No one else who was at Girvan that day said a word. The Perish brothers said nothing. On 27 January, Matthew Lawton was arrested at the Speedway Service Station at Austral and taken to Green Valley Police Station and charged. Lawton was an old school friend of Anthony’s; when Perish had gone on the run back in 1992, Lawton had left his wife and children to accompany him, and stayed by his side for the next fourteen years. It was another example of Anthony’s capacity to get his hooks into people.
Lawton did not roll. Jubelin talked to his solicitor when they first charged him, suggesting he might be interested in some sort of deal. Later he visited him in jail, still hoping he could be a potential witness. Jubelin laid it on pretty thick, but in the end nothing happened. Lawton was just too scared, or too loyal, to roll on the brothers.
Anthony Perish remained an enigma. Normally when you arrest someone, you find their base. They never found Perish’s home, or located any of his money. His solicitors were very keen to recover a set of keys found on him at the time of his arrest; with the exception of the Girvan property, police have never been able to identify the locks they fitted.
10
ROBBERIES, SHOOTINGS ETC.
Behold, the half was not told me.
On 25 January 2009, on the Australia Day weekend, there was another press conference at which the police minister announced rewards totalling $850,000 for information leading to the conviction of the killers being chased by Tuno. This was the largest reward total ever offered in New South Wales.
Brad Curtis continued to make statements to the police about other crimes. After the kidnapping, he had told Bennie and Bottin how well they all worked together as a team. He also told them what could happen to people who ratted on them, which Bennie took as a veiled threat. Despite Curtis’ past promises of more serious work, he had nothing else for his crew for the moment, and Bottin approached Bennie with the suggestion they do some robberies together. Bennie refused because he thought Bottin was unprofessional and, before long, Bottin struck out on his own.
At 8.50 am on 17 December 2001 he was found in a security block of units in Pyrmont by the building manager, who thought he looked suspicious and asked who he was. Bottin said he was the building’s security guard, and the manager demanded to see some identification. Bottin left the building pursued by the manager, who yelled out to some construction workers across the road that he needed help. He tried to grab Bottin and they fell to the ground and started to wrestle. Despite Bottin reaching inside his trousers and pulling out a loaded .44 magnum revolver, the manager and some of the workers subdued him and called the police.
Bottin was found in possession of a key to the building, fake identification, cable ties and papers indicating the name of an occupant of the building who owed someone $129,500. The occupant was involved in an internet gambling syndicate operating out of Nauru that had been placed in liquidation, with a dispute with investors over monies owed. Bottin also had a Toyota key, which police traced to a white van parked near the building. Inside was a flare—Curtis used flares whenever he wanted to burn a vehicle after a job. The van, police discovered, had been stolen three months earlier when Bottin had robbed Delta European Rentals at gunpoint.
They tested the magnum and found it was the same weapon that had been used by Brad Curtis to shoot at Shane Oien in Darlinghurst in June (although at that stage police did not know the shooter’s identity). With this information they approached Oien and asked him to talk to them about the shooting. ‘I don’t give statements,’ the Bandido replied. ‘That is not what I do. I won’t get in the witness box for anyone.’ In 2003 Bottin was convicted of the armed robbery of Delta European and other offences.
When Curtis and Bennie heard of Bottin’s arrest, they visited his apartment to talk with his girlfriend, who worked in the Xanadu massage parlour in the city. In the flat they found a scrapbook in which Bottin had proudly pasted newspaper items about jobs he’d done, such as the Falconer abduction. Curtis was appalled. Nevertheless, he and Bennie contributed to Bottin’s legal costs, although they used a woman they knew to go see him in jail: they had no desire to appear in the visitors’ book. They needed to keep Bottin onside so he wouldn’t roll on them over the Falconer abduction.
The Falconer killing had been preying on Bennie’s mind, and one day he met Curtis at Giotto’s Café in East Sydney and told him he didn’t want to do any more jobs involving serious violence. He did this with a certain nervousness—he didn’t want to break the friendship in case Curtis had him knocked because of what he knew. But it seemed to go all right, and they agreed that from now on, Bennie would only work on low-level stuff.
