WA drug trade: The DEA crime strategist pushing police to ‘prosecute up the ladder’ in war on meth

It is the foremost authority on the war on drugs in the US and is mythologised in hit TV shows such as Narcos. And now, WA Police wants to model itself on the much-vaunted Drug Enforcement Administration. Driven by Acting Police Commissioner Col Blanch, WA Police have hired a former DEA agent to help co-ordinate the State’s own global war on drugs. In a career that’s included real-life events that aren’t a million miles from those portrayed in Hollywood hits such as Scarface and Sicario, Paul Larsen has helped prosecute two of the world’s most prolific weapons traffickers. The unit he worked for has also turned a cartel boss into a DEA informant, and has taken on the Taliban and al-Qaida. Now he’s at WAPOL. Working with and training the State’s top cops and analysts, he’s delivering new techniques and strategies designed to help smash WA’s meth trade. The former DEA Special Operations Division (SOD) officer has been instrumental in Perth’s move to a more sophisticated approach to tackling crime syndicates. And in the past two years working here, his efforts have coincided with some major busts. Now, the crime strategist has for the first time opened up about his new mission Down Under. The 58-year-old’s decades of experience in finding and catching some of the world’s most notorious drug smugglers and arms dealers has already culminated in an unprecedented disruption of organised crime in the State. In the past year alone about $58 million was seized from suspected criminals in WA, which Mr Blanch told budget estimates in September represented about 80 per cent of the national total. About 390kg of methylamphetamine was also intercepted, leading to the arrests of nearly 200 people. Mr Larsen arrived in WA from Virginia in the same week police seized $1 billion worth of meth, ecstasy and cocaine from a yacht that ran aground at the Abrolhos Islands. Since then, he has worked closely with the gang crime, and drug and firearms and organised crime squads on several cases now before the courts. They include a massive drug bust in Kellerberrin in April, which snared former Comanchero bikie Mohammed Oueida. This year, the amount of crime cash seized in WA has increased eight-fold on four years ago. The huge uptick has largely been put down to the closure of interstate and international borders, which have massively disrupted the operations of drug traffickers. In February, WA Police declared the establishment of a “hard meth border” after four busts netted authorities 175kg of drugs and $24 million. The first haul, discovered by the gang crime squad in a truck in Coolgardie, netted a staggering $13.1 million — one of the biggest cash seizures in Australian law enforcement history. The vehicle was one of two stopped on November 5, 2020, as part of an ongoing police operation “targeting illicit commodities being moved across the WA border”. The other vehicle, stopped at Meckering, contained $2.94 million in cash. About 10 weeks later on January 29, again in Meckering, a small town 130km east of Perth, a sniffer dog helped find 14.6kg of meth and $3.6 million in cash hidden in a truck trailer at a Vehicle Search Authority area. The fourth bust came just days later at a Fairbridge truck stop on February 3. Police say they caught the alleged drug smugglers red-handed unloading boxes filled with meth from a truck into two vans. Police found $4.5 million and 163kg of meth. By that time, Mr Larsen had been working with WAPOL for more than a year. Mr Blanch hinted at his role when he told media at the time that his officers were using technology never before used and were engaging with “law enforcement partners around the world who are giving us information daily”. Mr Larsen advocates an old-school strategy for taking on global drug syndicates. For him, it’s about going back to building relationships. He said Mr Blanch wanted the State to adopt a more global approach in its war on drugs in order to “prosecute people up the ladder”. “Australia, collectively, needs to understand that the world has shrunk,” Mr Larsen said. “So, it’s a collective reset of thinking (that is needed) — a different way of building a case. Informants, witnesses (for example) instead of mainly surveillance. “He likes the way the DEA works their cases — how they build cases, always looking up the ladder, as opposed to ... just concentrating on who they catch at that moment.” The DEA operates in 70 countries, most notably in Mexico and South America, where it tries to bring down the most violent drug cartels on the planet. Mr Larsen said jurisdictions across the world often did not have the ability to look at the bigger picture, bringing about single arrests that made mere dents in entire networks. “Australian law enforcement has seen in recent years that a lot of their targets who may once have been in Australia have gone offshore, or they are offshore people to start with who realised the immense profit you can make from selling drugs in Australia,” he said. “He (Mr Blanch) has sort of said that as a whole we need to be able to look outside of Western Australia, because cocaine isn’t made in Western Australia. Meth, for the most part, isn’t made in Western Australia. It has to come from somewhere.” Mr Blanch said the appointment of the DEA consultant was “very much a key part” of strengthening relationships with international agencies and “bringing together a stronger law enforcement community to tackle global crime that, if left unchecked, can cause significant harm in our neighbourhoods”. “This is real-life, boots-on-the-ground policing that now occurs in every corner of the globe,” he said. “In real terms, this has resulted in WA Police Force officers travelling across the world to physically work alongside other law enforcement officers in an effort to target crime before it reaches Western Australia.” Mr Larsen, who could not be pictured due to the sensitive nature of his role and for the safety of those who work with him, has worked with police agencies and military units around the world. He said police in WA were committed and “really, really good”, but said “what the United States does better than anybody is actually put their hands on people and charge them”. “There’s not a lot of agencies that work the kind of cases that my old unit did, that the DEA does, routinely charging people in other countries,” he said. Viktor Bout, one of the world’s most prolific arms traffickers who is also known as the “merchant of death”, was one of those criminals. The reputed inspiration behind the 2005 Nicolas Case film Lord of War, the 54-year-old Russian was captured in Thailand in 2008 after a sting operation by the DEA. Using informants posed as fighters for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), they negotiated with him the purchase of weapons to shoot down US helicopters. Bout, who is also alleged to have trafficked weapons to several Middle East dictators and African war lords, was sentenced to 25 years in prison. The SOD were also behind an undercover operation that brought down infamous Syrian-born weapons dealer Monzer al-Kassar. Drug lord and weapons dealer Paul Le Roux, who spearheaded a team of mercenaries and ran a weapons research and development program for the Iranian government, was also one of the SOD’s most infamous collars. Le Roux, who is already the subject of several books and an upcoming film by director Michael Mann, was sentenced to a 25-year jail term. For 10 years from 2009 Mr Larsen’s focus as a member of the SOD was on targets involved in sending drugs into the US, or those involved in narco-terrorism. “We would go anywhere the case brought us,” Mr Larsen said. “We worked on Russian weapons traffickers, South American-Mexican drug traffickers ... we worked against the Taliban; we worked cases against al-Qaida. We indicted the general of the army of Guinea-Bissau, who took over the country in a coup. “We tried to make cases around the world that had an impact on the US. “So, in the big picture of things, I think that’s what (Mr Blanch) is looking at here, to where, eventually, depending on the case, we may be able to say, oh, there’s someone outside of Australia who’s impacting on Western Australia. “We need to be able to charge those people.”