Law Enforcement

Nothing illustrates the resilience and resourcefulness of organised crime than the story of a Sydney cocaine dealer known to police as ‘Aunty’. She is a Colombian woman in her fifties who came to Australia with her family in the 1970s. She is the face of a syndicate that has been operating for almost two decades.

Her husband stays in the background but has the necessary power and influence with Colombian cocaine barons. The syndicate imports around a tonne of cocaine every eighteen months. It is estimated to have carried out at least ten and possibly as many as fourteen importations (totalling between 10 and 14 tonnes of the drug). The cocaine is sold in bulk, primarily to networks in Sydney, but it also makes its way to other state capitals.

The retirement of some distributors and the arrest and jailing of others enabled an eastern suburbs professional surfer and dealer Shane Hatfield to progress up the drug chain. By the early 2000s he was dealing directly with Aunty. One of Hatfield’s distributors was a criminal in his mid twenties who has been given the pseudonym ‘Tom’ by law-enforcement authorities.

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