The search for the remains of the toolbox at Girvan
Pieces of the toolbox recovered at Girvan
Anthony Perish arrested by Tuno detectives at McMahons Point, 19 January 2009
A member of the State Protection Group at the arrest of Anthony Perish and Brad Curtis
Anthony Perish and Brad Curtis, after their arrests
Andrew Perish
Matthew Lawton
Craig Bottin
Rob Institoris
Ian Draper, disappeared 3 August 2001
Draper’s car was left outside the Rebels’ Leppington clubhouse six weeks after his disappearance
The Rebels’ clubhouse, 124 Bringelly Road, Leppington
Anthony Perish’s fortified compound at West Hoxton
Michael Christiansen, rear view
Michael Christiansen caught by police camera on the F3 in 2008, while planning the murder of Paul Elliott
Paul Elliott, killed 6 December 2008
Tuan Anh Tran
Thanawat Chudtalay
Lyle Pendleton
Jeremy Postlewaight
Marcelo Urriola
Jay Sauer
Part of Brad Curtis’ armoury
Detective Inspector Gary Jubelin
KILLERS
We have made a covenant with death,
and with hell are we at agreement.
9
DEATH OF A COOK II
Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.
On 22 January 2009 Glen Browne and John Edwards talked to Brad Curtis and he agreed to do a recorded interview, known as an ERISP (Electronically Recorded Interview of a Suspect Person). That was breaking the first golden rule for criminals arrested by police, which is: say nothing. He then broke the second, and did the interview without a lawyer. Before he started, he asked to speak to his children. He spent twenty minutes on the phone, mainly crying. Then he talked to the detectives for seven hours.
Why did Curtis, an intelligent man, do this? We don’t know, but possibly it was pride, and he believed he did not require anyone’s advice. Whatever the reason, it was exactly what the police needed. For the first time, they heard what had happened to Terry Falconer the day he died, from someone who was there.
Once Curtis had rolled, police were able to achieve some of the cascade effect they’d hoped for. They told his accomplices he was speaking with them, to try to persuade them to roll over too, in order not to deprive themselves of the discounts on sentencing provided to criminals who help police. As 2009 progressed Michael Christiansen and Jake Bennie rolled, and what follows, based on what they and Curtis told police, is the most comprehensive account of the activities of Anthony Perish’s company and its associates that we are likely to have. Essentially, Curtis was the man to whom Perish sub-contracted many of the acts of violence needed for the success of his business.
Curtis first met Anthony Perish through Tony Martin in 1997, when Curtis and Martin were doing security at the Bourbon and Beefsteak Bar in Darlinghurst Road. This establishment was started in Kings Cross in 1967 by Bernie Houghton, who had excellent connections with American intelligence and major Australian criminals such as Abe Saffron. Born in Texas, Houghton had ended up in Vietnam and, learning from his contacts that Sydney was about to become a destination for American troops on R&R, came here and opened the Bourbon, which he continued to run until his death in 2000. The bar was close to the El Alamein Fountain in Fitzroy Gardens, where a bust of Houghton now stands, the subject of occasional interest from ibises, drug addicts and other loiterers.
Although Perish was on the run in the 1990s, he would go to the Bourbon a lot and never had any trouble from the notoriously corrupt detectives at Kings Cross Police Station, who drank there for free. Curtis became friendly with Anthony and also met his brother Andrew. Curtis was an amateur motorcycle racer and Anthony Perish sponsored him to the tune of $2,000. As we’ve seen, Curtis and Martin started their own security company a few years later. They worked at places including the Vegas Hotel and the Aussie Rules Club. Curtis said that when the company got into financial trouble, Anthony Perish loaned the partners $100,000 (which Martin denies).
Jake Bennie worked for the company and became very friendly with Curtis, who was about ten years his senior and whom he soon regarded as an older brother. He found Curtis a capable operator with an army background and solid experience with firearms, in general an impressive character but also a dominating one.
