by Gary Jubelin
They’re organised. They’re smart. They’re proper crooks.
‘No. Let them go,’ I say. ‘We’ll keep gathering intelligence.’
Curtis and the second man drive south, back home. Over the coming months, our investigation will suggest this trip had been to deliver drugs and pick up money owed to Anthony by the managers of several businesses he owned.
Glenn and I know this is big. It’s every detective’s dream. I’m coming for you Anthony, I think. But first, I have to go home and apologise to Tracy.
* * *
On 21 November 2008, I’m in the headquarters of State Crime Command, working on the Perish gang, when I get a call to say the jury is coming back in the trial of Gordon Wood for the murder of his fiancée, Caroline Byrne. It’s now 13 years since Caroline’s body was discovered.
I head for the Supreme Court in Darlinghurst, and hear the news on the way in: guilty.
When I get there, Paul Jacob, who led the investigation, says they’re in a nearby bar with Caroline’s father, Tony. I join them and we raise a glass to his daughter.
This is Personal
19 January 2009: 23 years in
It’s early morning and most people will still be in their beds when I stand up in front of a roomful of violent men. ‘I want you to hit him and I want you to hit him hard,’ I tell them. A few of those listening to me nod. For them, this is not unusual. They are the State Protection Group (SPG), the shock troops of the New South Wales police, who train for sieges, terrorist attacks and the worst, most difficult arrests.
‘Him’ is the person in the photograph I stuck up in my office more than a year ago now. The person I think about when I come into work and who I think about when I leave. The person whose business dealings I’ve taken great satisfaction in unpicking since that long drive up to Brisbane with Glenn, following Brad Curtis.
It feels like he and I have been following each other’s footsteps sometimes. Last year, when one of our telephone intercepts revealed he was on his way to Mudgee, a bush town 265 kilometres to Sydney’s northwest, to do a concreting job, I sent two detectives to the town, telling them to ask around the local motels with his photograph, trying to locate him.
The first motel they walked into, a man walked in behind them. Well-groomed, a collared shirt and jeans, sharp eyes, it was the face in their photograph. Anthony Perish. They followed him until he turned down an isolated road and they had to drop back for fear of being spotted.
Later, they asked around the local concrete firms and one driver described doing a strange job at a property on that same isolated road; a slab was being laid above a hidden cavity dug into the ground.
Glenn and I arranged for a police helicopter to fly us up to Mudgee and, from the sky, we saw a shed was being built on top of the slab. It was the perfect set-up for a meth lab, the kind used to produce the drug that Anthony was said to have introduced to Australia and used to make his fortune. We were getting closer, following behind him. And now the time has come to let him know I’m coming.
* * *
For weeks, we have been planning for this moment. Last month, in December 2008, we arrested two other associates of Curtis’s in a drug bust at a self-storage unit at Camperdown, in inner-west Sydney. Inside, we found a wallet containing a driver’s licence in the name of Paul Elliott, a name which meant nothing, until a search of police records showed his burned-out car had been found the week before, and his girlfriend had reported him as missing.
We’ve got enough, I think, to move and need to do so before anyone else is killed. I decide to pull everybody in at once, hoping the shock and awe will make them talk, just like Operation Day in the Bob Ljubic murder investigation.
Only this time, it’s bigger. Around 100 cops have been involved in planning the operation, including the SPG, uniformed cops, surveillance teams and the 16 people now working on the strike force. Resources are no longer an issue; the more we have uncovered, the more our bosses realised how this case is important. The plan is to arrest Anthony and Curtis together. It has to be done this way, partly because if we arrest one, we will alert the other and partly because although we have surveillance on Curtis, Anthony is still a ghost. We don’t know where he is.
Everything needed to be ready at the moment, day or night, when our surveillance teams learned the two men would be meeting. We’ve drawn up operational orders and prepared ring binders of background information for each of our targets. We have search teams ready to hit Curtis’s house and his mother’s house, as well as Andrew Perish’s house and the isolated property in Mudgee. Another team will stay on standby, ready to move if we can find an address for Anthony.
This meant long hours. We worked weekends and public holidays through the new year to get everything ready. When the bosses denied our overtime request, we kept working.
For weeks, I’ve also been training hard, waking early to run up the hills round Copacabana, or boxing and doing circuits in the work gym, getting fit for the stretch of sleepless days ahead.
Each day, when I got home, I practised qigong or meditation, seeking that feeling of when you’re just about to fall asleep. When my thoughts about the case crowded in, or my fears and stresses about what could go wrong became overwhelming, I tried to let them pass, as if they were being carried down a river.
This discipline of being able to clear my mind was vital. With so much at stake, I knew that when the call came, and I needed to step into the ring I could not afford to feel fear or let doubt distract me. This is between Anthony and myself, going toe to toe, and I intended to be ready.
The plan is:
On day one, we arrest them but say nothing publicly.
On day two, we arrest or question another roughly 20 of their friends, family and criminal associates.