To replace Bottin, Curtis’ crew gained another member, Michael Christiansen, aka Mick, Trigger or the Big Feller. Curtis had first met him through Tony Martin, when the two were working on security at Fox Studios in 2001. Born in 1969, Christiansen grew up in Sutherland in Sydney’s south. He left home at the age of fifteen after his mother died and he became estranged from his father. Two years later he worked as a male model for a while, and then in the security industry and as a personal trainer. He was devoted to bodybuilding and began to take steroids while training for world titles. He also became a drug dealer, partly to finance his cocaine and marijuana habits. Unlike Jake Bennie, Christiansen had no problem with committing acts of extreme violence.
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When Perish had a job for Curtis, he would call him from one phone and say something in code, and Curtis would go to a public phone and call back—but to another of Perish’s phones. This was done simply to arrange a meeting—the actual job was never discussed over the phone. This was the procedure used in the planning for the robbery of a gas distribution centre, which occurred on 14 July 2002. Perish’s supply of one of the precursor drugs needed to make ecstasy had dried up, and he needed some monomethylamine. Perish called Curtis, who came to the house in Turramurra. Then the two went for a walk around the streets, to avoid the chance of being recorded, and Perish explained the details.
There were two possible targets, BOC Gases at Wetherill Park and another company at Smithfield. Perish didn’t mind which place Curtis robbed—it was a bit like sending someone to the shops and not caring if they went to Woolworths or Coles. Perish said he’d pay $25,000 for the robbery, and the same again if they got the gas he needed. In terms of the value of the drugs he would be able to produce, $50,000 for one of the most important ingredients was not much at all.
Curtis, who was given $10,000 in advance, then carried out some reconnaissance and decided BOC Gases provided the best opportunity. He set about hiring four people to help with the job: Jake Bennie, Michael Christiansen, and two new men, Jay Sauer and Jeremy Postlewaight, aka Jez, Blowie or Five. Sauer ran a Harley Davidson outlet in Newcastle called Rolling Thunder, and dressed like the bikies who constituted a large proportion of his clients. As for Postlewaight, he’d been born in New Zealand in 1977, and his family moved to Australia when he was still a child. His parents separated when he was eight and his mother suffered from depression. Postlewaight attended Waverley College near Bondi and went on to work as a builder’s labourer, car wholesaler and security worker. He met Christiansen and fell under his influence, with Christiansen supplying him with cocaine and emotional support.
Curtis allocated jobs that needed to be done beforehand. Bennie was given the task of sourcing a van, while Sauer had to obtain balaclavas and paint them pink, so they would look like faces on CCTV footage. Curtis conducted another recon of BOC Gases with Sauer, to check out the positions of security guards and cameras and hence the best way to break in.
They located some empty industrial units not far from the factory and decided these would be a ‘transitional storage location’, in case the gang was pursued following the robbery and needed to hide the goods somewhere. In the next week Curtis organised the gear they’d need for the job: two-way radios, guns, overalls, gloves, wire-cutters and bolt-cutters. He held planning meetings with the team at his rented apar
tment in the Saville Park Suites in Darlinghurst, explaining the job to them with the help of a whiteboard. On one occasion the gang visited some vacant land in Artarmon, where Curtis made them practise climbing over a barbed wire fence.
Late on the night of 13 July, using the van and two cars, the team drove out to a prearranged ‘form-up place’ near the complex. One of the cars was left there, and the crew travelled to BOC Gases, where Curtis and Christiansen, who were armed, gained access by cutting through a wire fence from the vacant lot next door. It was now after midnight. The others waited in the vehicles around the corner.
Curtis told Christiansen the name of what they needed and they began to search for it but there was no monomethylamine there. They found the manifest listing all the gases in the store room and confirmed the absence of what they needed. Curtis decided to take the list when they left, so Perish could see what had happened. But he didn’t want to leave empty-handed, so he looked for some carbon-hydrogen bonded chemicals he hoped might be similar to what Perish wanted. Some cylinders were found and taken over to ‘the exfiltration point’, and loaded into the van.