The company did not last, partly because Brad Curtis was in a relationship with a woman in Newcastle and went to live there. He would visit Sydney and stay in an apartment in Oxford Street, Darlinghurst, meeting with his friends in the café below. It was there he introduced Jake Bennie to Craig Bottin. Curtis told them he was frustrated his military training was going to waste, and that he wasn’t earning enough money.
Sometimes Bottin and Bennie would stay with the increasingly irascible Curtis in the apartment and, on 6 April 2001, Curtis woke up angry and swearing about his bad financial situation. ‘That’s it,’ he announced, ‘get ready, we’re going to do over the TAB up the road.’ He went into his bedroom and came out with some handguns and balaclavas. He gave Bennie a Luger and said, ‘You’re going through the doors with me. Craig’ll be driving.’
They talked about what they would wear, and Curtis advised the others to have two sets of clothes, ‘unders’ and ‘overs’, the latter to be discarded after the robbery, to reduce the risk of being identified. He seemed to have thought about this a lot, and went into quite a bit of detail: they would go to their car in their unders, and put the overs on before doing the job. Afterwards, back in the car, they’d remove their overs and put them in a backpack, which would be discarded.
They left the apartment and got into the car to be used for the job, and drove down to the adjacent suburb of Surry Hills.
‘Bally up, guys,’ Curtis said, and they all pulled on the balaclavas.
Bottin parked out front of the TAB in Crown Street, and Curtis and Bennie rushed in, with Curtis yelling, ‘This is a robbery, get on the floor!’
Bennie controlled the door, and saw one of the clients staring up at him. ‘Get on the floor,’ he ordered, ‘face down on the floor!’
Curtis had assured them it would be well executed, like a military operation, but it didn’t work out like that. He got very upset when he wasn’t given enough money, and started to yell at the unfortunate young woman behind the counter, pointing the gun at her face. ‘Give me the big money from underneath,’ he cried. When handed more money, he asked, ‘Is that it, is that all, where’s the rest of it?’
They raced out and back to the car. Bottin had the engine running and took off, with Curtis and Bennie busy pulling off their overs. The robbery netted $1,755.35.
The crew robbed other places—including some where Curtis had worked as a security guard—but the pickings were slim given the risks they were taking and the trauma they created for some of their victims. They got $2,213 from the Robin Hood Hotel in Waverley, $14,000 from the Mansions Hotel in Kings Cross, and $8,000 at the Cauliflower Hotel in Waterloo.
Like a good manager, Curtis tried to take care of his crew. In June 2001 he and Craig Bottin dealt with Shane Oien, a bodybuilder and member of the Bandidos. Bottin had met Oien at Gold’s Gym in Darlinghurst, and for some reason in Oxford Street one night the men had a fight that left Bottin cut and bruised, his ego in shreds. He was determined to have his revenge.
Curtis and he attacked Oien one day after he came out of the gym in Pelican Street, Surry Hills. They drove up to him in a stolen vehicle and Curtis, steadying his .44 magnum, fired four or five bullets around Oien.
‘You should have seen his face,’ Bottin later told a friend. ‘His face went white from the shock.’ Curtis later told police he’d taken care not to hit Oien, although you have to wonder if this was good marksmanship or luck: one bullet took out the back window of Oien’s vehicle, while another went into a car parked
nearby, with the driver sitting inside.
In October 2001, Curtis told Bennie they had something more challenging to do: a contract shooting. It was for Anthony Perish, although he did not tell Bennie that. What he did say was that the sort of work they would do in future would be—as Bennie later said in court—‘only targeting scumbags, and people who had done the wrong thing. There was not going to be any scaring of innocent people, women and children, like the TAB job. Brad also advised that the next jobs will be more profitable.’
