by Gary Jubelin
Rocco says he was approached by a woman, someone he knew to be the girlfriend of one of the Perish brothers’ associates. She gave him $1000 in cash, telling him to buy some decent cloths to wear for dinner. A few days later, Andrew Perish picked up Rocco and drove him towards the city, saying they were heading for Newtown. When they got there, Anthony was waiting.
This in itself is a shock. As far as we knew, Anthony, the elder brother, is a ghost. Known by his nickname, Rooster, he’s been on the run for 14 years over a drug offence, without the police catching him. Rocco knows little about what Anthony got up to all that time, except it was unlikely to be good, and the idea of him sitting openly in an inner-west restaurant, inviting people to dinner, is disturbing.
The close relationship between the brothers is also concerning. Word has it Anthony was the first person in Australia to produce ice, and made himself a fortune. Andrew, the younger brother, runs an agricultural goods store in the city’s southwest suburbs and is an apparently legitimate businessman. We have no evidence these two businesses are linked.
Rocco says the three men sat and talked. Anthony ordered wine. During the meal, he raised the subject of his grandparents, asking Rocco if it was true that Terry Falconer once told him in jail that he killed them.
Rocco said he hadn’t.
Later, Anthony wanted to talk business, asking, ‘So, Rocco, what can you do for the company?’ – meaning, Rocco thought, the Perishes.
‘What would the company have me do for them?’ he asked, testing the waters.
‘You’ve got a boat?’
Rocco did, but said it needed fixing.
‘If the boat was fixed, would it make it out to the shelf and back?’
Rocco guessed he meant the continental shelf, way out in the Pacific Ocean. He said it would.
‘I want you to put the boat in,’ Anthony continued. ‘Come up the Karuah River to Bulahdelah.’ Bulahdelah is a town on the Mid North Coast, an hour and a half’s drive south of Port Macquarie. ‘There’s a wharf up there. Come up to the wharf and I’ll be waiting for you just like a fisherman with a couple of Eskies because the cunt might be in a few pieces.’
‘Who is the cunt?’ asked Rocco.
‘Don’t worry, it’s not you,’ but Rocco was still uncertain. The more we learn about him, the more we realise how deep his suspicions run. He insists on meeting us at 10pm in isolated parks around western Sydney suburbs like Mount Druitt and Blacktown, where Glenn and I will go and talk with him, while Jason Evers and Luke sit in a nearby car, worrying about our safety.
Or Rocco will call late at night, saying he’s seen a car go by and wanting us to check it out. We also learn that he is right to be paranoid. He’d fallen out with different members of the Rebels over time and, underneath his leather jacket, carried the scars of seven stab wounds he got while serving time in prison.
The Perish brothers offered Rocco $30,000, as well as the cost of fixing his boat. They gave him a prepaid mobile phone so they could contact him without the call being traced and, after their meal, both of them visited him in person to check on the repair work.
Rocco, who still worried he was being set up – or worse, he might be the real intended victim – tells us he filmed these visits. Hearing that, my first thought is exultation; it would mean concrete evidence to back up what he’s saying. Then Rocco’s paranoia starts to infect me. Is he trying to set us up? Could he have faked the tapes? We can check the dates of the recordings. It’s now over a year since the meetings he describes took place. How likely is it he would plan a conspiracy over that length of time, just to ensnare some cops he doesn’t know, who turned up at his door one morning uninvited?
Rocco shows us a tape of Anthony’s last visit, which took place a few days before Terry’s abduction on Friday 16 November 2001. In it the two men are walking together to the gate of what looks like a rural property, where they stop to talk. There’s no sound, but Rocco tells us Anthony was saying: ‘You’ll come up, you’ll pick up a couple of Eskies, you’ll go out and take them out to the continental shelf, you will empty out the contents over a big hole using a depth sounder. On the way back, wash those Eskies out halfway back and throw them over the side. When you get back, wash the boat out with ammonia.’
‘Huh?’ Rocco replied. This wasn’t the plan that they’d discussed.
