By this time—late 2004—the Tuno team was a little jaded. Despite Tod Daley’s information, which they’d now had in its complete version for over a year, they did not have enough to charge anyone with Terry Falconer’s murder. All the obvious leads had been chased up and there was nothing pressing left to do. It was not that the detectives hadn’t been working hard—in fact they’d been working so hard that it had prevented them from going for promotions. Their careers were passing them by, and they agreed they needed to take a step back and play the promotion game more effectively.
Within a year they’d all been promoted, but this took some of them away from homicide, and from Tuno, forever. Nigel Warren and Glen Browne stayed in homicide as sergeants, but Luke Rankin ended up at Mudgee and Jason Evers at Ballina. Gary Jubelin moved to a surburban police station.
When he left, he handed Tuno over to Warren and Browne. He told his bosses it would need a team of six for six months to get it to the point where someone could be charged, but no extra officers were allocated. You have to feel some sympathy for the bosses—it would have been easy at this point to decide Tuno had failed and that there was little point in wasting more resources on it. Soon Warren was taken off the investigation, and two years later rotated out of homicide himself, to sex crimes. Tuno continued to be run by Glen Browne and a senior constable named John Edwards.
Around 2004, Tuno’s analyst Camille Alavoine learned she had cancer, and transferred back to Campbelltown, near her home, to reduce the amount of time she spent commuting. She received treatment for her illness, which went into remission, and still spent some of her time doing analysis for Browne.
Jubelin would happily have stayed in homicide for his whole career, but when his time for rotation approached he decided he would prefer to jump than be pushed, and when an opportunity came up for him to apply for a promotion to inspector as crime manager at Chatswood, he took it and won the position.
The environment at Chatswood was very different to what he had been used to in homicide for the past decade. He found it a shock at first, and there were long days when he wondered what he was doing there. Until he got to Chatswood, human resource issues were something other people dealt with, but in his new job he found himself dealing with all sorts of matters that were important to the individuals concerned, such as details of rosters or of the tea room, but just about as far removed from the sort of work he’d previously done as could be imagined.
Jubelin was reluctant to wear a police uniform. It was not that he was ashamed of the uniform or felt he was too good to wear it, but he was proud to be a detective, and detectives wore suits. He felt that detectives had been shamed during the very public Royal Commission hearings, and some within the job had come to think all detectives were an embarrassment to the organisation. Jubelin wanted to make a stand against this attitude, and so he continued to wear a suit, even when asked to don a uniform by his commander. There were rumours he hid or gave away certain key parts of his uniform, but in the end there was a compromise and Jubelin was spotted on rare occasions wearing the blue.
Fortunately for his peace of mind, he soon found a murder with which to occupy himself. In March 2005, a woman came to the front desk at Chatswood to say her husband, Bob Ljubic, a luxury car dealer of Mosman, had disappeared. He’d received a phone call the night before asking him to go out to inspect a Ferrari 355 Spider that was for sale, and had not returned. The police database COPS showed his own car, a Porsche, had been found that morning at The Gap at Watson’s Bay. An officer told Jubelin about the notification and he was interested, because he knew who Ljubic was: he had been a suspect in an on-call murder Jubelin had dealt with at homicide the year before, of another car dealer named Franco Mayer.
Five days later, Ljubic’s body was found floating in the sea off Kurnell. The case was being treated as a possible suicide, even though police had established that the phone from which the call about the Ferrari had been made had been bought under a false name. Jubelin found this suspicious, and managed to take over the matter and turn it into a murder investigation. He ran it himself—while still performing his duties as crime manager—with staff including two very junior but capable officers at Chatswood, Andrew Brennan and Ben Walsh. It was an unusual thing to do, and one gets the impression Jubelin’s bosses let him do it simply because it was easier than arguing with him.
