TRAFFIC CONTROL BUYS A BRIEF RESPITE

They say you can't win the war on drugs. A few good men in Ballarat
might beg to differ.

At the least, they say, if you can't win, you can lose more slowly.
You can make it very difficult for dealers to operate with impunity.
You can buy time for other solutions to be put in place.

The old golden city of the west has been in the grip of one of those
epic struggles of good and evil, a battle fought over the bodies of an
increasing number of heroin overdose victims.

On the sidelines are the shocked and bereaved families of young people
caught up in addiction, the health services without enough resources
to help, and a general community numb about the best way to respond.

But police were in no doubt. A special group of local detectives have
run a series of operations that have snared the three successive major
operators of the local heroin market, and a whole ring of associates,
over the past year.

Using get-tough tactics, the police pushed the cases up into the
County Court, where the accused all pleaded guilty and, although they
tried to avoid coming before him, received lengthy periods in jail
from the stern Judge Paul Mullaly.

Although the sums involved are smaller than in Melbourne, they are
indicative of a significant heroin-user scene. In one surveillance
operation, police intercepted more than 3000 incoming mobile phone
calls over 42 days to a dealer known as "Bill from Ballarat".

You don't often see dealing on the streets the way it happens in
Footscray and Springvale. There is a lot of heroin consumed, though,
the proof being 50,000 needles a year handed out. Probably it's very
private consumption has kept heroin addiction off the agenda in Ballarat.

For instance, the mother and aunts of a boy who died in February last
year want to put out a book to educate primary school children about
"Mr Darkness", as they call the drug. No one is interested in helping
them, they say.

And, despite everything, there is still considerable naivete and
unknowingness about the problem.

Just a few months ago, a young woman persuaded her Human Services
Department social worker to drive her every day to a place where she
said she had to feed the cat. The address was that of her heroin dealer.

Ballarat has yet to be galvanised into the sorts of debates that
Melbourne has undergone about heroin.

Until now, most of the attention has focused upon the associated
crime, such as two recent insurance company surveys that showed
Ballarat ranked in the top 10 worst areas of the state for burglaries
and car theft.

Even a provocative call for heroin decriminalisation by the mayor, Cr
John Barnes, has failed to kick-start community involvement.

But last week, as first the Premier's drug expert committee chairman,
Professor David Penington, then the Health Minister, John Thwaites,
made for Ballarat, the signs of action began.

The announcement on Friday of four new beds for youth detoxification
in a city that has had no rehabilitation or detoxification facilities
of its own, showed that, after three years, the problem is getting
official recognition. It was in 1997, about the time heroin began
seeping into Ballarat, that Senior Sergeant Ron Cosgrave, now 50, and
Sergeant Bill Patten, now 41, found themselves together in uniform at
Ballarat police station. Both were veterans of the Melbourne policing
of drugs, Cosgrave in the Drug Squad in the early '90s and Patten as a
member of a joint federal-state taskforce. Both men detest the heroin
trade.

Three years ago, Sergeant Patten began seeing addicts among the
criminal class with which he routinely dealt. At that time, they
appeared to be making regular trips to Melbourne to supply themselves.

He talked about it with his boss, Ron Cosgrave, who was trying to work
out how to attack the root causes of the spate of household burglaries
and car theft, the hallmarks of drug-related activities.

Cosgrave set up a response group, a special unit of plainclothes cops,
and put Patten in charge.

The group began to hear reports about the activities of a local petty
thief and heroin addict, Terry Foster. Then 30, Foster was a member of
a family known to Ballarat police, one not without its own tragedies -
two of Foster's brothers, Darren and Shane, have died of drug overdoses.

On September 17, 1998, police searched his home and found about a gram
of rock heroin, for which he received a suspended sentence of a
month's jail. But through the summer, further reports reached the
group that Foster had set himself up as a heroin dealer from his home
at Tarawa Drive, Ballarat North.

That summer, the ante was upped with the overdose deaths of three of
Ballarat's young people.

The most public was that of Kane Gerrett, a 20-year-old tearaway who
worked on the boilers in Sovereign Hill, a boy known never to refuse a
dare but, according to his mother, Julie, with a repugnance for injections.

