Speaker 1: this very subject. But there's no doubt that a lot
Speaker 1: of kids do this stuff for kicks. They might get
Speaker 1: paid by somebody, they might steal something that they can sell,
Speaker 1: but deep down they're doing it for thrills kicks. One
Speaker 1: of the most addictive drugs of all is adrenaline. So
Speaker 1: such his life for the young and the reckless while
Speaker 1: it lasts. But if they don't end up deadl like
Speaker 1: Billy and ned Kelly and a lot more, they end
Speaker 1: up buried in concrete and steel cells, serving huge sentences,
Speaker 1: like the older criminals who were sucked in and spat
Speaker 1: out by the underworld wars. If these kids don't pull
Speaker 1: up in time, jail or death is the most likely
Speaker 1: prospect when they get to be adult offenders. They're being
Speaker 1: treated too leniently at this level. Some would say they've
Speaker 1: been let go on the streets. They've been shown that
Speaker 1: they can offend and offend an offend and rarely be
Speaker 1: locked up for it, and until it's too late, because
Speaker 1: when they get to twenty twenty one, twenty two, whatever,
Speaker 1: and they do a serious crime, suddenly they'll be in
Speaker 1: front of a judge and jury who say there's no
Speaker 1: more chances for you, Sonny Jim. You are going in
Speaker 1: the big house for a long time, and that is
Speaker 1: when they'll realize they've wrecked their life. An example of
Speaker 1: how those sort of kids can turn into adult criminals
Speaker 1: is this. We can't name names here because what happened
Speaker 1: in children's courts can never be revealed. But in twenty thirteen,
Speaker 1: three teenagers well known to police embarked on a series
Speaker 1: of terrifying robberies on pokey venues across Melbourne. The jam's
Speaker 1: sawn off, shot and a pistol in the faces of
Speaker 1: terrified customers and staff, and then they'd grabbed the money
Speaker 1: because they're pretty well informed about where the money was,
Speaker 1: and then they'd run outside jumping a stolen cart waiting
Speaker 1: with a getaway driver and they head off at terrible
Speaker 1: high speeds up to one hundred and eighty kilometers an hour.
Speaker 1: Very dangerous process, but they got away with a series
Speaker 1: of these robberies, pretty big robberies on pretty big venues
Speaker 1: and until they were caught by the Armed Crime Squad,
Speaker 1: which ran an operation called Operation Dark Knight that was
Speaker 1: in late in twenty thirteen October and November the Operation
Speaker 1: Dark Knight targeted five particular robberies of gaming venues, four
Speaker 1: in the Western suburbs and one was in Mulgrave. There
Speaker 1: were four in just thirty three days. Significantly, the guns
Speaker 1: and the getaway car were provided by an older, experienced
Speaker 1: Middle Eastern organized crime figure who we can't name at
Speaker 1: this point, who told his teenage underlings which targets to
Speaker 1: hit and when during that month of madness. That series
Speaker 1: netted the mastermind a lot of stolen cash for a
Speaker 1: minimum of risk to himself. But of course the kids,
Speaker 1: the teenagers did get caught. They did get banged up,
Speaker 1: but not for long, not for the sort of sentences
Speaker 1: they would have got if they were a few years older,
Speaker 1: and it set them firmly on the way to becoming
Speaker 1: seasoned career criminals themselves. The experience of being caught and
Speaker 1: locked up briefly for less than a year, I think
Speaker 1: didn't have the necessary effect. To read the police reports
Speaker 1: from Operation Dark Knight, and I quote the armed robberies
Speaker 1: in question targeted lucrative venues reasonably expected to be holding
Speaker 1: large sums of cash. It could also be reasonably expected
Speaker 1: these venues would contain large numbers of patrons and staff,
Speaker 1: particularly the elderly. The commission of these armed robberies involved
Speaker 1: a high level of planning and preparation. It entailed the
Speaker 1: sourcing of a stolen motor vehicle, stolen registration plates, and
Speaker 1: a stolen firearm shotgun. Most clothing worn by the offenders
Speaker 1: was either destroyed or disposed of. Although police were unable
Speaker 1: to identify any particular safe house, it became evident that
Speaker 1: offenders were utilizing a secure location to store the stolen
Speaker 1: motor vehicle, firearms, and stolen cash. That is code for
Speaker 1: this was being run by older crooks and highly organized.
Speaker 1: The victims were mostly elderly and were quote ordered down
Speaker 1: on the ground by masked men with a shotgun pointed
Speaker 1: directly in their faces. Many of those victims have suffered
Speaker 1: severe psychological distress and trauma as a result. Many report
Speaker 1: that these offenses have impacted on the way they now
Speaker 1: lived their lives, forcing them to stay at home. In
Speaker 1: other words, listeners, The robbers were not some Alarican kids
Speaker 1: lair rising on a Saturday night. They were taking part
Speaker 1: in clinically planned, traumatizing, potentially fatal crimes, and yet it
Speaker 1: seemed to frustrate a police that when are arrested and
Speaker 1: charged with the most serious crimes short of homicide and rape.
