Rugby league legend Graeme Langlands was ‘well-known to police’ before his alleged attempt to import heroin, according to the senior officer who tried to put him behind bars.
Australian Federal Police Commander Grant Edwards spent a year investigating Langlands over a plot to import 10 kilograms of heroin worth up to $20million from the Golden Triangle.
‘Langlands was the brains trust, it was his idea, he had the plan,’ Commander Edwards told Daily Mail Australia.
‘I gathered from the language he used and the way that he spoke that he’d done it before, he wasn’t fumbling through, he knew what he was doing. It wasn’t the first time.’
Daily Mail Australia asked the NRL if revelations about Langlands allegedly being involved in the international drug trade would affect his status as an Immortal of the game.
‘Thanks for getting in touch,’ a spokesman said. ‘We will not be adding any commentary to this.’
Australian Federal Police Commander Grant Edwards led a year-long investigation which could have put Graeme Langlands behind bars almost two decades ago. A tribute to the man known as ‘Changa’ was held before the round 1 match between St George and the Broncos last year
Grant Edwards (left with AFP Commissioner Andrew Colvin) has had a 34-year career with the Australian Federal Police, personally establishing cybercrime units to fight child exploitation and human trafficking. He investigated Graeme Langlands over an alleged drug plot in 2001
Langlands, known as ‘Changa’ and the fifth player to be declared a rugby league Immortal, was the subject of a ‘substantial investigation’ by Australian Federal Police in 2000-2001.
Commander Edwards writes in a new book that Langlands was ‘well-known to police’ and had been ‘running close to the wind for a while on account of the people he was mixing with.’
Police were ready to pounce on Langlands as he plotted with his alleged fellow conspirators, but the operation was blown when a passerby stopped to tie his shoelace, spooking the retired St George great.
Langlands, who died last year aged 76 suffering dementia and facing charges of child sexual abuse, objected to Andrew Johns joining him as an Immortal in 2012 due to Johns’s admitted party drug use.
Commander Edwards said Langlands and his criminal associates planned to smuggle 10 kilograms of heroin with a street value of up to $20million into Australia on a ship.
The Team of the Century player’s sister Paula told Daily Mail Australia she had never heard of any drug investigation and ‘didn’t believe a word of it’.
Commander Edwards told Daily Mail Australia he was struck by how careful Langlands was while planning the alleged importation.
Langlands, who was ‘acutely paranoid’ and distrusted all his co-conspirators, planned the whole operation in code, making him difficult for police to arrest.
Rugby league legend Graeme Langlands was a would-be drug trafficker who planned to import heroin from the Golden Triangle, according to a new book. Langlands, an ‘Immortal’ of the game, was the subject of a ‘substantial investigation’ by Australian Federal Police in 2001
Langlands, who died last year aged 76 suffering dementia and facing charges of child sexual abuse, objected to Andrew Johns joining him as an Immortal in 2012 due to Johns’s admitted party drug use. Johns, named the eighth Immortal, is pictured with his partner Kate Kendall
The police operation culminated in a meeting between Langlands and four other men outside the old footballer’s home in Sydney’s inner-city in mid 2001, with officers listening in to their chat.
‘Langlands was petrified that his house could be bugged so he did all his meetings on a traffic island outside his house,’ Commander Edwards told Daily Mail Australia.
‘I can still see the meeting in my head and feel the pain of when it all went to dust.’
Commander Edwards said his team believed the plan was to smuggle the heroin in on a ship through one of Sydney’s ports.
‘Back in those days the wharves were so corrupt that you pay the right people the right amount of money and they’d turn a blind eye to it,’ he said.
‘The [ship’s] crew would normally walk it off in bags when they came off on shore leave. That’s why the investigation was so important as we were hoping to identify corrupt elements.
‘[Langlands and his co-conspirators] made contact to be able to facilitate that.’
Langlands, who was famed for his prodigious sidestep, won four premierships (1963-1966) with St George as part of their 11-year run of titles.
‘I have no pity for anyone who seeks to make money from drugs, but even so, it was sad as a one-time fan for me to witness such an inglorious end to a life once so widely celebrated,’ Commander Edwards writes. Langlands is pictured with his plaque at the SCG in 2003
The goal-kicking fullback and sometime centre played a then-record 45 Tests for Australia and was the last captain-coach of the national side.
He had a brewery truck run while still playing but none of his post-football endeavours was a success.
Langlands made a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (MBE) in 1976 after his retirement and bought a pub at Taree on the New South Wales mid north coast the following year.
That business was a disaster and Langlands continued to have an unsettled life after football, shifting from one job to another including a stint during the 1990s in the Philippines where he managed a bar in Manila.
The claim Langlands was involved in drug trafficking is contained in a book by Commander Edwards, who investigated his footballing hero almost 20 years ago.
Commander Edwards does not name Langlands in his book, but he confirmed his identity to Daily Mail Australia.
He writes he was shocked when Langlands ‘found his way onto my radar’ because ‘he was one of the sporting heroes of my generation.’
The policeman had recently returned from working in Los Angeles when he was assigned to the AFP’s Transnational Criminal Intelligence Team and began investigating Langlands.
