There’s a black joke doing the rounds in law enforcement agencies. Q: How do you get a gun into Sydney? A: Hide it in the cocaine importation.
On Saturday afternoon, the barrel of a high-powered rifle, likely an SKS with modified 30-round magazine, protruded from a car window in the city’s southwest. A hooded figure fired more than two dozen rounds into the glass facade of an event hall where the funeral of a 24-year-old gangster was set to take place.
The shooting at Diamond Venues in Punchbowl was more than just the latest in a long-running tit-for-tat between two gangs contesting the city’s drug market, and avenging their losses.
It also shows the underworld is willing and able to deploy military-grade weaponry against families and friends of their enemies in broad daylight.
Two senior police independently told the Herald there would be 100 dead if the Bondi Beach shooters had used some of the guns available to the underworld, referring to the mass shooting in which alleged Islamic State terrorists used a straight-pull bolt-action rifle and shotguns to kill 15 people.
No one was harmed at the original funeral venue for Lorenzo Lemalu on Saturday night, his family having cancelled the gathering at short notice.
Lemalu, a leader of the so-called Coconut Cartel, was shot dead outside a Ho Chi Minh City restaurant last month amid a bloody gangland war with the cartel’s former allies, the Alameddine organised crime network (OCN).
Authorities are yet to establish who ordered the killing of Lemalu, but are exploring the possibility that it was retribution, ordered by a third group known as the Badger OCN, after police seized a 390kg meth shipment from the cartel’s operations in Sydney.
Mourners instead gathered at Forest Lawn Memorial Park to bury Lemalu on Sunday, under heavy police presence and the threat of another shooting.
Lemalu, who was also a drill rap aspirant, had only just been lowered into the grave on Sunday when a Sydney underworld rap-linked account posted an image of two military rifles and ammunition on a grey sheet.
Online rap fans speculated whether the image was of the weapon used in the Punchbowl shooting, a modified Soviet-era SKS, or a variant of the infamous and similar AK-47 assault rifle.
The weapon on the grey sheet also sported a curved “banana clip” magazine capable of carrying dozens of high-powered rounds.
Military rifles, including the SKS, extended magazines and silencers have been seized in Sydney as search warrants were executed in recent years.
Just 12 days before the Bondi Beach shooting police searched a commercial property in Kingsgrove and found an AR15 assault rifle, an SKS, a pistol, approximately 30 3D printed high-capacity pistol magazines, ammunition and numerous 3D-printed slides and pistol frames.
Detectives working the case stopped a van in Narellan, that same day, and found a duffel bag containing a folding semi-automatic rifle with more banana clips, magazines and silencers.
Two months earlier, another strike force busted a gang with an SKS, three magazines, 76 rounds of ammunition, knuckledusters, capsicum spray, and $300,000 of MDMA.
Sydney’s gangsters have a few methods to obtain their weapons – print 3D components, steal lawfully owned guns or bring in high-powered weapons the same way as their drugs, in shipping containers.
Authorities arrested a Merrylands man in October 2020 after the Australian Border Force found pieces for an AR-15 assault rifle inside a bluetooth speaker imported from the United States. It led them to a sprawling drug and weapons operation in the city’s west.
In April this year, police traced the importation of a folding, single-shot pistol to a drug dealer with a weapons cache in Telopea.
NSW Police declined to reveal the number of SKS rifles registered in NSW. However, a document released under freedom of information request in 2020 suggests there were 128 variants of the rifles known to be held by the state’s dealers and collectors.
The Violence Policy Center in the United States has called the SKS a “menace to society”, and said the predecessor of the infamous AK-47 posed a “grave threat” to law enforcement.
“From 1988 to 2021, 27 law enforcement officers were killed in the line of duty with SKS assault rifles. In six of those incidents, bullets fired from the SKS rifles were known to have penetrated the officers’ vests,” the centre wrote in a report.
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