‘I wished him good luck and went on my way. That was on the Wednesday, and he was due to give evidence before the Royal Commission the following Tuesday. I was stunned when I found out he’d escaped on that Sunday – surely he would have preferred to leave as a free man?
‘It was later revealed that Savvas, unoriginally and predictably described by the media as the “Mr Big of drug importation”, had already been interviewed at length, and over a period of time, by the National Crime Authority. He had agreed to talk to them with the NCA offering the prospect of early release if he cooperated.’
The Mystery Blonde
The guards were stunned.
Who is this good sort? they thought as she signed her way into the visiting section. And why the hell is she coming two hours from Sydney to see that putrid piece of scum?
Wearing a short skirt, a tight top and a flirtatious smile, the intriguing visitor began appearing at Goulburn Jail in 2006, the exact date locked away in the Department of Corrective Services logbooks. The man she had been coming to visit was a notorious paedophile who was kept in protection for his own safety. The woman gave no clues as to why she would visit such a man, convicted of the most abhorrent crimes. Was she a relative? A friend? God forbid … a lover?
‘We found out about this woman afterwards,’ said Chisholm, who was in charge of the immediate investigation following the escape. ‘I can’t think of the paedophile’s name, but he was a no good piece of shit. Anyway, this sheila would come down from Sydney to visit him. It just started out of the blue, and she kept on coming.’
Officers were further floored when they found out exactly how she was getting to Goulburn.
‘Turns out she lived in Queensland,’ said Chisholm. ‘She used to fly to Sydney and then catch a taxi all the way to Goulburn. A taxi … You can only imagine how much that would cost.’
The leggy blonde had also rented a unit in Goulburn, and she was never short of company.
‘Wives and girlfriends were always coming up to Goulburn to visit their men,’ Chisholm said. ‘Goulburn is a decent drive from anywhere, and this woman took advantage of that. She befriended a bunch of the visiting women and ended up getting a group of them together that she would put up in the unit for free. They would all stay in this unit on weekends so they could be close to the jail.’
Now for the schooners and sex …
‘This woman,’ Chisholm said. ‘She was a good-looking woman. And it turns out she had gone to my deputy on the weekend before the escape and filed a complaint against one of my officers. She claimed the senior officer in charge of visits had harassed her. He had bumped into this woman down at the Soldiers Club and ended up screwing her. He was married but started having an affair with her.
‘We figured that she would have been in a position to find out how everything worked in the visiting section from an officer’s perspective. She would have known all the policies and all the procedures. She would have known the system inside-out, and she would have known how to create a distraction – a big distraction. If you look at the tape, she’s the one obstructing the camera that was looking at Savvas.’
Chisholm concluded that the mystery woman had orchestrated the brazen escape – she had spent months in Goulburn planning and plotting before finally unleashing the chaos that allowed a wig-wearing, moustachioed Savvas to simply walk from the jail.
‘I don’t even think Savvas knew he was getting out,’ Chisholm continued. ‘Not until he met those two fellas that visited him anyway. We never got any intel on this, and we didn’t know it was coming because this escape was not arranged by the inmates. It was very unique in that it was arranged by the visitors.
‘The inmates had no idea what was happening. If any one of them had known about it then we would have known about it too. Jail is full of informants – someone would have given them up.
‘The only people that knew about this escape was the woman that had organised it, the women that had been staying with her and were visiting on that day, and the two men that visited Savvas. Those two men were just nobodies. They used fake IDs to get in, and I don’t think they’d visited him before. To my knowledge they were never found, nor were the women.’
So who would go to such lengths to bust Savvas free? If Savvas hadn’t used a secret honey pot to pay for and organise his freedom, who had?
‘There are all these stories about Savvas having all this money,’ Chisholm said. ‘But he didn’t have any money. Not that sort of money, anyway. The government had seized his assets. It is a fallacy that he had all this money to pay all those people off. The police told me that. They were adamant it was not arranged by Savvas.’