The following day, Curtis drove up to the Turramurra home of Anthony Perish, who later paid him $15,000, making only $25,000 in total. Maybe the cylinders Curtis had got weren’t much use after all.
The next major crime police learned about from Curtis was the October 2002 shooting of Raniera Puketapu at JB’s Bar and Grill in Haymarket. But it turned out there had been a prologue to this, committed at the same place by some of the same people.
At that time Michael Christiansen worked on security at the Holiday Inn, where the bar is situated. A month earlier he asked Brad Curtis to rob the place with the help of Jeremy Postlewaight, who’d done the BOC Gases job with them. It might seem ironic that a security guard would rob a business he was paid to protect, but this is not uncommon. Security often attracts people with criminal connections—many guards, for example, use illegal steroids as part of their training regimens—and the work is not well paid. As we’ve already seen, Curtis too robbed places where he’d worked as a security guard.
There was a fire exit leading from the hotel to Kimber Lane out back, and the plan was that Christiansen would leave the door propped open at 12.30 am one Sunday. The others would come in and make their way through the hotel’s lift lobby to an office where the manager would be counting the night’s takings. Christiansen provided Curtis with an electronic swipe card for access to the offices.
The job, which occurred on 22 September 2002, went off without a hitch—except for the victims, who after crimes like this are often traumatised for years. Curtis and Postlewaight found the door in the back lane and sure enough it opened. Curtis removed the wedge in the latch, and the men went into the hotel and past a few guests in the lobby. The swipe card opened the office door without trouble and the men went in, closed the door behind them, and produced their guns.
‘This is a stick-up,’ Curtis said to the three staff members inside.
The takings were $12,746.15, which was divided up three ways.
The shooting that occurred at JB’s the following month was a very different affair. As we’ve seen, Tuno had already linked DNA found in burning vehicles near that scene and the scene of the murder of Michael Davies on the Gold Coast with Brad Curtis. They also suspected the intended victim of the JB’s shooting was criminal Dallas Fitzgerald, who was in the bar at the time. Now, thanks to the rollover confessions, they were able to understand some of the background to what had happened at JB’s. Unfortunately, though, the picture remains confused, as there were essentially two different versions.
There is no disagreement that Brad Curtis had briefly managed a nightclub in Kings Cross around 2000, and a relative of a major underworld figure had been badly injured in a fight with one of the bouncers. Curtis had been held responsible and the dispute had festered over the next year or two, with various meetings and the drawing in of other criminals, including some bikies. What is in dispute is what happened next.
According to the judge’s comments at his sentencing, Curtis claimed to have been told by police that the Bandidos had been contracted to kill him. The bikies were seen in the vicinity of Anthony Perish’s house in Turramurra, and ‘Perish told him that because he had created the mess and caused the safe house to be compromised, he had to kill Felix Lyle and Dallas Fitzgerald of the Bandidos’. The other motive given at the sentencing, proposed by the Director of Public Prosecutions but not agreed to by Curtis, was that Anthony Perish paid him to kill the Bandidos in order to help the Rebels in some inter-gang dispute. Whatever the motive, Curtis admitted he had tried to shoot Dallas Fitzgerald that evening, the plan being that Michael Christiansen, who was working security at the Holiday Inn at the time, would indicate to him where Fitzgerald was sitting.
Unfortunately for Raniera Puketapu, Christiansen identified the wrong man. It was an odd mistake: both men were tall and lanky, with long hair tied back in a ponytail, but Puketapu is Maori and Fitzgerald is very plainly not. In any case, Brad Curtis almost killed an innocent man. Puketapu had gunshot wounds to the front and back of his chest, his lower right back, his right side and his right wrist. A portion of his lung had to be removed, resulting in permanent incapacity.
