Gangs vie for control of the world's most lucrative cocaine market

When leaving a restaurant onto the busy streets of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, while customers are sitting at tables on the street, the shooter pulls out a gun and shoots his targets from behind.

The alleged attack kills a key member of a feared Australian drug cartel and injures another, further increasing the carnage in a war between gangs for control of the world's most lucrative cocaine market.

A video of the exchange of fire in Vietnam shows Lorenzo Lemalu, 24, a member of the Coconut Cartel, staggering on the sidewalk before being dragged into the restaurant, where they try to save him. The alleged accomplice is seriously injured next to him, on the blood-stained tiles.

Less than 72 hours after the May 21 shootings, Vietnamese authorities announced the detention of two Samoans near the border with Cambodia, airing them on state television for alleged confessions.

The men, both in their 20s, said the attack was orchestrated by someone abroad, according to state media. CNN attempted to contact his lawyers.

Although the shooting occurred on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City, the impact was felt thousands of kilometers away in Sydney, Australia, where violence has increased over the past 18 months due to gangs fighting for control of drug trafficking.

According to law enforcement authorities, consumers pay several times more per gram for cocaine and methamphetamine in Australia and New Zealand than in the United States and Europe.

The potential profits encouraged traffickers to ship large quantities of illicit drugs to both countries, often across the Pacific Ocean from South America to the Pacific Islands, a scattered collection of thousands of islands and atolls.

One of the main selling points is Sydney, in the Australian state of NSW (New South Wales), where police say offshore operators are hiring criminals, including teenagers, to carry out the dirty jobs.

"Organized crime in New South Wales is now completely global," New South Wales Police Assistant Commissioner Scott Cook said in late May, warning of overseas crime figures complicit in violence that police would hunt them down.

Rising Violence
Sydney's western suburbs are the epicenter of a turf war that has seen criminal gangs attack rivals' homes, burn down cars and businesses, kidnap and kill associates and terrorize their families.

The Lemalu Coconut Cartel began trading favors with the Alameddine crime family early last year, said Vince Hurley, a former New South Wales Police detective and now a criminologist at Macquarie University.

She described the cartel as "muscle for hire" who clashed with their former employers over pay.

The group's name attempts to subvert the narrative of a historical offense against Pacific Islanders, who hail from small nations like Fiji and Samoa.

"The name is a trophy they rub in the face of anyone who ever doubted them," Hurley said. "Every act of recognition, fear, media coverage, recognition of rivalry is proof that the dismissal was wrong."

Police say violence on the streets of Sydney is being orchestrated from abroad, and that teenagers are being lured into the complex web of gang warfare with the promise of easy money.

On the eve of Lemalu's funeral, a video circulated on social media showed a man armed with a semi-automatic rifle firing 30 shots from the back of a car at the place where the wake would be held, in Sydney's west.

No one was at the scene at the time, but police said the shots could have caused "multiple deaths."

The alleged shooter was just 17 years old, a sign of a worrying trend police say of young people being drawn into organized crime.

"(It's) extremely concerning, and it's not just about young men, it's about young women as well," New South Wales Police Detective Superintendent Jason Box said earlier this month.

"We recently arrested 17 and 18-year-old women involved in murder plots who were carrying out surveillance on potential armed targets. Therefore, there are a large number of young men and women willing to commit this serious crime."

Police stated that young offenders are typically not loyal to any specific criminal network and are often unaware of the identity of their potential victims.

"A lot of families need to be aware of what's going on with their children," Box said. "Are they receiving money inexplicably? Are they leaving the house at all hours of the night? Are they walking around with five or six cell phones?"

Maritime Trade
Australia and New Zealand together constitute the world's most lucrative market for cocaine, thanks to the relatively high cost per gram on the street and a seemingly insatiable appetite on the part of consumers.

According to the latest report from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), released on Friday, 4.2% of people in these countries aged 15 to 64 used cocaine in 2024 - more than double the percentage in the US (1.9%) and Europe (1.7%) and the highest rate worldwide.

Traffickers mainly send shipments from the Americas, along a route known as the "Pacific drug highway", using Pacific islands such as Fiji and the Solomon Islands as stopping points to reach the lucrative Oceanian market.

"It's like a balloon, you squeeze one side and it goes the other," said Antoine Vella, a researcher with the UNODC World Drug Report, explaining that experienced cocaine traffickers were increasingly realizing the potential of westward routes, which attracted less attention than traditional routes to Europe.

