by Malcolm Knox
Customs intercepted 154 kilograms of ice in 2002, but the drug was increasingly being locally produced, rather than imported. A fortnight after the Lennox Head-bound ice was found coming in from Hong Kong, police in Brisbane raided a methamphetamine laboratory and arrested two 34-year-olds from the suburb of Wishart, Tony Paul Pavolvice and Melissa Gamblin. They were caught with ice to a street value of $35 000—not an extraordinarily large amount, but it was notable for having been produced locally, the second such find in six months in Queensland. Across the country, that number was about to leap: by the end of 2002, police were to dismantle 201 clandestine labs across all eight states and territories.
Ice had originated in East Asia, however, and the importation of the knowledge didn’t stop the importation of the finished drug. The biggest Australian ice bust on record occurred in May 2003, and it was an import job, not a clandestine lab.
Customs seized a record 233 kilograms of ice in the 2002/03 financial year, 98 per cent of it from Asia. Heroin seizures at the border were down by 27 per cent, and cocaine intecepts had plummeted dramatically, from 983 kilos to just 59 kilos.
Most of the intercepted ice, plus another 200-plus kilos captured by police, was seized in three separate operations within the space of five days in May 2003. The biggest was when 212 kilograms of crystal meth was found packed in boxes of rice noodle sticks and brown sugar in a shipment from China to Sydney. This one seizure was bigger than all previous cross-border captures put together.
Anna Zhang, born in 1956 and raised in Shanghai, had come to Australia in 1990. Having four elder brothers, she was the baby of a relatively poor family but had a happy childhood and married when she was 25. This marriage produced a son, but she and her husband divorced after a few years. She worked for fifteen years with a Shanghai food company, and after migrating to Australia she set up a food importing business, Eastern Trade and Import Pty Ltd. Among the items she was importing by 2003 were rice sticks and brown rock sugar which came in large chunks. She had also, since arriving in Australia, developed a costly addiction to gambling.
Tony Tu, 40, was a Canadian citizen who had flown into Australia from China in March 2003. Tu, like Zhang, was a gambler, and he moved into a hotel room at Star City Casino in Sydney, which provided him the free accommodation and other services that were offered to big-time players. He had carried $30 000 into Australia and deposited $9000 of it in a gambling account in the casino. When it fell low, he replenished it. He also rented a flat in Jones Bay Road, Ultimo. The courts were told that Tu and Zhang met shortly after Tu’s arrival in Sydney, in the VIP Lounge at Star City.
They were quickly a romantic item, but their dalliance was about to come to a not-very-happy ending.
Within weeks, on 2 May, the container ship Magnavia arrived at Port Botany from Guangzhou. It was carrying 401 cartons marked as containing rice sticks and brown rock sugar, addressed to Eastern Trade and Import.
Customs found about twenty of these cartons to be suspicious on first glance, with some inconsistencies in the way they were packed. They X-rayed some of them and found ice. They notified the Australian Federal Police, who replaced some of the drug with an inert substitute.
Eleven days later, on 13 May, the shipment was delivered to a warehouse leased by Zhang’s company at 39 Jones Street, Ultimo. Zhang watched as the truck was unloaded and the boxes, some of them broken, were taken inside unit LJ8.
A day later, Zhang and Tu went into the warehouse for a few hours, before emerging at 5 pm with a yellow plastic shopping bag and a green sports bag. Tu drove Zhang to her apartment at 288 Wattle Street, Ultimo, and she got out with both bags. As she arrived at her apartment, Federal Police officers approached her and escorted her inside, where they found a garbage bag in the bottom of her wardrobe containing about four kilograms of crystal methamphetamine. A further two kilograms were found inside boxes labelled brown rock sugar in pieces, People’s Republic of China.
In the green sports bag police found some of the inert substance they had substituted for the ice they’d earlier removed at Port Botany. Zhang’s bags also contained a set of scales, which bore traces of ice, and some mobile phones.
