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Saturday, May 5, 2012

AUSTRALIA - Target kingpins in Gold Coast bikie menace, experts say....


OFF THE WIRE
QUEENSLAND authorities should concentrate on weeding out serious criminals from outlaw motorcycle clubs instead of wasting time and money trying to ban the groups, legal experts say. And one solution might lie in laws copied from Canada, where there has been success prosecuting elusive kingpins in clubs such as the Hell's Angels.
The State Government has vowed to crack down on bikies after an outbreak of violence, including a public shooting on the Gold Coast a week ago, and a bashing on the Gold Coast yesterday.
In a suspected bikie bashing on the Gold Coast yesterday, a man had his teeth knocked out and a baseball bat was snapped in two. Two men were brutally bashed at a house on TE Peters Drive at Broadbeach Waters about 1.30pm in what could be the latest violence in southeast Queensland's bikie war.
One man was found at the Gold Coast Convention and Exhibition Centre and another in nearby Chant St, bloodied and bruised.
"He said, 'I've been bashed, I've been bashed', and asked me to give him a lift somewhere," one Chant St resident said. "I told him I'd get the police for him but he said, 'No, no - not them'."
Both men were taken to hospital by ambulance under police escort.
A woman who was at the scene of last week's drive-by shooting at the Bandido-owned East Coast Tattoo parlour at Mermaid Beach turned up at the TE Peters Drive residence and spoke to police there.
The tattoo shop is owned by senior Bandidos' bikie Jacques Teamo, who was shot in the arm at Robina Town Centre last weekend - allegedly by a Finks bikie gxxg member.
Premier Campbell Newman has flagged using the controversial Criminal Organisation Act - which his government had considered repealing - to try to ban clubs.
But this was no quick-fix, University of Queensland professor Andreas Schloenhardt warned. The inevitable High Court challenge - which vanquished similar laws in NSW and South Australia - could take 18 months and a lot of public money to defend.
Even if the Government won, only a few bikies could then be targeted with control orders because enforcing them would be "incredibly cumbersome and costly".
Prof Schloenhardt said bikie kingpins "who don't get their hands dirty" proved elusive in Canada until they started using laws - adopted by the Commonwealth in 2010 but still unused - to punish participation in criminal organisations. "If you're smart enough - and some of them are smart - you just don't get too involved: you issue directions, you manage, you skim off some profits."
Canada's laws - introduced after a boy, 11, was killed by a car bomb in a bikie drug war in Montreal in 1995 - targets individual kingpins, soldiers or supporters rather than clubs, and a jury decides if they're in a "criminal organisation".
New Zealand uses similar laws against gang members.
"It hasn't totally disrupted all organised crime - none of this will - but it gets certain individuals out of the picture for a time," Prof Schloenhardt said.
http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/push-to-hit-bikie-kingpins/story-e6freoof-1226347270454