Australia's Most Murderous Prison: Behind the Walls of Goulburn Jail

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Australia's Most Murderous Prison: Behind the Walls of Goulburn Jail Page 17

by Phelps, James


  It can also be revealed that Naden tried to kill himself on his first night in Goulburn …

  ‘I saw him straight after he was arrested and he was a mess,’ said one Goulburn officer. He was absolutely tiny and his calf had been ripped off by the police dog. It was horrible to look at because [the muscle] just fell off when it was bitten. He was taken straight to Goulburn.’

  ‘For some reason he was given a radio,’ the officer continued. ‘And that’s what he used for the attempt. He was found with the cord around his neck. He had tied it around a shower curtain rod and tried to hang himself.’

  He was kicking when they came in, his skeletal legs slashing through the air. His hands were around his neck and his face was red. One officer rushed in and grabbed the killer in a bear hug to relieve the pressure. The other ripped down the electrical cord.

  Sound like a desperate cry for help? Shower rail? Electrical cord? Surely these two items couldn’t combine to kill a man?

  ‘Sure, it would be pretty hard for most people to do,’ the officer said. ‘But you have to remember he was a skeleton at the time because he’d been starving himself in the bush. He would have been 45kg at the most. He was almost dead when they found him. They saved his life and, from what I know, he hasn’t tried it since. We have certainly made it more difficult with no more electrical cords and hanging points.’

  Captain Commando

  BING!

  The light above the lift flashed and the steel doors groaned as the gears pulled them open.

  ‘Quick,’ said the startled officer, grabbing the shotgun from his lap. ‘The lift. Someone is coming.’

  Another officer, all black mesh and bulletproof vest, turned towards the lift, the sliding doors slowly revealing what was inside. They were heavily armed and highly trained; part of an elite Corrective Services unit used to ‘escort’ Australia’s most dangerous convicts.

  Standing side by side, firepower at their fingertips, they watched and waited …

  Bing!

  Two men stood inside the lift – two big men, clad ominously in black leather and wearing black sunglasses under black caps.

  ‘Ummm,’ said one of the leather-clad men following a moment of silence and blank stares. ‘Ummm. Wrong floor.’

  His hands mashed at buttons, a finger stabbing at the one marked ‘G’, and once again the lift was alive, groaning as the gears pushed the steel doors shut.

  And then they were gone.

  ‘They had come to put a hit on the prisoner we were guarding in the hospital,’ recalled an officer, part of the eight-strong security team who were watching over a high-profile inmate for two weeks.

  ‘We think they were bikies, but we can’t say for sure because they didn’t introduce themselves and we didn’t go after them. It wasn’t a random thing, either – the whole hospital floor had been shut down for this inmate. We had intel that someone was going to try and kill him, and they would have had we not been there.’

  Their objective? Meet former One Company commando turned contract killer Sean Laurence Waygood.

  ‘You sure that was by the book, officer?’ Waygood snapped. ‘If you’re going to search me then I would appreciate it if you did it properly. A job’s not worth doing if it isn’t done right.’

  The officer sighed. ‘Yeah, the mouth,’ he said. ‘I forgot to look in your mouth. Go on … open up, then.’

  Waygood, the man who was discovered with an arsenal of 3000 rounds of ammunition, a bolt-action rifle, a rifle fitted with a silencer, a Ruger mini-rifle, a machine pistol, a .22-calibre pistol, a Luger pistol, a .38-calibre pistol, ten empty magazines, rubber masks and wigs, all found in his luxury Newcastle house the day after his arrest, smiled. ‘That’s more like it.’

  A high school drop-out turned elite Australian Army commando turned contract killer, Waygood was arguably Goulburn’s most dangerous man.

  ‘He was a lethal unit,’ said a current Corrections employee. ‘He was a martial arts expert, and there was no doubt he could kill with his bare hands. But he was also just bloody difficult to deal with because he was so arrogant. He thought he knew everything. He was compliant as an inmate but very arrogant in his ways. Searching him was a nightmare. You would have to do it by the letter of the law or he would give you hell. He would pull you up on any procedure that wasn’t carried out 100 per cent. He would belittle you because he was an ex-commando and he knew everything, apparently. But he was one bad dude and no one in there would mess with him. No one had the balls.’

