by James Morton
On 22 June 1982 three couriers, each with false cheques, arrived at the Perth Mint and took away gold bullion weighing 68 kilograms, then worth $653 000. In today’s terms it would be valued at around $1.5 million. The couriers delivered the gold to an office several kilometres away and promptly vanished. In many ways it was an attractive crime—daring, well thought through and, best of all, involving no violence. In charge of the investigation was Hancock, then a sergeant and one of many officers worldwide who revelled in the soubriquet ‘Grey Fox’. He came from an era of policing when rules were bent to get results. The CIB under Hancock got the job done. ‘You know they did it; they know they did it; just make sure the jury knows they did it.’ They saw themselves as the bastions of noble cause corruption. ‘The last line, the defenders of society.’ There might have been pockets of corruption, but the CIB was respected, ‘almost revered’, said one observer.
Although the Mickelbergs, who worked as abalone divers and pilots, had only one previous conviction between them—Peter had been fined $50 for possessing an unlicensed firearm—they were high on the list of suspects. Ray Mickelberg was a former and well-thought-of SAS commando in Vietnam and, given the military precision with which the rort had been carried out, was regarded as the mastermind.
On 26 July that year Peter Mickelberg was driving home to the northern suburbs when a police car forced him to stop. He was taken to Belmont police station, where he was interviewed by Hancock and another officer, Tony Lewandowski. This was regarded as an odd choice of station, as there was a headquarters in the city that had been specially set up to deal with the robbery. Other odd features of the arrest were that all Belmont officers save one had left the station by the time Mickelberg arrived. The one remaining officer, Bob Kucera, later the Western Australian health minister, left shortly afterwards.
According to Peter Mickelberg—something denied until after Hancock’s death—Lewandowski first told him that no one knew where he was and that as far as others were concerned he could be dead. Then Hancock told Lewandowski to make the prisoner strip and he punched Mickelberg in the solar plexus and throat. Years later Lewandowski claimed that he told Hancock they really had no evidence but Hancock had replied, ‘Don’t worry, it will get better’. According to the policemen, Peter then confessed to his involvement and implicated his brothers. The confession was, as so often in such cases, unsigned. The prosecution also claimed that a fingerprint of Ray Mickelberg’s was found on one of the fraudulent cheques. The defence claimed that, since one of his hobbies was casting hands—about twenty casts were found when his home at Marmion Beach was raided—it would have been easy for police to obtain a mould of Mickelberg’s finger and plant it on a cheque. In 1983 Peter received six years and Ray a massive twenty; Brian served nine months before his conviction was quashed.
The brothers’ other problem was that they had also been involved in the high-profile case of the second-largest gold nugget ever found in Western Australia, said to have been discovered near Kalgoorlie by their mother, Peggy. Wearing a wig and glasses and without her false teeth, said to have been taken out because she felt sick on the flight, Peggy left a light aircraft at Perth’s Jandakot airport carrying the nugget, to be photographed by the alerted press. She had, she said, discovered the gold while out prospecting. It became known as the Yellow Rose of Texas—the name suggested by an American seaman who won $200 in a competition run by the brothers’ friend Bryan Pozzi. Wrongly authenticated by experts, the nugget was sold in 1980 to businessman and identity Alan Bond for $350 000. During the course of the mint investigation police discovered photographs of the nugget, which, far from originating in the goldfields, was being made at the time by Ray Mickelberg and Pozzi, an engineer.
Arrests followed and all refused to sign what were alleged to be confessions but which were admitted into evidence. On 19 May 1984 Peggy Mickelberg received an eighteen-month sentence, of which she served nine months. Pozzi and Ray were sentenced to thirty months to five years, and Peter and Brian to eighteen to thirty months. The Mickelberg brothers’ father, Malcolm, was found not guilty. With his sentence tacked onto the end of the mint swindle sentence, Ray now had the longest sentence of any serving Western Australian prisoner. The rort had, said the Micklebergs, merely been a publicity stunt for an adventure business they were running.