That’s when Chisholm gets all Twilight Zone …
Savvas’s escape was front-page news … and someone needed to be blamed.
‘The Minister of Corrective Services charged into my office,’ Chisholm said. ‘The cameras were all outside, media everywhere, and he stood in my office and told me everything would be fine if I gave him a head. He looked at me and said, “Give me someone.” I refused.
‘I had reviewed the incident and it was a failure of the system. There was no corruption or anything else on the part of the officers. The only bloke that played a role in it was the officer who rooted the sheila, and he had no idea what she was up to. But the minister wanted a head to give to all the reporters waiting outside. They wanted to show that the department had done something. I told him the only head I would give him was mine, and he took it. I thought I was invincible at the time; I was naive thinking I was too big to be blamed.’
Several investigations were launched – Corrective Services, the police, ICAC and the NSW Ombudsman – all examining the escape. The report released by NSW Ombudsman Irene Moss in December 1997 claimed Chisholm ignored intelligence given to him just weeks before the escape. Moss found the acting governor had made no obvious attempts to tighten security, despite tip-offs.
Corrective Services commissioner Leo Keliher revealed both Chisholm and his deputy Paul Lafoe were facing disciplinary charges over the escape shortly after the ombudsman’s report was released. (The full report was never released publicly, just a four-page summary.)
‘I got hammered,’ Chisholm said. ‘I was the first superintendent in history to have departmental action taken against him. There were charges but there was no punishment, which was convenient because that gave me no right of appeal. If I had been found guilty and was penalised in a way that disadvantaged me, then I would have had a right to appeal. Well, they found me guilty but took no further action – I wasn’t suspended, docked, demoted and nothing was noted on my file.
‘The ombudsman’s inquiry found me guilty of negligence, but the police investigation found me innocent, and I was cleared by ICAC.’
Moss, however, was scathing in her report that no procedures were in place to ensure inmates were accounted for before visitors were allowed to leave: ‘There was not even a thorough headcount of visitors arriving and those leaving.’
The report also pointed to intelligence that was ignored, saying, ‘The department did have intelligence about possible escape bids by Savvas. He had been moved from Maitland Correctional Centre to Goulburn in January 1995 for precisely this reason. In June 1995, additional intelligence was gathered about the possibility of him escaping through the visitors section at Goulburn. While this information was, by the time of Savvas’s actual escape, at least a year old, it was brought again to the attention of the governor as part of an updated profile of the inmate just weeks prior to the escape. In view of this, it is surprising that particular steps were not taken in relation to this inmate’s visits, especially when visits were to be conducted in a temporary area. The governor noted that, in reality, all maximum-security inmates are a potential security risk and so if there is no particular intelligence available, or other suspicion, no additional steps are put in place.’
While the report could not rule out ‘collusion’, the ombudsman found administrative
failings were to blame. A raft of high-tech changes were introduced in a bid to stop the top 100 high-risk prisoners in New South Wales from escaping. The measures introduced following Savvas’s brazen escape included:
No transport anywhere without the agreement of the newly formed High-Risk Management Committee (HRMC)
Forced regular cell changes
Visitors nominated in advance to enable thorough criminal record checks
All nominated visitors to submit to a ‘biometric visitor ID’, a high-tech system involving photographs and fingerprints.
The sad footnote when the dust cleared and all the reports were filed was that Chisholm’s career in Corrective Services was doomed. He claims he was shuffled through the system following the escape, his cards forever marked.
The Fox
The ‘Black Fox’ picked up the phone and dialed 000.
‘Hello,’ the man addressed the emergency operator. ‘This is the Black Fox. George Savvas is dining at the Suntory restaurant on Kent Street if you want to go and pick him up.’
Click.
The line was dead.
‘Attention all units,’ the police two-way blared. ‘Possible prison escapee spotted. Suspect may be armed and dangerous. Approach with caution.’
