Court Reporter

by Jamelle Wells

  On 2 June 2017 Ian Macdonald, then sixty-eight, was jailed for at least seven years and John Maitland, seventy-one, was jailed for at least four years.

  In sentencing, Justice Christine Adamson said Macdonald betrayed the people of New South Wales and was devious.

  ‘The coal resources of New South Wales, which should have been used for the benefit of the whole society, were squandered by the criminal conduct of the very person who was trusted to safeguard them,’ she said. She also said Macdonald had a misplaced sense of entitlement.10

  Other criminal charges that resulted from the ICAC inquiries I covered are still before the courts with more charges widely expected following ICAC recommendations. The ICAC’s function is not just to achieve prosecutions but also to reveal corrupt conduct in the public sector and make recommendations to try to stop it.

  If not for the ICAC’s work, the corruption linked to some former politicians and officials would never have made it to court. It’s reassuring to know that someone is watching over these people.

  7

  Stalkers

  MY OWN DAY IN Balmain Local Court in 2013 showed me first-hand how frustrating and slow court matters can be when you are personally involved.

  I had a troublesome stalker who lived in my street and who knew that I was covering ICAC inquiries into corrupt politicians because he spent a lot of time watching the ABC television News Channel. He was obsessed with conspiracy theories and the ICAC. The harassment started with him buzzing my intercom at all hours of the day and night with ‘important messages’ he wanted me to pass on to ICAC investigators.

  At first, as with many of these sorts of things, it was mildly amusing and I shared a few of the notes with my colleagues in the ICAC media room and assumed the man would just move on to find something more interesting to do with his time. But the behaviour soon progressed to him persuading other tenants in my building to let him through the security doors to my foyer to deliver packages or mail and sticking notes for the ICAC on my door.

  The stalking increased in frequency and one night a neighbour came home from work to find him swinging two large samurai swords around his head in the building car park. I often parked down the street and called the police when I saw him out the front of my building but he had usually gone by the time they arrived.

  Another night he was waiting in the garbage-bin area and jumped out in front me as I came out of the building but ran off when I yelled at him.

  It was a really busy time at work and at home so I was more annoyed at this guy wasting my time than anything else.

  The final straw was one Saturday morning, he tried to kick my front door down because I wouldn’t open it and he told concerned neighbours he was going to kill me.

  There are matters before the courts daily about people charged over home invasions, assaults and other infringements of personal liberty and here was someone putting me on the receiving end of that behaviour. Police suggested I come down to the station and make a statement so they could apply for an Apprehended Personal Violence Order to keep him away.

  I wasn’t his only target. He had been bothering another woman, doing exactly the same thing so when the matter eventually went to Balmain Local Court, we were there together.

  Sitting in the public gallery with two friends and the other woman and her friends was a whole new experience. For the first time, I was not there to report on other people’s days in court — but dealing with my own.

  It took an entire day and we sat there from when the court opened at 9.30 a.m. not knowing when our matter would be up. The magistrate dealt with the usual fodder of local courts: dozens of drink driving, speeding and other traffic offences and a few AVOs.

  ‘How many more excuses will these Balmain women come up with for their bad driving?’ quipped ABC newsroom colleague Adam Storey, who, along with my long-time friend Gerard Maree, had come along for moral support.

  He was joking, but on this day he was right. I was gobsmacked at the number of driving offences the magistrate was dealing with that involved professional people who had children in the car with them. The court heard every excuse under the sun for speeding and drink driving, from ‘I was going through a stressful divorce’ to ‘I forgot how much I had to drink’ and ‘My son was late for school’.

  During the court lunch break the police prosecutor had bad news. As a stalling tactic, the stalker had sent a fax to the court saying he had a medical appointment and would be late. The police prosecutor explained to us that the matter might get adjourned until another day.

  No, no, no, I thought. Not another day off work.

  I wanted his threatening behaviour to stop and to be able to stay in my own home without the fear of him buzzing my intercom and I was also angry at him for wasting my time.

  I also began to see how some people just drop court matters or don’t pursue them in the first place because the process can be so time-consuming and emotionally exhausting. It’s a conversation I have almost daily with taxi drivers as I make my way between courts around the city and suburbs. They are keen to tell me about the unfair infringement notices they say they’ve been given for stopping to drop off or pick up passengers but say they don’t have the time or money to fight them in court.

  But during the afternoon session, the stalker actually turned up and we could hear him very clearly yelling in the court foyer that he was here because ‘two bitches’ who lived in his street were out to get him. He came into court, sat up the back of the public gallery and yawned loudly while the magistrate was talking.

  ‘Are we keeping someone up?’ she asked.

  He then burst into loud highly dramatic crocodile tears while demanding a box of tissues from one of the court officers. Minutes later he stood up, walked down the front of the gallery to where we were sitting and shouted at my friend Gerard, ‘Stop staring at me!’

  It was insane behaviour but the magistrate barely batted an eyelid, ploughing through the AVOs and driving offences. The court sheriffs escorted the man back to his seat and not long after, our case came up.

