Stepping out of a restaurant onto the bustling streets of Ho Chi Minh City, as diners sit at street tables, the shooter pulls out a gun and fires on his targets from behind.

The alleged hit kills a senior member of a feared Australian drug cartel and injures another, yet more carnage in a gang war for control of the world’s most lucrative cocaine market.

Video of the shooting in Vietnam shows 24-year-old Lorenzo Lemalu, an operative with the Coconut Cartel, staggering on the footpath before he’s dragged into the restaurant, where attempts are made to save his life. His alleged associate lies seriously injured beside him on the blood-smeared tiles.

Within 72 hours of the May 21 shooting, Vietnamese authorities announce two Samoan men have been detained near the border with Cambodia, parading them on state television to deliver purported confessions. The men, both in their 20s, said the attack was directed by a person overseas, according to state media. CNN has attempted to contact their lawyers.

The shooting may have taken place on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City, but its impact was felt thousands of miles away in Sydney, Australia, where violence has surged in the past 18 months as gangs fight over control of the drugs trade.

Users pay several times more per gram for cocaine and meth in Australia and New Zealand than those in the US and Europe, according to law enforcement agencies.

Potential profits have encouraged traffickers to ship massive amounts of illicit drugs to both countries, often across the Pacific Ocean from South America via the Pacific Islands, a loose cluster of thousands of islands and atolls.

A prime point of sale is Sydney, in the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW), where police say offshore operators are hiring offenders – including teenagers – to carry out their dirty work.

“Organized crime in New South Wales is now completely global,” said NSW Police Assistant Commissioner Scott Cook in late May, as he warned offshore crime figures complicit in the violence that police would hunt them down.

Escalating violence

Sydney’s western suburbs are ground zero for a turf war that’s seen criminal gangs shoot up rivals’ homes, ignite cars and businesses, kidnap and kill associates and terrorize their families.

Lemalu’s Coconut Cartel initiated the tit-for-tat with the Alameddine crime family early last year, said Vince Hurley, a former NSW Police detective and now criminologist with Macquarie University, who described the cartel as “muscles for hire” who fell out with their past employers over payment.

The group’s name attempts to flip the narrative on a historic slur against Pacific Islanders, who hail from small nations including Fiji and Samoa.

“The name is a trophy that gets planted in the face of anyone who ever doubted them,” said Hurley. “Every act of recognition, fear, media coverage, rival acknowledgment is proof that the dismissal was wrong.”

Police say the violence on Sydney’s streets is being orchestrated from abroad – and teenagers are being lured into the complex web of gang warfare with the promise of fast cash.

On the eve of Lemalu’s funeral, video spread on social media of a gunman armed with a semi-automatic rifle, firing 30 rounds from the back of a car into the planned wake venue in western Sydney. No one was in the venue at the time, but police said they could have caused “multiple fatalities.”

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

“(It’s) extremely concerning, and it’s not just young men, it’s also young women,” NSW Police Detective Superintendent Jason Box said earlier this month.

“We’ve arrested 17-year-old, 18-year-old women recently, females who have been involved in conspiracies to murder, who have conducted surveillance on potential targets who were armed with weapons, so it is a large pool out there of young men and women that are willing to take on this serious crime.”

Police said typically the young offenders aren’t loyal to any particular crime network and often don’t know the identity of their intended victims.

“A lot more families need to be aware of what is occurring with their children,” Box said. “Are they coming into unexplained wealth? Are they leaving at all hours of the night? Are they walking around with five or six phones?”

The ocean trade

Australia and New Zealand are collectively the world’s most lucrative market for cocaine, thanks to the comparative ly high cost per gram on the streets and a seemingly insatiable appetite from consumers.

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

Traffickers primarily send shipments from the Americas, along a route known as the “Pacific drug highway,” using Pacific Islands like Fiji and the Solomon Islands as pitstops to the lucrative Oceania market.

“It’s like a balloon, you press one on one side and it goes on the other side,” said UNODC World Drug Report researcher Antoine Vella, explaining that savvy cocaine traffickers were increasingly seeing the potential in westward routes that attracted less attention than traditional paths to Europe.