Over the years Peter and Ray Mickelberg made a total of seven appeals over the mint swindle—six to the Western Australian Court of Criminal Appeal—and all were rejected. In 1989 some 55 kilograms of the gold was left in a Perth suburb, which certainly cannot have been done by the brothers. Two were still in prison and the meticulous Brian Mickelberg had been killed on 27 February 1986 when the light aircraft he was flying mysteriously ran out of fuel forty minutes into a three-hour flight. That year a gold bar and two containers, later tested and identified by the Perth Mint, were sent to a local television station together with a note that the Mickelbergs were innocent and had been framed. The note claimed that a prominent Perth businessman was behind the swindle.
A 1995 campaign by journalist Avon Lovell saying that the brothers had been the victims of a miscarriage of justice came to a temporary halt when police officer Tony Lewandowski sued Lovell and put a stop to sales of his book, The Mickelberg Stitch, which had sold 17 000 copies in a week. The Police Union imposed a dollar-a-week levy on its members to fund Lewandowski’s action. There were also allegations that the union prevented Lovell from getting a job with The West Australian, telling the paper that, if he did, no officer would work with it. It was similar to the ‘you’ll never work again’ approach that had been used in Victoria after the Beach report and in New South Wales when Premier Askin wished to shut down whistleblower Philip Arantz.
After a further rejected appeal in November 1989, Police Commissioner Brian Bull told the press that the decision ‘totally vindicates the actions of the police in their investigation into the Perth Mint swindle’. Peter Mickelberg was released later that year and Ray two years later.
On the back of the successful prosecution of the brothers, and regarded as a man who knew how to get results, Don Hancock became the head of the Perth CIB. One colleague described him as a ‘take no prisoners sort of bloke’ and as ‘the Roger Rogerson of Western Australia without the criminality’. Shortly before the 1983 trial a recording, which was never played at the hearing, had been made by Ray Mickelberg of a conversation with Hancock at Mickelberg’s home:
Hancock: I’m not a mean person, but I’ll tell you what:
I’ve done things in my life that you never did, and harder
things, worse things, and if I’ve got to do them again, well,
I’ll do them again.
RM: In the line of duty?
Hancock: That is, yes. What I believe is my line of duty—to get the job done.
Of course, this sort of conversation can be interpreted in a number of ways. Hancock may simply have meant he was prepared to associate with informers and general scum to obtain information, but there are other less favourable ways it can be construed.
When he retired in the late 1990s the hair trigger tempered, often kilt-wearing and Banjo Patterson–reciting Hancock went back to the Kalgoorlie goldfields where he had grown up and opened a hotel in the remote town of Ora Banda as well as working a claim. There, on 1 October 2000, he met with trouble from the local branch of the Gypsy Jokers motorcycle gang. Hancock banned one of its members, William Grierson, from his hotel after he and other bikers swore in front of Hancock’s daughter, Alison. Hancock then shut the bar down for the evening. Later that night the biker was shot dead at a nearby campfire, hit in the shoulder and his spine severed. By the time the police interviewed him, Hancock, known as a fine shot, had showered and changed. He refused to hand over his clothing and he ate an orange, something that would mask gunshot residue. He then returned to Perth, where he took legal advice, declining to assist with police inquiries. Over the next few weeks Hancock’s home was firebombed, as was a store he ow
ned, and the hotel was blown up.
In the spring of 2001 the police heard that some Jokers were mounting surveillance on Hancock’s home and that there was a plot to kill him at a Kalgoorlie race meeting—he had a horse running in the last race on 1 September. They managed to persuade him not to go and instead, along with his friend Lou Lewis, he went to Belmont racetrack in Perth. Probably while they were at the races, a bomb was placed in Lewis’s Holden station wagon. They stayed late at the track because Hancock wanted to listen to the Kalgoorlie race, in which his horse ran third. As Lewis drove them back to Hancock’s home the bomb was remotely detonated, killing both men and blowing a large crater in the road.
