Just before Christmas Dragan Arnautovic’s elderly mother phoned him to say the “Telstra man” was coming.
But she didn’t need her phone line fixed.
Underneath her St Albans house, concealed in a clip-lock lunch box, was a cache of heroin and methamphetamine with an estimated street value of up to $500,000.
The pair might have suspected police were listening that day, yet detectives from Geelong’s drug unit had been recording calls for the previous three months and that phone call in December, 2016, would prove crucial in bringing down the man dubbed Machine Gun Charlie.
Last month, Arnautovic, 55, was found guilty in the Melbourne County Court of the commercial supply of heroin and trafficking of methamphetamine.
The trial was told police had been watching Arnautovic for months, even involving undercover police to pose as his buyers in three covert “buys” as they built their case.
Arnautovic had earned the title Machine Gun Charlie, for his rat-a-tat style in the boxing and kickboxing rings.
He was a national kickboxing champion and the owner of a gym in Melton West and, as police put it, one of the state’s most prolific heroin dealers.
He’d been dealing heroin between Melbourne and Geelong since the 1980s.
Trusting very few people and preferring to operate alone, he would learn from his mistakes and regroup when caught. As he smartened up his game, he hid his stockpile in public places, with some buried under football fields, parks and public buildings across Melbourne’s western suburbs.
One of his early hiding spots was in a dead-end street in Sunshine, another was a baseball centre in Altona North where police found heroin stashed in Berocca containers and stuffed in gaps in the walls.
Between 1999 and 2012, Arnautovic did three stints behind bars. By 2016, he was back on police radar, dealing again.
Arnautovic was put under 24-hour surveillance. Unknown to him, he’d been selling to covert cops
The pivotal phone call with his mother in December, 2016, came three months into the Victoria Police sting, dubbed Operation Rehangs, led by Senior Constable Daniel Hughes of the Geelong drug squad and his regional team.
In a hole under his mother’s place, police found his haul – 502 grams of heroin and 55 grams of ice in ziplock bags in two plastic containers.
His mother hasn’t been charged.
Arnautovic’s escapades came to an end when police arrested him in the carpark of a Geelong motel, a far cry from the spotlight of the international boxing rings he once graced.
The 55-year-old was found guilty by a County Court jury of trafficking a commercial quantity of drugs.
He will be sentenced at a later date.
– The Age
