Two men arrested after shocking discovery inside a Sydney unit block
Two men allegedly involved in a South American crime syndicate have been charged with drug offences after allegedly selling fake cocaine.
NSW Police Organised Crime Squad detectives arrested the men, aged 61 and 27, at a unit in North Rocks, Sydney, around 8.15pm on Wednesday.
Police allege the group travelled from Spain to Sydney in May and sold fake cocaine to four Sydney-based criminal networks.
The group is also believed to have run similar operations in London earlier this year.
Footage released by NSW Police captured the moment officers attached to Strike Force Bookara pounded on the door of the unit before forcing entry.
During the raid, officers allegedly found ten bricks of a white substance believed to be cocaine, but later confirmed through testing not to be.
Police claim the syndicate sold the fake product to other criminal groups for $90,000 per kilogram.
Police also seized $121,000 in Australian cash, foreign currency, 14 mobile phones, multiple SIM cards, bank cards, and documents related to foreign currency and cryptocurrency transfers.
Photos released by police show plastic-wrapped bundles of cash and white powder bricks seized from the unit.
Another image shows five people with blurred faces sitting on black leather couches around a glass coffee table during the raid.
All five were taken to Parramatta Police Station, where the two men were charged with supplying a prohibited drug in both small and large commercial quantities.
They were refused bail and are due to appear in Parramatta Local Court on Friday. The other three were released and are pending further investigation.
Anyone with information that could assist police with inquiries into organised criminal activity is urged to contact Crime Stoppers.
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The last time Erin Patterson welcomed guests across the threshold of her home on the outskirts of Leongatha, a small cattle-farming town in the Australian state of Victoria, it was 12.30pm on Saturday, July 29, 2023. Four elderly family members were joining her lunch. But within a week of this supposedly happy occasion, three of her guests were dead and the fourth in hospital, fighting for his life. Erin, 50, had served beef wellington, a dinner party staple her mother used to cook on special occasions. It soon became clear that highly poisonous death cap mushrooms had somehow found their way into the dish's filling. Shortly afterwards, Patterson was interviewed by police. A month or so later she was arrested and, for the past six weeks, this middle-aged mother of two has been at Latrobe Valley Magistrates' Court, in the nearby town of Morwell, on trial for murder. 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Erin and Simon, who married in 2007, separated in 2015, a year after the birth of their second child. While they initially remained close, sharing custody of their son and daughter and taking family holidays together, things changed in late 2022 when Erin discovered Simon had described himself as 'single' on a tax return. The move seems to have affected her ability to claim tax breaks and the duo soon began to argue over money and school fees. That December, Erin asked her in-laws Don and Gail to intervene in the row. But they were reluctant to get involved. This led Erin to post a series of angry messages to a group of women she used to chat with via Facebook. 'Nobody bloody listens to me,' read one. 'This family! I swear to f**king God,' read another. In a third, Erin wrote: 'I'm sick of this s**t. I want nothing to do with them. 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But in the witness box, Erin claimed that was untrue, saying that she had been in the habit of picking wild mushrooms since the early months of the 2020 Covid lockdown. The defence case is that this hobby led her to accidentally pick death caps, which were then inadvertently served to lunch guests in what her barrister Colin Mandy has dubbed 'a tragedy and a terrible accident'. Prosecutors say she picked them deliberately, however. In support of this thesis, they have shared digital evidence suggesting that Erin was a user of iNaturalist, a website where enthusiasts share mushroom sightings. They say her mobile phone records indicate that, in April 2023, she travelled to areas near rural towns named Loch and Outtrim where sightings of death caps had been recently logged. HOW DID THEY GET IN TO THE MEAL? On the day of her alleged visit to Loch, Erin also visited a hardware store to buy a food dehydrator. 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A traditional beef wellington involves an entire beef fillet, encased in pastry, which is then sliced into portions served to individual guests. Erin, who served the dish with mashed potato, beans and gravy from a packet, says she was unable to source an entire fillet of beef from her local Woolworth's supermarket, so instead bought half a dozen individual steaks wrapped in plastic. This, in turn, forced her to adapt the dish so that each portion consisted of a single wellington, similar to a pasty. Ian Wilkinson told the court that Erin served all four of her guests their meals on a grey plate but she used an orange one. Simon Patterson has recalled that, the following day, Heather told him she had 'noticed Erin used a different coloured plate to us'. Prosecutor Rogers has claimed that Patterson could easily have purchased a whole beef fillet from the region's butcher shops, but instead deliberately created individual ones, adding death caps to the ones her guests would eat, while making sure her own wasn't poisonous. Then 'to avoid any error, in case you accidentallyate one of the poisoned beef wellingtons, you