Bad

by Michael Duffy

  The first meeting was on 30 September 2002. At a remote location, Daley was equipped with miniature recording equipment. Once it was turned on, Jubelin briefly explained the nature of the operation and said to him, ‘I have been authorised to offer you the following inducement for the purposes of this operation only. Nothing you say and no information you give in this operation will be used in any criminal proceedings against you in any court in New South Wales. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Daley went into the store and found Andrew Perish, who said, ‘Is there a summons?’ Perish had two things at the forefront of his mind: the imminent inquest into his grandparents’ death and the Falconer investigation, involving both Tuno and the Crime Commission. When Daley said he’d received a summons to give evidence at the inquest, Perish said, ‘Bullshit, isn’t it . . . Did you get it today?’

  ‘Yeah, about eleven o’clock today at my girl’s—’

  ‘Fuckin’ can’t, mate,’ Perish said, ‘you go there and fuckin’—’

  ‘Yeah, they’re going to ask me that shit and what do I say, man? What do you want me to say?’

  ‘Fuck, just something like—’

  ‘Want me to say that fuckin’ Terry told, told me that he’d done it or what?’

  ‘No, no don’t fuckin’—’

  ‘Well I dunno, that’s why I’m asking, that’s why I’m here to fuckin’ see ya, Andrew.’

  But Andrew did not ask Daley to lie, and it is a feature of this and all the taped conversations that followed that Andrew Perish did not admit to or propose any illegal activity. Either he was a man innocent of all wrong, or a man with a constant wariness that the conversations he had with Daley might be taped.

  He said, ‘Some cunt’s fuckin’, some cunt’s fuckin’, some cunt in our circle has fuckin’ dogged ya, mate, just to put you in the picture.’

  The news that he’d been accused of informing did not make Daley happy. ‘Don’t need this shit, man,’ he said, ‘that’s why I pulled out of the fuckin’ job [meaning the disposal of Falconer’s body] in the first place.’

  ‘It’s just fuckin’ shit, mate . . .’

  ‘Speak to the Rooster, mate. Speak to the Rooster, find out what the fuck I’ve got to do, all right? If he wants to see me I don’t care, whatever, mate.’

  Daley was using the situation to try to make contact with Anthony Perish, as the detectives had asked.

  ‘No worries,’ Andrew said, ‘I’ll get it sorted out, fuckin’ oath.’

  ‘And sort the fuckin’ money out too, all right?’

  This seems to be a reference to whether Daley had to repay any of the $8,300 he’d been given to repair his boat and make his reconaissance trip.

  ‘Yeah, no worries.’

  ‘Just tell him, mate, I’ve had a hell of a lot of fuckin’ heat on my arse here and there, you know. I’m just staying away from every cunt. I’ve heard the bullshit rumours and all this fuckin’ crap.’

  ‘Yeah . . . I know they’re not going to want you to say nothin’ about knocking the other thing. They’re not gonna learn nothin’.’

  ‘Nothing.’

  Given that ‘to knock’ means ‘to kill’, ‘knocking the other thing’ was presumably a reference to the Falconer murder—but it was as close as Perish would ever come to a direct mention in any of these conversations. The police had hoped for more explicit admissions, and they were disappointed. However, one feature of Andrew’s conversation was interesting, and that was the way he accepted without question references Daley made to some of the circumstances of the Falconer murder. It’s unlikely he would have done this had he not known about them. For example, at one point Daley said, ‘I just fuckin’, you know this is a flamin’ surprise to me. I don’t want any more fuckin’ surprises like you comin’ out to my place . . . that’s why I pulled out of the fuckin’ thing in the first place, Andrew. I don’t want to go back to jail for no cunt.’

  To which Andrew’s reply was, ‘Yeah, I know. No worries, no worries.’

  ‘I’m not a weak cunt, mate, it’s just that things weren’t right, I was fresh out of jail.’

  ‘No worries. I fuckin’ understand that, mate.’