On day three, we release photographs from the arrests, hold a televised press conference and announce rewards for information about the murders our strike force is investigating.
I want anyone connected to the Perish operation to feel fear, at first when they hear rumours about the arrests, then that fear should grow as the arrests widen before we finally reveal the scale of our operation. I want them to doubt what those other people we’ve arrested may be saying. It has to feel like a creeping artillery barrage, a demonstration of police power that will shake the ground beneath them.
Anthony is strong, I sense, as is his brother Andrew. Both men have faced questioning about their alleged crimes before, and neither was broken. But I’m hoping Curtis turns out to be the weak link. He’s a cleanskin, with no criminal record, although we think he’s good for several murders. He’s never had to deal with the police before. I hope he panics when he’s in a cell and learns his home is being searched, and his wife and mother questioned.
Just knowing Anthony is also in a cell somewhere might be enough.
Maybe Curtis will roll over.
* * *
Around 11pm yesterday, Sunday 18 January, we intercepted a call in which Curtis and Anthony arranged to meet this morning. We don’t know where they’ll meet, but Anthony seems to spend a lot of time on Sydney’s north shore, so we’ve set ourselves up in Chatswood Police Station, in the same room we used for Operation Day in the Bob Ljubic murder case.
All night, as I checked through our preparations, I thought about what could go wrong. The lessons from 18 years ago, when Isaac was shot inside his unit while I was talking to him, are still painful to remember.
* * *
Around 9am, surveillance cars follow Curtis to the Lavender Blue Cafe close to Sydney Harbour, where he and Anthony take a table next to a big, open window. We don’t alert the café owners. We can’t risk it. Instead, an unmarked van parks out the front of the building and a few cops dressed as tradesmen enter, find seats and order coffee.
We’ve got one chance to get this right. From Chatswood, I tell the SPG commander, ‘You guys take them whenever you want them.’ He’s in charge now. Get it wrong and Anthony will disappear for good
.
The commander gives an order and the back doors of the van burst open. Men in black body armour carrying high-powered weapons race down the path towards the café, while the undercover officers inside draw their pistols. Coffee cups are knocked over or dropped as the other customers respond in shock. Anthony and Curtis are hauled out through the café window and pushed onto the ground, guns pointing at their heads as their hands are bound behind them. Everybody plays their part perfectly.
I tell the commander to keep them there until I arrive. It’s a ten-minute drive and when I get to the café, they’re lying side by side, face down, black cable ties biting into the soft, pink flesh of their wrists. This is the first time Anthony and I have met in person. I want to show him who’s in charge. Who’s in control. This is my chance to show him who he’s up against and, if I can, unsettle him before his interview.
He turns his head and looks up at me in silence.
A TV crew who were filming a fire down the road have captured the arrests on tape. The arrests make the evening news. The journalists ask us what is going on, but we stick to the plan and do not give them anything. I want to allow rumours and suspicion to run wild among Anthony’s associates.
So far, I could not have written this better.
Underbelly
20 January 2009: 24 years in
It’s 6am and I’m back in Chatswood Police Station, briefing the cops involved in the next salvo of the assault. Around the room is a line of whiteboards on which I’ll tack every arrest, each search, each interview, who’s talking and what they’re saying. Every piece of information or evidence gained in any one of these can then be passed on to any other team, particularly the detectives running each of the different interviews, so they can use it to gain an advantage.
Throughout the day, I’m in touch with every team by phone. Each door we go through is another heavy round fired at the Perishes and, in among all the explosions, the noise can be deafening, with different, sometimes contradictory and high-pressure decisions to be made all the time. Kaan, a junior detective with a cool head, works with me, assessing what we’ve learned from one interview and how we can use it to create a detonation in another. I’ve warned him in advance, ‘It’s not going to be pretty, but nothing’s going to be personal.’
At times I’m yelling, ‘Not good enough, I need him found now!’ It’s full-on, but this is a big job, it matters. Right now, I don’t have the time to worry about how the people I’m shouting at react.
The plan works. Brad Curtis is clearly shocked and the cops in the interview room with him, John and Dave, push him hard to roll over. At his house, we find a hitman’s arsenal of guns, as well as bulletproof vests and police identification patches. Curtis also tells them about some military-grade explosives he has stored at his mother’s place in Lane Cove, forcing us to seal off the street and send in the Bomb Squad, who take them away safely. Inside, among Curtis’s other possessions, we find a bag of cat skulls.
He says he’d be prepared to talk.
* * *
On 21 January, we plan to launch a media blitz, encouraging other witnesses to come forward. The message is: Anthony’s hold on you is broken.
Geoff, the new Homicide Squad commander, calls me and says that he’ll be doing all the interviews. After years spent working on this high-pressure investigation and three days of making nonstop decisions, I lose patience. Geoff can tell from my silence something is wrong
He starts saying it’s to protect me, a way of making sure I don’t say anything in front of the media that I later contradict when called to the witness box in court.
