Police will sift through phone taps and tracking devices to build their case against four men accused of running one of Victoria's biggest drug operations.
Daniel Peter Martin, 25, of Brunswick; Brok Seckold, 28, of Maribyrnong; Matthew Lowe, 22, of Hawthorn; and Kris Kaje, 36, of Ascot Vale faced the Melbourne Magistrates Court on Wednesday charged with a string of drug offences following their arrests on Tuesday.
All four men face charges relating to the possession and trafficking of methamphetamine and precursor chemicals.
Lowe and Seckold - who barricaded themselves in a Maribyrnong unit for four hours before their arrest - are also charged with owning two unregistered handguns and three unregistered long-arm firearms, as well as handling $162,000 cash suspected of being the proceeds of crime.
Prosecutor Cara Foot told Magistrate Gerard Lethbridge police would trawl through extensive records of telephone intercepts and listening and tracking devices as they prepared their case.
A seven-month police surveillance operation from July 2011 saw police track the men through three drug laboratories in Melbourne before raiding a lab in the beachside town of St Leonards on Tuesday, an earlier court hearing was told.
There they allegedly seized 15 kilograms of methamphetamine with an estimated street value of up to $15 million.
At the out-of-sessions court hearing on Tuesday night, Detective Senior Constable Warren Day described the drug operation as being 'as sophisticated and large as we've seen for 10 years'.
'We're getting up there in relation to Carl Williams and Tony Mokbel level of production,' Det Sen Constable Day told the hearing.
None of the accused men applied for bail on Wednesday.
All four were remanded in custody and will reappear in court for a committal mention on June 19.