On 28 March 2002, 38-year-old Sidney John Reid, a full member of the Jokers, pleaded guilty to the murders. After a long police investigation he had been persuaded to roll over and break the bikers’ code of silence. Reid, who came from a broken home and was estranged from his children, had come to regard the Jokers as his family. He had come under suspicion because he had been at the campsite on the night Grierson was shot. Now he implicated another Joker, Graeme ‘Slim’ Slater, as being with him when the bomb was planted. In return for his cooperation Reid was given fifteen years, a reduction of ten in the sentence he might have expected. He also gave evidence in the successful prosecution of Gary White for the murder of Alan Tapley, who had been killed over a debt and barbecued. He later gave evidence against other bikers who, on 27 August 2004, were all acquitted of the bombing campaign against Hancock. Slater, who had earlier been acquitted of the murders, admitted four charges relating to the earlier bombing campaign and received a three-year sentence, which resulted in his immediate release.
Ironically, it had been thought that Hancock’s death would end any chance the Mickelberg brothers had of clearing their names, but it was then that Tony Lewandowski, now estranged from his wife and son, broke ranks and swore an affidavit admitting that he had lied and had, in fact, taken part in the beating of Peter Mickelberg:
I have had enough. Now that Don Hancock is dead I can’t harm him and I am now telling the truth … a couple of times I wanted to come clean but there was no way I could go against Don.
While he admitted fabricating evidence, Lewandowski said he still believed the brothers to be responsible for the robbery. ‘I do have remorse, of course, but I still believe implicitly that they were guilty of the crime.’ Nevertheless, he asked the DPP for immunity but, while it was being considered, he left the country. He returned to give evidence by video link on 27 September 2002 at a preliminary hearing of a further appeal by the brothers.
On 2 July 2004, by a majority of two to one, the court allowed the appeal, quashed the conviction and indicated that there would be no retrial. It is difficult to see how there could have been. Hancock was dead and so was Lewandowski, who had committed suicide in May that year. The Western Australia Police were unwilling to accept the verdict and Assistant Commissioner Neil Hay said there was an abundance of evidence linking the brothers to the crime. In turn they claimed compensation, which was eventually settled for $1.6 million.
During this period, under Commissioner Bob Falconer, the Western Australia Police lost the respect of the public. There were continual claims of corruption; unsolved murders, including the Claremont serial killings; and sloppy work in briefs handed to the DPP. The consorting squad had been disbanded.
On 4 November 2001 respected West Australian journalist Gary Adshead, in his article ‘Cops on take’, claimed that detectives in the 1990s had been standing over dealers, stealing drugs and cash from them, and giving the green light to favourites. But no witnesses had come forward and if they did, ‘He would say that, wouldn’t he?’ would be the defence. Who would believe a drug dealer’s word against that of a police officer?
In a number of examples presented by Adshead, Dealer 1 said that he sold hydroponically grown cannabis from a house in Lansdale and was raided on average every six weeks. The police would take drugs and cash, and charge him with a ‘pissy’ offence. Once when they had found him with 2500 marijuana sticks or foils and forty-three 50-gram sachets, along with $4900; he was charged with possessing half a gram of cannabis. Once he had been raided while dealing with the son of a senior police officer, who was just kicked out of the house.
Dealer 2, wrote Adshead, claimed that he had been paying $2000 a week to a detective sergeant from 1991 and that he stole a total of twenty-eight cars for another corrupt detective sergeant who was jailed in 1996 for offering a bribe to a third officer to drop an investigation into a smash repairer. A third dealer said that the police had taken well over $100 000 from him over a period of years and that it was not a financial arrangement as in New South Wales but was simply a standover.
The next year Geoffrey Kennedy QC was appointed to head a royal commission ‘Into whether there has been any corrupt or criminal conduct by any Western Australian police officer’. During the commission one former officer told of a twenty-year corrupt career and named forty officers whom he said were also involved in corruption, which he listed as stealing cash from a man shot dead by police, forging signatures, and using and supplying illegal drugs to informants. There was also apparently a videotape of a sergeant trying to steal $1 million. Four years later, in 2006, the final report of the commission concluded that it was ‘an organisation of mediocre achievements’ and:
the full range of corrupt or criminal conduct from stealing to assaults, perjury, drug dealing and the improper disclosure of confidential information have been examined. The Western Australian Police force has been ineffective in monitoring those events and modifying its procedures to deal with that conduct and to prevent its repetition … The fact that there remain in WAPS a number of officers who participated in this conduct, and who not only refused to admit it, but also uniformly denied it with vehemence, is a matter of concern.
