by Gary Jubelin
The producers say they want to write a drama based on the case and for me to be one of the central figures. I’m excited. This was good police work and I’m not about to back away from it in public. Also, with all the fights I’ve had with my bosses over the years, it’s started to feel like I have a target on my back and the public profile of being in a television show might make it harder for anyone to get rid of me. The politics inside the cops is fierce, especially as you climb up the ranks. A couple of mates have already warned me, ‘Just be careful, they will go after you.’
The other guys on the strike force also seem flattered by the attention and the senior command approve the series. Everyone seems happy, but I start to see how this could be uncomfortable. Already, the writers are talking to Pam, my ex, and Tracy, my current partner. Pam’s cautious at first, though I try to joke that our relationship is worthy of a TV series. She reminds me her life’s moved on, she’s married now, and says her new husband is only going to hate me more after watching the two of us on screen.
Tracy says she doesn’t have a problem with it, though I start to suspect she’s really less than happy with the prospect. She’s a high-profile businesswoman, who travels the country for work or to give keynote speeches at conferences. She’s used to being the centre of attention.
At work, people now seem to be spooked at the thought of how they will appear on screen. I don’t know what’s going on with Glenn; I barely see him in the office now. I try to talk to him a few times, but he’s always caught up with something else.
I can understand it. I try to play it cool but I’m also wondering and worrying over who they find to play me on screen.
My heart jumps when the producers call and say they’ve found an actor. It’s like I’m being judged – this person is the way other people will see me. They say he’s called Matt Nable, a former professional footy player and boxer, who’s currently in the US, filming a movie called Killer Elite with Robert De Niro. I look him up online and he seems tough, a hardarse, and when we talk on Skype, I can see he’s smart as well. We talk about the work I’ve done in Bowraville and he seems to care about it. We meet for breakfast when he’s next in Sydney and it feels natural talking to him.
Matt tells me he’s been playing a bikie in an upcoming TV series about the Milperra massacre, when the Bandidos and Comancheros went to war in 1984, and doesn’t have another bad guy in him at the moment. He says he’s got a sense of who I am, and likes it. I’m flattered. I can already see him watching me, thinking about how he will put my mannerisms and character on screen.
I go to the first script reading, with all the actors sitting round a table, and I’m starstruck. But by the end of the evening I’m feeling comfortable. I defy anyone to have a TV series written about them and not enjoy the process. When they finish the read-through, I tell them to do it one more time with feeling. Jonathan LaPaglia, the actor playing Anthony Perish, quips, ‘You don’t look that tough.’
‘I’d fucking chew you up and spit you out,’ I tell him. He laughs. It’s a new world, and I like it.
* * *
The Underbelly series also brings pressure with it. With the trial of the Perish brothers and Matthew Lawton coming up over Terry Falconer’s death, I’m already feeling the weight of expectation from my bosses and the prosecution lawyers. While the series won’t be shown until the trial is over, so as not to prejudice the court process, the TV producers are saying how they’ve invested all this money and really need convictions.
Other trials are also coming down the line towards us, dealing with some of the other crooks we’ve picked up through Strike Force Tuno’s investigations, which bring with them more pressure. I try to ignore it. Pressure is what you accept in the cops and I want to bring the same single-minded focus in preparing for court that I learned from Paul Jacob this time around, despite the protests from the strike force at the pace of work, and the intrusions caused by the TV series.
Much worse, our analyst, Camille Alavoine, who’s worked the case since 2001 and has already fought off cancer once, is told the disease is back. I worry about her; over the years, I’ve seen Camille work herself into the ground. She just keeps going and going and going.
‘You don’t have to work on this, you’ve done everything you can,’ I say to her.
‘This is what I’ve dedicated my life to. I want to see it through,’ she tells me.
It’s tragic, and as death approaches she’s desperate to hand over her work on the investigation to another analyst. I ask the bosses if we could replace her in time for Camille to do the handover in person, so she doesn’t feel all her work has been wasted. The request is refused.
One day, Camille comes into my office and breaks down, saying she is scared of dying. Having spent years dealing with death only after it happens as a Homicide detective, here it was sitting inside my office with me. I shut the door and told Camille she had every right to be scared, that it was only right to show fear after being so brave for so long.
Without Camille, and her selfless attitude to seeing someone jailed for Terry’s murder, the case wouldn’t be close to where we’ve got it, but she is not replaced before finally being admitted into the hospital. It’s a hideous, bureaucratic decision. When I go to see Camille on the ward, she gives me an envelope with money inside it.
‘When I die, I don’t want a funeral, but can you put this on the bar and people can have a drink?’ she asks. A week or two later, Camille dies, so I get some people together and we go and have a beer with the money. Her loss rocks me. I’ve lost a friend. Someone I relied on. Yet, when that night is over, we still have to go back into work.
Everybody dies, I know that, and know that it can happen in a moment. Now I know it acutely. But the job has to continue. Camille would expect it. As unsteady as I feel without her presence on the strike force, there is no other way to live.
* * *
By the time we get to court, for a committal hearing in June 2010, it’s been eight years since we first spoke to Rocco, our key informant. His evidence that the Perish brothers wanted to use his boat to dispose of a body is going to be critical; it could mean the difference between murder and manslaughter.
