Also by Michael Duffy
Call Me Cruel—the many victims of Paul Wilkinson
FICTION
The Tower
The Simple Death
BAD
MICHAEL DUFFY
This book gives the true account of the events portrayed in the series Underbelly: Badness, but it is not the book of the series and has not been approved or endorsed by the producers or writers of Underbelly.
First published in 2012
Copyright © Michael Duffy 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.
Allen & Unwin
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ISBN 978 1 74343 063 7
Internal design by Bookhouse
Maps by Ian Faulkner
Non-aerial photographs of house and shed at Girvan © copyright the author. Photograph of Gary Jubelin © copyright Simon Alekna/Fairfax Syndication. All other photographs courtesy of the NSW Police Force. Crown copyright retained.
Set in 12.5/17 pt Bembo by Bookhouse, Sydney
Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
And the Lord said unto Satan,
Whence comest thou?
Then Satan answered the Lord, and said,
From going to and fro in the earth,
and from walking up and down in it.
CONTENTS
Maps
Author’s note
Prologue
Cops
1 Death of a cook
2 Redemption
3 The wire
4 Arrest of a ghost
5 Fear
6 Tuno 2
7 The man from Melbourne
8 Creeping barrage
Killers
9 Death of a cook II
10 Robberies, shootings etc.
11 The man from Melbourne II
Justice
12 The first trial
13 The second trial
14 The company of killers
Postscript
Appendix: the men and women of Tuno
Sources & thanks
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This is a book about badness but it is about darkness too. Badness—a term used by some police for evil and criminality—needs darkness in which to flourish. The central story here is of the biggest murder investigation in Australia and how it shone a light into that darkness. Terry Falconer died in November 2001 as a result of an elaborate scheme in which he was to be kidnapped and tortured before being killed and cut up. The murder was arranged by Anthony Perish, his brother Andrew, and Anthony’s driver, Matthew Lawton. Other men were involved in the plan to dispose of Falconer’s body, and in his kidnapping. They were all organised criminals experienced in acts of violence and they almost got away with it.
It is only because of the unusual complexity of the scheme, and the involvement of so many people, that Anthony Perish was caught and convicted. For almost two decades he was one of Australia’s most careful and successful major drug manufacturers, with such a reputation for violence that few criminals—even long-time informers—were prepared to talk about him to police.
Fear kept people quiet, but not all that many would have known about his operation anyway. Even though he referred to it as a ‘company’, its structure was quite loose. Rather than a mafia-style hierarchy of permanent employees, it was an informal network in which people would be engaged temporarily to do particular jobs, a bit like the contractor/sub-contractor arrangements that exist in many legitimate industries. People were told only enough to do their own job, and no more. This has been quite typical of organised crime in Australia, and has always made it difficult for investigators to discover its shape and scale. Only one individual—the man at the centre—knows everything that goes on, and he is never going to tell. The Falconer investigation was unusual in that it led police to contract killings, other shootings, and many other major crimes, and revealed a great deal about how organised crime operates in Australia today.
This story is told largely from the point of view of the detectives involved. It took ten long and hard years for Anthony Perish and his associates to be convicted, a decade that involved extraordinary persistence by a core group of police, assisted at times by dozens of others.
The investigation was known as Strike Force Tuno, and later Tuno 2, and I have done my best to name everyone who had any substantial involvement in an appendix at the end of the book. Their investigation is now ranked as the longest and—because of its difficulty and the scale of criminality it uncovered—one of the most remarkable in the history of Australian policing.
I thank all the officers who spoke with me, in particular Gary Jubelin, who was Tuno’s first OIC (officer in charge) and later its Investigation Supervisor. He generously agreed to provide a picture of his life that provides an insight into the challenges and rewards of a detective’s life. Society depends on the police to preserve its safety, yet few of us understand the price paid by the officers involved, and their families. I trust this book conveys a sense of that. Not all members of Tuno were prepared to talk about personal matters, but I hope what follows acknowledges their professional contribution. In particular Glen Browne, OIC for more than half of the investigation, played a major role.
For the best part of a decade, Gary Jubelin struggled not only with the criminals he was pursuing but with his own managers, who often wanted to shut down the investigation, or reduce its resources, because of the lack of progress. I have not referred to them by name but by the generic term ‘bosses’. This is because I have no idea what their motives were. In some cases, I’m sure, they were dedicated officers struggling with the same organisational issues as Jubelin, only further up the line. It would be unfair to imply they had more control over their decisions, or over the actions of the police force, than they really did. In retrospect, Jubelin and his team were right to persist with Tuno, but at times shutting it down could have seemed like a sensible option to reasonable people.
