The record cocaine prices in Australia – only exceeded in two Gulf states where supplying drugs attracts the death penalty – have also raised the stakes,attracting not only more crime gangs,including some from overseas,but also less polished ones.

That can be dangerous. One person with detailed knowledge of organised crime,speaking on the condition of anonymity,said reckless,amateurish criminals were more likely to make rash decisions and messy mistakes.

“I’d much rather have someone at the top who knows how to discipline their crew,” they said.

New entrants were less likely to respect the conventions that used to give the drug trade a loose order. “No one is staying in their lane,” Australian Federal Police Assistant Commissioner Kirsty Schofieldrecently said,and the resulting tensions were leading to bloody and public score-settling.

Police have also warned that drug busts that do not result in arrests also inflate the problem,as criminals take retribution into their own hands.

Amid the latest public outcry,NSW Police is throwing resources at the problem.

It has brought seven separate investigations,which it suspects are linked,under one taskforce,and added extra manpower. There are now 100 officers on the job. It’s an old strategy,drawn from a decades-old playbook designed to reassure the community and appease a hungry media.

The first of those seven is the daylight “execution-style” of Marvin Oraiha,who was shot dead while sitting in his car in Sydney’s west in May.

They include the killing a month ago in Bondi ofAlen Moradian, a notorious criminal also known as Fathead,and the early July shooting of two men in front of customers in a hair salon in Sydney’s inner west,less than 100 metres from Marrickville Police Station.

The taskforce,known as Magnus,will also focus on two shootings in Greenacre in the past week;the murder of 25-year-old Ahmad Al-Azzam as he sat in his car;andthe shooting of prominent lawyer Mahmoud Abbas,who was hit on the leg and torso outside his house on Wednesday morning.

The most recent isthe murder of Ferenc David Stemler,28 in Canterbury,in Sydney’s south-west at 2am on Thursday. On Friday,there was a bouquet of white roses taped to a nearby street sign bearing the words RIP D-Teddy,and a shrine of incense and Esse slim cigarettes.

The police face a difficult task. In most of the cases burnt-out cars were found nearby,meaning much of the evidence had been torched. Victims are scared to open up. Deputy Police Commissioner David Hudson described it as a wall of silence.

“We’ve had victims who have survived their attacks who refuse to speak to us,refuse to tell us why they were a target of some other group or some other individual,” he said. Hudson warned there were often only two ways out of the drug business:by police van to jail,or by hearse to the cemetery.

In an interview with theHerald on Friday,he also reminded Sydney’s cocaine users that there was a dark side to their fun night out. “I think users of cocaine might obtain it through friendly transactions,with trusted insiders from the same social background as themselves,” he said.

“But there’s a whole pathway for that drug getting into this country that is the seedy underbelly of the cocaine trade into NSW and Australia. And some of the results that we’ve seen on the streets of Sydney are the product of that seedy underbelly of the trade.

“People think that it’s a pristine product,but you know that there’s a whole illicit trade ... the people who consume it would never associate with those who move it.”

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