Caught, Zhang turned on her boyfriend. She said she hadn’t known anything about the drugs until Tu had told her that day that the boxes contained some ‘special sugar’ which helped to make ‘a tablet for dancing’. She said the garbage bags in her wardrobe had been given to her by Tu and she didn’t know what was in them. Why hadn’t she asked him what was inside? That would be against Chinese culture, she said.
Meanwhile, at 5.55 pm Tu was arrested at his apartment in Jones Bay Road, near the warehouse. He had a piece of paper in his pocket with a list of twenty numbers, variously circled or ticked, which corresponded with the box numbers of the cartons containing ice. In his laundry, police found 107 kilograms of ice in the same packaging, and of the same purity, as the drug found in Zhang’s apartment.
The courts didn’t believe Zhang’s story of innocence, and the pair were put away for periods approaching the maximum penalties available. Tu would receive a 25-year sentence with sixteen years non-parole, and Zhang twenty years with twelve years non-parole.
It’s worth pausing for a moment to calculate the real quantity of ice Zhang and Tu were caught bringing into Australia. The shipments of 212 kilograms (including that which had come on the Magnavia and that which was found in their apartments from an earlier shipment) were on average 70 per cent pure. At the time, the average purity of ice on Sydney streets was about half that. So let’s assume they sold the ice to dealers who eventually cut it down to 35 per cent purity. This makes their load effectively 424 kilograms of street ice, or 424 000 lots of one gram. But ice was very often sold, at the lowest level, in points of 0.1 grams. A point is enough to get most users high for several hours.
Zhang and Tu were caught with an amount that represented 4 240 000 occasions where an ice user would get high. If the ice eventually smoked or injected was less pure than 35 per cent, that means even more. The sheer bulk of the intercepted importation throws some stunning light on how big the market was.
The size of the Zhang–Tu shipments brought home the extent to which Sydney was the main entry point for Asian shabu. Police were still referring to crystal meth as a ‘new’ and ‘rare’ drug, but a co-commander of the Joint Asian Crime Group, AFP Senior Agent Rob Milner, said he was staggered and alarmed at the quantities.
‘We would like to think we are making a dent in it but it is difficult to say because of the increasing demand for this type of drug,’ he said.
His co-commander, NSW Police Detective Inspector John Lehmann, acknowledged ice’s popularity on the south-east Asian nightclub circuit. ‘Now we are seeing it here.’
‘Of course we are alarmed,’ he said. ‘We see it as basically the same type of criminal syndicates who have been traditionally involved in the importation of large quantities of other types of narcotics, just diversifying from heroin.
‘It is a new market that the syndicates have identified.’
For all the methamphetamine intercepted, many more times that amount got through. Thanks to the Zhang–Tu bust, four million hits of ice didn’t make it to the market. But their absence caused no change in price or purity. Wherever it came from, all that ice had to go somewhere, and as long as the majority of users were young men and women enhancing their weekend hedonism, the drug was going to remain widely used and safely beneath the radar. But ice is not ecstasy. It can induce violent actions, as a University of Newcastle researcher, Melissa Claire, found in a 2003 survey of 153 users, one in six of whom admitted to having committed violent acts. Most were relatively minor outbursts, flashes of temper that got a little out of control. None had escalated to the kind of bizarre behaviour ice produced in Mohammed Kerbatieh and Dimitrios ‘Jim’s World’ Kyriakidis.
But far worse was to come. The real impact of ice has always been at the user end of the chain, and the story was about to take a dramatic down
ward turn.
For Matthew Gagalowicz—the young Canberra man whose response to misfortune and death among his loved ones was a descent into habitual drug use—2002 hadn’t been the best of years.
Leaving school early in his HSC studies, Gagalowicz tried a number of manual jobs. He could only function while he was on speed. Without it, his concentration would jump about and he would sink into deep depressions. On it, though, he started to have paranoid delusions about his workmates. He would make accusations, get into verbal altercations, and storm out. He moved rapidly from one job to the next. He tried living with friends, but bounced back home to his parents’ house when things didn’t work out.
Ever since he had been diagnosed with diabetes, around the time of his grandmother’s death and his mother’s cancer, Gagalowicz had intentionally cut himself with razors and knives when he got angry. One night in July 2002, he took amphetamines and flew into a rage. To ‘release’ his anger, as he put it, he slashed his arms and neck. He was taken to Canberra Hospital, but refused to see the mental health crisis team.
