Firebomb 03 | Punks and Ninjas

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Just before we start, this episode contains descriptions of violence and strong language.

Dadas was a record store that I used to go to all the time.

They sold punk records.

Back in 1988, Neil was just a teenager.

He was your classic 80s punk.

Bleached denim jacket, piercings, and short-cut blonde hair with a long fringe that went down to his chin.

And on this day, he was in Dada Records, searching for something particular.

And I had a look around, but they didn't have what I was looking for.

So after a bit, he turned to leave the records store.

And as I was walking out, there were about

maybe seven or eight Nazi skinheads walking in.

These guys had shaved heads, jack boots and swastikas.

They were part of Perth's Nazi skinhead scene.

Racist bullies and kind of disorganised.

But since the Australian nationalist movement had started covering the city in racist propaganda, the skinheads had become more confident and more visible.

So they started to become a lot more public, right?

So they started to get out and about in groups.

Neil was literally wearing his feelings about that on his sleeve as he walked out of the record store that day.

I had a,

there's a band called the Dead Kennedys and they've got a song called Nazi Punks Fuck Off.

When you bought the EP, they came with a little patch that you could sew on your jacket which said Nazi Punks Fuck Off with a picture of a swastika, a circle around it and a cross through it.

So I had that on my arm.

Whether the skinheads saw the patch or just his general look, they weren't impressed.

And what Neil says happened next would haunt him for years to come.

So I started going past him and as I kind of got down four steps, I felt an elbow got me right in the eye.

And I just thought, oh, fuck.

And I looked back and they were just yelling at me.

Neil put his head down and kept walking.

I just had this feeling, you know, when you get when you think someone's looking at you.

And I just, and I looked back and there they were running towards me.

And so I just bolted.

I just thought,

if I don't go, if I run, I'm dead.

I knew exactly what was going to happen and they were heading towards me.

And I could hear their boots

on the footpath.

Neil ran towards his old multi-story car park.

I ran into there and then ran up the steps all the way up and up and up and up and up and up and up.

He kept running until he reached the top floor of the stairwell.

So I opened the door which was right next to the lift and it was open.

So I jumped in the lift and there was a woman in there and I was just you know hyperventilating and I was like call the police please.

Now this was 1988.

There were no mobile phones.

So as Neil tried desperately to catch his breath, the woman pressed the button for the lift to go down.

But after travelling just one floor, the lift stopped and the doors opened.

And there they were.

And they just grabbed me and pulled me out of the lift.

And then I just got hit and hit and then fell and then I was unconscious.

He doesn't really know what happened next.

Maybe that woman in the lift called for help.

But after a while, he became aware of a voice.

I lay in a pool of blood out the front of that lift for hours.

Now I've got this distinct memory of someone saying, oh my god, you're alive, get up.

But it sounded like they were talking down through like a cardboard tube.

I had blood in my eyes, so I couldn't really see.

I didn't know what was going on, but I just felt like I was being picked up and I could sort of see bits and then I could feel myself in the car.

Neil Neil says the skin heads fractured his jaw, broke four of his ribs, two of his fingers and hit his head so hard that he had swelling on the brain.

So I was just in intense pain.

I could barely move, you know.

My head was just, felt like it was just about to explode, you know, that pressure in my head that, yeah, it just felt like

I was going to die.

Neil didn't pursue the assault with the police.

He didn't trust the force.

He didn't know the people who beat him up.

He didn't know if there were A ⁇ M members or just some other skinheads.

All of which made life really scary for Neil.

I didn't go into the A Street Mall for at least, I reckon maybe three or four years.

I was always on edge.

You know, I'd look outside of shops up and down the footpath before I'd go out.

But Perth's neo-Nazi skinheads weren't going anywhere.

And with the A ⁇ M on the rise, Neil decided he couldn't just keep hiding.

Because this is escalating and I'm not going to give up.

I'm not just going to walk away and let these fucking idiots be able to walk all over people and, you know, impose their fascism on us.

Things were getting scary in Perth.

Racist firebombers were already on the loose and police had so far seemed kind of unable to stop them.

But then, something really interesting happened.

President of the World Ninja Society spoke out about the fears in his community and the role the lethal ninja fighters can play.