I also thank those police managers who permitted me to talk with officers on the record. The New South Wales Police Force was for a long time reluctant to permit this level of scrutiny, not least because it used to be systemically corrupt and often inefficient. The corruption finding came from the royal commission conducted by James Wood QC from 1994 to 1997. This corruption was not just a bad thing in itself, but it also diminished the effectiveness of much policing because customs that had arisen to protect the corrupt were also used to protect the incompetent and the lazy. Partly for that reason, some homicide investigations were not conducted as efficiently as they should have been.
These things need to be mentioned because they crop up in the following story, which has its origins in the early 1990s. However, after the royal commission the force went through a series of major reforms and was transformed. It is my observation, based on covering many trials as a journalist,
that for a long time now homicide investigations in New South Wales have generally been conducted with a high degree of professionalism.
Although I’m grateful for the access I was given to the officers who worked on Tuno, this is not an authorised account and the police force is not responsible for anything I’ve written.
While writing this book I became aware for the first time of the extent of the effectiveness of the New South Wales Crime Commission, a sort of standing royal commission with the capacity to suspend the right to silence held by people interviewed by police or tried in courts. The commission can often obtain information that would otherwise never be revealed to law enforcement authorities, and pass it on to police. It backs up this power with considerable analytical capacity and extensive use of phone taps. The commission has a general policy of not talking to journalists or writers, but the leaders of Tuno told me its considerable contribution was essential to the success of the investigation.
The judge at the 2011 Terry Falconer murder trial placed a permanent non-publication order on the names of certain witnesses because police say their lives are still in danger as a result of the evidence they gave. These are the men known in this book as Tod Daley, David Taylor, Tony Martin, Brad Curtis and Jake Bennie. The name of the woman known here as Tracy Eastman has been changed at her request. This book is based on the same set of events as the television series Underbelly: Badness but is an entirely independent project. The differences between the two include the invented names used for the above people.
Like most organised crime outfits, Anthony Perish’s flourished because of the thriving market in illegal drugs. In what follows I’ve used the term methamphetamine rather than methylamphetamine, simply because it has one syllable fewer. The two words refer to the same thing, a more powerful version of ordinary amphetamine that has been popular since the 1990s.
The quotations at the start of each chapter are taken from the Bible. In true crime books it is easy to get distracted by the procedural and other details. But the importance of these stories lies in what they tell us about evil—about badness—and the Old Testament is a reminder of that.
PROLOGUE
But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.
It all began with a man and a woman and a big garden in the countryside beyond Sydney’s south-west fringe, people and a place of an innocence that was destroyed, as innocence tends to be. It was destroyed from the outside, as the city swept out to engulf them, but also from the inside, by their own strange son and the boys he reared. In 1993 the couple, then in their nineties, would be killed, in a crime that was both terrible and odd, and remains unsolved to this day. The investigation that is the main subject of this book has its roots in those deaths, and the belief Anthony and Andrew Perish came to hold that a man named Terry Falconer had killed their grandparents.
Anthony and Frances Perish were born in Croatia in the first years of the twentieth century, in the fishing village of Brijesta. Even as children they knew they loved each other, but the road to marriage was long and arduous. Lots of Croatians came to Australia in the 1920s, and they decided to be among them. They couldn’t both afford to come, so Anthony steamed off first. He had trouble finding work in Sydney and spent two years cutting timber down at Bombala, and another five in New Zealand, to save the money to establish their future. In Brijesta, Frances spent the years of her youthful beauty waiting for him. Eventually he could afford to bring her out, and they married in 1931.
Anthony wanted a farm, and they came to own thirty-two acres in a place called Leppington, a flat, rural area some 50 kilometres south-west of Sydney. They were the first non-Anglos in the area, and Anthony was determined to fit in: they would speak English and adopt Australian ways. When many Croatians followed them in the years to come, and a Croatian church was built, Frances and Anthony continued to be Sunday regulars at their local Catholic church, St Mary’s in Leppington.
The couple had three children, Albert, Elena and Jean. They made money from their land, first growing tomatoes and later rearing chickens, whose eggs they sold to the rapidly expanding metropolis to the north-east. They built a home at 116 Heath Road, which they later gave to Albert and his family. In 1966 they moved into a modest brick-and-tile bungalow just around the corner, at 15 Byron Road, and surrounded it with a garden that was not modest but bounteous, full of flowers and fruit and vegetables, all the produce and wonder of the earth. It included ponds full of goldfish and a long pergola covered in grape vines. When Anthony retired in the late 1960s, handing over the egg business to Albert, Frances and he devoted their time to the garden and to their family, filling people’s cars with fruit and vegetables whenever they visited, which was often. In 1974 the garden was awarded second prize in the Sydney Morning Herald’s annual competition, in the large gardens section. By that point it had won the Camden Council’s grand championship for homestead gardens five years in a row. With its conifers, flowering shrubs, roses and cactus, it symbolised much about the couple: hard work, connection to the land, and a certain simplicity. It was often opened to the public to raise money for the Red Cross and Camden Hospital.