Several weeks later, agitated and pale, again high on methamphetamine, he returned to the hospital to say he had run out of the glucometer strips he needed to monitor his blood sugar. He had swollen glands and a cold that wouldn’t go away. He was given the strips but refused the offer of diabetes education.
That same week, on 11 August 2002, the police brought him into Canberra Hospital after his parents had called, saying he had destroyed furniture in the family home in a fit of anger. Gagalowicz told a mental health team that he had been hearing voices, was unable to sleep, suffered from paranoid delusions, and his temper was on a short fuse. He was detained for three days and put on sedatives and anti-psychotic medication, but stopped taking both shortly after his release.
Three years later, Justice Michael Adams of the NSW Supreme Court would say of Gagalowicz:
The [illicit] drugs provided a way by which he could feel both better about himself and secure and hopeful about the future. Of course, such drug-induced feelings are a delusion, a delusion which becomes distressingly obvious as soon as the effect of the drug wears off. He did not commence drug-taking as a mature person, nor even as a young person approaching maturity. He was a child, a child who became addicted to a substance that enabled him, for a short time, to think that his life was or could be worthwhile. His ability to cope with the stresses in his life and his response to those stresses must be viewed in that context. To treat him as a recreational drug user would be not merely quite inaccurate but grossly unjust as well.
Nevertheless, it is also important to recognise that Gagalowicz viewed himself as a recreational drug user, even though it’s obvious to anyone from the outside that he was not. In Gagalowicz’s own mind, he was just a young man—with his troubles, for sure—out having fun with his drug buddies.
Drug buddies were never far away, even though their identities would change. After his hospitalisation in August 2002, Gagalowicz went to a rehab facility near Wollongong called Kedesh House for an eight-week course. For $160 a week the residential program provided ‘a Cognitive Behavioural Therapy-based treatment programme for substance abusers. Other treatment modules include relapse prevention, social skills, self-identity, health education and self-help groups.’
In his self-help group, Gagalowicz became friendly with a 21-year-old amphetamine user, David Farrington, and his 17-year-old girlfriend who we will call Alicia Lewis. Gagalowicz also had a teenage girlfriend of his own.
After seven of the proposed eight weeks, Gagalowicz broke a curfew and left the program. Every indication is that he was off drugs. He had neglected his cleaning chores and was put under restrictions; one day he thought, ‘Fuck it, I want to go to the shops.’ He was ejected from the course for breaking the rules.
After leaving Kedesh he stayed with his parents on the south coast of New South Wales for a short time before moving, with his girlfriend, Farrington and Lewis, into a Department of Housing cottage in Farrell Road, Bulli, in January 2003. When they moved in together to start a new adventure, the two couples were drug-free.
Bulli is a working-class coastal village with a mix of mining families, surfers, and commuters to Wollongong and Sydney. Also living nearby was a 41-year-old man named Rick Smith, the father of a four-month-old daughter. Rick Smith was a known drug dealer.
In the summer heat, the good intentions of Gagalowicz, Farrington and their girlfriends lasted little more than a week before they were buying a number of different substances from Smith, including cannabis and heroin—but Smith’s main attraction was that he could get them crystal methamphetamine. They pooled their Centrelink payments. Smith came every day or two to sell them ice, which they would sit around and inject.
The case of Matthew Gagalowicz would blow out of the water any idea that ice and ordinary speed are more or less the same thing. While it is true that his teenage years had hardly been a walk in the park, he had taken amphetamines throughout those years and had done no worse than break some furniture, shout at his parents, and harm himself. Living in the Bulli house with his friends, injecting ice most days, Matthew Gagalowicz went off the deep end.
Life in the house was, at least in the minds of the four occupants, a nonstop party. They listened to music and played cards with the tweaker’s obsessive concentration on inconsequential tasks and patterns, and ate infrequently. When they ran out of ice and were coming down, they used heroin to soften the crash. Gagalowicz lost track of his insulin injections and his blood sugar levels rose and fell like a yoyo. He experienced episodes of terrified paranoia, heard voices, and suffered visual distortions. Alicia Lewis would frequently hallucinate, seeing cockroaches running across the floor of the house.
