Underbelly 2

by John Silvester

  Roche say more than a million people in eighty countries are prescribed Rohypnol every year. According to Federal Health department figures the number of prescriptions filled for the drug Flunitrazepan (including Rohypnol) has fallen from 336,062 in 1990 to 223,888 in 1996.

  Its effects can include amnesia. It is colourless, odourless and dissolves easily and has been described as ‘the perfect crime in a pill.’

  Its effects are magnified when used with alcohol. US authorities have said the drug has been smuggled through Mexico and is now abused by many college students in Florida.

  The Drug Enforcement Agency says the drug is popular with Texas high school students and and is considered Floridas’s biggest growing drug problem. US authorities claim some students mix the drug with alcohol to boost the effect.

  Known as ‘ropies’, ‘roofies’ and ‘roughies’, a combination of alcohol and Rohypnol can result in blackouts that last up to twenty-four hours. Medical reports in the US say it is used as an alcohol extender to exaggerate the effects of a few drinks to that of a bender.

  US authorities say another drug, known by the acronym GHB, is also being used to spike girls’ drinks at clubs. It has been given the nickname of ‘Easy Lay’.

  Police fear some people may drop drugs in people’s drinks at nightclubs as a misguided prank — an extension of spiking the punch at the high school social — but police say it can result in death.

  Detective Senior Sergeant O’Connor said: ‘It is highly irresponsible. The offender could not know what reaction the drugs would have on the victim.

  ‘It should be made clear that giving someone drugs without their knowledge in order to have sex is a rape offence with a maximum penalty of twenty-five years.’

  The head of the drug squad, Detective Chief Inspector John McKoy, said heroin addicts sometimes used drugs such as Rohypnol when they could not get their drug of choice.

  ‘We are finding more and more deaths involve people who are found to have several types of drugs in their system including heroin, tranquilisers and alcohol,’ he said.

  He said it was available for about $10 a tablet on the street.

  Prison officers said that about nine inmates involved in riots at the Victorian private jail, Port Phillip Prison, tested positive to Rohypnol.

  The makers of Royphnol, Roche, are well aware of the drug’s dark reputation in date rapes. The company has developed a new formula so the drug dissolves slowly and turns any drink blue. It plans to introduce the improved version in Australia.

  Meanwhile, the Hot Chocolate Rapist was unlikely to stop before he was caught, according to a rape squad policeman. ‘He may change his methods slightly but he will keep going as there are women he can dope.’

  Rohypnol

  U.S. Customs Seizures

  Number of Cases

  Number of Pills

  A world-wide problem … figures from the US show a huge jump in the amount of Rohypnol coming into the country.

  CHAPTER 23

  A routine shift

  Dying in the line of duty

  It always seems unlikely anything will happen. But it did.

  THERE was just enough late Saturday-night traffic to remind them of what they were missing.

  Sergeant Gary Silk and Senior Constable Rod Miller were in an unmarked Commodore, sitting off the Silky Emperor Chinese restaurant in Warrigal Road, Moorabbin, with odds of 200-to-one against anything happening.

  Miller had a wife and a seven-week-old son at home. Silk was single and treated his colleagues at St Kilda as his extended family. Both were popular and respected officers in the Victoria Police. Both could think of better things to do on a Saturday night. Silk would have preferred to sit with his mates, downing a few ouzos and coke, while watching his beloved Hawthorn Football Club beat the Brisbane Lions that night. Those who know say he probably listened to the game on the radio while sitting in the car looking for crooks.

  For Rod Miller, leaving home was difficult since his wife, Carmel, and son, James, had come home from hospital. It was his first child and it seemed likely he would rather spend a Saturday night at home with the baby and his wife than sitting in a police car listening to a footy game. But on Friday, and again on Saturday, up to sixty police were doing the same thing, from Frankston to Brighton, and across to Nunawading and Box Hill. This was Operation Hamada.

  Armed robberies on so-called ‘soft targets’, such as takeaway food stores, restaurants and convenience shops, soared by twenty-six per cent in 1997-98. Police knew there was nothing ‘soft’ about suburban armed robberies from the victims’ viewpoint. When a gun is stuck in someone’s face they can remain traumatised for years.

  That’s why, in July, 1998, senior police launched a rolling strike-force of police, moving from district to district to deter armed robberies.

  But the August operation was bigger than a well-publicised police show of force to deter armed robbers; this was designed to nail a gang that may have been active as far back as 1992. In the two years up to 1994 bandits robbed twenty-eight restaurants and shops in the eastern suburbs. They were never caught. In 1998, there have been eleven similar robberies — five of them on Chinese restaurants — leading police to believe the same offenders may be involved.

  For months, the armed robbery squad has been trying to identify the robbers who commonly raid Chinese restaurants around closing time on weekends, when the takings are greatest. They tie up staff and patrons, often robbing the customers. Sometimes they would wear novelty rubber masks — the scariest being ‘Bob Hawke’ faces — as disguises. Senior police authorised an operation to sit off as many likely targets as possible in the hope of grabbing the robbers at the scene.

  In each police district where the bandits had been active police chose four to six likely targets. It was based on logic and a little guesswork.

