Also by Michael Duffy

Call Me Cruel—the many victims of Paul Wilkinson

FICTION

The Tower

The Simple Death

BAD

MICHAEL DUFFY

This book gives the true account of the events portrayed in the series Underbelly: Badness, but it is not the book of the series and has not been approved or endorsed by the producers or writers of Underbelly.

First published in 2012

Copyright © Michael Duffy 2012

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

Allen & Unwin

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Internal design by Bookhouse

Maps by Ian Faulkner

Non-aerial photographs of house and shed at Girvan © copyright the author. Photograph of Gary Jubelin © copyright Simon Alekna/Fairfax Syndication. All other photographs courtesy of the NSW Police Force. Crown copyright retained.

Set in 12.5/17 pt Bembo by Bookhouse, Sydney

Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

And the Lord said unto Satan,

Whence comest thou?

Then Satan answered the Lord, and said,

From going to and fro in the earth,

and from walking up and down in it.

CONTENTS

Maps

Author’s note

Prologue

Cops

1   Death of a cook

2   Redemption

3   The wire

4   Arrest of a ghost

5   Fear

6   Tuno 2

7   The man from Melbourne

8   Creeping barrage

Killers

9   Death of a cook II

10   Robberies, shootings etc.

11   The man from Melbourne II

Justice

12   The first trial

13   The second trial

14   The company of killers

Postscript

Appendix: the men and women of Tuno

Sources & thanks

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This is a book about badness but it is about darkness too. Badness—a term used by some police for evil and criminality—needs darkness in which to flourish. The central story here is of the biggest murder investigation in Australia and how it shone a light into that darkness. Terry Falconer died in November 2001 as a result of an elaborate scheme in which he was to be kidnapped and tortured before being killed and cut up. The murder was arranged by Anthony Perish, his brother Andrew, and Anthony’s driver, Matthew Lawton. Other men were involved in the plan to dispose of Falconer’s body, and in his kidnapping. They were all organised criminals experienced in acts of violence and they almost got away with it.

It is only because of the unusual complexity of the scheme, and the involvement of so many people, that Anthony Perish was caught and convicted. For almost two decades he was one of Australia’s most careful and successful major drug manufacturers, with such a reputation for violence that few criminals—even long-time informers—were prepared to talk about him to police.

Fear kept people quiet, but not all that many would have known about his operation anyway. Even though he referred to it as a ‘company’, its structure was quite loose. Rather than a mafia-style hierarchy of permanent employees, it was an informal network in which people would be engaged temporarily to do particular jobs, a bit like the contractor/sub-contractor arrangements that exist in many legitimate industries. People were told only enough to do their own job, and no more. This has been quite typical of organised crime in Australia, and has always made it difficult for investigators to discover its shape and scale. Only one individual—the man at the centre—knows everything that goes on, and he is never going to tell. The Falconer investigation was unusual in that it led police to contract killings, other shootings, and many other major crimes, and revealed a great deal about how organised crime operates in Australia today.

This story is told largely from the point of view of the detectives involved. It took ten long and hard years for Anthony Perish and his associates to be convicted, a decade that involved extraordinary persistence by a core group of police, assisted at times by dozens of others.

The investigation was known as Strike Force Tuno, and later Tuno 2, and I have done my best to name everyone who had any substantial involvement in an appendix at the end of the book. Their investigation is now ranked as the longest and—because of its difficulty and the scale of criminality it uncovered—one of the most remarkable in the history of Australian policing.

I thank all the officers who spoke with me, in particular Gary Jubelin, who was Tuno’s first OIC (officer in charge) and later its Investigation Supervisor. He generously agreed to provide a picture of his life that provides an insight into the challenges and rewards of a detective’s life. Society depends on the police to preserve its safety, yet few of us understand the price paid by the officers involved, and their families. I trust this book conveys a sense of that. Not all members of Tuno were prepared to talk about personal matters, but I hope what follows acknowledges their professional contribution. In particular Glen Browne, OIC for more than half of the investigation, played a major role.

For the best part of a decade, Gary Jubelin struggled not only with the criminals he was pursuing but with his own managers, who often wanted to shut down the investigation, or reduce its resources, because of the lack of progress. I have not referred to them by name but by the generic term ‘bosses’. This is because I have no idea what their motives were. In some cases, I’m sure, they were dedicated officers struggling with the same organisational issues as Jubelin, only further up the line. It would be unfair to imply they had more control over their decisions, or over the actions of the police force, than they really did. In retrospect, Jubelin and his team were right to persist with Tuno, but at times shutting it down could have seemed like a sensible option to reasonable people.

I also thank those police managers who permitted me to talk with officers on the record. The New South Wales Police Force was for a long time reluctant to permit this level of scrutiny, not least because it used to be systemically corrupt and often inefficient. The corruption finding came from the royal commission conducted by James Wood QC from 1994 to 1997. This corruption was not just a bad thing in itself, but it also diminished the effectiveness of much policing because customs that had arisen to protect the corrupt were also used to protect the incompetent and the lazy. Partly for that reason, some homicide investigations were not conducted as efficiently as they should have been.

These things need to be mentioned because they crop up in the following story, which has its origins in the early 1990s. However, after the royal commission the force went through a series of major reforms and was transformed. It is my observation, based on covering many trials as a journalist, that for a long time now homicide investigations in New South Wales have generally been conducted with a high degree of professionalism.

Although I’m grateful for the access I was given to the officers who worked on Tuno, this is not an authorised account and the police force is not responsible for anything I’ve written.

While writing this book I became aware for the first time of the extent of the effectiveness of the New South Wales Crime Commission, a sort of standing royal commission with the capacity to suspend the right to silence held by people interviewed by police or tried in courts. The commission can often obtain information that would otherwise never be revealed to law enforcement authorities, and pass it on to police. It backs up this power with considerable analytical capacity and extensive use of phone taps. The commission has a general policy of not talking to journalists or writers, but the leaders of Tuno told me its considerable contribution was essential to the success of the investigation.

The judge at the 2011 Terry Falconer murder trial placed a permanent non-publication order on the names of certain witnesses because police say their lives are still in danger as a result of the evidence they gave. These are the men known in this book as Tod Daley, David Taylor, Tony Martin, Brad Curtis and Jake Bennie. The name of the woman known here as Tracy Eastman has been changed at her request. This book is based on the same set of events as the television series Underbelly: Badness but is an entirely independent project. The differences between the two include the invented names used for the above people.

Like most organised crime outfits, Anthony Perish’s flourished because of the thriving market in illegal drugs. In what follows I’ve used the term methamphetamine rather than methylamphetamine, simply because it has one syllable fewer. The two words refer to the same thing, a more powerful version of ordinary amphetamine that has been popular since the 1990s.

The quotations at the start of each chapter are taken from the Bible. In true crime books it is easy to get distracted by the procedural and other details. But the importance of these stories lies in what they tell us about evil—about badness—and the Old Testament is a reminder of that.

PROLOGUE

But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.

It all began with a man and a woman and a big garden in the countryside beyond Sydney’s south-west fringe, people and a place of an innocence that was destroyed, as innocence tends to be. It was destroyed from the outside, as the city swept out to engulf them, but also from the inside, by their own strange son and the boys he reared. In 1993 the couple, then in their nineties, would be killed, in a crime that was both terrible and odd, and remains unsolved to this day. The investigation that is the main subject of this book has its roots in those deaths, and the belief Anthony and Andrew Perish came to hold that a man named Terry Falconer had killed their grandparents.

Anthony and Frances Perish were born in Croatia in the first years of the twentieth century, in the fishing village of Brijesta. Even as children they knew they loved each other, but the road to marriage was long and arduous. Lots of Croatians came to Australia in the 1920s, and they decided to be among them. They couldn’t both afford to come, so Anthony steamed off first. He had trouble finding work in Sydney and spent two years cutting timber down at Bombala, and another five in New Zealand, to save the money to establish their future. In Brijesta, Frances spent the years of her youthful beauty waiting for him. Eventually he could afford to bring her out, and they married in 1931.

Anthony wanted a farm, and they came to own thirty-two acres in a place called Leppington, a flat, rural area some 50 kilometres south-west of Sydney. They were the first non-Anglos in the area, and Anthony was determined to fit in: they would speak English and adopt Australian ways. When many Croatians followed them in the years to come, and a Croatian church was built, Frances and Anthony continued to be Sunday regulars at their local Catholic church, St Mary’s in Leppington.

The couple had three children, Albert, Elena and Jean. They made money from their land, first growing tomatoes and later rearing chickens, whose eggs they sold to the rapidly expanding metropolis to the north-east. They built a home at 116 Heath Road, which they later gave to Albert and his family. In 1966 they moved into a modest brick-and-tile bungalow just around the corner, at 15 Byron Road, and surrounded it with a garden that was not modest but bounteous, full of flowers and fruit and vegetables, all the produce and wonder of the earth. It included ponds full of goldfish and a long pergola covered in grape vines. When Anthony retired in the late 1960s, handing over the egg business to Albert, Frances and he devoted their time to the garden and to their family, filling people’s cars with fruit and vegetables whenever they visited, which was often. In 1974 the garden was awarded second prize in the Sydney Morning Herald’s annual competition, in the large gardens section. By that point it had won the Camden Council’s grand championship for homestead gardens five years in a row. With its conifers, flowering shrubs, roses and cactus, it symbolised much about the couple: hard work, connection to the land, and a certain simplicity. It was often opened to the public to raise money for the Red Cross and Camden Hospital.

Anthony and Frances became venerable figures for the many Croatians who emigrated to Australia after World War II, examples of what could be achieved here. Anthony would provide them with loans and advice, and he continued to be an advocate of assimilation. When the local community became preoccupied by the Croatian independence movement in the 1970s, illegally helping to train young men to go to Yugoslavia to fight, he refused to participate in or encourage this. It was not that he did not love Croatia, but he loved Australia more. The couple were never wealthy, but they had done very well and, as the city spread, their landholding increased in value and should have made a fine inheritance for their children and grandchildren.

But this was all brought undone by Albert. Born in 1933, he grew up to be an eccentric man who lived too much inside his head, and caused trouble for anyone unfortunate enough to be connected with him. At first he trained to be a priest, but then he met Thea, who wanted to be a nun, and they both changed their minds. They married in 1964, and had seven children. Albert was a harsh and remote figure who would yell and scream at his children and make them work for hours in the chicken sheds when they came home from school. Thea reacted by pretending everything was perfect. She withdrew into her own world and didn’t seem to notice or be concerned as some of the children went off the rails and engaged in dangerous behaviour, overlooking or excusing their actions.

Usually Albert was preoccupied with long-running disputes related to the egg business, or with a 2,300 acre block of timber country he’d purchased at Coolongolook near Bulahdelah on the mid-north coast—a restless man, he dreamed of building a mill there and making his fortune. He helped form a rebel group of egg farmers opposed to the government’s quota system, a struggle he was involved in, often publicly, for many years. In 1966 he stood as a candidate for the seat of Macarthur in the federal election. He represented the conservative and largely Catholic Democratic Labor Party, and did not win. His preoccupations meant he had little time for his growing children, including Anthony, born in 1969, and Andrew, born in 1971. Anthony developed a stutter in infancy and was never taken to a speech pathologist to correct it. He did poorly at school and left just before his fifteenth birthday, to start an apprenticeship in panel beating and spray painting. Beth, the oldest, died in 1983 in a car crash at the age of sixteen. The car had been driven by her boyfriend.

Andrew and Anthony clashed with Albert and spent a lot of time at their grandparents’ place, becoming close to Anthony senior. There were many guns in Leppington and the grandfather gave Anthony junior a (non-working) rifle because he liked the Daniel Boone character on television.

In 1988, Albert Perish told the Sydney Morning Herald he’d lost a great deal of income from siding with the rebels in the still-running egg war, which would have come as no surprise to his relatives. His quota to produce eggs had been greatly reduced, and he took the matter to the Supreme Court. He represented himself and lost. In the same year he helped blockade a friend’s farm when the Egg Board turned up to seize the man’s illegal hens, accompanied by his daughter Kathleen. Albert parked his car across the driveway and when police arrived and tried to remove it, Kathleen pulled out the spark plug cables and allegedly threw them away.

The boys became involved in criminal activities in their adolescence when there was plenty of that going on in the area. The population around the nearby centre of Campbelltown boomed in the 1970s and 1980s as Sydney’s inner city was gentrified, with lots of poor people being moved to new housing estates in the south-west. The government promised jobs would follow, but they never did. Over the next decades the area became a welfare sink. Changes were made much later—following the Macquarie Fields Riots of 2005, some of the public housing estates were pulled down and rebuilt—but for a long time the area was out of sight and mind for most of Sydney. The boom in fatherless families, plus long commutes for those men who stayed, saw many boys in the area grow up untamed. Anthony and Andrew Perish were among them, although their father was absent emotionally, not physically. They started with petty crimes such as car theft and, in Anthony’s case, car rebirthing.

When a boy graduated to serious badness in the south-west, he entered an alternative world, a sort of parallel suburban universe with its own society and economic basis. At the top sat the Rebels outlaw motorcycle gang; with some 2,000 members, it was the biggest bikie group in the country. Formed in 1969, its national headquarters was just up from the Perishes, in Bringelly Road, Leppington. The long-term president of the organisation is Alex Vella, a former boxer of Maltese extraction. Like most bikie groups, the Rebels have members who specialise in making and distributing illegal drugs, mainly ecstasy and methamphetamine.

The two oldest Perish brothers found places for themselves in this world. Andrew, who left home at seventeen and became a plumber, joined the Rebels in 1991 and would later become president of their Campbelltown chapter. Anthony never joined, but he associated with them and became a skilled cook of amphetamines, which he sold to the Rebels and other bikie gangs. In this way he came under their protection and gained a distribution network, but did not have to suffer the annoyance of walking around with club colours, a target for police, on his back. Anthony was always to be extremely effective at avoiding police attention, and it seems his thinking on this began at an early age. Until he was convicted of murder in 2011, his only adult conviction was for using offensive language in 1990.

The Perish brothers (when I use this term I am referring to Anthony and Andrew only, and not their younger brothers) and their criminal associates adopted their style from the surrounding society. They wore shorts and drove utes, and their approach to business reflected that of the many tradesmen in the burgeoning building industry of the area, where in the 1990s a new suburb seemed to be created each year. The business model for the building of thousands of new brick bungalows was not corporate, but based on contracting and sub-contracting arrangements made possible by the fact that Australia was a prosperous place where many young men could afford a house on a block of land, with a big ute and a shed in which to store the tools and materials of their trade. Supported by changes to the law that made it easier to be an independent contractor, this created a world in which the small businessman could flourish. Independence and flexibility were important qualities, which Anthony Perish possessed to an extreme degree. He’d never done well at school, but by the early nineties he’d worked out there was more money in drugs than in eggs, and was cooking in a shed on the family farm.

He didn’t just sell to the Rebels. On the evening of 5 August 1992, an associate met a woman in her car near McDonald’s in Bondi Junction. The woman had $92,500 and was keen to buy some drugs. The associate counted the money and told the woman to drive to Fairfield railway station, where two more accomplices got in the car. They then motored out to Leppington, onto a property that from the smell housed a lot of chickens. Anthony was waiting out front, next to his Holden ute. When they drove through the gate, he locked it and showed them a bag of speed. At that moment a car came roaring up the road outside and the woman declared herself to be an undercover police officer. Anthony took off into the night and would stay on the run for the next fourteen years.

It was a traumatic event for the Perish family, which despite its problems was still close-knit. But it was nothing like what happened less than a year later, when someone came to the home of Anthony and Frances Perish on a Monday evening in June and shot the old couple dead in their backyard. Anthony died from a .22 bullet in the front of his chest, while Frances was shot in the back, possibly while lying on the ground.

The day before, at 2 pm, Anthony called his son, Albert, who was then fifty-nine, and asked if he would come around, as there was something he wanted to talk about.

‘Is it important I see you now?’ asked Albert, who’d just got back from a trip out west to buy some grain. ‘I’m behind on the feeding.’

His father said it could wait.

Two days later, on 15 June, when his parents did not answer the phone, Albert drove around to their house with his wife, Thea. It was about 5.15 pm. There was no answer to his knocking, so he forced an entry and found his parents’ bodies. Anthony and Frances were not out back anymore. They had been moved into their bedroom and placed on the two single beds there, with a certain amount of respect. Each was wearing a cardigan. Anthony also had on a green flannelette shirt and blue King Gee trousers. Frances’ clothing included an apron now stained with blood. Each was face-up, their slippers arranged neatly beneath each bed, Frances with her dress pulled down modestly to her knees. It was as though the killer had cared, and yet he’d made a strange mistake for someone who cared—the bodies had been placed in the wrong beds.

There were bloodstains on the patio and some of the outdoor furniture behind the house. Inside was a mess, with trails of tissue and toilet paper throughout and mineral turps, methylated spirits and cooking oil splashed around. Some of the kitchen hotplates were on, and what looked like a crude timing device of candles taped together was lying on the floor. Although the autopsies showed neither of the old people had drunk alcohol recently, there were also five empty beer bottles in the house. It seemed the murderer had either socialised with the couple beforehand, or stayed around for a few drinks after the killings. A bloodstained jacket was found in the laundry.

After Albert found the bodies, many members of the family turned up. His daughter Colleen came with her boyfriend, David Taylor. Andrew arrived and ran up the drive, crying. Then there was a lawyer named Justin Birk Hill, who rolled up in his silver Mercedes 300E. Birk Hill had gone out with Colleen a few years earlier and remained a family friend. He had been a property developer in Queensland and, since 1982, a solicitor in New South Wales, running his own practice in Kogarah. He was an unusual lawyer, one who claimed to have been a founding member of the Mobshitters outlaw motorcycle gang, and did work, then and later, for the Black Uhlans, the Finks, the Rebels and the Nomads. He’d done some work for the Perishes, too, and had been advising the grandparents on their wills in the weeks before they died. This was not the first time clients of his had died violently: two years earlier, a man named Peter Wade and his girlfriend had been shot dead in a Surfers Paradise apartment Birk Hill owned.

Birk Hill refused to be formally interviewed by police, but did say Albert was an authoritarian figure who suppressed his wife and children. Police told a subsequent inquest, ‘It was [Birk] Hill’s opinion that Albert was of an unbalanced mind, very cunning and gives the appearance of a stupid oaf. He also has a violent temper and is susceptible to violent mood changes . . . [Birk] Hill stated that it was his opinion that the family was suspicious of Albert’s possible involvement in his parents’ deaths.’

He described the family as dysfunctional, and said Anthony (junior) hated his father but was close to his sister Colleen. Anthony and Birk Hill had become friends after Anthony approached him for legal advice at the age of fifteen. The two men would later go to restaurants and rugby league games together. Sometimes Anthony, Andrew and Colleen would stay at Birk Hill’s place on Grand Parade, Brighton-Le-Sands, the Riviera of southern Sydney criminals. It was a nice house with six bedrooms, six bathrooms, a pool and gymnasium, not far from the beach on the edge of Botany Bay. Anthony did not turn up at his grandparents’ house that evening as he was still on the run. Birk Hill told police he knew where his friend and client was hiding, but declined to reveal the location. He was aware that Albert was in serious financial trouble and had discussed this with his father, who had been upset by his son’s business failures and his constant requests for money.

For someone who did not want to give a statement about the family, Justin Birk Hill had a lot to say.

The detectives who ran the subsequent investigation came up with twenty persons of interest—a term that does not mean ‘suspect’ but does mean someone who cannot be ruled out as a possible perpetrator. In the end they focused a lot on the family, because many murders are committed by family members, and in this case there seemed no conceivable reason why a stranger would kill two old people and place them in their beds.

The problem was the detectives could find no reason any member of the family would have wanted to kill them. As a subsequent coronial inquest was told, much thought went into Albert and the hypothesis that he had killed his parents in anger because they would no longer help him financially, or for some sort of financial benefit, although it was never clear what this might be. Under his parents’ 1990 wills, Albert received the family company, which was heavily in debt, while his two sisters received their other assets, which comprised the Byron Road house, the seven acres it stood on, and $68,000 in the bank. To add to the confusion, there was some question as to whether Albert had known the terms of the will, and there was also the possibility there had been a later will that had been destroyed in a fire at a solicitor’s office.

The extended Perish family was quickly riven by suspicion, and at first most immediate family members refused to talk to police, which was odd. But over the next year some information came in. One member of the family told detectives that Albert, referring to his father, had once said, ‘That bastard has been holding me back for years stopping me from doing what I want to do . . . If it wasn’t for him I wouldn’t be in this mess.’ Another family member explained how badly Albert was in debt, and how he had been trying to set up a sawmill at Coolongolook, and had asked for a large loan. In fact Albert and the egg business were pretty well bankrupt, with debts of some $750,000. Albert was behind on the interest repayments on the mortgages he’d taken out on the land he owned, on which he was paying 18.5 per cent interest. He had sold seven acres of the Leppington farm a few years earlier, and had been trying to sell another seven, without success.

An alternative theory about the deaths of Anthony and Frances—promoted by Albert for a while—was that they had been killed by another member of the family in order to stop them giving Albert any more money and thereby whittling away their own inheritance. In July 1993 police placed listening devices in Albert’s house, but all they got was him talking about wild theories such as that one of his sisters had hired a hitman with the assistance of her solicitor. Then and in the coming years, he would flood the police with a variety of unhelpful notions about the deaths, one involving a Bermuda-registered company linked to organised crime. All these theories he set out at length on paper. He was obviously and irritatingly eccentric, but at the end of the day there was no evidence he was a killer.

The following year, Albert was evicted from his property in Heath Road when the mortgage was foreclosed and the place was put up for sale. He was allowed back in to collect his equipment, and was seen there the evening before the auction. At 4.30 am the next day, two buildings on the property were set alight by an unknown person.

The murder investigation dragged on for years, and police found nothing to enable them to identify the killer or killers. In 1995 a reward of $100,000 was offered for information, but to no effect. For those left behind, life went on. Justin Birk Hill’s girlfriend’s place was raided by police, who found lots of false identity papers and an encryptor used to scramble mobile phone calls. Birk Hill abandoned his legal practice and moved to South Australia, where he became national president of the Gypsy Jokers outlaw motorcycle gang. Anthony Perish joined him in Adelaide for a while. In June 1996 Birk Hill was convicted of conspiring to manufacture amphetamines and ecstasy—he arranged finance for a big factory in the Adelaide Hills—and jailed for a minimum of three and a half years. He was debarred from practising as a solicitor in New South Wales.

In the end, police could not find anyone to charge with the murders of Anthony and Frances Perish, so the matter was referred to the coroner to confirm that the investigation had exhausted all avenues and could be dropped. The inquest, under coroner Derek Hand, began in February 1997 but sat hardly at all. Hand was frustrated by the unusually long time police had taken to conclude their investigation—four years—and the lack of thoroughness. At that stage there was still confusion as to when the couple had been shot. Neighbours were no help: apparently gunfire was common in the area. One told the inquest: ‘If my dog goes on someone’s land . . . they have all full rights to shoot my dog.’ Police had not even thought to fingerprint items such as the switches on the stove or the handle of a pan of fat found on top. Hand decided the inquest was a waste of time, and on 12 June adjourned it and ordered a new investigation, involving senior officers not connected with the original inquiry.

Strike Force Seabrook was set up with eight officers and pursued the matter with some vigour. A letter requesting information was sent to 560 homes around the old Perish house, with senior officer Dave Laidlaw writing, ‘I believe the key to the solving of these murders lies within the Leppington community.’ But the Leppington community wasn’t saying anything. Nor were some members of the Perish family. When police knocked on the door of Colleen Perish and David Taylor in Arncliffe in 2001, she told them, ‘It’s been eight years, our memory is no good now,’ and slammed the door in their face.

The reinvestigation took four years, and the name of Terry Falconer cropped up, as it had during the first investigation. Falconer was a long-time criminal in his fifties, well known in the south-west. On 15 March 2001 an anonymous caller rang Burwood police station and claimed Falconer had committed the murders. Two days later, someone told police they’d heard Colleen Perish say Falconer had played some role in the murders, possibly by helping arrange them. On 9 July Andrew Perish told them Falconer had admitted his involvement to two individuals. The police were unable to confirm this with the individuals. When Andrew Perish, by that stage a senior Rebel, was told this, he expressed his great unhappiness with the police investigation’s lack of progress.

Terry Falconer was approaching the end of a jail sentence at the time and on daily work release. On 24 August 2001, Seabrook officers called on him at his place of work and took him to a police station where he was interviewed about the rumours. He denied all knowledge of the murders, and said he’d been at his property near Brewarrina when they occurred. In the next few weeks there was further contact between Falconer and police, some of it initiated by himself. Lots of people knew he was a person of interest, but there was no evidence to link him to the deaths. And then he disappeared.

COPS

Wisdom is the principal thing: therefore get wisdom:

and with all thy getting get understanding.

1

DEATH OF A COOK

Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.

The cops came for Terry Falconer again on Friday 16 November 2001, a fine and warm day, at Wreck-A-Mended Smash Repairs in Ingleburn. The busy workshop was situated in three factory units off Louise Avenue. Early in the afternoon, head spray painter George Kaillis was mixing paint when a blue Commodore stopped outside and two men in suits came in and asked for the boss. Told he was out, they asked where they could find Falconer. Kaillis knew Terry was a friend of the boss, and that he was on work release from Silverwater jail.

The men sure appeared to be cops. The Commodore looked like an unmarked police car and the driver was wearing a uniform shirt. One of the blokes in suits produced a badge and Falconer, a fifty-three-year-old man of medium build with brown hair and lots of tattoos beneath his work clothes, allowed himself to be searched. It seemed like a professional job and was certainly thorough: the cop put on latex gloves and even looked inside Falconer’s mouth. Then they cuffed him and took him out to their car, put him inside and drove off.

Alan Morcomb, who owned Wreck-A-Mended, was out buying some paint. When he got back at 3 pm and learned what had happened, he was concerned—his daughter Leonie had rung the prison and been told they knew nothing about the police visit—so he drove straight to Macquarie Fields police station to see what was going on. An officer there checked and said Falconer had not been taken to any police station. Eventually detectives drove over to Wreck-A-Mended to begin the investigation into what they now knew was a kidnapping.

In theory, Falconer’s abduction should have been known by Corrective Services the moment it happened. He’d been wearing an anklet the day he disappeared, a sort of leg bracelet that can be detected by a receiver, thereby recording the location of the person wearing it. Ideally there should have been a receiver attached to the landline at Wreck-A-Mended, sending a signal to Corrective Services indicating Falconer was at his place of work—and warning them if he left. But due to a shortage of equipment, there was no receiver at the workshop that day.

The police had no leads, and Macquarie Fields called in detectives from the Violence and Major Offenders (VMO) Unit based in Strawberry Hills in the inner city. They specialised in kidnappings, and this job was given the name Strike Force Tuno. (Like all investigation names, this one was randomly generated by a computer.) One of the detectives from VMO who arrived at Ingleburn was Luke Rankin. He recalls that staff at Wreck-A-Mended gave the detectives likenesses of the abductors using the COMFIT photo book in use at the time, but these composite pictures did not match any known criminals. No one at the workshop had noted the plate number of the Commodore, and neither the police nor Corrective Services had any intelligence suggesting who might have kidnapped Falconer. So the detectives did what they always do in this situation, and began to go back over the victim’s history, looking for people who might have a motive to do him harm. It’s what they’d done with the murders of Anthony and Frances Perish, without success. But with Terry Falconer they found no shortage of people with the necessary motive.

Falconer was born in 1948 and had a troubled childhood. Both parents were alcoholics, and his mother showed him little affection. He tried to commit suicide several times during his life, first when he was twenty, after which he was admitted to Parramatta Psychiatric Centre for a month. He became a miner and was working at the Appin Colliery south of Sydney in 1979 when there was a serious explosion that killed fourteen men, some of them close friends. In fact, he should have been working on that shift himself. He left mining and ended up driving tow trucks, in the days when the industry was corrupt and violent. Falconer was shot by rivals in 1980 and suffered serious injury, including brain damage. He trained as a panel beater, but later started making drugs.

In June 1996 he was arrested and charged with manufacturing methamphetamine and hashish on a property he and his wife, Elizabeth-Anne, known as Liz, owned near the inland town of Brewarrina. Falconer had been a big manufacturer of meth, with connections to the Gypsy Jokers, although he was not a member. His clients had also included some members of the Dubbo Rebels.

Falconer suffered from depression and had been using amphetamines and drinking heavily, and jail hit him hard. Soon after his arrest he was taken to Bourke Hospital with chest pains, and tried to hang himself. He was treated with anti-depressants, and took an overdose during his trial, requiring ventilatory support to recover. He was found guilty and sent to jail until 30 December 2001. He continued to be depressed, and tried to kill himself again in Bathurst jail in 1997.

Alan Morcomb, the owner of Wreck-A-Mended, had grown up with Falconer in Macquarie Fields and gone to school with him. ‘We was all hooligans in them days,’ he later recalled, ‘and we all done our thing, but we weren’t what you call violent.’ Later they remained friends, and worked in the mines together. He visited Falconer in jail, and sponsored him after he became eligible for work release.

Falconer worked at the repair shop six or seven days a week, starting at 7.30 am and leaving by five to get back to Silverwater jail by 7 pm. About five months before his abduction, he was allowed—as part of his gradual movement back into ordinary life—to stay at Morcomb’s home on Saturday nights, every second weekend. So as the time of his release approached, Falconer had a job and some personal support, although his marriage had broken down and he was in bitter disagreement with his wife about property.

As already noted, Falconer had emerged as a person of interest for Strike Force Seabrook, the investigation into the death of the Perish grandparents. In the days after his abduction, the Tuno detectives spoke with colleague Bryne Ruse, who was working on Seabrook. He told them how Andrew Perish believed Falconer had killed his grandparents. In the recorded interview Seabrook had then conducted with Falconer, he’d denied this and expressed fears that his wife, Liz, and daughter Linda were putting out rumours in order to get him. Falconer told Ruse, ‘I think they’re going to try to get me knocked . . . It’s a known fact.’ He said Liz had urged him to apply for a transfer to Long Bay jail, where ‘Neddy [Smith, a notorious killer] was going to knock me.’ As for Linda, ‘she’s got more murders than a bucketful of worms’. There was no evidence for any of these allegations, but clearly Falconer was scared about something.

Tuno soon came up with a list of Falconer’s enemies and a few theories. One was that Falconer might have arranged for the abduction himself and be on the way out west to harm his wife. Liz was warned, and moved out of the property at Brewarrina. But Falconer was not seen, there or anywhere else. Not alive, anyway.

•

Just after midnight on 26 November 2001, the phone rang in the Port Macquarie home of Douglas Breakwell, a volunteer in the State Emergency Services. Breakwell, a qualified boat driver, was asked to assist police by taking a punt out on the Hastings River at Wauchope, a town some fifteen kilometres west of Port Macquarie. Fishermen had found a bag and slit it open, discovering what looked like tattooed human flesh. The police wanted to recover it and some similar-looking bags before daylight.

The punt was on a trailer. Breakwell fetched it and a generator and some floodlights from the depot, and with colleagues launched the boat at Wauchope, where the river is tidal. The SES officers and three police motored up the river with the lights on, and presently located a blue plastic bag high on the bank near the high school. There was a strong smell of decomposing flesh. The parcel was about the size of a football and had been tied off with silver duct tape, with the bag being cut off above the tape. The whole thing was wrapped in chicken wire that also contained a river stone, and seemed to have been snagged on a branch by the receding tide.

The police filmed the scene and then manoeuvred the package into a yellow contamination bag. The process was repeated for another five bags found further up the river. Some were bigger than the first parcel. The third was the one the fishermen had found, and it had been further ripped open by the first police on the scene. Inside was a human torso, heavily tattooed with images including a pair of lips, sharks, and a female lying down with her hands behind her head and a towel around her midriff. For some reason, it was the lips Breakwell would remember.

At this point the Homicide Squad was called in, another of the specialist units based at Strawberry Hills. Homicide is widely regarded as elite police work, but it is not appealing to many officers because of its nature and the intensity and long hours often required, which can take the Sydney-based detectives away from home for weeks and even months. The squad tends to attract officers passionate about their work. It deals with most of the murder investigations around New South Wales and consists of a number of teams. Each is allocated one main investigation at a time, and also does on-call work every six weeks, when team members must be ready to go to any murder in the state at a moment’s notice, and handle the initial investigation. If the killer is not caught after a few days, the case is allocated to another team.

Detective Sergeant Paul Jacob was in charge of the on-call team when Falconer’s body was found. He is one of the state’s most experienced homicide investigators, and has worked on well-known cases such as the killing of Victor Chang and the so-called Granny Killer, John Glover. His long investigation of the 1995 death of model Caroline Byrne, found at the foot of The Gap, Sydney’s most frequented suicide spot, was to lead to the conviction of Gordon Wood, later quashed on appeal. He and a small team packed their bags and headed up to Port Macquarie, the main police station near Wauchope, and out to the river.

That morning the most urgent tasks were to establish crime scenes where the six parcels had been found, and to search the river to make sure there were no more. Jacob figured the last thing he wanted was for some other poor bastard to come across another package. It was soon apparent there was nothing to be gained from examining the locations—the parcels had floated to where they were found, and it was clear from their condition that they’d been in the water a while. The search up and down the river found no more packages.

While this was happening, Jacob and his small team interviewed the fishermen again, and ensured the parcels were on their way to the morgue at Newcastle. A system of record management was instigated so their locations and contents could be tracked.

The Tuno detectives heard about the discovery when they got to work at 8 am, and Luke Rankin remembers phone calls back and forth as the Port Macquarie police opened the parcels and passed on details of the tattoos they found on the body. Tuno was able to confirm these were Falconer’s—they had descriptions of some of his tatts in their records. On the left arm, for example, was the name of his wife, Elizabeth. They were told the parcels had been meticulously sealed with duct tape, which is possibly why the packages were found so soon—the gases produced by the decomposing flesh could not escape, so the six bags had perhaps floated to the surface. (There were actually seven bags in all, although the last one did not emerge from the depths until twelve months later.)

The disposal method was odd, and struck the detectives as both elaborate and careless. It seemed to have been done by one or more people who were not squeamish and had a lot of time and determination. The fact they knew little of the chemistry of the decomposition of human flesh was not surprising, but expecting that parcels wrapped in chicken wire would not be disturbed in a river that sees a lot of fishermen seemed strange.

On 28 November Dr Kevin Lee, a forensic pathologist at the Department of Forensic Medicine at John Hunter Hospital in Newcastle, conducted the first of two autopsies. The bags were X-rayed to ascertain their contents. Bag one, for example, contained two forearms, an upper arm, and both feet. Then the contents of the bags were laid out on a steel table and reconstructed, like a gruesome jigsaw puzzle. The whole body was there, except for all the upper teeth but one, the lower jaw, the stomach organs and a large piece of skin from the front of the stomach. There were signs of pre-death blows to the face, and some sort of burning or chemical stinging under one arm. There were shotgun pellets in the face, chest and one arm, but the skin had grown over them, indicating they were old: presumably they dated from Falconer’s days in the tow truck wars. The body had been cut up with a handsaw. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to remove the teeth, presumably to avoid identification although this was strange given that Falconer’s tattoos were so distinctive.

On 2 December Strike Force Tuno became a murder investigation. It was to be run by the Homicide Squad, and a number of the VMO detectives were allocated to the team. This is quite typical: murder teams can draw in officers from different areas with relevant skills and backgrounds. The OIC of the investigation was a thirty-nine-year-old detective named Gary Jubelin, a tough and lean cop of unusual intensity and with a devotion to physical exercise. He was regarded as a hard man to work for or with, because of his relentless dedication to the job and the long hours he put in.

Jubelin was a detective sergeant who’d just completed another investigation when he heard about Falconer’s abduction, and then the discovery of his body in the river. He regarded the kidnappers having posed as cops as provocative, almost as though they were taunting the police. Jubelin had two senior constables on his team, Jason Evers and Nigel Warren, and asked them how they felt about requesting the Falconer investigation, which would take them away from home for a while.

The others were keen. Warren was interested in the possibility that it might have something to do with organised crime—Falconer’s background, and the elaborate abduction, suggested that. Warren had been in homicide since joining the squad in 1998 to work on Kerry Whelan’s disappearance, and regarded it as the pinnacle of detective work, in part because of the variety of circumstances encountered. Most murders were domestic, or personal, but the Falconer case looked different.

Jubelin asked homicide commander Nick Kaldos for the job and got it, and the team headed up to Port Macquarie. After a one-day handover with Paul Jacob, Jubelin found himself in charge of an investigation that was to occupy a lot of the next decade of his life.

Nigel Warren was the quieter member of the team. In the words of the ebullient Evers, ‘Nigel had a more subtle kind of personality. Gary and I tended to get in people’s faces a bit.’ Warren managed the exhibits and kept track of the six parcels as their contents were tested. He actually didn’t find autopsies unpleasant. He’d been apprehensive at his first one, but when the surgeon made the initial incision he found his mind switched to clinical mode, and he was fascinated by how the body worked, and how much a doctor could sometimes learn from it about the circumstances of a murder. The smell was always a kick in the guts at first, but you learned to switch that off. He figured it was important not to lose your compassion for the victim, but if you couldn’t control your emotions, you wouldn’t be much use as a detective.

As with the earlier kidnapping investigation, there was very little evidence. The parcels had probably been thrown off Bain Bridge west of Wauchope and drifted some way downriver. There were no eyewitnesses to the dumping, and no forensic evidence of any use: Tuno discovered the plastic bags, chicken wire and tape used were commonly available around the state, and the river stones in the parcels came, according to a geologist, ‘from eastern Australia’. So they turned their attention to Falconer’s life. ‘He was a big manufacturer,’ Jason Evers recalls. ‘He used to bring ute loads of meth from Brewarinna. He made lots of money. At one stage the Crime Commission took a house and a boat off him [as proceeds of crime].’

The most extraordinary aspect of the case, apart from the way he’d been abducted and killed, was the number of suspects. At the start they had over seventy persons of interest, and all had to be investigated to see if they met the three key criteria required to commit a crime: motive, opportunity and capability. This should have been a narrowing-down process, but Falconer, because of enemies he’d made in his career and the fact he’d recently been talking to the police, had been disliked by so many violent criminals that by the end of this process—which took months—most of the seventy remained as possibilities.

The team was expanded to some thirty detectives and analysts in its early months, located in the training room at Port Macquarie police station. They spent much of their time using phones and staring at computers, to the disgust of some of the more traditional police at the station, who wondered why they weren’t out busting down people’s doors. One reason they didn’t do this was that there turned out to be few local suspects. Initially the detectives wondered if the way the body had been disposed of suggested a local connection. Obviously the intention had been that it never be found, which might mean the perpetrators had not taken pains to dispose of it far from where they lived. But Port Macquarie is better known for its retirees and holiday-makers than its violent criminals.

Another reason the police spent so much time at their computers was because the team knew from experience that information management, undramatic as it is, would be crucial for a complex and possibly long investigation of the sort this looked like being. You never knew if a piece of information gathered now might become vital in a year’s time, even crucial when exposed to fierce analysis in the Supreme Court one day. So every piece of data had to be logged onto the investigation database, called eaglei, and put in the correct category and linked to other pieces of information where possible connections existed. Someone had to ensure that it was read by the right people and, if necessary, acted upon. As the database grew—and in the first months it grew exponentially—the categories had to be revised and refined, and the connections reviewed and redrawn. Once Nigel Warren had established records for all the exhibits—he created a big paper chart for every parcel—he helped control the flood of information produced by all the other detectives.

As it became clear that Falconer’s enemies were mainly in Sydney, after a few months Tuno relocated to the Homicide Squad headquarters in the city. It lost most of its members, as usually happens when a case is not solved soon. The general principle with murder is that the longer a case goes unsolved, the smaller the chance it ever will be, which means resources get switched to newer cases where they’re likely to do more good. This is why in the coming years Tuno would have to fight not just for resources but, at times, for its survival.

The smaller strike force comprised Jubelin’s original team plus Glen Browne and Luke Rankin from VMO. They’d kept Browne because he was good—Evers had worked with him before—and because of his extensive knowledge of south-west Sydney, where he’d spent most of his career. Rankin, although he was younger than the others, had a spark and a good analytical mind.

Like all investigations, this one threw up a lot of work that led nowhere, but some of it had potential. Terry Falconer’s son James had received a phone call saying, ‘Your cunt of a father is in the ground and you’re next.’ This was traced back to a prison phone, linked to inmate Rob Institoris, husband of Terry’s daughter Linda. She, like her mother, Liz, had been in bitter conflict with Terry. The police learned that Liz had feared for her safety once Terry got out of jail, and had been keen to turn the criminal world against him, telling people he was a police informer.

Now Jubelin and Evers spoke with her often. To do this they drove out to Dubbo on a number of occasions, timing the trip for Sunday afternoon so they could listen to the football in the car. Evers was as deeply committed to the case as Jubelin. His theory was that you had to ‘find the passion’ in an investigation, the element that made you want to try that extra bit harder. Often it was the innocence and vulnerability of the victim. In this case—Terry Falconer had been no innocent, although he hadn’t deserved to die—it was the fact that the crime had obviously involved at least three brazen criminals (the abductors), and possibly more: locking them up would be doing the world a favour.

In the end they got nowhere much with Liz Falconer: they played the role of concerned detectives dealing with a grieving widow, but always suspected she knew more than she was saying. She did show them a document she’d found in her husband’s papers. It was a ‘running sheet’, a sort of formal note, prepared by police who’d interviewed him when he was arrested for manufacturing meth. They noted that he’d refused to tell them anything about other criminals but had said he might do so later, depending on how things went for him. In particular, he said he might be prepared to give them information about the Dubbo Rebels and drug dealing. It was a fairly standard comment by an experienced crook in his situation, hoping to persuade the police to go a little easier on him now in the faint hope of future information. The document had become part of the Crown’s brief of evidence for Falconer’s prosecution and was given to his lawyer, which is how Falconer came to have a copy among his papers. After Liz found it, and the conflict over property began, she used it to support her claim that he was an informer, and showed it to a number of people.

The detectives had already identified several main groups of suspects. One consisted of the people of interest from the killing of Anthony and Frances Perish back in 1993. As we have seen, there was a current reinvestigation of those murders, Strike Force Seabrook, and Falconer had been spoken to by its detectives not long before his death. Maybe he’d been killed because he’d murdered the old couple—or because others had done it, and they suspected he was about to give evidence against them at a forthcoming coronial inquest. These were only theories—at the moment, all Tuno had were dozens of such possibilities, hypotheses and hunches that needed to be worked through and tested.

The next and biggest group of suspects consisted of criminals who might have feared Falconer was informing against them, either because of what Liz Falconer was telling people or because they’d somehow discovered that Falconer, as Tuno learned, had indeed been talking not just to the police but also to other law inforcement agencies. Another category of suspects comprised other criminals who Falconer might have upset during his career as a drug manufacturer and dealer. It was quite possible he’d committed acts of violence to protect his operation, and had made some serious enemies. Altogether, it was a rich assortment of possibilities.

Tuno was hampered right from the start by the reluctance of criminal informants, so essential to solving many crimes, to come forward. That Falconer had possibly been killed because he was an informant himself had sent out a clear message to even the slowest crook. This shutdown of traditional sources of information was to hamper Tuno for years.

Even the New South Wales Crime Commission was unable to break through this silence. It was working on some bikie killings at the time, and one of the people it had talked with was Terry Falconer. In 2001 and 2002 it assisted Tuno on the investigation into his murder, and tapped a number of phones and held hearings of people including Liz and James Falconer, and Rob Institoris. But despite its special powers and deep knowledge, the commission was unable to indentify Falconer’s killers.