In those eight years, he’s met someone and settled down. He’s started a family. When we visit to ask if he’s still prepared to give evidence, Rocco says, ‘Fuck, I put my life on hold for you guys, but now I’ve got my life in order, I’ve got kids, you’re going to drag me right back into this shit again?’
He’s always been difficult at times. I remember when, in 2008, I got a call from him one night, asking to meet in a deserted car park. When I arrived, his car was parked on its own, with the lights off and Rocco sitting on the back seat. I got in the front and he asked me: ‘How do I know I can trust you?’
My mind raced. This bloke had been charged with murder once, and convicted of manslaughter. I stared straight out the windscreen, and hoped my voice would hide my fear.
‘You’re asking me how you can trust me?’ I replied. ‘Fuck me, you’re sitting behind me in a car at night in the middle of nowhere, you’ve probably got a gun pointed at me as we speak and you’re asking me how you can trust me?’
Now, two years on, Rocco is working and paying taxes. He says he’s enjoying a settled life, without having to look over his shoulder. It means that he’s got more to lose – and plenty of time to worry about things now.
We talk him round. He tells me how it was his manslaughter conviction that put him on the road leading to this point. Years ago, Rocco was part of a bikie gang who set out to bash a bloke, only someone pulled a knife and their victim was killed. It didn’t sit right with Rocco to be a part of that, even if he wasn’t the one who did the stabbing. He needed to get out of the bikie world for good and cooperating with us is one way of making sure he can never go back there. But he’s nervous. I tell him to trust me.
But even with him on board, the court process is slow, particularly as the prosecution barrister gets si
ck and has to be replaced, and it is another year before we get the Perish brothers to trial in July 2011. Not long before the hearing, I get a call from Rocco, asking for my address.
‘Mate, I can’t give you that,’ I tell him. Home is my safe place. Cops don’t publish their addresses, because catching crooks means that we can be targets. I’ve seen it happen, when Reg Irish was threatening my family years ago. It’s not just our own safety we’re protecting, but our loved ones’.
‘I’ve put my life in your hands,’ Rocco says. ‘I could and probably will get killed because of this. You want me to trust you? You’ve gotta show that you trust me.’
Could I trust him? I tried again, ‘I am a cop, Rocco. I can’t have bad guys turning up at my place.’
‘If you don’t give me your address I won’t be coming to court.’
‘Fuck it,’ I say, and give him the details.
A week later, I receive an envelope containing scribbled notes of the rego plates from cars he thought were following him during the investigation, and of the different times he saw helicopters overhead or footprints in the earth outside his place and feared people were coming for him. His paranoia isn’t news to me, but it’s impressive to see it written out, like a record of his fears over the years that we’ve been working together.
I call him and confirm what he has sent me, so he knows the address I gave him was correct.
‘See you in court,’ he tells me.
* * *
Shortly before the trial begins, Anthony Perish offers to plead guilty to manslaughter but not murder. Tactically, I think his offer is a dumb move; it shows us that he thinks we’ve got him, but I’m so tired and beaten up by the pressure we’re all under, I am tempted to take it.
The Underbelly writers are still following the case, getting material for the series, and it feels like half the strike force are trying to hide their private lives from them while the other half are desperate to make it onto television. Glenn and I are managing to keep it civil while we work together, and I hope our friendship will repair itself once all of this is over. Every day brings another bust-up to be refereed: at one point I have to deal with a complaint that Rocco has been showing the female cops a photo of himself in a spa with a beer bottle in front of his penis.
Glenn and I talk to the prosecution barrister, Paul Leask, about Anthony’s offer. He’s a good, switched-on and intense lawyer, which means, right now, he is absolutely what we need.
‘No, fuck it, let’s run with it. We’ve got him for murder,’ Paul says. The guilty plea is rejected.
The case runs on for months, through the winter of 2011 and into spring. As a witness, I have to wait outside the courtroom until I’m called to give evidence, meaning I sit there wondering what’s going on inside. The division between Glenn and I has also seemed to spread through the strike force and I hear whispers other cops are calling me a media whore because of the TV series. It gets so bad, the lawyers representing the Perish brothers invite me to have lunch with them because they see me sitting out there on my own as they walk in and out of the courtroom.
Not that they go easy on me when I make it into the witness box. Instead, Andrew Perish’s barrister, a terrier called Winston Terracini SC, focuses on the failure of the listening device when Rocco claimed that he’d got a confession.
‘Did you get a report from the scientific and technical branch about this?’ asks Terracini loudly, in a disbelieving tone that tells the jury, Look at this performance.
I reply, ‘No, I didn’t.’
‘It must have been so frustrating and disappointing that, out of all the tapes, that it just malfunctions when the confession is tumbling out?’ he wheedles.
‘It’s happened to me on other murder investigations, and I was as frustrated then as I was on this occasion,’ I deadpan.
‘Can you tell us one?’ he asks me, turning to the jury, as if saying, He’s making this all up. Now watch him twist himself in knots.
