REMEMBER WHEN

Friday September 26, 1997

POLICE claimed to have smashed the Gold Coast’s chief ”designer drug’’ cartel after concluding the ‘largest sting’’ in the state’s law-enforcement history.

The sting culminated in a series of simultaneous raids in NSW and Queensland which led to the arrest of 48 people on a total of 350 charges. Those arrested included a former first grade Sydney rugby league footballer, a barrister, bikies and a former night club manager.

At dawn, 250 police officers, including the special antiterrorist squad, swooped on luxury Gold Coast houses, units and Surfers Paradise nightclub Fever to seize drugs with a street value of $2 million.

The 70 raids capped off a marathon 11-month operation for undercover police officers.

The two “coverts’” infiltrated the coast’s nightclub scene and allegedly made 125 purchases of drugs ranging from cocaine and LSD to heroin and ecstasy from drug dealers who were working as everything from bouncers to blackjack dealers.

During the operation, police allege the multimillion dollar drug-dealing syndicate fed the street level dealers through a multi-tiered system with the cartel bosses offering cut-price rates to top customers.

At a court appearance it was alleged one dealer had told an undercover operative he was ”flat out”’ selling 70 to 100 ”packets’’ of heroin a day.

Drug squad Detective Inspector Anne MacDonald, who co-ordinated the operations, said the operation had ”dismantled the drug syndicates responsible for the distribution of perhaps 80 percent of the drugs on the Gold Coast the designer drugs’’.