She knew he smoked a bit of marijuana, and a week before his death she
suspected he had been using amphetamines, but heroin was not on her
horizon. Only later, she discovered, one of his mates had tried
unsuccessfully to stop him having his first go at heroin on a Saturday
night. She noticed him being ill, but he dismissed it as food poisoning.

On the next night, while she was away, he was out in the shed playing
his guitar, and was later heard snoring. But he didn't come in for
breakfast as he usually did.

In the afternoon, his sister Casey found him dead, sprawled on a couch
cradling his guitar, his eyes wide open and the needle still hanging
from his arm.

Kane's death galvanised Ballarat into an outpouring of emotion. His
mother said she had never seen so many young men crying as at Kane's
funeral, but the power of the moment has dissipated.

In March last year, Cosgrave and Patten's group began surveillance of
Foster, which showed in the first three days that he got 150 visits.
People coming and going at all hours.

Foster, heavily addicted himself with a daily habit requiring two
grams worth $500, was known to deal while lying on his bed, the heroin
and thousands of dollars floating about on the blankets.

Police estimated he had distributed about a kilogram of heroin in 12
months, at a street value of between $200,000 and $400,000.

The official "Operation Glenferry" was then begun by the District
Support Group to gather evidence, and eight police then physically
smashed their way into his home on the morning of June 15 last year.

In charge, Bill Patten recalls that neighbors stood on the footpath
and nearby nature strips and clapped. He's never seen anything like
it. They had lived in awe of the Fosters' reputation and could do
nothing about the open trafficking going on.

Foster was charged with trafficking on June 15, pleaded guilty and
eventually was sentenced on September 13 to five years' jail with a
four-year minimum.

However, with Foster's arrest, enter Dragan "Bill from Ballarat"
Gnjatovic, 35, with a criminal history in NSW that included armed
robbery. Also a heavy heroin user and, as surveillance photos showed,
a customer of Foster's, he had already come to Bill Patten's notice.

Through a preliminary operation called "Dragon Fly", police received
overwhelming intelligence that Gnjatovic had taken over Foster's
business, and Ron Cosgrave, just back from a spell off work for
stress, kicked off "Operation Rickard", a major surveillance job
sometimes involving 24-hour shifts.

All up, it was to involve 76 police, from the devoted team of
detectives-in-training under the Cosgrave/Patten command, to the
special operations group which pounced on Gnjatovic in the western
suburbs on November 29.

Gnjatovic lived in Spencer Street, Sebastopol, barely 400 metres as
the crow flies from the heavily wired-in Sebastopol police compound,
from which Operation Rickard was coordinated.

As well as introducing an undercover agent, Gary, as a buyer, the
operation used physical and electronic surveillance of deals done in
shop car parks, and police watched as Gnjatovic drove to Melbourne
each night to buy seven grams of heroin for $1700 from two men in Deer
Park.

Back in Ballarat, it was packed in little color-coded balloons, in
deals of $30, $50 and $100, and sold for a big profit. One of
Gnjatovic's clients was a 16-year-old girl, Samantha Phillips.

Once at the Deer Park address the undercover agent handed over $15,000
for 63 grams of heroin, and the special operations group swooped.

On June 15 this year, Gnjatovic received a five-year sentence with a
four-year minimum on charges that included selling heroin to a child,
and eight other members of his ring received sentences ranging from 42
months to 15 months for Gnjatovic's de facto wife, Michelle Densley,
also a heroin user.

Following Gnjatovic's arrest last year, the same police began
surveillance of a house lived in by Tim McDonald, 32, in Wattle
Avenue, Wendouree West, and on February 8, they intercepted Densley
driving away from the house with heroin in her bag.

The police raided the home later that day, finding heroin and several
thousand dollars. McDonald also secreted heroin inside a Yowie
container somewhere on his body. It was found in the cell the next
day.

He had been selling heroin from mid-December, and for his crime, got
four years' jail with a minimum of three.

Heroin use has continued in Ballarat, but it appears that those who
want it must make the trip down the Western Highway to Melbourne. The
local dealer network has not reappeared, but police are not relaxing.

"We're laying in wait like mongrel dogs waiting to attack the next
person who sticks their head up out of the grass," says Ron Cosgrave.