‘If you wash it out with ammonia, they can tell there’s been blood in the boat but they can’t tell whose it is. It fucks the DNA.’
‘What, you’re not coming with me?’
‘Nah, that’s what I’m paying you for.’
Playing for time, and with his mind now twisting with worry that he was being set up, Rocco said his boat was fixed but still needed to be run in before it could make the journey.
‘Get on with it,’ said Anthony. ‘Hurry up because this cunt goes Friday regardless.’
Rocco says he had to get out. He wasn’t going to go through with it.
After Anthony’s visit, he switched off the prepaid phone. He says the Perish brothers didn’t visit him again, although rumours started going round that the Rebels were demanding his colours back, meaning the patches worn on a bikie’s leather vest identifying them as a gang member. Handing your colours back could also mean the gang forcibly burned or cut off your identifying tattoos. Rocco was too ballsy to go into hiding, but his paranoia grew.
Among the strike force, we also asked ourselves how much we could trust him. Running an informant is common practice in the cops, but it is rarely easy. To start with, they’re criminals and their world is an extreme one. I try to look past that background. The real question is why they’re helping you. Often, an informant only offers information to get themselves out of trouble. That makes it difficult to respect them, because informing’s un-Australian. It means dobbing on your mates. Informers get called dogs, and are treated worse if the people they inform on are able catch them.
But Rocco isn’t asking us for anything. We know he’s not an innocent – he tells us stories about armed robberies, drive-by shootings and drug dealing – but when I ask him why he wants to go down this path, he says he needs a change of direction. He’d only recently got out of jail when the Perish brothers approached him and hadn’t planned on going back to his old life, but being a crook is like smoking: I’m gonna give it up, but I’ll just have one now and then I’ll give up later.
Rocco needed something to make him quit for good. Informing on the Perishes will do it.
He knows what that decision means. At the least, he’ll have to abandon his old life and cut the connections to everyone he knows. But fail to take that step and his old life will likely lead him somewhere fatal, he says, either dead in a fight or back in jail where he was stabbed before, and neither prospect looks attractive.
We decide to trust him. I ask Rocco to wear a wire and approach the Perishes again, recording the conversations. The risks are huge, but so are the rewards if we can pull it off, and keep him alive. At the least, it will help to check the truth of what he’s told us. At best, we might gather more evidence.
At first, Rocco refuses. Wearing a wire goes beyond simply telling us what he knows about the killing. I tell him that it’s only one more step along the path he’s chosen. Eventually, he says that he will do it.
Rocco sets up a meeting with Andrew Perish for 30 September 2002. The two men will meet in Andrew’s store on a dusty stretch of highway outside Sydney. Rocco’s cover story will be the inquest that is soon to hear evidence about the deaths of the Perish brothers’ grandparents. This inquest will later prove to be inconclusive, but at this moment, we think, the Perishes must be uncertain about what it will find, particularly if Terry Falconer’s murder is related.
We tell Rocco to say he’s received a summons to appear as a witness.
I like the plan, but we run into a problem. It relies on Rocco going alone into Andrew’s South Western Produce store, where he’ll be out of sight. A listening device normally has both a recorder and
transmitter, so we can listen to the conversation as it happens, but Rocco says Anthony is wise to this and always carries something in his pocket that vibrates if there’s a transmitter near him. We don’t know if Anthony will be at the meeting
‘If I walk in there and that goes off, I’ll be a fucking dead man,’ says Rocco.
I tell him we have his back.
‘You know as well as I know if they wanted to do me, they’ll do me and you’ll only get in there after I’m already done,’ he says. He’s right.
The risks are getting bigger. We send him in alone, with just the recorder, and wait nearby – just close enough to be able to hear a gunshot.
* * *
‘Bullshit, isn’t it?’ we hear Andrew saying when we play back the recording later. This is the first time the two have met since Rocco switched off his mobile phone, but so far Andrew doesn’t seem suspicious. Rocco is playing his part well. When he mentions the summons to give evidence at the inquest, Andrew says, ‘Did you get it today?’
