MELBOURNE: Tuyet Thi Anh Tieu had one that flourished in the backyard of her Vermont South house, its healthy roots testament to the powers of the worshipped “money plant”.
But those who found $50,000 cash buried under Tieu’s plant weren’t admiring green thumbs. They were members of a Victoria Police drug task force armed with a search warrant.
What they dug up was the tip of an iceberg in a powdered white ocean of heroin, sourced in Vietnam, imported to Australia internally by a mule train of female couriers and then distributed and trafficked in Melbourne.
In more than 10,000 hours of intercepted telephone calls recorded in operation Rattlesnake, Tieu’s home was called “The Bank”, where she was the syndicate’s trusted cashier.
Tieu, who would later be jailed for laundering $1.3 million, was also the cousin of Khanh Minh Duong, a principal of Rattlesnake – and a major player in a second operation codenamed Raptor.
Until his arrest in 2011, Sydney-based Duong who once sourced, offered and exchanged about $1 million of wholesale heroin in one month had a critical “senior management role”, said Colin Mandy, prosecutor for Raptor.
Prosecutors for Rattlesnake, Richard Pirrie and Natalie Sheridan-Smith, told Melbourne’s County Court that Duong had approved couriers, facilitated the supply of heroin in Vietnam for importation to Australia, vouched for people, made structured payments and kept others informed.
With the last two of dozens of offenders recently admitting their guilt, The Sunday Age can report on how – over three years and using numerous surveillance techniques Victoria Police, the Australian Federal Police, interstate colleagues and Customs targeted and ultimately busted the syndicates.
Millions of dollars in assets were seized as Raptor targeted large scale street heroin traffickers in Collingwood and Richmond, while Rattlesnake focused on wholesale transactions.
Duong, 34, did not use heroin or gamble heavily, but was found on arrest with $98,000 in jewellery and $17,000 cash. His barrister, Michael Cahill, said Duong was a family-loving, polite and non-violent Buddhist who believed in karma – “that you create your own destiny”.
Of those prosecuted, only one offender used heroin, but many particularly vulnerable females persuaded to become couriers – were targeted by loan sharks at Crown and Star City casinos to import heroin to clear gambling or other debts.
When he pleaded guilty to three charges of trafficking a marketable quantity of heroin – with Judge Duncan Allen taking into account that he also facilitated multiple importations of similar amounts – Duong apologised for his conduct, but claimed he’d been drawn into one established heroin business and had acted at another’s direction in a second.
Judge Allen, who jailed him for 11 years with a minimum of seven years – a sentence the Crown is appealing as manifestly inadequate – said Duong had played important and high roles “somewhere near the top” in both profitable syndicates.
He took into account the value of Duong’s guilty pleas, lack of prior convictions and the need to avoid a crushing sentence.
The woman, known as F1, sought authority from Duong prior to arranging couriers and used his Vietnamese connections to have them obtain heroin to import internally. She once paid him $240,000 for 1.4 kilograms of the drug.
F1 had a coded conversation with an associate in Vietnam about “feeding grandma” and “sweet talking” a courier who later imported eight ounces of heroin.
Another woman swallowed 50 balloons of heroin, but when detected by Australian customs Duong was heard crying in a tapped conversation.
A month later, he let a woman, who had asked to courier drugs, import pellets of heroin because she needed money to bury her father in Vietnam.
Judge Allen had commented, in sentencing another female courier, that he had heard “time and time again” the same “tragic tale”, having dealt with others from the previous, unrelated operation Ripsaw – named, like its sisters, after rollercoasters.