Detectives Cameron Lindsay and Nick Read, cruising past Sydney Harbour Casino, agreed it was a long shot … but a shot all the same. The suspect allegedly spotted was, after all, Australia’s most wanted man. They arrived at Suntory City – a fine-dining venue – at about 9pm.
‘We attended the restaurant and spoke to the manager,’ recalled Detective Lindsay. ‘He was quite shocked, but he sat us down at a table behind the suspect.’
The detectives ordered a couple of Cokes and sat back, studying the man alleged to have been on the run for 258 days after escaping Australia’s most secure jail. The man they watched was flanked by two good-looking women, eating beef fillets and sipping red wine. He had a beard and wore his hair short. They could not be certain of his identity, so Lindsay walked outside, made a call back to the Sydney Police Centre and asked for a picture of Savvas. A uniformed officer rushed the picture to the restaurant and Lindsay compared it to the suspect. And that’s when they made their move and approached the trio’s table.
‘I am Detective Cameron Lindsay of the Rocks police. Could we please talk to you about certain matters outside, sir?’
Walking past the brimming bar, Detective Lindsay asked the bearded man with the short hair if he was George Savvas.
‘No,’ the man replied.
‘Do you have any ID?’ the detective continued.
‘No.’
That’s when Savvas bolted.
‘Nick went in high and I went in low,’ said Lindsay of the crash tackle that downed Savvas before the fugitive was handcuffed and pushed into the back of a paddy wagon.
‘I suppose it was a bit stupid staying in Sydney,’ Savvas blurted, his fling with freedom ending on a busy city street.
Police found $750 cash in Savvas’s pocket, along with a gram of cocaine. There were also telephone numbers written on scraps of paper. The two good sorts back at the bar said they had known ‘Andy’ for a month or so. They were left with the $317.50 bill for the Wolf Blass and beef.
Just 59 days after his recapture, George Savvas was found dead in Maitland Jail. The drug-dealing former alderman was swinging from a sheet when prison officers unlocked his cell at 8.25am on 18 May 1997.
Savvas spent his last night alone, placed in isolation after authorities learned he was plotting another escape – this time with serial killer Ivan Milat. The attempt was to be far more elaborate, and potentially lethal.
‘They were prepared to injure or kill anyone who got in their way,’ said former prison official Ron Woodham. ‘They planned to overwhelm guards in the top security unit, tie them up, steal their uniforms and then make their way to the perimeter wall. Rope ladders were going to be thrown over the wall by outside accomplices, with weapons and getaway cars.’
None of this happened, of course – authorities swooped after an alleged tip-off saw Savvas and Milat abandon the escape. Prison authorities, police and ICAC had been monitoring the plot for three weeks with hidden recording devices, informants and undercover agents.
‘Operation Bengal’, the name of the joint operation, left Savvas a broken man. Threatened with unprecedented surveillance and no prospect of freedom for possibly 30 years, Savvas turned his bedsheet into a noose, secured it to the metal bar of the inner security grille and hung himself.
Or did he?
Provocative questions have since been raised: Why wasn’t Savvas found in his cell until 8.30am when wake-up time is 7 and breakfast is served at 7.45? Why was a man who was just threatened with unprecedented surveillance left unwatched and alone in a cell on the night his escape plan was foiled? Why did no one even check on him since it is standard practice for an officer to make a cell check every 15 minutes when an inmate is in an observation cell?
Chisholm, now ‘too old to care’, has suspicions too: ‘Stinks a bit to me. He tells me the Royal Commission is going to get him out, and then he escapes just before he is due to appear. Then he gets recaptured in a pub with a couple of prostitutes, cocaine and cash, the day after the Royal Commission finishes. And then all of a sudden he necks himself in Maitland Jail. Mmmm.’
9
HIGH RISK
The Bushman
‘Fuck you, DOG!’ he screamed through the fence. ‘We’re going to fucking kill you.’
Another joined in: ‘Yeah, you dead, cuz.’