One thing on Jubelin’s mind from when he first heard about the murder was that it would have been much easier just to shoot Falconer dead. The fact he’d been abducted could suggest a desire to extract information from him, and this guided Tuno’s thinking as the detectives pondered the long list of persons of interest. There was a strong possibility Terry Falconer had possessed information someone else wanted to know. But what?

In the first half of 2002, little progress was made even though an enormous amount of work was done. The packages in which Falconer’s body had been found were examined minutely. Every piece of tape and wire and plastic and flesh, every hair found in the parcels, was pored over by experts in the government analytical laboratories at Lidcombe, a job that was to take years and—unfortunately—yield absolutely nothing of significance. In April 2002 someone found Falconer’s anklet on a vacant block of land at Ingleburn, cut through and wrapped in an old singlet. This too told them nothing.

Jubelin’s bosses in homicide began to wonder about keeping Tuno going. Unfortunately for the investigation, Crime Agencies, the Homicide Squad’s umbrella group in the New South Wales Police Force, was undergoing a budget crisis, and resources dried up. For a period in 2002 there was limited overtime and it was difficult for officers to travel out of Sydney. Tuno didn’t even have its own permanent office, and was first placed in an office of analysts who spent their days looking at computers. The noisy homicide detectives were not a welcome addition and were soon asked to move on.

The investigators talked to most of the seventy persons of interest and dozens of others they thought might know something. After a few months they had spoken with a majority of the state’s toughest criminals. They went in hard, telling the crooks this was a personal one: ‘They’ve dressed up as police, so now people are pointing their fingers at us. They think they can fucking get away with that and make us look bad, especially after the Royal Commission? We are going to come after them hard.’ Jubelin wanted the word to get around that he and his team were determined to solve the crime no matter what.

Often when several people are involved in a serious offence and realise it is being pursued by police with especial vigour, one will get nervous and roll over to avoid jail. Or one will talk to a criminal associate not involved in the crime, who will give the information to police to gain some advantage such as avoiding prosecution for his own criminal activity. The investigators thought one of these outcomes might occur here, because the kidnapping had been so well planned and complex that more people than just the three kidnappers might have been aware of it. They were trying to increase the chance of this happening by keeping the pressure on. But the months rolled on and no one was offering anything.

Jubelin and some of the team went out to Lightning Ridge to talk to a man who’d cooked with Falconer. They didn’t have much luck—they’d pull up in an unmarked car at a mine where he was supposed to be working, and all the blokes hanging round would disappear into the mine shaft like rabbits down a hole. On one occasion Jubelin looked at the desolate surrounding countryside and then into the black hole at his feet. I’m not going down there, he thought. Later they went to a bar, just a corrugated iron shed in the bush, and everyone else there fell silent and just watched until they’d had their drinks and left.

The investigation continued to struggle for information. Jubelin had not given up, but after eight months he still had no idea who had killed Terry Falconer. He was facing the prospect of failure, and this upset him.

•

Gary Jubelin was born in 1962 in Sydney’s north-west, and went to the local public high school. His adolescence was rocky, and there were times when he broke the law. He got into fights at school and on the sports field because, although tough and not one to back down, he was a quiet person and sometimes people mistook this for weakness. It was a mistake because, after being pushed for a while, he would react strongly. To some degree this continued once he grew up, and even today he confuses some people, which can be a problem but also an advantage.

Jubelin was friends with an Aboriginal boy named Anthony who’d been adopted by the white family next door. Anthony had a troubled childhood, often being sent back to the orphanage when he was disobedient. One day, at the age of about fourteen, he turned up at Jubelin’s house to say he’d just had a fight with his foster mother and was going on the run. Did Gary want to come? Jubelin declined the offer.

After leaving school he became an electrician, working mainly on building sites. It wasn’t what he wanted to do, but he had no idea what that might be until the day he climbed out of a hot roof one lunchtime and saw some cops chasing a bloke through the streets of Ryde. That looked like a better job than the one he was doing, and the next day he applied to join the force.

Six months later he was a policeman at the age of twenty-three, working at Hornsby in Sydney’s north, and soon knew it was what he wanted: it matched his personality. Like many cops he has a strong feeling for justice, an understated but confident manner, and considerable tenacity. He enjoyed the ordinary uniform work and also the more exciting action as a part-time member of the Tactical Response Group, a job where the physicality attracted him. After a year of this he was tapped on the shoulder and invited to join plain clothes, the training ground for criminal investigation. He jumped at the chance: he had found himself envying the detectives who would turn up to every serious crime the uniforms discovered and take it over just when it got interesting. The following year he married Deborah, whom he’d known since childhood.

After a few years in plain clothes, Jubelin was promoted to detective and assisted in his first murder investigation. He found it totally fascinating, and decided that one day he would join the homicide detectives. He didn’t share his ambition with any of his colleagues: it would have seemed out of place in one so young. The attraction of homicide, for him as for many others in the job, was not moral; it had little to do with the nature of the crime, except that murder was the worst crime and investigating it was the height of police work. Jubelin was an ambitious man, not in a career sense but in the sense of wanting to push himself to the limits of whatever he was doing. He wanted to play A grade.

But there was still a long way to go. In his late twenties, he was invited to join the Armed Hold Up Squad at Chatswood. The squad’s members were seen as being tough—they were the cops who got things done by confronting criminals head-on. Their reputation was also linked, rightly or wrongly, to the exploits of corrupt cops such as Roger Rogerson, and accusations of bashing and loading crooks were not uncommon. When Jubelin arrived he was told, ‘We work hard and we play hard,’ and this was certainly true. He realised it would be a tricky learning curve, but knew he had to get major crime experience before he would be considered for homicide work.

Deborah and he now had their first child, Jarvis, and Jubelin continued to be heavily involved in sport. As drinking was a big part of the Armed Hold Up Squad culture, a good work/life balance was difficult to maintain, especially as he had to get home to Dural every night. After little more than a year he realised things weren’t working out and decided to move back to Hornsby detectives, in 1992, a hard decision because major crime was his passion and he thought he might be burning his bridges. He also enjoyed the camaraderie of working with hard men doing a tough job. There were some flawed characters in the squad, but there were also people he had great respect for, yet he figured the squad was not only bad for him but that its best days were over, and so it was to prove: when the Police Integrity Commission struck a few years later, some of Chatswood’s colourful detectives were out of the job.

Jubelin did his best to make a go of it back at Hornsby, but after a year he was frustrated and returned to Chatswood, although not the Armed Hold Up Squad. This time he joined the Organised Crime section. It was a busy life: in his spare time he coached a soccer team and was heavily involved in kickboxing and martial arts. On top of that he was finishing a degree in policing. One night while waiting to catch a gang of professional thieves in a darkened unit block, he hid in a kitchen cupboard and completed an overdue assignment by torchlight.

Soon he did his first murder investigation as a major crime detective and it was a terrible case. Eileen Cantley, who was eighty years old, was sexually assaulted and killed near Hornsby. Homicide was too busy to take it and Jubelin was put on the job along with Jim Williams from Hornsby, an old workmate and mentor. They caught the killer, who turned out to be a serial predator, a couple of months later.

After this Jubelin applied for a homicide posting and in 1995 got a job with the Chatswood squad, working under some of the state’s finest investigators, including Paul Mayger and Paul Jacob. Another was Andrew Waterman, who was struck by Jubelin’s extreme determination, which was unusual even by the standards of homicide. He would later conclude, after observing Jubelin for two decades, that he was the most competitive and focused detective he’d ever come across. Not all the challenges of homicide can be met by simple determination, though. The work requires persistence because many investigations take a long time; it requires attention to detail because every case ends in a court of some kind, the Supreme Court or the coroner’s, being scrutinised by experts; it involves constant contact with grieving families, which many police find hard; and it tends to be more complicated than much other police work, with multiple lines of inquiry and persons of interest. There is also the need to be able to put yourself in the shoes of the defence, especially when compiling a brief.

There are two main parts of a detective’s job: first, solving the crime and, then, preparing the brief of evidence to go to the lawyers at the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, who will take the case to court. The strength of the brief determines whether the accused persons will be prosecuted, and can strongly influence whether they plead guilty and whether they’re convicted if the matter goes to trial. So a strong brief is a thing of great importance, but it is something the public almost never sees. Jubelin began to learn how to prepare a case for court, how to look at it from the outside and spot its weaknesses. This flowed back into his investigative work and he acquired, as all good detectives must, the ability to be objective as well as passionate.

Another murder he worked on involved the disappearance of Martin Davidson, a paedophile who ran an indoor slot car track at Hornsby. He had been reported missing by one Bruce Matthews, who ten years earlier had reported his wife, Bernadette, missing. This seemed like too much of a coincidence, and to make things worse, when Jubelin reviewed the investigation into Bernadette’s disappearance he found serious flaws. Matthews hadn’t even been interviewed at the time.

He interviewed Matthews about his wife and told him they weren’t going to let the matter drop. Matthews went on the run. The detectives tracked him to Queensland and flew up and brought him back. He was in Parramatta jail and Jubelin drove out to talk to him one day, to try to get a confession to the murders of Bernadette and Davidson. Matthews knew he was coming. While Jubelin was still in his car he received a call from Waterman to say the interview would not be proceeding: Matthews had hanged himself in his cell.

Around this time Jubelin qualified as a member of the State Protection Support Unit. Officers attached to this unit usually worked elsewhere, but when necessary were called out to provide support for the State Protection Group, the police section that deals with armed, dangerous offenders and high-risk situations. The pressure of work—and his busy life—began to take a toll on him and his marriage. Deborah was pregnant again. Despite having achieved his dream of working in homicide, in 1997 he put in a request to return yet again to Hornsby, with its more predictable work hours and shorter travel time to Dural.

His request was knocked back, and a month later he was given a job that was to see him away from home for much of the next eighteen months. He was offered a place on Strike Force Ancud, which was being set up to reinvestigate the deaths of three Aboriginal children at Bowraville, west of Nambucca Heads on the north coast. It was one of Australia’s greatest unsolved murder cases.

In September 1990, sixteen-year-old Colleen Walker had gone missing, followed in October by four-year-old Evelyn Greenup and in February 1991 by Clinton Speedy, also sixteen. The bodies of Greenup and Speedy were found dumped in bushland, each killed by a blow to the head. Walker’s body has never been found, although her discarded clothes turned up in a local river.

Despite the fact there was only ever one suspect, a local white man seen near each of the children shortly before they disappeared, there were problems with the original investigation, and when Jay Hart was tried for the murder of Clinton Speedy in 1994, he was found not guilty. His trial for the murder of Evelyn Greenup was then no-billed, meaning the attorney-general withdrew the prosecution.

The families of the victims were deeply unhappy with these outcomes, and it was widely said that if the children had been white, their murderer would have been in prison long ago. Following a small riot, Police Commissioner Peter Ryan went to a public meeting at Bowraville and decided to hold a second investigation. It was a tough assignment, and reviewing other detectives’ work is not something all cops are keen to do, but Jubelin didn’t regard it as a punishment. He’d got the job by chance—Bowraville was part of the north region where he worked, and the other homicide detectives were tied up on other jobs. Waterman, for instance, was involved in the investigation into the disappearance of seven backpackers, which would ultimately see Ivan Milat convicted of murder.

Jubelin’s second child, his daughter Mia, was born during the many months he was away at Bowraville. The distant job pushed Deborah and him apart as he lost himself in the task of re-interviewing the large number of witnesses and uncovering new information about the three murders. It was there he met Jason Evers, who also worked on the reinvestigation, and began a friendship that continues to this day. The two worked well together, Evers admiring Jubelin’s relentlessness and contributing his own humour and tact to put out the spot fires the sometimes angry Jubelin created.

Finally, in May 1998, Strike Force Ancud submitted a brief of evidence to the Director of Public Prosecutions suggesting Jay Hart be charged again, this time in connection with the disappearance of Colleen Walker. Jubelin was told he’d done a good job and could pick his next assignment. One Saturday morning, while coaching his son’s soccer team, he was rung by Rod Lynch, the senior officer who allocated work. Lynch said that although he’d promised Jubelin would not have to do another reinvestigation in a hurry, one had cropped up that was so interesting he might want to be involved. This was the death of Caroline Byrne. The initial investigation had been cursory and concluded the death was suicide, but Byrne’s father, Tony, had been claiming publicly for years that his daughter had been murdered. Paul Jacob was running the reinvestigation, and Jubelin joined and ended up being one of the team that flew to London and interviewed suspect Gordon Wood for five hours.

Around 1999 Jubelin’s marriage ended and he moved out of the family home. It would be too simplistic to blame his job for the breakdown, something he did not think would happen and for which he continues to feel shame. He is uncomfortable discussing it except to acknowledge he was the one who changed during the relationship. Deborah and he grew apart before he even realised.

In order to deal with the pain of the separation, he threw himself even more intensely into work, trying to shut out his emotions by focusing only on what was in front of him. He also put considerable effort into trying to be around for his children as they grew up, moving into a place close to the family home and attending school functions, sometimes while juggling the pressures of work. Many times the children would find themselves heading to a murder scene as Jubelin made phone calls to find a family member who could look after them.

Meanwhile, there was bad news on the Bowraville front: the Director of Public Prosecutions announced he did not think the evidence was strong enough for Jay Hart to be charged as a result of Strike Force Ancud’s work. The matter would now go to the coroner. Jubelin and Jason Evers were bitterly disappointed.

In September 2000 there was a need for extra police to provide security for foreign dignitaries attending the Sydney Olympics, so Jubelin did the training needed to qualify in Close Personal Protection, building on his experience in the State Protection Support Unit. He figured it would be a good way to see lots of sport, and he was not disappointed: his assignments during the games ranged from protecting Prime Minister John Howard to looking after the president of Bulgaria. The latter job was cut short when a Bulgarian weightlifter who’d just won a gold medal tested positive for drugs, and the president and his entourage left Sydney on the next plane out.

Towards the end of 2000 Jubelin was promoted to sergeant. It was late coming—he’d always assumed promotion would follow good work, but now realised he had to learn certain buzz words and expressions to present at interviews in order to be considered for more senior positions. It was a lesson he would need to come back to later in his career.

By now he was working in Surry Hills—all the city’s homicide squads had been centralised as part of the reforms that flowed from the Royal Commission. Around this time, he began a relationship with a colleague, Pamela Young. She was a detective sergeant, one of the few women in homicide, and had come from the North West Homicide Squad, based at Parramatta. They got to know each other when they were chosen to give lectures about homicide investigation at the police academy at Goulburn, and worked on various on-call jobs together and on a strike force set up to investigate a serial rapist, which was part of homicide’s charter at the time.

Jubelin was attracted to her and impressed with the way she conducted herself professionally and personally. She taught him how to take a step back from things. Until then his practice had been to crash through something head-on, but he saw how she would take a more logical approach and invariably get the same result, with less collateral damage. There were certain costs in being a woman in a man’s environment—as Jubelin got to know Young better, he found the compassionate and caring side to her, which would have been seen as weakness and had to be concealed when competing with the men.

For her part, Young says she came to admire Jubelin for the effort and energy he put into his work. She also liked the affection he had for his children and the time he devoted to them when he could. After a while, she and Jubelin started to live together, and she saw that his energy did not stop outside work, but was channelled into formidable daily routines of exercise and training. He found it almost impossible to relax. ‘I dragged him to the theatre a few times but that didn’t work,’ she recalls. She says it was a rich and intense relationship, but sometimes the going was hard.

When the Olympics were over, Jubelin did his first job as sergeant, leading his own team. It marked an important step up, from working under experienced men such as Jacob and Waterman to standing alone. His senior constables were Jason Evers, who had joined him on the Caroline Byrne investigation after Bowraville, and Nigel Warren.

Their first investigation was into the murder of Barbara Saunders, a housewife from sleepy Normanhurst, near Hornsby, who was shot while walking home from the railway station in December 2000. For the first time Jubelin found himself fronting the media on an almost daily basis—a job normally grabbed by more senior officers, but due to the season most were away on holiday. He was struck by how distracting the media pressure could be, but it was valuable experience. After a few months they caught Saunders’ killer, a young local man named Nicholas Grayson who’d shot her while trying to steal her money.

In May 2001, the team investigated the murder of Jayden Marsh, an eighteen-month-old Aboriginal child killed by his foster carer, Linda Wilson. The child had been beaten to death. The killing had occurred in Sutherland—following centralisation, Jubelin was working all over Sydney, spending hours each day commuting. By now he regarded homicide as a sort of vocation, and resented colleagues not prepared to bleed for the job, which mainly meant working long hours and weekends. It is not hard to see why so many good detectives are divorced.

After charging Linda Wilson, who was later found guilty of manslaughter, Jubelin and his team moved on to Strike Force Tuno.

2

REDEMPTION

When the wicked man turneth away from his wickedness that he hath committed, and doeth that which is lawful and right, he shall save his soul alive.

Tuno’s first break came in August 2002. It occurred during a house call to talk to one of the hundreds of people whose names had come up in the course of the investigation as having a link—usually tenuous—to someone who might or might not have murdered Terry Falconer. It was dispiriting work but, nine and a half months after Falconer’s death, the detectives still had no productive leads. That afternoon the man to be interviewed was a Rebel named Tod Daley. On 29 August, Glen Browne and Luke Rankin knocked on his door at Minchinbury in western Sydney. They had no great expectations of the interview, and half expected him to tell them to get fucked. It was what bikies often did.

There was a locked security screen providing largely one-way vision from the inside. When the door behind it opened, they could just make out a large figure looming on the other side.

‘What do you want?’ asked the man.

Once they’d confirmed his identity, they said, ‘We’re from homicide. We want to speak to you about the Falconer murder.’

‘Where are you from?’

‘Homicide. We—’

‘I know who’s done it, and why they’ve done it,’ Daley said. ‘I’ll meet you later.’ He arranged to see them at another address.

As they waited for the evening meeting, the detectives wondered if this might be a joke, or the break they’d been looking for. There was no point getting too excited—police work is full of disappointment—but men can dream. Daley was in his thirties, a tough and long-time bikie, but he’d had his problems. While serving time for manslaughter, he’d been savagely assaulted. He’d also been summonsed to hearings at the Crime Commission on two occasions, in 1996 and 1997, and some of his criminal associates thought he was an informer.

Browne and Rankin met him in a granny flat out back of another house at 8 pm. It was a small place full of junk, and the detectives cleared some space so they could sit down. Daley had not been joking that afternoon, and proceeded to tell them an amazing story. He said he’d been approached by two men the previous October and asked to help them get rid of the body of a man they were going to torture and kill. The men were Anthony and Andrew Perish. This was the first time anyone had definitely linked the brothers to Falconer’s murder.

It was to take Tuno over a year to get the full account out of Daley, who was extremely suspicious of them. Several of the detectives got to know him well; Glen Browne was particularly adept at getting on with criminals. Luke Rankin recalls how the story came out in dribs and drabs, and how Daley would always be watching them warily, asking questions about what they’d done about things he’d told them previously. He was also high maintenance—for example, he would ring them in the middle of the night and express concern about a car he’d seen go by in the street. He’d insist on meeting at 10 pm in parks out the back of Mount Druitt and Blacktown, where Jubelin and Browne would go to talk with him while Evers and Rankin sat in cars on either side of the park, concerned for their colleagues’ safety as the hours ticked by. But in the end Rankin came to admire Daley, to feel he’d redeemed himself by telling the police what he knew.

For the sake of coherence I will set out most of Daley’s story now, apart from certain details that have to be left out to protect his identity: after he eventually gave his statement, he moved away from Sydney and changed his name. The following account comes from multiple sources, but is mainly what he would later say in court.

Daley had first met Anthony and Andrew Perish through their connections with the Rebels, in the early nineties. He was sentenced to jail for murder (later reduced to manslaughter) in 1996 for his part in a fatal brawl. One day in Long Bay jail in 1999 he briefly met Terry Falconer, whom he knew of but had never spoken to. He’d heard rumours that Falconer had killed the Perish grandparents. The main topic of conversation was Rob Institoris, another Rebel, who was going out with Falconer’s daughter Linda. Falconer believed, rightly or wrongly, that Linda had given him up to the cops for manufacturing amphetamines, and resented the fact Institortis was in a relationship with her. To make matters worse, they were living in Falconer’s house and not paying rent.

At one point, Daley changed the subject and said, ‘Rumour has it you killed Rooster’s [Anthony Perish’s] grandparents.’ In fact, Daley had heard the rumour from Institoris.

‘Yeah,’ Falconer said. ‘I heard that one too.’

Then the conversation moved on.

In 2000 Daley again met Rob Institoris, who had just started a sentence for forging not very good $100 notes. Institoris tried to be friendly, recalling incidents from their past, but Daley was deeply upset because Institoris had given the police information about the offence for which he was in jail. Members of the Rebels were not supposed to cooperate with police if a brother was under investigation.

In the end Daley said, ‘You wrote a fuckin’ statement against me.’

‘What can I say? I fucked up.’

‘If I did to you what you did to me, you’d want me dead. As far as I’m concerned, I want a new bike [as reparation], and you’ve got two weeks to get it.’ Daley looked around the yard and saw two big blokes he didn’t know. ‘If I don’t get it, those two blokes over there are going to cut your fuckin’ head off.’

Institoris said he was broke, but eventually agreed to give Daley his major asset, a boat. It was a 4.9 metre Markham Whaler with twin Evinrude 70 horsepower engines. Ownership was signed over in jail, and Daley arranged for it to be collected.

Daley got out of jail in 2001, and it was a condition of his parole he not mix with the Rebels. He did arrange some casual meetings, to try to gauge their attitude towards him, but generally he was happy to be away from the club. He was nervous because members knew he’d been to the Crime Commission, and he believed he was a marked man. At one social gathering, a Rebel sang along to the song ‘Skunk Dog’, implying Daley was an informer. When the music stopped, the man mumbled, ‘You’re living on borrowed time, cunt.’

‘What did you say?’ Daley demanded.

‘Nothing, nothing. I’m just singing.’

In October a woman Daley knew as Denise aka Delirious (at one stage the wife of Anthony Perish’s driver Matthew Lawton) came by the house where he was living in Bringelly and told him, ‘I got a message from our mate.’

‘Who? Which one?’

‘Rooster.’

‘Oh yeah, how’s he going?’

‘Yeah, he’s going good.’

Denise gave Daley a thousand dollars and said, ‘Buy yourself some decent clothes to go to dinner in.’

‘When?’

‘Andrew will come and see you in a couple of days.’ And she drove off.

A few days later, Andrew Perish turned up in his four-wheel drive and told Daley, ‘Be ready [at 7 tonight]. We’ll go and have dinner with our Mate.’ He did not mean just any mate: Mate, like Rooster, was one of the nicknames of Anthony Perish.

Andrew returned in a Commodore and drove Daley into the inner city, telling him when they parked that they were in Newtown. They met Anthony, who was waiting for them on a corner, and after they’d greeted each other and hugged, they went into a small restaurant. Anthony ordered a bottle of wine and there was small talk. At some point he raised the subject of his grandparents, and asked Daley if it was true that Terry Falconer had told him in jail that he’d killed the old people.

‘Given we have mobile phones in jail,’ Daley said, ‘don’t you think you would have known pretty much straight away if I’d been told that?’

Anthony thought about it and agreed. Daley said, ‘Who told you this shit?’

‘We got a phone call from Liz.’

Daley had never met Elizabeth Falconer.

Later Anthony got down to business and said, ‘So, mate, what can you do for the company?’

Daley, who was mystified, said, ‘What would the company have me do for them?’ At first he thought that by ‘company’ Anthony might mean the Rebels, but that was not it at all.

‘You’ve got a boat?’

‘Yeah. It’s fucked at the moment.’

Anthony asked what the problem was, and Daley went into details.

Anthony said, ‘So, if it was fixed, would it make it out to the shelf and back?’

Assuming he meant the continental shelf, Daley said, ‘Yeah. Fucking oath.’

‘You know what you’re doing? You can handle a boat all right?’

‘Yeah. I’ve been a captain for a long time.’

‘How much would it cost to fix it?’

‘At least a couple of grand.’

‘If I gave you a couple of grand tomorrow, you’d put it in and get it fixed?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You won’t go to town and blow it?’

‘Mate!’

Anthony turned to Andrew and asked if he could give Daley a few thousand dollars that night. Then he said to Daley, ‘I want you to put the boat in and come up the Karuah River to Bulahdelah. There’s a wharf up there. Come up to the wharf and I’ll be waiting for you, just like a fisherman with an esky. A couple of eskies, because the cunt might be in a few pieces.’

So now Daley had an idea of what was going on. He said, ‘There’ll be people everywhere.’

‘Mate, nobody will know any different, we’ll just look like a couple of fishermen going out for a day’s fishing.’

Later in the conversation, Daley said, ‘Well, who is he?’

‘Don’t worry, it’s no one in the club.’

‘Who is the cunt?’

‘Don’t worry. It’s not you.’

‘What’s the pay like?’

‘Twenty grand.’

Daley just stared at him, and Perish thought about it. ‘Tell you what, I’ll pay you thirty.’

‘Half up front?’

‘No, no. I don’t work like that—’

‘Standard practice, isn’t it? Well, you pay me half up front and I’ll incur the expenses.’

‘No, I don’t work like that. We’ll give you the money for your expenses.’

Anthony said a mobile phone would be delivered to him, to be used for communicating about the job. When the meal was finished, Anthony paid the bill in cash and said goodbye. Andrew drove Daley home via his own house in Eagle Vale, where he went inside and came back with $2,000.

The next day Daley hooked his boat up to his vehicle and drove to Marine Scene in Campbelltown, where he left it for repairs. They later called to say the power head on the left engine needed replacing, which would cost $4,000 by itself. Daley rang Andrew, who said the extra money would be forthcoming.

A few days later, a mobile phone was delivered to Daley by a man he subsequently learned was Matthew Lawton.

‘Here’s the phone from Steve,’ said Lawton.

‘Who?’

‘Rooster.’

Lawton told him to keep the phone charged and on at all times, and not to use it except for contacting the Perishes.

Daley was nervous and confused about what was happening. On the one hand, he wanted to get his boat fixed, and in any case was reluctant to say no to Anthony Perish. On the other, he did not want to commit a crime and risk going back to jail. He was also concerned that maybe he was being set up, because of his contact with the Crime Commission. In his worst dreams, he wondered if he was actually the intended victim and it would be his body dumped off the continental shelf.

Daley had an interest in surveillance devices—his late father had been a private investigator. He set up two video cameras covering the front of the house, connected to a screen in the lounge room. This enabled him to record visitors, and to see who was outside without having to open the front door. The equipment captured images of one of the three or four visits Anthony Perish made over the next few weeks, in each case having been driven by Matthew Lawton. The purpose of the visits was to check on the progress of the boat repairs, and to discuss the trip up north. On one of the visits, Perish showed Daley a copy of the police running sheet indicating Falconer had been prepared to give information to the authorities about the drug dealings of the Dubbo Rebels.

In late October, Daley and his girlfriend drove up to Port Stephens via Newcastle. Along the way they dropped in at the Waterways office in Newcastle and bought a duplicate set of rego papers for his boat and some maps. He later said he wanted to leave a traceable trail of his trip, to cover himself in case the Perishes were trying to set him up. This is confusing, but Daley is a confusing man, a mixture of paranoia and intelligence and muddled thinking. He seems to have been concerned to keep his options open, to some extent making it up as he went along. A serious consideration was still that he might be the Perishes’ intended victim—in which case, it made a certain sense to stay close to them by pretending to cooperate, in the hope of learning more.

After the reconnaissance trip, Daley told Anthony Perish the Karuah River was ‘crawling with cops’ and had a speed limit of four kilometres per hour. (It also does not run through Bulahdelah.) They discussed other places where the boat might be put in.

On Perish’s last visit, which occurred on 9 November 2001, the boat had been repaired and was back at the house on its trailer. Daley said it needed to be run in.

‘Get on to it,’ Perish replied impatiently.

‘What do you think I’ve been doing, mate?’

‘Hurry up, because this cunt goes this Friday, regardless.’

Daley learned the plan had changed. ‘You’ll come up,’ Perish said, ‘you’ll pick up a couple of eskies, you’ll go out and take them out to the continental shelf, you’ll empty out the contents over a big hole [located] using a depth sounder. On the way back, wash the eskies out halfway back and throw them over the side. When you get back, wash the boat out with ammonia.’

‘Huh?’

‘If you do that, they can tell there’s been blood in the boat, but they can’t tell whose it is. It fucks the DNA.’

Daley thought about what he’d just heard, and said, ‘What, you’re not coming with me?’

‘Nah. That’s what I’m paying you for.’

With the job now imminent, it was time to drop out. After 12 November Daley did not take any calls on his mobile phones, so attempts by Andrew Perish to call him were unsuccessful. The brothers did not visit him again—presumably they realised something was wrong and decided to cut all contact.

Once Daley had told the short version of this story to detectives Browne and Rankin, he used the television set and VHS player in the granny flat to play them the video he’d made of Anthony and Matthew Lawton arriving at his house to inspect his boat. When the video was finished, Browne, who’d been taking notes, asked Daley why he’d decided to talk to them.

‘I just looked at you and decided I could trust you,’ Daley said.

It was a surprising statement and, as it was to turn out, not totally honest. In fact, Daley was to harbour fears of the Tuno detectives throughout his dealings with them, at times convinced they were corrupt and meant him harm. There was nothing personal in this: it was only five years since the Wood Royal Commission, and many people still mistrusted the police in general; Daley would not have been reassured by the fact that Terry Falconer had been killed after being kidnapped by men who might have been police. And yet, in Daley’s mind such concerns coexisted with the feeling that maybe Browne and his colleagues could be trusted. It was complicated, but his was a troubled and dangerous world.

There followed a series of meetings—in excess of fifty—over more than a year. Daley remained nervous, especially after the detectives asked him to make a statement and give evidence in court one day. He knew this would mean relocating and starting a new life, and that was something he was still in two minds about doing, despite his desire to turn over a new leaf. But gradually the police convinced him this was the only course of action he could take if he wanted the information he’d given them to achieve any effect.

It took a great deal of skill and patience on the part of Browne and Jubelin to deal with Daley, to meet him again and again, to always answer his phone calls, and to listen to his rambling paranoia over the long months. Fortunately, each of the detectives could draw on experience that had equipped them with patience and empathy where difficult witnesses were concerned. Browne had grown up with a lot of people who went on to be criminals. As for Jubelin, he’d learned about patience at Bowraville.

Strike Force Ancud had been big at first and Jubelin gained an education in major investigations from watching OIC Rod Lynch, a quietly spoken man with a great grasp of detail. One thing he noted was how Lynch would give a detective a job and expect him to do it but nothing else—Jubelin’s own natural tendency was to go racing off in pursuit of further information, but Lynch would say, ‘No. I just want you to do the task I gave you.’ Jubelin came to see how this was essential for control of a complex investigation, where only the person at the top had a complete overview.

Once the publicity circus had moved on, Ancud lost most of its resources (as was to happen with Tuno a few years later). Lynch was promoted and left, replaced as OIC by a sergeant who had other jobs that distracted his attention. Jubelin became the de facto head of the investigation, which before too long had just one other officer, Jason Evers. Born in 1969, Evers was a rugby league player who worked as a bricklayer on leaving school. He joined the police in 1989 after it had rained for two months. He became a detective because it was a chance to use his mind more, and also for the challenge: he figured it was an opportunity to move up to a higher level of effort. He realised that Jubelin shared this ambition.

The most obvious flaws in the initial Bowraville investigation were that the officers had failed to talk to some witnesses, and obtained much less detail than they could have from those they did speak with. History shows there has been a poor relationship between police and Aboriginal people for two centuries. Many cops, who have generally been white, have felt a sense of unease with black people living in different conditions, where parenting arrangements, partly because of an acceptance of more extended families, are far from the white ideal of the nuclear family. Many black people have been—and still are—wary of the police, for all sorts of reasons.

In addition, there are fundamental differences in how the two groups communicate, with Aboriginal people often slow, hesitant, and with a tendency to agree with any proposition put to them, whether true or not. Some of their mannerisms, such as pauses before answering and refusing to look others in the eye, strike many whites as evasive—indeed, as possible evidence of criminality.

Jubelin and Evers adopted a thorough approach, requiring far more patience than either man had used in previous police work. They spent a lot of 1997 simply turning up to potential witnesses’ houses and hanging around, sitting and lying under trees and waiting, waiting for an old man to decide he trusted them or for a young mother to remember what she’d seen on a certain afternoon years before. At first the people generally ignored them, either politely or by ‘growling’, to use a word Jubelin heard in this context for the first time. Elaine Walker, aunt of Colleen, told him, ‘Look, you’re a white copper, I’m black. Coppers took our children from us. Why would I want to speak to you?’ But eventually she did, and so did others. The detectives gained more evidence, and learned a great deal about slow detecting.

It took a long time to convince Daley to agree to make a statement, longer for him actually to make it, and even longer before he signed it. The detectives sometimes discussed his motive among themselves. He’d just got out of jail and wanted to break away from his old world—by talking to the cops he’d made that move, at least in his own mind—and once he signed the statement, there would be no going back. Daley was a man looking for redemption. He told Jubelin some stories about his life, how he’d been in gangs since the age of fourteen. His recent experiences had given him the chance to reflect on the direction of his future.

As a bikie, Daley had been a recognised expert on surveillance matters and police methodology. He’d done a lot of research and had made his own listening devices, and it seemed to the detectives that this sort of activity might have developed his intrinsic wariness. Some of his fears seemed extreme, and yet maybe there was a basis for them. He said for a while that helicopters were hovering near his house, and described one as being quite distinctive. The police later found Anthony Perish often hired helicopters from a company in western Sydney, and one of them matched the description given by Daley. It was the only helicopter of its kind in the city.

Once the detectives decided Daley was telling the truth, the entire investigation became focused on the Perishes. The police spent a lot of time talking to colleagues from Seabrook, which had now wound up without finding out who had killed Anthony and Frances Perish. Their work had been referred to the coroner for an inquest.

Albert Perish had continued to act strangely in the years after his parents’ murders. He told Seabrook many things, including that the deaths had been predicted in a dream he’d had, and that the killer was a dark-haired stranger he’d seen about the property. He also said the murders were linked to Yugoslavian politics (in fact his parents had not been politically active) and, alternatively, had been carried out by a hitman hired by a group of solicitors. In 2001 he told the New South Wales Crime Commission that he had been defrauded of timber royalties over his property at Coolongolook and that his sister Elena and one of the detectives from the police murder investigation were involved. None of this was true.

For the detectives of Seabrook, and now Tuno, the problem of motive for the grandparents’ deaths remained. Although multiple informants claimed that while in jail Terry Falconer had admitted to involvement in the murders, either by doing them himself or assisting someone else, it was all hearsay: police could not find anyone to whom he had actually said this. There were practical problems in finding out: Falconer had shared cells with some two hundred other prisoners in seven jails. And why would he have killed Anthony and Frances Perish anyway?

Other persons of interest were even less helpful. On 27 February 2002, investigators had attempted to interview Andrew Perish about his movements on the day his grandparents were killed. He told them to ‘Fuck off.’

In September 2002 the rest of Terry Falconer turned up. Detective Glenn Williams of the Newcastle Crime Scene Section was called to a property on the Hastings River near Wauchope. Owner Ellen Old had found a blue package on the riverbank and opened it with a hacksaw, a decision she probably regretted. This bag was the same as the previous six, except it had no chicken wire around it. When an autopsy was conducted, the bag was found to contain all the remaining body parts except the teeth and lower jaw, which have never been found.

Following Strike Force Seabrook’s report, the coronial inquest into the grandparents’ deaths recommenced on 8 October 2002, an extraordinary nine years after the murders. On 30 June 2003 Deputy State Coroner Carl Milovanovich announced an open verdict—Anthony and Frances Perish had been killed by a person or persons unknown. He blamed this disappointing outcome on the initial police investigation, which was ‘deficient in many ways’. Opportunities to gather forensic evidence had been missed. The investigators, he said, had ‘disregarded all their training, and there is a feeling they adopted an attitude that this case would solve itself [presumably by assuming Albert was guilty]. How wrong they were.’ Of Anthony and Frances he said, ‘It saddens me when I reflect on their lives, the fact that they came to this country from Europe and through hard work and invariable sacrifice carved out not only a fortunate life for themselves, but also built the stepping stones for security and prosperity for their children and grandchildren.’

Tuno was now pursuing two possible reasons the Perishes might have killed Falconer. One was revenge for their beloved grandparents’ deaths, the other because they suspected him of informing on them or their Rebels associates.

The team made their slender travel budget go a long way. Officers who went to Dubbo to talk to the Rebels there drove furiously around neighbouring towns and made themselves visible, to create the impression they were better resourced than was the case. In everything Jubelin did, including his comments to the media, he wanted the bikies to think the investigation was big and remorseless, in order to increase nervousness that might prompt one or more to roll over. It was even possible the bikies might hand over the killer just to get the police off their backs: after all, a major murder investigation is bad for business if you’re in the drug trade.

In the end the Dubbo Rebels proved irrelevant to the investigation. ‘They were different to city bikies,’ Jason Evers recalls, ‘older and poorer. A bit more like a drinking group.’

One asset Tuno obtained in 2003 was analyst Camille Alavoine, an officer who discovered she had skill in sorting and arranging information. She had been involved tangentially in the investigation into the death of Caroline Byrne: in an experiment conducted by Professor Rod Cross to see how Byrne might have been thrown off The Gap, Alavoine was hurled into a swimming pool seventeen times by two male detectives. This was recorded on video. Cross based some of his expert evidence at the 2008 trial of Gordon Wood on this unusual experiment.

Alavoine proved adept at helping Tuno make sense of some of the information it gathered. Jubelin liked the way that she approached her work with the instincts of an investigator: unlike some analysts, she had a feeling for information that was relevant. She was a somewhat prickly character, a single woman aged around forty who lived in Campbelltown and kept show dogs, and insisted on doing things her own way. After a few arguments, Jubelin gave her her head: the results were worth it. Not only was she good, she was dedicated, and would often take work home on the weekend.

Alavoine was not ambitious but she was clever. In her early days with Tuno she told the others how she was buying cheap properties that no one else wanted, as investments. They wondered why she bothered, but eight years later she would have more money than she knew what to do with.

With Tod Daley’s information, the detectives began to push informants and other criminals for more information about Anthony Perish. They still hit a wall of silence, with many people they spoke to confiding that they were refusing to speak because Perish was just too dangerous. This was news to the Tuno detectives and to all the police intelligence to which they had access. Despite the attempts that had been made to catch him since he went on the run in 1992—which included publishing his photograph in the Readers Digest in an article on Australia’s most wanted criminals—he remained a ghost.

3

THE WIRE

Man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward.

The information Daley had provided was important, but corroboration was needed before Tuno could charge the Perishes, so the detectives asked Daley to wear a wire to a meeting with Andrew Perish. Often, this is a point at which informants pull back, and Daley was reluctant at first, but not because of fear the recorded conversation would reveal he’d been lying. His concern was with his sense of honour: wearing a wire went against the outlaw code he’d lived by for most of his life. But in the end he agreed, seeing this as a further step along the path he’d chosen. Police taped half a dozen conversations at South Western Produce, Andrew Perish’s store in Camden, over a period of sixteen months. Daley was nervous about these meetings because he suspected the Perishes wanted him dead on account of what he knew about the plan to kill Falconer. And Andrew Perish was a dangerous man: Tuno suspected he had killed before.

Eight years earlier, on 18 August 1995, a man named Ian Draper had been working in one of the bars at the Railway Hotel in Liverpool when Andrew Perish came in with a friend. While drinking he got into some bother with an Islander named Kai Dempsey, who threw a punch. Andrew hit back and Dempsey went down, striking his head against the leg of a pool table. Some witnesses said Perish then kicked him, but Perish denied this. Dempsey died soon after from blunt force trauma, and Perish handed himself in at Liverpool Police Station three days later. He said he’d acted in self-defence, but refused to give a statement. He was charged with murder and manslaughter.

Draper had not witnessed the fight between Perish and Dempsey, but he had seen Perish’s companion swinging a stick at an Islander in the bar where he was working. He gave police a statement and was called to give evidence at Perish’s trial. Police had opposed bail for Perish from fear witnesses might be intimidated. At the committal a security guard told the court, ‘I seen Perish kick him [Dempsey] once in the head’ and said it had been like kicking a football. The Crown told the court the guard had been offered a paid holiday not to give evidence, and other witnesses had been harassed. Despite this, bail was provided. At his trial in November and December 1998, Andrew Perish was found not guilty. The jury took an hour and a half to reach its decision, including lunch.

In 2001, Ian Draper was working as a cellarman at Mounties—Mount Pritchard Community Centre—the biggest club in the south-west. On Friday 3 August he finished a shift at 3.30 am and drove out of the car park in his white Ford. He had his own place but had been staying with his girlfriend, Odette O’Connell, who was concerned when he didn’t come home. After she called Mounties that afternoon and found he hadn’t turned up for work, she reported him missing. As far as police know, no sign of Draper has ever been seen since, although his car turned up six weeks later, parked on an area of grass across the road from the Rebels national headquarters at 124 Bringelly Road, Leppington. Inside the car was an item that had been placed in an unusual position that clearly indicated Draper’s identity. (Police are not prepared to be more specific than that.)

The disappearance was a total mystery. Draper was a gentle man, very close to his mother, Janet, and liked by everyone who knew him. Police looked into his background and could find only one unusual incident, but it was very strange. About two months before he disappeared, Odette had gone to his house and found him in a bad way, half naked, dopey, his speech slurred. She’d got him to Campbelltown Hospital, where tests revealed he’d suffered drug-induced ataxia, meaning he’d had his drink spiked the night before, when he’d been at the Minto Inn. All he claimed to remember was being helped into a car by a waitress, and being given a lift home. His reaction to the incident seemed to imply he remembered more about what had happened than he was saying. He refused to talk about it, became very nervous at being alone, and started staying at Odette’s house.

The detectives investigating Draper’s disappearance couldn’t find anything more about the incident at the Minto Inn. They talked to the OIC of the investigation into the death of Kai Dempsey and learned that a witness at Andrew Perish’s trial had been threatened beforehand, but that had not been Ian Draper. Still, giving evidence—even making a statement—in a matter concerning a Rebel could be dangerous, even if it did not support an accusation. Simply cooperating with the police was disapproved of.

The investigation ran down and in the end the matter was referred to the coroner, who in 2004 issued an open finding: there was insufficient evidence to say what had happened to Ian Draper. Andrew Perish was not called to give evidence at the inquest.

In the meantime he had become an apparently prosperous local businessman, starting an agricultural produce business in 2000, which soon reached an annual turnover of $3 million. As well as the big store in Hill Street, there was an offsite bulk feed storage facility and a breeding herd of a hundred Limousin and Charolais cattle at a West Hoxton feed lot. In October 2001, Andrew’s business partner in the cattle project, his sister Colleen, told The Land newspaper their company, Pacific Pastoral, hoped to create a boutique beef market in the wealthy eastern suburbs.

•

The detectives asked Daley to wear a wire to the meetings with Andrew Perish to seek confirmation of his claim that he’d been asked to assist in the disposal of Terry Falconer’s body. They were also interested in other information, most urgently the location of Anthony Perish. The plan was that Daley would go into the store and have a conversation in which he would try to elicit such information from Andrew.

Police have refused to give details of the methodology used in the meetings, or about their use of electronic surveillance more generally. They don’t want criminals reading this book to learn how it’s done. But from publicly available information on the subject, it can be noted that recording these days does not require the elaborate arrangements still sometimes seen on television, with wires taped to the body. The technology is now much more compact.

