Scattered (14 page)

But then, disarmed of his crowbar, Kyriakidis switched roles again. He took a Glock pistol from his pocket. He pointed it at Pestana who, now that things looked a lot more serious, cowered by the car. Kyriakidis moved around, grunting and gesticulating like Bruce Lee in a kung-fu movie. Then he walked towards Hennessey and fired a shot into the air.

As the two victims huddled near the ground, fearing for their lives, Kyriakidis took the keys from the Colt's ignition while Caldwell kept videotaping. He strode off towards his own car, then, remembering his crowbar, turned around and demanded it back from Pestana, who gave it to him.

Kyriakidis and Caldwell drove off. She had videotaped the entire attack. As they drove away, Kyriakidis smirked at the camera and said, ‘They'll be there for days.'

They weren't. They flagged down a truck that day and were taken to a hospital. Two days later, Kyriakidis's car was tracked down in Carnarvon. Kyriakidis and Caldwell were arrested. Initially they denied any involvement in the assault of the two men, but the incriminating videotape was found in a sock secreted in the car's air filter. Police also found the Glock pistol. Kyriakidis's explanation for the attack? He wanted to start an internet site called ‘Jim's World' and all he was doing was performing stunts, ‘pretend assaults', and turning them into a digital video that he could show on the website.

Of all the crimes committed under the influence of ice, the Kyriakidis outback attacks are a clear-cut instance of how the drug can intermesh with, and exacerbate, serious mental disorders. Several psychiatric evaluations were made of Kyriakidis after his arrest. One, from Dr James Fellows-Smith, said:

[Kyriakidis's] anxiety is understandable based on the psychopathology that he was experiencing in the days preceding this offence. Furthermore, although it is likely that his use of amphetamines greatly exacerbated his condition[,] his symptoms, in particular his ‘fear of being attacked by people on the road', were part of a recognisable psychiatric condition, temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) that Mr Kyriakidis has had since early childhood.

Kyriakidis told another psychiatrist, Dr Raymond Wu, that he had been in ‘a dream state' after snorting crystal meth that morning and the subsequent events were ‘a blur'. He said he had been ‘hearing voices' and ‘seeing spirits' since the age of fourteen; under the influence of crystal meth he could ‘foretell the future' and ‘sense things'. Television shows often spoke to him directly, sometimes telling him how to do his job and at other times delivering him messages from his dead father. He told Dr Fellows-Smith that he received signs from the spirit world and suffered seizures that gave an effect of deja vu and time distortion. Sometimes he hallucinated that he could smell vinegar strongly, or hear loud techno music in his head. He said he could only clear these sensations in two ways. One was by banging his head against a wall. The other was by using crystal methamphetamine, which seemed to clarify the world around him, sharpening his perception and steadying his concentration. But when the drug was wearing off, and indeed even when he was high after he had become a habitual user, he felt that people were watching him, that messages were coming at him through digital clocks and car registration numbers, and he felt that he had to ‘fix the wrongs of the world'.

Kyriakidis pleaded guilty to a number of charges. He was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison, which was later reduced by almost half on appeal.

In jail, once he was off crystal meth and taking antipsychotic medication, Kyriakidis resumed his lapsed school studies, repeatedly expressed remorse for his crimes, and became as good a father as he could to his and Caldwell's baby daughter. If he could resist the pull of ice, examining psychiatrists expressed hope that he could start a productive life once he was released.

Through 2002 and into 2003, ice percolated steadily through Australian society. One steady, if imprecise, measure of this was the number of occasions law enforcement officials were coming across the drug. They were now fighting on two fronts: customs were trying to stop the importation of the drug across the borders, and police officers were battling the clandestine labs.

Stories emerged from both fronts. In February 2002, an unaccompanied parcel arrived at Sydney Airport on a flight from Hong Kong. Its documentation said it was a computer part, but customs officers found it weighed more than it should have. They cracked it open and found 1.67 kilos of crystal meth. Its addressee was a man living in Lennox Head, the noted surf spot near Byron Bay in northern New South Wales. He was located, arrested and convicted.

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 downward 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.