Real estate agent Lauren Macpherson said the email left her feeling hurt, distressed, embarrassed and humiliated.
Follow the money
"Follow the money" is a catchphrase popularized by the 1976 docudrama film All the President's Men, which suggests political corruption can be brought to light by examining money transfers between parties.
Fear of Packer’ pushed Star to go rogue, says director
- Patrick Hatch
Zahed’s brother Omar buried after gym shooting
- Jenny Noyes
Before recent inquiries into The Star and Crown casinos, few people would have suspected that money laundering was a huge problem in Australia.
Senior executives at those companies confidently asserted our capable law enforcement officials were on the case and money laundering was something that only happened in shadowy overseas jurisdictions such as Switzerland or the British Virgin Islands.
Yet the inquiries have shown that organised criminals, including Chinese triads, were likely using gaming tables at The Star and Crown as their back offices, laundering their drug money and taking out legal cash.
Those revelations were shocking but they are not isolated examples. Australia is generally performing poorly in cracking down on the illegal transactions on which organised crime depends.
As the Herald’s Nick McKenzie reported on Friday, NSW Assistant Police Commissioner Stuart Smith in a secret briefing last December said Australia and NSW are losing the fight against organised crime. He said police were fighting with “pool noodles” while criminals were armed with guns.
While the attack that wounded Comancheros sergeant-at-arms Tarek Zahed and killed his brother in an Auburn gym this week grabbed headlines, the key to stopping organised crime, in real life just like on television, is to follow the money.
This is where Smith expressed most concern, criticising AUSTRAC, the federal agency in charge of chasing financial crime. Calling them “nitwits,” he said they were too focused on money laundering in the banking system and ignoring other forms of crime.
It is hard to know whether he is right to blame AUSTRAC for being too focused on banks. The agency can point to several significant prosecutions launched against NDIS fraud and an international MDMA drug syndicate investigation.
Smith’s briefing is a worrying sign of friction between AUSTRAC and NSW police when they should be working hand in glove. It suggests there is a need for better co-ordination between state and federal agencies, including NSW police, the Australian Federal Police, the Australian Tax Office, AUSTRAC and the National Crime Commission.
Yet the issue is much wider than the failings of regulators. Many of the problems are rooted in corrupt behaviour.
Logically, it should be just as easy to launder money through the 96,000 poker machines at the state’s 4000 clubs and hotels as at The Star and Crown casinos. The industry has gross winnings of about $8 billion a year.
Yet when former digital minister Victor Dominello recently tried to introduce a cashless gaming card to track the identities of people who use gaming machines and in the process control problem gambling, Clubs NSW and the Australian Hotels Association used their formidable lobbying power to kill the idea and move him aside.
At a federal level, the Morrison government has dragged the chain on passing basic protections against money laundering, which have been recommended since 2007 by the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
The government passed the first stage of the rules requiring banks to establish the identity of their clients and report any suspicious transactions but, even though most comparable countries have already complied, Australia has found excuse after excuse not to enact the second stage extending the same obligations to the real estate agents, accountants and lawyers who advise organised criminals on how to hide their cash.
A parliamentary inquiry into the adequacy of Australia’s monetary laundering regime in March endorsed the second stage but voiced concern about the effect on small business and the legislation still seems years away.
Equally, the inquiry endorsed a so-called public beneficial ownership register, such as exists in many countries, which lists the ultimate owners of the trusts and complex corporate structures behind which money launderers hide their assets.
The OECD’s Financial Action Task force said: “Australia’s measures to ensure the availability of accurate and up-to-date information on the beneficial owners of companies and trusts in a timely manner needed improvement.”
The difficulty NSW has faced in recovering the tens of millions of dollars former ALP minister Eddie Obeid pocketed from his corruption shows another hole in our laws.
The NSW Crime Commission has struggled to untangle the web of family trusts and companies through which Obeid laundered his income, raising questions about the reach of the NSW Criminal Assets Recovery Act.