The target was an ex-Nomad named Gary Mack, who Curtis said had ‘done the wrong thing’ and needed to be taught a lesson. Several motives for Perish’s desire to have Mack shot later emerged from different witnesses, as with several of the crimes in this book. In this case Mack variously had raped a woman (it was a feature of the weird moral world of Curtis that victims should be portrayed as somehow deserving of their fate), owed Andrew Perish money, or was involved in some other dispute with Andrew, who’d recently been removed as president of the Campbelltown chapter of the Rebels.
Curtis said he was going to shoot Mack in the buttocks, because it was the best place to wound someone without causing serious injury. Like all Curtis’ jobs for Perish, this one was well planned. He sent Bennie and Bottin to the Peakhurst Inn where Mack worked, to identify him and get a feel for the place. They returned to report to Curtis, who explained that on the night of the attack, Bottin would be a spotter, reporting to him by two-way radio on Mack’s movements when he came out of the pub at the end of his shift. Bennie would be with Curtis, watching his back and listening to the police radio on a scanner.
They would all wear unders and overs, and while Curtis would ride a motorbike, Bennie and Bottin would be in a car, which they would ‘turn and burn’ if discovered. This meant they would abandon the vehicle and torch it to destroy DNA evidence. He said the two of them would get paid about $7,000 each for their work.
At the end of this planning meeting, Curtis assured them that his friend Tony Martin had a high level contact in the police and would find out if their identities were ever discovered. This would come in handy because there would be more work like this, which he called ‘black ops’, involving attacks on scumbags and other people who’d done the wrong thing, such as rapists. ‘He said,’ Bennie later recalled, ‘the police would be thankful because we would be doing them a favour taking the scum off the streets and doing to them what the police wish they could do.’
In the early hours of 14 October 2001, Curtis’ crew assembled across the road from the Peakhurst Inn and Curtis and Bennie climbed some stairs to a balcony, where Curtis lay down with a 7.62 mm rifle equipped with a telescopic sight. He was about sixty metres from where Mack would appear. Around 5.15 am he received a message from Bottin through the earpiece connected to his radio, saying Mack had left work. Soon after, Mack came into sight and Curtis shot him. The three men fled the scene.
Anthony Perish paid them for their work and soon they were preparing for the crime that would be the defining one of their careers, the abduction of Terry Falconer.
•
An abbreviated version of the interview Glen Browne and John Edwards conducted with Brad Curtis in January 2009 was later played in court, and so became a public document. I’m going to quote from it at some length, because it gives a sense of Curtis’ character, which was such a strange combination of intelligence, boastfulness and an absence of feeling for other human beings. Curtis’ version of events was almost certainly self-serving in parts, but enough of it fitted with what the detectives did know to suggest it was generally truthful. They were finally hearing the story of Terry Falconer’s last hours. What follows accurately reflects the meaning of what was said in the interview, but it has been shortened and some sentences have been moved around to present the account in chronological order.
DETECTIVE SERGEANT GLEN BROWNE: Brad, do you agree that apart from yourself, myself and Detective Edwards, there are no other persons present in the room?
BRAD CURTIS: That is true.
GB: I’m going to ask you further questions about these matters. You are not obliged to say or do anything unless you wish to do so, but whatever you say or do will be electronically recorded on these discs by this machine and may later be used as evidence. Do you understand that?
BC: Yes, I do.
GB: Has any threat, promise or inducement been held out to you by any person to be interviewed in relation to this matter?
BC: No.
GB: Do you agree that [this morning] we had a discussion with you about a number of matters but predominantly in relation to concerns for the safety of your wife?
BC: Yes. And family.
GB: And family. Of course. And do you agree that you were given a phone and you contacted your wife and you spoke to her for some time regarding those matters?
BC: That is true.
GB: And do you agree that at least we’ve told you that we’ve spoken to other people and commenced to make arrangements in relation to her safety?
BC: You’ve advised me of that.
INTERVIEW SUSPENDED. INTERVIEW RESUMED.
GB: What can you tell us about [the murder of Terry Falconer]?