‘Yes, I can. The murder of Bob Ljubic,’ I say. ‘The device failed in that case too and we still got a conviction.’ That shuts him up. Terracini is too smart to let his reactions show in court, but he drops off the line of questioning.
When it is Rocco’s turn to speak, I realise how impressed I am by him. He’s risked his life by giving evidence, and turned his life around in the time I’ve known him. I can’t excuse what’s in his past, but that was then. I’ve trusted him with my life now. He knows my address. Redemption’s a huge part of being a cop. Sometimes we’re solving cases and helping punish crooks, and sometimes we’re helping the criminals to turn their lives around. It is a privilege to play a part in someone’s absolution.
Anthony Perish declines to give evidence. His version of events, according to his lawyer, is that he only wanted to kidnap Terry Falconer, but arrived at the property at Girvan and found the journey there inside the box had killed him.
Paul Leask, the prosecution lawyer, challenges this account. The case, he says, comes down to the evidence of Rocco.
As Paul says, when Rocco first told us his story, back in 2002, neither he nor we knew anything about the significance of Girvan, where Terry was dismembered. Girvan is over 170 kilometres south of where Terry’s body parts were found in the Hastings River. Yet Rocco said the Perish brothers wanted him to bring his boat up the Karuah River. A tributary of the Karuah flows close to Girvan.
That shows the plan was always to kill Terry, Paul argues. Accept Rocco’s evidence, he tells the jury, and you have to find this was a case of murder.
The jury believe him. After a week’s deliberation, in September 2011, Anthony Perish and Matthew Lawton are found guilty of murder, while Andrew is found guilty of conspiracy to murder.
Anthony just stares at me as the verdict is read out, so I stare back. But, inside me, relief wells up. For one thing, this vindicates Rocco. For another, it means that he is surely safer with the Perish brothers in jail.
After another, months-long delay, the judge holds a sentencing hearing in March 2012, during which Terry Falconer’s son James reads out a Victim Impact Statement saying his father died with ‘no dignity, no respect and no mercy’. Raising his eyes to meet the eyes of the convicted men, he says his dad was ‘like a lion being pulled down by a pack of sniffing hyenas’.
The judge accepts the Victim Impact Statement, acknowledges ‘the grief and distress of the deceased’s family’, and offers his sympathy.
On 13 April 2012, the judge hands down his sentence. Anthony gets 24 years with a non-parole period of 18 years, Andrew gets 12, of which he must serve nine, and Matthew Lawton gets 20 years with 15 before he can be released.
All up, over their different trials, 14 criminals charged by Strike Force Tuno are sentenced for crimes including murder, attempted murder, kidnapping, shooting, conspiracy to murder, drug manufacture and distribution, armed hold-up and firearms offences.
Brad Curtis is sentenced over the kidnapping as well as two other shootings, and asks that a long string of a further 14 offences is taken into account. He’s jailed for 20 years, having received a 50 per cent discount on what the judge would have awarded him if he hadn’t cooperated with police and will later die in prison.
Jake Bennie, who took part in Terry’s kidnapping from the smash-repair workshop, is sentenced to three years in prison, with two years non-parole. Craig Bottin, the third man that day, gets five years, with a minimum of three.
Every charge that Strike Force Tuno lays results in a conviction.
You don’t get results like this, I think, unless you’re prepared to pay the price to get them. Working murders is the ultimate responsibility, and you have to be prepared to meet it, even if it leaves you with nothing. Look at our analyst Camille, whose work on this case was the last thing she did in the police, or look at my relationship with Glenn, who stands apart from me in the courtroom to watch the Perish brothers’ sentencing. The friendship between us has finally been broken by the pressure we’ve been under. My r
elationships with some of my bosses may also never recover from all the confrontations sparked by my demands for more staff, time and resources to work on this case.
At home, the case has damaged my relationship with Tracy, with whom I could have spent all those evenings and weekends I instead spent in the office. Or I could simply have been a better, more balanced person if I’d had that time.
But that is what it costs to work murders, and I don’t regret it. I would rather pay up than try explaining to Terry’s family why we let his killers walk free.
This has been a once-in-a-career case, but just before the Underbelly series is broadcast in August, I get cold feet. I tell the producers I’m worried about the sex scenes they’ve filmed between the actors playing Pam and me. Too much of my private life has already been wounded or left exposed by my job, I tell them. They get it, and when I watch the program, on my own at home – Tracy is in Perth for work – the sex scenes have been cut.
At first, watching my life play out on screen, I want to curl up into a foetal position. Then I unwind. They’ve captured who I think I am; a complex person who is hard when he needs to be hard but is also vulnerable as well. My life changes with all the attention; I get more calls from journalists and there are posters for the show on the side of buses driving through the city. I go out drinking with Matt Nable and people come up to tell him how they love him in Underbelly.
When they are gone I look at him and joke, ‘Fuck me, you’re the pretend Gary Jubelin. I’m the real Gary Jubelin.’
Even working the perfect Homicide investigation, the one where every charge results in a conviction, is really a lose-lose, I realise, because your starting point’s a killing, there’s no way of changing that.
But maybe that suits me. Ever since I started to play soccer growing up, I’ve always performed better when I’m on the losing side.