Tuno 2 set up its incident room on level fourteen of the State Crime Command offices, which had now moved to gleaming new premises in Charles Street, Parramatta. Black and white portraits on whiteboards around the room showed all the targets. Three teams were established. Glen Browne had the Falconer murder, the disappearance of Ian Draper, and the shooting of Gary Mack. Team two, led by Joe Doueihi, was looking at the shooting of Puketapu at JB’s Bar and Grill, and the Queensland murders. And Morfoot, with the ‘proactive’ third team, had the job of keeping the targets—most importantly the elusive Anthony Perish and Brad Curtis—under surveillance. In order not to alert the targets to the level of police interest, a blackout was placed on all dealings with the media. This is one reason why the biggest murder investigation in Australia’s history stayed a secret for so long.
On Browne’s team, Kaan McGregor was given the job of reinvestigating the 2001 disappearance of Ian Draper. He soon discovered that in 2007 police had been told Draper had been killed by a man who was not Andrew Perish. McGregor and others spent the next eighteen months learning more about the allegation and then investigating the alleged killer. This involved speaking with some forty people and conducting various forms of surveillance. In the end it was established the person had no link to Draper’s disappearance, or to Andrew Perish, back in 2001. In one sense this was a disappointment, but in another it was positive: building a circumstantial case involves excluding all reasonable alternative hypotheses.
The detectives also spoke with some of the other witnesses from Andrew Perish’s 1998 murder trial, where Draper had given evidence, and confirmed that more than one had been threatened, not only before the trial but after it. One witness had been followed and talked to in 2003, five years after the trial.
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In early 2008 Tuno had completed the brief of evidence for Anthony Perish and Andrew Perish, and sent it to the DPP for a so-called sufficiency advising. The initial response from the DPP was promising, but the detectives still faced the problem of persuading Tony Martin to sign a statement and agree to give evidence in court. Until this was done, they could not arrest Anthony Perish or Brad Curtis for the murder of Terry Falconer. Martin was clearly terrified. Tuno and the Crime Commission continued their surveillance of Perish and Curtis, hoping to catch them in some criminal activity for which they could be arrested. Once they were in custody (Andrew Perish was already locked up for his drug conviction) Martin would feel safer, as would other witnesses and potential witnesses.
On 17 September 2008, surveillance showed that Brad Curtis was heading to a meeting. Jubelin had established four levels of alert to apply to targets. Level One was when they were going about their ordinary business in their normal locations. Curtis was now raised to Level Two, which meant preparations were made to interfere immediately if it looked like he was about to engage in criminal activity.
Tuno had one unmarked car on him in Newcastle, and arranged for more to be ready to shadow him in Sydney, assuming that was where he was headed. But when he reached the freeway outside Newcastle, to their surprise he turned right and went up the coast. Jubelin and Browne, down at Parramatta, jumped in a car and headed north through the heavy Friday afternoon traffic. As they drove up the expressway, the surveillance car announced Curtis had stopped at a McDonald’s and met someone.
They observed the two men go around to the boot of the unknown man’s black car, and Curtis took something out and shoved it down the front of his pants. Almost certainly it was a pistol, suggesting the other man was a criminal too. This pushed the alert status to Level Three.
Jubelin had to decide whether to wheel Curtis over (meaning stop and arrest him). Because of the strong suspicion he was carrying a gun, it would have to be a ‘tactical stop’, with heavily armed police forcing him off the road. Obviously this would soon alert all Tuno’s targets to the possibility they’d been under surveillance. Heading up the F3 in the rush hour traffic, Jubelin had to make a quick decision; he called the head of homicide and was told it was up to him.
He chose to let the crooks keep going, and they all continued driving up the Pacific Highway, the two targets together in the second man’s car. It grew late and the traffic thinned out, but Curtis and the other man kept going north; it looked like they might be heading for Queensland. Sometimes they would stop at a McDonald’s, and the cops figured they must like hamburgers; later they discovered Curtis had been taking advantage of the burger chain’s WiFi facilities to use his laptop.