took the extra precaution of using a different and smaller plate for your non-poisoned serve'. Erin denies the claim, saying she doesn't own any grey plates and served the lunch on a mixture of white and black crockery. However video footage of a police search of her home on August 5 appears to show at least two beige or grey plates adjacent to the dishwasher. The defence case is that her hobby of foraging led her to accidentally pick death caps DID ERIN REALLY VOMIT HER MEAL? When initially quizzed by police asking why she'd survived the lunch, while her guests were either dead or in hospital, Erin didn't offer any explanation beyond a cryptic 'hmmmm'. In court, she has elaborated considerably, revealing to the jury that she'd been 'fighting a never-ending battle of low self-esteem most of my adult life', which revolved largely around 'issues with body image' and manifests itself via bulimia, an eating disorder characterised by binge eating and subsequent vomiting. This condition struck that very afternoon, when she clapped eyes on roughly two-thirds of an orange cake that Gail, 70, had brought for dessert. 'I kept cleaning up the kitchen and putting everything away and, um, I had a piece of cake,' she told the jury. 'And then,' she added, 'I had another piece of cake. And then another.' 'How many pieces of cake did you have?' asked her barrister, Colin Mandy. 'All of it,' came her reply. 'And what happened after you ate the cake?' 'I felt sick. I felt over-full. So I went to the toilets and brought it up again.' WAS SHE PRETENDING TO BE SICK? Erin claims she then experienced a spectacular bout of diarrhoea, which kicked off on the night of the meal and continued into the following week. This has involved much courtroom discussion of her bowel movements, including a graphic account of a disputed incident in which she allegedly became 'worried I would poo my pants' while driving her teenage son to a flying lesson the following day, so stopped her car by the side of the dual carriageway and scampered off into the bush to defecate. Patterson then presented at Leongatha hospital the following day, complaining of 'gastro'. But medical professionals, who were by then treating her lunch guests, did not believe her symptoms were anything like as serious as the others. Nurse Cindy Munro told the court Patterson 'didn't look unwell' compared with her in-laws, while an expert toxicologist called Laura Muldoon recalled that she'd 'noted [Erin] looked clinically well, she had some chapped lips but otherwise very well. She had normal vital signs'. A third doctor, Varuna Ruggoo, said Patterson's liver function tests returned normal results. According to prosecutors, Erin was feigning illness 'to cover your tracks'. The defence case is that, perhaps thanks to the aforementioned vomiting incident: 'She was sick too, just not as sick.' WHY DID ERIN DUMP THE FOOD DEHYDRATOR? Amid growing concerns over the fate of her lunch guests, Erin told a series of lies to police and public health officials. She denied having foraged for mushrooms, claiming instead that the beef wellington contained fresh ones and some dried specimens from an unnamed Chinese supermarket, and repeatedly insisted that she didn't own a food dehydrator. The day after she was discharged from hospital, she drove to the local rubbish tip, whose CCTV cameras caught her disposing of the Sunbeam dehydrator she had purchased that April. Police forensic tests then discovered both Erin's fingerprints and traces of death cap mushroom toxins on the device. Asked to explain what looks suspiciously like a bungled effort to destroy evidence, Erin claimed that she had decided to get rid of it because she had 'panicked' after a confrontational conversation with Simon earlier in the week. Specifically, she claimed that her estranged husband had mentioned the device and asked: 'Is that what you used to poison my parents?' This question had left her 'frantic' and 'scared', she said, because 'child protection were now involved' in the investigation into the meal. She therefore took the decision to dump the dehydrator because, 'I was scared of the conversation that might flow about the meal and the dehydrator and I was scared that they [child protection] would blame me for it'. Simon remembers things differently, however, and denies making any such remark to her. Prosecutor Rogers has claimed that Patterson could easily have purchased a whole beef fillet from the region's butcher shops, but instead deliberately created individual ones, adding death caps to the ones her guests would eat, while making sure her own wasn't poisonous SO WHO WILL THE JURY DECIDE IS TELLING LIES? During her eight days giving evidence, Erin has claimed that virtually everyone else involved in the Mushroom Murder trial is somehow mistaken. Family members whose accounts she has contradicted range from her husband Simon to his surviving uncle, Pastor Ian Wilkinson, to Ian's late wife Heather. And on at least one occasion, she has also disagreed with remarks made by her own children during recorded interviews. In cross-examination, she has claimed various Facebook friends are mistaken about the contents of their various conversations, while alleging that a host of professional witnesses – from mushroom experts to public health officials, doctors and nurses, to the analysts who examined her phones and computers, to the police who searched her property – have got various important pieces of their testimony quite seriously wrong. At one point this week, Rogers accused her of 'making this up as you go along' to which Erin responded with a vigorous: 'No!' But if she's telling the truth, some of the witnesses must have been lying. The jury will shortly have to decide who, exactly, they want to believe.