Also unlike what we see on most television shows, a great deal of preparation and care goes into operations. A plan is prepared, indicating things such as the nature of the target, the likely level of danger, the names and phone numbers of all officers involved, the roles of the various teams, and the location of the nearest hospital. The aim is for the operation commander to have as good an idea as possible of just what is going on at all times. To assist in this, a surveillance team can be used to ensure the target is on the premises beforehand, observe the conversation from a distance (where this is possible) and make sure the person with the wire gets away from the premises safely afterwards without being followed. A briefing is held beforehand to ensure everyone—and there can be ten or more officers involved in one operation—understands the plan.

The first meeting was on 30 September 2002. At a remote location, Daley was equipped with miniature recording equipment. Once it was turned on, Jubelin briefly explained the nature of the operation and said to him, ‘I have been authorised to offer you the following inducement for the purposes of this operation only. Nothing you say and no information you give in this operation will be used in any criminal proceedings against you in any court in New South Wales. Do you understand?’

‘Yes.’

Daley went into the store and found Andrew Perish, who said, ‘Is there a summons?’ Perish had two things at the forefront of his mind: the imminent inquest into his grandparents’ death and the Falconer investigation, involving both Tuno and the Crime Commission. When Daley said he’d received a summons to give evidence at the inquest, Perish said, ‘Bullshit, isn’t it . . . Did you get it today?’

‘Yeah, about eleven o’clock today at my girl’s—’

‘Fuckin’ can’t, mate,’ Perish said, ‘you go there and fuckin’—’

‘Yeah, they’re going to ask me that shit and what do I say, man? What do you want me to say?’

‘Fuck, just something like—’

‘Want me to say that fuckin’ Terry told, told me that he’d done it or what?’

‘No, no don’t fuckin’—’

‘Well I dunno, that’s why I’m asking, that’s why I’m here to fuckin’ see ya, Andrew.’

But Andrew did not ask Daley to lie, and it is a feature of this and all the taped conversations that followed that Andrew Perish did not admit to or propose any illegal activity. Either he was a man innocent of all wrong, or a man with a constant wariness that the conversations he had with Daley might be taped.

He said, ‘Some cunt’s fuckin’, some cunt’s fuckin’, some cunt in our circle has fuckin’ dogged ya, mate, just to put you in the picture.’

The news that he’d been accused of informing did not make Daley happy. ‘Don’t need this shit, man,’ he said, ‘that’s why I pulled out of the fuckin’ job [meaning the disposal of Falconer’s body] in the first place.’

‘It’s just fuckin’ shit, mate . . .’

‘Speak to the Rooster, mate. Speak to the Rooster, find out what the fuck I’ve got to do, all right? If he wants to see me I don’t care, whatever, mate.’

Daley was using the situation to try to make contact with Anthony Perish, as the detectives had asked.

‘No worries,’ Andrew said, ‘I’ll get it sorted out, fuckin’ oath.’

‘And sort the fuckin’ money out too, all right?’

This seems to be a reference to whether Daley had to repay any of the $8,300 he’d been given to repair his boat and make his reconaissance trip.

‘Yeah, no worries.’

‘Just tell him, mate, I’ve had a hell of a lot of fuckin’ heat on my arse here and there, you know. I’m just staying away from every cunt. I’ve heard the bullshit rumours and all this fuckin’ crap.’

‘Yeah . . . I know they’re not going to want you to say nothin’ about knocking the other thing. They’re not gonna learn nothin’.’

‘Nothing.’

Given that ‘to knock’ means ‘to kill’, ‘knocking the other thing’ was presumably a reference to the Falconer murder—but it was as close as Perish would ever come to a direct mention in any of these conversations. The police had hoped for more explicit admissions, and they were disappointed. However, one feature of Andrew’s conversation was interesting, and that was the way he accepted without question references Daley made to some of the circumstances of the Falconer murder. It’s unlikely he would have done this had he not known about them. For example, at one point Daley said, ‘I just fuckin’, you know this is a flamin’ surprise to me. I don’t want any more fuckin’ surprises like you comin’ out to my place . . . that’s why I pulled out of the fuckin’ thing in the first place, Andrew. I don’t want to go back to jail for no cunt.’

To which Andrew’s reply was, ‘Yeah, I know. No worries, no worries.’

‘I’m not a weak cunt, mate, it’s just that things weren’t right, I was fresh out of jail.’

‘No worries. I fuckin’ understand that, mate.’

It was pretty obvious—to a listener aware of the background—that Perish knew exactly what Daley was talking about.

Another example of this familiarity occurred when Daley referred to the police running sheet Anthony had once shown him at his house. He said, ‘I need to know if that fuckin’ piece of paper you showed me about Terry Falconer is gone, because it’s got my fuckin’ prints on it.’

Andrew didn’t say, ‘What piece of paper?’, he said, ‘It’s gone, mate. Don’t worry.’

The conversation also included a lot of general chat about the bikie life, matters such as killing, rivalries and constant paranoia. The details are not clear most of the time, but the violence of their culture is. For example, Daley said about some unnamed people, ‘He was gonna ask me and we all got asked last week before to fuckin’ shoot the cunt . . . I’m fuckin’ spinning, mate, I’m getting loaded for it . . . I’m not havin’ any arguments over that cunt.’

‘Yeah, you don’t want any cunt setting you up for that, ay?’

There was more chat about mutual acquaintances, interspersed with Daley’s attempts to get Andrew to talk about Terry Falconer. We can only wonder what Andrew Perish must have thought during these conversations. Daley was playing a dangerous game, by suggesting he was scared about his contacts with police over the inquest into the grandparents’ deaths. There was always the possibility the Perishes would decide he was about to roll over, and that he had to be dealt with.

On the other hand, it was possible Andrew just considered Daley a harmless pain in the arse who needed to be kept happy with as little effort as possible. After fifteen minutes of rambling, expletive-ridden conversation, he said, ‘I gotta let you go, mate, all right?’

‘All right,’ said Daley.

‘Have a good afternoon.’

Daley went back to South Western Produce wearing a wire in early October, and got taped confirmation that the Perishes had given him money in connection with his boat. He gave Andrew Perish $1,000, which the police had provided, and said, ‘Give that to him [Anthony] too. I promise to round off what I owe him.’

‘Oh, right,’ said Andrew.

‘Do I have to pay the eight and a half or just fuckin’ . . . cause I don’t really wanna fuckin’ put a new motor on the boat.’

Andrew said he’d talk to Anthony about it. Daley said he’d pay it back bit by bit, and Andrew said, ‘Yeah, no worries.’

Daley met a bikie mate in the store, and their casual chat about Falconer (whose death was still of interest in the underworld) makes chilling reading, even if not every detail of it is clear. Daley seemed to be saying that Falconer had ratted on some bikies: ‘He got busted with the drums of chemicals [and gave up] a heap of Jokers and fuckin’ other hairy cunts over it when he got busted . . . with drums and drums, millions of dollars worth of chemicals . . . what I’ve always been understood to believe, Uhlans and Jokers, and that was all when the Uhlans and Jokers come unstuck and they reckon they found that, remember that little fuckin’ cunt from the Uhlans that I used to know real well, they—’

‘Jack.’

‘They found him burned in his ute.’

On the next visit, in the middle of October, Daley said he had to give evidence at the inquest the next week and Andrew said, ‘Yeah, you don’t know nothing, right.’ Daley again raised his concerns about his fingerprints being on the police running sheet, and Andrew said, ‘Hey, hey, hey. But you know nothing about that boat.’

During this conversation, Daley thought he heard Andrew say, in regard to the Falconer murder, ‘Nobody knows we done it.’ When he left South Western Produce, he was exultant about this and sent a text to the detectives, ‘U love me don’t you? . . . Don’t you!! . . . I do believe I have admis. [Smiley face.] C U in 40 I hope. Traffic is fucked.’

Regrettably, although Daley did not know this, the main recording device had stopped working some time between when it was fitted and the start of the conversation. Daley had been equipped with a second device, but on account of its location on him it did not record very well, and parts of the conversation, including the place where Daley claimed Andrew had made the admission, were inaudible. A noisy machine, sounding like a compressor, had been running in the room. The recording was later sent to experts at Scotland Yard to see if they could improve the sound quality, but without success.

Daley returned to the store at the end of the month and actually got to talk with Anthony Perish. He’d been told he might be in Sydney, so he said to Andrew, ‘Mate didn’t come down?’

‘What’s that?’

‘Mate didn’t come down?’

‘Yeah, he’s down now, Mate.’

‘Is he?’

‘We might catch up with him tonight.’

‘Yeah, that’d be all right.’

‘Or fuckin’ tomorrow night or something, you know . . . I’ll give him a call.’

‘When?’

Andrew dialled a number, and said, ‘Hey, Mate, how you goin’? . . . Uh yeah, I got someone here okay . . . Have a little talk, you know. Are you there? Yeah, he’s here now, yeah.’

Daley, handed the phone, spoke to Anthony: ‘Hey, buddy, how ya goin’? What’s happening? Ah, fuckin’, fuck all, mate . . . Well, there’s lots of shit really, ha, ha . . . So we fuckin’ need to have dinner, mate . . . Fuck, just give Andrew a ring and organise it with him and he can let me know, yeah, pick us up or whatever. Yeah, no worries. All right, Mate, take it easy, eh? See ya, bud.’

Daley hoped Andrew would ring him back some time soon and arrange the meet with Anthony at short notice, so for the next few weeks the detectives took their guns and Kevlar vests home each night, waiting for a call from Daley that would draw them across the city in a rush to seize Anthony. But there was no meeting. Presumably the Perishes were highly suspicious of Daley by now.

Daley was under a lot of pressure and told the police some strange things. Glen Browne wrote this report of a phone call about the helicopter in December 2002: ‘Daley immediately seemed to be excited and irrational. Daley stated a helicopter had been circling his house and he requested to be told why. Daley went on to say that he believed that the helicopter was a police helicopter and they were checking out his house prior to raiding it. He stated that the helicopter was flying at very low level, approximately two hundred feet. In confirmation of these facts a helicopter could be heard in the background over the telephone.’

Daley had a bike accident, and the police who attended the scene searched his panniers and discovered $20,000 and tapes of meetings between him and Jubelin and Browne. Apparently he was paranoid about the police and, after secretly recording these conversations, had been carrying the tapes as insurance.

Finally, in late 2003, Daley said he’d had enough and wanted to go away and start his new life. The police sent him back to the produce store for one last attempt, in November. They told him to try harder than before to get Andrew to say something incriminating—raising his suspicions now would not matter. Jubelin sought legal advice and explained to Daley just how far he could go in trying to get Andrew to talk without making ‘untrue representations’ that might make an answer inadmissible in court.

At the store, Daley told Andrew police had come to his girlfriend’s house and asked questions about the boat. ‘Who the fuck is talking?’ he said.

‘I don’t fuckin’ know, mate, I don’t know.’

‘You know I had concerns about this shit from the fuckin’ start.’

‘Yeah, yeah.’

Daley pretended to get angry about this, and again demanded to know who’d been talking to the police.

‘It’s that fuckin’ Fuck Off,’ Andrew said, giving the nickname of a bikie. ‘That Fuck prick.’

‘I don’t need this shit, mate,’ Daley said. ‘Just sort it out.’

‘It’s fuckin’ Fuck Off, mate. I’m telling you.’

Daley referred to the previous conversation in which Andrew had acknowledged Falconer’s murder, but this had not been caught on tape because of the faulty recording device. ‘Remember the conversation we had?’ he said. ‘At the back of the place? And you said nobody knows who done it?’

‘Yeah.’

It was close, but not close enough to get a conviction by itself.

In November 2003 Daley left Sydney with a one-way ticket provided by police. It wasn’t much for what he had lost and all he was risking. The last few months had been traumatic for him, but Jubelin felt that on the whole he’d handled them with commendable mental strength.

Daley gave police an eighty-seven-page signed statement, which was taken over a week in a safe house north of Sydney. Over a series of ten- to twelve-hour days, Jubelin did the talking while Glen Browne, Jason Evers and Luke Rankin typed or looked after security. It was a tense time because Daley was emotional: he realised that once the statement was done and signed, there would be no turning back.

On the day before his flight, he came into the building where Tuno’s office was located to collect his plane ticket. A detective met him in the foyer and took him through security and into a meeting room where Jubelin was waiting. When the ticket was handed over, Daley looked at it with surprise, almost as though he’d never believed this would happen.

‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘I suppose you can have this now.’

He reached beneath his shirt and produced a loaded automatic with a laser sight on top, and laid it on the table.

4

ARREST OF A GHOST

Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.

Gary Jubelin was frustrated by the lack of progress. Fortunately he was in the relationship with Pamela Young and so had something to take his mind off the job, but sometimes they didn’t see much of each other. She’d come to realise that even in a group of colleagues who were extremely dedicated to their work, Gary was an extremist. At home he never turned off his phone, no matter what they were doing. Sometimes she would ask him to, but he refused. It was as though being available to anyone who wanted him—bosses, staff, witnesses—was a compulsion, maybe even an addiction. This created tensions in their relationship. He found it difficult to be still, to go out to a restaurant and have a meal, or even just to sit and have a cup of coffee with her. All his talk was about work. And then there was the constant exercise, whether it was running or the gym or martial arts. She still admired his intensity, and liked it when this was directed at her. But always it was at a time of his choosing, not her own. He was a hard man.

From the end of 2003, Tuno went into a lull, for several reasons. It had run out of leads, and there was no great enthusiasm left from management. As Luke Rankin recalls, it did not have a high media profile because the victim was not someone many people would have much sympathy for. It also happened that at this point some of the detectives had to devote serious time to commitments from previous investigations. Jubelin, Jason Evers and Nigel Warren got tied up with the Linda Wilson trial in October and November.

Another thing that took them away from Tuno was that the homicide officers on the team (who now included Glen Browne and Luke Rankin, who had transferred into the squad) spent one week in six doing on-call work. One job that Nigel Warren remembers with horror involved a paedophile named Jeffrey Hillsley, who, after many years in prison, had written to the Parole Board, ‘A message to the community: I’ll be back. Thank God for little girls.’ It was signed ‘The Walking Evil’. He was released anyway, and on New Year’s Day 2004, Warren, Jubelin and Rankin were on call when they received notice that there’d been a murder near Burwood. A man’s head had been destroyed by what at first seemed to have been a shotgun, although later they found the damage had been caused by a frenzied hammer attack. The detectives arrived and learned the man’s ten-year-old daughter had disappeared. Her mother told police that Hillsley had befriended the family. After killing the father, he kidnapped the girl and sexually assaulted her. Later she escaped, and police caught Hillsley. The homicide team was up for thirty-six hours chasing him—not unusual with on-call work. Warren later recalled how the need to work closely with the victim’s family, ‘Rather than making the task of investigating their misfortunate easier . . . added an exhaustive element to the investigation, leaving an indelible imprint on my memory.’

These various distractions continued into 2004, which also saw the second Bowraville inquest, this time into the death of Evelyn Greenup and the suspected death of Colleen Walker. It ran in fits and starts from February to September. Jubelin and Evers attended, and the work of Strike Force Ancud was scrutinised by the court. The coroner found that Colleen Walker had been killed although there was not enough evidence to convict her murderer, but that a jury might well find a known person had killed Evelyn Greenup. The matter was referred to the Director of Public Prosecutions to consider a prosecution.

Nigel Warren was tied up with the Kerry Whelan case for some of the year and then, to cap things off, Jubelin was told he had to leave homicide as part of the rotation policy. This had been introduced to the specialist squads after the Royal Commission, to reduce the chance of corruption—although there’d never been much chance for corruption in homicide anyway.

By this time—late 2004—the Tuno team was a little jaded. Despite Tod Daley’s information, which they’d now had in its complete version for over a year, they did not have enough to charge anyone with Terry Falconer’s murder. All the obvious leads had been chased up and there was nothing pressing left to do. It was not that the detectives hadn’t been working hard—in fact they’d been working so hard that it had prevented them from going for promotions. Their careers were passing them by, and they agreed they needed to take a step back and play the promotion game more effectively.

Within a year they’d all been promoted, but this took some of them away from homicide, and from Tuno, forever. Nigel Warren and Glen Browne stayed in homicide as sergeants, but Luke Rankin ended up at Mudgee and Jason Evers at Ballina. Gary Jubelin moved to a surburban police station.

When he left, he handed Tuno over to Warren and Browne. He told his bosses it would need a team of six for six months to get it to the point where someone could be charged, but no extra officers were allocated. You have to feel some sympathy for the bosses—it would have been easy at this point to decide Tuno had failed and that there was little point in wasting more resources on it. Soon Warren was taken off the investigation, and two years later rotated out of homicide himself, to sex crimes. Tuno continued to be run by Glen Browne and a senior constable named John Edwards.

Around 2004, Tuno’s analyst Camille Alavoine learned she had cancer, and transferred back to Campbelltown, near her home, to reduce the amount of time she spent commuting. She received treatment for her illness, which went into remission, and still spent some of her time doing analysis for Browne.

Jubelin would happily have stayed in homicide for his whole career, but when his time for rotation approached he decided he would prefer to jump than be pushed, and when an opportunity came up for him to apply for a promotion to inspector as crime manager at Chatswood, he took it and won the position.

The environment at Chatswood was very different to what he had been used to in homicide for the past decade. He found it a shock at first, and there were long days when he wondered what he was doing there. Until he got to Chatswood, human resource issues were something other people dealt with, but in his new job he found himself dealing with all sorts of matters that were important to the individuals concerned, such as details of rosters or of the tea room, but just about as far removed from the sort of work he’d previously done as could be imagined.

Jubelin was reluctant to wear a police uniform. It was not that he was ashamed of the uniform or felt he was too good to wear it, but he was proud to be a detective, and detectives wore suits. He felt that detectives had been shamed during the very public Royal Commission hearings, and some within the job had come to think all detectives were an embarrassment to the organisation. Jubelin wanted to make a stand against this attitude, and so he continued to wear a suit, even when asked to don a uniform by his commander. There were rumours he hid or gave away certain key parts of his uniform, but in the end there was a compromise and Jubelin was spotted on rare occasions wearing the blue.

Fortunately for his peace of mind, he soon found a murder with which to occupy himself. In March 2005, a woman came to the front desk at Chatswood to say her husband, Bob Ljubic, a luxury car dealer of Mosman, had disappeared. He’d received a phone call the night before asking him to go out to inspect a Ferrari 355 Spider that was for sale, and had not returned. The police database COPS showed his own car, a Porsche, had been found that morning at The Gap at Watson’s Bay. An officer told Jubelin about the notification and he was interested, because he knew who Ljubic was: he had been a suspect in an on-call murder Jubelin had dealt with at homicide the year before, of another car dealer named Franco Mayer.

Five days later, Ljubic’s body was found floating in the sea off Kurnell. The case was being treated as a possible suicide, even though police had established that the phone from which the call about the Ferrari had been made had been bought under a false name. Jubelin found this suspicious, and managed to take over the matter and turn it into a murder investigation. He ran it himself—while still performing his duties as crime manager—with staff including two very junior but capable officers at Chatswood, Andrew Brennan and Ben Walsh. It was an unusual thing to do, and one gets the impression Jubelin’s bosses let him do it simply because it was easier than arguing with him.

Almost all vehicles in Sydney use electronic tags to cross the Harbour Bridge, and records are kept whenever a tag is activated. The detectives established exactly when Ljubic’s car had crossed on the night he disappeared, and then looked at the owners of all the cars that had crossed around the same time. One belonged to a Jason McCall, who had a criminal background and had reported his car as having been broken into that evening.

Fortunately the Crime Commission had been conducting an investigation into Ljubic while he was alive, and was able to provide essential assistance to the police investigation. Starting with the phone numbers of Ljubic and McCall, it identified other people involved in the case, and police began surveillance. The targets didn’t all like each other—soon the $800,000 house of one of them in Goulburn was destroyed in an arson attack. Jubelin suspected another of the group had set the fire, and wondered how he could prove it. Figuring the arsonist might have stopped for petrol on the drive down from Sydney, one keen member of Jubelin’s team suggested he and a colleague visit every service station on the way to Goulburn and get the CCTV footage for the night in question. Jubelin didn’t like their chances but approved the show of keenness and told the young detectives to go ahead. They returned with a pile of tapes and Jubelin looked at it pessimistically, realising that watching them all would be like looking for a needle in a haystack—a needle that was probably not even there. But on the first tape they viewed, they found images of their suspected arsonist going into the service station and buying a box of matches.

Eventually they interviewed this man, who was shattered when he saw the photographs from the service station. He rolled and gave evidence that Jason McCall had thrown Bob Ljubic off The Gap. There was a trial and McCall was convicted of murder.

The man who rolled became a registered informant, and one day when they were talking, Jubelin asked him to name the biggest criminal he knew.

‘Anthony Perish,’ was the answer.

At this point it might be helpful to give an outline of the industry Anthony Perish was involved in, as it affects and helps explain a lot of the behaviour to be revealed in the pages to come. The first point to be noted is that amphetamines (including more potent variations such as methamphetamine) and ecstasy are the only major illegal drugs, apart from marijuana, that can be produced in Australia. The other two most common types, heroin and cocaine, must be imported. This has helped create a vibrant local industry for the production of amphetamines.

From about 1990 to 2009, Anthony Perish was a manufacturer of various forms of amphetamine and ecstasy, which involved five main types of activity: obtaining the ingredients, combining them using chemical processes, selling the resulting products, protecting himself from police and also criminals wanting to rip him off, and spending or investing his profits.

The market for these drugs is enormous, with surveys suggesting that over the past decade about ten per cent of people aged twenty to twenty-nine used them, with lower but still significant rates for the age groups either side of that. In recent years ecstasy has become less popular, amphetamines more. In 2009–10 the retail price for a gram of amphetamine or methamphetamine varied from $50 to $1,000, depending on a number of factors including the type. Many people with no other criminal behaviour and who consider their use purely recreational spend several hundred dollars a week on the drug. It is this participation in the market by hundreds of thousands of otherwise law-abiding Australians that supports a major underground industry that employs thousands of people and turns over hundreds of millions of dollars a year, all of it untaxed.

Obtaining large quantities of so-called precursor chemicals is one of the keys to success as a drug manufacturer, and is very difficult as the law carefully restricts their import and sale. Some manufacturers have used crude means, such as paying young people to visit pharmacies to buy products like Sudafed from which they extract pseudoephedrine, a key precursor chemical. But these so-called pseudo runs have become less useful since pharmacists, urged on by police, have introduced restrictions on purchases. The ideal way to obtain precursors is to import them illegally from places such as Russia—often using someone who specialises in this—or by stealing them from chemical companies here.

The television series Breaking Bad gives a good portrayal of the life of an amphetamine manufacturer, although it downplays the difficulties of obtaining precursors. As viewers of the program would know, the manufacture requires knowledge and premises. Knowledge can be obtained from experience aided by chemistry books and intelligence, and, although Anthony Perish did not do well at school, he was a natural ‘cook’ from an early age. Just as significantly, he proved to be very inventive when it came to setting up premises—known as labs—for large-scale manufacturing.

Some of the problems with making amphetamines are that the process produces liquid waste and also a distinctive smell, resembling cat urine. These are some of the main reasons so many clandestine labs are discovered by police each year. In 2009–10, a record 694 labs were found around Australia, most of them in houses. It therefore makes sense to establish labs at remote rural locations, which is what Anthony Perish (and Terry Falconer) did. A large farm shed is big enough to house a lab produing hundreds of kilograms of drugs each year. Apart from the ingredients, some elaborate laboratory equipment is requried—a big lab will have up to $100,000 of glassware—and, if ecstasy is being produced, an expensive, and now illegal, tablet press.

Perish sold most of his product to bikie gangs, who for a long time have controlled the distribution of amphetamines around Australia. One reason for this is they like using them themselves: heroin and marijuana have at different times had reputations as ‘hippie’ drugs, whereas amphetamines are hard-edged, and also enable users to drink more alcohol than usual and stay awake for longer, which is of benefit to hard-riding and hard-partying bikies with an affection for beer and Jim Beam.

Outlaw motorcycle gangs are the closest Australia has to a mafia, even when not involved in the drug trade. They are closed and secretive hierarchies with codes of loyalty and silence and a propensity for violence. It is understandable that they have attracted criminals as members, and have entered into criminal activities. In 2010 there were 1,630 bikies in New South Wales, including nominees or ‘noms’ (apprentices) but not the numerous hangers-on who cluster around each club and do a lot of the retail drug-dealing for members. At that time there were around twenty gangs throughout the state, some with many chapters, each of which had its own clubhouse. Most bikies, however, were in a few main gangs, most importantly the Rebels (600 members), the Bandidos (235), and the Nomads and the Comanchero (200 each). The Hells Angels, with only 60, were important beyond their numbers, because of their reputation and international connections.

Some people claim the clubs are just social groups, but their criminality is beyond doubt. In the decade to the end of 2008, 8,118 charges had been laid against gang members for offences ranging from murder down. Allowing for members who’d died or left the gangs, this represented 4.1 charges per member. This, of course, would have been only a fraction of the offences actually committed. Police say members of most chapters of most gangs are involved in drug dealing. The gangs deny this when asked.

An important part of gang activity is to maintain a monopoly of drug sales within the gang’s own area. Often this, or disputes when members switch clubs, leads to armed conflict between gangs, such as the Rebels–Bandidos clash at the end of 2008, and the Comanchero–Hells Angels dispute that culminated in the affray and killing at Sydney Airport in March 2009. In the first part of 2012, Sydney suffered a spate of drive-by shootings on account of an argument between the Hells Angels and the Nomads.

An insight into the involvement of bikies in the drug trade was provided by Strike Force Sibret, which in 2001 rolled up a major operation in which the Newcastle Nomads had been buying amphetamines for years from an illiterate cook named Tod Little, president of their Gold Coast chapter. Richard Walsh, the sergeant-at-arms of the Newcastle chapter, received a sentence of thirty-two years after pleading guilty to supplying four hundred kilograms of amphetamine, although he’d been charged with supplying a tonne. This was the longest sentence ever given for a non-importation drug offence in Australia. Tod Little received twenty-four years. Forty-two others were charged, including fourteen other Nomads.

The amounts of money involved were considerable—on his last pick-up, Walsh had paid Little $65,000 for half a kilogram. (He would have intended to dilute this before he sold it in smaller quantities to members and other drug dealers.) The Nomads reacted violently to the arrests, at one point arriving in force at a Newcastle pub where police from Strike Force Sibret were known to drink and blocking off each end of the street before searching the premises. Fortunately the police were not there. Detectives learned the bikies had employed a private eye to locate their residences.

Anthony Perish flourished for years because of his close relationship with the Rebels. In this he was helped by the close connections he forged when he was a young man, and by the fact that his brother Andrew was for a while a senior member of the club. The Rebels gave Anthony both a market and, importantly, security.

Protection is an essential part of a drug manufacturer’s professional life. In many ways that life resembles a legitimate businessman’s, but of course Anthony Perish could not depend on the police when he was threatened. And he would be threatened, because he was a wealthy man in a world of violent criminals. What Perish did was cultivate a reputation for extreme violence, an important part of a drug manufacturer’s ‘brand’, and, as the Tuno detectives discovered when they started to look at him, he did this very successfully. That reputation was based on acts of violence that will be described later in this story, at the time police became aware of them. The important point for now is that Perish was a man accustomed to using violence to solve problems, which is one of the reasons he chose to deal with Terry Falconer the way he did.

The final part of a drug manufacturer’s business is the way he disposes of his considerable income. The smart ones employ lawyers and accountants who help them launder the proceeds of their crimes. They invest their money in legitimate businesses, and often the owners of those businesses are aware of the murky origins of the funds. As we shall see, enough is known about Anthony Perish to be able to say he dealt intelligently with his profits: but thanks to that, much of what he did with them remains unknown.

•

In 2005 the Crime Commission was given a reference to a matter that would eventually be closely connected to Tuno. It involved a DNA link between two shootings, one in Sydney and the other on the Gold Coast. The Sydney incident was an attempted murder at JB’s Bar and Grill in Haymarket, where a New Zealander named Raniera Puketapu had been shot but not killed on 8 October 2002. He’d been sitting with his back to the big window in the bar when an unknown man stopped outside on Little Hay Street and fired eight shots at him at close range through the glass, hitting him three times. Puketapu was seriously wounded, but did not die.

The shooter had gone around the corner into Harbour Street and run towards Goulburn Street, showing a badge and yelling out, ‘Get down, police!’ Soon after, real police were alerted to a burning van about four hundred metres from JB’s Bar and Grill, in the direction in which the shooter had run, and recovered two 9 mm Norinco pistols from it, one of which matched cartridges found at the scene of the shooting.

Detectives who interviewed Puketapu in hospital a week later pursued various possibilities, including that the shooting might have been done by his girlfriend’s former lover, a member of an Auckland-based Islander gang named Black Power. The gang had no chapters in Australia, which Puketapu said was just as well because it was ‘way more intimidating than the gangs are here in this country, you know. So, I figure if they came over here they would just push all the other gangs out for sure.’ But there was no evidence of a revenge shooting, or indeed of any other motive.

Puketapu’s parents and aunt and uncle had been visiting Sydney to attend the rugby league grand final, the parents staying at the Holiday Inn, and in the evening he, his dad and his uncle had gone down to the bar for a beer. It had been a spontaneous decision, which made it even less likely the shooting had been planned. He’d been hoping to meet up with a former workmate, a Columbian woman named Martha, but she hadn’t turned up. The police looked at the possibility he’d been shot by Martha’s boyfriend, but found no evidence for that.

Meanwhile police scientists and analysts went to work on the items recovered from the burning van. A fire-damaged mobile phone proved to be one of two phones purchased for cash a week earlier in Darlinghurst, using false buyer details. Police obtained call records and found the phones had been used exclusively to contact each other. The second phone—the one the police did not have—had been used mainly in the vicinity of JB’s Bar and Grill. The last calls came from that vicinity just before the shooting, suggesting the person using the second phone might have been a spotter.

There was one tenuous lead on the shooter. As soon as news of the shooting had gone out on the police radio, security staff monitoring the City of Sydney Streetsafe CCTV cameras had begun looking for the shooter. The camera at the corner of Liverpool and George streets showed him running east on Liverpool Street not far from where the van was burning. Once all other leads had dried up, police released indistinct footage of the shooter, which was published on the front page of the Daily Telegraph on 27 May 2003, under the headline ‘PERFECT CRIME’. It was the police’s last hope, and when they got no response from the public the investigation fizzled out. It was hard to think of a motive, once the jealous lover angle was exhausted. Puketapu was, in his own words, ‘a good person, you know, and I don’t do anything irrational to anyone. And pose any irrationalities to anyone really.’

Three years later, police received information that Dallas Fitzgerald, son of Felix Lyle, then president of the Bandidos, might have been the intended target of the shooting. He was interviewed on 11 August 2005, along with his father, and confirmed he’d been in JB’s at the time, with two friends named Paul and Mark, whose surnames he didn’t know. Fitzgerald was dismissive of the suggestion he’d been the intended target, for several reasons. He wasn’t Maori or an Islander, for a start, and the shooter had had plenty of time to make a correct identification: ‘I saw him walking up to the window and then he just stood there and then he selected [his target]. It was definitely intentional on that person because he was only less than three feet away from him, it was a hundred per cent that’s who his target was.’

Fitzgerald had left the scene immediately, and declined to be interviewed later. In the 2005 interview police asked if he’d had disagreements with anyone in the period before 8 October 2002.

‘No,’ Fitzgerald replied. ‘Not that I can recall, no.’

‘So, you haven’t been shot at all since then?’

‘No, not at all.’

He declined a police offer of protection.

The whole thing remained a puzzle, although it produced one thing of interest. DNA found on a glove in the burning van, and assumed to belong to the shooter, was matched using the national database to DNA recovered in similar circumstances at the time of the shooting of a man named Michael Davies on the Gold Coast in April 2002. There too DNA had been found on an item recovered from a vehicle burning nearby. In that case the shooter had managed to kill his victim, and with only one shot.

The Crime Commission looked hard at the two shootings, but couldn’t match the DNA to any known person. It was thrown off the trail for a long time by the fact that someone had called a Sydney crime family from a public phone box near Davies’ home around the time of the shooting. Naturally they assumed the family were involved in the killing, and looked into this with rising hope. But in the end it turned out to have been just a coincidence.

•

Not long after the success of the Bob Ljubic murder investigation, Jubelin’s personal and professional life took a downturn. His relationship with Pamela Young broke up. She’d found it a rich and intense period of her life, but very hard. She believes a good homicide detective needs to be fearless in all sorts of ways, able to triumph over criminals and reluctant witnesses and lazy staff and bosses who don’t want to provide necessary resources and personnel. To do this often requires you to put aside personal needs, and this was something Gary was good at, but his private life suffered. It happened with many detectives, but more than most with Gary, so that it destroyed many of his relationships, not just with partners but with people he worked with, including some of his bosses. At times he seemed to view the police hierarchy as having no value except to help him with cases. ‘He’s an extremist,’ Young recalls. ‘His dedication to work was unusual even by the standards of homicide. It was like an addiction.’

When her relationship with him ended, Young felt exhausted, as though he’d taken everything she had. And yet, she acknowledges, this single-minded intensity helped make him such a good detective: ‘If I was murdered, he’s the one I’d want to work on it.’

Jubelin acknowledges he was selfish during this period and should have paid more attention to his personal life. He knew he was lucky to be in a relationship with such an impressive woman and has great memories of their time together.

•

In February 2006, Jay Hart went on trial for the murder of Evelyn Greenup at Bowraville, as recommended by the coroner back in 2004. Jubelin, Jason Evers and Luke Rankin went up to Port Macquarie to support the witnesses, for whom simply attending a court was difficult enough even without the traumatic nature of this particular trial. Jubelin spoke to the community beforehand, explaining what it would entail. One of the people in the audience, a thirty-six-year-old Aboriginal woman, was not from Bowraville. She was from the other side of the country, and found herself intrigued by Jubelin, far more than she’d ever thought she’d be by a cop.

Tracy Eastman was born in 1970 in a place just about as far from the big cities of the south-east as you can get: the north-west corner of Australia. As a small child she lived on Tarmla Station, near Shark Bay, where her father was a station manager and her Aboriginal mother a shearers’ cook. Later the family moved to Useless Loop, where they lived in a shack with a dirt floor, finally settling in the mining town of Tom Price when Tracy was seven. At the age of fifteen she realised she wanted to be a psychologist, and eventually became the first Aboriginal person in Australia with a clinical psychology PhD. Frustrated by the limited opportunity to improve things by seeing individual patients, she decided to create intervention programs for whole communities, so that far more people might be helped. She began her own company and now works around Australia, training mental health workers and helping communities with her team. She has won awards for her research and her work, and her programs have been adopted by the Canadian government.

In 2004 she was asked to assist the Bowraville community, which was still devastated by the unsolved murders of thirteen years earlier. When Eastman first drove into Bowraville, she was struck by its physical beauty but shocked by the extent of trauma in the community, which still referred to time as being before the murders or after them. Eastman was involved in intense part-time work there and, as the trial approached, she returned to help the people cope with what was about to happen.

She heard that the detectives who had reinvestigated the murders were to meet with the victims’ relatives at the Bowraville Health Outpost. She went along and was impressed by Jubelin, who spoke clearly about the way the trial would proceed, and warned that information relevant to the other murders would not be admitted. The people obviously knew and respected this officer, something Eastman had never seen before from an Aboriginal community. She left the meeting curious about the white policeman who seemed to care.

The trial’s outcome was a bitter disappointment. When the jury delivered its verdict of not guilty, Jubelin was shattered. Normally he is a stoical person, but this, after all the hard work and the long years, was devastating. He didn’t rant and rave, but he went deep into himself and didn’t emerge for some time. He felt as if no one understood what had happened during the trial, and how wrong the verdict was. When he got back to Chatswood Police Station, well-meaning colleagues joked about whether he’d enjoyed his four-week holiday up the coast. Jubelin just laughed, unable to explain what he’d been through. The only colleague who understood was his friend and workmate Jason Evers, but for some reason they both still don’t understand, it took a year before they could even begin to talk to each other about it. Something about the Bowraville investigation had affected them deeply.

The only person he could talk to was Tracy Eastman, who’d returned to Perth. Over the next months they had a series of long phone conversations, and she soon realised he was an unusual man: most people tend to favour a justice ideology or a welfare one, but Gary was somewhere in the middle. And it was not just talk: she’d spoken with members of the victims’ families at Bowraville, and discovered how much they admired him. One of her transcontinental phone conversations with Gary went for two hours but seemed to last only five minutes. Eastman recalls wryly, ‘It was then we knew we were in trouble.’ They lived three thousand kilometres apart, and neither could move. It was not a good basis for a relationship—but they proceeded to embark on one anyway.

•

Glen Browne kept working on Liz Falconer. She claimed Terry had been saying she had informed on him, and said she was afraid for her own life. She had responded by telling people he was an informant, back in 2001, and realised he might get beaten up in jail as a result of what she was telling people. But she hadn’t wanted him killed. In fact, she thought he could look out for himself—he was a violent man who had broken various of her bones during their marriage. Finally, in 2005, Liz admitted she’d met Andrew Perish in 2001 at a pub near Penrith, and showed him the police running sheet that indicated Terry might be prepared to give information about the Rebels’ drug dealing. She’d been denying this for four years, so it was an important addition to the case.

Then, in late 2005, came another big break. An informant got in touch with Glen Browne and told him where Anthony Perish was hiding out. Given that police had been unable to locate Perish for fourteen years, it was tremendous news. Perish was living on a semi-rural block leased from the Department of Infrastructure and Planning at West Hoxton in Sydney’s south-west. He had turned it into a secure compound with three-metre-high walls, electrified fencing, twenty-seven security cameras and a room lined with steel plate inside the house. Apparently this was common knowledge among many of the crooks of western Sydney—a member of the Rebels was living next door—but none had mentioned it to police for fear of Perish.

Glen Browne decided that, rather than moving straight in, he would try to milk the situation first, finding out as much as he could about Perish before arresting him. To do this Tuno again enlisted the cooperation of the New South Wales Crime Commission.

•

The commission has the power to jail people if they refuse to provide information. It can also offer them the chance to provide ‘induced’ statements, meaning anything they say cannot be used against them in a court of law. (This is different from immunity, though, as the person can still be prosecuted if evidence of an offence is obtained from another souce later.) Most people respond to this arrangement, and only a few are jailed each year for refusing to say anything.

Perhaps the commission’s greatest strength lies in its analysts, who are highly trained and adept at working out how best to use its capacity to persuade suspects to talk. One common approach is to look at the people a suspect talks to on the phone, then use phone taps to find out more about these people, and then call them in for a hearing at which they will (hopefully) reveal information of value about the suspect. In this way the commission can build up information with which to challenge the suspect when he is finally summonsed to a hearing.

All this means the commission has a different focus to a lot of police work: it is interested in finding out what happened rather than gathering evidence for a prosecution (although the former will ideally lead to the latter), and spends far more time looking at, and talking to, people who are neither suspects nor witnesses. One of the reasons its operations are secret (compared, say, with the Independent Commission against Corruption) is because so many of those it talks to have committed no crime.

The commission can only work on jobs called ‘references’, referred to staff by the management committee, consisting of the police minister and commissioner, the commission’s own commissioner and the chairman of the Australian Crime Commission. Its resources are limited—it has about one hundred staff—so it selects jobs where it feels it can make the biggest difference. With murders these tend to be cases where the police have been baffled and a fresh perspective might be productive. It had already done quite a bit of work on a number of the murders covered by Tuno, and now amalgamated them in a reference called Hampton. In total, the amount of work the commission had done and was to do on these murders was extensive—there were over a hundred hearings, involving some seventy people (many were called more than once), and recordings were made of some 180,000 phone calls. Much of this was enormously helpful to Tuno.

Attempts were made to introduce electronic surveillance to Perish’s place at West Hoxton but, due to the high level of security, without success. So in September 2006, having ascertained Perish was at home, heavily armed police surrounded the property and rushed in, with a helicopter in the air, a truck to ram the fence, and motorcycles to get officers to all the buildings in the compound as quickly as possible. There’d been concerns about the outcome, and the possibility that Perish would choose to die in a hail of bullets. But in the end he surrendered quietly. It had been fourteen years since he’d committed the drug dealing offence for which he was now arrested.

The place was pretty clean—Perish must have had other locations available to him for illegal purposes. One thing police did find in the house was a large number of photos, some of police surveillance teams. It was a glimpse—a rare one—of the scope of his operation, and of his paranoia. Police also found camouflage gear in which Perish and his associates would roam the property and adjoining land late at night.

There was great excitement among the detectives after the arrest: finally, they’d found the ghost. Perish was put in jail, and the Crime Commission proceeded to haul in him, Andrew, and family and acquaintances to question them about Falconer’s murder. But in the end they got almost nothing. The brothers certainly had little to say. Anthony appeared cool in the witness box although his stutter, which always stops when he is angry, disappeared.

Looking at all the information the commission had gathered, its analyst working on the reference—who cannot be named—decided to return to the murders of the grandparents. The analyst formed the view, based partly on Andrew’s anguish at the time and the grief shown by him and Anthony in the recent hearings, that they hadn’t killed their grandparents. The boys had loved the old folk, perhaps more than they loved their father, and there had been no financial incentive to commit murder, especially for Anthony. He had pioneered a new way to make amphetamines and reputedly would later be the first person in Australia to make ice (crystal methamphetamine), according to one informed guess eventually raking in maybe ten or fifteen million dollars from selling drugs. But even back in 1993 he was doing well, and stood to gain nothing from his grandparents’ deaths.

The analyst considered the theory that Terry Falconer had committed the murders, and wondered why he would do such a thing. There was no personal motive, so presumably he would have been paid. This made sense because the commission knew Falconer had been a very violent man, far more so than was reflected in his criminal record. He might well be hired for a murder. But this left the question of who would have paid him. The police who’d conducted the first investigation had spent a lot of time looking at Albert, but he did not have any connections with criminals, including Terry Falconer. There was one person close to the family who might have known Falconer, and this was Justin Birk Hill, the lawyer who had turned up at the house the day the bodies of Anthony and Frances Perish were found. Both men had long associations with the Gypsy Jokers. But the question of motive remained. The analyst knew Colleen Perish had continued her relationship with Birk Hill for a very long time, right through the nineties (even when she was living with David Taylor) and into the next decade. Colleen had felt desperately sorry for her mother, and hated the way her father, Albert, behaved towards Thea. Was it possible Birk Hill had decided Thea’s situation could be improved in some way by killing the grandparents?

One problem with this hypothesis was that Thea had not inherited anything after the grandparents’ death—according to their will, Albert was a beneficiary but Thea received nothing. But poring over the evidence from the time of the deaths, the analyst then found something interesting: there had been calls from the grandparents’ home to Albert on 13 June. The analyst discovered that Anthony senior had called his son and asked him to come over to the house, but Albert had said he couldn’t go because he was too busy. Was it possible the killer had forced Anthony to make the call at gunpoint, hoping Albert would come over and also be shot? Maybe there’d already been several calls, with the earlier ones unsuccessful because Albert was out. This would explain one of the mysteries of the crime scene, the evidence police had found that the killer (or killers) had drunk beer and eaten food at the house. It had struck people as macabre that the killers would shoot the old couple and hang around drinking afterwards. But maybe they’d been waiting for Albert to answer his phone?

This theory would only make sense if the couple had been killed on 13 June. This was a possibility—although the coroner had settled on 14 June as the most likely date of death, he’d acknowledged it might have occurred on one of the days either side of that.