Jubelin decided he needed to find out who was in the car with Curtis, and this might be achieved through a random breath test. He rang the police station at Coffs Harbour, the next big town north, hoping he’d get someone who would grasp the situation quickly. He was put onto the sergeant in charge of Highway Patrol and said, ‘Mate, this is the situation, we’re running out of time. We’ve got a contract killer half an hour away, we think he’s armed and on his way to kill someone. We want to find out who’s in the car without them knowing we’re onto them.’
‘That’s a difficult one,’ said the sergeant.
‘I’ve told you everything we’ve got. If you don’t want to do it, I’d fully understand it because there’s a great deal of risk associated with this.’
‘Mate, I get what you’re saying. I’ll do it.’ Thank Christ, Jubelin thought. ‘We’ll stop them as they come into Coffs. I’ll do it myself.’
They went through the details and Jubelin said, ‘Mate, if you’ve got a vest, could you put it on for me? It’d just make me feel better.’
The sergeant agreed.
Jubelin and Browne kept going, still half an hour behind the other car. Jubelin was on tenterhooks, expecting to get a call that a police officer had been shot, but the stop went like clockwork: Curtis’ companion was driving, and produced his licence when pulled over. As soon as the Coffs Harbour police did the breath test and let him go, they passed on his name to the detectives, who checked on the radio and found he was connected to the Russian mafia. This was interesting: the Russians were not big in Australia and hadn’t come up in the investigation before.
It was almost midnight, and the car kept travelling north. As it approached the state border, Jubelin was faced with another problem—he would lose jurisdiction the moment they crossed into Queensland. He made a call to police headquarters in Brisbane and explained they had a situation: he needed to speak urgently to their on-call person for major crime.
Through a stroke of luck, the on-call officer that night was Darren Edwards, a detective who’d worked on the Michael Davies murder on the Gold Coast. Edwards arranged for full surveillance from the moment Curtis and his companion crossed the border. He also resisted the pressure from his bosses that began as soon as they heard about the New South Wales visitors. They wanted Curtis and his companion wheeled because there was a chance he’d come to Queensland to do a hit. Fortunately Edwards, who knew all about Curtis and Tuno’s pursuit of the Perishes, was able to explain to them the importance in the bigger scheme of gathering intelligence and not moving on Curtis—and alerting him and the Perishes to the surveillance—unless absolutely necessary.
Brad Curtis did not shoot anyone on that trip. As police followed his every move, he went to the Gold Coast and visited a few nightclubs, being admitted at once and not staying long at any of them. It was as though he was expected. At 5 am he and his companion stopped at the hotel attached to Jupiter’s Casino and took a room, but left a few hours later. Police searched the room and found the packaging for a mobile phone: the identifying number had been cut out of the cardboard box and taken.
By this point Jubelin and Browne had been up for twenty-four hours and were tired and dirty. They booked into a cheap motel and got an hour’s sleep before sitting around while the local police kept them informed as Curtis and his companion visited some pubs outside of Brisbane, again not staying anywhere long. This went on until Sunday morning, when the two criminals met up with a man in Brisbane. It was Anthony Perish.
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Despite their electronic surveillance of Perish, the police had had no idea he had left Sydney. They later learned he was staying at the upmarket Marriott Hotel, down by the Brisbane River. It was a quick meeting: Curtis handed Perish a package, and then he and the Russian headed off back south. The police followed Curtis all the way home, via the McDonald’s car park north of Newcastle where he picked up his car. Later investigations suggested the purpose of the trip had been to deliver drugs and pick up money owing to Anthony Perish by the managers of various businesses he owned. The Russian was along as Curtis’ bodyguard.
It was established that Anthony co-owned three pubs in Queensland. After he sold one, his share in the others would eventually end up with the New South Wales Crime Commission, which is responsible for seizing property purchased with the proceeds of crime.
7
THE MAN FROM MELBOURNE
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die.