‘This particular football great was well-known to police,’ Commander Edwards writes in The Strong Man, which details his 34-year policing career and struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder.
‘He’d been running close to the wind for a while on account of the people he was mixing with.
‘I’d recently been promoted to the rank of sergeant and my team had run a substantial investigation into him and his activities, but we kept it close to our chests because we didn’t want to risk details being leaked to the media.
‘The longer our investigation continued, the clearer it became that he had signed on to drug trafficking, and I wanted to be there when he was convicted.’
Commander Edwards writes that the AFP had ‘good intelligence’ that Langlands had planned to import a shipment of ‘a commodity’ from South-East Asia.
Investigators were certain the group planned to smuggle heroin because they were arranging to obtain the drugs from the Golden Triangle, where the borders of Laos, Thailand and Myanmar meet.
Langlands, like many footballers and ex-footballers of his era, was a heavy drinker who in 2001 could regularly be found in hotels around inner-city suburbs including Redfern and Alexandria.
Commander Edwards and his partner eventually found themselves watching Langlands and four other men as they chatted outside the retired footballer’s inner-city home.
Langlands and his associates were engaged in deep conversation and while the others seem relatively relaxed the sporting legend was hyper-vigilant.
Commander Edwards writes that just as the five men seemed to be on the verge of revealing their plan in detail a university student walked towards the group.
The young man was carrying a backpack as he walked along a footpath across the traffic island and bent down to tie one of his shoelaces right behind the group, instantly arousing Langlands’ suspicion.
Commander Edwards said Langlands threw his hands in the air and said, ‘it’s off’ then stormed back inside his house.
Police later detected Langlands and the other members of the group talking about what happened, accusing each other of tipping off police.
‘He refused to speak to anyone after that and they all started pointing fingers at each other about who was the leak,’ Commander Edwards said.
‘They pretty much shut up shop.’
Dragons fans celebrate the life of Graeme Langlands at Jubilee Oval, Kogarah, before the 2018 first-round match between St George-Illawarra and Brisbane two months after his death
The setback did not end the investigation but after the scare with the innocent university student Langlands’s paranoia only increased.
Commander Edwards believed that Langlands might have not had the finances to continue with the plan and backed out because he feared getting caught.
He had also noticed what he suspected were signs of the dementia which would later fell the footballer, whose sentences were often garbled or made no sense.
The AFP reluctantly closed the file on Langlands, who they came to believe was getting out of the drug game.
Commander Edwards described Langlands as being a patient person who had clearly spent time around criminals and understood how their world worked.
He writes that if his team had arrested Langlands over a drug importation the media would have gone into meltdown.
Commander Edwards believed Langlands, who was not a drug user, turned to heroin smuggling because he needed the money and stood to share in a payday of up to $3million
‘It was also considered a bit of an easy gig, if you did it right you could make a hell of a lot of money in a sort amount of time,’ he said.
‘Many of them tried and a lot of them came undone.’
To the policeman’s knowledge, Langlands never tried drug smuggling again and his health was already beginning to deteriorate by 2001.
Commander Edwards did not name Langlands in his book because he is no longer alive to defend himself.
At the time of his death Langlands was facing six charges of indecently treating a child under 16 on the Gold Coast in 1982.
He would have been too ill to defend those charges but his family said at the time his prosecution was ‘improper’ and the allegations ‘refutable’.
Daily Mail Australia has informed the Langlands family of the contents of the book.
Paula Langlands said trafficking drugs was not something her brother would have done: ‘Heroin, good heavens…not by any means’.
‘I can’t remember a time when his demeanor was such that he may have had anything on his mind, so I don’t believe a word of it,’ she told Daily Mail Australia.
‘He was a wonderful man when he was alive and admired and respected by his peers.’
As a boy Commander Edwards had watched Langlands play for the Dragons on television and had often seen him labouring around inner Sydney.
He had admired the sporting champion but was too shy to ask for his autograph.
Graeme Langlands is one of 13 rugby league players named as ‘Immortal’. Left to right are some of the Immortals and their relatives: Clive Churchill’s widow Joyce Churchill, Arthur Beetson’s son Mark Beetson, Johnny Raper, Wally Lewis, Langlands and Andrew Johns
‘I have no pity for anyone who seeks to make money from drugs, but even so, it was sad as a one-time fan for me to witness such an inglorious end to a life once so widely celebrated,’ Commander Edwards writes.
Langlands had two daughters and a son with his wife Lynne Burgess, whom he married in 1966 and left when their eldest child was nine.
He was estranged from a fourth child, son Trent, who is a successful Sydney personal trainer.
Trent carries his father’s nickname but has said that was the end of their association.
‘I don’t know the bloke and never have,’ the younger Chang said after the sexual assault allegations against his father first surfaced.
In 2013 Langlands was forced to sell his Alexandria home after he was allegedly ripped off by a close friend in another poor business venture.
He had taken out a three-month $160,000 loan at an interest rate of 96 per cent from a lender of last resort.
Langlands moved to live with his daughter in the NSW southern highlands before shifting to a nursing home at Sutherland in Sydney’s south where he died in January last year.
The Strong Man, by Grant Edwards, is published by Simon & Schuster and available now. RRP: $35.