  Except for a couple of former friends who were now mortal enemies …

  After dropping out of North Shore private schools, Waygood became an expert in airborne assaults and against-all-odds raids. After quitting the army, he went from dodging bullets to dealing with drunks, the killing machine becoming a security guard at several Sydney nightspots.

  ‘He started some sort of security business,’ the officer continued. ‘But it went bust. And it was about then he decided he might start working for some of the dodgy people he’d met while working on the doors. He went back to doing what he knew best.’

  And that was killing.

  Waygood became a gun for hire and performed what he called ‘black-ops’ for anyone who had the cash. He was available for contract killings, high-risk robberies and near-impossible break-ins. The commando orchestrated a daring robbery at the BOC Gas headquarters in Wetherill Park, where he bypassed state-of-the-art security to steal chemicals to be used in the production of drugs.

  Waygood was also one of three men who abducted and killed a man in an infamous Australian crime.

  Waygood, along with underworld brothers Anthony and Andrew Perish, wore suits and flashed badges before ‘arresting’ drug dealer Terry Falconer at the Wreck-a-Mended Smash Repairs in Ingleburn on 16 November 2001. They then drove to North Sydney, where they drugged him, put him in a toolbox and loaded the box onto the back of a ute.

  Falconer died from a combination of of heat and lack of oxygen while the trio drove to Bulahdelah on New South Wales’s north coast, so they took his body out, strung it up on an engine block-and-tackle and hacked him into pieces. The body parts were then put into plastic bags and dumped into the nearby Hastings River.

  Waygood was arrested in early 2009 when tactical officers swamped him at a café. And that’s when he turned snitch on the Perish brothers and became a marked man.

  ‘We had loads of intel that the Perish brothers had put out a hit on him,’ the officer continued. ‘Waygood rolled over when he was arrested and got a 50 per cent reduction after pleading guilty to his crimes. I think he only got about 15 years on top. The cops were really after the Perishes, who are very heavy dudes, and Waygood was only too happy to give them up. He was always going on escorts to the Crime Commission and stuff like that, but the heavy intel came when he got sick.’

  Waygood was diagnosed with cancer soon after he pleaded guilty to numerous charges, including conspiracy to murder and accessory to murder.

  ‘He had an eight-hour operation for something to do with his illness,’ the officer continued. ‘He had cancer of the bowel and ended up having to wear a colostomy bag. The intel was that the Perishes were going to knock him while he was at the hospital, so they sent in eight armed officers to guard him for two weeks. And they were lucky they did, because a couple of blokes turned up to hit him.

  ‘They saw the firepower we had and disappeared. The officers were fully armed – shotguns and the whole lot. The hospital wing was locked down and they shouldn’t have even been able to get that far. These two guys turned up and the guards shat themselves. Fortunately the two bikies shat themselves more when they saw they were outnumbered and did a U-turn.’

  The brave guards saved Waygood’s life, but the surgery did not. The former commando turned Australia’s most dangerous prisoner was dead at the age of 43, the cancer killing him in 2014 after he had served the first five years of his sentence.

  Tuna Tins, Socks and Soap

  CLI
CK!

  Bassam Hamzy hung up the phone, his 30-minute chat with his solicitor over.

  Knock. Knock.

  He banged on the door, now ready to leave the ‘phone cage’ – a small Supermax cell containing a prison payphone.

  ‘Done?’ the officer asked as he unlocked the door. ‘Getting out anytime soon?’

  The handcuffed inmate snarled. ‘Whatever, bro. Take me back to my cell.’

  Hamzy’s heavy chains rattled as he moved into the corridor. He spotted another inmate, also shuffling in steel.

  Is that him? Nah, it couldn’t be. Yep, it is. Fucking cunt.

  Hamzy charged, his minder left closing the cage.

  Whack.

  Hamzy struck the inmate in the face, his chains singing as they swiped through air.

  Bang.

  The other inmate smacked back, more of a double-handed push than a punch, thanks to the cuffs.

  Whack.