Martial artists, activists, punks and vigilantes started pushing back.

But Perth's racists weren't going to back down easily.

They surrounded us and we're just all going to fucking kill you.

And the nighttime attackers came up with the most devastating plan yet.

The discovery that a device of some sort had been detonated in that fire scene, it now became a protection of life.

This is Firebomb, the latest season of the ABC's Unravel podcast, episode 3: Punks and Ninjas.

I was young back in the late 80s and I was like only eight years old.

So I had no idea what was happening on Perth streets at the time.

So when Neil described all of this, the street battles, the skinheads, the violence, it was totally new to me.

Like when you start to see people who don't like you doing things like that, it's a real concern starting to see that escalation.

I'm kind of beginning to understand the kind of fear and the level of fear.

And I can understand why

a lot of migrants probably kept quiet and didn't speak up.

It must have just been terrifying.

Like, I can't imagine, you know, trying to build a life in a country that's already relatively racist and then this extremism sort of coming to your door and destroying your livelihood.

I just can't imagine how that must have been with your family.

I mean, you know, my parents never talked about the roaming skinheads walking around.

But then I also know that my parents, they would literally leave the house, go to the restaurant, they'll cook till midnight, close the shop up, and then head back home.

I think a lot of the Australian community or the West Australian community were quite unaware of what was going on.

They would have seen these posters, but I think a lot of them just thought it was just a small group of people and had no idea of the extent of what they were doing and what they were planning.

Neil, though, he was watching closely.

He was seeing the skinheads in Perth grow in numbers and strength.

What had seemed like a chaotic mess of racism and violence was beginning to feel more controlled.

And one day in about 88-89, just as the Chinese restaurants were all coming under attack, Neil says he caught a glimpse of just how organized the threat was becoming.

It was about a year after he'd been bashed in the car park.

Here's what he remembers about that day.

I was on the train with a friend of mine.

It was really high.

Just sitting there and then I think it was City West station that we stopped at.

So the train stops at the platform and the doors open and suddenly Neil and his mate look up to find the train carriage filling with angry looking young men.

And

yeah, a whole big bunch of Nazi skinheads climbed onto the train.

The entire carriage was full of them.

Neil's breathing gets faster.

His ribs still hurt from where they've been broken by skinheads about a year earlier.

I was still in that sort of state of trauma.

I really felt like I was living quite outside of my own body.

Then Neil sees two other people get on the train.

They aren't skinheads, but he recognises them straight away.

They're the two most senior members of the Australian nationalist movement, Jack Van Tongren and his right-hand man, John Van Bliterswick.

And they were wearing military-style outfits.

There were two leaders and their soldiers on the train.

It was like a small military.

They were ready to go, you know, they were quite, you could sell some of them quite drunk.

Neil's pulse is rising, but he's trying to stay calm, or at least he's trying to look that way.

All those guys were always armed, you know, I know, I knew a few of them, and I know the one, the particular guy that I knew, always would carry a massive knife with him.

It only takes a moment before the skinheads noticed Neil and his mate and start to close in on them.

They surrounded us and we're just thought we're going to fucking kill you, you fucking hippie, you blah blah blah, using the N-word and

you know like it was I was just terrified, you know, there was just a point where I just thought these guys are going to kill me.

The train takes off sealing Neil and his mate in.

They're surrounded.

He talks to his mate as quietly as he can as they approach the next station.

I said as soon as we get off we're going to run.

So I got up and walked and they followed us to the doors.

But as he reaches the doors of the train, Jack Van Tongren Tongren has some words for Neil.

Jack actually said to me, Have a safe night, mate.

Have a safe night, mate.

And with those words, the doors open.

Neil and his mate step off the train and they run.

I just, you know, well, I just was ready.

I just thought they're going to follow us off.

When they let themselves look back, they realize the skinheads have stayed on the train.

They've let them go.

He doesn't know why.

But what he does know is this.

The skinheads are getting bolder and more organized and now seem to be standing shoulder to shoulder with the A ⁇ M.

The A ⁇ M had also escalated to a point where those skinheads were going out and beating people regularly.

Sort of upper leadership of the Australian nationalist movement saw them as henchmen.

Any hard work they needed to do, they would get the skinheads to do it and they were happy to do it.