  It was pretty obvious—to a listener aware of the background—that Perish knew exactly what Daley was talking about.

  Another example of this familiarity occurred when Daley referred to the police running sheet Anthony had once shown him at his house. He said, ‘I need to know if that fuckin’ piece of paper you showed me about Terry Falconer is gone, because it’s got my fuckin’ prints on it.’

  Andrew didn’t say, ‘What piece of paper?’, he said, ‘It’s gone, mate. Don’t worry.’

  The conversation also included a lot of general chat about the bikie life, matters such as killing, rivalries and constant paranoia. The details are not clear most of the time, but the violence of their culture is. For example, Daley said about some unnamed people, ‘He was gonna ask me and we all got asked last week before to fuckin’ shoot the cunt . . . I’m fuckin’ spinning, mate, I’m getting loaded for it . . . I’m not havin’ any arguments over that cunt.’

  ‘Yeah, you don’t want any cunt setting you up for that, ay?’

  There was more chat about mutual acquaintances, interspersed with Daley’s attempts to get Andrew to talk about Terry Falconer. We can only wonder what Andrew Perish must have thought during these conversations. Daley was playing a dangerous game, by suggesting he was scared about his contacts with police over the inquest into the grandparents’ deaths. There was always the possibility the Perishes would decide he was about to roll over, and that he had to be dealt with.

  On the other hand, it was possible Andrew just considered Daley a harmless pain in the arse who needed to be kept happy with as little effort as possible. After fifteen minutes of rambling, expletive-ridden conversation, he said, ‘I gotta let you go, mate, all right?’

  ‘All right,’ said Daley.

  ‘Have a good afternoon.’

  Daley went back to South Western Produce wearing a wire in early October, and got taped confirmation that the Perishes had given him money in connection with his boat. He gave Andrew Perish $1,000, which the police had provided, and said, ‘Give that to him [Anthony] too. I promise to round off what I owe him.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ said Andrew.

  ‘Do I have to pay the eight and a half or just fuckin’ . . . cause I don’t really wanna fuckin’ put a new motor on the boat.’

  Andrew said he’d talk to Anthony about it. Daley said he’d pay it back bit by bit, and Andrew said, ‘Yeah, no worries.’

  Daley met a bikie mate in the store, and their casual chat about Falconer (whose death was still of interest in the underworld) makes chilling reading, even if not every detail of it is clear. Daley seemed to be saying that Falconer had ratted on some bikies: ‘He got busted with the drums of chemicals [and gave up] a heap of Jokers and fuckin’ other hairy cunts over it when he got busted . . . with drums and drums, millions of dollars worth of chemicals . . . what I’ve always been understood to believe, Uhlans and Jokers, and that was all when the Uhlans and Jokers come unstuck and they reckon they found that, remember that little fuckin’ cunt from the Uhlans that I used to know real well, they—’

  ‘Jack.’

  ‘They found him burned in his ute.’

  On the next visit, in the middle of October, Daley said he had to give evidence at the inquest the next week and Andrew said, ‘Yeah, you don’t know nothing, right.’ Daley again raised his concerns about his fingerprints being on the police running sheet, and Andrew said, ‘Hey, hey, hey. But you know nothing about that boat.’

  During this conversation, Daley thought he heard Andrew say, in regard to the Falconer murder, ‘Nobody knows we done it.’ When he left South Western Produce, he was exultant about this and sent a text to the detectives, ‘U love me don’t you? . . . Don’t you!! . . . I do believe I have admis. [Smiley face.] C U in 40 I hope. Traffic is fucked.’

>   Regrettably, although Daley did not know this, the main recording device had stopped working some time between when it was fitted and the start of the conversation. Daley had been equipped with a second device, but on account of its location on him it did not record very well, and parts of the conversation, including the place where Daley claimed Andrew had made the admission, were inaudible. A noisy machine, sounding like a compressor, had been running in the room. The recording was later sent to experts at Scotland Yard to see if they could improve the sound quality, but without success.