After this, Curtis stayed out of Sydney for a long time. He spent most of 2003 at the property at Girvan, providing security for Perish’s big drug manufacturing operation. The place was well equipped, with machines such as a gas chromotograph mass spectrometer for analysing chemicals, and an enormous pill press. The property, purchased using a false name, was 250 acres in size, mainly bush with the house and shed in a clearing in the middle. It was a remote area but there were other houses scattered along the road. It was part of Curtis’ job to visit the neighbours from time to time, posing as the caretaker, to create an impression of normality. Despite the growing list of crimes he’d committed, Curtis still had the ability to charm people.
Curtis later said Perish produced about two hundred kilos of ecstasy while he was there in 2003. He said Perish wouldn’t let him leave the property, and he escaped at the end of December. The idea that Curtis the hitman was in effect Perish’s slave for this period seems unlikely. Possibly what happened was that the threat of payback from the Bandidos abated, for some reason, or maybe Curtis just got tired of hiding and decided to resume life with his family back in Newcastle.
What the criminals got up to over the next five years is largely unknown. In his statements Brad Curtis only told police about matters they already had some inkling of, and they knew very little about the period from 2003 to 2008. The fact Curtis still had a relationship with Anthony Perish in 2008 suggests badness had been committed during those five years, but just what it was we may never know. The only exception—albeit a significant one—was that Curtis later pleaded guilty to distributing drugs for Anthony Perish on at least ten occasions between 2006 and 2008.
In 2009 Tuno continued to struggle to connect Anthony Perish and his associates with several deaths in Queensland. As we’ve seen, in 2008 the strike force had been given responsibility for the New South Wales end of the investigation into the deaths of Benita Forster and her young son, Tana Taui. On 29 June 2002 they had been found at the foot of the Twin Falls Waterfall in Springbrook National Park on the Gold Coast. According to the Courier Mail newspaper, a scrap of paper with the word ‘goodbye’ on it was found in Forster’s car nearby, and police initially treated the deaths as non-suspicious.
Forster, who had once worked in Sydney as an exotic dancer, had had a long-term relationship with Black Uhlans president John Niven until his death in a traffic accident in 1995. Tana’s father was Fred Taui, a former member of the Black Uhlans, and club members paid for the funeral, were pallbearers, and gave the coffins a motorcycle escort from the church. The connection with Anthony Perish is that Forster had been a friend of one of his ex-girlfriends, and the suspicion was that she’d been involved in the theft of a large sum of money from Peris
h’s home. This has never been proved, and no one has yet been charged in relation to the deaths of the thirty-two-year-old mother and her three-year-old child.
The other Queensland death Tuno was involved with was the shooting of Michael Cleaver Davies on 17 April 2002. He was killed while sitting at the kitchen table in his duplex at Paradise Point on the Gold Coast. We’ve seen how police connected Brad Curtis’ DNA with samples found in burning vehicles near the scenes of Davies’ shooting and the shooting of Raniera Paketapu at JB’s Bar and Grill.
A source later told authorities that Davies had been paid a deposit of $200,000 by Anthony Perish to import some precursor chemicals from Russia by way of China. The chemicals were seized in China and Davies was unable to repay the deposit, so Perish paid Brad Curtis to kill him. Curtis did the job with another man, who cannot be named but confessed to his role in 2009. In 2012 Queensland police issued a warrant for Curtis’ arrest for the murder of Michael Davies. So far no action has been initiated against Anthony Perish for the murder.
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As men rolled over and more arrests were made, the amount of information pouring in to Tuno became a flood. It all had to be recorded and linked to what was already known, so its implications could be fully understood and pursued. As previously noted, all strike forces have their own investigation database on the police eaglei computer system. By the end, Tuno had more than twelve thousand records listed there, although not every one was accessible to all the officers involved: in eaglei, documents can be ‘caveated’ so only certain ranks, or individuals, can read them. Now, as new information was matched to what was already there and produced more leads, the virtues of the patient work done with the computers since those first days at Port Macquarie in 2001 became apparent.
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