Speaker 1: You know, these sort of vicious arm robberies. They're the
Speaker 1: crimes that fall just below homicide and rape. The offenders
Speaker 1: were treated like school kids caught shoplifting. That's how it
Speaker 1: seemed to some of the police. In the end. As
Speaker 1: I said before, two of these young offenders walked from
Speaker 1: court on a basis they'd already done two hundred and
Speaker 1: thirty five days on remand by the time they offered
Speaker 1: guilty please. Police were angered by this, not surprisingly, and
Speaker 1: one a police officer wrote these words. One could argue
Speaker 1: that the element of punishment has not been achieved. It
Speaker 1: could be argued that neither child has been held accountable
Speaker 1: for their actions. Fast forward to twenty twenty four, that's
Speaker 1: eleven years later. The PostScript to Operation Dark Knight is
Speaker 1: that two of those three teenage criminals have gone on
Speaker 1: to become quite serious players in what we now call
Speaker 1: the Tobacco War. Unlike long deck criminals from history, these
Speaker 1: now frightening young adults can't be named because of the
Speaker 1: tough rules governing under age court proceedings in the recent past.
Speaker 1: But Anyone familiar with the rise of Middle Eastern crime
Speaker 1: in Australia will know their surnames, and you would have
Speaker 1: to have been under a rock not to realize that
Speaker 1: Middle Eastern crime has taken off in the last decade.
Speaker 1: One of this pair is now a feared and wealthy
Speaker 1: gangland figure implicated in high level drug trafficking and crimes
Speaker 1: of violence. Detectives have noted during previous interactions his eagerness
Speaker 1: to learn everything he can about their tactics and their
Speaker 1: methods of investigation. The other one of this pair is
Speaker 1: a suspected drug dealer, a money launderer who has in
Speaker 1: the past made gaudy displays of his unexplained wealth on
Speaker 1: social medium and so on. That was until his enemies
Speaker 1: put a big price on his increasingly isolated head and
Speaker 1: he was forced to move out of the aseratis and
Speaker 1: into the shadows. Meanwhile, the crime convey a belt which
Speaker 1: produced these two grinds on throwing up fresh pawns for
Speaker 1: older crooks to exploit the way they were every week
Speaker 1: in Victoria. It's young offenders who've rushed to the front
Speaker 1: line in the war over Melbourne's elicit tobacco industry, burning
Speaker 1: smoke shops or carrying out ram raids to steal goods
Speaker 1: that their masters, their criminal masters will then on sell.
Speaker 1: These are the guys that are the fagans of crime,
Speaker 1: and we probably need Fagan laws to specifically target older
Speaker 1: crooks who use younger crooks to do their bidding and
Speaker 1: basically just teaching them what to do so that they're
Speaker 1: creating a whole raft of new criminals. The price of
Speaker 1: this sort of crime apprenticeship is that it sets them
Speaker 1: on the long wrong road, often for life. When they're young,
Speaker 1: these useful idiots are paid, often only a few hundred
Speaker 1: dollars to blow up businesses and miskilling or injuring innocent people.
Speaker 1: Of course, it's not only these arsonal attacks. In the
Speaker 1: tobacco wars, there have been cases of teens drawn into
Speaker 1: attempted hits and doing terrifying drive by shootings that overwhelmingly
Speaker 1: in danger innocent lives. Quite a lot of people in Melbourne, Sydney,
Speaker 1: but especially Sydney have been hurt by indiscriminate shooting with
Speaker 1: semi automatic weapons. Meanwhile, their criminal bosses know that if
Speaker 1: the kids are court it's odds on that they'll get bail.
Speaker 1: Automatically because of their tender years, which makes prison only
Speaker 1: a remote possibility for many of them, until the day
Speaker 1: comes when they turn eighteen and find themselves a long
Speaker 1: way from the bleeding hearts and the revolver doors down
Speaker 1: at the children's Court. It's only then that it will
Speaker 1: be too late to dodge the consequences of their wasted youth.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening. Life and Crimes is a Sunday Herald
Speaker 1: Sun production for true crime Australia. Our producer is Johnty Burton.
Speaker 1: For my columns, features and more, go to Heroldsun dot
Speaker 1: com dot au, forward slash andrew rule one word. For
Speaker 1: advertising inquiries, go to news podcasts sold at news dot
Speaker 1: com dot au. That is all one word news podcasts
Speaker 1: sold And if you want further information about this episode,
Speaker 1: links are in the description. Can you go a