It was an unusual aspect of Tuno as a murder investigation that as it progressed, its subject matter expanded. The detectives now had three important informants, the Mudgee shed, various shootings and murders, the meeting on the F3, and Brad Curtis’ business trip to Queensland. They knew Anthony Perish, Brad Curtis and a number of associates were connected in some sort of criminal network, with links to the Rebels outlaw motorcycle gang and possibly the Russian mafia. Clearly they were major criminals involved in manufacturing and distributing methamphetamine, money laundering, and acts of extreme violence. And yet, with the exception of Andrew Perish (who seemed to have operated independently of his brother most of the time), they’d managed to avoid almost all police scrutiny over many years: law enforcement intelligence groups around the country, and specialist units such as the Drug Squad, knew almost nothing about them. The reason for this seemed to be that, like most really effective organised criminals, they terrified people so much that few were prepared to talk to the police.
After the meeting on the F3, Tuno started to watch Michael Christiansen, the big man they’d seen there, following him to a Kennards self-storage unit at Camperdown, an inner city suburb near his home in Annandale. Checks with Kennards showed it was leased under the name Michael Euros. On 26 November 2008 police began surveillance on the shed. In December they saw Christiansen place what looked like a bag of powder inside.
Jubelin still didn’t want to reveal his hand, so he asked the Drug Squad to tip the place over the next time the camera showed Christiansen at the lock-up. Mick Vaneyk from the Drug Squad, and Peter Robinson, another Drug Squad detective seconded to Tuno, led the team that arrested Christiansen on 16 December. He was leaving with a backpack containing almost three kilos of methamphetamine, with a street value of over $700,000. So far as he was concerned, it was a simple drug bust and had nothing to do with Brad Curtis or the Perishes.
Once Christiansen was gone, the officers of Tuno moved in and searched the lock-up. While they were doing this, a friend of Christiansen’s named Marcelo Urriola arrived in his black SS Commodore ute, and he was arrested too and charged with a drug possession offence.
In the lock-up the detectives found anabolic steroids, forty-nine small bags of cocaine, $24,900 in cash, and firearms including a sawn-off shotgun. They also found a black Hedgren Urban bag containing a wallet that appeared to belong to someone named Paul Elliott of Melbourne. It contained a driver’s licence and various cards. Paul Elliott was not a name that meant anything at first, but when his name was run through COPS, Tuno saw a car he’d hired had been found burned out in Alexandria on 7 December. A detective called the Victorian police, who said Elliott, who was forty-one, was known to them—in fact, he was a serious criminal. They contacted his girlfriend, Lisa Gibson, and learned he’d gone missing during a visit to Sydney on 6 December.
It was likely Elliott had been murdered, and Tuno was given the job of solving this case too. It received no extra staff, so the brief period when it had a reasonable number of officers was now over, and once again everyone was working crazy hours. The pressure this placed on individuals and their families would continue to mount over the coming year.
Team two, under Joe Doueihi, was given the task of finding out what had happened to Paul Elliott. Doueihi and Matt Fitzgerald flew to Melbourne and talked to Victorian police to learn about Elliott’s background and his movements in the weeks before his disappearance. They were told he had been a childhood friend of David Moran, the Melbourne underworld boss, and was the nephew of drug dealer Dennis ‘Fatty’ Smith. His father was also a serious crook, although Paul had seen little of him while growing up. After a failed attempt at reconciliation when he became an adult, he had changed his surname to his mother’s maiden name.
Although a bit of a loner, he’d been one of the leaders in the attempted robbery of Sigma’s Croydon plant in Melbourne’s south-east in 1996. The target had been precursor chemicals that would have enabled the manufacture of drugs worth more than $166 million on the street. The planning had been meticulous: the gang had studied the heist film Heat for ideas, and over a period of nine months had broken into the factory more than twenty times to find out where everything was and learn how to bypass the security systems, so things would run smoothly on the night of the robbery. Thirty thousand dollars had been spent on equipment.
On the big night, they wore Telstra uniforms and used a truck with Telstra logos on the outside. When they arrived, they cut the chain at the gate and replaced it with one of their own after they drove in, so as not to arouse suspicion. Elliott was armed, and everyone had a two-way radio. Their only problem was that the chemicals were in a big safe, and none of them had experience opening safes. So a few months earlier, they’d approached an outsider who had the necessary expertise, and he’d kindly offered to help—after he’d told the police everything that was happening. He was there on the night, along with an undercover cop posing as a backup safe man. It ended badly, and Elliott was sentenced to five years.
