DRUG BUST THAT STUNG THE TAXPAYER FOR $84,000

It reads like the script of a police drama set against the Sydney
skyline: Covert surveillance of a triad drug deal in Crows Nest
restaurants; cruising around Chinatown in a triad boss's Mercedes; and
$84,000 of public money in a David Jones shopping bag.

The cash was given to an informer - in his own words "a successful
informer, don't forget" - to buy just over half a kilogram of heroin
from Danny Sum Mok, a leader of the 14K triad in Sydney and Canberra.

But here the script goes awry. The National Crime Authority got their
man, Mok - but not the money.

In a case before the NSW Supreme Court, the state Crime Commission
failed in its application for the return of the $84,000, which it said
was paid to Mok, because the judge was not convinced that he had
received it.

Mok is serving a jail sentence of seven years and six months after
pleading guilty in 2000 to supplying a commercial quantity of heroin.

But in civil proceedings begun by the commission to recover the
"sting" money - and to strip Mok of the proceeds of his activities -
Mok denied receiving the cash from the informer.

The informer, who wore a listening device during the operation, said
he and Mok drove from Crows Nest to the city, and before getting out
of Mok's van he put the money in the glove box.

He had then waited at McDonald's at the Entertainment Centre, and was
picked up by a man introduced as Brother Hung, 14K's top man in
Australia, who arrived in a Mercedes.

The drug deal was finally done outside the ANZ bank at the corner of
Castlereagh and Bathurst streets.

The informer then caught a taxi to the Art Gallery of NSW, where he
handed a plastic bag containing heroin to the NCA officers.

But Justice Sully found the transcripts of the bugged conversation -
translated from Cantonese - were ambiguous.

He said there had been no constant police surveillance of the
informant. ". . . There is no evidence of any attempt by anybody to
keep proper overall control of the $84,000, so that there is . . . no
corroboration of what [the informer] says that he did with the money."

The judge noted the informer's evidence that he had sold a successful
business "in order to fund what he perceived as the lifestyle
necessary to give verisimilitude to his activities in the world of
drug trafficking". "He felt the National Crime Authority had let him
down . . . by not respecting . . . the privacy and security of his
family but he denied he was still actuated by animosity."

Justice Sully found the crime commission was unable to make its case
for the return of the $84,000. But it could seize proceeds of Mok's
criminal activities over six years.