The analyst discovered something else. According to the law of succession in New South Wales, if a number of people die in a related event, the oldest one is considered to have died first. So if Albert had gone to his parents’ house that day and been shot, even if forensics could not say who died first, he would be considered the last to die for legal purposes. This means he would have inherited his share of their estate before dying, which meant it would pass on to Thea. (Whereas if he’d died before them, the inheritence would have to go to his two sisters, with Thea getting nothing.) It seemed to the analyst that a lawyer’s mind might be detected behind the killings.

This elaborate theory explained some strange aspects of the case, but it contains some major problems. One is that, as we’ve already seen, the business was almost bankrupt, so if Albert had died, he’d have inherited almost nothing to pass on to Thea, who would have been pretty well penniless. But maybe the person who’d arranged for the grandparents to be killed hadn’t known this. And yet Justin Birk Hill presumably would have known this, as he’d been advising Anthony and Frances on their wills before they died.

Had Anthony and Andrew Perish had any suspicion of Birk Hill or Colleen? Presumably their having Falconer kidnapped rather than killed outright suggested a desire to question him about who had paid him to commit the murders. How had Birk Hill reacted to the abduction? He was living in Adelaide at the time, and the commission had no idea if he’d reacted at all. But they did find that a fortnight before his murder, Terry Falconer had been visited in jail by two Gypsy Jokers up from Adelaide. Maybe this was related to the fact that he’d been interviewed by officers reinvestigating the grandparents’ murders—maybe the Jokers had been sent to tell him to keep quiet.

Then the analyst looked at the movements of Colleen Perish, Birk Hill’s long-time girlfriend, and found she’d got on a plane within a fortnight of Terry Falconer’s abduction, and had lived overseas ever since, although she visited Sydney from time to time. Was this departure just a coincidence, or had she had something to do with her grandparents’ murder too? Intelligence emerged to suggest Colleen had let something slip at a family meeting soon after Falconer’s disappearance that might have caused Andrew to think she was involved.

Like everyone else who’d examined the deaths of Anthony and Frances Perish, the analyst was confused. Looked at logically, there was no explanation for the deaths. Looked at illogically—assuming the person or people who’d arranged them had had a flawed idea of the circumstances—you could come up with several theories. This was one of them.

I stress that there is absolutely no evidence that either Justin Birk Hill or Colleen Perish had anything to do with the murders of Anthony and Frances Perish. However, as we shall see later, there is evidence that Anthony (junior) and Andrew Perish might have believed they had commissioned the murders, and that these had been carried out by Terry Falconer.

And then, after the excitement of Anthony’s arrest, things went wrong. In a great twist of fate, the police who’d investigated him back in 1992 were unavailable to give evidence and the prosecution couldn’t proceed: six months after he was arrested, the matter was effectively dropped. In March 2007 Perish was a free man again, still without a criminal record.

In another surprise, Andrew was arrested the following month, charged with manufacturing amphetamines. Police had discovered not one but two meth labs he was running. The main one was inside a locked forty-foot shipping container, itself inside a locked shed on a rural property at Theresa Park. It was a big set-up, complete with two hundred litres of chemicals and a pill press capable of producing five hundred ecstasy tablets a minute. During their investigation, police had managed to break into both shed and container, examine them, and depart without leaving any traces. Now they went in with the Chemical Operations Unit from the Drug Squad and shut the lab down.

They found another lab in the back of Andrew’s business premises, South Western Produce, Camden, where Daley had gone with a wire five years earlier. Also on the premises were three hidden guns, including a shortened pistol in a filing cabinet near the front counter.

Perish told the court he’d made the drugs in order to pay a tax bill he couldn’t afford because an employee had stolen a large amount of cash and stock from him. (The pistol must not have been much of a deterrent.) In fact his affairs had been rocky for some time. In July 2006 he’d been to the Federal Court to stop the winding up of his company because it hadn’t paid a tax bill of $85,945. On that occasion Perish said he’d been experiencing unspecified personal problems because his wife was pregnant, and had not been giving his full and proper attention to the management of his company’s affairs. He’d paid his bill in full, and the winding up was stopped.

Now the court was told his only recent conviction had been for stalking and intimidation of an unnamed victim earlier that year, for which he’d received a two-year good behaviour bond. He pleaded guilty to the drug manufacture charges and got a relatively short sentence—the police hadn’t actually found many drugs—of a minimum of three years and four months. The earliest he could be free was August 2010.

Meanwhile Gary Jubelin was still at Chatswood, recovering from the disappointment of the Bowraville trial. He had continued to stay in touch with the victims’ families and do what he could to help them. A significant achievement occurred in December 2006, when the state government, at the urging of the Bowraville community and its supporters, modified the previous ‘double jeopardy’ law, which held that someone could not be tried twice for the same murder. It would now be possible, if certain criteria were met, to retry Jay Hart for the killing of Clinton Speedy or Evelyn Greenup—or preferably both. This was important because one of the problems with the aftermath of the Bowraville murders had been the decision by a judge back in 1993 that Jay Hart could not be tried at the same time for both murders. This was disappointing as the circumstances were so similar that many believed a joint trial would have increased the chance of a conviction. Now, thirteen years later, there was a chance such a trial might finally be held. Jubelin wrote a report recommending that the police approach the Director of Public Prosecutions to ask the Court of Criminal Appeal to approve such a prosecution.

It still upset him not just that someone had killed three children, but also that the initial investigation had not been conducted well, and the rest of the justice system had—to his mind—proceeded to let down the children’s memories. Other police were not upset; in fact, some colleagues criticised him, if not to his face, for persisting with Bowraville. But Tracy Eastman was impressed, and their long-distance relationship continued to gather strength.

5

FEAR

There is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother.

One of Tuno’s distinguishing features was the number of witnesses the detectives eventually persuaded to give evidence, despite the danger this created for them and those near them. In each case the motive was different. For one person, as we’ve seen, it was redemption. For another, it was fear.

Before arresting Anthony Perish in September 2006, police had discovered he was in frequent contact with two men nicknamed Larabee and Redmond. They had no luck identifying Redmond, but did discover that Larabee (named after an agent in Get Smart) was David Taylor, former boyfriend of Colleen Perish. Photos they obtained of Taylor showed a clean-cut man who resembled the witnesses’ descriptions of one of those who’d abducted Terry Falconer. Naturally this interested Tuno a lot. The detectives knew from the descriptions that neither Anthony nor Andrew had been among the kidnappers, but until now they’d had no idea who any of the three were. In fact, they’d wondered if the men had been brought in from interstate to do the job. Now they thought Taylor might be one of Anthony’s crew.

But they were wrong. They investigated Taylor’s background and found he was clean, and had not abducted Terry Falconer. Yet he’d lived with Colleen Perish for many years and had a long relationship with the rest of the family, including Anthony, who continued to be in touch with him after leaving jail in March 2007. In fact, Perish moved into Taylor’s flat for three months.

Glen Browne and the analyst at the Crime Commission decided Taylor might be able to tell them more about the murder of the Perish grandparents. They summonsed him to appear at the commission where, on 2 November 2006, he told them very little. Over the next year they started talking to members of his family. The Perishes were upset when they learned about this and started applying pressure from their side. Anthony Perish sent two of his employees to Taylor’s workplace and his parents’ homes to intimidate him, and them. This had the opposite effect to that hoped for—Taylor came to believe his life was in danger, and agreed to become a police informant and disappear. The Crime Commission called him in again, on 21 November 2007, and later that month he provided police with a lengthy statement. It was another big break in the Tuno investigation. The following account of Taylor’s time with the Perishes is taken largely from the evidence he later gave in court, but it reflects information he gave to Tuno in late 2007.

Taylor met Colleen Perish in 1986 while studying accounting at TAFE. She was attractive, slim and about 152 centimetres tall, with long hair. (Taylor himself cannot be described here as he is living under a new identity at a secret location.) They began seeing each other and Colleen took him home to Leppington one night. Halfway through dinner, the police raided the house. That was his introduction to the Perish family. He must have found it interesting, because the friendship with Colleen persisted, even when he learned the brothers were involved in dealing with stolen property and selling drugs. Taylor became friendly with Andrew, but not Anthony. Before long he was living with Colleen.

On the evening of 15 June 1993, Taylor was at home alone in Brighton-Le-Sands when Thea Perish rang and told him the grandparents had been killed. When Colleen came home he passed on the news and she broke down and cried. They drove over to Leppington and joined the other relatives, including Andrew, who Taylor recalled ‘running up the driveway, crying and screaming . . . He was very upset.’

Over the next few years, Taylor also became friendly with Anthony, socialising with him and sometimes Matthew Lawton. He spent a lot of time with the Perish family—Colleen has a strong personality, and was known as the family ‘Queen’—and there were many gatherings at which members discussed who might have killed the grandparents.

In 1998 Taylor received a call from a woman he knew saying she’d just heard Terry Falconer was the person who had killed Anthony and Frances Perish. It was hearsay at several removes: her husband had heard it from a man who’d heard it from his neighbour in Wells Street, Macquarie Fields (where Terry and Liz Falconer had their home). Taylor told Colleen, and a few nights later they visited Anthony, who was staying at the Sheraton on the Park in the city, the hotel of choice for many criminal visitors to Sydney. They told him what they’d heard but refused to disclose the source. This seems to have been the point from when Anthony began to brood on Falconer as his grandparents’ killer.

Taylor and Colleen’s relationship ended in 2000, but Taylor and Anthony Perish remained friends, and Taylor often visited Perish’s place in north Turramurra, where he’d moved after living for some years in a waterfront house in Hunters Hill.

They would also go out for meals together, and in March 2001 went to a restaurant in Double Bay, a meal Taylor later described in court. During the conversation, Perish asked Taylor if he would ask a relative who was a police officer for some items of uniform. Taylor said he would, although he didn’t, and later told Perish the answer had been no. He’d been afraid to reject the request directly—despite the friendship, Taylor retained a fear of Perish’s potential for violence, which sometimes manifested itself in a bizarre fashion. In one incident in 2005, Perish took Taylor to a shed in western Sydney and held him captive there for three days. Perish seems to have enjoyed his friendship with Taylor but at times become nervous at just how much Taylor knew about his criminal activites.

By then Perish was living at the property in West Hoxton. Once when Taylor visited, a man named Redmond was there too, a tough guy about Perish’s age who worked for him as a sort of enforcer. The three men discussed the Perish grandparents’ deaths. Perish had copies of documents from the inquest, and raised the possibility that his sister Colleen and the lawyer Justin Birk Hill had been involved.

Tuno and the Crime Commission were very interested when Taylor told them this in late 2007. It strengthened the possibility Colleen and Birk Hill might be the ‘missing link’ between Falconer and the Perish grandparents’ deaths, at least in Anthony’s imagination. But if Falconer had been kidnapped in order to be questioned about this, why was Anthony still in the dark in 2007?

Taylor said Perish and Redmond seemed to feed off each other’s capacity for violence. In 2006, when he was having a meal with them at the Lavender Blue Café in McMahons Point, Perish said to Redmond, ‘Should we tell him?’

‘Yes.’

‘We did it,’ he said to Taylor.

‘Did what?’

‘Killed Falconer.’

‘Bullshit. Who killed Falconer?’

‘Me and Undies [Andrew Perish], and Redmond was one of the kidnappers. We killed him at Redmond’s mother’s property up the coast.’

Taylor looked surprised, and then the conversation took an even stranger turn.

Perish said to Taylor, ‘What, you did it?’

‘Do what?’

‘Did you kill Falconer?’

‘Oh yeah,’ he said, going along with what he assumed was a macabre attempt at humour, ‘I killed Falconer.’

At which point Redmond produced a dictaphone and turned it on to record the conversation.

Taylor didn’t know if they were joking or not, but he felt shocked. He went outside to have a smoke, and when he returned Redmond asked him if he’d ever felt like killing himself after his separation from Colleen.

‘Yes, it went through my mind.’

Again Redmond produced the dictaphone and tried to tape Taylor’s words.

These were not normal men, yet Taylor continued to spend time with them. They possessed a weird fascination for him.

When Anthony Perish was arrested in September 2006, he applied for bail and Taylor was asked if Anthony could live with him if bail was granted. The hope was this might find favour with the magistrate because Taylor had no criminal record. Taylor reluctantly agreed, but for a long time bail was declined.

As previously noted, in late 2006, with the Crime Commission hearings in full swing, Taylor was called in and asked to tell them everything he knew about the Perishes. There were more hearings the next year.

Anthony Perish became increasingly concerned about what Taylor might be saying. In November 2007, Taylor, his mother and his girlfriend were having lunch at the St George Rowers Club at Wolli Creek when he received a call from Redmond, who said, ‘Mate, it’s Redmond.’

‘Oh, how ya going, buddy?’

‘How are ya, you bastard, what ya up to?’

‘Oh, not much.’

‘Mate, come down the Rowers.’

‘I’m at the Rowers.’

‘We’ll be there in one minute.’

A minute later, Redmond turned up with Anthony Perish. Taylor left the women to join them, and Perish (referring to the Crime Commission) said, ‘Who do they reckon it is [who killed Falconer]?’

‘You and Undies.’

‘Oh good. Get in the car. Tell your dad [for whom Taylor worked] we’ve got to go for a road trip and we’ll be back in a week.’

Taylor declined the offer. It was around this point that he seemed to realise he might be in need of police protection.

After Taylor told police he would give them everything he knew, he was taken up the coast and interviewed for two days. Then he changed his identity and moved. Soon after this his father was contacted by a stranger asking after his son’s whereabouts. The father refused to say, and presently there was an arson attack on his golf buggy in the carport next to his house, causing $9,000 damage.

Taylor was able to provide Tuno with valuable information about the Perishes in general, including—as we’ve seen—Anthony’s request for a police uniform before the Falconer murder, and the existence of Redmond and his role in the abduction. The general picture of Anthony he gave, based on his long acquaintance, was chilling, but it was these last details that were most useful in building the case against Terry Falconer’s killers.

At first glance, the main advances by Tuno had had little to do with the work of the police themselves; instead they had involved the decision by Ted Daley to come forward in 2002, and the decision by the unnamed informant to tell the detectives where Anthony Perish was living in 2006. But both those decisions would almost certainly not have been made without the police activity. Daley was uncertain of his future, but if Glen Browne and Luke Rankin had not called on him that day in September 2002, he might never have talked to the police. And the informant who gave up Anthony Perish’s address in 2006 took that risk because he was aware of Browne’s enduring interest in the case. The detectives of Tuno had hung on by their fingernails in the hope—maybe the faint hope—that something would come up. And it had. And, of course, they’d made the best of every break they’d got, spending a year convincing Tod Daley to sign a statement, conducting extensive surveillance on Anthony Perish once they learned his location, and identifying David Taylor as a potential witness and persuading him to come over. These achievements came from extraordinary skill, patience, and persistence.

•

Gary Jubelin had been constantly applying to return from his position as Chatswood crime manager to State Crime Command and detective work. In July 2007 he was successful, but didn’t get a job in homicide. Instead, he went to the Gangs Squad.

By now Glen Browne had developed a brief (meaning a formal collection of evidence), which was sent to police Legal Services for an initial opinion on whether there was enough to charge the Perish brothers with conspiracy to murder Falconer.

As part of the brief, it was assumed Tod Daley would still be prepared to give evidence, but now this had to be confirmed. He had been living happily in a place far away for almost four years. He must have thought Terry Falconer’s murderers had escaped justice, and the long statement he’d provided Tuno had been consigned to a secure archive somewhere, so he was deeply unimpressed when Glen Browne and Gary Jubelin arrived at his home in September 2007. (Jubelin was there because of his previous involvement with Daley.) The detectives felt bad about asking him to give evidence after all this time, and wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d knocked them back. Several of their bosses had always said this would happen. Daley was upset at first—in fact he had the shits: it had been five years since he’d offered to help the police, and in the meantime he’d stayed out of trouble and built a new life for himself far from Sydney. But Daley was strong. He thought about it overnight, and when Jubelin and Browne returned to his house the next morning, he said, ‘I’ll finish what I started.’ It was an impressive decision: he had actually lost a lot of money through dealing with the police, sacrificing assets and having to move out of Sydney with minimal assistance. He owed them nothing legally and little enough morally, but he agreed to help, partly, Jubelin thought, because he respected the fact that Tuno had done what it had promised all those years ago, and was about to bring the Perishes to trial.

Things seemed to be picking up, but there was another blow in October 2007: Browne learned it was now his turn to rotate out of homicide. After some argument, he was told he could take Tuno with him if he could find another squad to accept it. This he decided to do, sensing that despite the progress that had been made, Tuno might still die if he left it behind. The bosses were still dubious about whether Daley and Taylor would come through in court, with one manager telling Browne he’d just been ‘chasing rabbits down holes’ for years and would never solve the murder of Terry Falconer.

Eventually they came up with a solution: Browne would move to the Gangs Squad, on Jubelin’s team, and bring Tuno with him. Jubelin would be the investigation supervisor, while Browne would continue as OIC. This was what happened, in February 2008, but only after a fairly heated argument between Jubelin and his superiors. He told them the Perishes were major criminals who had killed before and would kill again, and that in his view Tuno was within six months of arresting them, if only the investigation could be beefed up. The bosses had heard this before, and were again sceptical. Jubelin stormed out of the meeting, but eventually returned and was told the Gangs Squad would take the investigation. Browne moved across, on the condition that he first used his accrued leave, which was considerable. John Edwards was seconded to assist, and Jubelin was told he had either to finalise a brief for the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) or prepare a report to the coroner saying police had been unable to solve the crime. Either way, after seven years the bosses were sick of Tuno and wanted it wrapped up.

This arrangement enabled Tuno to survive, but it led to one unfortunate outcome. Compared to some investigation supervisors, Jubelin was a very hands-on operator, and Glen Browne—who had made major advances in the investigation in the years Jubelin was away from it—came to resent this. Eventually the two men fell out, although they worked together effectively to the end.

Soon they received some good news: police Legal Services had considered Browne’s brief and thought that with the evidence of Daley and Taylor, there was enough to charge Anthony and Andrew Perish with conspiracy to murder. It wasn’t as good as murder, but it was a start.

Jubelin was still engaged with Bowraville, although things didn’t look good on that front. In June 2007 the DPP had told the victims’ families that there was not enough ‘fresh and compelling evidence’ (as required by law) to apply for a retrial of Jay Hart, despite the overturning of the old double jeopardy law. The families, backed by Jubelin, embarked on a series of appeals to a succession of attorneys-general for a retrial, which have been unsuccessful to this day. As a result, the Bowraville murders remain one of the worst unsolved cases in New South Wales.

At Campbelltown, Camille Alavoine’s cancer was in remission and she was doing more and more work for Tuno. Finally she came up to Parramatta and told Jubelin she was going to apply for a transfer back to homicide. He advised against it, pointing out that if she got there it was likely she’d be allocated other jobs, but she transferred anyway, and in the event it worked out well and she was able to do even more work than before on Tuno.

One line of inquiry Tuno and the Crime Commission had been working on was the name Redmond, the man Taylor said was a close and violent associate of Anthony Perish who had been involved in the kidnapping of Falconer. But despite all their efforts, they still had no idea who Redmond might be.

On 18 March 2008, surveillance indicated Anthony Perish was on his way to Mudgee, a town several hundred kilometres west of Sydney, on the far side of the Blue Mountains, to do a concreting job. Two detectives from the Gangs Squad were sent to the town, where they were to call on motels with a photo of Perish, trying to locate him. They arrived at the first motel, approached the counter and were just about to announce themselves when Perish walked in. Making themselves scarce, they followed him around. Eventually he headed out of town, along a road so remote it would soon have become obvious he was being followed. The detectives dropped off and returned to Sydney.

Later a detective made the rounds of the local concrete companies, asking if they’d done a job for anyone in the area into which Perish had been heading. At one plant he was told, ‘We thought you guys would be coming to speak to us.’ A driver described how he’d delivered a load to a remote site on Aarons Pass Road, Carcalgong, east of the town. As he’d been backing the truck over the formwork, the rear wheels had started to sink. He’d seen a cavity, and been told by the two men at the site that there were storage tanks beneath the ground. But from the position of the hole, it was clear there was actually some sort of chamber beneath where the slab was to go. Presumably Perish’s intention was to cut a hole through the concrete into the space below once the slab was poured.

Dectectives went up in a police aircraft and flew over the area, and it was easy to spot the property where a shed was being built on a big concrete slab. The obvious inference was that the place was intended for purposes of badness, possibly as a meth lab—there was no other reason to build a shed at such a location. The police learned that the property belonged to someone named Brad Curtis, a name that meant nothing to them.

Still, Mudgee was another step forward: in seven years, Tuno had not been able to link Anthony Perish to any contemporary crime, thanks to the wall of fear that surrounded him, but the concealed chamber clearly indicated serious criminal intent. With this development, Tuno was given more officers, and a major surveillance operation was launched and continued for months. Police identified one of the men working at Mudgee with Perish as a bikie and amphetamine cook recently released from prison.

Officers would be dropped off along the dirt road several kilometres from the site at night, and walk in to conduct covert operations, often in the freezing cold. One night some of the detectives, along with members of the State Protection Group, went in to inspect the shed, which was almost finished, to try to work out the dimensions of the basement. This proved impossible with the equipment they had, in part because another slab had been poured over the original one. The doors had not yet been placed on the shed, so no access hole to the chamber below had been cut.

The detectives hoped that if they kept the shed under surveillance, eventually they’d be able to catch Perish and others cooking meth there. Once they were arrested for that, Tuno might be able to put pressure on the colleagues to roll and tell them about the Falconer murder. This is one of the standard ways detectives get people into jail: by sacrificing smaller convictions to get greater ones.

Things were looking up. Tuno was now engaged on the task of preparing the brief of evidence that would go to the Director of Public Prosecutions, who would make the final decision on whether to charge the Perishes over Terry Falconer’s murder.

Tuno investigated the background of Brad Curtis, the man who owned the Mudgee property, but learned little. Much admired in his local community, he lived an apparently blameless life in Newcastle and had no criminal record. He taught boxing at the Police Boys Club and went cycling with friends on the weekend. The only hint that he might not be what he seemed was that he’d worked for some years in the security industry at Kings Cross, which was well known for its links to criminals. But that had been years earlier.

Curtis clearly had some sort of connection to Anthony Perish, but maybe it extended no further than allowing himself to be used as a front for the property purchase. The police would ask him about this at some point, but decided not to do anything yet. If he was more involved than they knew, they didn’t want to tip him off that he was under suspicion.

Now Tuno got another break, although this one, like the others, would require much patience and work before it bore fruit. In June 2008 a member of the public approached a police officer he knew and said he was willing to provide information about the Falconer murder. The man was Tony Martin, then in his forties, and detectives met him in a quiet spot in a car park in south Sydney. He told them Brad Curtis was the man who had been contracted by Anthony Perish to kidnap Terry Falconer. And there was more. Curtis, the detectives realised as Martin went on, was someone they knew already—Perish’s muscle, the man named Redmond. Martin said he’d done the kidnapping with two other men, Jake Bennie and Craig Bottin (aka Skitz, because of his violent mood swings). This was just about the final bit of the jigsaw.

Martin’s story, much of which came out later in court, was that he’d first met Curtis in 1997 when they worked in security together at a bar in Kings Cross. The men were soon friends, with Martin becoming something of a big brother to Curtis, who’d been in the army and had an interest in firearms. Around 1998, Martin was promoted to duty manager at the bar and a security company was hired to look after the door. They kept the old workers but paid them less, and Curtis resigned to start his own security business. In 1999 he and Martin went into business together and for a while did well, providing security at pubs and stores around Sydney. Jake Bennie was one of their staff.

Not long after Terry Falconer was abducted in 2001, Curtis and Bennie were out drinking, and called in on Martin, who was working at a bar. Curtis said to him, ‘Did you hear about the bloke being abducted from the panel beater’s shop by the police?’

‘Yeah.’

‘That was Jake, Skitz and me that did it.’

Curtis described how they’d stolen the plates off a real police car and replaced them after the job—he’d been hoping someone might have spotted the rego number while they were at Wreck-A-Mended, and reported the police number. When they got Falconer into the back of the car, Curtis said, he’d put up a violent struggle, and Curtis had hit him too hard and killed him. ‘I really fucked up. I was only supposed to take him to somebody else to be tortured. I fucked up.’

Martin was surprised by this—at that stage Falconer’s body hadn’t even been found—and he didn’t know what to say. The conversation petered out and Curtis and Bennie left. In a later conversation, Curtis told Martin he’d done the abduction for Steve (Anthony Perish), who Martin knew as a customer in one of the bars he’d worked at. Curtis said he’d been worried about Steve’s reaction when he learned Falconer was dead, but all he’d said was it didn’t matter as Falconer would have ended up ‘like this’ anyway.

When the body parts turned up in the Hastings River, Martin had another conversation with Curtis, who said, ‘Yes, Steve asked me if I’d ever chopped a body before.’ Curtis explained he was still working for Steve, and was about to go up to Queensland for him. He took his car and had the upholstery replaced at a cost of $7,000. When he got back he told Martin what he’d done.

‘Are you mad?’ Martin asked.

‘It just had to be done.’

Not long after this, Curtis sold the Commodore and bought himself a Saab.

A few years later, Martin met Perish and Curtis for a meal, and heard Curtis say to Perish, ‘You couldn’t even get rid of the body parts.’

Thanks to Martin’s information, the relationship between Anthony Perish and Brad Curtis now assumed a central place in Tuno’s thinking, more important than the relationship between the Perish brothers. Anthony was the dominant personality, smart—he often stuttered because his mouth couldn’t keep up with his brain—and with no conscience. He could be charismatic, and had the ability to get his claws into people and hang on. Curtis seemed attracted to the dark side Anthony represented, and excited to be given the chance to use his army skills for criminal purposes.

Where Daley’s motive for rolling had been redemption and Taylor’s fear, Martin’s was, at least initially, a desire for reward money, even though no reward had yet been offered for information leading to the conviction of Terry Falconer’s killer. He thought all he had to do to get a reward was provide information, but it was explained to him that he would have to sign a statement and perhaps give evidence in court. He said he didn’t want to go that far—he believed Anthony Perish would kill people close to him if it was known he’d talked. For months the detectives tried to persuade Martin to speak on the record, without success.

Tuno had some new officers: Senior Constables Mario Rubelj, Nathan Surplice and Stephen Brown. As a group they were young and keen, and helped inject some more enthusiasm into the investigation. And as well as Martin, for a while it looked like they had another informant—in August 2008, someone told Tuno that Andrew Perish had admitted to killing Falconer. Unfortunately, this source of information never provided enough to be used in court, but, like all the fruitless leads they’d chased over the years, it required a great deal of work.

Overall the case was gradually strengthening: the detectives were further heartened when they obtained a photo of Brad Curtis and showed it to David Taylor, who confirmed this was the man he knew as Redmond. It was another link in the long chain that Tuno was uncovering, which stretched from Terry Falconer’s murder to Anthony and Andrew Perish.

6

TUNO 2

Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, wither thou goest.

In August 2008, Tuno found a possible link between Brad Curtis and the attempted murder of Raniera Puketapu in JB’s Bar and Grill in 2002. They learned of a conversation between Curtis and a newspaper photographer regarding publicity Curtis was after for youths he was training at the Police Boys Club. Curtis said, ‘Now make sure there’s no photo or mention of me, okay? I don’t like any notoriety whatsoever.’

‘Front page,’ the photographer said, joking.

‘Nah, nah.’ Curtis laughed. ‘Been there before. No thanks.’

That got the detectives wondering when Curtis might have been in a newspaper before, which led their thoughts to the photograph on the front page of the Daily Telegraph showing the shooter running away from JB’s Bar and Grill. What they needed was Curtis’ DNA, to see if it matched that found in the vans near the Puketapu and Davies shootings. A sample was obtained by covert means and, sure enough, it matched. This made everyone very happy. Apart from having solved two major crimes, it was now clear Curtis was not the clean-cut family man he looked like from the outside. He was a killer, probably a hitman—just the sort of individul to have been involved in the death of Terry Falconer.

Curtis was now under surveillance, and the police became aware of a planned meeting between him and his associate Jake Bennie. On 4 September 2008 Jubelin and a few detectives from the Gangs Squad headed up to the Caltex service station and McDonald’s on the F3 expressway between Sydney and Newcastle, hoping this was the intended meeting place. They arranged for surveillance police to be there too, and were glad to see Curtis turn up. He met with a younger man, presumably Bennie, and another fellow identified afterwards as Michael Christiansen. The latter was a big man, one hundred and twenty kilos of solid muscle; they later learned he used steroids.

A sheet of paper was handed around the small group and the detectives grew worried. Tuno now suspected Curtis was a contract killer: what if the paper was the photo of a target to be killed that night? Should they move in and arrest the men? But if they did and they found nothing incriminating, they would have alerted the crooks—and the Perishes—to the fact they were under surveillance. Jubelin decided not to move, and later the police followed the men back to their homes.

The F3 meeting, following all the information provided by Martin, was something of a defining event for Tuno. The detectives now had firm evidence that the Perishes and people with whom they were closely linked were major criminals who seemed to be planning further serious badness. In other words, they posed a grave danger to the community. Jubelin met with Assistant Commissioner Dave Hudson, the head of State Crime Command (which had replaced Crime Agencies), and put this to him, and Hudson agreed. It was decided to beef up Tuno and give it formal responsibility for a number of other unsolved murders possibly linked to the Perishes. The new strike force would be called Tuno 2 and have about twenty officers.

At this stage Tuno still had little idea of the structure of Anthony Perish’s organisation. They knew he referred to it as a ‘company’, but the impression they’d built from what they knew was that it was not a formal hierarchy but more like a fluid network in which people were hired for individual jobs. This—plus the fact that Perish’s base remained unknown—made his operation frustratingly hard to track down. But from what they did know, they were certain it was significant and it was dangerous.

The new officers included Joe Doueihi, Glen Morfoot, Kaan McGregor, Andrew Tesoriero and a number of others from various squads at State Crime Command who brought with them a wide range of experience. Jubelin needed a group capable of taking on the type of criminals they were pursuing, and that’s what he got.

Detective Sergeant Joe Doueihi was an experienced homicide investigator who’d worked the tough Kings Cross beat. Glen Morfoot and Kaan McGregor were homicide detectives who had worked with many of the Tuno team before: Morfoot was known for his good legal knowledge and McGregor had a reputation as being a very focused analytical type. Tesoriero came highly recommended by Andrew Waterman, who’d worked with him before. He was glad of the chance to be part of such an unusual type of case: ‘Organised crime murders are few and far between in New South Wales, and it’s a privilege to work on them. I like the focus on crooks, the offence is not opportunistic or personal. They wake up each day to be criminals, and we wake up each day to be police. That’s interesting and rewarding.’

The disappearances and killings under active investigation by Tuno 2—in a few cases involving assistance to Queensland police—were those of Ian Draper, the witness from Andrew Perish’s murder trial, and Terry Falconer in 2001; and of Michael Davies, Benita Forster and her young son Tana Taui in 2002. These last two had been found at the foot of a waterfall on the Gold Coast, their deaths at first classified as suicide. The attempted murders Tuno 2 was looking at were of Gary Mack, an ex-bikie shot in 2001, and Raniera Puketapu in 2002. In the background, as it were, were the murders of Anthony and Frances Perish in 1993, and bikies Greg McDonald and Paul Wheeler in 1991. (Police refuse to give details about some of these murders as they remain unsolved and investigations are continuing. But all were suspected of being linked to the strike force’s targets.)

Tuno 2 set up its incident room on level fourteen of the State Crime Command offices, which had now moved to gleaming new premises in Charles Street, Parramatta. Black and white portraits on whiteboards around the room showed all the targets. Three teams were established. Glen Browne had the Falconer murder, the disappearance of Ian Draper, and the shooting of Gary Mack. Team two, led by Joe Doueihi, was looking at the shooting of Puketapu at JB’s Bar and Grill, and the Queensland murders. And Morfoot, with the ‘proactive’ third team, had the job of keeping the targets—most importantly the elusive Anthony Perish and Brad Curtis—under surveillance. In order not to alert the targets to the level of police interest, a blackout was placed on all dealings with the media. This is one reason why the biggest murder investigation in Australia’s history stayed a secret for so long.

On Browne’s team, Kaan McGregor was given the job of reinvestigating the 2001 disappearance of Ian Draper. He soon discovered that in 2007 police had been told Draper had been killed by a man who was not Andrew Perish. McGregor and others spent the next eighteen months learning more about the allegation and then investigating the alleged killer. This involved speaking with some forty people and conducting various forms of surveillance. In the end it was established the person had no link to Draper’s disappearance, or to Andrew Perish, back in 2001. In one sense this was a disappointment, but in another it was positive: building a circumstantial case involves excluding all reasonable alternative hypotheses.

The detectives also spoke with some of the other witnesses from Andrew Perish’s 1998 murder trial, where Draper had given evidence, and confirmed that more than one had been threatened, not only before the trial but after it. One witness had been followed and talked to in 2003, five years after the trial.

•

In early 2008 Tuno had completed the brief of evidence for Anthony Perish and Andrew Perish, and sent it to the DPP for a so-called sufficiency advising. The initial response from the DPP was promising, but the detectives still faced the problem of persuading Tony Martin to sign a statement and agree to give evidence in court. Until this was done, they could not arrest Anthony Perish or Brad Curtis for the murder of Terry Falconer. Martin was clearly terrified. Tuno and the Crime Commission continued their surveillance of Perish and Curtis, hoping to catch them in some criminal activity for which they could be arrested. Once they were in custody (Andrew Perish was already locked up for his drug conviction) Martin would feel safer, as would other witnesses and potential witnesses.

On 17 September 2008, surveillance showed that Brad Curtis was heading to a meeting. Jubelin had established four levels of alert to apply to targets. Level One was when they were going about their ordinary business in their normal locations. Curtis was now raised to Level Two, which meant preparations were made to interfere immediately if it looked like he was about to engage in criminal activity.

Tuno had one unmarked car on him in Newcastle, and arranged for more to be ready to shadow him in Sydney, assuming that was where he was headed. But when he reached the freeway outside Newcastle, to their surprise he turned right and went up the coast. Jubelin and Browne, down at Parramatta, jumped in a car and headed north through the heavy Friday afternoon traffic. As they drove up the expressway, the surveillance car announced Curtis had stopped at a McDonald’s and met someone.

They observed the two men go around to the boot of the unknown man’s black car, and Curtis took something out and shoved it down the front of his pants. Almost certainly it was a pistol, suggesting the other man was a criminal too. This pushed the alert status to Level Three.

Jubelin had to decide whether to wheel Curtis over (meaning stop and arrest him). Because of the strong suspicion he was carrying a gun, it would have to be a ‘tactical stop’, with heavily armed police forcing him off the road. Obviously this would soon alert all Tuno’s targets to the possibility they’d been under surveillance. Heading up the F3 in the rush hour traffic, Jubelin had to make a quick decision; he called the head of homicide and was told it was up to him.

He chose to let the crooks keep going, and they all continued driving up the Pacific Highway, the two targets together in the second man’s car. It grew late and the traffic thinned out, but Curtis and the other man kept going north; it looked like they might be heading for Queensland. Sometimes they would stop at a McDonald’s, and the cops figured they must like hamburgers; later they discovered Curtis had been taking advantage of the burger chain’s WiFi facilities to use his laptop.

Jubelin decided he needed to find out who was in the car with Curtis, and this might be achieved through a random breath test. He rang the police station at Coffs Harbour, the next big town north, hoping he’d get someone who would grasp the situation quickly. He was put onto the sergeant in charge of Highway Patrol and said, ‘Mate, this is the situation, we’re running out of time. We’ve got a contract killer half an hour away, we think he’s armed and on his way to kill someone. We want to find out who’s in the car without them knowing we’re onto them.’

‘That’s a difficult one,’ said the sergeant.

‘I’ve told you everything we’ve got. If you don’t want to do it, I’d fully understand it because there’s a great deal of risk associated with this.’

‘Mate, I get what you’re saying. I’ll do it.’ Thank Christ, Jubelin thought. ‘We’ll stop them as they come into Coffs. I’ll do it myself.’

They went through the details and Jubelin said, ‘Mate, if you’ve got a vest, could you put it on for me? It’d just make me feel better.’

The sergeant agreed.

Jubelin and Browne kept going, still half an hour behind the other car. Jubelin was on tenterhooks, expecting to get a call that a police officer had been shot, but the stop went like clockwork: Curtis’ companion was driving, and produced his licence when pulled over. As soon as the Coffs Harbour police did the breath test and let him go, they passed on his name to the detectives, who checked on the radio and found he was connected to the Russian mafia. This was interesting: the Russians were not big in Australia and hadn’t come up in the investigation before.

It was almost midnight, and the car kept travelling north. As it approached the state border, Jubelin was faced with another problem—he would lose jurisdiction the moment they crossed into Queensland. He made a call to police headquarters in Brisbane and explained they had a situation: he needed to speak urgently to their on-call person for major crime.

Through a stroke of luck, the on-call officer that night was Darren Edwards, a detective who’d worked on the Michael Davies murder on the Gold Coast. Edwards arranged for full surveillance from the moment Curtis and his companion crossed the border. He also resisted the pressure from his bosses that began as soon as they heard about the New South Wales visitors. They wanted Curtis and his companion wheeled because there was a chance he’d come to Queensland to do a hit. Fortunately Edwards, who knew all about Curtis and Tuno’s pursuit of the Perishes, was able to explain to them the importance in the bigger scheme of gathering intelligence and not moving on Curtis—and alerting him and the Perishes to the surveillance—unless absolutely necessary.

Brad Curtis did not shoot anyone on that trip. As police followed his every move, he went to the Gold Coast and visited a few nightclubs, being admitted at once and not staying long at any of them. It was as though he was expected. At 5 am he and his companion stopped at the hotel attached to Jupiter’s Casino and took a room, but left a few hours later. Police searched the room and found the packaging for a mobile phone: the identifying number had been cut out of the cardboard box and taken.

By this point Jubelin and Browne had been up for twenty-four hours and were tired and dirty. They booked into a cheap motel and got an hour’s sleep before sitting around while the local police kept them informed as Curtis and his companion visited some pubs outside of Brisbane, again not staying anywhere long. This went on until Sunday morning, when the two criminals met up with a man in Brisbane. It was Anthony Perish.

Despite their electronic surveillance of Perish, the police had had no idea he had left Sydney. They later learned he was staying at the upmarket Marriott Hotel, down by the Brisbane River. It was a quick meeting: Curtis handed Perish a package, and then he and the Russian headed off back south. The police followed Curtis all the way home, via the McDonald’s car park north of Newcastle where he picked up his car. Later investigations suggested the purpose of the trip had been to deliver drugs and pick up money owing to Anthony Perish by the managers of various businesses he owned. The Russian was along as Curtis’ bodyguard.

It was established that Anthony co-owned three pubs in Queensland. After he sold one, his share in the others would eventually end up with the New South Wales Crime Commission, which is responsible for seizing property purchased with the proceeds of crime.

7

THE MAN FROM MELBOURNE

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die.

It was an unusual aspect of Tuno as a murder investigation that as it progressed, its subject matter expanded. The detectives now had three important informants, the Mudgee shed, various shootings and murders, the meeting on the F3, and Brad Curtis’ business trip to Queensland. They knew Anthony Perish, Brad Curtis and a number of associates were connected in some sort of criminal network, with links to the Rebels outlaw motorcycle gang and possibly the Russian mafia. Clearly they were major criminals involved in manufacturing and distributing methamphetamine, money laundering, and acts of extreme violence. And yet, with the exception of Andrew Perish (who seemed to have operated independently of his brother most of the time), they’d managed to avoid almost all police scrutiny over many years: law enforcement intelligence groups around the country, and specialist units such as the Drug Squad, knew almost nothing about them. The reason for this seemed to be that, like most really effective organised criminals, they terrified people so much that few were prepared to talk to the police.

After the meeting on the F3, Tuno started to watch Michael Christiansen, the big man they’d seen there, following him to a Kennards self-storage unit at Camperdown, an inner city suburb near his home in Annandale. Checks with Kennards showed it was leased under the name Michael Euros. On 26 November 2008 police began surveillance on the shed. In December they saw Christiansen place what looked like a bag of powder inside.

Jubelin still didn’t want to reveal his hand, so he asked the Drug Squad to tip the place over the next time the camera showed Christiansen at the lock-up. Mick Vaneyk from the Drug Squad, and Peter Robinson, another Drug Squad detective seconded to Tuno, led the team that arrested Christiansen on 16 December. He was leaving with a backpack containing almost three kilos of methamphetamine, with a street value of over $700,000. So far as he was concerned, it was a simple drug bust and had nothing to do with Brad Curtis or the Perishes.

Once Christiansen was gone, the officers of Tuno moved in and searched the lock-up. While they were doing this, a friend of Christiansen’s named Marcelo Urriola arrived in his black SS Commodore ute, and he was arrested too and charged with a drug possession offence.

In the lock-up the detectives found anabolic steroids, forty-nine small bags of cocaine, $24,900 in cash, and firearms including a sawn-off shotgun. They also found a black Hedgren Urban bag containing a wallet that appeared to belong to someone named Paul Elliott of Melbourne. It contained a driver’s licence and various cards. Paul Elliott was not a name that meant anything at first, but when his name was run through COPS, Tuno saw a car he’d hired had been found burned out in Alexandria on 7 December. A detective called the Victorian police, who said Elliott, who was forty-one, was known to them—in fact, he was a serious criminal. They contacted his girlfriend, Lisa Gibson, and learned he’d gone missing during a visit to Sydney on 6 December.

It was likely Elliott had been murdered, and Tuno was given the job of solving this case too. It received no extra staff, so the brief period when it had a reasonable number of officers was now over, and once again everyone was working crazy hours. The pressure this placed on individuals and their families would continue to mount over the coming year.

Team two, under Joe Doueihi, was given the task of finding out what had happened to Paul Elliott. Doueihi and Matt Fitzgerald flew to Melbourne and talked to Victorian police to learn about Elliott’s background and his movements in the weeks before his disappearance. They were told he had been a childhood friend of David Moran, the Melbourne underworld boss, and was the nephew of drug dealer Dennis ‘Fatty’ Smith. His father was also a serious crook, although Paul had seen little of him while growing up. After a failed attempt at reconciliation when he became an adult, he had changed his surname to his mother’s maiden name.

Although a bit of a loner, he’d been one of the leaders in the attempted robbery of Sigma’s Croydon plant in Melbourne’s south-east in 1996. The target had been precursor chemicals that would have enabled the manufacture of drugs worth more than $166 million on the street. The planning had been meticulous: the gang had studied the heist film Heat for ideas, and over a period of nine months had broken into the factory more than twenty times to find out where everything was and learn how to bypass the security systems, so things would run smoothly on the night of the robbery. Thirty thousand dollars had been spent on equipment.

On the big night, they wore Telstra uniforms and used a truck with Telstra logos on the outside. When they arrived, they cut the chain at the gate and replaced it with one of their own after they drove in, so as not to arouse suspicion. Elliott was armed, and everyone had a two-way radio. Their only problem was that the chemicals were in a big safe, and none of them had experience opening safes. So a few months earlier, they’d approached an outsider who had the necessary expertise, and he’d kindly offered to help—after he’d told the police everything that was happening. He was there on the night, along with an undercover cop posing as a backup safe man. It ended badly, and Elliott was sentenced to five years.