  Daley returned to the store at the end of the month and actually got to talk with Anthony Perish. He’d been told he might be in Sydney, so he said to Andrew, ‘Mate didn’t come down?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Mate didn’t come down?’

  ‘Yeah, he’s down now, Mate.’

  ‘Is he?’

  ‘We might catch up with him tonight.’

  ‘Yeah, that’d be all right.’

  ‘Or fuckin’ tomorrow night or something, you know . . . I’ll give him a call.’

  ‘When?’

  Andrew dialled a number, and said, ‘Hey, Mate, how you goin’? . . . Uh yeah, I got someone here okay . . . Have a little talk, you know. Are you there? Yeah, he’s here now, yeah.’

  Daley, handed the phone, spoke to Anthony: ‘Hey, buddy, how ya goin’? What’s happening? Ah, fuckin’, fuck all, mate . . . Well, there’s lots of shit really, ha, ha . . . So we fuckin’ need to have dinner, mate . . . Fuck, just give Andrew a ring and organise it with him and he can let me know, yeah, pick us up or whatever. Yeah, no worries. All right, Mate, take it easy, eh? See ya, bud.’

  Daley hoped Andrew would ring him back some time soon and arrange the meet with Anthony at short notice, so for the next few weeks the detectives took their guns and Kevlar vests home each night, waiting for a call from Daley that would draw them across the city in a rush to seize Anthony. But there was no meeting. Presumably the Perishes were highly suspicious of Daley by now.

  Daley was under a lot of pressure and told the police some strange things. Glen Browne wrote this report of a phone call about the helicopter in December 2002: ‘Daley immediately seemed to be excited and irrational. Daley stated a helicopter had been circling his house and he requested to be told why. Daley went on to say that he believed that the helicopter was a police helicopter and they were checking out his house prior to raiding it. He stated that the helicopter was flying at very low level, approximately two hundred feet. In confirmation of these facts a helicopter could be heard in the background over the telephone.’

  Daley had a bike accident, and the police who attended the scene searched his panniers and discovered $20,000 and tapes of meetings between him and Jubelin and Browne. Apparently he was paranoid about the police and, after secretly recording these conversations, had been carrying the tapes as insurance.

  Finally, in late 2003, Daley said he’d had enough and wanted to go away and start his new life. The police sent him back to the produce store for one last attempt, in November. They told him to try harder than before to get Andrew to say something incriminating—raising his suspicions now would not matter. Jubelin sought legal advice and explained to Daley just how far he could go in trying to get Andrew to talk without making ‘untrue representations’ that might make an answer inadmissible in court.

  At the store, Daley told Andrew police had come to his girlfriend’s house and asked questions about the boat. ‘Who the fuck is talking?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t fuckin’ know, mate, I don’t know.’

  ‘You know I had concerns about this shit from the fuckin’ start.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’

  Daley pretended to get angry about this, and again demanded to know who’d been talking to the police.

  ‘It’s that fuckin’ Fuck Off,’ Andrew said, giving the nickname of a bikie. ‘That Fuck prick.’

  ‘I don’t need this shit, mate,’ Daley said. ‘Just sort it out.’

  ‘It’s fuckin’ Fuck Off, mate. I’m telling you.’

  Daley referred to the previous conversation in which Andrew had acknowledged Falconer’s murder, but this had not been caught on tape because of the faulty recording device. ‘Remember the conversation we had?’ he said. ‘At the back of the place? And you said nobody knows who done it?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  It was close, but not close enough to get a conviction by itself.

  In November 2003 Daley left Sydney with a one-way ticket provided by police. It wasn’t much for what he had lost and all he was risking. The last few months had been traumatic for him, but Jubelin felt that on the whole he’d handled them with commendable mental strength.