Almost all vehicles in Sydney use electronic tags to cross the Harbour Bridge, and records are kept whenever a tag is activated. The detectives established exactly when Ljubic’s car had crossed on the night he disappeared, and then looked at the owners of all the cars that had crossed around the same time. One belonged to a Jason McCall, who had a criminal background and had reported his car as having been broken into that evening.
Fortunately the Crime Commission had been conducting an investigation into Ljubic while he was alive, and was able to provide essential assistance to the police investigation. Starting with the phone numbers of Ljubic and McCall, it identified other people involved in the case, and police began surveillance. The targets didn’t all like each other—soon the $800,000 house of one of them in Goulburn was destroyed in an arson attack. Jubelin suspected another of the group had set the fire, and wondered how he could prove it. Figuring the arsonist might have stopped for petrol on the drive down from Sydney, one keen member of Jubelin’s team suggested he and a colleague visit every service station on the way to Goulburn and get the CCTV footage for the night in question. Jubelin didn’t like their chances but approved the show of keenness and told the young detectives to go ahead. They returned with a pile of tapes and Jubelin looked at it pessimistically, realising that watching them all would be like looking for a needle in a haystack—a needle that was probably not even there. But on the first tape they viewed, they found images of their suspected arsonist going into the service station and buying a box of matches.
Eventually they interviewed this man, who was shattered when he saw the photographs from the service station. He rolled and gave evidence that Jason McCall had thrown Bob Ljubic off The Gap. There was a trial and McCall was convicted of murder.
The man who rolled became a registered informant, and one day when they were talking, Jubelin asked him to name the biggest criminal he knew.
‘Anthony Perish,’ was the answer.
At this point it might be helpful to give an outline of the industry Anthony Perish was involved in, as it affects and helps explain a lot of the behaviour to be revealed in the pages to come. The first point to be noted is that amphetamines (including more potent variations such as methamphetamine) and ecstasy are the only major illegal drugs, apart from marijuana, that can be produced in Australia. The other two most common types, heroin and cocaine, must be imported. This has helped create a vibrant local industry for the production of amphetamines.
From about 1990 to 2009, Anthony Perish was a manufacturer of various forms of amphetamine and ecstasy, which involved five main types of activity: obtaining the ingredients, combining them using chemical processes, selling the resulting products, protecting himself from police and also criminals wanting to rip him off, and spending or investing his profits.
The market for these drugs is enormous, with surveys suggesting that over the past decade about ten per cent of people aged twenty to twenty-nine used them, with lower but still significant rates for the age groups either side of that. In recent years ecstasy has become less popular, amphetamines more. In 2009–10 the retail price for a gram of amphetamine or methamphetamine varied from $50 to $1,000, depending on a number of factors including the type. Many people with no other criminal behaviour and who consider their use purely recreational spend several hundred dollars a week on the drug. It is this participation in the market by hundreds of thousands of otherwise law-abiding Australians that supports a major underground industry that employs thousands of people and turns over hundreds of millions of dollars a year, all of it untaxed.
Obtaining large quantities of so-called p
recursor chemicals is one of the keys to success as a drug manufacturer, and is very difficult as the law carefully restricts their import and sale. Some manufacturers have used crude means, such as paying young people to visit pharmacies to buy products like Sudafed from which they extract pseudoephedrine, a key precursor chemical. But these so-called pseudo runs have become less useful since pharmacists, urged on by police, have introduced restrictions on purchases. The ideal way to obtain precursors is to import them illegally from places such as Russia—often using someone who specialises in this—or by stealing them from chemical companies here.
The television series Breaking Bad gives a good portrayal of the life of an amphetamine manufacturer, although it downplays the difficulties of obtaining precursors. As viewers of the program would know, the manufacture requires knowledge and premises. Knowledge can be obtained from experience aided by chemistry books and intelligence, and, although Anthony Perish did not do well at school, he was a natural ‘cook’ from an early age. Just as significantly, he proved to be very inventive when it came to setting up premises—known as labs—for large-scale manufacturing.