Anthony and Frances became venerable figures for the many Croatians who emigrated to Australia after World War II, examples of what could be achieved here. Anthony would provide them with loans and advice, and he continued to be an advocate of assimilation. When the local community became preoccupied by the Croatian independence movement in the 1970s, illegally helping to train young men to go to Yugoslavia to fight, he refused to participate in or encourage this. It was not that he did not love Croatia, but he loved Australia more. The couple were never wealthy, but they had done very well and, as the city spread, their landholding increased in value and should have made a fine inheritance for their children and grandchildren.
But this was all brought undone by Albert. Born in 1933, he grew up to be an eccentric man who lived too much inside his head, and caused trouble for anyone unfortunate enough to be connected with him. At first he trained to be a priest, but then he met Thea, who wanted to be a nun, and they both changed their minds. They married in 1964, and had seven children. Albert was a harsh and remote figure who would yell and scream at his children and make them work for hours in the chicken sheds when they came home from school. Thea reacted by pretending everything was perfect. She withdrew into her own world and didn’t seem to notice or be concerned as some of the children went off the rails and engaged in dangerous behaviour, overlooking or excusing their actions.
Usually Albert was preoccupied with long-running disputes related to the egg business, or with a 2,300 acre block of timber country he’d purchased at Coolongolook near Bulahdelah on the mid-north coast—a restless man, he dreamed of building a mill there and making his fortune. He helped form a rebel group of egg farmers opposed to the government’s quota system, a struggle he was involved in, often publicly, for many years. In 1966 he stood as a candidate for the seat of Macarthur in the federal election. He represented the conservative and largely Catholic Democratic Labor Party, and did not win. His preoccupations meant he had little time for his growing children, including Anthony, born in 1969, and Andrew, born in 1971. Anthony developed a stutter in infancy and was never taken to a speech pathologist to correct it. He did poorly at school and left just before his fifteenth birthday, to start an apprenticeship in panel beating and spray painting. Beth, the oldest, died in 1983 in a car crash at the age of sixteen. The car had been driven by her boyfriend.
Andrew and Anthony clashed with Albert and spent a lot of time at their grandparents’ place, becoming close to Anthony senior. There were many guns in Leppington and the grandfather gave Anthony junior a (non-working) rifle because he liked the Daniel Boone character on television.
In 1988, Albert Perish told the Sydney Morning Herald he’d lost a great deal of income from siding with the rebels in the still-running egg war, which woul
d have come as no surprise to his relatives. His quota to produce eggs had been greatly reduced, and he took the matter to the Supreme Court. He represented himself and lost. In the same year he helped blockade a friend’s farm when the Egg Board turned up to seize the man’s illegal hens, accompanied by his daughter Kathleen. Albert parked his car across the driveway and when police arrived and tried to remove it, Kathleen pulled out the spark plug cables and allegedly threw them away.
The boys became involved in criminal activities in their adolescence when there was plenty of that going on in the area. The population around the nearby centre of Campbelltown boomed in the 1970s and 1980s as Sydney’s inner city was gentrified, with lots of poor people being moved to new housing estates in the south-west. The government promised jobs would follow, but they never did. Over the next decades the area became a welfare sink. Changes were made much later—following the Macquarie Fields Riots of 2005, some of the public housing estates were pulled down and rebuilt—but for a long time the area was out of sight and mind for most of Sydney. The boom in fatherless families, plus long commutes for those men who stayed, saw many boys in the area grow up untamed. Anthony and Andrew Perish were among them, although their father was absent emotionally, not physically. They started with petty crimes such as car theft and, in Anthony’s case, car rebirthing.
When a boy graduated to serious badness in the south-west, he entered an alternative world, a sort of parallel suburban universe with its own society and economic basis. At the top sat the Rebels outlaw motorcycle gang; with some 2,000 members, it was the biggest bikie group in the country. Formed in 1969, its national headquarters was just up from the Perishes, in Bringelly Road, Leppington. The long-term president of the organisation is Alex Vella, a former boxer of Maltese extraction. Like most bikie groups, the Rebels have members who specialise in making and distributing illegal drugs, mainly ecstasy and methamphetamine.
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