BC: [Anthony Perish] wanted me to look over some information that he had, but it was before the coronial inquest and I couldn’t make much sense of it. It had got to do with the murder of his grandparents and who could have done it. He wanted to bring the people to justice, that’s what he said to me, so that I should start investigating it. The people who he mentioned were this Terry Falconer, a solicitor called Justin [Birk] Hill [and a few others].
GB: Did Anthony seem quite concerned about getting to the bottom of who killed his grandparents?
BC: I think he was impacted far more than anyone else. I don’t know why. I don’t know why. He was hell-bent, hell-bent on getting not only anyone that did it but anyone that knew about it.
GB: And what was he asking you to do in respect of those documents?
BC: Look at them to see if I can see any inconsistencies in statements . . . to see if other family members could know things. He suspected his sister, Colleen, of hiding information, and also his aunty. [Author’s note: There is no evidence of this.] . . . He thought that the police had bodged the crime scene and I think some information in the coronial inquiry came out about that, that people didn’t follow protocol, but I don’t think it was malicious.
GB: Apart from looking through those documents and presumably offering an opinion, did you do any other investigation on his behalf in respect to that?
BC: At some stage I flew to South Australia where apparently a corrupt solicitor called Justin [Birk] Hill, otherwise nicknamed Judd, was residing at a location. I did some surveillance . . . I didn’t sight the aforementioned at any time.
GB: What was it that [Perish] actually asked you to do down there?
BC: See if he’s at this address. [Author’s note: This doesn’t sound very plausible. According to one source, Curtis was actually sent to Adelaide to kill Justin Birk Hill, but failed to do this.]
GB: Anthony has approached you to kidnap Terry Falconer?
BC: The information at that stage was very brief, but he requested to, in order to get some additional information, we could talk to one that was seen in the area, which was Falconer. Perish said all we had to do is get a hold of that guy and talk to him and persuade him to give up who did it. From my understanding, at that stage he didn’t think Falconer was directly involved in the doing of it, but knew information about it. He told me where he was on day release, which was some smash repairs place in Ingleburn.
GB: I know we cautioned you at the start, but I want you to understand again that you know you’re not obliged to say or do anything as anything you say or do will be recorded and may later be used as evidence. Do you understand that?
BC: Yes. He gave me the address of the smash place shop and gave me a description of him, no photo, and said that he would organise a guy to call us when h
e was there and all we needed to do was to pick the guy up, posing as police, cut the tracking device off him, take him to be questioned by Anthony and then drop him back at a later stage. Perish had organised for a guy to call in when Falconer was at the smash shop, I was told [the guy] had a haircut on that day and apparently the hairdresser is within vision of the smash shop. I decided that the best thing was to get Jake Bennie and Craig Bottin to help, and Perish advised he would pay another $15,000 and take some money off [my debt to him].
GB: Do you recall how you approached those people?
BC: I would have just talked to Craig and Jake and said, ‘Oh look, there’s a job on, this guy has got knowledge of a murder that’s happened to a good mate of mine’s grandparents, we want to take him in for some questioning, rough him up and then drop him off later. To do the job I was advised by Perish to obtain a van and a lock box and to organise it so we would look like police, we needed to get hold of a badge. He provided a general duties police shirt, which he stated came from a stripper, but I don’t think that’s the case, as it fit Jake and it was quite big. The wheels for the car, because I was going to use my own personal car, we had to get wheels that looked like police detective wheels. They were sourced by Matthew Lawton and painted by Lawton at the Turramurra house where we were staying during this time. [Author’s note: Matthew Lawton, aka Muzz or Bristle Hound, was Perish’s driver and long-time employee.] Jake dressed as the general duties cop and was the driver, and myself and Craig dressed as detectives and I had the badge, which I rented for $200. Perish gave me strict instructions that, ‘He’ll put up a fight, so make sure you handcuff him and put this anaesthetic over his mouth.’ He told me it was kind of like chloroform and it will just help him sleep until he gets to Turramurra, without him making too much noise.
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