The task of fighting organised crime is enormous but one way of lightening the load would be establishing a federal integrity commission, with broad investigative powers similar to those of NSW’s Independent Commission Against Corruption.
It could take over the responsibility for integrity cases involving politicians and bureaucrats, leaving the Australian Federal Police more time to focus on international crime rings.
Law enforcement officials must be given the tools and the time they need to focus on catching Mr Bigs rather than the little fish.
Organised crime thrives because NSW cannot follow the money
An unknown number of women were deceived into relationships with undercover police as part of the Spycops Scandal. One, Donna McLean, speaks to Tribune about the discovery, the anger, and the ongoing struggle for justice.Life After Loving a Met Police Spy Tribune
On a cold winter night in 1986, I met my father and the writer C.D.B Bryan at the Irish Connection, a bar in the basement of a building on DeSales Street in Washington, D.C. I was a student at Catholic University who had just published his first article as a professional, a piece on preventing animal cruelty for The Progressive. My father was the Senior Associate Editor of National Geographic magazine. C.D.B. Bryan was the popular author of Friendly Fire, a book about Vietnam. He had been hired by National Geographic to write the book National Geographic: 100 Years of Adventure and Discovery, which would be published in 1987.
My father had invited me to meet Bryan because he knew I had developed a fascination with Vietnam during a high school history class. He also knew that as a young journalist I would be enthralled to meet such an accomplished writer as Bryan who had written for the New Yorker, Harper’s,Esquire, Rolling Stone, and the New York Times Book Review. Over pints of Guinness, we three talked about various things—music, literature, sports, what it was like to write a massive history of National Geographic. Bryan expressed delight that I had just professionally published my first article, but added a quip: “The Progressive is a great place to start. I don’t know if you’d want your daughter dating a writer from there, but still.”
We discussed Friendly Fire, Bryan’s book that told the tragic story of Michael Mullen, an American soldier who had been killed by friendly fire in Vietnam. Friendly Fire revealed the lies the government had told about the nature of Mullen’s death. It explored in moving detail how Mullen’s parents, especially his mother Peg, went from staunch patriots to anti-war activists. “He was very proud of the fact that he exposed the friendly fire issue, and the fact that the government was lying to people who were as very patriotic as the Mullens were,” Mairi Bryan, C.D.B.’s wife, said after his death in 2009. “Of all of his works, Friendly Fire was the one of which he was most proud.”
It’s been more than thirty-five years since the night I had Guinness with my father and Bryan. Today, National Geographic reflects an obsession with race, gender, and “equity,” dedicating covers to slavery, feminism, transgender ideology, and Black Lives Matter. In 2017, the magazine ran a special issue on “The Gender Revolution,” parroting the catechism of the transgender faith, with all the logical inconsistencies that go along with it. It’s no surprise that the Western world has gone native into wokeism. Yet because it’s so personal, National Geographic‘s surrender is particularly painful.
As self-help author Mark Manson wrote in his 2019 book, Everything is F*cked, A Book About Hope (and Manson, like the rest of us, had no idea what was right around the corner):
Ideological religions are difficult to start, but they are far more common than spiritual religions. All you have to do is find some reasonable-sounding explanation for why everything is fucked and then extrapolate that across wide populations in a way that gives people some hope, and voilà! You have yourself an ideological religion. If you’ve been alive for more than twenty years, surely you’ve seen this happen a few times by now. In my lifetime alone there have been movements in favor of LGBTQ rights, stem cell research, and decriminalizing drug use. In fact, a lot of what everyone is losing their shit about today is the fact that traditionalist, nationalist, and populist ideologies are winning political power across much of the world, and these ideologies are seeking to dismantle much of the work accomplished by the neoliberal, globalist, feminist, and environmentalist ideologies of the late twentieth century.
Hence the moral panic within the leftist overculture of the last five years, which went into maximum overdrive in mid-2020, and as a result destroyed not only the readers’ trust of publications such as National Geographic that were once perceived as politically neutral, but trust in the public health profession as well