  For officers with a watching brief it seems unlikely anything will happen. This time, it did.

  As restaurants go, the Silky Emperor is isolated, sharing Warrigal Road with car yards and warehouses. Behind it is a sprawling industrial estate of panel-beaters, car wreckers and small factories. It was remote and had a main roadway at its front door for a fast exit. That made the Silky Emperor vulnerable, a soft target.

  It was on a list of about six Moorabbin targets to be watched by police in unmarked cars. Similar lists were drawn up for Frankston, Dandenong and Nunawading. Common among the targets were that they were medium-sized, with few staff and in isolated locations.

  The Silky Emperor was a typical target, but Silk, 34, and Miller, 35, were not supposed to be there. They had been assigned to sit off another restaurant in Moorabbin district, but that had closed without incident.

  They were both known as dedicated officers who loved the job. And so it seems, because they drove to the Silky Emperor as back-up for another car from the Moorabbin Regional Support Group that had been stationed there.

  It is understood that before midnight, Sergeant Silk saw something that alerted his suspicions. A car, since described as small, dark-coloured and of Asian manufacture, moved slowly by the restaurant and stopped briefly. About twenty minutes after midnight, it reappeared.

  The two officers in the back-up unit decided to intercept it. Silk and Miller followed the car into Cochranes Road. As they did, one of them placed the portable blue light on the roof of the Commodore and switched it on. They did not switch on the siren because it still appeared to be a routine intercept.

  The dark car pulled up in Cochranes Road and the police vehicle stopped behind it.

  Having seen the move, the second police car followed the Commodore’s path into Cochranes Road. As they drove past the scene, its officers noticed nothing untoward. By then, Silk and Miller were out of the unmarked Commodore and talking to the driver of the dark car. The body language indicated all was under control; it was just another routine check during a boring shift.

  The unknown driver was wearing a blue-checked shirt, jeans and runners. He
was about 182 centimetres tall. The three were standing in front of the police car.

  The second police car continued down Cochranes Road about 200 metres where it made a U-turn and parked to observe from a distance.

  Seconds later there was gunfire. The police in the second car saw the sharp flashes from the gun muzzles. They grabbed their bulky ballistic vests from the car boot and put them on. They didn’t know whether it was police or suspects doing the shooting, nor how many gunmen there might be.

  They were faced with a life and death dilemma. Do they chase the suspects, (police now know there were two) or look after their mates? The two police decided to go to the aid of their colleagues. The killers’ car sped out of the district while the police attempted first aid.

  Sergeant Silk died almost instantly from a gunshot wound to the head. He was also shot in he stomach and hip. One of the first police at the scene knew him and although he could see he was dead, he was filled with the desire to put a pillow under his head, to make him comfortable. He knew he couldn’t. Years of police training told him not to touch the crime scene.

  Constable Miller was shot in the abdomen but was able to return fire. As a former SAS soldier he was a good marksman. Police believe the killer’s car may have been struck and could bear gunshot damage.

  At 12.27, an emergency call went in to Moorabbin ambulance station, and two ambulances, including an intensive care vehicle, were dispatched a minute later. Ambulance officers were at the scene within ten minutes. They realised they could not help Sergeant Silk, and were directed to Constable Miller, who had struggled back to Warrigal Road, where he had collapsed.

  There are three possibilities: He ran from the gunman who chased him to finish him off. He chased the gunman while wounded, then collapsed. Or, knowing he was seriously injured and bleeding profusely, he ran back towards the restaurant for help.

  If so, he didn’t make it.

  When he was put in the back of the ambulance he pulled off his oxygen mask and told a colleague he was dying. ‘I’m fucked,’ he said.

  Constable Miller was transferred to the intensive care ambulance and driven to the Monash Medical Centre, but he died hours later.

  Sergeant Silk had been in the job thirteen years. He had wanted to be a policeman as long as anyone could remember. In year eight he had been asked to write an autobiographical essay for school. In it, he said he wanted to join the force.

  He had worked at Port Melbourne, the prison squad and St Kilda, in uniform and as a detective. He had cradled the head of a colleague shot during a drug raid in Hawthorn and had learned the need to be careful and well-prepared when on the street. In an occupation where people can be judged harshly, no-one had a bad word for a man seen as a hard-working investigator who loved the job and was one of the most popular characters at the St Kilda station.

  Rod Miller had seven years experience after joining the police in his late twenties. He was stationed at Prahran and colleagues said his main interest apart from work was his wife Carmel and baby son, James.

  Only weeks earlier he had sat and told his wife what sort of father he intended to be. His own father had died when he was a toddler and he told Carmel he intended to be there for his own son. He vowed not be a part-time dad and take his son for granted. Through his own background and loss he knew that every day was precious and how important a father was to a boy.

  All James Miller will have is other people’s memories of his father and yellowing newspaper clippings of how he was killed on duty.

  When the Operation Hamada surveillance teams were briefed, they were warned of the possible dangers and told not to tackle the armed offenders, but to observe and call for back-up.

  Some top-ranking police had expressed concern over the operation because of the possibility of armed confrontation. Under Project Beacon, the force’s safety-first program ‘The safety of police, the public and offenders and suspects is paramount.’