One of the high-profile cases the commission had examined was that of the death of Stephen Wardle in the East Perth lock-up in 1988. Allegations of police brutality surrounded the death, and seventeen officers had refused to testify at the coronial inquest. The commission also looked at the Argyle diamonds case, in which one of the defendants alleged he had paid nearly $250 000 to derail an investigation into a series of thefts worth up to $30 million from the Kununurra mine. Overall, however, Commissioner Kennedy found little or no substance in claims of corruption in these cases. In particular, Don Hancock was not on the take, nor had he made money from illegal gold dealings and prostitution, as some had thought and claimed.
The report did not please everybody. One question raised was why the commission had put no time aside for any inquiry into allegations of corrupt relationships with Northbridge identity John Kizon and his offsiders when so much time had been spent finding out so little new about Wardle’s death nearly twenty years earlier and the old Argyle case. Why had Operation Red Emperor, an investigation into organised crime and Northbridge identities, been aborted? There were also complaints from an undercover detective who had worked for three years with Kizon’s associates. ‘West Australia’s recent history with corruption fighters does not inspire a deal of confidence.’
Another case from the previous century spilled over into this mystery. On 11 September 1995 heroin addict Andrew Petrelis had been found dead following a drug overdose in the seaside town of Caloundra, Queensland. Supposedly sent there in a Western Australian witness protection program, he was waiting to give evidence against Kizon, for whom he had worked as a driver. His body, hunched over a CD player on repeat, was discovered after he failed to turn up for a flying lesson.
In 1994 Petrelis had been instructed—by whom it was never wholly clear—to dig up some bags, expected to contain cannabis, in Perth’s Kings Park and take them to a self-storage unit he had rented, padlocking the door behind him. The owners of the unit became suspicious, broke open the door, discovered $150 000 worth of drugs and called the police. When questioned, Petrelis rolled over. Grass cuttings were substituted for the cann
abis. Petrelis was used as bait for a trap and John Kizon’s offsider Michael Rippingale picked up the bags on 22 November that year. Following surveillance and phone taps, he and Kizon were arrested. Unfortunately, even before he left Western Australia Petrelis’ cover had been blown. A police constable, apparently looking on the web for information about Elvis Presley’s manager Colonel Parker, had accidentally stumbled on confidential details of Petrelis’ new identity. Worse still, a second officer also came across the details and passed them on to Western Australian criminals. The second officer later resigned. One of the officers who accessed Petrelis’ file was Murray John Shadgett and, at best, his record showed a total laxity of supervision by his superiors. As at June 1994 Shadgett had more disciplinary charges against him than any other Western Australian officer and was on a final written warning. In 1995, seventeen days before the Colonel Parker search, information was received that a man on work release from Albany prison was living with Shadgett. He eventually retired on medical grounds on 6 July 2000, shortly before the completion of an internal affairs unit investigation.
A report tabled in parliament on 9 August 2000 showed that Petrelis’ supposedly secret identity had been accessed seventeen times on the police database. Despite these breaches he was still moved to Caloundra.
In November 1999 Kizon and Rippingale were acquitted of the drug offences. Kizon, who was in hospital at the time of Petrelis’ death, complained bitterly, suggesting that the drugs charge was a slur on his character and that he had only been arrested because of his associates.
In 2006 Queensland coroner Michael Halliday, inquiring into Petrelis’ death, found that ‘there was no evidence which would reasonably suggest that the cause of death was other than self-administration’. There are, however, believable suggestions, backed by evidence—there was no tourniquet, spoon or needle and the injection was in Petrelis’ right arm although he was right-handed—that the overdose was a result of forced feeding.