‘Fuck off,’ I tell him, feeling insulted. I’m not some rookie constable who needs to be looked after. ‘If you want to do a media stand-up, then you do yours. I’m going to do mine.’ Then I hang up.
He calls back straightaway and says, ‘All right, I’ll do Ray Hadley on 2GB and you can do the rest of it.’
‘Thank you,’ I say and leave it there. I know I will regret this exchange later. Geoff doesn’t tend to hold a grudge, but I wonder if I’ve made yet another enemy among my own police force, to go with Anthony Perish.
* * *
On 22 January, Brad Curtis spends 20 minutes on the phone with his children in tears, then seven hours talking to detectives. Glenn leads the interview while I wait outside, watching it live on the ERISP machine screen. Curtis shows no remorse and rolls on his mates to get a reduction in his sentence. Like other times when I’ve seen informants cut a deal to save themselves, it’s hard to respect him. At least out here, where he can’t see me, I don’t have to hide the look of distaste on my face.
Curtis says he met Anthony at a bar in Kings Cross in 1997, around the time of the Wood Royal Commission, when the area was red hot with crooks. I wonder if Anthony dealt with the bent cops who were exposed by the royal commission. Certainly, he was on the run back then, yet Curtis says he never seemed to get in trouble with the Kings Cross detectives.
Curtis started to get work carrying out acts of violence for Anthony, telling others they were doing ‘black ops’ together. He justified it by saying the police would be thankful to them for taking the scum off the streets.
When Glenn asks about the murder of Terry Falconer, Curtis says Anthony wanted him to look over some documents he had. ‘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.’
‘Did Anthony seem quite concerned about getting to the bottom of who killed his grandparents?’ Glenn asks. We’d looked at this as one possible motive for Terry’s murder; another was the suggestion Terry might be informing on the Rebels.
Curtis says it was all about Anthony’s grandparents, ‘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.’
He says that Anthony paid him to kidnap Terry. Curtis approached two other men, Jake Bennie and Craig Bottin, who was also known as Skitz, on account of his violent mood swings. The three men used Curtis’s car and stole the rego plates from a police car, planning to replace them after the job was done. Anthony gave them a police uniform shirt and a bottle of something chemical.
‘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.’
Once they’d kidnapped Terry, they cut off the tracking device he was wearing to monitor him on day release from prison and loaded his unconscious body into a metal toolbox in the back of another vehicle, a van. Inside it, they drove him to a house in Turramurra on Sydney’s upper north shore, where Anthony was waiting.
Curtis says when they opened up the box, Terry tried to get out, ‘so Anthony grabs his head and slams it down’.
‘And then what happens?’ Glenn asks.
‘He shut the fuckin’ lid.’
‘Who shut the lid?’
‘Perish.’ Anthony told Curtis to load the box onto a white ute, which Curtis and another man, a rough bloke called Matthew Lawton, were to drive north, for hours, to a remote bush property at Girvan, over 200 kilometres away. Early on in the journey they heard noises coming from the back of the ute, but then these fell silent.
When they arrived at Girvan, Curtis says they found a run-down house and a large, corrugated-iron shed with strip lighting hanging from the ceiling. Lawton, who was driving at this point, turned the engine off and said they should go in the house. ‘I asked “Aren’t we going to get him out?” and he goes “No, we’ll wait for Mate”,’ – meaning Anthony Perish.
Hours later, Anthony arrived. He told them to put on white plastic suits and spread plastic sheeting across the shed floor. Curtis says they opened up the toolbox and hauled Terry out, but he was dead. He says Anthony told him, ‘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.’
Between them, they lifted Terry up using a block and tackle attached to his handcuffs. Curtis claims he stood back while the other men cut off Terry’s clothes and pulled out his teeth. ‘Then they started to, you know, do the job of cutting him up.’ He says Anthony told him to get involved. They packed up the plastic bags. ‘I was feeling sick after what I’d just seen and had also done.’
Afterwards, the men cleaned the shed floor with chemicals, burned the toolbox and the handcuffs outside on the property and loaded the bags into the ute. Curtis says that he was scared. He says he’s not guilty of murder, but guilty of abduction and stupidity. Stupidity, I guess, for getting involved.
‘I never intended for that guy to die,’ he says. Anthony had told him he wanted to question Terry about who killed his grandparents, but ‘he didn’t even ask him one fuckin’ question’.
We’ve got enough to go to court.
Anthony and his brother Andrew are tougher than Brad Curtis. They refuse to answer any questions.
* * *
In the months following the arrests, in mid-2009, my bosses in State Crime Command say I should talk to a TV company. After keeping our investigation undercover for almost a decade, Strike Force Tuno was big news. The TV producers have also recently proved a sensation with their 2008 crime drama series Underbelly, based on the Melbourne gangland wars in which dozens of people were murdered. New series are being planned and I figure my bosses want to show the New South Wales police can be just as tough as our counterparts in Victoria.