Roaming bands of skinheads are now orbiting the A ⁇ M.

And as far as Neil can see, they're doing its dirty work without even trying to hide it.

And that was the thing about the A ⁇ M back at that point was they were getting away with a lot of stuff and the police weren't really doing much about it.

As far as I was aware, it was really just, you know, people on the far left, socialists, anarchists, communists, punks, university students.

They were actually doing things about it, you know, campaigning against it, tearing the posters down, you know, talking to other people about it.

So I think

not much was really happening.

Most of the Chinese community was lying low.

I mean, we were understandably terrified, but there was this one guy who just kind of all of a sudden stuck his head up and very publicly said he was ready to push back against the AM.

And he created a service to do just that.

It was called Dal and Ninja.

We are very much against any racial prejudice or any racial bias.

We stand for that.

Earth's ninjas made themselves available on Hotline to sort out any racist intimidation.

I remember seeing Zhong Ang on TV.

He was this Chinese man with a stern face and a stocky build.

And he would appear on the screen in his ninja uniform, all black.

And he had this white headband with Japanese writing around his head.

And he didn't smile throughout the whole interview.

He just spoke with this authoritative voice.

The art of the ninjas are definitely an extremely lethal art, without doubt.

But that doesn't mean that we are going to kill anybody.

Mr.

Aang says his organization will remain well within the law, but that he fully intends to bring the full extent of racism into sharp focus.

Maybe it was because around this same time as a kid, I was watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on the TV.

It just come out.

So having this concept of a real-life ninja for me was something that really stuck in my mind.

And now, as an adult doing this story, I know that I need to hear from him.

And it turns out he wasn't that hard to find because his wife is in this dim sum social group that my parents are in.

So we just reached John's place.

So ABC reporter Alex Bannon and I went to visit him in his house.

John, thank you so much.

Do you want us to sneak to you?

Yeah, so we reckon closer to the microphone.

Just sit down.

When John migrated to Australia from Singapore in 1987, he expected to find a laid-back and welcoming place, but instead he found the opposite.

I

see posters everywhere, stickers everywhere.

Asians, go home.

Asians, you're not wanted.

I was

traumatized when I realized that I am not welcome here at all.

Why?

Well, because of the color of my skin,

because of the colour of my hair.

Friends of mine, also Chinese or Asians,

Equally they are petrified about what's going on.

And we started to look a little deeper into the problem and we realized that the root of this problem lies with one man and his gang.

We need to do something because the majority of the Asians were petrified by the actions of Jack Van Tongren.

John was a lawyer by training but he also had a black belt.

Martial art has always been my passion.

So

I started martial arts school.

Our art is the Ninjukai Taijutsu, which is basically a ninja art.

We want to sort of let the public know at that time that if you happen to encounter problems like your restaurant being firebombed or you're being yelled at and all that, give us a call.

We will try to look into the issue for you.

It's a sort of a thing where we want to give them a bit of confidence that they are not alone.

Then one day John was walking towards his martial arts studio and he says he noticed that something was wrong.

When I came over and I said, hey my god, what happened to my dojo?

It's all been painted, red color, splashed.

Not really painted, but splashed with paint.

And that was my reward for saying that, look, we are going to stand up with the Chinese community against Jack and Comrade.

Although John held a black belt in martial arts, he was becoming increasingly worried about what the A ⁇ M could do in retaliation.

My dojo at the time being splashed with plane, graffiti and all that kind of thing, you know, you know, for sure that they are looking for you.

He even started carrying a samurai sword when he left his studio late at night.

I was scared too.

To say I'm not scared will be alive.

Because for the simple reason that they are armed with guns.

They are armed with guns.

What is a black belt against a gun?

Thankfully, John never had to try out that sword.

He never actually got into a fight with the city skinheads or A ⁇ M members.

But getting into fights wasn't really the point anyway.

The point was that John was standing up for the community in a really public way when few other people were.

Can I just ask one more question?

I mean for me growing up you were quite visible in my childhood memory watching you speak on behalf of the Chinese community.

I didn't feel like there were many voices back then from our community.

Was this

something that you were conscious of?

Asians generally, you know, they do not want problems or trouble.

They are very happy keeping to themselves, you know, running their own business.

They are more the passive kind of people.