The Tuno detectives spoke with Elliott’s girlfriend, Lisa Gibson, who was thirty-three. The Crime Commission became involved and there were many hearings involving her and others who had known Elliott. Gibson said she’d met Paul after he got out of jail, and they’d begun a relationship that had seen them move to Queensland for a few years. Elliott worked as a stonemason when not dealing in drugs, and on their return to Melbourne had lived with her and her children in Oak Park. She described him as a fitness enthusiast who didn’t take drugs and drank very little. He was fanatical, she thought: ‘Paul would cut up SIM cards, I’ve seen him do this quite a few times. He was very meticulous and would burn documents that had his name on them. I’m not sure why he would cut up the SIM cards or burn the documents.’ He sometimes carried a pistol in his ute, and told her it was to protect himself. He was always busy and stressed.

In 2008 he visited Sydney a few times each month but didn’t seem to like the place and often came home in a black mood. ‘There’s trouble with the Lebanese,’ he once told her, ‘they’re taking over Sydney. They’re the ones with all the guns.’ Before one of his trips he said, ‘There’s trouble with them, but I’m going to sort the problem out.’ She assumed a person of foreign background had done something to him.

On 5 December 2008 he’d rung and asked her to meet him outside his grandmother’s place. As she was approaching she saw Paul coming away from the house in his black ute. She turned and followed, and found him parked in the street out back of the house, talking with an Asian man who had short dark hair and was about thirty years old. Lisa was curious about the man, as Paul had complained about meeting Asians up in Sydney who did not speak English and laughed at him. When Paul spotted her, he told her to go back to the house.

Later he joined her there, and said he had to take the Asian man back to the airport. Paul needed go to Sydney the next day, and asked Lisa to come with him. She knew he’d been chasing up a big debt, which she thought might be worth about half a million dollars. He’d said, ‘It’s taken a while, but it’s coming back to me.’ But he was agitated, and added, ‘If this doesn’t go right, you might not see me again.’ She agreed to go on the trip with him.

At 9.30 pm Elliott hired a black Holden Statesman from Budget Rent a Car so they could get an early start the next day. On Saturday morning, he drove his ute to a factory unit he used and she followed in the hire car. At the lock-up he took something about the size of a gun, wrapped in an old towel, out of the tray of the ute and put it in the Statesman.

They made good time up the Hume Highway and by mid-afternoon had reached Sydney, where they checked into the Mercure Hotel at Wolli Creek, near the airport. Elliott had stayed there before and always liked to have the same room, 804. Fortunately it was free this time. He had been in a good mood during the long drive, but once they were in the room he became preoccupied. After half an hour, he went out. He was wearing a grey Armani T-shirt, dark grey Nike running shorts and thongs, and carrying a black shoulder bag. As he left he said to Lisa, ‘I’ll be back in an hour.’

He wasn’t, and with increasing desperation she tried to call him over the next twenty-four hours. Relatives she contacted back in Melbourne hadn’t heard from him either. She considered calling the police, but ‘I thought that if Paul came back and I had called the police he would go off, as Paul doesn’t like the police.’ So she stayed at the hotel until Monday morning and then, not knowing what else to do, bought a ticket and flew back to Melbourne.

The Tuno detectives also spoke with Elliott’s mother, Sue, who confirmed he was a loner. ‘Paul and I don’t actually talk,’ she said. ‘Paul and I have a troubled relationship . . . Paul seems to have a chip on his shoulder and holds some resentment towards me.’ He suffered from depression: ‘Paul is a big guy and can be very intimidating, there have been times I have been quite scared of him.’ She said it wasn’t unusual for him to go off on his own, but the fact he’d left Lisa at a hotel in another city was out of character. She’d spoken to Lisa and, ‘I was trying to push up on having the matter reported to police but was also reluctant as was Lisa because Paul might have been up to something.’

The detectives were told Elliott had a rural property near Melbourne, but none of his family and friends would say where it was. Eventually Lisa Gibson provided the Northwood address—the place was in someone else’s name—and told them that when she’d visited soon after Elliott disappeared, the house had been ransacked. Someone must have suspected or known Elliott was dead and come looking for drugs. When the police visited later, the place had been turned over again: this time insulation had been removed from the roof cavity and holes had been punched in the walls, so the cavities there could be searched. None of which helped answer the question: where was Paul Elliott now?

•

On 20 December 2008, Jubelin prepared an updated plan for Tuno. He considered whether developments since the original plan—essentially the arrest of Christiansen and what he hoped was the imminence of Martin signing a statement—should change their approach. There were three options. The first was to talk to Christiansen and Urriola about the disappearance of Elliott, but he was reluctant to do this yet. They might exercise their right to silence and he would have gained nothing and tipped his hand.

The second option was to pull in all the targets immediately, but Tuno still did not have sufficient evidence to charge them all, so if no one rolled, some would walk free. This meant going with option three: continuing as they were for the moment, trying to gather more evidence.

Nevertheless, it was likely they would have to make the arrests soon, if they detected the targets about to commit a crime. So Jubelin began to plan how they would do this. What he wanted was to create the impression Tuno knew even more than it did about their activities. So, when the time came, Tuno would arrest all its targets at once, and confront them with everything it had, in the hope of creating a sense of panic in at least some of them. He decided the questioning of Christiansen and Urriola about Elliott’s murder would be more effective if conducted as part of this bigger operation, which would be the police equivalent of a major military assault. The idea was to rattle the targets so badly that one or more would turn on their associates.

The need to act came very soon. Colleen Perish returned to Sydney for Christmas and was still there in January, when Tuno learned of a coded communication between Anthony and Curtis that appeared to refer to her. There was also intelligence suggesting Colleen believed Anthony wanted her dead. As her life might now be in danger, Jubelin decided the time had come to arrest Anthony Perish and Brad Curtis.

Tony Martin’s affairs had been put in order and he signed his statement not long after the New Year. It was an irrevocable step for him and those close to him, because even if he later refused to give evidence in court, the statement’s existence would become publicly known and his life would be in danger. The next step was for him to move. He disappeared and has built a new life somewhere away from Sydney.

There was one other piece of unfinished business. After many months, Glen Browne had still not received confirmation from the DPP that Tuno had enough evidence to charge Anthony Perish and Brad Curtis, and to be confident they’d be refused bail. This was important, because if the men were released they would have the opportunity to intimidate or even kill witnesses and their families, and after what had happened to Terry Falconer and to David Taylor’s family, police had little doubt this would occur. Senior police put pressure on the DPP to provide what was now urgently needed advice.

8

CREEPING BARRAGE

He smote them hip and thigh.

Gary Jubelin had two plans for the arrests of Anthony Perish and Brad Curtis, a personal one and a work one. The personal one involved exercise, training hard so he would go into what he knew would be a stretch of twenty-hour days as fit as possible. He did a lot of running and some boxing and qi gong, a form of eastern meditation he’d practised for twenty years.

Then there was the work plan for what would be an enormous operation involving officers from many different sections, with the arrests of Perish and Curtis to be followed a day later by the arrests or interviewing of twenty more people, which itself would be followed by the announcement of large rewards for information about certain of the murders Tuno was investigating. The whole thing would be a bit like a creeping artillery barrage, designed progressively to strike fear into the hearts of Sydney’s criminals and their associates and families, and encourage some to roll over or otherwise give information to the police. It was clever stuff, but the coordination was going to be a big job. Apart from anything else, all the planning had to be done over the New Year holiday period.

The team came through, as always, working long hours, weekends and public holidays. Other organisations had to be prompted to greater efforts. Finally Nicholas Cowdery, the Director of Public Prosecutions, signed off on the opinion that there was enough evidence to arrest Anthony Perish and Brad Curtis, and to prevent them getting bail.

The detectives now turned their minds to just how to make the arrests. As they had no idea where Perish was, they would have to wait until Curtis—who was under physical surveillance—met up with him, in order to take them together. They were violent men, so Tactical Operations officers from the State Protection Group (SPG) would be needed, with their high-powered guns and body armour. All up, with the SPG and the surveillance crew and the Tuno detectives, a hundred officers would be involved and they would have to be ready to assemble at short notice at any time of the day or night.

The job would be even more complex because of Jubelin’s plan to interview almost twenty family members and associates of the targets the day after the two key figures were arrested. The purpose of this was to put psychological pressure on the pair, and also on Christiansen and Urriola, hopefully overwhelming them by showing just how determined the police were and how much they knew about their lives. Presumably the arrests would come as complete surprises, and Jubelin wanted Perish and Curtis to be fully aware their worlds had just collapsed. Maybe Perish would cope with this, but Curtis might panic when he learned just how much police knew about his activities, and that his home was being searched and his wife and mother interrogated. Being put inside a cell for the first time can have a powerful effect on a man.

A media plan was part of the strategy. Jubelin was after maximum publicity, and intended to release photographs of the arrests and give a stand-up interview to get word of what had happened out to the general public and associates of the targets. Crooks read the papers and watch television just like the rest of us (as do their families and lawyers), and if they thought Anthony Perish’s power had been undermined, they might be more prepared to come forward with information, especially when they heard about the rewards. In any case, a publicity blitz would be bad for the morale of the arrested men.

Jubelin drew up a set of operational orders, a document always prepared in advance of any significant police operation. It was a bit like a plan of battle, and set out the actions to occur before, during and after the arrests, and just who was to do each of them. The plan would form the basis for the briefing before the operation, and be a reference point for everyone involved, including the bosses.

Jubelin had learnt the importance of such orders back in his Hornsby days. Not long after he had returned there from the Armed Hold Up Squad, he was contacted by a woman who knew of him from a third party. She had information about a relative responsible for a recent armed hold-up. Jubelin and a junior detective went and met her, and she asked if they could arrest the person without harming him. Jubelin assured her the job would be done carefully, and she told him where the offender could be found. He applied for a search warrant, arranged for surveillance, and called the Armed Hold Up Squad for back-up. Then he prepared a detailed set of operational orders, although at the time he had no idea how important the wording would become.

He arranged a ‘form up point’ near the suspect’s home in a block of units at Dundas and conducted a briefing with all the police involved. While waiting to execute the search warrant, the junior detective spoke about how exciting it was doing real police work. Jubelin said he’d only get excited when the suspect was in custody; things can always go wrong when arresting armed offenders. At the designated time all police were in position and the operation commenced. Surveillance officers were covering the rear of the flats. The plan was for Jubelin and his partner to go to the front door, where they would knock and gain entry.

From the moment Jubelin knocked on the door, he knew it was not going to be a simple operation. The suspect on the other side of the door reacted aggressively and began abusing him. Jubelin attempted to negotiate his way into the unit, and was talking to the suspect when the man started to yell. Then came the unmistakable sound of a gunshot, followed by screams from a woman. Jubelin and his partner kicked the door off its hinges and entered the unit, where they found a man on the floor, bleeding from a wound in his chest, and a surveillance officer standing over him with his gun drawn. There was a woman crouching on the floor next to the man, crying. Jubelin and his partner tried to revive the man, but he was dead.

The surveillance officer had heard the yelling coming from the front of the unit and made a split second decision to enter through the back door to see if he could assist. The offender saw him and came at him with a knife, so the officer had shot him in self-defence.

It was a tragedy, but also a useful experience. In the subsequent coroner’s inquest, Jubelin was thankful he had prepared comprehensive operational orders, which showed he’d acted in a professional and well-planned manner. He called the dead man’s relative later on, and she just screamed and screamed at him. That night he had a few drinks with colleagues and went home and thought about quitting the cops.

The plan for the arrest of Anthony Perish and the others noted that the operation ‘would be conducted over a wide range of suburbs throughout the Sydney region and regional areas. The later phases of the operation will be conducted at various police stations and the NSW Crime Commission.’ In other words, it was huge. There were twenty-one teams, each of which would interview a different suspect or person of interest, in most cases a suspect’s wife or girlfriend. A ringbinder full of information was prepared for each interview, giving the person’s background and the purpose of questioning. Officers were matched carefully with suspects according to experience, temperament and familiarity with the target. Other teams would search six known locations and one unknown one—if an address for Anthony Perish could be found. The known locations were the homes of the other targets, plus the shed at Mudgee.

The strike force of twenty people had to race to prepare to put the plan into action. It needed to work though a January weekend but overtime was denied. Nearly every one worked the weekend anyway. The plan was to be ready to go from 21 January, but at 11 pm three days before that, surveillance revealed Curtis was to meet Perish somewhere the next day. Obviously it was time to move. Some officers stayed up all night to bring the operation forward.

On the morning of 19 January 2009, a Tuesday, surveillance cars followed Curtis as he left his home in Newcastle in his yellow Mercedes and headed south. As he drove down the expressway, the SPG sought permission from the highest levels of the police force for their part in the operation, which might involve running into a public place with powerful weapons. By this time Jubelin was at Chatswood, guessing that the meeting would be somewhere on the North Shore, and learned permission had not yet been given. He decided that Tuno detectives would have to make the arrest themselves, but approval did come through for the SPG at the last minute.

The surveillance vehicles saw Curtis stop in Crows Nest and get out of his car, and meet Anthony Perish. The men were together for only a moment, and returned to their vehicles and drove off. Jubelin was alarmed—there’d been no time to make the arrests, so if that was the meeting, they’d lost their chance. But Curtis did not turn around to go back to Newcastle. The men drove south and then turned off the Pacific Highway at McMahons Point, where they parked and went into their favourite café, Lavender Blue, on Blues Point Road. Jubelin, his spirits restored, stayed at Chatswood in a room with the coordinators from the SPG and the surveillance teams, each of them in constant radio contact with their commander in the field.

At McMahons Point the SPG parked an unmarked van out the front of the building. A few officers dressed as tradesmen entered the café, where they took seats and ordered coffee. Perish and Curtis were sitting at a table next to a big open window. With everyone in position around 11 am, Jubelin told the SPG boss it was now in his hands. The back doors of the van opened and men in body armour raced down the path towards the café, while the undercover officers already inside drew their weapons. Perish and Curtis, completely surprised, were hauled out through the window and pushed onto the ground, where their hands were secured with cable ties.

Jubelin left the Chatswood command post and drove down to McMahons Point to take delivery of the prisoners, who were still lying facedown on the ground. Police found a pistol in the glove box of Curtis’ Mercedes. The first stage of the operation had occurred successfully and, to cap things off, a television crew who’d been attending a fire at the end of the road captured the aftermath of the arrests on camera. Jubelin swears he did not light that fire.

Glen Browne and Glen Morfoot took charge of Anthony Perish, who was completely cool following the arrest. After the senior SPG officer handed him over, Browne put him in the back of a police car and they drove to North Sydney Police Station, where he was charged with Terry Falconer’s murder. Asked if he would participate in an interview he said words to the effect of, ‘I don’t know. What do you think?’ There was no interview.

Later the police searched Curtis’ home in Newcastle and in two locked double garages under the house found everything a well-equipped hitman might need. In the first were two large, padlocked toolboxes, which they opened with bolt-cutters. The top one contained several rifles, the other one an extendable baton and a bulletproof vest. In the other garage there were three more toolboxes containing pistols, a machine pistol, another vest, a silencer, various police identification patches for uniforms, many police badges, wigs, face masks and balaclavas. Three thousand rounds of ammunition were also discovered.

The police worked through the night sorting and documenting everything they found. Meanwhile, although the footage of the arrests had now appeared on television, Jubelin was refusing to talk to the media: he didn’t want to warn anyone about the next phase of the operation.

The following day, 20 January, there was a briefing at 6 am for the eighty police who were to bring in the family and associates of the two men and interview them. An operations room was set up in the Tuno office at Parramatta to coordinate the day’s activities. It would be necessary to monitor who had been brought in to police stations around the state, and determine if any useful information obtained in interviews with one person needed to be fed to officers interviewing someone else. Jubelin ran the room assisted by Kaan McGregor, selected because of his ability to think clearly and quickly under pressure. Jubelin told him at the start, ‘I’m going to be yelling at you. It’s not going to be pretty, but nothing’s going to be personal.’ Whiteboards were used to keep track of the seizures and interviews. A few of the people they wanted weren’t at the addresses they visited initially, and had to be tracked down throughout the day.

The operation began, spreading further alarm among those close to Anthony Perish and his network. No one was sure just how much the police knew—one of the men’s solicitors asked how many more murders his client would be charged with. Some of them started to think about rolling on their associates before they were rolled on themselves.

Anthony and Andrew Perish continued to decline to be interviewed. Brad Curtis was clearly rocked, and detectives John Edwards and Dave Chambers pushed him hard, knowing that the longer he was in jail, the less likely it was he’d do a deal as he toughened up. On the day of his arrest he said he’d be prepared to talk but wanted to consider his position first. This was promising, but the detectives knew from long experience of criminals that you don’t celebrate until they’ve come through.

Curtis had told detectives he had some explosives stored at his mother’s place in Lane Cove. They organised an operation to retrieve these, and Jubelin, who was exhausted and about to head home for his first decent sleep in days, told them to keep it low-key. But in the end the army’s bomb disposal unit turned up, headed by a captain in uniform, which naturally attracted the interest of local residents. Jubelin had to do more media about the explosives, which gave the story another burst of life. Then he went to sleep for a long time.

On 21 January, Jubelin launched his media blitz, holding a press conference and announcing the magnitude of Tuno and the seriousness of the crimes they were investigating. It was a big story and received good coverage, sending a clear message to suspects that police were not mucking around. The creeping barrage was well under way, and the all-important interviews with the targets were proceeding. Now it all depended on whether any of them would roll.

Terry Falconer, killed 16 November 2001

Anthony Perish’s remote property at Girvan on the New South Wales mid-north coast

The shed at Girvan, 2012

The house at Girvan

Cameras covered the entrances to the Girvan property and were monitored from the house on these screens

The search for the remains of the toolbox at Girvan

Pieces of the toolbox recovered at Girvan

Anthony Perish arrested by Tuno detectives at McMahons Point, 19 January 2009

A member of the State Protection Group at the arrest of Anthony Perish and Brad Curtis

Anthony Perish and Brad Curtis, after their arrests

Andrew Perish

Matthew Lawton

Craig Bottin

Rob Institoris

Ian Draper, disappeared 3 August 2001

Draper’s car was left outside the Rebels’ Leppington clubhouse six weeks after his disappearance

The Rebels’ clubhouse, 124 Bringelly Road, Leppington

Anthony Perish’s fortified compound at West Hoxton

Michael Christiansen, rear view

Michael Christiansen caught by police camera on the F3 in 2008, while planning the murder of Paul Elliott

Paul Elliott, killed 6 December 2008

Tuan Anh Tran

Thanawat Chudtalay

Lyle Pendleton

Jeremy Postlewaight

Marcelo Urriola

Jay Sauer

Part of Brad Curtis’ armoury

Detective Inspector Gary Jubelin

KILLERS

We have made a covenant with death,

and with hell are we at agreement.

9

DEATH OF A COOK II

Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.

On 22 January 2009 Glen Browne and John Edwards talked to Brad Curtis and he agreed to do a recorded interview, known as an ERISP (Electronically Recorded Interview of a Suspect Person). That was breaking the first golden rule for criminals arrested by police, which is: say nothing. He then broke the second, and did the interview without a lawyer. Before he started, he asked to speak to his children. He spent twenty minutes on the phone, mainly crying. Then he talked to the detectives for seven hours.

Why did Curtis, an intelligent man, do this? We don’t know, but possibly it was pride, and he believed he did not require anyone’s advice. Whatever the reason, it was exactly what the police needed. For the first time, they heard what had happened to Terry Falconer the day he died, from someone who was there.

Once Curtis had rolled, police were able to achieve some of the cascade effect they’d hoped for. They told his accomplices he was speaking with them, to try to persuade them to roll over too, in order not to deprive themselves of the discounts on sentencing provided to criminals who help police. As 2009 progressed Michael Christiansen and Jake Bennie rolled, and what follows, based on what they and Curtis told police, is the most comprehensive account of the activities of Anthony Perish’s company and its associates that we are likely to have. Essentially, Curtis was the man to whom Perish sub-contracted many of the acts of violence needed for the success of his business.

Curtis first met Anthony Perish through Tony Martin in 1997, when Curtis and Martin were doing security at the Bourbon and Beefsteak Bar in Darlinghurst Road. This establishment was started in Kings Cross in 1967 by Bernie Houghton, who had excellent connections with American intelligence and major Australian criminals such as Abe Saffron. Born in Texas, Houghton had ended up in Vietnam and, learning from his contacts that Sydney was about to become a destination for American troops on R&R, came here and opened the Bourbon, which he continued to run until his death in 2000. The bar was close to the El Alamein Fountain in Fitzroy Gardens, where a bust of Houghton now stands, the subject of occasional interest from ibises, drug addicts and other loiterers.

Although Perish was on the run in the 1990s, he would go to the Bourbon a lot and never had any trouble from the notoriously corrupt detectives at Kings Cross Police Station, who drank there for free. Curtis became friendly with Anthony and also met his brother Andrew. Curtis was an amateur motorcycle racer and Anthony Perish sponsored him to the tune of $2,000. As we’ve seen, Curtis and Martin started their own security company a few years later. They worked at places including the Vegas Hotel and the Aussie Rules Club. Curtis said that when the company got into financial trouble, Anthony Perish loaned the partners $100,000 (which Martin denies).

Jake Bennie worked for the company and became very friendly with Curtis, who was about ten years his senior and whom he soon regarded as an older brother. He found Curtis a capable operator with an army background and solid experience with firearms, in general an impressive character but also a dominating one.

The company did not last, partly because Brad Curtis was in a relationship with a woman in Newcastle and went to live there. He would visit Sydney and stay in an apartment in Oxford Street, Darlinghurst, meeting with his friends in the café below. It was there he introduced Jake Bennie to Craig Bottin. Curtis told them he was frustrated his military training was going to waste, and that he wasn’t earning enough money.

Sometimes Bottin and Bennie would stay with the increasingly irascible Curtis in the apartment and, on 6 April 2001, Curtis woke up angry and swearing about his bad financial situation. ‘That’s it,’ he announced, ‘get ready, we’re going to do over the TAB up the road.’ He went into his bedroom and came out with some handguns and balaclavas. He gave Bennie a Luger and said, ‘You’re going through the doors with me. Craig’ll be driving.’

They talked about what they would wear, and Curtis advised the others to have two sets of clothes, ‘unders’ and ‘overs’, the latter to be discarded after the robbery, to reduce the risk of being identified. He seemed to have thought about this a lot, and went into quite a bit of detail: they would go to their car in their unders, and put the overs on before doing the job. Afterwards, back in the car, they’d remove their overs and put them in a backpack, which would be discarded.

They left the apartment and got into the car to be used for the job, and drove down to the adjacent suburb of Surry Hills.

‘Bally up, guys,’ Curtis said, and they all pulled on the balaclavas.

Bottin parked out front of the TAB in Crown Street, and Curtis and Bennie rushed in, with Curtis yelling, ‘This is a robbery, get on the floor!’

Bennie controlled the door, and saw one of the clients staring up at him. ‘Get on the floor,’ he ordered, ‘face down on the floor!’

Curtis had assured them it would be well executed, like a military operation, but it didn’t work out like that. He got very upset when he wasn’t given enough money, and started to yell at the unfortunate young woman behind the counter, pointing the gun at her face. ‘Give me the big money from underneath,’ he cried. When handed more money, he asked, ‘Is that it, is that all, where’s the rest of it?’

They raced out and back to the car. Bottin had the engine running and took off, with Curtis and Bennie busy pulling off their overs. The robbery netted $1,755.35.

The crew robbed other places—including some where Curtis had worked as a security guard—but the pickings were slim given the risks they were taking and the trauma they created for some of their victims. They got $2,213 from the Robin Hood Hotel in Waverley, $14,000 from the Mansions Hotel in Kings Cross, and $8,000 at the Cauliflower Hotel in Waterloo.

Like a good manager, Curtis tried to take care of his crew. In June 2001 he and Craig Bottin dealt with Shane Oien, a bodybuilder and member of the Bandidos. Bottin had met Oien at Gold’s Gym in Darlinghurst, and for some reason in Oxford Street one night the men had a fight that left Bottin cut and bruised, his ego in shreds. He was determined to have his revenge.

Curtis and he attacked Oien one day after he came out of the gym in Pelican Street, Surry Hills. They drove up to him in a stolen vehicle and Curtis, steadying his .44 magnum, fired four or five bullets around Oien.

‘You should have seen his face,’ Bottin later told a friend. ‘His face went white from the shock.’ Curtis later told police he’d taken care not to hit Oien, although you have to wonder if this was good marksmanship or luck: one bullet took out the back window of Oien’s vehicle, while another went into a car parked nearby, with the driver sitting inside.

In October 2001, Curtis told Bennie they had something more challenging to do: a contract shooting. It was for Anthony Perish, although he did not tell Bennie that. What he did say was that the sort of work they would do in future would be—as Bennie later said in court—‘only targeting scumbags, and people who had done the wrong thing. There was not going to be any scaring of innocent people, women and children, like the TAB job. Brad also advised that the next jobs will be more profitable.’

The target was an ex-Nomad named Gary Mack, who Curtis said had ‘done the wrong thing’ and needed to be taught a lesson. Several motives for Perish’s desire to have Mack shot later emerged from different witnesses, as with several of the crimes in this book. In this case Mack variously had raped a woman (it was a feature of the weird moral world of Curtis that victims should be portrayed as somehow deserving of their fate), owed Andrew Perish money, or was involved in some other dispute with Andrew, who’d recently been removed as president of the Campbelltown chapter of the Rebels.

Curtis said he was going to shoot Mack in the buttocks, because it was the best place to wound someone without causing serious injury. Like all Curtis’ jobs for Perish, this one was well planned. He sent Bennie and Bottin to the Peakhurst Inn where Mack worked, to identify him and get a feel for the place. They returned to report to Curtis, who explained that on the night of the attack, Bottin would be a spotter, reporting to him by two-way radio on Mack’s movements when he came out of the pub at the end of his shift. Bennie would be with Curtis, watching his back and listening to the police radio on a scanner.

They would all wear unders and overs, and while Curtis would ride a motorbike, Bennie and Bottin would be in a car, which they would ‘turn and burn’ if discovered. This meant they would abandon the vehicle and torch it to destroy DNA evidence. He said the two of them would get paid about $7,000 each for their work.

At the end of this planning meeting, Curtis assured them that his friend Tony Martin had a high level contact in the police and would find out if their identities were ever discovered. This would come in handy because there would be more work like this, which he called ‘black ops’, involving attacks on scumbags and other people who’d done the wrong thing, such as rapists. ‘He said,’ Bennie later recalled, ‘the police would be thankful because we would be doing them a favour taking the scum off the streets and doing to them what the police wish they could do.’

In the early hours of 14 October 2001, Curtis’ crew assembled across the road from the Peakhurst Inn and Curtis and Bennie climbed some stairs to a balcony, where Curtis lay down with a 7.62 mm rifle equipped with a telescopic sight. He was about sixty metres from where Mack would appear. Around 5.15 am he received a message from Bottin through the earpiece connected to his radio, saying Mack had left work. Soon after, Mack came into sight and Curtis shot him. The three men fled the scene.

Anthony Perish paid them for their work and soon they were preparing for the crime that would be the defining one of their careers, the abduction of Terry Falconer.

•

An abbreviated version of the interview Glen Browne and John Edwards conducted with Brad Curtis in January 2009 was later played in court, and so became a public document. I’m going to quote from it at some length, because it gives a sense of Curtis’ character, which was such a strange combination of intelligence, boastfulness and an absence of feeling for other human beings. Curtis’ version of events was almost certainly self-serving in parts, but enough of it fitted with what the detectives did know to suggest it was generally truthful. They were finally hearing the story of Terry Falconer’s last hours. What follows accurately reflects the meaning of what was said in the interview, but it has been shortened and some sentences have been moved around to present the account in chronological order.

DETECTIVE SERGEANT GLEN BROWNE: Brad, do you agree that apart from yourself, myself and Detective Edwards, there are no other persons present in the room?

BRAD CURTIS: That is true.

GB: I’m going to ask you further questions about these matters. You are not obliged to say or do anything unless you wish to do so, but whatever you say or do will be electronically recorded on these discs by this machine and may later be used as evidence. Do you understand that?

BC: Yes, I do.

GB: Has any threat, promise or inducement been held out to you by any person to be interviewed in relation to this matter?

BC: No.

GB: Do you agree that [this morning] we had a discussion with you about a number of matters but predominantly in relation to concerns for the safety of your wife?

BC: Yes. And family.

GB: And family. Of course. And do you agree that you were given a phone and you contacted your wife and you spoke to her for some time regarding those matters?

BC: That is true.

GB: And do you agree that at least we’ve told you that we’ve spoken to other people and commenced to make arrangements in relation to her safety?

BC: You’ve advised me of that.

INTERVIEW SUSPENDED. INTERVIEW RESUMED.

GB: What can you tell us about [the murder of Terry Falconer]?

BC: [Anthony Perish] wanted me to look over some information that he had, but it was before the coronial inquest and I couldn’t make much sense of it. It had got to do with the murder of his grandparents and who could have done it. He wanted to bring the people to justice, that’s what he said to me, so that I should start investigating it. The people who he mentioned were this Terry Falconer, a solicitor called Justin [Birk] Hill [and a few others].

GB: Did Anthony seem quite concerned about getting to the bottom of who killed his grandparents?

BC: I think he was impacted far more than anyone else. I don’t know why. I don’t know why. He was hell-bent, hell-bent on getting not only anyone that did it but anyone that knew about it.

GB: And what was he asking you to do in respect of those documents?

BC: Look at them to see if I can see any inconsistencies in statements . . . to see if other family members could know things. He suspected his sister, Colleen, of hiding information, and also his aunty. [Author’s note: There is no evidence of this.] . . . He thought that the police had bodged the crime scene and I think some information in the coronial inquiry came out about that, that people didn’t follow protocol, but I don’t think it was malicious.

GB: Apart from looking through those documents and presumably offering an opinion, did you do any other investigation on his behalf in respect to that?

BC: At some stage I flew to South Australia where apparently a corrupt solicitor called Justin [Birk] Hill, otherwise nicknamed Judd, was residing at a location. I did some surveillance . . . I didn’t sight the aforementioned at any time.

GB: What was it that [Perish] actually asked you to do down there?

BC: See if he’s at this address. [Author’s note: This doesn’t sound very plausible. According to one source, Curtis was actually sent to Adelaide to kill Justin Birk Hill, but failed to do this.]

GB: Anthony has approached you to kidnap Terry Falconer?

BC: The information at that stage was very brief, but he requested to, in order to get some additional information, we could talk to one that was seen in the area, which was Falconer. Perish said all we had to do is get a hold of that guy and talk to him and persuade him to give up who did it. From my understanding, at that stage he didn’t think Falconer was directly involved in the doing of it, but knew information about it. He told me where he was on day release, which was some smash repairs place in Ingleburn.

GB: I know we cautioned you at the start, but I want you to understand again that you know you’re not obliged to say or do anything as anything you say or do will be recorded and may later be used as evidence. Do you understand that?

BC: Yes. He gave me the address of the smash place shop and gave me a description of him, no photo, and said that he would organise a guy to call us when he was there and all we needed to do was to pick the guy up, posing as police, cut the tracking device off him, take him to be questioned by Anthony and then drop him back at a later stage. Perish had organised for a guy to call in when Falconer was at the smash shop, I was told [the guy] had a haircut on that day and apparently the hairdresser is within vision of the smash shop. I decided that the best thing was to get Jake Bennie and Craig Bottin to help, and Perish advised he would pay another $15,000 and take some money off [my debt to him].

GB: Do you recall how you approached those people?

BC: I would have just talked to Craig and Jake and said, ‘Oh look, there’s a job on, this guy has got knowledge of a murder that’s happened to a good mate of mine’s grandparents, we want to take him in for some questioning, rough him up and then drop him off later. To do the job I was advised by Perish to obtain a van and a lock box and to organise it so we would look like police, we needed to get hold of a badge. He provided a general duties police shirt, which he stated came from a stripper, but I don’t think that’s the case, as it fit Jake and it was quite big. The wheels for the car, because I was going to use my own personal car, we had to get wheels that looked like police detective wheels. They were sourced by Matthew Lawton and painted by Lawton at the Turramurra house where we were staying during this time. [Author’s note: Matthew Lawton, aka Muzz or Bristle Hound, was Perish’s driver and long-time employee.] Jake dressed as the general duties cop and was the driver, and myself and Craig dressed as detectives and I had the badge, which I rented for $200. Perish gave me strict instructions that, ‘He’ll put up a fight, so make sure you handcuff him and put this anaesthetic over his mouth.’ He told me it was kind of like chloroform and it will just help him sleep until he gets to Turramurra, without him making too much noise.

GB: How big was the box?

BC: Oh it was big. It was big. It was to fit a grown man in so he didn’t have to be all crunched up.

GB: Can you describe what it was made of, what colour it was?

BC: It was gal, ’cause it had—

GB: Do you mean like that checker-plate—

BC: No, no, not, no, not checker-plate. It was like galvanised tin, like a buy from Bunnings one. It had two flaps that went down so you could put a pad bolt through them. It was substantial, it would have been close to six foot.

GB: Did you ever go to the location at Ingleburn prior to that day to do any sort of reconnaissance?

BC: I can’t recall, but I’d say I would have driven past it. I wouldn’t like to think that I’d ever just rock up somewhere to do something without even having an understanding of the topography.

GB: You all met at [the grassy hill] near the Housing Commission area with the van and in your car?

BC: Yeah, that was like the FUP [form-up point]. I drove the van to the area not too far away from the smash shop. Jake and Craig drove my car there, but it had bodgie number plates put on.

GB: Do you know where they came from?

BC: Just another Commodore.

GB: Who got those?

BC: I think Craig got them. It was also fitted with the wheels that Lawton had sprayed silver. We then all got into the Commodore and went to the smash repair shop in Ingleburn. Jake stayed in the vehicle as the driver and myself and Craig went in, we were just wearing suits as a detective would. I produced my badge and asked to speak to Terry Falconer. One of the workers pointed him out to me, I went and spoke to Falconer and said, ‘We need to take you in again for some questioning.’

And he goes, ‘Oh, not again.’ I said, ‘I need to search you before we can take you.’ I put on some latex gloves and did a search of him, and asked him if he was carrying any weapons, to which he said no. I then handcuffed him with handcuffs that Perish had supplied. I handcuffed him to the front so it wouldn’t be too uncomfortable in the box. Craig and I then escorted him to the back of my Commodore and I put him in the centre. I got in on the left hand side and Craig got in the other side.

We were driving off and Falconer said, ‘I hope it’s not about those silly murders.’ I can’t recall how I replied. We then drove to where the van was parked. It was a hot day. It was warm. It was, it was, warm.

GB: Okay.

BC: I had a bottle in front of me with the anaesthetic Perish gave me, and I had a handkerchief in my pocket. When we got to the location where the van was, we pretended that there was a [police] call to suss out the van, and I said, ‘I’ll just suss out that van while we’re here.’ When we got there I bent down, put my handkerchief in the chemical, it was like a big orange juice bottle that was filled just that much with it, but it was pretty on the nose. I then secured the lid and put it down. I put the handkerchief over Falconer’s face and he was struggling and was trying to hit me with his hands, so Craig helped me subdue him and get him out that side. So we got him out the right-hand side of the Commodore. He was still struggling, like, I was thinking, fuck, this isn’t working. Anyway, another thirty seconds and it did. He was like, really really dopey. Jake had already opened the side of the van and opened up the lock box. We put Falconer in the box and I threw the [handkerchief] inside. We then secured the lock box, put the pad bolts on, then I got changed out of my kit, I took it all off.

GB: Do you remember what you got changed into?

BC: I had unders underneath. I would have just had a T-shirt and shorts. The boys also got undressed and they started to put hubcaps on the wheels and also took off the dodgy registration plates. They then drove my car away. I then shut the door and drove the van to the house in Turramurra where Perish and Matthew Lawton were. Throughout the journey, Falconer was coughing in the back and banging the sides. He was making noise the whole trip. When I got to Turramurra, Lawton and Perish were there.

GB: Can you describe the property?

BC: It’s a decent-sized property. It’s got a pool at the back and it’s got a tennis court on the far left side, a driveway goes up the centre and on the right-hand side there are three garages facing the driveway and there are these wagon wheels at the front.

When I turned up there one of them opened up a roller door to the garage and someone said, ‘Drive in there.’ I got out of the car and Perish goes, ‘Well?’ And I just gave him the thumbs-up.

I said, ‘Yeah, I got him okay.’ We pulled the box out. Perish requested the key and he drove the van out. Then they opened the box. I was quite concerned, not only for the guy getting out, because he was coughing more and more, he’d been in the box for quite a period of time. As soon as we opened it he starts to get up and I put my foot on his torso ’cause I thought he was going to try and up and at us.

GB: Did he say anything at all?

BC: No, he was coughing. He was coughing and he was red, and he was sweating profusely. I could even see in the actual box itself there was a lot of condensation. It wasn’t too on the nose, like, you normally get a bit of waft if something’s confined, it wasn’t too bad at that stage, but he was, he was, he was struggling.

GB: Right.

BC: It was obvious he was struggling. [But] he was getting up, it looked like he was getting up with some vigour, so Anthony grabs his head and slams it down, goes, ‘Yep.’ Pulls up [Falconer’s] shirt and I saw he had a Gypsy Joker tattoo. It’s like a skull and maybe flowers or a knife or a gun or something.

GB: And then what happens?

BC: He shut the fuckin’ lid.

GB: Who shut the lid?

BC: Perish. I said, ‘Man, don’t you think we should get him out? He’s pretty hot in there.’

Perish puts his hand on his gun, he’s got a silver five-shot revolver, and he goes, ‘Are you fuckin’ with us or what?’ At that stage the guys had a conversation just at the side of the shed quietly, and then Perish said, ‘Right, you and Muzz, you’re going to take it up to this place, and we can get rid of it.’ And he’s got his hand on his gun the whole fuckin’ time. And I said, ‘But don’t you reckon we should get rid of the van?’

And he goes, ‘Yeah, I’ll do that.’

There was no way out for me. If I would have objected I would have been fuckin’ shot. I was unarmed, I didn’t have keys to a vehicle and he made it quite clear it was his way or the highway. I just kept saying to myself, just play it through, it’ll be all right, just play it through. Then he put the box in the back of a white ute, with a black rhino liner that lined the whole thing and a tarp on top of the liner.

Perish goes, ‘You go with Muzz up to the property and I’ll get rid of the van.’

He opened the door of the ute for me with his hand on his gun and I saw Muzz get in and Muzz had a piece on him too. From that time on I knew that I was under threat. I was unarmed. If I bailed out I thought my family would be under threat. I just had to play along.

GB: Did you have any discussions with Matthew Lawton along this trip?

BC: It was a very quiet trip.

GB: Could you hear any noises coming from the back of the vehicle?

BC: Initially but not for long.

GB: Did you stop anywhere along the way?

BC: No.

DETECTIVE SENIOR CONSTABLE JOHN EDWARDS: How long do you think it would have taken you to get there?

BC: Fuckin’ ages. We went this way that took fuckin’ hours up to the property, via the Old Pacific Highway, this wild back way. It just took ages. I don’t know how long it took to get there but I’m just thinking this guy’s not going to survive the trip, he was already hot back at Turramurra. You go along Bucketts Way and then you turn towards Girvan then you get to the top of the hill where there are all these mail boxes so the postie doesn’t have to go down to the lots, and there’s a dirt road and about a few kilometres down there’s a big entry gate. When we got to the gate Lawton got out and unlocked it. He secured the gate after him, and when the car got to the top gate, I think I could have unlocked that gate, and then he drove the car towards the big shed, which is to the right of the house as you’re looking at it. He turned the engine off and said, ‘Let’s go in the house.’ And I asked, ‘Aren’t we going to get him out?’ and he goes, ‘No, we’ll wait for Mate,’ referring to Perish.

According to Curtis’ version, Terry Falconer probably died of asphixiation and heat exhaustion an hour or two north of Sydney. The property they arrived at was on Brooks Road, Girvan, surrounded by external and internal perimeter mesh fences almost two metres high. The track to the house was rough and hilly, some six hundred metres through thick bush, passing several ponds and crossing a usually dry creek bed. The house and shed were up on a rise, the house single storey, brown brick and tile, built about twenty years earlier.

It was a poorly designed place with raw-brick walls and varnished-pine ceilings, with mean-sized rooms cramped together. Pictures on the walls included a drawing of villians from 1970s Hollywood movies and the rear view of an attractive and naked young woman. The front lounge room had several big screens and a good collection of action and crime VHS tapes including Braveheart, Mad Max 2, and a Harrison Ford collection. On the building’s left sat a double garage, with a granny flat and a carport out front. Some fifty metres beyond the garage was a green shed, with a large open-fronted section on its left side. The interior of the shed measured fifteen by ten metres, illuminated by six fluorescent strip lights hanging above the concrete floor.

GB: Did you hear any noises coming from the box at that point?

BC: No.

GB: Had you formed the opinion in your mind that he was dead?

BC: Yes. Perish rocked up hours later casual as all hell, in a four-wheel drive, and I think he said the words, ‘All right, let’s get into it.’ The ute was then reversed so it was as close as possible to the shed and it was stopped there. He opened up the shed; I was just waiting around, knowing both of them were armed and I wasn’t, and then he told me, ‘Get the handle of the box,’ so I went to the tailgate side, picked up the handle, slid it out. Lawton picked up the other side, we walked into the shed, put the box down, and there was some kerfuffle about who was dumb enough to leave the fuckin’ keys behind [so they cut the padlocks off].

Perish said to me, ‘Give us a hand with this,’ and pointed to a big roll of plastic sheeting. We put it down on the ground and rolled it over this huge square, cut it, rolled it over another huge square, he cut it.

And he reiterates to me, ‘Just remember everyone last saw you with the body, they’re gonna think you’re the killer, even your own mates. You’re the one that’s been seen, your car, but I’ll help ya, I’ll help ya get rid of it.’ They pick him out of the box, and I remember they rig up a chain, he’s dead, there’s no dispute, he’s totally dead.

GB: Do you remember how they lifted him out?

BC: There’s a block and tackle but they didn’t use that to lift him out, they lifted him out, because Perish wanted to cut off his clothes first—

GB: Before he was lifted up with the block and tackle?

BC: Yeah. I remember another thing now. Perish also wanted to extract his teeth prior to lifting him up.

GB: So he was lifted out of the box by Anthony Perish and Matthew Lawton. Is that right?

BC: Yes.

GB: And he was laid down on the ground?

BC: Yes.

GB: And what happened next?

BC: They got in the suits.

GB: Did you get into a suit at that point too?

BC: No, not right away. I was standing back.

GB: And in respect of the teeth, do you know how he pulled them out?

BC: I can’t remember the implements.

GB: Yep. I imagine it’s a fairly difficult process, to pull someone’s teeth out though?

BC: I’m sure it is.

GB: After the teeth were pulled out, then what happened next?

BC: Either the clothes were cut off or he was hoisted up and the clothes were cut off. I don’t know which order.

GB: And how did they actually hoist him up using the block and tackle?

BC: They used the handcuffs, attached the block and tackle to the handcuffs and hoisted him up. I think [Perish] had already thrown me a suit by then. He said, ‘Get this on.’ It was white, like a spray painter’s one. I think it contained feet in it.

GB: After he was hoisted up, what happened then?

BC: Then they started to, you know, do the job of cutting the guy up. I can’t remember what they started cutting him with. That cunt threw a leg in front of me.

He goes, ‘Here, get into it,’ passes me an implement, I don’t know what it was. I’ve tried to remember, I can’t even envisage it. After he was cut up, they started to package him in plastic bags.

GB: Was anything used to secure the bags once the parts had been put into them?