Some of the problems with making amphetamines are that the process produces liquid waste and also a distinctive smell, resembling cat urine. These are some of the main reasons so many clandestine labs are discovered by police each year. In 2009–10, a record 694 labs were found around Australia, most of them in houses. It therefore makes sense to establish labs at remote rural locations, which is what Anthony Perish (and Terry Falconer) did. A large farm shed is big enough to house a lab produing hundreds of kilograms of drugs each year. Apart from the ingredients, some elaborate laboratory equipment is requried—a big lab will have up to $100,000 of glassware—and, if ecstasy is being produced, an expensive, and now illegal, tablet press.
Perish sold most of his product to bikie gangs, who for a long time have controlled the distribution of amphetamines around Australia. One reason for this is they like using them themselves: heroin and marijuana have at different times had reputations as ‘hippie’ drugs, whereas amphetamines are hard-edged, and also enable users to drink more alcohol than usual and stay awake for longer, which is of benefit to hard-riding and hard-partying bikies with an affection for beer and Jim Beam.
Outlaw motorcycle gangs are the closest Australia has to a mafia, even when not involved in the drug trade. They are closed and secretive hierarchies with codes of loyalty and silence and a propensity for violence. It is understandable that they have attracted criminals as members, and have entered into criminal activities. In 2010 there were 1,630 bikies in New South Wales, including nominees or ‘noms’ (apprentices) but not the numerous hangers-on who cluster around each club and do a lot of the retail drug-dealing for members. At that time there were around twenty gangs throughout the state, some with many chapters, each of which had its own clubhouse. Most bikies, however, were in a few main gangs, most importantly the Rebels (600 members), the Bandidos (235), and the Nomads and the Comanchero (200 each). The Hells Angels, with only 60, were important beyond their numbers, because of their reputation and international connections.
Some people claim the clubs are just social groups, but their criminality is beyond doubt. In the decade to the end of 2008, 8,118 charges had been laid against gang members for offences ranging from murder down. Allowing for members who’d died or left the gangs, this represented 4.1 charges per member. This, of course, would have been only a fraction of the offences actually committed. Police say members of most chapters of most gangs are involved in drug dealing. The gangs deny this when asked.
An important part of gang activity is to maintain a monopoly of drug sales within the gang’s own area. Often this, or disputes when members switch clubs, leads to armed conflict between gangs, such as the Rebels–Bandidos clash at the end of 2008, and the Comanchero–Hells Angels dispute that culminated in the affray and killing at Sydney Airport in March 2009. In the first part of 2012, Sydney suffered a spate of drive-by shootings on account of an argument between the Hells Angels and the Nomads.
An insight into the involvement of bikies in the drug trade was provided by Strike Force Sibret, which in 2001 rolled up a major operation in which the Newcastle Nomads had been buying amphetamines for years from an illiterate cook named Tod Little, president of their Gold Coast chapter. Richard Walsh, the sergeant-at-arms of the Newcastle chapter, received a sentence of thirty-two years after pleading guilty to supplying four hundred kilograms of amphetamine, although he’d been charged with supplying a tonne. This was the longest sentence ever given for a non-importation drug offence in Australia. Tod Little received twenty-four years. Forty-two others were charged, including fourteen other Nomads.
The amounts of money involved were considerable—on his last pick-up, Walsh had paid Little $65,000 for half a kilogram. (He would have intended to dilute this before he sold it in smaller quantities to members and other drug dealers.) The Nomads reacted violently to the arrests, at one point arriving in force at a Newcastle pub where police from Strike Force Sibret were known to drink and blocking off each end of the street before searching the premises. Fortunately the police were not there. Detectives learned the bikies had employed a private eye to locate their residences.
Anthony Perish flourished for years because of his close relationship with the Rebels. In this he was helped by the close connections he forged when he was a young man, and by the fact that his brother Andrew was for a while a senior member of the club. The Rebels gave Anthony both a market and, importantly, security.