And that was when I felt it is just so unfair.

John was still haunted by those posters he had seen soon after arriving in Australia.

He wanted to do more than just tear them down.

He wanted them outlawed.

The Dahl and Ninja thing had given him this platform, so he decided to use it to reach out to politicians.

So he was writing letters in bulk urging the government to change the laws to ban the posters to do something

i mean what are we what are we looking at here what is this this is this huge pile of paper here

i mean how many letters did you write these are all correspondence correspondences over the years correspondences with the state government because i want to be heard i want the government to hear us, to understand

the plight that the Chinese and the Asians are in.

WA's oldest Chinese association, Chunghwa, was also organizing meetings and lobbying politicians in the background.

By 1989, their pleas were getting desperate.

Please understand that it is a plight that these Asians are facing and experiencing, and you have got to help us.

While John Eng and others in the Chinese community were trying to get the ANM's racist posters outlawed, the A ⁇ M themselves were becoming bolder, more brazen, and more violent.

And the group's leader, Jack Van Tongren, was starting to get personally involved in pursuing his group's enemies.

And one of them was a student activist called Nick.

We've been hearing stories of people getting bashed and stuff.

And I thought, well, we're doing something that's a bit, you know, that is definitely going to annoy the crap out of Nazis.

And one needs to be careful.

Nick was pretty sick of the A ⁇ M's intimidation so he set up this group called Aussies Against Racism.

They used to go around and spray paint over the A ⁇ M posters.

It was quick and efficient and Nick could paint over heaps of posters in a single night.

People had to know each other to become part of the group.

And that's what I thought was, well, some level of safety.

But one day, this young guy called Dennis came to one of their meetings.

He was young, a bit younger than me.

He was about 17.

And he was just seemed just a regular young guy.

So

he just came in and one of the guys pointed him out to me and I started talking to this young guy called Dennis and finding out who he was and that.

And they said, oh, how'd you find out about us?

He said, oh, a friend of mine told me about you.

And it just sort of went okay.

He was part of the meetings and getting involved.

So Dennis came out on a few spray painting runs with Nick's crew.

And then one night, a little bit later on, Dennis and another guy went around to Nick's place and knocked on his door.

Now, it was late at night, but they told Nick that they had seen some of these A ⁇ M posters at the back of the local Kmart, which was just around the corner from Nick's.

And so they asked him to come with them and take down the posters.

Nick had a funny feeling in his gut about this whole thing, but he decided to go along anyway.

with a bit of protection.

So what I decided to do was to bring my dog with me, which is a german shepherd labrador cross named tan because i think about that on the way down it's just you know how how safe am i because i'm i'm i'm really really seriously suspicious about this

as he's walking down the back alleyway behind kmart nick realizes his suspicions are right

and i noticed Dennis and this other young guy just bolt, run.

I was going, what the hell?

And I was looking and then my dog bolted as well.

Dennis is an infiltrator.

He's not an anti-racist activist.

He's a senior member of the AM.

He spent weeks passing on Intel about Nick's activities to Jack Van Tongren and other members of the gang.

And now he's left Nick in a dark alleyway.

And Nick has walked into a trap.

And I turn around and there's these guys covered in balaclavas on with camouflage fatigues, head to toe, with boots, jack boots on.

I tried to bolt, but then they

cracked me over the head with a clump of wood

and they caught me.

They grabbed me.

Two of them grabbed me and then they started dragging me around the corner.

I knew, I thought I was going to have my legs broken or get really bashed up.

I knew that other people had been bashed and hurt already.

The main thing I went into was into immediate survival mode.

Nick's bleeding from the wound on his head, but he's still conscious.

And I actually went limp.

I decided to make it hard for them.

They had to carry me.

And I pretended to be like out of it and like, you know, totally fucked.

The attackers start pushing him towards his yellow car and one of them pulls out a big hunting knife.

So the two guys grabbed on either side and there's a guy with a big bowie knife.

There's a guy literally holding it to my stomach.

Nick is terrified.

He's struggling to get free.

One of the attackers tries to stuff a sock in his mouth mouth to keep him quiet.

And then he hears this familiar voice.

Heard him on TV radios and been interviewed and that, so I knew it was his voice.

