Operation Warrior: drug empire defeated

Daniel Kalaja. Source: The Courier-Mail

OUTWARDLY, there was nothing unusual about the life of Daniel Kalaja.

He would go for runs with friends, pump iron at home in his spotless Gold Coast house and follow the fitness tips of his ex-girlfriend, a personal trainer.

Polite and personable, respectful to women and devoted to his father George and dog Roxy, he was also one of the state's most prolific drug traffickers.

While he looked like any other resident, his phone was being tapped. Listening devices were installed in his home and investigators were strangling his mammoth drug syndicate including a number of family members through seemingly unconnected busts.

The 13-month covert investigation, codenamed Operation Warrior, combined the resources of the Crime and Misconduct Commission, Queensland Police Service and NSW and Victorian police forces.

By the end of Warrior, 71 people would be arrested on 375 charges and Kalaja and his network would be collectively sentenced to more than 100 years' imprisonment.

Timeline: Rise and fall of a drug family.

Almost 170kg of cannabis, 5.13kg of methamphetamine, 3544 ecstasy tablets, 60 litres of fantasy precursor GBL and $1.9 million in cash were seized, putting an end to what was described in court as trafficking on a "heroic scale".

After Kalaja was convicted and jailed, The Sunday Mail spoke to investigators and obtained court records to reveal the inside story of the biggest covert operation ever led by the CMC and the syndicate it brought down.

"This was an ongoing enterprise for a long, long time," said lead Warrior investigator, Detective Sergeant John Hare, of the CMC's Organised Crime Investigation Team.

Warrior began in April 2009 with a core team of three investigators, two financial investigators, two intelligence officers and a lawyer.

The Kalaja syndicate initially traded in chop-chop, or illegal tobacco, after Daniel's father George and other relatives emigrated to Australia from Albania from the 1970s.

Cannabis became their mainstay. Kalaja and two relatives were all stopped by police in separate cars with multiple kilograms of the drug on different occasions in 2001.

The family stayed in the marijuana business and may have stayed off the radar of Queensland authorities except for one key development - Kalaja moved from Melbourne to the Gold Coast and branched out into other drugs for the first time.

Ecstasy, speed, ice, fantasy and cocaine dominate the glitzy Gold Coast party scene and new arrival Kalaja became immersed in the chemical culture.

The first raid on Kalaja occurred before Warrior started, when detectives from Surfers Paradise and the drug squad searched his Nexus Towers' home in April 2008.

Brazenly, he had been running his operation opposite the local police station.

Police thought they had stumbled on a huge haul of up to 2kg of ice and Kalaja was dubbed the "Ice Man". It was one of the most short-lived nicknames in criminal history after tests revealed that most of the powder was a mixing agent.

He escaped with a small fine but the raid kick-started court-confiscation proceedings to seize his cash and assets and ultimately led to the formation of Operation Warrior.

As the Warrior team tracked the syndicate, it was confirmed the former family chop-chop business had matured to include all the major illicit drugs, with the exception of heroin.

One surprise for investigators was the volume of fantasy and its precursor GBL. The liquid drug requires a tiny dose and can be lethal with the slightest of miscalculations.

"We were seeing litre upon litre of it (GBL). I was shocked there was such a market," Hare says.

It was discovered a Queensland printing company shipped in GBL from Manila in the Philippines as a legitimate business product then secretly diverted it to the syndicate.

Worried about the potential for overdoses on their watch, investigators intervened with a tactical intercept to seize at least one batch of fantasy.

"They were going to a rave party and he was intercepted with multiple little vanilla essence bottles. There must have been seven to 10 of these full of GHB (fantasy)," Hare says.

"There were five of them going to that party. One of those bottles would have killed all five of them so what were they doing with the others?"

Other intercepts strangled Kalaja's operation by cutting off his money and supply lines.

At Brisbane's Oaks Festival Towers, where Kalaja had booked a room, Taskforce Hydra anti-bikies police seized $166,000 in cash and 11 mobile phones in August 2008.

When Kalaja was preparing to board a flight at Gold Coast airport to Melbourne, he was searched and found with $102,000 in June 2009.

Hare personally intercepted Kalaja at the Tugun Hungry Jacks and found $133,000 in a Louis Vuitton bag in August 2009 in response to information from physical surveillance and listening devices in his home, court documents reveal.

Policing around fast-food outlets had increased, owing to a spate of recent break-ins. The search looked random.

If Kalaja suspected the raids were targeted, it didn't scare him off. Each time he was hit by police he would resume operations as if nothing had happened.

But the raids were starting to have a serious impact on business.

The cumulative effect of the seizures was to leave Kalaja in debt to his suppliers, who became unwilling to deal with him.

He went down the tree and was forced to turn to new, local, supply lines.

"Because we kept doing these financial take-outs of large sums of money, it strangled him. It choked him. Kalaja went from someone supplying a lot of gear to getting it off other people," Hare says.

The whole time, investigators were watching through a combination of electronic and physical surveillance.

They observed him on health kicks interspersed with ice binges.

"His behaviour around that period was erratic. It was outside the norm," Hare says of the binges.

"Outside of that and apart from his drug trafficking, he was a very normal person."

The syndicate centred around Kalaja's relationship with his father, Hare says.

"He loves his dad to death. His dad and his dog Roxy are probably the two most important things in his life. He supported his father. He paid for a credit card, he paid for his father's rent," Hare said.

"His father was on an old-age pension and living well beyond his means."

Warrior closed in April 2010 with a raid on Kalaja's home. He had moved to Southport and thought police didn't know where he lived.

More than 6000 phone calls and text messages relating to drug sales were intercepted throughout the operation.

Kalaja's father George was convicted for receiving money obtained from trafficking and sentenced to six months' imprisonment, wholly suspended. Kalaja was sentenced in July to 14 years' jail.

Only he knows why he didn't slow down as police closed in. He owed money to suppliers, so may have been obligated to continue the operation to pay off his debts.

Detective Inspector Lance Vercoe, Operations Co-ordinator of CMC Crime Operations, says targets often don't want to believe the "worst-case scenario" that the game is up.

"They will convince themselves they're not being targeted and it's just bad luck, because the alternative is they're going to jail for 14 years," he said.

david.murray@news.com.au

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