  Both men were knocked flat, a posse of guards making easy work of the cuffed inmates.

  ‘You’re fucking dead,’ Hamzy promised from the ground.

  ‘Not if I get you first,’ the other man spat.

  Welcome to the secret Supermax feud that threatens to spill out onto the streets. It is the until-death-do-us-part prison fight between two of Australia’s most dangerous men …

  ‘Bassam Hamzy and Reynold Glover are at war,’ a Supermax officer revealed. ‘They have both put hits out on each other, and they had a massive blue in handcuffs not long ago. Hamzy was being moved out of the phone cage, the segregation area, and they crossed paths. It was on as soon as Hamzy saw him. They were smashing each other while in chains.

  ‘It was jumped on pretty quick. They were both in handcuffs, so they couldn’t put up much of a fight against the officers. They could have done some damage if the guards weren’t around, though – a double-handed punch straight from the chest would do a lot of damage with the metal cuff. It would split you right open.

  ‘Glover got the better of the short exchange because he’s a lot stronger than Hamzy. He would have done a lot of damage if he wasn’t stopped.’

  The warring duo live just 25 metres apart and are separated by one wall.

  ‘Hamzy is one side of Unit 7, what they call the “long side”, and Glover is on the short side of Unit 7,’ the officer continued. ‘They never come together and never will. Well, not again …’

  We have already heard about Hamzy – the gang leader who ran his criminal empire from prison with a mobile phone – but who is this bloke he desperately wants to kill? Who is this Reynold Glover, and what makes him so dangerous?

  Reynold Kwame Glover, 29, is the only Australian inmate who is escorted in shackles.

  ‘He’s so bad that he gets moved around in ankle cuffs,’ the Goulburn officer said. ‘He’s that bloke who did all the armed robberies in Sydney, the bloke who went shooting an AK-47 in George Street. He is a very, very dangerous man and a very heavy criminal. He’s also a very fit boy who knows how to fight.’

  Glover was arrested on 10 March 2013 for an armed robbery on an Armaguard cash delivery van on Broadway. He was charged with seven offences relating to the $1.2 million theft. His arrest came a year after he was controversially found not guilty of 34 serious crimes that saw $6 million stolen in six other van heists. Only $500,000 was ever recovered.

  ‘He was taken to Goulburn and put in X Wing at first, which is minimum security,’ said a prison officer. ‘But thankfully someone had a closer look at his file and saw the he had many charges that he hadn’t been convicted of – holding up armoured van charges, discharge firearm charges and assault charges. The officer spoke to the boss and told him who Glover was and what he was capable of. The boss looked at it and agreed he shouldn’t be in X Wing. He was one bad dude. If that paperwork hadn’t been studied, he would have been put in X Wing and he would have escaped straightaway. We soon found out what he was capable of.’

  It was a phone tap that uncovered Glover’s audacious plan.

  ‘There was a plot last year where he was going to be broken out,’ the officer continued. ‘He had smuggled a mobile phone into prison and used it to hire people to get him out.’

  Glover was planning to stab himself in the leg with a big, dirty shiv and then claim he had been attacked.

  ‘And then the men he had hired were going to ram the ambulance,’ the officer said. ‘They were going to come armed with machine guns, shoot all the escort staff and get him out while he was on the way to hospital. Thankfully, the escape plan was uncovered through phone intercepts. It was then we figured out how dangerous he was. He has a big gang on the outside that he still commands, and he also has plenty of money. They only ever got back a bit of the money he allegedly stole, and he is suspected of still having millions out on the streets.’

  So it’s money and men that makes Glover so dangerous?

  ‘Yep,’ the officer said. ‘He’s real piece of work … very fit and very dangerous. He has a lot of money and a lot of connections. He’s one of the most dangerous inmates in the country.’

  And that’s why he was sent to the HRMCC. To live a stone’s throw away from the violent criminal who has promised to kill him.

  Prison officials claim the war between Hamzy and Glover has spilled onto Sydney’s streets, with rival gangs exchanging shots ordered by their incarcerated leaders.