It's Jack Van Tongren, the leader of the A ⁇ M is there.

And as they get closer to that yellow car and Nick listens to them, one of the men says something that makes him worry that this might not just be a warning.

One guy's got the door and opened it, and that's when I heard, we can't kill him here, we've got to get him out of here.

Nick needs an escape route.

He's groggy from the blow to his head but he's also trying desperately to work out what to do and then just by chance another random person drives past.

Everyone pauses as the headlights sweep over them and then at that moment Nick sees a dark shape running towards them.

Tan came around the corner and went berserk and he started going at them and they jumped back.

In the confusion Nick makes a run for it.

And then I bolted and I just bolted and I just kept running and jumped the fence.

He runs towards the first open door of a house that he can see on the street.

With a light, and I just went in through the open door, and in the lounge room was a young family, complete with grandmother and grandkids.

And

they, I was bleeding from the cut to my head, and they just immediately rang the police and the ambulance.

Nick is bruised all over his face and body and needs stitches in his head.

His dog Tan has cocked it much worse.

One of the gang had belted the dog over the face.

And unfortunately, he paid the price of getting his jaw broken.

Thankfully, after a trip to the vet, Tan would later make a full recovery.

But that distraction is what saved me.

If Tan hadn't come around the corner like that, I don't know what would have happened.

It was pretty clear now that anyone who opposed the AM was going to face the threat of violent retribution.

The city's racists seemed to be everywhere, on the streets pasting up posters, lighting fires, on the city's airwaves, spewing hatred.

But for Jack, all of that wasn't enough.

So in January 89, he opened up a new front in his fight for white Australia.

He decided to run for a seat in the state's parliament.

And not only that, he ran up against the same politician who had caught him postering and reported him to the police just a month before.

It was a message to me that he was going to be there in my face no matter what.

WA's Minister for Multicultural and Ethnic Affairs, Gordon Hill, wasn't happy.

He now had a neo-Nazi running against him in his own seat.

And on top of that, in the weeks leading up to the election, someone had been phoning his wife at work.

She was regularly receiving telephone calls from some anonymous person telling her that they were going to blow my head off if I won the election.

Gordon and his wife didn't know who was behind the cause, but police were taking the threat seriously.

They said that they wanted to follow me around.

They wanted to be close by because they saw that there was a real serious threat against me.

Then, just two days before the election, there was an attack.

But weirdly, it wasn't at Gordon's house.

It was at Jack Van Tongren's house.

The attackers had used the same method as in the other fires.

They threw a Molotov cocktail against the front of his house, then fired three shotgun rounds into the window for good measure.

So just to underline how confusing things had become, the guy who many people thought was responsible for the attacks had now been attacked himself.

The next day, the day before the election, Van Tongeren spoke to reporters outside his house.

It was aimed towards where I would normally be sitting in my chair.

That much we have worked that out already.

They use extra heavy pellets.

The heavy shot, whoever did it was not kidding.

On Election Day, the mood was tense.

Van Tongren's followers had actually turned up at the local polling booths and Gordon Hill says they were dressed in military style clothing.

So there were a lot of voters there lining up to vote and Van Tongren's people wearing their khaki greens and well organised with their how-to vote cards.

The thing that really stood out to me and worried me enormously was some of them were actually carrying knives.

Gordon says he reported what he'd seen to the electoral staff on the booths and he was just about to leave when someone started yelling.

I was walking out of the, away from the polling booth talking to my helpers and thanking them for their presence when I heard this voice.

Of course I recognised the voice.

I'd heard it enough on radio and television.

I'd also heard it personally in Vic Park a few months before.

Gordon hadn't noticed but Jack Van Tongram himself was at the booth and and he was livid.

And he saw me and he made a beeline for me and he yelled at me.

He yelled,

you firebombed my house.

He made these outrageous accusations accusing me of doing it.

It certainly wasn't Gordon who firebombed Jack's house, but police weren't sure who had.

He was frothing at the mouth.

He was so ideologically driven.

My campaign director who was there with me said, let's get out of here, Gordon.

He's mad, this man.

He can do anything.

Gordon Hill left, and later that night, when the election results rolled in, it became clear that he had been re-elected.

Meanwhile, Jack Van Tongren and the AM only ended up receiving 2% of the vote.