‘Yeah, about 11 o’clock at my girl’s –’
‘Fucking can’t, mate,’ Andrew interrupted. ‘You go there and fucking . . .’
‘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’ –’ Andrew replies.
‘Well, I dunno, that’s why I’m asking. That’s why I’m here to fuckin’ see ya, Andrew.’
Listening, we have to give Rocco credit. He has balls.
It seems like Andrew’s trying to calm him down: ‘I know they’re not going to want you to say nothing about knocking the other thing. They’re not going to learn nothing.’
‘Knocking’ means killing, I think. That’s good, but it is not nearly enough to use as evidence. Hoping to hear more, I’m disappointed when the conversation veers off into more general discussion of bikie life, filled with rivalries, conspiracies and violence.
After a quarter of an hour or so, Andrew says, ‘I gotta let you go, mate, all right?’
‘All right.’
‘Have a good afternoon.’
Throughout September and October, we send Rocco back half a dozen times to talk to Andrew. To get it on tape that the Perishes did give him money in connection with his boat, we get Rocco to say that he wants to repay it, and give him $1000, which he gives to Andrew to pass on to Anthony, saying, ‘Give that to him. I promise to round off what I owe him.’
Andrew says he’ll talk to his brother. Rocco says he’ll pay it back in stages.
‘Yeah, no worries,’ Andrew says. Meeting by meeting, recording by recording, we are getting closer. But whether Andrew trusts Rocco or not, he never actually admits to any illegal activity.
By mid-October, the strain’s getting to Rocco. He is smoking cones to help him sleep as well as giving the amphetamines a decent going-over. One day he finds four Jatz crackers floating in his swimming pool and says they’re evidence that someone has broken into his property. When a car with the rego plate HSV-DNA goes past, he believes it’s part of a plan to break into his house and harvest his DNA.
Another time, Luke and I are at his place when he tells us, ‘Here you are, you can have this’, and hands me a metal pipe about 30 centimetres long, just too wide to get your hand around, and heavy.
‘What is it, mate?’ I ask.
‘A pipebomb. Rigged it up in case some fucker breaks in,’ he says. Then, seeing my expression, he adds, ‘It’s all right, I’ve disconnected it.’
Luke and I look at each other in silence, then leave, carrying the bomb back to our car. If we call the Bomb Squad, they’re going to block off the road and it will be on the evening news, but we don’t want anyone to know we’re talking to Rocco. So we put the bomb in the car boot and drive away, hands sweating on the steering wheel, to a deserted oval. When I call the Bomb Squad and explain what we’ve done, they royally abuse me.
On 16 October, as Rocco prepares to head into the South Western Produce store one more time, I can see the stress he’s under. It’s not just his paranoia, and his legitimate fear of being found out by Andrew Perish, it’s like he’s also wrestling with his conscience.
I have to respect that. Rocco’s been living by his outlaw code since he was a teenager, meaning it’s what’s guided him all his adult life. It’s like how, in the cops, you always have your partner’s back. For Rocco, even talking to police means going against the code. Wearing a wire is a complete betrayal.
* * *
Glenn and I wait in our unmarked car while Rocco is inside the store, coiled tight with the tension of not knowing what’s going on, half-expecting to hear the shot that means Rocco’s been found out and has paid the price, something for which we’ll ultimately be responsible.
Each of us is lost in silent thought. Is it right to ask someone to risk their life to help you solve a murder? What if you end up with two bodies here, not one? What price are you prepared to pay?
Any price. Murder cannot go unpunished.
This is my job. This is my role as a detective to sit here, hands sweating, inside a dusty car making these calls. Rocco’s job is to go into that store, one crook talking to another, and risk his life. If we are lucky, and we get it right, we’ll one day go to court where a jury will listen to this evidence and decide on their verdict. A judge in a white wig and black silk gown will pass sentence. Everyone has a part to play, but neither judge nor jury has to make these real, life and death decisions.