  Daley gave police an eighty-seven-page signed statement, which was taken over a week in a safe house north of Sydney. Over a series of ten- to twelve-hour days, Jubelin did the talking while Glen Browne, Jason Evers and Luke Rankin typed or looked after security. It was a tense time because Daley was emotional: he realised that once the statement was done and signed, there would be no turning back.

  On the day before his flight, he came into the building where Tuno’s office was located to collect his plane ticket. A detective met him in the foyer and took him through security and into a meeting room where Jubelin was waiting. When the ticket was handed over, Daley looked at it with surprise, almost as though he’d never believed this would happen.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘I suppose you can have this now.’

  He reached beneath his shirt and produced a loaded automatic with a laser sight on top, and laid it on the table.

  4

  ARREST OF A GHOST

  Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.

  Gary Jubelin was frustrated by the lack of progress. Fortunately he was in the relationship with Pamela Young and so had something to take his mind off the job, but sometimes they didn’t see much of each other. She’d come to realise that even in a group of colleagues who were extremely dedicated to their work, Gary was an extremist. At home he never turned off his phone, no matter what they were doing. Sometimes she would ask him to, but he refused. It was as though being available to anyone who wanted him—bosses, staff, witnesses—was a compulsion, maybe even an addiction. This created tensions in their relationship. He found it difficult to be still, to go out to a restaurant and have a meal, or even just to sit and have a cup of coffee with her. All his talk was about work. And then there was the constant exercise, whether it was running or the gym or martial arts. She still admired his intensity, and liked it when this was directed at her. But always it was at a time of his choosing, not her own. He was a hard man.

  From the end of 2003, Tuno went into a lull, for several reasons. It had run out of leads, and there was no great enthusiasm left from management. As Luke Rankin recalls, it did not have a high media profile because the victim was not someone many people would have much sympathy for. It also happened that at this point some of the detectives had to devote serious time to commitments from previous investigations. Jubelin, Jason Evers and Nigel Warren got tied up with the Linda Wilson trial in October and November.

  Another thing that took them away from Tuno was that the homicide officers on the team (who now included Glen Browne and Luke Rankin, who had transferred into the squad) spent one week in six doing on-call work. One job that Nigel Warren remembers with horror involved a paedophile named Jeffrey Hillsley, who, after many years in prison, had written to the Parole Board, ‘A message to the community: I’ll be back. Thank God for little girls.’ It was signed ‘The Walking Evil’. He was released anyway, and on New Year’s Day 2004, Warren, Jubelin and Rankin were on call when they received notice that there’d been a murder near Burwood. A man’s head had been destroyed by what at first seemed to have been a shotgun, although later they found the damage had been caused by a frenzied hammer attack. The detectives arrived and learned the man’s ten-year-old daughter had disappeared. Her mother told polic
e that Hillsley had befriended the family. After killing the father, he kidnapped the girl and sexually assaulted her. Later she escaped, and police caught Hillsley. The homicide team was up for thirty-six hours chasing him—not unusual with on-call work. Warren later recalled how the need to work closely with the victim’s family, ‘Rather than making the task of investigating their misfortunate easier . . . added an exhaustive element to the investigation, leaving an indelible imprint on my memory.’

  These various distractions continued into 2004, which also saw the second Bowraville inquest, this time into the death of Evelyn Greenup and the suspected death of Colleen Walker. It ran in fits and starts from February to September. Jubelin and Evers attended, and the work of Strike Force Ancud was scrutinised by the court. The coroner found that Colleen Walker had been killed although there was not enough evidence to convict her murderer, but that a jury might well find a known person had killed Evelyn Greenup. The matter was referred to the Director of Public Prosecutions to consider a prosecution.

  Nigel Warren was tied up with the Kerry Whelan case for some of the year and then, to cap things off, Jubelin was told he had to leave homicide as part of the rotation policy. This had been introduced to the specialist squads after the Royal Commission, to reduce the chance of corruption—although there’d never been much chance for corruption in homicide anyway.