"It wouldn't be surprising if this increased further, and it's also having an effect in the Pacific island states, not just in relation to cocaine but also other drugs," he said.

So far this year, 17 tonnes of illicit drugs, mainly cocaine, have been seized in the Pacific region - more than three times last year's total, according to the Australian Federal Police.

Some of the drugs were found on ships or hidden in "narco-submarines", semi-submersible vessels that are more difficult to detect by surveillance systems.

A customs agent with the Oceania Customs Organization said the seizures "prove that criminal groups see our Blue Pacific as a billion-dollar transit route."

There is also evidence that a lot of drugs are passing through the country. Wastewater samples from New Zealand showed "exceptionally high" levels of cocaine use in the last quarter of 2025 and "remarkably high" levels of methamphetamine, according to New Zealand Police.

At the same time, the price of methamphetamine has fallen in New Zealand, indicating that there is no shortage in the market.

"The biggest problem for me in all of this is not the drugs, which are terrible, but rather the corruption that infiltrates society," said Alexander Gillepsie, professor of international law at the University of Waikato in New Zealand, pointing to bribes to customs agents or local police as factors that help facilitate the flow of drugs.

"There is a certain degree of resistance to corruption in countries like Australia and New Zealand, but if you go to the Pacific, where there are not only developing countries but also less developed countries, where there is extreme poverty, the ability to resort to corruption or extreme violence to get what you need is much greater."

Seizure of more than a ton of cocaine in Havannah Harbor, northwest of Efate, in the Pacific Ocean - Australian Federal Police
The arrest of two Samoans for the alleged murder of Lemalu, from the Coconut Cartel, was front-page news on the small island in the South Pacific, a developing country with around 220,000 inhabitants. After the shooting, the island's prime minister reportedly said that local youth were being "used" for drug trafficking.

Emma Tufuga, a criminologist at Curtin University in Perth who is originally from Samoa, said young people are being recruited through peer networks and social media with the promise of money, or even just a sense of belonging.

"What really worries me is that small Pacific nations could end up suffering the damage caused by drug markets, much of which is concentrated elsewhere," Tufuga said.

"The partnership really needs to be focused on prevention and protection, and not just monitoring Pacific waters by large nations."

A record cocaine seizure
Earlier this week, Australian federal and state police forces seized the largest quantity of cocaine in the country's history - 2.7 metric tonnes - enough, police said, for three million street sales.

It was buried in plastic containers, which in turn were buried under three shipping containers on a semi-rural property in Sydney's west.

The trail that led to the record seizure began in the state of Queensland, when local police officers, responding to a fire in a truck, found 40 kilograms of cocaine floating in the sea near a boat ramp.

The discovery took investigators south to Sydney and then more than a thousand kilometers across the sea to the Solomon Islands, where local police had been monitoring a Belizean-flagged cargo ship called the MV Wealth.

Local police were already monitoring the ship's "suspicious movements" and, after receiving information from Australian authorities, intercepted it along with its 19 crew members, according to a government statement.

The Australian Federal Police say they are still investigating the ship's route to the Solomon Islands, including whether it arrived via the Pacific Islands or took a more northerly route.

In any case, police allege the cargo was ordered by a Sydney organized crime group and transported from the Queensland port to the South Australian city to be sold. Six people were arrested.

AFP Commander Stephen Jay refused on Monday to say whether the record cocaine seizure would disrupt or inflame the city's gang war.

"Somebody lost a lot of money, I think that's fair to say," Jay said. "No doubt there will be a lot of reflection on the loss of this significant quantity - Australia's large quantity - of cocaine."

Sydney Crime News (SCN) Worldstar's Zaky Mallah says predicting underworld violence is "never simple."

"It's a tit-for-tat situation," he said via text message. "For every arrest, it seems like two more shootings."

SCN Worldstar posts updates about Sydney's drug war on social media, often receiving video footage directly of crimes committed on the city's streets. Police say criminals often film their crimes as proof they did paid work - or to brag about themselves.

In the days following Lemalu's death, New South Wales Police carried out early-morning raids in Sydney, arresting nine people and expressing confidence that they were getting organized crime under control.

"We were able to arrest not only the key players and on-the-ground coordinators, but also many of the criminal hires and facilitators supporting this organized crime network in New South Wales," said New South Wales Police Assistant Commissioner Cook in late May.

"For a long time, we've been chasing losses," Cook told reporters. "For the first time, we think we are on equal footing."

Source: CNN