  ‘Hamzy is after Glover and anyone who is with him,’ said an intelligence officer. ‘There is massive intel on them. Hamzy has a lot of connections on the outside and so does Glover, so it’s a bit of a tit-for-tat thing. A lot of those shootings that are happening at the moment are over this. They are two dangerous dudes, even when behind bars.’

  So why are they warring?

  ‘Glover was charged with shooting Hamzy’s aunt,’ the officer continued. ‘Doesn’t take a genius to work that one out.’

  Maha Hamze, 47, was shot three times in the legs as she stood at her front door, and the imported German Glock handgun used in the Auburn home invasion was found in Glover’s Sydney home when police arrested him for the armed hold-up of the Armaguard van. Ballistics tests matched the gun to the shooting of Bassam’s aunt.

  Glover is also considered one of Australia’s hardest inmates.

  ‘He’s been gassed numerous times,’ an officer said. ‘He once lit his cell on fire. He used a bunch of papers and whatever other flammable material he had to start a fire in the front of his cell. He had his head covered with a green shirt, and he was standing there swinging a green jail sock full of soap and tuna tins at officers. The boys were trying to put the fire out from the front hatch with the hose while he was at the back, challenging the rest to a fight.

  ‘A 501 was fired, which is a projectile that explodes into a big cloud of gas, but it didn’t really have much of an effect, so another went in. He was placed in an OBS [observation cell] after they pulled him out, and he acted like nothing had happened after he was decontaminated.

  ‘He just wanted to cause trouble. He’s a mischief-maker. The reason he did that was he wanted his brother taken out of segregation at the MRRC [Silverwater] and moved to the HRMCC with him. His brother was part of his gang. The answer was no, so he went off.’

  10

  RAPE and RAPISTS

  Home and Away

  The detectives walked into the prison hospital, notepads out but not optimistic they’d need them.

  He won’t talk. They never talk. Especially when it comes to this …

  One of the officers pulled out a chair. ‘Mind if I sit down?’ he asked.

  The inmate nodded and gently patted the bleached white blanket he was wrapped in. ‘Go for it.’

  Well … he didn’t tell me to get fucked. That’s a start.

  The officer, now sitting as his copper colleague stood at the end of the bed, pulled a pen from his pocket and placed the notepad on his knee.

  ‘So we hear you were admitted to hospital with some quite serious wounds,’ the officer said. �
��Would you like to tell us how you got them?’

  The recovering inmate bashed him with a brow.

  ‘You mean my arse?’ he said, surprised by the beat-around-the-bush cop. ‘Who ripped it open?’

  Here we go then … Where’s that pen?

  The detective cut to the chase. ‘Were you raped? Were you sexually assaulted by another inmate?’

  ‘Of course I fucking was.’ The prisoner laughed. ‘Why else would I have needed 20 stiches in my arse. I was raped, raped and then raped some more. Go fuck up that piece of shit, that fucking rapist DOG.’

  That notepad was needed after all.

  ‘Well, some details first,’ the detective said. ‘We need to know exactly who did it, how they did and when they did it.’

  The inmate nodded again. ‘It happened at 7pm the first time – the first night of the lock-in.’

  The officer’s pen raced across the page.

  ‘Oh, 7pm,’ the officer said. ‘And how can we confirm this? Were you wearing a watch? Maybe an alarm clock in the cell?’

  The inmate looked stumped. ‘No, I don’t own a watch.’

  The officer stopped writing. ‘Well, how do you know it was 7pm?’ he asked, the credibility of the victim suddenly a concern.

  The inmate smiled. ‘Easy. I was trying to block everything out when he threw me over the bed, but all I could hear was that bloody theme song from Home and Away. You know, “Home and away … closer each day …” I don’t know what was worse, him pounding away or me having to listen to that shit. Anyway, it starts at 7pm, right?’

  The detective nodded. And then he laughed.

  To be fair to the detective, the inmate laughed first. The wounded prisoner was quite the comedian, as well as being a convicted rapist himself.

  What goes around comes around?

  ‘He was a scumbag,’ said one Goulburn officer. ‘He was a young bloke, sure, but he was in for brutally beating and raping a young girl. Anyway, he was sharing a two-out cell with another rapist, who just happened to be bigger, older and stronger.’

 

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