  Police considered allowing detectives to continue to try to identify gang members, or placing officers in every possible restaurant. After an internal briefing it was decided to proceed with a blanket operation.

  Asked if the officers should have been wearing protective vests, Assistant Commissioner George Davis said: ‘It’s easy to be wise in hindsight. The bullet-proof vests we have are cumbersome and are impossible to wear for the whole duration of an operation like this.’

  Operation Hamada has been cancelled.

  A team led by Detective Chief Inspector Rod Collins, the head of the homicide squad, was set up to investigate the murders.

  Hundreds of police were used to chase down snippets of information provided through thousands of tips from the public. Police volunteered to work on days off. Others wanted to cancel holidays.

  It was a crime the force and the community needed to solve.

  CHAPTER 24

  A mate’s farewell

  Show of force for one of its own

  The line of blue uniforms and white hats stretched for more than a kilometre.

  IT was the morning for a funeral. Fog shrouded the bell tower of the police academy as completely as the Australian flag covered the casket in the chapel below. Cold seeped from the damp ground through the soles of a thousand highly-polished shoes into the souls of those who had come to say goodbye.

  They started to arrive an hour before the service was to begin at eleven. They crowded the lobby in front of the chapel, spilling into the wide halls, faces set and voices low. They queued for two hundred metres to sign the condolence book. They stood in knots outside, talking quietly.

  The chapel can seat 480 people, but 600 crowded in. The marquee set up in the grounds the day before was made for 350 people; twice that number stood in it. The rest — more than 2000 of them — stood silently on the manicured lawns of the former Corpus Christi college at Glen Waverley. Inside, pews were reserved for family, friends and colleagues of Gary Silk, the sergeant shot dead with Senior Constable Rodney Miller in the early hours of a winter’s Sunday morning a week before.

  At the front sat the chief commissioner, his command officers and politicians: the deputy premier, the police minister, opposition leader and police shadow spokesman.

  There was also a couple for whom the week’s events brought back terrible memories — Wendy and Kevin Tynan, parents of Steven — the young policeman who, with Damian Eyre, was shot dead in Walsh Street, South Yarra, almost exactly ten years earlier. Damian’s father, retired policeman Frank, was there too.

  There was much pomp and pageantry — and yet ordinary touches that revealed the man as well as the force he served.

  Across the coffin, underneath the formal wreath of bright yellow flowers, in front of Gary Silk’s police hat, was the Hawthorn football scarf he wore in the outer.

  To the right of the altar is a space that is the spiritual heart of the Victoria Police. This is the Memorial Chapel, and in it burns a blue flame that is never extinguished.

  On the chapel walls are two sets of plaques. One set holds a full complement of twenty names of police ‘feloniously slain’ on duty since 1856.

  The other also holds twenty plaques — but only seven have names inscribed on them. The last two are Tynan and Eyre. Soon there would be two more beside them. That will leave eleven blank spaces. The unspoken message to all operational police is that any of their names could one day be there.

  The huge brick building on the hill at Glen Waverley has been Victoria’s police academy since 1972, and has dominated the local landscape far longer than that. It loomed large in Gary Silk’s short life.

  As a boy, he could see the tower from the family’s Mount Waverley home — and from the grounds of the local primary and high schools he attended.

  Like many a schoolboy, young Gary had wanted to be a policeman. Unlike most, he didn’t grow out of it. When he graduated from the academy in 1985 it was the beginning of not just a job, but the rest of his life. Gary Michael Silk was the youngest of three boys. The eldest, Ian,
faced one of the toughest tasks of his life at the funeral, delivering a eulogy that moved not just friends and relatives, but strangers.

  Ian’s steady voice cracked, not for the first time in half an hour, when he told how a station mate had described his little brother. ‘Gary loved the job, and the job loved Gary,’ was the way the policeman had put it.

  Ian sketched a picture of his brother as an old-style policeman in a modern force. A man who worked hard and played hard. One who received commendations for his diligence on the job — and who is to have a bar at a St Kilda hotel named after him because of his fondness for a drink after work ‘talking nonsense about Hawthorn.’

  Ian Silk said that a cornerstone of democracy was respect for the law, and that the murders of his brother and of Rodney Miller had to be solved to preserve it.

  ‘We must never become blase about this — must never accept that the lives of police are expendable in the pursuit of general community security,’ he said.

  ‘It’s not that a policeman’s life is more valuable than anyone else’s but (when police are killed) the fabric of the community is weakened.

  ‘The so-called police brotherhood gets a bad press from time to time … but police officers are unique. Members of no other profession run the risks that they do in the service of the community.’

  He paused for emphasis. ‘I want to make a plea to the members of the police force: please pursue this matter with thoroughness, dedication and professionalism — so that these criminals … these bastards … are detected, convicted and imprisoned.’

  In the hush after the eulogy some sniffed and reached for handkerchiefs. In the crowd outside, a bullet-headed detective wearing a grey suit and a dark squad tie fished out a mangled pink tissue and pretended to blow his nose.

  A uniformed constable broke down. Three others, one weeping, guided him to sit on the steps at the side of the chapel.