  The wise magistrate at first very carefully and quietly read the paperwork prepared by police, then called the stalker down to the front of the court. The stalker then started quoting legal jargon at her, perhaps picked up from watching too many television law shows.

  ‘As an Australian citizen I exercise my right to defend myself and I deny all the untruths said about me,’ he started.

  ‘I haven’t said anything yet,’ the magistrate replied.

  At this point I thought about the saying that a person who represents himself in court ‘has a fool for a client’.

  Then the magistrate called me and the other woman down to stand next to this man and she questioned him about his threatening behaviour. He denied all of it and said the allegations against him had been made up as part of some ‘conspiracy’ to get him.

  ‘Who’s Jamelle Wells?’ he whined. ‘I don’t even know who that is. I don’t even watch the ABC.’

  ‘Good,’ replied the magistrate. ‘You won’t have any trouble staying away from her then.’

  He then pulled tissues out of his shoulder bag and did another bad job of pretending to cry. This man was standing right next to me with a bag over his shoulder and I wondered what else was in it. I also thought how hard it must be for some domestic violence victims to be in the same building as their attackers applying for court orders.

  The man argued with the magistrate for almost an hour but he pushed his luck by asking her to transfer the case to another court. She was getting really angry.

  ‘Ladies, do you want to get back to work?’ she asked.

  We both nodded.

  The police had applied for an order for this man not to menace or harass me and my neighbour and not to come near our homes or cars or our places of work for one year. The man annoyed the magistrate so much that day she made the order for two years.1

  He stayed away after that.

  As we left the b
uilding relieved, I heard him sounding off at the court sheriffs about how unfairly he’d been treated.

  ‘This never happened the last time an AVO was taken out against me,’ he yelled. ‘I’m going to go to the High Court.’

  Outside, my two friends who had sat patiently in court with me for over six hours said this was by far the most theatrical case of the day.

  Cover my story

  Another stalker went away after getting a blast from some of my court reporter colleagues.

  In September 2009 I got a phone call on my work mobile on a Saturday night. It was a man who was a party in a low-profile workplace unfair dismissal case starting the following Monday and he was asking would I cover it.

  Tip-offs from the public and parties involved in court cases come at odd times and newsrooms are a twenty-four-hour workplace. It’s the job, especially if you have a round. I’ve always thought it’s tougher for police reporters, who at most networks, are on call and get woken to be sent out to jobs at all hours of the night.

  I was out with friends, so I put a note in my diary and explained to him that our newsroom had several other court stories we were going to be following, so there were no guarantees, but we’d keep it in mind.

  The week came and went and it was a busy time with a number of trials underway and first appearances. Although unfair-dismissal man’s matter was on the Lawlink court list, we didn’t cover his story and I didn’t give it much more thought. Newsrooms are inundated with people pitching stories to them hourly and it’s impossible to do them all.

  About a week later I got another night-time call from the unfair-dismissal man. This time he was abusive. I told him if he called again I’d have him charged and I blocked the number. He then began texting from different mobile numbers and the volume of phone calls increased.

  The next morning outside the main Supreme Court building in Phillip Street, I was with a big media pack waiting for a man involved with a case to come out of the building to get a comment from him. I was kneeling down on the footpath filing radio stories.

  A short man in a pinstripe navy suit approached the media pack.

  ‘Which one is Jamelle?’ I heard him ask some of the other reporters.

  I looked up thinking it was someone from my newsroom or another network but instead a strange man was standing over me, staring down. His eyes were glassy and I straightaway got the feeling he was medicated.

  ‘I’ve brought you some notes about my case,’ he said, shoving a fat, yellow envelope at me. ‘When are you going to do a story about me?’

  I explained to him that I wasn’t going to do any story because the case was over and told him if he didn’t stop texting and phoning I would call the police. He was so creepy I didn’t actually hear much more of what he said because I jumped up quickly and moved away to be near other reporters. While I was calling the police, a male colleague pointed out to this man that his harassing behaviour was an offence. Happy to try to intimidate a woman, but scared of a man even talking to him, he took off and I never heard from or saw him again.

  ‘It’s more dangerous outside here than inside,’ another reporter joked.

  Perhaps they were right.

  8

  The ICAC fall

  ‘DID AN ICAC WITNESS do this to you?’ asked retired Supreme Court judge and former Assistant Independent Commission Against Corruption Commissioner Anthony Whealy, as I slowly shuffled towards him on my walking frame. He was sitting in the physiotherapy room at Sydney’s Wolper Hospital hooked up to a machine, with wires hanging off him. The former judge was recovering from heart surgery and I had fractured my hip after falling down the stairs at ICAC. Neither of us were looking our best. How did we get here?

  About a month or so earlier, on Thursday 25 June, 2015, I was covering a public inquiry in the ICAC’s new building on Elizabeth Street in the CBD. After years of pubic inquiries at its old home in Castlereagh Street, the watchdog had moved.

