Page 1685 - Week 06 - Tuesday, 30 April 1991
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Alexander Gajic was named by the Costigan royal commission as one of the Mr Bigs of organised crime in Australia, along with Gerald Gold and Joseph David Shellim. Alexander Gajic signed an agreement with VCX Incorporated, a US company run by leading organised crime figures, to duplicate and sell pornographic videos in Australia and act as the agent for VCX expansion in this region. Among an interlocking web of companies, Gajic was also a director of Joyfrey Nominees Pty Ltd, which agreed to pay $US30,000 for this licence. It is perhaps not well known that organised crime groups will readily use normal banks to transfer funds, rather than banks like Nugan Hand. The bank that was used to transfer these funds from Australia to the Mafia-run VCX Incorporated was Barclays Bank of California Ltd. The account was titled "Humphrey Sales", the account number being 05430-00917.
Due to an informal protocol, the Commonwealth Customs Service did not prosecute individuals entering Australia with small, supposedly non-commercial amounts of unclassified and illegal pornography; nor was this material confiscated. Once master videos are shipped to Australia they can then be cloned and duplicated by their thousands. The only requirement is that professional video-duplicating services are available.
In the case of Alexander Gajic, he set up an agreement with a Melbourne based professional video duplicating company called Armstrong Audio Visual, or AAV as it was known, to duplicate the videos he obtained from VCX. AAV was a subsidiary of the David Syme publishing group. It was shortly after this time that Gajic decided to strip the assets from Joyfrey Nominees Pty Ltd, the company holding the licence with VCX Incorporated, and send Joyfrey into liquidation. On 13 June 1985, a liquidator was appointed for Joyfrey.
I make no suggestion that the appointed liquidator in this case did anything other than a professional job. The problem lay in the fact that he and the Corporate Affairs Commission were given false information. When Joyfrey Nominees was put into liquidation a problem arose for Gajic, because Armstrong Audio Visual had possession of the master tapes from which it had been copying and, until it got paid for its work, AAV was most reluctant to release the tapes.
On 29 October 1985, Gajic instructed Simons and Baffsky, a well-known Sydney law firm, to act on his behalf in the matter. Simons and Baffsky thereupon made a number of contacts with Mr Ian Robertson, the corporate solicitor for David Syme, the VCX organisation and another person, Harold Schekeloff. Harold Schekeloff is a person who, for some time, has attracted the attention of various crime intelligence bureaus in Australia regarding investments and other matters.
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