And then another: ‘I’ll fucking stab you, DOG!’
Australia’s most-wanted man was now Goulburn’s most-wanted man. And Malcolm Naden did not give a shit.
‘You!’ said Naden, pointing at the man who threatened first.
‘You!’ he continued, pointing at the next.
‘And you!’ he deadpanned, finger firmly fixed on the third. ‘Just been told I’m getting out of segro [segregation], so you better kill me before I kill you first.’
‘Thank God it’s over,’ Naden allegedly told police as his seven-year life on the run finally came to an end. ‘I’ve had enough.’
His leg savaged by a police dog called ‘Chuck’, Naden was cuffed and put in the back of a truck. A tip-off had led police to the expert bushman wanted for murder, aggravated assault and shoot with intent to murder. Sporting a heavy beard and tired eyes, Naden became Australia’s most famous fugitive after disappearing on 20 June 2005 – the day he allegedly killed his cousin, Lateesha Nolan. Naden, who no longer had a $250,000 reward on his head, was charged and sent to Australia’s most secure jail. Most would be terrified by the prospect of doing time in Goulburn but, after seven years eluding the authorities, Naden was afraid of nothing and scared of nobody.
‘When he first came in he was down the back in segregation,’ revealed a current Goulburn corrections officer. ‘He was classified as an NA [a non-association] prisoner, and that was to do with his crime and the fact he was so high-profile. They figured they couldn’t put him straight out into the yard. But he didn’t want to be locked up with blokes who couldn’t protect themselves.
‘Naden was in Yard 3, which is the yellow yard [strict protection], and they walked him across the Circle and into the Cookhouse, which is an empty yard between all the other yards, so no one could get at him.
‘He used to cop a lot of stick from the Aboriginals in the adjacent yard. They would scream at him. They would call him a Dog and threaten to kill him. But he wasn’t scared of anything. He walked straight up to the fence and said he would kill them. All of them. And they shat their pants.
‘I would call him a psychopath. He’s got cold, black eyes. There’s just nothing in there. There’s no empathy and no fear. The other inmates were all scared of him.’
All except one …
SMACK.
The sandwich-toaster-arm-turned-prison-battering-ram smashed into Naden’s head.
Smack. Smack. Smack.
Blows rained down as Naden was ambushed in the prison yard at about 2.20pm.
‘Naden hated being locked away in segregation,’ the officer said. ‘He could look after himself and didn’t want to be treated like a Dog. So it was actually Naden himself who signed a declaration saying that he wanted to be put out into the yard, that he was safe, that he had no dramas with anyone. He said there were no threats to him and he was no threat to anyone else. These sorts of documents are supposed to cover us, but they really don’t mean shit. There was a protection inmate a few years ago who signed one, and he ended up suing the department after he was bashed. So I guess it’s just a piece of paper.’
Naden said he’d be safe in the yard – but he wasn’t. His family had promised vengeance against anyone found to have hurt Lateesha Nolan before the fugitive was charged with her murder. And again they promised it after.
Naden’s cousin, Dean Nolan, himself a murderer serving 25 years for killing a young boy, was desperate to exact revenge on the man who’d killed Lateesha. Armed with the makeshift weapon, Dean ambushed Naden as he walked into the yard, smashing him about the head with repeated blows until Corrections officers stopped the brutal attack.
‘He absolutely got the crap kicked out of him by his [second] cousin,’ said the officer. ‘I’m pretty sure he didn’t see it coming, because there is little doubt he would have put up a fight.’
Naden was sent to hospital and then back to segregation.
‘He has been an NA inmate since the bashing,’ the guard said. ‘And he’s happy with that classification now. He’s quite happy to do his own thing and has learned to deal with it. There are just too many threats in prison for a bloke like Naden. Even if he didn’t have family members out to get him in jail, he would still be a high-profile inmate and a target for others wanting to make their name.’
Australia's Most Murderous Prison: Behind the Walls of Goulburn Jail Page 16