I was hoping that there would be no support for him at all.

My hope was that he would get no votes.

He'd lose his deposit.

Sadly, he got about 400 votes, I think, thereabouts.

Jack Van Tongren's hopes of making political political inroads were unfulfilled.

But hundreds of people in this one seat, knowingly or unknowingly, had just voted for a neo-Nazi.

So, for more than six months, the city of Perth had just been kind of sleepwalking through this unprecedented campaign of racist terrorism.

Media coverage of the firebombings against all the Chinese restaurants had been pretty low-key.

But in May 89, the firebombers did something that really couldn't be ignored.

At first, the head of the Arts and Squad, Morritong, thought he was just dealing with yet another attack on a Chinese restaurant, just like all the other ones.

Well, it was the same thing, and my thought was, here we go again.

This attack was even at a restaurant the firebombers had hit before, the Ko Sing Chinese restaurant in Linwood.

So we mobilized that morning, went out, set set up command centre as we always did.

Maury Tong set up a perimeter and in his usual way he started working his way back towards the centre of the fire.

But he quickly realised that this one was different.

For starters, the firebombers had actually entered the building.

There was evidence of forced entry into the restaurant from the back door, as against just having glass broken to introduce a flammable liquid.

So things had changed.

Maury and his detectives then entered the the restaurant and again he saw something new, something disturbing.

The first thing we noticed was that whilst there was a lot of black smoke and everything else, fire hadn't actually gained hold inside the restaurant.

But it had blown the roof off the wall and had blown a number of the restaurant chairs up and on top of the top plate of the wall and the roof had come back down onto the chairs and squashed them flat and trapped them between the top of the walls and the underside of the roof structure, which is something I've not seen before or since.

There was also this distinct aroma in the air.

There was a strong smell of explosive.

It's a very sticky, sickly, sweet smell that gives you a shocking headache very quickly.

So the detectives divided the restaurant into small one square meter sections and began working their way methodically into the middle of the restaurant.

And the closer they looked, the more concerned they got.

We started finding evidence of a huge amount of small lengths of fencing wire.

All over the place, embedded in furniture, on the floor, splattered into the walls.

The walls were pitted with it.

So this fencing wire, wherever it had originated, had been expelled under extreme force.

Then, in the center of the room, Mori found the source.

There was a blast crater, about four to five centimeters deep in the concrete slab where the carpet used to be.

This fire didn't start with a Molotov cocktail.

It was a powerful explosive.

The evidence that was obtained demonstrated a complete change in MODIS operandi.

We got some unexploded residues or residues that were analyzed and found to be, I think it was Emugel, which is a commercial explosive used in mining at the time.

This immediately changed the game.

The bomb had been deliberately wrapped in wire, which turned into shrapnel when the bomb exploded, causing maximum destruction.

And I became quickly aware that if this had gone off while somebody was in there, we would have had either multiple injuries or death, without any doubt whatsoever.

This was an IED type thing.

Without knowing for sure exactly who was carrying out the attacks and what their mindset was, Maury and his team could only speculate about what might come next.

And guessing what could be next well it terrified them.

The discovery that a device of some sort had been detonated in that fire scene it now became protection of life

because I feared and my fellow team members in the Arson squad feared that this was a precursor to having a device set off during trading hours.

I knew with horror that it appeared that somebody was testing the effectiveness of that sort of whatever device had been made.

By this point, the Arson Squad's investigation had narrowed significantly.

Despite the confusing fact that Jack Van Tongren's own house had been firebombed just before Election Day, the various senior members of the A ⁇ M were still the main suspects for the restaurant attacks.

This explosion just made the detectives' mission even more urgent, but they still couldn't get the definitive evidence they needed.

Well, it was horrifying.

It really put the pressure on.

Meanwhile, in the media, it seemed like the A ⁇ M's leader, Jack Van Tongeren, was almost goading the Arson Squad detectives.

The Australian nationalists movement, headed by Jack Van Tongeren, says it has nothing to do with this explosion or any others.

But it did say, and I quote, the Asians represent a hostile minority against the wishes of the Australian public.

At the moment, we're all living in difficult circumstances and extreme times call for extreme measures.

I felt exceptionally frustrated that we just couldn't seem to get the evidence required to link them directly to it.