Protection is an essential part of a drug manufacturer’s professional life. In many ways that life resembles a legitimate businessman’s, but of course Anthony Perish could not depend on the police when he was threatened. And he would be threatened, because he was a wealthy man in a world of violent criminals. What Perish did was cultivate a reputation for extreme violence, an important part of a drug manufacturer’s ‘brand’, and, as the Tuno detectives discovered when they started to look at him, he did this very successfully. That reputation was based on acts of violence that will be described later in this story, at the time police became aware of them. The important point for now is that Perish was a man accustomed to using violence to solve problems, which is one of the reasons he chose to deal with Terry Falconer the way he did.
The final part of a drug manufacturer’s business is the way he disposes of his considerable income. The smart ones employ lawyers and accountants who help them launder the proceeds of their crimes. They invest their money in legitimate businesses, and often the owners of those businesses are aware of the murky origins of the funds. As we shall see, enough is known about Anthony Perish to be able to say he dealt intelligently with his profits: but thanks to that, much of what he did with them remains unknown.
•
In 2005 the Crime Commission was given a reference to a matter that would eventually be closely connected to Tuno. It involved a DNA link between two shootings, one in Sydney and the other on the Gold Coast. The Sydney incident was an attempted murder at JB’s Bar and Grill in Haymarket, where a New Zealander named Raniera Puketapu had been shot but not killed on 8 October 2002. He’d been sitting with his back to the big window in the bar when an unknown man stopped outside on Little Hay Street and fired eight shots at him at close range through the glass, hitting him three times. Puketapu was seriously wounded, but did not die.
The shooter had gone around the corner into Harbour Street and run towards Goulburn Street, showing a badge and yelling out, ‘Get down, police!’ Soon after, real police were alerted to a burning van about four hundred metres from JB’s Bar and Grill, in the direction in which the shooter had run, and recovered two 9 mm Norinco pistols from it, one of which matched cartridges found at the scene of the shooting.
Detectives who interviewed Puketapu in hospital a week later pursued various possibilities, including that the shooting might have been done by his girlfriend’s former lover, a member of an Auckland-based Islan
der gang named Black Power. The gang had no chapters in Australia, which Puketapu said was just as well because it was ‘way more intimidating than the gangs are here in this country, you know. So, I figure if they came over here they would just push all the other gangs out for sure.’ But there was no evidence of a revenge shooting, or indeed of any other motive.
Puketapu’s parents and aunt and uncle had been visiting Sydney to attend the rugby league grand final, the parents staying at the Holiday Inn, and in the evening he, his dad and his uncle had gone down to the bar for a beer. It had been a spontaneous decision, which made it even less likely the shooting had been planned. He’d been hoping to meet up with a former workmate, a Columbian woman named Martha, but she hadn’t turned up. The police looked at the possibility he’d been shot by Martha’s boyfriend, but found no evidence for that.
Meanwhile police scientists and analysts went to work on the items recovered from the burning van. A fire-damaged mobile phone proved to be one of two phones purchased for cash a week earlier in Darlinghurst, using false buyer details. Police obtained call records and found the phones had been used exclusively to contact each other. The second phone—the one the police did not have—had been used mainly in the vicinity of JB’s Bar and Grill. The last calls came from that vicinity just before the shooting, suggesting the person using the second phone might have been a spotter.
There was one tenuous lead on the shooter. As soon as news of the shooting had gone out on the police radio, security staff monitoring the City of Sydney Streetsafe CCTV cameras had begun looking for the shooter. The camera at the corner of Liverpool and George streets showed him running east on Liverpool Street not far from where the van was burning. Once all other leads had dried up, police released indistinct footage of the shooter, which was published on the front page of the Daily Telegraph on 27 May 2003, under the headline ‘PERFECT CRIME’. It was the police’s last hope, and when they got no response from the public the investigation fizzled out. It was hard to think of a motive, once the jealous lover angle was exhausted. Puketapu was, in his own words, ‘a good person, you know, and I don’t do anything irrational to anyone. And pose any irrationalities to anyone really.’
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