  The new ICAC hearing room in Elizabeth Street is a lot more modern, but the media were still working out the best places to station camera crews and reporters to get pictures and comments from witnesses coming in and out of the building. We had our routines worked out for positions at the old building: a crew to capture the ‘walk of shame’ up Castlereagh Street past the David Jones menswear store, the ‘shot through the glass front door’ of witnesses dashing to the shopping centre food hall or Chinese restaurant, the ‘shot of an attempt to sneak out through David Jones and blend in with shoppers’ or the ‘exit shot’ of witnesses bolting through the back of the shopping centre into the Pitt Street Mall.

  We were still trying to work out the nuances of this Elizabeth Street building and the security staff at the front desk of the building were still getting used to having us around. They weren’t too keen on the idea of us having cameras near the building entrance and asked us to move further away.

  This day for me started like many of my court days, but by late afternoon my life would change dramatically with a ride in the back of an ambulance.

  Despite all the high drama of some ICAC cases that involve big-name witnesses, some of the public inquiries can be much less busy and much less exciting. That day I didn’t mind covering an inquiry that was a little less intense as I had just covered a very full-on fortnight instalment of the Sydney siege inquest. The court round is like that. It ebbs and flows. Big stories sometimes back to back or sometimes mixed in with lower-profile ones that nevertheless can be interesting.

  This particular ICAC public inquiry was into allegations government officials rorted contracts to upgrade country courthouses. The silly risks taken by some of the lesser-known public officials at the ICAC can be just as amusing as their high-profile counterparts and the audacity of thinking they can get away with it never ceases to astound and amuse me.

  This time round, a former capital works assistant director at the New South Wales Justice Department Assets Management Branch, Anthony Andjic, was accused of corruptly engaging two companies for courthouse upgrades in 2013 without a competitive tender. He was accused of scamming the state government of over $1 million by giving the contracts to companies associated with his partner’s family. The inquiry heard allegations that the cost of the work should have been much less than that. Mr Andjiic was also accused of corruptly enlisting a junior officer to help him and accused of destroying records to try to hide what he was doing. He denied any wrongdoing.

  As with most ICAC inquiries, some of the witnesses seemed to have chronic memory problems including a builder, Shadi Abou Chacra, who repeatedly couldn’t remember how he got the courthouse contracts and couldn’t recall details about invoices. During one day of evidence, clearly frustrated with his memory issues, the ICAC Commissioner at the time, Megan Latham, asked if he had a ‘disability’ or ‘serious’ problem that prevented him answering questions being put to him by counsel assisting the commission. The witness eventually said yes, he did have a poor memory, but added that he didn’t take notes.

  ‘So you have a terrible memory but you don’t find it necessary to take notes?’ Commissioner Latham said.

  ‘Yes,’ the builder replied.

  He then rejected a proposal by counsel assisting that a document was a fraud. The commissioner at one point got so frustrated with him she described his evidence as rubbish.

  ‘It’s rubbish, isn’t it?’ said Commissioner Latham.

  ‘I can’t remember,’ replied the witness.

  At the same inquiry, she asked another witness, ‘Are you just making this up as you go along?’1

  That’s a question I’m pretty sure I’ve heard posed by all the former ICAC commissioners whose inquiries I’ve covered. They must have been so sick of hearing the stock ‘I don’t remember’ or ‘I don’t recall’ response.

  So on Thursday 25 June 2015, I began with a live television cross on the ABC News Channel with morning host Joe O’Brien. Joe, with his usual good humour, found all the details about the case amusing and mad
e light of the very noisy black crows that had gathered in the tree I was standing under in Hyde Park, across the road from the ICAC building.

  ‘You’ve got some guests there, Jamelle,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, perhaps even they are curious about what’s going on at the ICAC today,’ I replied straightaway and kept talking about the inquiry. A sense of humour is required when doing live crosses in the streets of Sydney because anything can happen and crows are one of the easier things to deal with on live television. People passing by or running into shots have been known to remove items of clothing, flash parts of their anatomy and hurl expletives as reporters try to stay focussed on the camera and imagine they are talking to someone at home.

  Sound and pictures frequently drop out and traffic noise can be louder than you. When reporter Gabrielle Boyle was covering courts for Channel Ten, she set up near a court building in Phillip Street one afternoon to do a live cross into the 5 p.m. bulletin with presenter Sandra Sully. Just as she went to air a homeless man, who had been sitting nearby, pulled down his zipper and urinated on the side of the building. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the urine trickling down the footpath towards her feet but just stared straight down the barrel of the camera and kept talking.2

  Whatever happens during a live cross becomes part of the on-camera performance and you use it and keep going until you are told in your ear piece that you are clear.

  Looking back on that day in June 2015 now, the black crows above me in Hyde Park may have been some sort of dark, foreboding, Chekhovian omen for what was about to happen. There were seven of them and they lingered around until I had finished my cross. As we were packing the camera up and heading back over to the ICAC building, the birds flew off and I thought nothing more of them.

  During the morning session that day I filed radio and online stories and in the lunch break, left my laptop in the media room and walked to the café a couple of doors down to grab something to eat. Coming back into the building I walked past several CBD office workers scurrying along Elizabeth Street with heads down, eyes glued to their smartphones. I remember starting to walk up the stairs from Elizabeth Street to the building foyer, but I still can’t remember all the details of what happened next.