BC: Tape, I think. They then put all the bags to the side, I think it was on a table but I’m not sure. Then all of the plastic sheeting that was on the ground was taken up and put in another bag, then they poured this chemical on, which was so, so grossly bad for you, your mucus membranes and everything was just, I couldn’t stay in there, not only was I feeling sick after what I’d just seen and had also done. I walked to the outside of the shed. That cunt kept on checking on me. I was feeling very concerned for my safety, so I went inside with a broom, to try and look like I was participating. When he was happy with that, I took off my stuff and they took off their stuff and he asked me to go outside and check around. He actually asked me to go around and check around the cars. I noticed the ignition keys were in none of them.

He knew what I was thinking, he comes out and goes, ‘Er, you weren’t thinking about going, were you? Hey, we’ve got the keys.’ Like it’s any other fuckin’ day of the week. Then I went inside the shed. I didn’t know what I was going to be facing when I got in there, but I thought if I just keep playing it through like I’m not fazed by it I might get through. I never intended for that guy to die. He didn’t even ask him one fuckin’ question.

GB: You stayed there that night?

BC: They cut off the handcuffs, they burnt the box, the handcuffs, the padlocks, and anything that was used at the front of the property on the left-hand side of the drive. I think I stayed the night there. They were being nice to me all of a sudden. I was pretending to go along with it. For the whole next year after, that cunt had that over my head, or forever really, that I was the last one seen with him alive, and that not even my own guys would fuckin’ believe me. At some stage or other the bags were loaded into the ute. The rhino liner was removed and there are some side panels and they put the bags in there. Perish instructed that I go in the ute with Lawton and we drive up to another location. I didn’t know where the location was. I went in the car and we drove north along Bucketts Way to a big roundabout near the Pacific Highway.

He pulled up there and I said, ‘What’s happening?’ and he said, ‘We’ll just wait for Mate.’

GB: Yep.

BC: Perish turned up some time later and said, ‘You guys take my car and wait for me at the ranch.’ He didn’t call the property the ranch, he used to call the place at Turramurra the ranch because it had these two big wagon wheels and it looked kind of ranchy. So Lawton and I got in the four-wheel drive and drove off. I didn’t look back, I didn’t fuckin’ look back. At that stage Lawton was okay with me, he still had a gun. I didn’t think at that stage anything was going to happen to me, I thought I’d gotten across the line. I deeply regret my actions and my naivety. I never thought that was going to happen. I’m not guilty of murder. I’m guilty of abduction and I’m guilty of stupidity. I feel better for saying this, I feel better.

GB: Have the answers you have given as recorded in this interview been made of your own free will?

BC: Yes.

GB: Has any threat, promise or inducement been held out to you to give the answers as recorded in this interview?

BC: No.

•

A few days after Falconer’s murder, Curtis went over to Bennie’s to collect his car. The men went to lunch in Double Bay and, as Curtis later told police, he said to Bennie, ‘Look, I don’t know if you heard or read anything, but Falconer had to go. He was going to rat us out. I’m sorry. I told you it wasn’t meant to happen this way.’ Then he gave the surprised Bennie $7,000 in cash. The two men went to a hotel and played the pokies for a while and had a few drinks. When they had relaxed, Curtis said in a jovial manner that Falconer had not given him the answers he’d wanted and, ‘He got a bit lippy and he was mouthing off and being smart, so I went and chopped his head off.’ Bennie was shocked, although he suspected Curtis was capable of such an act.

It was a bizarre thing to say. Curtis later claimed he’d told Bennie and Tony Martin different stories about what happened to Falconer so that if either of them talked to a third party and word got back to himself, he’d know which one it was. That sounds like something Brad Curtis might do.

It was a thrilling experience for the detectives, listening at last to the account of a murder after an investigation taking over seven years. It had been an arduous feat of persistence and now, thanks to Curtis’ evidence, it looked like it was almost over.

Curtis gave more statements, about other crimes he’d committed. Jubelin noticed that the longer he was in prison, the more institutionalised he became, and the less keen to give information. It was something he’d seen with criminals in the past, their manner changing from that of citizen to inmate, concerned with jail talk and resentment. Curtis was also a control freak, and began to fall out with individual detectives, refusing to speak to them, but eventually Tuno got pretty much all it needed from him. The main exception was the murder of Michael Davies on the Gold Coast in April 2002, which he admitted to in conversation but refused to confess to in a formal interview or signed statement unless he was given certain concessions. In the process of making these demands he began to read legal material from the library and became a jailhouse lawyer. After eight months of pushing him about Davies, the detectives stopped asking. Still, what they had was fantastic. Curtis hadn’t had to give it all up: the fact was that even though he had been a hard man for many years, he’d had no experience of custody, and of having his family pulled in by police. When the crunch came, he’d been so unnerved that he’d acted against his own interests, by confessing unnecessarily.

No one else who was at Girvan that day said a word. The Perish brothers said nothing. On 27 January, Matthew Lawton was arrested at the Speedway Service Station at Austral and taken to Green Valley Police Station and charged. Lawton was an old school friend of Anthony’s; when Perish had gone on the run back in 1992, Lawton had left his wife and children to accompany him, and stayed by his side for the next fourteen years. It was another example of Anthony’s capacity to get his hooks into people.

Lawton did not roll. Jubelin talked to his solicitor when they first charged him, suggesting he might be interested in some sort of deal. Later he visited him in jail, still hoping he could be a potential witness. Jubelin laid it on pretty thick, but in the end nothing happened. Lawton was just too scared, or too loyal, to roll on the brothers.

Anthony Perish remained an enigma. Normally when you arrest someone, you find their base. They never found Perish’s home, or located any of his money. His solicitors were very keen to recover a set of keys found on him at the time of his arrest; with the exception of the Girvan property, police have never been able to identify the locks they fitted.

10

ROBBERIES, SHOOTINGS ETC.

Behold, the half was not told me.

On 25 January 2009, on the Australia Day weekend, there was another press conference at which the police minister announced rewards totalling $850,000 for information leading to the conviction of the killers being chased by Tuno. This was the largest reward total ever offered in New South Wales.

Brad Curtis continued to make statements to the police about other crimes. After the kidnapping, he had told Bennie and Bottin how well they all worked together as a team. He also told them what could happen to people who ratted on them, which Bennie took as a veiled threat. Despite Curtis’ past promises of more serious work, he had nothing else for his crew for the moment, and Bottin approached Bennie with the suggestion they do some robberies together. Bennie refused because he thought Bottin was unprofessional and, before long, Bottin struck out on his own.

At 8.50 am on 17 December 2001 he was found in a security block of units in Pyrmont by the building manager, who thought he looked suspicious and asked who he was. Bottin said he was the building’s security guard, and the manager demanded to see some identification. Bottin left the building pursued by the manager, who yelled out to some construction workers across the road that he needed help. He tried to grab Bottin and they fell to the ground and started to wrestle. Despite Bottin reaching inside his trousers and pulling out a loaded .44 magnum revolver, the manager and some of the workers subdued him and called the police.

Bottin was found in possession of a key to the building, fake identification, cable ties and papers indicating the name of an occupant of the building who owed someone $129,500. The occupant was involved in an internet gambling syndicate operating out of Nauru that had been placed in liquidation, with a dispute with investors over monies owed. Bottin also had a Toyota key, which police traced to a white van parked near the building. Inside was a flare—Curtis used flares whenever he wanted to burn a vehicle after a job. The van, police discovered, had been stolen three months earlier when Bottin had robbed Delta European Rentals at gunpoint.

They tested the magnum and found it was the same weapon that had been used by Brad Curtis to shoot at Shane Oien in Darlinghurst in June (although at that stage police did not know the shooter’s identity). With this information they approached Oien and asked him to talk to them about the shooting. ‘I don’t give statements,’ the Bandido replied. ‘That is not what I do. I won’t get in the witness box for anyone.’ In 2003 Bottin was convicted of the armed robbery of Delta European and other offences.

When Curtis and Bennie heard of Bottin’s arrest, they visited his apartment to talk with his girlfriend, who worked in the Xanadu massage parlour in the city. In the flat they found a scrapbook in which Bottin had proudly pasted newspaper items about jobs he’d done, such as the Falconer abduction. Curtis was appalled. Nevertheless, he and Bennie contributed to Bottin’s legal costs, although they used a woman they knew to go see him in jail: they had no desire to appear in the visitors’ book. They needed to keep Bottin onside so he wouldn’t roll on them over the Falconer abduction.

The Falconer killing had been preying on Bennie’s mind, and one day he met Curtis at Giotto’s Café in East Sydney and told him he didn’t want to do any more jobs involving serious violence. He did this with a certain nervousness—he didn’t want to break the friendship in case Curtis had him knocked because of what he knew. But it seemed to go all right, and they agreed that from now on, Bennie would only work on low-level stuff.

To replace Bottin, Curtis’ crew gained another member, Michael Christiansen, aka Mick, Trigger or the Big Feller. Curtis had first met him through Tony Martin, when the two were working on security at Fox Studios in 2001. Born in 1969, Christiansen grew up in Sutherland in Sydney’s south. He left home at the age of fifteen after his mother died and he became estranged from his father. Two years later he worked as a male model for a while, and then in the security industry and as a personal trainer. He was devoted to bodybuilding and began to take steroids while training for world titles. He also became a drug dealer, partly to finance his cocaine and marijuana habits. Unlike Jake Bennie, Christiansen had no problem with committing acts of extreme violence.

•

When Perish had a job for Curtis, he would call him from one phone and say something in code, and Curtis would go to a public phone and call back—but to another of Perish’s phones. This was done simply to arrange a meeting—the actual job was never discussed over the phone. This was the procedure used in the planning for the robbery of a gas distribution centre, which occurred on 14 July 2002. Perish’s supply of one of the precursor drugs needed to make ecstasy had dried up, and he needed some monomethylamine. Perish called Curtis, who came to the house in Turramurra. Then the two went for a walk around the streets, to avoid the chance of being recorded, and Perish explained the details.

There were two possible targets, BOC Gases at Wetherill Park and another company at Smithfield. Perish didn’t mind which place Curtis robbed—it was a bit like sending someone to the shops and not caring if they went to Woolworths or Coles. Perish said he’d pay $25,000 for the robbery, and the same again if they got the gas he needed. In terms of the value of the drugs he would be able to produce, $50,000 for one of the most important ingredients was not much at all.

Curtis, who was given $10,000 in advance, then carried out some reconnaissance and decided BOC Gases provided the best opportunity. He set about hiring four people to help with the job: Jake Bennie, Michael Christiansen, and two new men, Jay Sauer and Jeremy Postlewaight, aka Jez, Blowie or Five. Sauer ran a Harley Davidson outlet in Newcastle called Rolling Thunder, and dressed like the bikies who constituted a large proportion of his clients. As for Postlewaight, he’d been born in New Zealand in 1977, and his family moved to Australia when he was still a child. His parents separated when he was eight and his mother suffered from depression. Postlewaight attended Waverley College near Bondi and went on to work as a builder’s labourer, car wholesaler and security worker. He met Christiansen and fell under his influence, with Christiansen supplying him with cocaine and emotional support.

Curtis allocated jobs that needed to be done beforehand. Bennie was given the task of sourcing a van, while Sauer had to obtain balaclavas and paint them pink, so they would look like faces on CCTV footage. Curtis conducted another recon of BOC Gases with Sauer, to check out the positions of security guards and cameras and hence the best way to break in.

They located some empty industrial units not far from the factory and decided these would be a ‘transitional storage location’, in case the gang was pursued following the robbery and needed to hide the goods somewhere. In the next week Curtis organised the gear they’d need for the job: two-way radios, guns, overalls, gloves, wire-cutters and bolt-cutters. He held planning meetings with the team at his rented apartment in the Saville Park Suites in Darlinghurst, explaining the job to them with the help of a whiteboard. On one occasion the gang visited some vacant land in Artarmon, where Curtis made them practise climbing over a barbed wire fence.

Late on the night of 13 July, using the van and two cars, the team drove out to a prearranged ‘form-up place’ near the complex. One of the cars was left there, and the crew travelled to BOC Gases, where Curtis and Christiansen, who were armed, gained access by cutting through a wire fence from the vacant lot next door. It was now after midnight. The others waited in the vehicles around the corner.

Curtis told Christiansen the name of what they needed and they began to search for it but there was no monomethylamine there. They found the manifest listing all the gases in the store room and confirmed the absence of what they needed. Curtis decided to take the list when they left, so Perish could see what had happened. But he didn’t want to leave empty-handed, so he looked for some carbon-hydrogen bonded chemicals he hoped might be similar to what Perish wanted. Some cylinders were found and taken over to ‘the exfiltration point’, and loaded into the van.

The following day, Curtis drove up to the Turramurra home of Anthony Perish, who later paid him $15,000, making only $25,000 in total. Maybe the cylinders Curtis had got weren’t much use after all.

The next major crime police learned about from Curtis was the October 2002 shooting of Raniera Puketapu at JB’s Bar and Grill in Haymarket. But it turned out there had been a prologue to this, committed at the same place by some of the same people.

At that time Michael Christiansen worked on security at the Holiday Inn, where the bar is situated. A month earlier he asked Brad Curtis to rob the place with the help of Jeremy Postlewaight, who’d done the BOC Gases job with them. It might seem ironic that a security guard would rob a business he was paid to protect, but this is not uncommon. Security often attracts people with criminal connections—many guards, for example, use illegal steroids as part of their training regimens—and the work is not well paid. As we’ve already seen, Curtis too robbed places where he’d worked as a security guard.

There was a fire exit leading from the hotel to Kimber Lane out back, and the plan was that Christiansen would leave the door propped open at 12.30 am one Sunday. The others would come in and make their way through the hotel’s lift lobby to an office where the manager would be counting the night’s takings. Christiansen provided Curtis with an electronic swipe card for access to the offices.

The job, which occurred on 22 September 2002, went off without a hitch—except for the victims, who after crimes like this are often traumatised for years. Curtis and Postlewaight found the door in the back lane and sure enough it opened. Curtis removed the wedge in the latch, and the men went into the hotel and past a few guests in the lobby. The swipe card opened the office door without trouble and the men went in, closed the door behind them, and produced their guns.

‘This is a stick-up,’ Curtis said to the three staff members inside.

The takings were $12,746.15, which was divided up three ways.

The shooting that occurred at JB’s the following month was a very different affair. As we’ve seen, Tuno had already linked DNA found in burning vehicles near that scene and the scene of the murder of Michael Davies on the Gold Coast with Brad Curtis. They also suspected the intended victim of the JB’s shooting was criminal Dallas Fitzgerald, who was in the bar at the time. Now, thanks to the rollover confessions, they were able to understand some of the background to what had happened at JB’s. Unfortunately, though, the picture remains confused, as there were essentially two different versions.

There is no disagreement that Brad Curtis had briefly managed a nightclub in Kings Cross around 2000, and a relative of a major underworld figure had been badly injured in a fight with one of the bouncers. Curtis had been held responsible and the dispute had festered over the next year or two, with various meetings and the drawing in of other criminals, including some bikies. What is in dispute is what happened next.

According to the judge’s comments at his sentencing, Curtis claimed to have been told by police that the Bandidos had been contracted to kill him. The bikies were seen in the vicinity of Anthony Perish’s house in Turramurra, and ‘Perish told him that because he had created the mess and caused the safe house to be compromised, he had to kill Felix Lyle and Dallas Fitzgerald of the Bandidos’. The other motive given at the sentencing, proposed by the Director of Public Prosecutions but not agreed to by Curtis, was that Anthony Perish paid him to kill the Bandidos in order to help the Rebels in some inter-gang dispute. Whatever the motive, Curtis admitted he had tried to shoot Dallas Fitzgerald that evening, the plan being that Michael Christiansen, who was working security at the Holiday Inn at the time, would indicate to him where Fitzgerald was sitting.

Unfortunately for Raniera Puketapu, Christiansen identified the wrong man. It was an odd mistake: both men were tall and lanky, with long hair tied back in a ponytail, but Puketapu is Maori and Fitzgerald is very plainly not. In any case, Brad Curtis almost killed an innocent man. Puketapu had gunshot wounds to the front and back of his chest, his lower right back, his right side and his right wrist. A portion of his lung had to be removed, resulting in permanent incapacity.

After this, Curtis stayed out of Sydney for a long time. He spent most of 2003 at the property at Girvan, providing security for Perish’s big drug manufacturing operation. The place was well equipped, with machines such as a gas chromotograph mass spectrometer for analysing chemicals, and an enormous pill press. The property, purchased using a false name, was 250 acres in size, mainly bush with the house and shed in a clearing in the middle. It was a remote area but there were other houses scattered along the road. It was part of Curtis’ job to visit the neighbours from time to time, posing as the caretaker, to create an impression of normality. Despite the growing list of crimes he’d committed, Curtis still had the ability to charm people.

Curtis later said Perish produced about two hundred kilos of ecstasy while he was there in 2003. He said Perish wouldn’t let him leave the property, and he escaped at the end of December. The idea that Curtis the hitman was in effect Perish’s slave for this period seems unlikely. Possibly what happened was that the threat of payback from the Bandidos abated, for some reason, or maybe Curtis just got tired of hiding and decided to resume life with his family back in Newcastle.

What the criminals got up to over the next five years is largely unknown. In his statements Brad Curtis only told police about matters they already had some inkling of, and they knew very little about the period from 2003 to 2008. The fact Curtis still had a relationship with Anthony Perish in 2008 suggests badness had been committed during those five years, but just what it was we may never know. The only exception—albeit a significant one—was that Curtis later pleaded guilty to distributing drugs for Anthony Perish on at least ten occasions between 2006 and 2008.

In 2009 Tuno continued to struggle to connect Anthony Perish and his associates with several deaths in Queensland. As we’ve seen, in 2008 the strike force had been given responsibility for the New South Wales end of the investigation into the deaths of Benita Forster and her young son, Tana Taui. On 29 June 2002 they had been found at the foot of the Twin Falls Waterfall in Springbrook National Park on the Gold Coast. According to the Courier Mail newspaper, a scrap of paper with the word ‘goodbye’ on it was found in Forster’s car nearby, and police initially treated the deaths as non-suspicious.

Forster, who had once worked in Sydney as an exotic dancer, had had a long-term relationship with Black Uhlans president John Niven until his death in a traffic accident in 1995. Tana’s father was Fred Taui, a former member of the Black Uhlans, and club members paid for the funeral, were pallbearers, and gave the coffins a motorcycle escort from the church. The connection with Anthony Perish is that Forster had been a friend of one of his ex-girlfriends, and the suspicion was that she’d been involved in the theft of a large sum of money from Perish’s home. This has never been proved, and no one has yet been charged in relation to the deaths of the thirty-two-year-old mother and her three-year-old child.

The other Queensland death Tuno was involved with was the shooting of Michael Cleaver Davies on 17 April 2002. He was killed while sitting at the kitchen table in his duplex at Paradise Point on the Gold Coast. We’ve seen how police connected Brad Curtis’ DNA with samples found in burning vehicles near the scenes of Davies’ shooting and the shooting of Raniera Paketapu at JB’s Bar and Grill.

A source later told authorities that Davies had been paid a deposit of $200,000 by Anthony Perish to import some precursor chemicals from Russia by way of China. The chemicals were seized in China and Davies was unable to repay the deposit, so Perish paid Brad Curtis to kill him. Curtis did the job with another man, who cannot be named but confessed to his role in 2009. In 2012 Queensland police issued a warrant for Curtis’ arrest for the murder of Michael Davies. So far no action has been initiated against Anthony Perish for the murder.

•

As men rolled over and more arrests were made, the amount of information pouring in to Tuno became a flood. It all had to be recorded and linked to what was already known, so its implications could be fully understood and pursued. As previously noted, all strike forces have their own investigation database on the police eaglei computer system. By the end, Tuno had more than twelve thousand records listed there, although not every one was accessible to all the officers involved: in eaglei, documents can be ‘caveated’ so only certain ranks, or individuals, can read them. Now, as new information was matched to what was already there and produced more leads, the virtues of the patient work done with the computers since those first days at Port Macquarie in 2001 became apparent.

Information not only came in: sometimes it had to be produced too. Jubelin had maintained an investigation log, updated monthly. It was particularly useful as a running record of the investigation’s changing focus and strategies, and of important decisions made. One of its benefits was to help Jubelin justify his actions when the investigation was reviewed by senior officers, something that happens often in police work for all sorts of reasons. Given the almost unique length of Tuno, this record proved particularly helpful. There were plenty of other reports. In late 2008 and into 2009, Jubelin was reporting daily to his bosses on Tuno’s progress. Later it became weekly. There was also a more detailed fortnightly progress report.

People think police work is about excitement and violence, and sometimes it is. But mostly it’s about information, massive floods of it that threaten to overwhelm those involved. The struggle is with the crooks, but also with the information.

11

THE MAN FROM MELBOURNE II

Be sure your sin will find you out.

On 19 March 2009, Tuno took Brad Curtis up to Girvan so he could walk them through the place where Terry Falconer’s body had been dismembered, in the same shed that had also been used as one of the country’s biggest meth labs. The property had already been checked to confirm that the booby traps Curtis had described had been removed. Corrective Services were concerned he might escape, so they had him in handcuffs with manacles around his ankles.

Since 2001 the hilly track to the house had deteriorated so badly the police needed four-wheel drive vehicles to get in. (For some reason Anthony Perish seems to have stopped using the property by 2006; he simply abandoned it.) Curtis was accompanied by Gary Jubelin, Glen Browne and Nathan Surplice, a large contingent of Corrective Services officers, and various others including a video cameraman.

Curtis recalled some more details from the night of 16 November 2001, when Anthony Perish arrived in his Toyota Land Cruiser. Lawton heard him coming up the hill, and went out and opened the gate for him. Perish, Curtis recalled, had been very agitated, perhaps on drugs. As Curtis told police what had happened, he used the term ‘Mr Falconer’ to refer to the dead man in the box, an odd attempt to show respect, or maybe just a way to distance himself from what he’d done by the use of formal language. The party moved into the shed, where it was very hot, and the interview continued. Curtis described how once the body was out of the box, Perish had pulled the teeth out and smashed them on the concrete floor, with a hammer. Then the men cut up the body. Curtis’ memory of this part, and precisely what he had done, remained vague.

After explaining what had occured in the shed, Curtis took the police party outside and showed them the area where he thought the toolbox and other items had been burned. It was all covered now, by soil and vegetation, so the police recorded the location for excavation. While they were outside, Curtis also showed them where he’d erected various security devices around the house and shed when he’d worked there later on security for Perish’s drug lab. These had included trip flares, remote-controlled explosives, cameras and various weapons. A gun had been set up in an old chook shed pointing at the gate in the internal fence, and could be operated from the house by a wire.

The party went into the house, and Curtis explained where he, Perish, Lawton and another cook had slept. There was a screen next to the television that showed the vision from the four cameras outside, so they could be monitored whenever anyone was in the lounge room. Other items still in the house that Curtis recognised included camouflage gear worn by Perish and Lawton when walking around the property, and explosives. Curtis said that when he’d lived here in 2003 he’d had a map of the area, with an ‘escape and evasion’ route marked on it, just in case. All the men there had had weapons.

The scale of the operation was impressive. Curtis said while he’d been there he was told two hundred kilograms of methamphetamine and ecstasy had been produced in a period of eight months. There is other evidence for the scale of Perish’s activities. One informed source says that in a two-year period Perish purchased millions of dollars of precursor chemicals, which were presumably used to make drugs worth many times that. The source says Perish’s lifestyle was lavish; for example, he would sometimes invite people to lunch and send a helicopter to collect them and bring them to an expensive restaurant in the Hunter Valley. There is unconfirmed information that on another occasion Perish hired a helicopter to fly himself, another man and two prostitutes to Pepper Tree Estate in the Hunter Valley.

Police still don’t have a comprehensive picture of Perish’s activities. He was extremely good at evading surveillance: he was on the run for fourteen years and, after being caught and released from jail, managed to evade police again for several more years. His phones were tapped but this was not much good because he always used code. His Sydney base at the time of his last arrest in 2009 has never been found, and neither has another drug factory believed to have existed on the south coast. But it is known that his life right up to his arrest involved frequent travel up and down the coast of New South Wales, attending meetings with a range of criminals who included his precursor suppliers, his hitman, the bikie gangs he used as his major distributors for many years, and the people who helped him launder his profits through property in Queensland. Among other things, Anthony Perish was a very successful businessman.

Once Curtis had done the walk-through at Girvan, a good deal of searching and forensic work was carried out. The Field Operations Co-ordinator for the five-person crime scene crew was Detective Sergeant Glenn Williams. All obvious traces of criminal activity at Girvan, including the dismembering of Terry Falconer, had been removed, and it was their job to find any remaining forensic evidence. They examined the inside of the big shed using Luminol, and found blood traces at three places on the concrete floor. Now, although Luminol is very sensitive—it can detect blood diluted up to one in a million parts of water—it can produce false positive results for a few other substances, such as rust and cabbage. So swabs were taken from the three spots and sent to the lab to be tested for DNA. These tests, like so much of the hard work done over Tuno’s life, produced nothing useful.

While the fingerprint officers worked over the house—finding Anthony Perish’s and Matthew Lawton’s prints—the others moved to an area behind the house where the ground had clearly been disturbed some time ago. A big excavator had been hired, and this was used to dig up the soil in an area the size of a swimming pool and put it through a mechanical sifter. Another area was checked, where there had obviously been a fire. These searches produced a blue garbage bag similar to the ones used to wrap Terry Falconer’s remains in, bits of plastic sheeting, and pieces of a large metal toolbox showing burn marks. Also found were a padlock, three saw blades and a ballpein hammer head, possibly the one used to smash Falconer’s teeth.

Back in the shed, police strung a strap from the beam where Curtis said Terry Falconer had been strung up. Detective Nathan Surplice was suspended from the beam to ensure it would have been able to take Falconer’s weight. The experiment was recorded on camera.

•

There was one more killing to be solved by the interviews that took place after the arrests in January 2009. It was Michael Christiansen who told them the most about the murder of Paul Elliott.

Thanks to the steroids and the training, Christiansen was a huge man, so Tuno took care with security on 20 January 2009 when he was picked up from jail, where he was on remand for the drug charges, and taken to Parramatta Police Station. Detectives Joe Doueihi and Matt Fitzgerald suspected he was Elliott’s killer—they’d found Elliott’s wallet in the Kennards lock-up, and their surveillance showed Christiansen taking out his gun and replacing it before and after Elliott’s disappearance. So now they hoped to rattle him, in the hope he’d confess, but it was a long shot—contract killers don’t normally crumble very easily. It was true that, like Curtis, he had no significant criminal record, but he’d been in jail a month now, and had had time to adjust to his changed circumstances.

For the first time they told him they were aware of Paul Elliott. Christiansen knew Brad Curtis had been arrested the day before, and now he learned Tuno had just picked up several of his other accomplices and was interviewing them too. The detectives were pleased to see he was disturbed by the news, shaken by how much they knew and worried the others might roll on him. Even so he said nothing, so he was taken to the Crime Commission, put in the witness box in a hearing room, and offered the chance to make an ‘induced statement’—one that could never be used against him in court. The results were gratifying: he proceeded to confess that he’d killed Paul Elliott. Doueihi and Fitzgerald, watching on a screen in the boardroom upstairs, couldn’t believe their luck.

And then it got even better. The detectives asked Christiansen if he would give them a cautioned interview, in other words a standard police one that could be used to charge him, and after some negotiation—the police agreed not to pursue his drug dealing—he agreed. He did this after taking legal advice. So the next day, 21 January, he gave a long and detailed interview. He described how his friend Lyle Pendleton (aka Lozza, or Penguin) had approached him in November the previous year to say he knew an Asian drug dealer who needed protection for a meeting he was to have with a Melbourne heavy, which might turn nasty.

Later that month Christiansen had attended Curtis’ wedding in Newcastle, along with others including Anthony Perish and Jake Bennie. He’d asked Curtis to do the job with him. Curtis had agreed, and there’d been further discussion at the meeting at the Caltex/McDonald’s stop on the F3 observed by police.

Pendleton dropped out of the deal after being arrested for a hydro house he’d set up in Queen’s Park to grow marijuana, so on 4 December Jeremy Postlewaight (of the BOC Gases job) took over as intermediary and introduced Christiansen to the client, an Asian man he called Tong.

Tong, a short man in his early thirties, said he was having business difficulties with a Melbourne man named Paul Elliott, who was threatening to kill his mother. Tong had sold Elliott $600,000 of low-quality methamphetamine, which Elliott had returned and asked for a refund. The problem was that Tong didn’t have the money anymore—he was only the middle man in the deal, and the seller did not want to return the cash. Tong said Elliott was a notorious gangster and had even made it into a true crime book called Gotcha. Shaking with fear, he produced a copy of the book and opened it at a picture of Elliott. Christiansen already knew what he looked like, because he owned a copy himself.

Tong said he was flying down to Melbourne the next day to try to resolve the issue. If this failed, he would ask Elliott to come up to Sydney the day after, presumably by making some false promise to him. That was the point at which he’d need Christiansen’s assistance. Tong gave Christiansen a new phone to use for future contact. He also gave him 2.985 kilograms of methamphetamine as prepayment for the job. This was some of the poor-quality speed that Elliott had been sold and rejected, but Christiansen either didn’t know what he’d been given, or thought he could do something with it anyway. The fact of the prepayment suggested Tong had no confidence his trip to Melbourne would fix things with Elliott.

Christiansen kept trying to call Curtis to give him the details, but couldn’t get onto him. Unbeknown to him, Curtis had fallen off his pushbike and cracked some ribs, and was in John Hunter Hospital with his phone off. Christiansen realised if the job was to go ahead, he’d have to do it himself.

The Melbourne meeting achieved nothing, and Tong contacted Christiansen to say Elliott was coming up. According to Christiansen, Tong asked him to buy a toolbox and take it to the meeting. Christiansen purchased the toolbox, a big wheel-equipped model closer to a square than a rectangle, from MW Sheetmetal, on the Princes Highway at St Peters. Unlike the toolbox used in the Falconer abduction, this one had the familiar checked pattern on its galvanised surface.

On Saturday 6 December, Christiansen, driving a white van with the toolbox in the back, collected Tong from Belmore and took him to an address in General Holmes Drive at Brighton-Le-Sands. Christiansen drove down the driveway past the side of the house and unloaded the toolbox in the garage at the rear. Then he parked the van out in the street and went into the house, using the back door as the entrance point. Elliott was supposed to arrive at 1 pm, but he was late.

They waited several hours. At about 3.40 pm they heard a car pull up in the driveway, and Christiansen went into the front room, telling Tong to do his best to resolve the dispute. Tong met Elliott outside, and the two began a conversation and came into the house.

‘Why are we meeting here?’ asked Elliott.

‘I have some money for you.’

They discussed the amount, and Elliott grew angry. He said, ‘That’s not good enough.’

He seems to have suspected it was a trap, and unwisely began to search the house, getting closer to the room where Christiansen was waiting. Before long Elliott entered the front room, saw Christiansen standing holding a pistol, and went for his own weapon. Christiansen shot at him three times, hitting him once in the chest and once in the head.

The men put Elliott’s body into a large plastic bag. Tong went out to the backyard and washed his hands under the tap, and then his face. Then he helped Christiansen bring in the toolbox from the garage. They put Elliott’s body inside, closed it and took it back out and loaded it into the van. Christiansen took the box home with him to Annandale and left it in his garage. His friend Jeremy Postlewaight was there, and they arranged for him to borrow a boat for tomorrow so they could dump the box at sea. This way of getting rid of a corpse has a long tradition in the Sydney underworld and is, as the Perishes had discovered to their cost, superior to other methods.

With Tong’s help, Christiansen moved Elliott’s hire car to Alexandria, an inner-city suburb not too far away from his house. That night Christiansen’s friend Marcelo Urriola came by. Christiansen said he’d ‘done a job with the Asian guy’ and had been paid with twelve pounds of ‘base’ (methamphetamine). He added, ‘Po was supposed to help me, but he didn’t.’ Christiansen and his friends used nicknames for each other adapted from the children’s television program Teletubbies: Curtis was ‘Po’, Christiansen ‘Twinky’, and Jay Sauer ‘Laa Laa’.

Urriola was another young man, like Postlewaight, who’d come under Christiansen’s influence. Born in 1985, he’d grown up in a close family in Forestville and became a qualified landscape gardener, although his intention was to be a professional rugby league player. This ambition was thwarted in 2004, just as major clubs were discussing his future with him, when he suffered a serious knee injury. He took this badly and after meeting Christiansen at a Surry Hills gym, began to train with him in order to compete as a bodybuilder. He received steroids and cocaine from the older man, and eventually became Christiansen’s driver for his drug business. For this he received somewhere between $200 and $500 a day. By 2008 he had a loyalty to and even a great regard for Christiansen, whom he lived near and saw almost daily.

The morning after Elliott was shot, Jeremy Postlewaight arrived at Christiansen’s place in a truck towing a large boat, a Haines Hunter 650 Horizon. Urriola was there again, and Brad Curtis turned up at the front door, having driven down from Newcastle with his ribs strapped up. Christiansen met him and they walked around the block to the back laneway.

‘I did that thing,’ Christiansen said, making the shape of a gun with his hand.

They kept walking until they reached the garage, where they found Urriola. Christiansen went back to the house for a moment and Urriola said to Curtis, ‘He did good,’ and also made the gun shape with his hand. Obviously it was catching.

Postlewaight put a tarp on the floor of the boat and Christiansen opened the back door of the van in the shed to reveal the large metal toolbox. Christiansen and Urriola got the box out of the van and lifted it up onto the side of the boat. Blood somehow dripped out onto the boat and the roadway, and was cleaned up by Postlewaight and Christiansen.

Curtis soon left, and the others headed off to dispose of the toolbox. They launched the boat at Drummoyne and motored east, beneath the Harbour Bridge, past the Opera House and out through the Heads, and kept going until they could no longer see land. Christiansen and Urriola were seasick.

‘How far do we have to go?’ Urriola asked Postlewaight.

‘A hundred and thirty metres [deep],’ was the reply.

Christiansen had brought a cordless drill with him, and when they were out to sea he drilled two holes in the box to help it sink. An anchor was attached to the box, and finally they dumped it over the side. Postlewaight said a prayer as Paul Elliott’s makeshift coffin quickly slid beneath the waves.

It was a long haul, and they didn’t get back to Drummoyne until about 3 pm. That night, Christiansen and Urriola went to Alexandria on motorbikes and Christiansen ‘turned and burned’ Elliott’s hire car. He brought some petrol in a tin can, splashed it around inside the vehicle, and set it alight using a Zippo lighter.

About a week later, Christiansen and Curtis were doing some Christmas shopping together at the Broadway Shopping Centre, and passed a bookstore.

‘Do you want me to show you that guy I did?’ asked Christiansen. ‘He’s in that Underbelly book.’

The reference was to the popular volume Gotcha: Best of Underbelly by Andrew Rule and John Silvester, which Tong had previously shown Christiansen. A copy had also been found in the house of Lyle Pendleton when he was arrested.

After Christiansen made his statement to Joe Doueihi and Matt Fitzgerald about the killing of Paul Elliott, they had a team at the Brighton-Le-Sands address within hours, with detectives interviewing neighbours while crime scene officers carefully went over the house. In the room where Christiansen said the shooting had occurred, a large portion of carpet and underlay had been replaced. The rooms were checked for blood traces using Luminol. The reagent is sprayed on a surface in darkness, and if blood is detected it glows with a blue light known as chemiluminescence. Positive reactions were found on some carpet and a piece of underlay, and also on floorboards. Swabs were taken, and the DNA from the blood on the underlay was matched to that of Paul Elliott.

Also after Christiansen’s statement, detectives spent many hours reviewing the surveillance records of the Kennards lock-up. These showed Christiansen coming in and collecting a gun a day or so before the murder. He returned with a backpack containing a large quantity of drugs (his payment from Tong), and later the gun and Elliott’s bumbag. Following Christiansen’s confession, they could see how these movements matched the chronology of the murder. It was chilling to think that, thanks to the surveillance they’d been conducting, they had actually recorded the arrangements for a killing. But at the time they had no idea of this.

The one action that didn’t fit the chronology was Christiansen placing Elliott’s bumbag in the lock-up, which did not occur until a fortnight after the murder. This seems to be because, as soon as the body had been given a ‘Sydney send-off’ out at sea, Christiansen and Urriola had done another job unrelated to Elliott—a drug run to Perth—that took them away. Christiansen must have kept the bag somewhere else until his return. Police were puzzled that he would keep the bumbag with Elliott’s identification in it. The only reason they could think of was that he was so convinced Elliott’s disappearance wouldn’t be solved, he’d been considering using the driver’s licence and other items for some sort of identity fraud. But it was still a reckless act.

Tuno still didn’t know the real name of the man Christiansen called Tong, but over at the Crime Commission, which was also looking at Elliott’s murder, the analyst got to work on the records for various phones that had been seized, and found that Lyle Pendleton, who’d originally brokered the protection contract, had spoken a lot to a man named Thanawat Chudtalay. And Chudtalay’s phone had him talking often to a man named Tuan Anh ‘Andy’ Tran.

Phone records indicate the approximate location of their users because they show the mobile phone tower used for each call. With this information, the analyst was able to ascertain that Tran had been in the same area whenever Christiansen said he’d met Tong, so Tong and Tran were probably the same man. This important information was passed on to Tuno. Still not having enough information to charge Tran with involvement in Elliott’s murder, they arrested him on unrelated drug charges on 11 August 2009. Not only did he decline to talk, the detectives had a real problem with the issue of identification.

As we’ve seen, after Christiansen told detectives the location of the murder, police ‘canvassed’ nearby houses, asking the occupants if they had any memory of activity at the location around the time of the killing. They soon heard a bizarre story. In one of the neighbouring houses, a few boys had been hanging out in a room on the second floor while the parents of the one who lived there were at work. Over the course of the afternoon, they’d taken an interest in the comings and goings next door, and had seen the white van arrive and the toolbox being lifted out and carried into the garage. Later, they’d seen a black Statesman turn up, and soon afterwards heard some banging sounds, like gunshots. The boys had been watching movies, so their observation wasn’t continuous, but they had seen the same men who’d carried the toolbox out of the van carry it back to the vehicle later, and noticed that this time it seemed a lot heavier. When the mother of the boy who lived in the house came home that night, he told her he thought someone had been shot next door. She told him not to be silly, and that he’d been watching too many films.

The next day the boys got together again, and while one kept watch, the others got into the house and found a patch of carpet had been removed in the front room. While they were inside, a small car arrived and two Asian people got out with cleaning equipment. The cockatoo panicked and, trying to buy time for his friends still in the house, told the cleaners, ‘We thought we heard gunshots from in there yesterday.’

‘No,’ one of the Asians replied. ‘We’re just doing some renovations and using a nail gun.’

The boys accepted this, at least to the point where they did not say anything to the authorities, until police came knocking. Then they gladly told their story, but it contained one detail that created a huge problem for the police. The boys said one of the men they’d seen carrying the toolbox was dark-haired and huge—Christiansen—and the other was Asian—Tran—and had a pale mohawk haircut. That last detail seemed completely wrong: when Tuno arrested Tran he had average-length dark hair, and it was unlikely he’d had time to grow out a mohawk since the murder. Tran still wasn’t speaking to them, but no one who knew him—including Christiansen—had any memory of a mohawk haircut, pale or otherwise. The detectives obtained what photographs of Tran they could from previous years, and in all of them his hair was quite ordinary.

The detectives came to the conclusion that the boys had made a mistake. Probably it had happened because one of them had been in error about what he thought he’d seen, and in discussions afterwards his memory had been accepted by the others; such errors are less rare than most people realise. This one presented a problem to the police: they would have to disclose it to the defence, who would naturally make a great thing of it in court.

Tuno and the Crime Commission decided to use covert listening devices to record some of Tran’s conversations while in custody, particularly with Thanawat Chudtalay, his co-offender in the unrelated drug matter for which he’d been arrested. Chudtalay was a close associate of Tran, and his DNA had been found on the bag of drugs located in Christiansen’s lock-up. The police installed the listening device, told the two men they were being investigated for the Elliott murder, and sat back and waited.

On 14 August 2009, Tran told Chudtalay not to talk to police, and also relayed some advice he’d apparently received from his lawyer, whom I’ll call Dave. His English was not good: ‘Just stick to that, man, because, like, what, from what we know now, they have hard-core—Dave go to me my only escape, see what, what the situation is, switch that into self-defence.’ In subsequent conversations he was more explicit, and the police recorded him admitting to arranging the meeting at which Elliott was killed, to being there, and to helping Christiansen put the body in the toolbox.

A year after Tran’s arrest they were able to charge him with the murder. (Although Christiansen had fired the gun, Tran had set the whole thing up.) He pleaded not guilty at first, only changing this to a guilty plea on the eve of his trial in late 2011. He was sentenced to twenty years, with a non-parole period of fifteen.

•

In the end, just about everyone pleaded guilty to something, except the Perish brothers and Matthew Lawton—and Curtis’ associate Jay Sauer. On 18 December 2003 police stopped Sauer’s car and searched it, finding 132 grams of methamphetamine and $1,500 in cash. Sauer said he had no knowledge of the drugs. Searches of his home and business premises found more drugs, including eighty-one mauve ecstasy tablets with a Donald Duck logo on them, and a further $27,260 in used notes that Sauer said was working capital for his Harley shop. He was given six years with a non-parole period of four.

In April 2010 Marcelo Urriola was sentenced for helping dispose of Paul Elliott’s body at sea and for supplying cocaine. He asked that a further sixteen offences be taken into account, most involving the possession of anabolic steroids. Justice Elizabeth Fullerton noted Urriola had had a ‘pathological dependence on Christiansen for the supply of various drugs of addiction’ and an ‘utterly misplaced regard and respect for this man’. She gave him a discount of forty-five per cent on the first count for his plea of guilty and for assistance provided. For the first offence Urriola received a total sentence of six years, with a non-parole period of four years and six months, and for the second, a fixed term of two years and six months, to commence three years after the first sentence. He appealed against the length of his sentence and the judge was told to make a relatively minor alteration to the overall sentence.

On 15 April 2010 Craig Bottin, after serving seven years for various other offences, was arrested at his parents’ home in Mortdale and charged with his role in the Falconer kidnapping and other offences committed with Brad Curtis. In addition he was charged with obtaining a loan of $28,450 from Esanda Finance by securing it against a property he did not actually own. In fact it was his parents’ place. He was sentenced in May 2011 to three years, with two non-parole.

In May 2010 Brad Curtis was sentenced for eight offences, including kidnapping Terry Falconer and shooting Gary Mack and Raniera Puketapu. He asked that a further fourteen offences, including the BOC Gases robbery, be taken into account. Judge Deborah Sweeney observed that Curtis was thirty-nine years old and his only criminal history was for drink-driving in the Children’s Court back in 1989. Since 2005 he’d been working in occupational health and safety management positions with organisations including Railcorp and the Wesley Mission.

The court heard that since Curtis’ arrest in early 2009, his children’s behaviour had deteriorated and some were suffering severe anxiety. His wife had acquired a major depressive disorder.

The judge noted that a psychologist who’d examined Curtis said there was no history of substance abuse, mental illness or significant pathology. Curtis himself expressed only qualified remorse for his crimes; for example, still distinguishing between ‘fighting gangsters’ and ‘hurting innocents’. Therefore, said the judge, ‘my assessment of his prospects of rehabilitation must remain guarded given the cold-blooded approach he demonstrated in many of his offences without any psychological condition which may have provided some explanation for his conduct’. For this accumulation of criminality he would have received a sentence of forty years, but the judge noted that the assistance he had provided police—and was to provide in the future, when he gave evidence in court—was ‘of a very high order. It can probably be described as exceptional.’ Therefore Curtis received a discount of fifty per cent, meaning his final sentence was twenty years, of which fifteen must be served.