The Tuno detectives spoke with Elliott’s girlfriend, Lisa Gibson, who was thirty-three. The Crime Commission became involved and there were many hearings involving her and others who had known Elliott. Gibson said she’d met Paul after he got out of jail, and they’d begun a relationship that had seen them move to Queensland for a few years. Elliott worked as a stonemason when not dealing in drugs, and on their return to Melbourne had lived with her and her children in Oak Park. She described him as a fitness enthusiast who didn’t take drugs and drank very little. He was fanatical, she thought: ‘Paul would cut up SIM cards, I’ve seen him do this quite a few times. He was very meticulous and would burn documents that had his name on them. I’m not sure why he would cut up the SIM cards or burn the documents.’ He sometimes carried a pistol in his ute, and told her it was to protect himself. He was always busy and stressed.
In 2008 he visited Sydney a few times each month but didn’t seem to like the place and often came home in a black mood. ‘There’s trouble with the Lebanese,’ he once told her, ‘they’re taking over Sydney. They’re the ones with all the guns.’ Before one of his trips he said, ‘There’s trouble with them, but I’m going to sort the problem out.’ She assumed a person of foreign background had done something to him.
On 5 December 2008 he’d rung and asked her to meet him outside his grandmother’s place. As she was approaching she saw Paul coming away from the house in his black ute. She turned and followed, and found him parked in the street out back of the house, talking with an Asian man who had short dark hair and was about thirty years old. Lisa was curious about the man, as Paul had complained about meeting Asians up in Sydney who did not speak English and laughed at him. When Paul spotted her, he told her to go back to the house.
Later he joined her there, and said he had to take the Asian man back to the airport. Paul needed go to Sydney the next day, and asked Lisa to come with him. She knew he’d been chasing up a big debt, which she thought might be worth about
half a million dollars. He’d said, ‘It’s taken a while, but it’s coming back to me.’ But he was agitated, and added, ‘If this doesn’t go right, you might not see me again.’ She agreed to go on the trip with him.
At 9.30 pm Elliott hired a black Holden Statesman from Budget Rent a Car so they could get an early start the next day. On Saturday morning, he drove his ute to a factory unit he used and she followed in the hire car. At the lock-up he took something about the size of a gun, wrapped in an old towel, out of the tray of the ute and put it in the Statesman.
They made good time up the Hume Highway and by mid-afternoon had reached Sydney, where they checked into the Mercure Hotel at Wolli Creek, near the airport. Elliott had stayed there before and always liked to have the same room, 804. Fortunately it was free this time. He had been in a good mood during the long drive, but once they were in the room he became preoccupied. After half an hour, he went out. He was wearing a grey Armani T-shirt, dark grey Nike running shorts and thongs, and carrying a black shoulder bag. As he left he said to Lisa, ‘I’ll be back in an hour.’
He wasn’t, and with increasing desperation she tried to call him over the next twenty-four hours. Relatives she contacted back in Melbourne hadn’t heard from him either. She considered calling the police, but ‘I thought that if Paul came back and I had called the police he would go off, as Paul doesn’t like the police.’ So she stayed at the hotel until Monday morning and then, not knowing what else to do, bought a ticket and flew back to Melbourne.
The Tuno detectives also spoke with Elliott’s mother, Sue, who confirmed he was a loner. ‘Paul and I don’t actually talk,’ she said. ‘Paul and I have a troubled relationship . . . Paul seems to have a chip on his shoulder and holds some resentment towards me.’ He suffered from depression: ‘Paul is a big guy and can be very intimidating, there have been times I have been quite scared of him.’ She said it wasn’t unusual for him to go off on his own, but the fact he’d left Lisa at a hotel in another city was out of character. She’d spoken to Lisa and, ‘I was trying to push up on having the matter reported to police but was also reluctant as was Lisa because Paul might have been up to something.’
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