Phone taps reveal moment crime syndicate caught with ‘hands in the cookie jar’

The arrival of a letter to a modest house in Grafton in March 2020 caused shockwaves to reverberate among crime kingpin George Alex’s syndicate. Federal police were listening as one of the conspirators said of the impending disaster: “We’ve rode our luck too long and ..

. now we got caught with our hands in the f---ing cookie jar.” George Alex outside the NSW Supreme Court at Darlinghurst in August.

Credit: Dion Georgopoulos The disaster was an audit by the Australian Tax Office (ATO), which resulted in a missive to one of their “dummy” directors informing him that he was personally liable for the $4 million his company had failed to remit in PAYG withholding tax. The “corporate patsy” Andrew Hegedus, 56, who works with an Indigenous charity in Grafton, in northern NSW, was most upset at this turn of events, the NSW Supreme Court would later hear. Earlier this month, after a six-month trial, the jury found Alex and four of his crew – Pasquale “Peter China” Loccisano, Gordon McAndrew, Mark Bryers and Lindsay Kirschberg – guilty of defrauding the ATO of more than $10 million and then using the proceeds of their crime to buy luxury cars, houses and support their lifestyles.

During the 110 hours of intercepted calls played to the jury, it became clear that good help is hard to find, especially when you are running a multimillion-dollar criminal syndicate ripping off the tax office to the tune of $100,000 per week. “I’m fuming,” complained Alex to Lind.