In September 2010 Jake Bennie was sentenced to five years, with a minimum of three, for his role in the abduction of Terry Falconer. The judge had taken into account the BOC Gases robbery and gave Bennie a thirty-five per cent discount for assistance provided. Bennie struck some observers as a strangely cheerful man, even in jail, one of those who seem to go through disasters untouched.

In November 2010 Jeremy Postlewaight was sentenced for assisting with the disposal of Paul Elliott’s body and for the robbery of BOC Gases. Justice Elizabeth Fullerton noted that unlike Urriola, Postlewaight, who was thirty-three at the time of Elliott’s death, was not psychologically dependent on Christiansen, and had also provided the boat used to take the body out to sea, so his criminality was worse. He had also been in jail before, for supplying drugs.

Her Honour noted that Postlewaight’s lawyer claimed his client had said a prayer ‘out of respect’ before dropping the toolbox into the ocean. ‘Even if that is true,’ the judge said, ‘I do not consider that it carries any weight at all as evidence of remorse, or that it has any bearing at all on the issue of rehabilitation, whatever else it might reflect about this offender’s conscience or his faith.’

After applying a discount of twenty-five per cent for the guilty plea, Justice Fullerton sentenced Postlewaight to nine years, of which six years and six months must be served.

Michael Christiansen was almost like a kid when talking to police after he was caught, claiming that everything bad he’d done had been an accident, certainly not his fault. Apparently he hadn’t intended to kill Elliott—even though he’d taken the toolbox coffin to the house. When telling these stories to police he would adopt a subservient and vacuous expression, but they figured he wasn’t as dumb as he pretended. His generally successful criminal career suggested otherwise.

In July 2011 Christiansen, who had pleaded guilty, was sentenced for four offences, including the murder of Paul Elliott and for supplying a large quantity of drugs. He asked for an additional twenty-one offences to be taken into account.

Like Curtis, Christiansen had helped police and, as a result, his life and the lives of his family were in danger. He would serve his sentence in protective custody within the prison system, which meant his conditions and access to courses and jobs would be restricted.

Justice Megan Latham had received a letter from Christiansen saying, ‘I take full responsibility for my part in the death of Mr Elliott and expect to be punished accordingly.’ It was the judge’s view that Christiansen’s ‘prospects of rehabilitation appear sound, if only on the basis that, by the time of the offender’s release from jail, he will no longer be an associate of those who engage in large-scale drug dealing. The offender’s criminality appears to be almost wholly related to his participation in that milieu.’ After applying a discount of thirty per cent for the murder as a result of the guilty plea and the help provided police, the judge sentenced Christiansen to twenty-one years, with a minimum of fifteen years and three months.

‘The only upsetting thing about the investigation is the sentences don’t reflect the crimes,’ said Tuno detective Joe Doueihi when it was all over, ‘because most of them rolled and got discounts. Christiansen got fifteen years on the bottom for a contract killing where the body’s never even been recovered. It doesn’t get much worse than that.’

The arrests and subsequent confessions were an impressive success. Unfortunately this had been achieved alongside the continuing decline in the personal and professional relationship between Gary Jubelin and Glen Browne. The only thing they had left in common was a commitment to the investigation.

JUSTICE

They have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.

12

THE FIRST TRIAL

There is no peace, saieth the Lord, unto the wicked.

Anthony and Andrew Perish and Matthew Lawton had all been charged with conspiracy to murder Terry Falconer. Anthony Perish and Matthew Lawton were also charged with the actual murder. They’d all pleaded not guilty, so there would be a trial. In the case of the murder charge, it would be necessary for the Crown to prove not that Perish and Lawton had actually killed Falconer, only that he’d died as a result of actions carried out by them with reckless disregard for human life.

The first step in the trial process is a committal hearing before a magistrate, where the Crown presents its case—including some of its witnesses—and the defence challenges it. The magistrate decides if the case is strong enough to proceed to a trial before a jury.

This committal occurred before Magistrate Alexander Mijovich in the Downing Centre in Sydney in June 2010, with trial advocate Roger Kimbell representing the Crown, along with solicitor Victoria Garrity. Often defence lawyers are paid for by the state, through Legal Aid, but in this case the accused paid for their own defence. According to one informed observer, by the end of the trial they would have spent more than a million dollars, all provided by Anthony Perish.

It was fascinating to see how the state set out to prosecute, on the cheap, criminals of the stature of the Perishes. The Director of Public Prosecutions did not even allocate a Crown prosecutor (a barrister) to the committal, instead allowing a solicitor to take on three top barristers. As for the police force, you might think they would have provided a dedicated, crack squad to protect the lives of the three protected witnesses whose evidence would be vital for the case, but in fact the detectives of Tuno had to look after Tod Daley, David Taylor and Tony Martin themselves. They booked cheap hotel rooms that they shared with the witnesses for the course of the committal (and, later, the trials), staying with them twenty-four hours a day.

As most of what occurred at the committal was a rehearsal for the trial, it will not be described here, except for an incident on the morning of 9 June, after Tod Daley had been escorted into the courtroom by detectives. It was his second day in the witness box, and on the previous one the Perishes had alternated menacing stares with mocking laughter. Now, as the courtroom waited for the magistrate to appear, they took things to another level. First Andrew stared at Daley and made his right hand into a gun shape before placing it against his temple, then both Perishes got to scribbling on the pads with which they’d been provided, and wrote words that they held up for Daley to read. Anthony’s said ‘DOG’, while Andrew’s was ‘FINK’.

It wasn’t a physical attack, but it was the best the Perishes could do in the circumstances, and for a man in Daley’s situation it was unsettling. The police charged the brothers with witness intimidation and hoped they would would be tried before the murder trial, so convictions would be on their records at that point. (As there was CCTV in the committal courtroom, and the makeshift signs had been seized by police, there was little doubt they’d be found guilty.) But for some reason the matter did not go to court until after the murder trial.

The committal went for two weeks and at the end, Magistrate Mijovich decided there were cases to be answered. A trial date was set for 2011: the wheels of justice tend to move slowly, especially when there is a need to coordinate three busy defence lawyers. Experienced barrister Mervyn Grogan was assigned to be the Crown prosecutor, and he consulted with Roger Kimbell and Virginia Garrity (who would be at the trial too). He read the extensive brief—which occupied dozens of thick ringbinders—and began to work out how he would run the trial. This included determining in detail what evidence was admissible, and deciding which witnesses to call and the order in which to present them.

The trial was due to begin on 31 January before Justice Derek Price, a tall and lean man with a voice resembling that of television presenter Kerry O’Brien. The defence team was headed by a group of high-powered barristers: Carolyn Davenport SC (for Anthony Perish); Winston Terrracini SC (Andrew Perish’s long-time brief) and Stephen Hanley SC (for Matthew Lawton). Just as the trial was about to start, Mervyn Grogan fell seriously ill and was replaced by Paul Leask, who asked for a month to master the brief. Justice Price, apparently impatient to get things moving, gave him a week.

Gary Jubelin had checked Leask out and figured if any barrister could do it in the time, he could. Leask, a trim man who looks younger than his years and gives an impression of great energy, was born in South Australia in 1966 and attended state schools before completing an economics–law degree at the University of Adelaide. He worked for Legal Aid and as a Crown prosecutor in South Australia from 1989 to 1995, as a Public Defender in Queensland, and became a Crown prosecutor in Sydney in 2002. In 2008 he prosecuted two people charged with the murder of a couple, Gregory Hosa and Kathryn McKay, whose hog-tied bodies had been found smouldering in 44-gallon drums in the Tomerong State Forest near Nowra on the state’s south coast. One of the accused was acquitted, but the main perpetrator pleaded guilty during the trial. That trial had been very much personality-based, involving a witness who’d been an accomplice and gave evidence. The Falconer trial was similar: everything would depend on how Tod Daley, Tony Martin and Brad Curtis were received by the jury. Of these, Tod Daley was by far the most important, because he was first and if the jury believed his story of the attempt to hire his boat, all the subsequent evidence would fit naturally into the framework set up by his account.

The two cases also resembled each other in that the Crown could not say for sure just what action of the accused had led to the death of each victim, yet this did not matter. All it was necessary to establish for a conviction was that the victim had died as a result of some action of the accused. So the case Leask would take to the jury was that Terry Falconer had died as a result of his abduction, which had occurred at the instigation or with the assistance of the accused, and with the intention of killing him. In other words, he made no attempt to pin down the exact moment of death. This was probably wise, as confusion was likely to arise in the trial over whether Falconer had been killed by Brad Curtis or had died on the way to Girvan. Curtis, as we’ve seen, had given three different accounts of Falconer’s death, and no one knew which one he’d settle on during the trial, but given Leask’s trial strategy, in law this didn’t matter.

Paul Leask soon mastered the voluminous detail of the brief. He was taken up in a police helicopter with Glen Browne, and they flew to Wauchope and the Hastings River, and then back to Girvan, where the chopper landed in a paddock next to the house. The place had long been abandoned but still contained many of the belongings of Anthony Perish and Brad Curtis from the time they’d lived there. Leask saw the screens in the lounge area that had been connected to the cameras that monitored the gates, and also the extensive collection of action videos the men had watched at night. He examined the interior of the big green shed where Terry Falconer had been dismembered, which now looked like any other abandoned workspace, its concrete floor covered with pieces of machinery and paint tins.

It is clear from the air, or even on a map, that the Karuah River comes close to Girvan, so Anthony Perish’s initial request to Tod Daley to bring his boat up that river made good sense. But having said that, he was not very familiar with the rivers of New South Wales: he’d thought the Karuah flowed through Bulahdelah. And he’d dumped Terry Falconer in the heavily fished and tidal Hastings River when it would have been possible to deposit his remains much closer to the ocean. This mistake remained one of the mysteries of the case. Possibly he’d been affected by drugs, or by the emotion of what he’d just done and the sense of vengeance he must have been feeling that morning. Whatever the case, his normally cool judgment had failed him. That one lapse was the reason he was now about to go on trial.

A major problem arose for the prosecution when Brad Curtis was diagnosed with liver cancer after the committal hearing. The cancer had spread and affected other organs, and Curtis had major surgery—with armed guards in the operating theatre even when he was unconscious. It was now expected he would die in prison before serving his fifteen years, so the big question was whether he was still prepared to give evidence. He might well decide there was nothing to gain from this as he would not be alive to enjoy the discount he’d received off his sentence, and for the sake of his family’s safety he should stay silent.

Glen Browne took Paul Leask and Victoria Garrity out to Long Bay to meet Curtis. The meeting took place in his cell, which he had to himself, and he was plainly unsettled to have them there, in his private space. He didn’t have a lot to say, and when they handed him a copy of his statement to police, he didn’t seem interested. They got no idea of his intentions.

He might give evidence as he’d promised, but he also might refuse to go into the witness box at all, in which case Leask could be in trouble: in such a situation it is not automatic that the Crown can produce previous evidence. A third possibility was that he might give evidence, but in a half-hearted way that would weaken the case. In that situation, Leask would be able to ask the judge for permission to show the jury some of his past evidence, such as the ERISP or the video of the walk-through done with police at Girvan. Curtis was intelligent, secretive, a planner and manipulative. Anything might happen.

There was another important development not long before the trial was due to begin. Some of the defence lawyers had talked to Merv Grogan about possible pleas, and now Anthony Perish’s barrister Carolyn Davenport told Leask her client wanted to plead guilty to the manslaughter of Terry Falconer: he was prepared to acknowledge that he’d arranged for Falconer to be put in the toolbox and that he’d died there, but that this had not been the intention. It was up to Leask to decide if the Crown was prepared to accept this plea to the lesser charge of manslaughter, which carries a much shorter sentence than murder.

The attempted plea was a risky move, because if the Crown rejected it, the murder trial would proceed and the jury would be told of the plea. This would mean Perish would be unable to deny that he had planned the abduction and taken delivery of the box at Turramurra. This might make the jury more open to the idea that he was a murderer than if he’d been able to deny all connection with the death of Terry Falconer.

Why would Anthony Perish take such a risk? One possible reason is he (or his lawyers) had decided the outcome of the trial was highly unpredictable, because of the unusual importance of protected witnesses. Such witnesses are notoriously unreliable in court, and if the jury decided Tod Daley or Brad Curtis was lying, the case might well fall over. Perish might have hoped the Crown was as uncertain about the trial’s outcome as he was, and would accept the certainty of a lesser conviction over the possibility he might get off altogether—on the venerable legal principle that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. If this was what he was thinking, he was perhaps unlucky with the change of prosecutors. Paul Leask has a reputation as a Crown who does not do deals; he rejected the plea.

It was interesting that the manslaughter plea had come from Anthony Perish and not Matthew Lawton, whose involvement in the crime was so much less. Had Lawton pleaded guilty to manslaughter at an early stage, there’s a possibility it would have been accepted. But he stayed loyal to the end, and it was to do him no favours.

•

While it is the job of defence barristers to ensure the jury hears no untruths about their clients, a great deal of effort also goes into the suppression of unpalatable truths. Juries almost never, for example, get to hear about any previous criminal or even disreputable activities the accused might have engaged in. So in the Perish trial, the jury could not be told that Anthony had once been charged with a drug offence (even though he was not convicted), or that Andrew was currently serving a prison sentence for one. Our legal system holds that such information might prejudice the jury against the accused, and make them think it more likely than otherwise that they committed the crime for which they’re on trial. The system holds that such an assumption would be unfair, especially when the previous charge or conviction was for an offence quite different to the one for which the accused is now on trial.

Where this gets tricky for practical purposes is when a piece of evidence is both prejudicial and what is known as probative, meaning it is directly relevant to the trial. In such instances, the Crown can argue that the principle described above is countered by the need to include the evidence if the jury is to get a clear and complete sense of what occurred. Barristers and judges spend long hours discussing such matters, drawing on a wealth of legislation and case law. Such a discussion, like others that occur in the absence of the jury, is known as a voir dire.

In this trial there was a voir dire before the jury was empanelled, when the defence barristers made an unusual application. Strike Force Tuno had been the subject of press articles over the years indicating the breadth of its activities and the number of murders it was investigating. Such articles had largely stopped since the arrests in early 2009, because once someone is charged, journalists are not allowed to speculate on their activities in case this influences the thinking of readers who later find themselves on the jury. But the articles, published mainly before January 2009, were still available on the newspapers’ websites and Carolyn Davenport and the other barristers asked his Honour to order the Sydney Morning Herald and the Daily Telegraph to take down a number of specified reports. Such requests for ‘take down’ orders were relatively new and controversial.

Justice Price agreed with the barristers and on 16 February ordered the articles be removed. The news organisations opposed this in court. They argued that the jurors, in this trial as always, would be instructed by his Honour not to look up the case on the internet. They also argued that there was now such a volume of material on the internet about the accused (including versions of the articles that were to be taken down that had been copied onto other websites) that taking down half a dozen articles from two websites would not make much difference. Price rejected these arguments and the articles were removed.

It was a difficult situation. One of the bases of our trial system is the assumption that what jurors know about a case can largely be controlled by the court. The internet has undermined that control, but there has been no formal attempt in New South Wales to assess what this means for the integrity of the system and what, if anything, ought to be done about it. (One reason for this lack of action could be that it’s a problem to which there appears to be no solution.)

Price’s decision was naturally unpopular with the media, and after two articles about it were published in the Sydney Morning Herald, he postponed the trial for some months to ensure the controversy—which drew further attention to the fact that material was still on the internet—would not be fresh in the minds of the jury.

This delay was welcome for Paul Leask, as it gave him more time to prepare his case. The police were upset, though: the postponement produced havoc in their own jobs and consternation among all the witnesses for the trial, who just wanted to get it over with as soon as possible. The protected witnesses in particular had prepared themselves mentally and emotionally for the ordeal of giving evidence, and now had to wind down and prepare to do it all again in a few months. This sort of thing can take a heavy toll.

Tod Daley was particularly upset. He’d first talked to Tuno more than eight years earlier, and felt that in a way things had been on hold ever since. Now he pleaded to Jubelin, ‘When can I get on with my life?’

Unfortunately, Camille Alavoine’s cancer had come back after her return to Tuno in 2007. Despite this, she was still coming to work as death approached in 2011, because there was much to be done before the trial started. Her last months were like some grisly farce from which she was incapable of removing herself. ‘I’ve got to hand over all the work I’ve done in the past ten years to another analyst,’ she would say to Jubelin. But she could not be replaced until she stopped coming in. It was a terrible situation, and she never did get the chance to hand over her work. Only after she could work no more, and went into hospital to die, did Tuno receive its replacement analyst.

When 4 July 2011 came and the trial was due to start soon, the lawyers for Anthony Perish and Matthew Lawton asked that the two articles in the Sydney Morning Herald critical of the judge’s decision in February also be taken down from the internet. Justice Price declined to make such an order. When the trial began on 11 July, in Court Number Two at Taylor Square, he told the jury it would be ‘a serious criminal offence’ to seek information on the case from the internet, or indeed anywhere else outside of the courtroom. He reminded those members of the media present that there was a non-publication order on the names of a large number of witnesses in the trial.

Paul Leask opened with an address to the jury. He was intense and a little uneven at first, but soon settled into his stride and had the attention of the jurors, some of whom looked appalled as the terrible story of Terry Falconer’s death was told. The jurors sneaked glances at the three accused men in the dock, perhaps looking for a sign of criminality in their faces. There was little to see: they looked like three tradesmen in early middle age, each with a tan and neatly cut hair, and dressed in a suit. Anthony Perish, the drug boss, was the most pleasant-looking of the three—he has a charming smile that reaches his eyes. Andrew is taller and has a coarser face. Lawton, who always sat on Anthony’s left, appeared mild-mannered and reliable. Criminals in movies and on television generally look far more sinister than their real-life equivalents.

Carolyn Davenport opened her defence of Anthony Perish, whose failed manslaughter plea was known to the jury, saying he admitted to asking Brad Curtis to kidnap Falconer because he had been told Falconer had killed his grandparents and wanted to question him about this. He had no intention that Falconer would die, but he did die on the way to Turramurra. Once Perish saw that Falconer was dead, he decided to get rid of his body in such a way that it would never be found, and rang his associate Matthew Lawton to come to his house to help with this. The body was disposed of ‘not very professionally’.

As for Tod Daley, according to Davenport, Anthony Perish had lent him money to fix his boat from the goodness of his heart, and there had been no suggestion it was done so the boat could be used to dispose of a murder victim. Daley and Curtis were both lying, she suggested; Daley because he was paranoid and had mental problems, and Curtis (who was lying about when Falconer had died) because he’d received a discount off his own sentence in return for agreeing to give evidence in this trial.

Matthew Lawton’s barrister, Stephen Hanley, told the jury his client had known Anthony Perish for a long time and done work for him, but had had no involvement in the events under discussion until arriving at Turramurra and finding Perish and Curtis there with Terry Falconer’s corpse. He said Lawton might be guilty of helping dispose of the body and hiding an offence, but of nothing more. He noted the Crown had not suggested Lawton would have had any motive for such a murder. (The Crown does not have to prove motive for murder, but usually tries its best as this can be a powerful indicator of guilt.)

Andrew Perish’s long-time barrister, Winston Terracini, is a man with a grey beard, a squat, powerful body and a deep voice. His man-of-the-people manner goes down very well with clients. He began by telling the jury, ‘No one knows your names so please don’t think . . . that you’re anything but anonymous.’ Then he continued in his normal homely style, covering a lot of territory. ‘You will hear about drug use . . . and rather depraved behaviour,’ he told them sadly, but this should not affect their objectivity. Some of the next few weeks might be hard going: ‘There are no commercial breaks in trials. This is real.’ The juror’s job was important, he said, more so than someone who could make spaghetti marinara eight ways or dance the tango.

He told them the main witness against Andrew Perish was Tod Daley, ‘a man of violence, a man who used drugs’ and indeed one who had been in a ‘befuddled state from taking too many amphetamines’. Daley, said Terracini, ‘has zero credibility, he’s completely unreliable’. Then, just in case the jury hadn’t been completely reassured the first time, he again told them, ‘I don’t want you to feel uncomfortable, because no one knows who you are. You’re completely anonymous.’

On the morning of the trial’s second day, Carolyn Davenport asked that photographs of the parcels containing Terry Falconer’s body parts not be shown to the jury. The Crown opposed this, saying the parcels were evidence of the planning that had gone into the murder. Justice Price ruled that most of the photos could be given to the jury, but not two that showed open parcels, which ‘may produce an emotive response in the jurors’. This voir dire occurred before the jury was called in.

The first witness was Tuno OIC Glen Browne, who ran through practical matters such as a map showing the location of places that would be important in the trial, and estimates police had made of the driving times between Ingleburn and Turramurra, and from there to Girvan. The advantage to the Crown of having Browne give evidence first was that he would then be able to sit in the courtroom. Witnesses must stay outside until they give evidence: Jubelin, who was to go into the witness box later, stayed outside the courtroom for weeks. The police wanted Browne in the court every day, along with several other detectives, to provide moral support for their protected witnesses when they gave their evidence. This was symbolically important because most of the people at the front of the court—the three barristers plus junior barrister John O’Sullivan for Andrew Perish, plus at least three solicitors—were on the defence side. And as the witnesses gave evidence they were only four or five metres from the accused, who sat facing them.

In a trial the Crown presents all its witnesses first. In this case that was expected to take a month or so. Each witness gives their evidence in chief, prompted by questions from the Crown prosecutor, and is then cross-examined by the defence barrister—or, in this case, three barristers. The next witnesses were Alan Morcomb and George Kaillis from Wreck-A-Mended. Then Daryl Faint of the Department of Corrective Services explained the day release program. Douglas Breakwell of the State Emergency Services described the recovery of the first six parcels from the Hastings River, and after lunch a forensic officer described the Luminol blood test inside the shed at Girvan, and the excavation of the pit and what had been discovered at the site of the fire near the house. Another witness recalled the discovery six months later of the anklet containing a transmitter that had been cut off Terry Falconer’s leg at the grassy hill near Wreck-A-Mended.

The next day Bryne Ruse gave evidence. He was one of the detectives from Strike Force Seabrook, which had been reinvestigating the killing of the Perish grandparents at the time Terry Falconer disappeared. He explained there had been rumours of Falconer’s involvement in the murders, including some provided by Andrew Perish, but Seabrook had been unable to confirm any of them. When Perish had been told this in July 2001, he’d ‘become aggressive and stated a police cover-up’ had occurred.

Ruse said one of those who claimed Falconer had been involved in the murders was his wife, Liz. She had been in litigation with Terry over a significant number of properties they owned together, and Terry had told him Liz wanted him to remain in jail so she could keep milking the rent from some of the properties. Questioned by Winston Terracini, he said Terry Falconer had been very suspicious of his wife and daughter, saying, ‘They’re going to get me knocked, it’s a known fact.’ According to Ruse, ‘I formed the opinion Terry was a bit paranoid [because] he was due to get out of jail and there were risks ahead of him.’

After lunch the first major witness came into the box: David Taylor, Colleen and Anthony Perishes’ former friend. This must have been difficult for him: the witness box is elevated and faces the body of the court. When standing in it you look across the bar table, which is much lower, to the dock, which is in the middle of the courtroom facing the judge and the witness. So Taylor was face to face with Anthony Perish, the man with whom he’d had such a complex relationship over many years. He told the strange story of his meeting at McMahons Point with Anthony Perish and Brad Curtis, when Curtis had produced a dictaphone and asked him if he’d considered suicide after breaking up with Colleen.

He had other things to say, and Paul Leask had to be extremely careful when leading him through his evidence. Taylor knew an enormous amount about Anthony Perish’s criminal and other disreputable activities: none of this could even be hinted at in court, lest it prejudice the jury. But Leask managed to get to the end of Taylor’s evidence-in-chief without disaster.

When Carolyn Davenport cross-examined Taylor, she pointed out he’d not mentioned the McMahons Point meeting in a 2007 statement he’d made to police, and suggested he’d invented it in another statement made the following year. He said he’d just forgotten it the first time.

‘You’re making it up as you go along, aren’t you?’ she said.

Taylor denied the suggestion, and said he was in a state of post-traumatic stress at the time he made the first statement and was not remembering things as well as usual.

The next witness was the eagerly awaited Liz Falconer, who did not disappoint. A woman of below average height with a haggard face topped by short blonde hair, she wore sunglasses because, she told the court, she’d had cataracts removed from her eyes ten days earlier. She recalled how she’d first met Terry in 1976, and when he went to jail she’d visited him every week until the last year of his incarceration, when their relationship had become very strained. In 1996 she’d found the police running sheet suggesting Terry would give evidence to police about the Rebels’ drug dealing, and in 2001 she’d shown it to various people, including Andrew Perish at a hotel in Penrith. She said she’d also told Andrew details related to the grandparents’ deaths, which she’d heard from Terry.

Cross-examined by Winston Terracini, who suggested she’d invented her meeting with Andrew Perish, she said she could not recall the name of the pub where they’d met—‘I’ve had severe head injuries, I can’t recall.’ She said she showed the running sheet to five or six people because ‘I was getting death threats about me being an informant, and I was supposed to have killed Andrew’s grandparents.’ (This was the only time this suggestion was raised during the trial.) Showing the running sheet to people was her way of responding to Terry’s attempts to brand her as an informer when she wasn’t. ‘I thought it might cause him a little bit of trouble,’ she conceded, ‘I thought it might get him a little smack in the ear or be told by someone to pull up.’ Asked if it had in fact caused him any problems in jail, she said she thought not, because ‘Terry could handle himself.’ As for his murder, ‘No one deserves what Terry got.’

One of the problems the jury faced with Liz Falconer, as with David Taylor, was that she had done a number of interviews with the police and the Crime Commission and been inconsistent in what she said. She too had originally not disclosed a meeting that now played an important part in her evidence (the pub meet with Andrew Perish). In later statements they’d admitted the meetings, and naturally the defence made a great thing of this, suggesting they were lying when they’d added to their account of events.

The next witness was Jake Bennie, who, as we’ve seen, had pleaded guilty to helping kidnap Terry Falconer and was in jail, so he appeared wearing standard prison greens and Dunlop Volley sandshoes. He said Falconer had been unconscious and snoring the last time he saw him, when the toolbox was closed inside the white van at the grassy hill near Ingleburn on 16 November 2001. He described how Curtis had later told him that he’d chopped Falconer’s head off. ‘Brad could see I was upset [by this],’ he recalled, ‘and dropped the topic.’

Bennie came across in court as young, big and gormless. He gave some hints about the character of his former friend Brad Curtis, who, he said, ‘Doesn’t like taking no for an answer . . . He’s a very persuasive person, he’s a very forceful character.’ Bennie had looked up to him as a big brother figure (a type of relationship common in this book) and admired his leadership qualities, although he’d come to see some flaws over time. For example, he agreed with Lawton’s barrister, Stephen Hanley, that during the robbery of the Surry Hills TAB in April 2001, despite telling Bottin and himself how important it was to stay calm, Curtis himself had screamed and pointed his gun at a young woman’s head. ‘He did get upset,’ Bennie said.

On the fifth day of the trial, Tony Martin gave evidence. He recounted how he’d first met Brad Curtis on the door of the Bourbon and Beefsteak, and they’d become friends. After the kidnapping of Terry Falconer, Curtis had told him he’d hit Falconer too hard and he’d died. ‘Brad said he’d fucked up,’ Martin recalled. ‘He was only supposed to be taking him to somebody to be tortured.’

Once he’d finished, the jury must have been looking forward to what Brad Curtis had to say. They’d now heard three versions of Terry Falconer’s death: the Crown’s opening, suggesting he’d died in the toolbox between Turramurra and Girvan; Bennie saying Curtis had cut his head off (although not where this had happened); and Martin saying Curtis had killed him in the car during the kidnapping. In his opening address, Paul Leask had told the jury they would not have to be sure about every piece of evidence in the prosecution case in order to find the accused guilty. But they did need to be convinced beyond reasonable doubt of the general picture, and by the end of the first week they’d been confronted with some competing versions.

Perhaps for this reason, the jury asked if they could have a transcript of the Crown’s opening speech. In a voir dire the following Monday morning, the defence opposed this, pointing out that it conflicted with some of the evidence that had been heard. Justice Price decided to give it to them anyway, because the jury had been told at the start of the trial that the opening set out only what the Crown expected the evidence would show, and that it was the evidence itself they would need to use to reach their decision. Therefore they should be able to deal with any inconsistency.

Carolyn Davenport then complained to the judge about some admissions Anthony Perish had wanted to make to the jury since the start of the trial, and which had been delayed because the Crown had not yet signed off on them. She was concerned the delay in presenting them to the jury might suggest they were being made only as concessions in the face of the evidence that had been heard. The judge pointed out that the admissions could be presented without the Crown’s signature. When the jury was called in, it was told that Anthony Perish admitted the following: he had resided at the north Turramurra property from December 2000 to August 2002, although he was not the lessee; he did have ‘access to’ the property at Girvan; and Terry Falconer’s body had been dismembered there on 16 November 2001.

Stephen Hanley then made a set of admissions on behalf of Matthew Lawton: he had known Anthony Perish in 2001; he had visited him at Turramurra and Girvan; and Terry Falconer’s body had been dismembered at Girvan. The judge told the jury it had been intended to make all these admissions from the start of the trial, but this was the first opportunity there had been to do so.

Why did Anthony Perish and Lawton make these admissions, especially the last one, which at first blush appears so damaging? Presumably so that, later in the trial, their lawyers could argue there was no need for the Crown to produce detailed evidence of the dismemberment, as the accused had already admitted it happened and the Crown had accepted this. But by not signing, meaning accepting, the admissions, Leask had made it unlikely this would happen. The jury would get to hear the gruesome details.

The next witness was to be Tod Daley. Before he was called, Carolyn Davenport asked for the jury to be sent out and then urged the judge to exclude the detectives from the room because Daley was paranoid, at one time even suggesting Gary Jubelin and Glen Browne had kidnapped Terry Falconer themselves. Justice Price rejected this expression of concern for the witness’s wellbeing, and the jury came back, followed by Daley.

He gave evidence over several days, and we’re already familiar with most of what he said. At the end of the trial’s sixth day the jury was sent home early because of technological problems. These affected the intended playing of the listening device recordings that had been made by Daley when speaking with Andrew Perish at South Western Produce. In a voir dire the next morning, Winston Terracini asked the judge if two parts of the conversations could be deleted, one a reference to Rebel chief Alex Vella and the other an exchange relating to a handgun. Presumably he thought they might be prejudicial to his client. The judge agreed to both requests and the jury was sent home again, at 10.50 am, so the editing could be done.

At the start of the trial’s third week, on 18 July, the jury were soon listening to the third wire tap recording. There were some smiles as Daley was heard to ask Andrew Perish, ‘Where’s the dunny?’ The sounds of the witness urinating and flushing the toilet were much clearer than most of the speech on the tape—although to help with this, the jurors had been provided with transcripts.

Next the jurors heard Daley asking Perish if Anthony was in Sydney—‘Mate didn’t come down?’ Paul Leask asked Daley who ‘Mate’ was, and Daley replied that it was Anthony Perish, saying they called him Mate ‘because he was on the run’.

Carolyn Davenport rose to her feet. She asked the judge if the jury could leave the room. When they were gone, she requested they be discharged because of the prejudicial nature of Daley’s comment: Anthony Perish might not get a fair trial now the jury had been told he’d been on the run, therefore possibly involved in criminal activity.

Paul Leask opposed this, saying the comment had been ‘fairly vague’, but Winston Terracini supported Davenport’s request, pointing out that the comment implied Andrew had been aware of the whereabouts of a wanted man, which didn’t look good for him either. Terracini said he’d originally asked for a separate trial for Andrew precisely to avoid the risk of ‘the onflow of prejudicial material’ and this had been refused. What had just happened, he said, was ‘a burden we shouldn’t have to bear . . . that we have an association with someone who’s on the run . . . in effect harbouring him.’

Leask said the judge could direct the jury to disregard the comment and not speculate about it, to which Davenport responded, ‘He said it and it can’t be unsaid.’ She pointed out that the jury might already be wondering why Anthony had so many pseudonyms—they’d heard him called Rooster, Steve and now Mate. Stephen Hanley joined his client to the request for a new trial, saying Matthew Lawton had been close to Anthony Perish, so the fact that Perish was on the run would reflect badly on him too. None of the barristers was denying the truth of what Daley had said. They just didn’t want the jury to know it.

Fighting to the end, Paul Leask offered to tell the jury Anthony Perish was a person of good character, to which Justice Price responded, ‘That wouldn’t help.’ He had the jury brought back in and discharged them. After they’d left, Leask apologised and said he and Victoria Garrity had at length warned Daley and all their other witnesses about the danger of giving such answers, but that this trial was like ‘walking on eggshells’.

Daley was brought back into the witness box and admonished by the judge for giving a ‘non-responsive’ answer (meaning one that went beyond the scope of the question).

‘I thought I was, your Honour,’ he replied, ‘with all due respect.’

To which his Honour replied, ‘It’s not wise of you to debate this with me.’

He announced a new trial would begin in two days.

Tod Daley was shattered by what had happened, although Paul Leask met him soon after and said it was his own fault. It was in effect the second time the trial had been postponed, and again increased the pressure on all the witnesses who’d prepared themselves to give evidence. Those who’d already gone into the box had to decide if they were prepared to do it again.

Gary Jubelin was worried about what this might do to the prosecution’s chances. There was the question of whether all the protected witnesses would come back, in some cases from distant places to which they’d now returned. There was also the possibility the defence barristers would be able to take some advantage of the fact they now knew how some of the witnesses would behave in the box.

Tod Daley was the main concern. If anyone else dropped out, they might still have a case. But if Daley refused to come back to Sydney, the prosecution would collapse.

13

THE SECOND TRIAL

The way of transgressors is hard.

The second trial began on 20 July, and fortunately Jubelin’s concerns were largely unrealised. Tod Daley did come back. I won’t repeat the evidence already described from the first trial, which was very similar the second time round, and will take up the story from the point in Daley’s evidence where we left it.

Soon after Paul Leask finished playing the listening device recordings, he sat down and Winston Terracini began his cross-examination. As Daley was almost the only witness against his client, Andrew Perish, it was crucial for Terracini to demolish his credibility. He proceeded to do his best over many hours to encourage Daley to reveal himself as a man of confused thinking, poor memory and paranoia. It’s worth looking at what occurred in some detail as it reveals a wily barrister of considerable experience at work on a worthy opponent.

Terracini was aggressive, as always, and relied heavily on the old technique of launching a series of attacks from slightly different angles. Generally the hope is that this might rattle the witness and hence cause him to respond in some way that strikes the jury adversely. The witness, for example, might become confused or angry. One of Terracini’s themes was the location of the restaurant where Daley claimed to have had a meal with Andrew and Anthony Perish in 2001 to discuss his boat. Daley had already said he was unfamiliar with Newtown.

WINSTON TERRACINI: What restaurant is it in Newtown?

TOD DALEY: I don’t know.

WT: What street is it in Newtown?

TD: I don’t know.

WT: What cuisine do they serve, or sorry, did serve?

TD: I don’t know.

WT: What does it look like?

TD: Rustic. Old-looking, small building in the middle of the street.

WT: No doubt you would have pointed this restaurant out to the police?

TD: If I could have I would have, yes.

WT: You were unable even to find it?

TD: . . . I was driven in such a manner I couldn’t tell where I was.

WT: Yes, but you get out of the car, you don’t take the car into the restaurant.

TD: No.

WT: When you get out of the car and you walk into the restaurant you had dinner, apparently?

TD: Yes . . .

WT: Having thought about it, did you think you were in Newtown or not?

TD: I only know what I was told at the time. I don’t know the area so I cannot give an answer to that.

And so on. To someone who’s never been in a witness box, this might seem petty and even pointless. But remorseless questioning of this nature over many hours can confuse witnesses and cause them to flush, to stumble and hesitate, even to forget things and possibly appear unreliable to the jurors. There is, of course, absolutely nothing improper in a defence barrister using such a technique.

Presently Terracini turned to the matter of Daley’s fears for his safety when he’d been dealing with the police. Daley described how he’d been observed at times by three different helicopters. He’d taken some photos of the helicopters and other objects and had them in court with him on a thumb drive. On another occasion he’d told Glen Browne how he’d found four Jatz biscuits floating in his swimming pool one morning, which ‘indicated to me at the time somebody had been in my yard when I was asleep in my bed and put those biscuits in the pool’.

‘Any photographic evidence of the Jatz biscuits?’ asked Terracini.

‘I think they disappeared into the pool pretty much, they disintegrated in the water.’

Daley told the story of how in 2003 he’d been on his way to Channel 9 with his girlfriend, hoping to talk to a current affairs program to express his dissatisfaction with the police of Strike Force Tuno, whom he still didn’t trust. He had stopped at a chicken shop and, while waiting for his food, a man had come in holding a golf putter and ‘stared at me with a smile on his face’. Daley had gone out back to the toilet. The man had handed the putter to the person behind the counter and left. When Daley came back into the shop he saw the putter, which had the word ‘Hush’ written on it. He took that as a message: ‘Shut the fuck up.’ His girlfriend had been so scared she’d burst into tears, and Daley had called the police and told them this was a sign he was being watched.

‘Were you taking anything at this period of your life?’ asked Terracini.

‘No, I wasn’t.’

He said that he’d seen the television presenter Ray Martin outside the Channel 9 complex in Willoughby and had a word with him, and Martin had told him to speak to the gatekeeper. Daley had done this and security had rung someone and put Daley on the phone. They’d had a conversation, but the television people didn’t want to talk with him. He’d also gone to Channel 7, without success there either.

WINSTON TERRACINI: On the previous day at two o’clock in the morning, did you ring Detective Jubelin and speak to him—it was Saturday 19 July 2003?

TOD DALEY: Not that I recall, no.

WT: Well, you would agree that ringing a police officer in circumstances such as that at two o’clock in the morning would be a bit unusual?

TD: Not in the circumstances I was in, no.

WT: Well, were you obviously distressed when you made the call?

TD: I was in a state of hyper-vigilance from the word go; not distressed. I was hyper-vigilant, yes.

WT: I suggest to you that you were very, very distressed and agitated about a registration plate you had seen on a car?

TD: I’ve written down many registration plates over the years.

WT: Because this one you thought was of special interest because it had the letters DNA?

TD: Actually it was HSV-DNA, I believe was the number plate.

WT: . . . In fact, you thought, during this period, that people were getting into your home secretly and leaving and they were endeavouring to get DNA from hair follicles and cigarette butts?

TD: I don’t know what they were trying to do in my house. I had photographic evidence of the house being entered. I believe, not a hundred per cent, that I supplied that, or showed it, to police at some stage.

WT: Yes, you did.

Daley said he was in ‘a highly stressed environment’ and agreed he’d also called Gary Jubelin once to tell him he’d seen three ladders in the yard of a house in his street and, on another occasion, when he discovered part of a keyring in his driveway that he’d last seen in a restaurant, to tell him, ‘I’m being set up.’

Later Terracini returned without warning to Newtown.

WINSTON TERRACINI: Did you tell the police that you might be able to recognise the restaurant again?

TOD DALEY: If I was taken to Newtown and, yeah.

WT: Well, did they take you?

TD: No.

WT: In all this time. All right. You told them it was a little restaurant located in a side street near the railway station; and did you tell them that?

TD: No.

WT: What are you suggesting, I just made it up?

And so on. Daley was good in the box, especially given the oddness of some of his past behaviour that was revealed. He made no attempt to apologise for it, generally sticking to short answers and refusing to be provoked by the barrister’s constant needling.

WINSTON TERRACINI: You told Mr Jubelin that whoever was in the helicopter was also monitoring your mobile phone, because when you spoke over the phone, or said things over the phone, that you intended photocopying the helicopter, the helicopter left?

TOD DALEY: Taking a photo of the helicopter. It’d be hard to photocopy.

WT: I’m sorry, you’re quite right . . . have you ever taken prohibited drugs in large quantity?

TD: I don’t know about large quantities, I’ve taken prohibited drugs over the years.

WT: Taken a lot of amphetamines over the years?

TD: I’ve taken amphetamines over the years.

WT: You were still smoking marijuana up until the end of this investigation, weren’t you?

TD: Not as a rule, no.

WT: Well, what does ‘not as a rule’—

TD: Well I mean I may have smoked a cone of marijuana to help put me to sleep at times that I couldn’t sleep, yeah.

WT: And—

TD: Through stress and so on and so forth.

WT: And you know from your own experience that giving amphetamines a decent going over makes you paranoid, doesn’t it?

TD: It can do, yes.

WT: . . . You would agree that just listening to these events being recorded [meaning Daley’s fears of DNA theft and so on] it sounds pretty bizarre, doesn’t it?

TD: Well of course it would. To any normal person it would.

WT: Yeah, well you can assume that we are. It sounds very odd, very odd, doesn’t it?

TD: Of course it would. If you don’t live that life, it’s all going to sound odd.

Terracini pushed Daley hard, exposing what appeared to be a multitude of minor contradictions between things he’d said at different times to the police or in court. Sometimes Daley would blame a contradiction on the police, saying they’d recorded what he told them incorrectly. Other times he just said, ‘I can’t recall.’

‘You’re not very reliable, are you?’ the barrister said at one point.

To which Daley replied, ‘I believe I’m telling one hundred per cent truth here today.’

Daley claimed, as we saw earlier, that Andrew Perish had admitted to involvement in the death of Terry Falconer in one of their recorded conversations at South Western Produce, with the words, ‘nobody knows we done it’. The only problem was he’d whispered these words, and on the tape they were drowned out by the noise of a compressor running in the background. Apparently, Daley had been wearing two recording devices at the time, but the main one had stopped working. Terracini had the relevant piece of recording replayed to the court and afterwards asked Daley if it was possible to hear the alleged admission.

‘I heard whispered conversation,’ Daley said.

The barrister made much of the coincidence of the fact that the listening device had apparently failed only in the conversation in which, Daley claimed, Andrew Perish had confessed.

Terracini reprised the theme of paranoia. He read out a text Daley had sent Glen Browne in December 2002: ‘4 separate sets of fresh shoeprints in back fence . . . the chopper . . . lots of noises tonight and seriously strange cars tonight’.

Daley agreed that he’d sent another text saying: ‘saw 2 huge Tongans jump out of a red Bongo van and run to the telephone box and wipe it down’. He acknowledged finding the word ‘Help’ scratched inside the metal door of his shed one day, and being sure it had not been there when he’d bought the house.

WINSTON TERRACINI: Were there ever any discussions between you and the police where words like ‘irrational’ or ‘paranoid’ or ‘overanxious’ were used, or words like that?

TOD DALEY: I believe the word ‘paranoid’ may have been used on occasions.

WT: Did you ever consider you were?

TD: Well, if I was, I’m still alive and if I was paranoid, and didn’t see what I thought I saw, that’s okay with me. I’m here today.

Almost at the end of his cross-examination, Terracini introduced what at first seemed like it might be devastating new material. He said Daley had been desperate to get police protection to help avoid going back to jail and being killed by Aboriginal men.

WINSTON TERRACINI: The Aborigines got you [in jail] once because of what you did to a young Aboriginal male, wasn’t it?

TOD DALEY: Not at all.

WT: That’s not in club rules either, is it? [Daley had just been talking about some of the rules of the Rebels.]

TD: What’s that?

WT: Trying and succeeding to have sex with a young male prisoner?

TD: I don’t have sex with males, thank you very much.

Terracini referred to an allegation made in prison, and suggested Daley had been transferred from one jail for his ‘unnatural behaviour with a young man’.

WT: That’s why you didn’t want to go back to jail, because you knew they’d fix you right up?

