Transcript
A (0:00)
This is Australian True Crime with Michelle Laurie. And this week we have an old friend on the show. She's the artist formerly known as Xanthi Mallet. But she's gotten married, so she's now known as Dr. Xanthi Weston. And she is a criminologist, of course. She teaches criminology at university. Xanthi's joining us to talk about the hospitality wars that are gripping Melbourne. We want to know why nightclubs and even brothels are being firebombed. This is Australian True Crime. We acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which this, this podcast is created, the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation.
B (0:42)
You know, it's almost like we've reverted back to like the 1920s, isn't it? You know, and you've got like the gangsters taking over the cities. And I think we're kind of seeing a bit more of that now. We're seeing serious organized criminals. But what they doing is actually engaging, recruiting young people, particularly online. And they are recruiting them, paying them a few hundred dollars to undertake these, you know, firebombings, attempted, attempted kidnappings, aggravated break and enters, all targeting these hospitality venues. And I do think it's a continuation of what we saw with the tobacco wars, as they've been dubbed. And they. It is a war. There is a war on the streets. When we saw firebombings of tobacconists over and over again, the same businesses being targeted. Now, the purpose there was to get those, you know, to take control of the illicit tobacco trade. It's so lucrative. And the more expensive things get, the more lucrative it gets for the underground trade. Right? So I think we've seen an expansion of that. Alcohol is super expensive. It has a huge markup revenue wise for organized criminals. So of course they're in that market. But we have seen a shift in the way they're actually undertaking this war. And it's these kids, literally kids who are taking on these jobs, doing these firebombings and doing a bad job of it. Cause they don't know what they're doing. They're amateurs putting people at risk, putting themselves at risk. And we're just seeing an escalation of that. So it's all tied together.
A (2:09)
I'm gonna tie in the stories about youth gangs as well, because oftentimes this is reflected as, you know, our teenagers are wild. There's gangs on the streets. Sometimes there's racial connotations. There'll be like Sudanese gangs or something. But actually these are young people who are being recruited by proper criminals, aren't they?
B (2:28)
They are. And it's almost kind of like it's been described as almost like an air tasker. And I'm not suggesting they're being recruited on Airtasker, but they are being recruited on other similar apps. So that could be Signal or even Roblox which is a gaming app, you know. And they're literally posting jobs for them to do. The jobs are being posted anonymously but often they also want video evidence of the job being done. So there's that post and boast thing because the kids get some cred from I just did a firebombing amongst their peers. You know, they don't really understand the implications and a lot of them want to get involved in these gangs because they see the lucrative nature. You know, they're getting rewarded. Key element of this is reward. So they're posting their videos of their successes and we're literally talking like $500,000 up to say 10 or 20,000 for more serious crimes. But the ones the kids are doing, like literally 13, 14, 15 year old kids, few hundred dollars to firebomb a tobacconist or, or a nightclub or, or wherever. We don't know whether it's an international group because obviously these jobs can be posted anywhere. Crime is international. Drugs, guns, like all these trades, it's alcohol, tobacco, they're all international. So all these networks are working in different places in the world. You know, it's been suggested to me that this could be a Russian group that are doing this. Is it Russian? Is it. I don't know, it could be anyone. Right. Because it's all anonymous.