This never gets easier, no matter how many times I do it.
A text message arrives. It’s Rocco.
‘U love me don’t you? . . . Don’t you!! . . . I do belive that I have admis.’
I breathe out, sinking my head back into the car headrest. I’m just happy he’s alive. Fuck. Yes, Rocco, I love you.
We see him turn into the car park and get out of his car, face hidden in the shadow of a baseball cap, head turning from side to side to see if anyone is watching. He approaches us and tells us what happened.
He says that he and Andrew had another quiet conversation about the inquest, which starts next week.
Andrew said, ‘Yeah, you don’t know nothing, right.’
Rocco said he was worried about a police running sheet Andrew had once shown him, which the Rebels had got hold of and which suggested Terry was working as an informant for the cops. If this document exists, it would confirm the rumours about it which Jaco heard at the start of the investigation. Rocco was worried the paper would still have his fingerprints on it and this would come out at the inquest, linking him to Terry’s murder.
He tells us, Andrew whispered, ‘Rocco, nobody knows we done it.’
A smile cracks the toughened bikie’s face as he waits for our reaction.
We look at him and then we’re high-fiving, ecstatic.
‘Great mate, well done! You’ve got it,’ I say, thinking, Thank fuck, I can relax now. It’s over.
But it isn’t.
We take the tape back to the Homicide Squad office and listen to the recording. To my horror, the listening device Rocco was wearing has failed.
A backup device, less well positioned, picked up part of the conversation, but at the moment Rocco says Andrew admitted his involvement, a whirring air compressor starts up in one of the nearby store fridges, drowning out what he says.
What the fuck? I think. A man risks his life and this happens?
The lesson is that listening devices can fail you.
For one, final, attempt, Rocco goes back into the store at the end of October, telling Andrew he’d heard Anthony might be in Sydney.
This time the wire works. It records Andrew making a phone call, saying, ‘Hey mate, how you going? . . . Uh yeah, I got someone here, OK . . . Have a little talk you know. Are you there? Yeah, he’s here now, yeah.’
Listening, to the record
ing later, we can hear Rocco take the phone, ‘Hey buddy, how ya going? What’s happening. Ah, fuckin’, fuck all mate.’ The other voice on the phone call is not recorded, so we only hear Rocco’s half of what is said, ‘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.’
That dinner never happens, though, for weeks, Jason, Luke, Glenn and I take our guns and Kevlar vests home with us every night, in case we get a call from Rocco saying it’s on, meaning we’ll need to rush across the city to seize Anthony. As the months pass, I have to accept the Perishes must have decided to cut contact.
Rocco gets worse. He insists on meeting other crooks, saying he’ll be able to judge by their reaction if his cover is blown. One time, he calls me up saying he’s been asked to get involved in a beating. Someone owes one of his mates some money.
I tell him, ‘Mate, you can’t do that. I can’t have you getting involved in illegal behaviour.’
‘But if I don’t go, they’ll know I’m off.’
In the end, the debt gets paid, meaning the beating doesn’t happen. But keeping Rocco in check is exhausting. In December 2002, he calls Glenn, saying a helicopter has been circling his house and demanding to know why. He thinks it’s the police checking out his place before launching a raid on it. He crashes his motorbike and the uniform cops who respond find $20,000 inside his panniers, along with videotapes of his meetings with Glenn and me at his house, filmed using a camera hidden inside his television.
He says he was worried that we might betray him after everything he’s done, and the tapes are his insurance policy.
* * *
No matter that I’m trying to manage a paranoid bikie and investigate a murder, life at home doesn’t let up.
One morning in early 2003, I walk outside the flat in Copacabana where I’m living and look down at the ocean, close enough to just make out the surfers cutting through the water. I like it here. For eight months, Pam and I were living in the rented place we found together near another surf beach, Avoca, but the commute got too much for her and she moved back to Sydney, while I got this flat to be near the kids. She and I still spend most of our nights together, staying over at one another’s units.