So chaotic were events in the Farrell Road house that the date of Rick Smith’s death has never been ascertained. But sometime between 13 and 18 February 2003, Gagalowicz phoned Smith to ask him to bring some ice. The household had run out.
Unknown to Smith, they had also run out of money. But they were coming down hard, suffering the extreme depression, paranoia and psychotic effects of a meth crash. They were desperate.
When Smith arrived at the house in early afternoon, Gagalowicz, alone in the kitchen, said he had no money and wanted to buy some ice on credit. Smith—who was also high on crystal meth at the time—flew off the handle, refusing credit and saying Gagalowicz had wasted his time calling him over. Gagalowicz, feeling sick and with ‘the blood pounding in my head’, argued some more with Smith, then picked up a metal baseball bat, telling Smith to leave the drugs and go. Smith lunged at the bat to grab it, but Gagalowicz stepped clear, swung it and collected the drug dealer in the head. Gagalowicz would later say he only remembered hitting Smith twice—it felt, he said, like a dream.
For David Farrington, it was more like a nightmare. When Smith arrived, Farrington and Lewis had been sleeping in their bedroom at the back of the house. Farrington would tell a court he heard ‘sort of a high-pitched scream and then I just heard some more thudding, I’m not sure how long it went on for’.
After five or ten minutes, Gagalowicz came into the bedroom with a look on his face Farrington said he had never seen before.
‘I’ve killed Rick,’ Gagalowicz said, ‘and if you tell anyone I’m going to fuck you up.’
At this point, Farrington’s and Gagalowicz’s stories diverged. Farrington said he remained, scared, in his bedroom, and could hear a ‘sawing noise’ coming from the bathroom. Gagalowicz’s version, which a court found to be more convincing, was that, leaving Alicia Lewis asleep in the bedroom, the two young men went out into the kitchen to look at Smith’s body. Farrington asked where the drugs were. The clear plastic bag lay on the floor near the body. Gagalowicz and Farrington—their priorities undisturbed by what had just happened—took the ice into the living room and injected it. Then, energetic and motivated, they came back to the kitchen, picked up Smith’s body and carried it to the bathroom.
They discussed wh
at to do with the body. Their first idea was to borrow a neighbour’s car and dump Smith somewhere, but first they had to cut him up. They got knives and gloves, but when Farrington made the first cut he said he felt sick and left the dismemberment to Gagalowicz.
When he’d finished, leaving the body parts in the bathtub, Gagalowicz bumped into Alicia Lewis, who had woken up, and told her what had happened. She reacted with numb shock, not prepared to believe him. He told her and Farrington to get out of the house.
Taking Gagalowicz’s mobile phone, they walked to the beach while he started to clean up the kitchen and bathroom and put Smith’s remains into a suitcase. He kept injecting ice to keep himself on track.
By then dusk was falling. Gagalowicz’s girlfriend, who had been sleeping off a binge all day, woke up and went to the bathroom but found a sign on the door telling her to keep out. She found Gagalowicz in another room.
‘Why can’t I go into the bathroom?’ she asked sleepily.
Gagalowicz told her to sit down while he gave her a shot of crystal meth. When he’d done it, he said: ‘I’ve killed Rick.’
‘What?’ she said, thinking she wasn’t hearing clearly.
‘I’ve killed Rick. Whatever you do, don’t go in the bathroom.’
He told her to go down to the beach to find Farrington and Lewis. She complied, pliable in her shock. The three talked with a mixture of panic and disbelief about what they were going to do. Then, after about 45 minutes, Gagalowicz called them on the mobile phone and they returned to Farrell Road.
At the house, they found kitty litter scattered across the still-bloody kitchen floor. Gagalowicz, all manic activity, told them not to tell a soul what had happened. He said he would take full responsibility for the consequences, and told his girlfriend (who, due to her age, could not be named in court proceedings) to get an alibi—‘Find someone who’ll say you were with them today.’