TD: Not at all.

WT: Because the other Aborigines found out what you did, didn’t they?

TD: No.

WT: That’s why you got stabbed?

TD: It’s not why I got stabbed.

Terracini ended his cross-examination soon after, without presenting any further evidence for the extraordinary claim.

Daley’s cross-examination by Carolyn Davenport was along similar lines. After a few minutes she raised the reason for his going to the Crime Commission in the late 1990s. Daley said, and this was interesting, that ‘once I done that, that was the point of no return for me. No run to gang life, no return to nothing. That was it for me . . . Once I done that, there was no way I would go back, which is what I done from [an early age]. I’d always gone back. [To have a warrant issued by the Commission] was something I needed done so that I never went back to the clubs.’

Davenport was uninterested in Daley’s desire for redemption. She spent a lot of time on more pragmatic matters, comparing what he’d told police during some of his more than fifty meetings (all of which had been recorded in police notes, which the defence had copies of) with what he had told them in his eighty-seven page statement, which was the basis for his answers in court. Many of these inconsistencies involved not the content of what he’d said but the time and place he’d said it. Davenport suggested the first time Daley had met Anthony Perish after leaving jail in 2001—the one during which Perish had asked him, ‘What can you do for the company?’—had been at the house in Bringelly and not at Newtown. Here, as many times elsewhere, Daley said the police record was simply wrong, and that he stood by his signed statement. This was potentially plausible as some of the police records alluded to by the defence were rough notes of rambling conversations early in their acquaintance with Daley.

It was impossible to guess what the jurors were making of Daley’s evidence. Obviously it was less than ideal from the prosecution’s point of view, but would they conclude he was completely unreliable, or decide he was a man who’d been in very unusual circumstances and had tried to do the right thing, suffering terrible emotional pressure along the way? He did not break down at any stage under the prolonged and intense questioning, and continued to give the impression of someone trying to do his best. In response to yet more questions about his inconsistency, he told Davenport, ‘I can’t recall dates and stuff, I’m sorry. It was ten years ago . . . It’s been ten years of nightmare for me.’

Davenport finished her cross-examination powerfully, getting Daley to agree to a summary of the most damaging points of his evidence, such as the incident with the ‘Hush’ putter. She concluded by proposing there’d been threats against his life from other sources, and that in order to get police protection he’d invented the story about his boat: ‘I want to suggest the whole of the evidence that you have given about your interactions with Anthony Perish are false.’

To which Daley responded: ‘It’s your job to say that.’

It was almost the only time he talked back in the face of considerable, if professional, antagonism over several days, and it was nicely judged. Tod Daley had done some terrible things, and terrible things had happened to him from an early age, but still he was a man of intelligence and spirit.

The question in the minds of the Crown lawyers and police was just what effect the revelations about Daley’s state of mind would have on the jury. As the old saying goes, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean you have nothing to be afraid of, and Daley seemed to have had good reason to be terrified.

So did other witnesses—you could almost say fear was a theme of this trial, and in that context perhaps Daley’s fears did not appear as extreme as they might have in a different setting. And even if the jurors did conclude Daley had been paranoid, would they also conclude he was lying? The defence lawyers seemed to be hoping that would follow, but it might not.

This was a particularly tough trial for the lawyers. The stakes were high, for the defence lawyers with their particular clients, and for Paul Leask, one barrister against three and carrying the weight of police expectations after an investigation of almost ten years.

On the eleventh day of the second trial, Gary Jubelin gave evidence. A striking figure with his shaved head and smooth skin, he didn’t look like a typical fifty-year-old police inspector. If he was in a film you might have picked him, given his athletic build and straight back, as a military officer some years younger than that. He did speak with the slightly defensive delivery used by most police in the witness box, reflecting a desire to consider each word before it is spoken.

Paul Leask asked him mainly about his contact with Tod Daley, and Jubelin agreed he had encouraged Daley to see a psychiatrist in mid-2003, as Daley had broken the code by which he’d lived since the age of fourteen and appeared to be under extreme stress. Daley had refused. Questioned by Davenport, Jubelin said Daley had been relocated and provided with a new identity at the expense of the state. (However, as had already come out, he was not on the witness protection program.) Jubelin said there had been fifty-eight meetings with Daley in 2002 and 2003, and countless phone calls and text messages. Davenport pointed to the many inconsistencies between the police notes of these meetings and what Daley had finally said in his signed statement, and suggested he’d had a long time to come up with his story. Jubelin acknowledged that considerable time had elapsed during which Daley had been able to think about past events, and said this was why the statement was more reliable than the notes.

On the matter of Daley’s state of mind, to which Davenport devoted some time, Jubelin agreed he’d used the term ‘paranoia’ back in late 2002 but suggested it had been meant colloquially. Davenport read out a text message sent by Daley to Glen Browne at the time, at 3.38 one morning, reading, ‘Liar. You’re just using me for sex. The Professor also stated that physical gratification is but one form, gratification being individual, hence the term sex can come in myriad form.’

It was a very strange message, of course, and indicated a certain facility with language not usually found in criminals. Davenport suggested it was unusual, and Jubelin agreed, and said he thought it was ‘an attempt at humour that has probably gone astray’. Davenport then read out the rest of the message: ‘PS—When we find good sex we hope to feel satisfied upon completion of the act. Didn’t anyone explain to the Professor that Murphy proved that you can’t please every cunt.’

Jubelin suggested this was another attempt at humour. Questioned yet again about Daley’s state of mind, he said, ‘he was seeing threats in everything, but he was a person who was under stress and I believed the stress related to the fact that he breached the code that he lived by all his life’.

•

The next major witness was to be Brad Curtis. Tod Daley had been important in establishing that the accused had intended to kill Terry Falconer, and Jake Bennie had been present at the abduction. But Curtis was the only Crown witness who could give details of what had happened afterwards, including whether Falconer had been alive or dead when he reached Turramurra. But of course there was his cancer. The detectives and Paul Leask tried to find out his intentions, but Curtis wasn’t saying. He’d refused to see Leask the previous day out at Long Bay jail, and now, on the morning of Thursday 4 August, asked to see his own solicitor. At a voir dire at 11 am, Leask told the judge the solicitor had relayed only this instruction from his client: ‘Put me in the box.’

‘What’s he going to do?’ Leask had asked.

‘Just put him in the witness box.’

Winston Terracini asked the judge for documents from Justice Health, the health wing of the state’s prison system, that would show what drugs Curtis was on, if any. He said he was concerned they might be mood-altering, and thereby affect Curtis’ evidence. Justice Price called for this information, and said Curtis would come into the witness box in the absence of the jury, after Gary Jubelin had finished giving evidence, so the court could ascertain his situation.

The jury came in and Stephen Hanley proceeded to cross-examine Jubelin. He began by asking if it was true that Terry Falconer had told Alan Morcomb, his friend and the boss of Wreck-A-Mended, that he feared his wife, his daughter and her husband, Rob Institoris, and Tod Daley were going to set him up for the murder of the Perish grandparents in order to claim the reward money. Jubelin said this was correct, and Tuno had talked to all those involved who were still alive, and had found no evidence for the claim. Hanley pushed him on other matters, including just how much evidence they had about Matthew Lawton.

Then Terracini had a go, homing in for a while on the matter of the recording device that had failed on the day Daley claimed Andrew Perish had admitted to the murder.

‘Did you get a report from the scientific and technical branch about this?’ asked Terracini.

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘Anything about, “Oh gee, these listening devices are no good, we’d better get another brand.”—Anything about that?’

‘There were plenty of comments about what I thought about the listening devices,’ Jubelin said, ‘I can assure you about that.’

‘It must have been so frustrating and disappointing that out of all the tapes, that it just malfunctions when the confession is tumbling out?’ Terracini asked sceptically.

‘It’s happened to me on other murder investigations, and I was as frustrated then as I was on this occasion.’

‘Can you tell us one?’

‘Yes I can. The murder of Bob Ljubic . . . The device did not record it clearly at all.’

‘And that did not involve a confession that somebody claimed that they heard, did it?’

‘Yes, it did.’

Terracini decided to push it: ‘And was that person an informer?’

‘Yes, he was.’

One last try: ‘And he had the listening device on him or her?’

‘Yes, he did.’

When Jubelin finished giving evidence, the jury was sent out and Justice Price told the court Brad Curtis was being ‘brought across’. Because he was high risk, two officers would sit with him while he gave evidence. Curtis, somewhat curiously and very unusually, would be wearing his prison hospital orange jumpsuit ‘as a statement’. Paul Leask prepared for the encounter, twitching the gown across his broad shoulders and adjusting his wig.

When Curtis appeared in court he was indeed wearing a faded orange garment with the word VISITS across its back. It’s an item almost never seen in court, and the heavily guarded Curtis reminded some observers of Hannibal Lecter in the film Silence of the Lambs. Possibly this was the impression he wanted to give as he shuffled up to the witness box and took his place. Or maybe he thought it gave an indication of how brutalised he’d been by jail.

He stared at Leask, unshaven and with his mouth half open, as though wanting to appear an idiot. He was uncooperative from the start. Leask took him through his sentence and Curtis claimed to have forgotten important points such as the date he was sentenced. Leask reminded him of the discount he’d received in return for his offer of future assistance to police, and said, ‘You understand if you don’t give evidence you could be resentenced.’

‘I understand your veiled threat,’ Curtis said.

This was interesting—an expression such as ‘veiled threat’ is rarely heard from the mouths of criminals. In fact, you could go for several years in any Sydney criminal court without hearing anything like it from a prisoner or accused person. But more interesting than Curtis’ use of language was his reluctance to answer questions. He claimed to have no memory of the date when he’d made his recorded statement to police after his arrest, and excused himself by saying, ‘For the last so long, as long as I can remember, I’ve been in isolation twenty-two, twenty-four hours a day in a cell.’

Cross-examined by Winston Terracini, Curtis said he’d had the left lobe of his liver removed and was due to start chemotherapy soon. He was not on any medication at the moment. Carolyn Davenport asked if being in isolation might have affected his memory.

‘Psychological wellbeing and memory,’ he replied, ‘yeah.’

‘Do you feel it has had an effect on your functioning generally, that is, your mental functioning generally?’

‘When you’re not talking to anybody, you’re not getting any stimulus,’ he explained. ‘I started a course, which Corrective Services tried to make it very difficult for me to have computer access. I only have library access . . . when I was at the Supermax and for two weeks I presented severe, acute symptoms, they just left me shitting blood and vomiting bile, and they just left me until I got peritonitis. My intestine split open. Yes, so it has an effect on your trust.’

‘Have you ever seen, for example, a psychologist or [had] any sort of counselling in relation to all that you’ve been through this year—the two major operations?’

‘So they can lock me up longer? . . . No. It will just put me in a worse position. They’ll just use that information against me.’

Later Justice Price said to him, ‘Do you have any more comfortable clothes to come to court tomorrow?’

‘I’ll stay in these . . . I’ll stay in orange.’

‘That is your choice, that is how you would like to be seen in court?’

‘It is lying to the jury otherwise. It is a lie, isn’t it?’

‘Okay, you are free to come to court in—’

‘They are clean.’

Curtis began to give his evidence before the jury on 12 August. He explained how Anthony Perish had first talked to him about the deaths of his grandparents and ‘that the police botched up the investigation through their incompetence and he wanted to find out who could have been responsible’. Perish, whom he now referred to as ‘the client’, paid him to look over some documentation relating to the murders, and later it was decided to abduct Terry Falconer to question him.

At this point Curtis’ answers began to fade. He said he could not remember anything about the planning of the abduction, including whose idea it had been. He couldn’t recall who had changed the number plates on the Commodore, or who had changed the wheels. He did say that when they arrived at Turramurra, Falconer had looked ‘pretty crook’ but he thought he was still alive. His answers became increasingly vague.

PAUL LEASK: When you arrived at Turramurra did you arrive at a house?

BRAD CURTIS: Arrive at a house?

PL: Yes?

BC: Yes.

PL: Who was at the house when you arrived at Turramurra?

BC: It was either Steve or Matthew.

PL: Matthew, who was Matthew?

BC: It is another guy that was sometimes at the house or it could have been Roy.

Curtis wasn’t sure who’d been in the garage when the box was opened. He refused to say Anthony Perish had even been at the house. It was clear he was not going to give the evidence he’d promised in return for his discount.

Paul Leask asked for the jury to be sent out. After they’d gone, he said to the judge, ‘The witness is not making a genuine attempt to give evidence about matters which it may reasonably be supposed would be within his knowledge. He is not identifying the participants in the enterprise as he has done previously at committal and in his statements.’

Under Section 38 of the Evidence Act, this refusal enabled the Crown to present evidence the witness had given in the past. Leask proposed that the ERISP of Curtis’ original police interview be played to the jury. After some argument among the lawyers, the judge agreed, but this was postponed for a number of days, because the ERISP had to be edited to remove many sections relating to criminal activity other than the murder of Terry Falconer. The jury could not hear this material as it was irrelevant and might prejudice them against the accused.

Meanwhile the next witness was one of Tod Daley’s former girlfriends, followed by Stephen Yeomans, a metallurgist who had retired from the University of New South Wales in 2009. He’d examined the pieces of sheet metal found at Girvan, at a site where there’d obviously been a fire, and said they came from a tool box. The design of the box was ‘some years’ older than the ones currently on sale, but he wasn’t asked to be more specific.

On 15 August, as Curtis’ ERISP was still being edited, Glen Browne gave evidence again. Paul Leask got him to explain the process by which the detectives had taken notes of their conversations with Tod Daley over a long period. Then Browne was robustly cross-examined by the three defence barristers in turn. It was an intense experience, given the enormous scope of the investigation and the vast number of areas about which questions might be asked. Browne said Tuno had produced ten thousand Investigator’s Notes, each with an attachment of between one and hundreds of pages, and each entered into the eaglei database. The barristers as usual cut between different subjects abruptly, in this case relating to the specifics of an eight-year investigation, but Browne showed an impressive power of recollection. The few times he didn’t know something, he knew where it could be found.

Winston Terracini was naturally interested in Tod Daley’s claim that he’d heard Andrew Perish confess to the murder but the recording had failed to capture this. He asked if Browne could point him to the Investigator’s Note that recorded this failure.

‘Not off the top of my head, no,’ said Browne.

Terracini appeared to be sceptical about the existence of such a note, to which Browne responded, ‘I would like to think there’s one there.’

Terracini asked that the note be produced, and an hour later it was, as was a note of the delivery of the recording to experts in Sydney who, despite sending it to Scotland Yard for further checking, had been unable to enhance its quality so that the words Daley claimed had been said could be heard.

It took a long time to edit the Curtis ERISP, so the jury had a day off. When they returned the next morning, 17 August, they asked the judge if they’d be paid for the previous day, and he assured them they would be. Then Brad Curtis returned to the witness box and Paul Leask continued to question him for some time, but with no better results than previously.

‘Whose idea was it that Mr Falconer be taken to Turramurra?’ asked Leask.

‘Um, I don’t remember.’

‘Did anybody say anything about the contents of the box once the box was opened?’

‘I, I don’t recall the conversation.’

And so on.

After the lunch adjournment and before the jury returned, Justice Price said to the lawyers, ‘I should disclose that I have received a communication a few moments ago from Mr Curtis which I will read so there is no mystery about it. “To your Honour, I have an assignment due in a week for a course in ‘Exercise’ that I am doing at Charles Sturt by distance. Could you please write something saying how many days I have attended this court so I can get an [extension].”’ His Honour said, ‘We will see what we can do to assist him.’

Then the jury and Curtis were called in, and the ERISP played. It was part of the seven-hour interview Glen Browne and John Edwards had conducted with him at Parramatta Police Station on 22 January 2009, three days after his arrest. The Crown had edited it down to material relevant to the trial, to a length of about two hours, with the shortened version viewed by the defence lawyers. Arguments had been conducted before the judge, in the absence of the jury, over whether a few sentences should stay in or out.

The results were gripping viewing. They showed Curtis in his prison greens, sitting at a white table in an interview room and recalling the abduction and murder with animated expression and the occasional vivid movement of his hands and arms to illustrate some of the things done to Falconer in his last hours. In the interview Curtis speaks fluently, as we have seen, his vocabulary indicating he is an educated and intelligent man. It is also clear there is something missing from his personality, possibly the ability to tell right from wrong. He boasts several times about his careful planning, as though still proud of this and completely unaware of its incongruity in the context of the terrible events he is describing.

The contents of the ERISP gave the jury the description of Falconer’s death as described in Chapter 9. With their details of Falconer’s appearance in the toolbox at Turramurra, and the dismemberment of his body and cleaning of the concrete floor with acid at Girvan, they were extremely moving. Curtis insisted throughout that he thought Falconer was to be questioned, not killed: ‘We were paid five grand each, for God’s sake, to just take a guy to be questioned about their grandparents’ murder.’

Once the ERISP had been played, the jury went home. The next day Paul Leask, who seemed to have a cold, questioned Curtis one last time, but with no more success. At one point Curtis referred to ‘the movie you played yesterday’. Later he asked Leask to repeat a question, and when this was done, Curtis turned to the judge and said, ‘I object, your Honour. He is trying to lead me.’ (Leading is where a barrister asks a question in such a way as to encourage a particular response.) At another point he said, ‘Is that a rhetorical question?’ It was provocative dumb insubordination and Leask was provoked, raising his voice and looking angry at times.

‘Mr Crown, please allow the witness to answer the question,’ the judge said.

‘He goes off in other directions, your Honour.’

‘Take it gently, Mr Crown.’

After Leask finished, Stephen Hanley had a go, and Curtis relaxed a bit. He still expressed a weird pride in his ability as an organiser, agreeing with the proposition he was a ‘careful planner’: ‘What I can say, just knowing myself from nature, if I was going to go for a job interview, I would want to know, like, where the nearest parking station was, or if it was public transport, so I would not be late.’

But, as Hanley pointed out, ‘This was a kidnapping, not a job interview?’

‘I think the same principle applies.’

His other theme cropped up in an answer to a question from Hanley later on, when he declared, ‘I have never tried to hurt a decent member of the community.’ Terry Falconer, he said, was ‘an undesirable’.

Hanley suggested he had exaggerated Matthew Lawton’s role in events to make himself look better, but Curtis wouldn’t give him anything, as these exchanges show.

STEPHEN HANLEY: I suggest between the arrest and your ERISP [three days later] that you decided you were in big trouble, didn’t you?

BRAD CURTIS: Sorry, what was that?

SH: And I suggest that you decided to enter into this record of interview and give a version of your involvement in Mr Falconer’s abduction and subsequent death that was most favourable to you as possible, is that correct?

BC: I don’t recall taking the interview, but after seeing it there are peculiarities with it.

SH: I want to suggest you made up this story about Mr Lawton having a gun whilst you drove from Turramurra to Girvan, to suggest to the police that you were acting under duress and could not be responsible for what may have happened to Mr Falconer in that journey, that is correct, isn’t it?

BC: I can’t recall if it was Matthew that drove up.

Later Hanley suggested Curtis was a good actor and had been acting in the ERISP and also at home, where his wife apparently had had no idea she was married to a violent criminal.

BRAD CURTIS: Well, I guess I was leading a double life from everyone that thought I was on the straight and narrow, not just my wife.

STEPHEN HANLEY: This went on for years and years and years, didn’t it, the leading of this double life?

BC: Yes.

SH: And volunteering for the local PCYC [Police-Citizens Youth Club] was another part of the façade, wasn’t it?

BC: No. I object to that strongly.

SH: It was done to suggest to the people in the Newcastle area where you were living with your wife that you were a nice guy interested in helping those less fortunate in the community, wasn’t it?

BC: That was not my motivation, you are out of line.

SH: There were two Brad Curtises, weren’t there? The one that pretended to be the family man, good member of the community, and the other one who was the violent man. That is correct, isn’t it?

BC: It is one person with two different behaviour sets, you might say.

Towards the end of his cross-examination, Hanley ran through all the crimes for which Curtis had been convicted. ‘You committed a lot of crimes, didn’t you?’ he said.

Curtis had a grievance about being lodged in the Supermax; he’d mentioned it not long ago and now returned to the theme: ‘There are a lot of worse people not in the Supermax.’

‘During that period of time you were a walking one-man crime wave, weren’t you—there are a lot of crimes there?’

‘There are a lot of crimes.’

Next Curtis was cross-examined by Carolyn Davenport, who also proposed he had downplayed his own role in the murder. She then outlined an alternative scenario for what had happened, which is interesting because presumably it came from her client, Anthony Perish, and is the only reflection of events he has ever given. ‘I suggest to you,’ she said, ‘that [when you arrived at Turramurra] Anthony then said to you, “What’s he doing in the box? Let’s get him out?” . . . I suggest to you that [when the box was opened, Terry Falconer] was well beyond gasping, and that Anthony said to you, “Give him CPR” . . . And you said, “I’m not touching him, he’s been in jail, who knows what he’s got.” . . . after it was determined that Mr Falconer was dead, Anthony said to you, “It’s your mess, you better clean it up.” . . . And that you begged him to help you get rid of Mr Falconer’s body?’

Davenport further suggested that although Curtis had said Matthew Lawton was at Turramurra when he arrived, this wasn’t true, and that Anthony Perish had called Lawton for help when he realised Falconer was dead. To which Curtis replied that he couldn’t remember either man being at Turramurra when he arrived (which contradicted what he’d said in the ERISP). She suggested the three men had driven to Girvan where ‘you all sat down and had something to drink, some strong drink, and talked about what you could do to cover up what had happened to Mr Falconer . . . various options were discussed about how he might be got rid of, how his body might be got rid of, remember discussions about the possibility of burying him on the property?’

‘No.’

‘Discussions about the possibility of burning his body in the fire?’

Curtis did not reply.

‘I want to suggest to you that you were the one who suggested chopping him up then disposing of his body in pieces.’

‘I don’t remember.’

Finally Curtis’ evidence was completed. The question in the prosecution’s mind was whether the jurors felt his presence in the witness box had compromised the compelling ERISP.

•

The next witness was Penelope McCardle, a forensic anthropologist from John Hunter Hospital in Newcastle. She confirmed that cut marks on certain of Terry Falconer’s bones could have been made by some of the saw blades found at the site of the fire at Girvan. She was cross-examined by Winston Terracini, who asked one particularly gruesome, if convoluted, question. ‘Ma’am, just so it can be put to rest, you cannot tell as a forensic anthropologist whether the person who was once alive was the subject of these cuts or saw marks, whether alive or dead?’

‘At the time they were being dismembered?’

‘Yes.’

‘No.’

Detective Glen Browne was again recalled to give evidence, mainly verifying miscellaneous dates and facts. He said Matthew Lawton had only ever been convicted of a few driving offences and one minor offence of assaulting police (a $300 fine, withdrawn on appeal). Anthony Perish had only ever been convicted as an adult of swearing in public.

Possibly frustrated by Browne’s pleasant, deadpan manner, an increasingly irascible Winston Terracini had one last go at him, first saying he was the ‘2IC’ of the investigation (instead of the OIC) and then suggesting he was lying over a certain date, even though ‘you’ve portrayed this image that butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth’.

‘Wait one minute,’ said the judge. ‘Don’t be offensive, Mr Terracini . . .’

‘I withdraw butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth . . .’

‘Mr Terracini,’ said the judge. ‘Keep your shirt on please.’

The Crown case concluded and the defence called amost no witnesses. None of the accused went into the witness box. This is their right, and no one—not the judge nor the Crown prosecutor—was allowed to suggest this reflected badly on them. The right to silence is often described by Australian lawyers as one of the bulwarks of Anglo justice—although in Great Britain itself, since the 1990s lawyers have been able to point to a refusal to give evidence as a possible indication of guilt.

Of course it is, and it is regrettable that the right still exists in its raw form in New South Wales. Most ordinary people—including many members of the families of murder victims I’ve spoken with—find this incomprehensible. There were many facts in this trial that only the accused could have provided, and it was absurd that they could not even be asked about them in front of the jury.

•

Paul Leask gave his summing up on 29 August, explaining to the jury that ‘to satisfy you that Anthony Perish and Matthew Lawton are guilty of murder, the Crown must prove to your satisfaction that they did an act which caused his death and that act was caused and done with an intention to kill or with reckless indifference to Mr Terrence Falconer’s life.’

He described the Crown case as like a jigsaw puzzle of a picture of the Sydney Harbour Bridge: ‘Some parts may not fit and perhaps some parts are missing: a bit of sky is missing, one of the pylons is missing, some of the water is missing. But even if some parts are missing and some parts do not fit, you can stand back and say, “That is a picture of the Sydney Harbour Bridge” . . . So it is in a criminal trial.’

There was, he pointed out, no need for the Crown to prove motive, ‘But there is a motive, and the motive is a strong one, it is a motive rooted in emotion, it is a motive rooted in family, it is a motive that does not recede during the passing of time: it’s personal, very personal . . . it goes back to the death of their grandparents in 1993.’

He reviewed the evidence and spent the last part of his speech talking about the key witness, Tod Daley, conceding his state of mind had been nervous when he was telling police his story, piece by piece, in the years 2002 and 2003. At that time the police knew Falconer’s body had been found in the Hastings River, but had no idea of the significance of a place named Girvan, well over a hundred kilometres to the south. Nor did Daley, yet he told police he’d been asked to bring his boat up the Karuah River, part of a water system that runs within ten kilometres of Girvan, the place where, police would only learn seven years later, Falconer had been dismembered. This could not be a coincidence, Leask suggested: it indicated Daley must have been telling the truth. The case came down to Daley. If the jury accepted his account beyond reasonable doubt, everything else the Crown claimed flowed from there.

The defence barristers and then Justice Price gave their summings-up, and the jury retired to consider its verdict. They were out for a week, which caused some of the police concern: the adage goes ‘Quick to convict, slow to acquit.’ But in this case there was a great deal for the jury to work their way through: five charges, three accused, several major protected witnesses whose motives had to be considered. Some on the prosecution side took heart from the fact that the jury didn’t ask the judge one question, which is unusual when they’re out so long. It suggested the jurors were not confused, just busy.

For the week the jury was out, Paul Leask and Gary Jubelin remained on the court premises, doing other work but ready should any questions be asked. Relatives of the accused and of Terry Falconer came to court each day, sat on the benches outside for six hours, then left.

Finally the jury came back and announced its verdict. All the accused were guilty of all the charges, with one exception: the jury was hung on the question of whether Matthew Lawton was guilty of conspiracy to murder. As the foreperson announced these verdicts, the jurors did not look at the accused. There was no reaction from the men in the dock. Justice Price sent the jurors back to try to reach a majority verdict on Lawton and the conspiracy charge, meaning eleven votes out of twelve would do.

News of the verdicts had gone out across the city, by phone calls and text messages, and journalists converged on Darlinghurst Road. In the lobby outside the courtroom, the detectives were doing a good job of restraining their relief, and their exultation. As he prepared to face the waiting cameras, Gary Jubelin, the hard man of few words, was asked how he felt.

‘It’s sweet.’

14

THE COMPANY OF KILLERS

From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.

Sentencing of the convicted three was delayed considerably because of the serious illness of a relative of one of the lawyers and the long Christmas break. As in many trials, some of the relatives of the victim were suprised at the enormous delays that are taken for granted by those who work in the justice system. The court next sat on 16 March 2012 to receive and hear sentencing submissions. Not much was said by the defence. Terry Falconer’s son James read a moving victim impact statement, in which he said his father had died with less dignity than an ‘animal in an abattoir’ with ‘no dignity, no respect and no mercy’. The end, he said, had been ‘like a lion being pulled down by a pack of sniffing hyenas’. The statement was much more aggressive than most heard in court. Falconer read with his head down for much of the time, but occasionally lifted his eyes to the convicted men in the dock. He concluded by saying he was haunted by dreams of the killing, which took his ‘heart, mind and body to a dark place . . . I can’t go any deeper into the pain they’ve caused.’

Justice Price went away for a month to consider the material he’d been given, and decide for how long the men would go to prison. There were reports from psychologists who’d interviewed them after their convictions. Their purpose was to assist the judge in determining a few matters relevant to sentencing, such as the remorse of each man (if any), and his prospects for rehabilitation.

Matthew Lawton’s psychologist found him still asserting his innocence (the jury had found him guilty of the conspiracy charge too) and intending to appeal. Lawton, now forty-five years old, recounted how his parents had divorced when he was twenty-one, and he had not seen his father for the next twenty years. His father, like himself, had been a heavy drinker. Lawton ‘described a restless disposition and although constantly employed never lasted terribly long in one fixed job. He has worked in the transport industry for the past twenty years as a truck driver, with his job ending at the time of his arrest.’

Lawton has two sons from a former relationship, and had been with his current partner, Sharon Miller, for seven years. He told his psychologist at his first interview that he was ‘actively involved in a Koori Art Class, stating that he has some Koori heritage on his mother’s side. He reported always being artistically inclined.’ By his second interview, in March 2012, he was in protective custody in Nowra jail, apparently due to a false rumour that he had turned police informer.

Justice Price was also given a number of testimonials from Lawton’s relatives. His father, George, wrote that his son was ‘a very kind and compassionate man, who devoted his life to his sons, and family . . . Matthew has never been a lawless person.’ Lawton’s aunt, Leone Davidson, who had attended the trial regularly, recorded that he had always been a polite and considerate boy with a strong sense of family responsibility, so much so that she and her husband had appointed him their executors. ‘My family and I,’ she wrote, ‘are still unable to fathom that my nephew has been charged with [these] crimes.’ Sharon Miller told the judge, ‘It has been a great shock and has deeply saddened all Matthew’s friends and family about his current situation. Disbelief would be the general feeling of those who regard Matthew as a dear friend, loving devoted father and a respectful, considerate partner.’

The psychologist for Andrew Perish, who was now aged forty-one, said his wife had recently separated from him because ‘she was not coping very well with him being convicted of the offence’. Perish had told the psychologist, ‘My time in jail has given me a long time to reflect on my life, and a chance to focus on my life and what I want to achieve. I’ve worked on myself in jail and I have become physically and mentally stronger. I realise the effects it [my offending] had on my children—they have really suffered.’ Tests conducted by the psychologist found Andrew ‘is not likely to be influenced by antisocial friends and associates’ and ‘he is not likely to have impulse aggressive behaviour’.

But the strangest report was for Anthony, forty-two, who ‘was co-operative and responded to questions in a seemingly frank manner’. Despite his ‘limited but adequate social and intellectual ability’, he seems not to have done so badly in the leg-pulling department. In his youth, apparently, Perish had ‘earned extra funds by buying and selling cars’, progressing into ‘buying and selling excavating equipment and operated his own business in this field until his incarceration in January 2009. He reported that he had been financially stable throughout his life.’ Indeed.

Perish, the psychologist went on, ‘reveals a history of relationship stability and positive interpersonal relationships prior to his incarceration’ and ‘told me that his peer group for most of his adult life have consisted of pro-social peers who do not endorse criminal attitudes’. The psychologist reported optimistically that Perish ‘intends to return to operating his own excavating equipment business upon his release from jail’. In her opinion, the sooner this happened the better, because prolonged incarceration was ‘unlikely to offer as much rehabilitative opportunity to him compared to supervised, supported residence in the community where he can pursue stable employment, participate in pro-social activities and better draw upon his family and social supports’.

Justice Derek Price delivered his judgment on 13 April 2012, in Court One at Darlinghurst. He was obliged by law to sentence the convicted men according to sentencing standards at the time of the crime, which helped them a little as standard non-parole periods had been shorter back then.

Two motives had been presented to the jury: the desire to avenge the Perish grandparents’ deaths and the desire to kill Terry Falconer because he was a police informer. While briefly acknowledging the second motive, Price said the genesis of the murder lay in the killing of Anthony and Frances Perish in June 1993.

In general the judge agreed with the evidence produced in the trial, with a few exceptions. He found that there was a reasonable possibility Terry Falconer was dead when he reached Turramurra, despite the fact that the only person there who gave evidence in the trial—Brad Curtis—said he was alive. ‘I am not satisfied,’ his Honour said, ‘that his account of events at Turramurra was honest and reliable.’ Anthony Perish and Matthew Lawton, he continued, were to be sentenced on this basis, although he later said that in terms of the objective gravity of the offence, ‘It matters little that [Falconer] died unexpectedly in Curtis’ white van.’

His Honour also refused to accept Brad Curtis’ claim that he had been forced almost at gunpoint to accompany the others to Girvan. He remained Perish’s friend, which is not what you’d expect if the experience had been as he described it. ‘It is evident that Curtis maintained a close relationship with Anthony Perish,’ Justice Price said, ‘which included an invitation to his wedding in 2008. They were together at McMahons Point on 19 January 2009 [when they were arrested].’

Andrew Perish was guilty of conspiracy because of his involvement in attempting to recruit Tod Daley. So too was Matthew Lawton, although Price noted that, ‘It is plain from the evidence that the offender was under the influence of and subordinate to Anthony Perish, with whom he had a long association. His culpability for the conspiracy to murder is less than that of the other two offenders.’ The judge accepted that Lawton had been at Turramurra when the toolbox arrived.

In general, his Honour said, ‘The Crown does not submit that this case falls within the worst category of murder and therefore attracts the imposition of a life sentence. There is no suggestion of future dangerousness.’ As for Anthony Perish, his Honour accepted the account relayed by his psychologist that he’d lived in Queensland until the age of thirty-five, dealing in cars and later running his own excavator and bobcat business. But he was less sanguine than she about the convicted man’s future prospects.

‘As [Anthony Perish] refuses to accept responsibility for the murder,’ Justice Price said, ‘his prospects of rehabilitation remain guarded. I am unable to make a positive finding on the balance of probabilities that he is unlikely to reoffend or has good prospects of rehabilitation. Nevertheless, in the circumstances of the present case, I conclude that the offender’s motive to avenge his grandparents’ murders lessens the need for personal deterrence and protection of the community. The offender’s lack of a prior criminal history of violence and good behaviour in custody re-enforces this conclusion.’

Andrew Perish also ‘has neither expressed nor shown contrition for the offence . . . He, also, has not accepted responsibility for his actions, and his prospects of rehabilitation remain guarded . . . Nevertheless, as in the case of Anthony Perish, I conclude that the offender’s motive to avenge his grandparents’ murders lessens the need for personal deterrence and protection of the community.’

His Honour acknowledged James Falconer’s victim impact statement, noting this could not affect the sentences, and also said the court acknowledged ‘the grief and distress of the deceased’s family, and express on the community’s behalf its sympathy and compassion for them’. He sentenced Anthony Perish to a total of twenty-four years with a non-parole period of eighteen. Matthew Lawton received twenty years with fifteen non-parole, and Andrew Perish got twelve years, of which he must serve nine.

The courtroom was packed, so most of the Tuno detectives who were there sat in a bunch in the business part of the room, off to the left side and only a few metres from the accused. As if to indicate the distance that existed between Jubelin and himself, Glen Browne stood down the back by the door. Anthony and Andrew Perish and Matthew Lawton listened to the judge’s comments without showing any emotion, and when he was finished they calmly left the dock. There was only one exception, when Justice Price referred to the police’s inability to find the people who had murdered Anthony and Frances Perish in 1993. At that point, Anthony Perish turned and stared at Gary Jubelin, long and hard. Maybe he still thought, despite all that had happened since, that the killing of Terry Falconer had been a job well done.

There were plenty of journalists outside the court, but the family members just wanted to get away. Tracey Perish walked off quickly, as did Sharon Miller and Matthew Lawton’s aunt Leone Davidson. Liz Falconer headed in one direction, James in another, and Terry’s brother Barry, who’d attended both trials, in a third. These days none of the Falconers speaks to the others.

Also in court that day was Janet Draper, mother of Ian, the barman who had made a statement in a matter involving Andrew Perish and later disappeared. She was grateful for all the effort Strike Force Tuno had put into trying to discover her son’s fate, and for their regular meetings with her. But at the moment she just felt numb.

These people cared deeply in their own ways about whether Terry Falconer’s killers were brought to justice, but all they wanted to do now was to escape and grieve in their own private worlds. As a wise detective once said, it is necessary to solve homicide cases, so that people know they cannot kill with impunity. But even in successful murder investigations, there are no winners.

Meanwhile, in the labyrinth of low-ceilinged, concrete corridors beneath the old Supreme Court building, the convicted killers were led back to their cells to await the truck that would take them away to their own wretched futures.

•

The story of which Tuno was a large part was extraordinary. Putting all the pieces together, from the murders of Anthony and Frances Perish in 1993 to the sentencing of two of their grandchildren in 2012, this seems to have been the longest active inquiry in Australian history. Along the way there were three police investigations, a number of New South Wales Crime Commission references, two coronial inquests, one major murder trial, and much other legal and judicial activity.

Strike Force Tuno charged fourteen criminals with offences including murder, kidnapping, attempted murder, shooting, conspiracy to murder, firearms offences, armed hold-up, arson, break and enter, the large scale manufacturing and distribution of illegal drugs, and fraud. Every charge resulted in a conviction. Although one sometimes sees stories in the media about a large number of organised criminals being arrested and charged, it is rare to see such a successful outcome in the courts.

Someone who’d followed Tuno’s progress with great interest for eleven years was Paul Jacob, who’d led the on-call team when Terry Falconer’s body was found in the Hastings River back in November 2001. ‘Tuno was the most amazing job I ever came across,’ he recalls. ‘It struggled from day one to get the support needed—no one realised back then how big it would become. Organised crime murders are rare, and they can be very difficult to uncover because of the nature of the criminals. In this case you had the management of the rollover informants, and then the way the arrests were managed at the end. I’m in awe of what was achieved.’

For Luke Rankin, now an inspector at Bourke: ‘Tuno was a big part of my career. It was a challenging investigation and the calibre of the leaders was high. I wish I’d been there at the end. It is really awesome to see how it unfolded.’

‘If you think of intensity, you think of Gary Jubelin,’ says Andrew Waterman. ‘He could have been promoted higher if he wanted to, but I suspect he doesn’t want that, because if he went any higher he’d lose all hands-on control. Tuno is very highly regarded, one of the premier murder investigations.’

Success was achieved at a cost. ‘Tuno is an amazing achievement, the biggest murder investigation in New South Wales and perhaps Australia,’ says Pamela Young. ‘If anyone other than Gary had done it, it wouldn’t have been half as successful. But you can’t achieve that success without damage—he always wants more from people, and is such a hard man.’ Some colleagues, she says, have been hurt. ‘I hope he can repair some of that.’

It is difficult, more so than most of us can imagine. ‘Homicide is the pinnacle of police work,’ Waterman reflects. ‘Your head has to be in the right place, you have to be able to pay attention to the family of the victim and yet not let it get to you. If you’re too emotional, you won’t be a good homicide investigator. To be given a homicide investigation means you’ve been given the ultimate trust. It’s very significant work because of the life and death aspect, and also because often the investigation is not quick or easy. I was rotated out after a long time, and I wouldn’t have gone of my own volition. Maybe it was for the best, maybe you need a tap on the shoulder, sometimes.’

Says Pamela Young: ‘There is a certain thrill, an addictive element in the work, the sense in each case of going where no one’s ever gone before. I am fascinated by human beings and why they behave the way they do. I take on an element of the tragedy, the trauma and anguish and anger. But I can’t be deterred by that from doing a good job, I use it to give me motivation and energy. That’s why I can expose myself to horrible people and scenes: it has an effect on me, but it doesn’t discourage me.’

There are different ways of being a good homicide detective, but there is one quality they all speak of as vital: sheer, bloody-minded, often personally destructive, often provocative, determination.

Gary Jubelin: ‘That’s a problem I have. Once I get hold of something, I find it hard to let go.’

POSTSCRIPT

At the time of this book going to print in mid-2012, Anthony Perish and Matthew Lawton had announced their intentions to appeal their convictions. The Director of Public Prosecutions was appealing the sentence of Brad Curtis, seeking to have his discount reduced because of his unhelpfulness at the trial of Terry Falconer’s killers.

Nineteen years after their deaths, no one has been charged with the murders of Anthony and Frances Perish.

APPENDIX

The men and women of Tuno

Strike Force Tuno (2001–2008)*

SC Camille Alavoine

DSC Stephen Brown

DSC Glen Browne

DSC Sarah Clark

DSC John Edwards

DSC Jason Evers

DS Gary Jubelin

DSC Luke Rankin

DSC Mario Rubelj

DSC Nathan Surplice

DSC Nigel Warren

Strike Force Tuno 2 (2008–2011)*

SC Camille Alavoine

DSC Stephen Brown

DS Glen Browne

DS Joe Doueihi

DSC John Edwards

DSC Simon Ellis

DSC Matthew Fitzgerald

DI Gary Jubelin

DSC Tim Kelly

DSC Roxane McGee

DSC Kaan McGregor

DS Glen Morfoot

DSC Brendan Plummer

DSC Peter Robinson

DSC Mario Rubelj

SC Joanne Sinclair

DSC Nathan Surplice

DSC Andrew Taylor

DSC Andrew Tesoriero

DSC Kelly Veness

DSC Patricia Walsh

*   There were also several dozen other officers working on Tuno in its early months

*   Two members of Strike Force Tuno 2 have asked not to be named.

SOURCES & THANKS

Most of the information in this book comes from evidence given at the trial of Terry Falconer’s killers, transcripts of the inquests into the deaths of Anthony and Frances Perish, the agreed statements of fact provided to courts in the cases of criminals who pleaded guilty, court files, and conversation with police officers.

Many members of the New South Wales Police Force and related agencies I talked to asked not to be thanked here. I am grateful to them for their help, and also to Tim Archer and Mick Garrahy of Police Corporate Communications, and the following current or former homicide detectives: Joe Doueihi, Darren Edwards, Jason Evers, Matt Fitzgerald, Paul Jacob, Gary Jubelin, Luke Rankin, Andrew Tesoriero, Nigel Warren, Andrew Waterman, Michael Willing and Pamela Young.

I thank others connected with the investigation in various ways, who also asked not to be named. I did not seek interviews with any of the accused men in the book because the people who run New South Wales’ prisons deny writers access to the people in their care.

I thank those who work in our courts, including the coroner’s court. Various officials were helpful with some of the practical issues in covering a long trial, while public information officers, judges and judges’ associates assisted with access to information relied on here, and I am grateful for their assistance.

Parts of this story have been covered by dozens of journalists. In particular I acknowledge Geesche Jacobsen at the Sydney Morning Herald, Simon Lomax at the Courier Mail, and Janet Fife Yeomans at the Daily Telegraph. The work of Andrew Rule and John Silvester helped me with aspects of the career of Paul Elliott. I thank my editors at the Sydney Morning Herald and the Sun Herald, who enabled me to cover the trial and report on Strike Force Tuno more generally over a lengthy period. Two of those editors left Fairfax as the book was being finished, as I did too. Due to changes in newspapers, it is unlikely many books like this will be published in the future. Information in Chapter 4 about bikies and Strike Force Sibret comes from other articles I wrote for these newspapers. Statistics on the illegal drug industry are from various reports of the Australian Crime Commission. Details of the Jeffrey Hillsley case come from Nigel Warren’s article ‘Who Do You Trust’ in the Australian Police Journal, December 2006.

After I started to write the book, I learned of a forthcoming television series on the same subject, and my publisher decided to bring the book out at the same time as Underbelly: Badness. I am particularly grateful to those who helped produce it so quickly, especially Margaret Connolly, Jane Palfreyman, Elizabeth Cowell, Denis Tracey, Jo Jarrah, and my family. The contribution of Bookhouse typesetters, who dealt with numerous changes, was heroic. At Radio National I thank Paul Comrie Thomson and Ian Coombe for tolerating my occasional need to be in the city’s courts at short notice, and for their support more generally.