But there was one piece of evidence discovered at the fire scene that did provide Maury Tong with what felt like a promising lead.

Snagged on one of the cut ends of the cyclone fence was a fragment of cloth material, fibres,

which forensic officers kept, seized, preserved.

Maury had been keeping a close eye on the gang and he knew that one of the members lived super close to that Chinese restaurant.

With the fibers received off the back fence.

And the coincidence that just down the road from the restaurant, one Russell Willey lived, who was already being looked at.

And that led to getting sufficient evidence to take out a search warrant.

So Russell Willie was a senior member of the A ⁇ M and he'd even been seen in public standing next to Jack during a lot of his media interviews.

So in the days that followed, Maury and the other Arsenal Sport detectives went full throttle.

They went over to his house to talk to him, but they also searched his home.

And inside, they found a green jumper with a tear in it.

So it was sent off for analysis in the hopes that it could get them a little closer to concrete answers.

But they didn't just search Russell Willie's house.

The Arson squad also paid a visit to the leader of the A ⁇ M, Jack Van Tongren.

And what they found in his house was so concerning, they arrested him.

Jack Van Tongren was arrested early this morning after Arsen squad detectives searched his house and allegedly found explosive substances including gunpowder and safety fuses.

For a moment it looks certain that Jack and the gang were completely cooked.

But incredibly even these breakthroughs weren't enough.

The detonation cord and the other explosive stuff at Jack's house looked suspicious, but none of it matched what was found at the Ko Sing.

And the fibers they found in the Cyclone Wire fence around the restaurant, well, they did match Russell Wheelie's jumper.

But even that on its own wasn't enough to keep him behind bars.

The police needed more, so they had to let both men go free.

We had plenty of supposition and we had plenty of indicators and became, you know, within a millimetre of getting the evidence that was required.

We pulled out all stops and I just had virtually two detectives doing the day-to-day fires that were coming in and the rest of us were 100% focused on the A ⁇ M.

We were getting considerable political pressure from up on high flowing down to our neck of the woods.

And it was like Premier and Police Minister contacting Commissioner, contacting the head of the CIB, contacting me, and him saying, we need a result, and me saying, well, you give us the evidence and we'll give you the result.

In the 1980s, Western Australia really didn't understand terrorism.

It just didn't really enter their mind as a possibility.

and maybe that's one part of the reason that Perth had been kind of slow to react to what was happening.

But once that bomb went off in the Ko Sing,

things were different.

Things seemed to move much more quickly, and it seemed like everyone was paying attention from then on.

That also meant that the AM was getting the attention that its leaders had always craved.

Their campaign of terror was causing panic all the way from the state government in WA to the federal government and even overseas in Asia.

This has been the only news on our state in Hong Kong.

The Asians out signs posted around Perth and the bombing of Chinese restaurants, the shock through prospective migration and Asian trade.

I know for a fact that quite a few business migrants have gone to other countries rather than Australia.

Six Chinese restaurants in Perth have been the subject of arson squad investigations.

All of this tends to confirm the assertion that Western Australia is the most racist state in the country.

It is impossible to convince people that everything is sweet and rosy in WA at that time.

It's just not possible.

Later, the Premier will be forced to make a special trip to Hong Kong in an attempt to repair the damage to the state's international reputation.

The Premier flies out to Hong Kong this weekend in an attempt to alter our image.

But Western Australia's police force was about to get a breakthrough handed to them.

One that would lead them to someone on the inside.

Someone who had the potential to bring down the gang's whole operation.

I've been searching for all my life, doing things dangerous, things just for the pure pleasure.

And the dogs were let loose.

This was just a nightmare from hell for them.

They never expected this in a million years.

This series is hosted and reported by me, Crispian Chan and Alex Mann.

We've been making this podcast on Gadaguland and Watjuknunga Land.

Our producer and researcher is Dunya Karagic.

Research and fact checking by Johnny Liu.

Our theme and music composition is by Martin Perolta.

Sound design and additional music by Simon Branthwaite.

The commissioning editor was Alice Brennan.

And our executive producer is Tim Roxburgh.

To make sure you're the first to get the next episodes, follow the Unravel podcast.

You can find it on the ABC Listen app.