“It would not be surprising if this picked up even more, and it’s also having an effect on the Pacific Island states, not just for cocaine, but also for other drugs,” he said.

So far this year, 17 tons of illicit drugs, mostly cocaine, have been seized in the Pacific region – more than three times the total across the whole of last year, according to the Australian Federal Police. Some has been found on ships or hidden in “narco-subs,” semi-submersible vessels that are harder for surveillance systems to detect.

One customs enforcement officer from the Oceania Customs Organisation said the seizures “prove criminal syndicates view our Blue Pacific as a billion-dollar transit route.”

There’s also evidence a lot is getting through. Wastewater samples from New Zealand showed “exceptionally high” levels of cocaine use in the last quarter of 2025 and “markedly elevated” levels of meth, according to NZ Police. At the same time, the price of meth has eased in NZ, indicating there’s no market shortage.

“The biggest problem for me out of all of this is not the drugs, which is terrible, but it’s the corruption that seeps into society,” said Alexander Gillepsie, professor of international law at the University of Waikato, New Zealand, pointing to bribes to customs agents or local police as helping to smooth the flow of drugs.

“There’s a degree of resilience against corruption in countries like Australia and New Zealand, but if you get into the Pacific, where you haven’t just got developing countries, you’ve got least developed countries, where you’ve got extreme poverty, the ability to do corruption or extreme violence to get what you need to achieve is much higher.”

The arrest of two Samoans over the alleged hit on Lemalu of the Coconut Cartel made headlines on the small South Pacific island, a developing country home to about 220,000 people. After the shooting, the island’s prime minister reportedly said local youth were being “used” by the drug trade.

Emma Tufuga, a criminologist from Curtin University in Perth, who hails 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 concerns me is that small Pacific nations can end up carrying the harm from the drug markets largely driven elsewhere,” said Tufuga. “Partnership needs to be really, really focused on prevention and protection, not just big nations policing Pacific waters.”

A record cocaine haul

Earlier this week, Australian federal and state police forces seized the country’s biggest ever cocaine haul – 2.7 metric tons – enough, police say, for three million street deals.

It was buried in plastic tubs buried beneath three shipping containers on a semi-rural property in western Sydney.

The trail that led to the record haul began in the state of Queensland, when local police officers responding to reports of a truck fire found 40 kilograms of cocaine floating in the sea near a boat ramp. The discovery led investigators south to Sydney, then more than a thousand miles across the sea to the Solomon Islands, where local law enforcement had been monitoring a Belize-flagged cargo ship called the MV Wealth.

Police there were already monitoring “suspicious movements” of the ship, and after receiving information from Australian officials, they intercepted it and its 19 crew, according to a government statement.

Australian Federal Police say they’re still investigating the ship’s route to the Solomon Islands, including whether it came via the Pacific Islands or followed a path further north.

Either way, police allege the shipment was ordered by a Sydney organized crime group – and ferried from the Queensland port to the southern Australian city for sale. Six people have been arrested.

AFP Commander Stephen Jay on Monday declined to say whether the record cocaine bust would disrupt or inflame the city’s gang-related warfare.

“Someone’s lost a lot of money, I think that’s fair to say,” said Jay. “There’ll be some soul searching, no doubt, about losing this significant quantity – Australia’s large quantity – of cocaine.”

Zaky Mallah, from Sydney Crime News (SCN) Worldstar, says predicting underworld violence “is never straightforward.”

“It’s a tit-for-tat situation,” he said via text. “For every arrest, two more shootings seem to follow.”

SCN Worldstar publishes updates from the Sydney’s drugs war on social media, often receiving videos direct of crimes committed on the city’s streets. Police say the offenders often film their crimes as proof they’ve performed a paid task – or to boast.

In the days after Lemalu’s death, NSW Police conducted early morning raids across Sydney, arresting nine people – and expressing confidence that they were getting on top of organized crime.

“We have been able to arrest not just the onshore principals and the onshore coordinators, but also many of the contract criminals and facilitators that are supporting this organized crime network in New South Wales,” NSW Police Assistant Commissioner Cook said in late May.

“For a long time, we’ve been playing catch up,” Cook told reporters. “For the first time, we think we’re on par.” (CNN)

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