Bad

by Michael Duffy

  Information not only came in: sometimes it had to be produced too. Jubelin had maintained an investigation log, updated monthly. It was particularly useful as a running record of the investigation’s changing focus and strategies, and of important decisions made. One of its benefits was to help Jubelin justify his actions when the investigation was reviewed by senior officers, something that happens often in police work for all sorts of reasons. Given the almost unique length of Tuno, this record proved particularly helpful. There were plenty of other reports. In late 2008 and into 2009, Jubelin was reporting daily to his bosses on Tuno’s progress. Later it became weekly. There was also a more detailed fortnightly progress report.

  People think police work is about excitement and violence, and sometimes it is. But mostly it’s about information, massive floods of it that threaten to overwhelm those involved. The struggle is with the crooks, but also with the information.

  11

  THE MAN FROM MELBOURNE II

  Be sure your sin will find you out.

  On 19 March 2009, Tuno took Brad Curtis up to Girvan so he could walk them through the place where Terry Falconer’s body had been dismembered, in the same shed that had also been used as one of the country’s biggest meth labs. The property had already been checked to confirm that the booby traps Curtis had described had been removed. Corrective Services were concerned he might escape, so they had him in handcuffs with manacles around his ankles.

  Since 2001 the hilly track to the house had deteriorated so badly the police needed four-wheel drive vehicles to get in. (For some reason Anthony Perish seems to have stopped using the property by 2006; he simply abandoned it.) Curtis was accompanied by Gary Jubelin, Glen Browne and Nathan Surplice, a large contingent of Corrective Services officers, and various others including a video cameraman.

  Curtis recalled some more details from the night of 16 November 2001, when Anthony Perish arrived in his Toyota Land Cruiser. Lawton heard him coming up the hill, and went out and opened the gate for him. Perish, Curtis recalled, had been very agitated, perhaps on drugs. As Curtis told police what had happened, he used the term ‘Mr Falconer’ to refer to the dead man in the box, an odd attempt to show respect, or maybe just a way to distance himself from what he’d done by the use of formal language. The party moved into the shed, where it was very hot, and the interview continued. Curtis described how once the body was out of the box, Perish had pulled the teeth out and smashed them on the concrete floor, with a hammer. Then the men cut up the body. Curtis’ memory of this part, and precisely what he had done, remained vague.

  After explaining what had occured in the shed, Curtis took the police party outside and showed them the area where he thought the toolbox and other items had been burned. It was all covered now, by soil and vegetation, so the police recorded the location for excavation. While they were outside, Curtis also showed them where he’d erected various security devices around the house and shed when he’d worked there later on security for Perish’s drug lab. These had included trip flares, remote-controlled explosives, cameras and various weapons. A gun had been set up in an old chook shed pointing at the gate in the internal fence, and could be operated from the house by a wire.

  The party went into the house, and Curtis explained where he, Perish, Lawton and another cook had slept. There was a screen next to the television that showed the vision from the four cameras outside, so they could be monitored whenever anyone was in the lounge room. Other items still in the house that Curtis recognised included camouflage gear worn by Perish and Lawton when walking around the property, and explosives. Curtis said that when he’d lived here in 2003 he’d had a map of the area, with an ‘escape and evasion’ route marked on it, just in case. All the men there had had weapons.

  The scale of the operation was impressive. Curtis said while he’d been there he was told two hundred kilograms of methamphetamine and ecstasy had been produced in a period of eight months. There is other evidence for the scale of Perish’s activities. One informed source says that in a two-year period Perish purchased millions of dollars of precursor chemicals, which were presumably used to make drugs worth many times that. The source says Perish’s lifestyle was lavish; for example, he would sometimes invite people to lunch and send a helicopter to collect them and bring them to an expensive restaurant in the Hunter Valley. There is unconfirmed information that on another occasion Perish hired a helicopter to fly himself, another man and two prostitutes to Pepper Tree Estate in the Hunter Valley.

  Police still don’t have a comprehensive picture of Perish’s activities. He was extremely good at evading surveillance: he was on the run for fourteen years and, after being caught and released from jail, managed to evade police again for several more years. His phones were tapped but this was not much good because he always used code. His Sydney base at the time of his last arrest in 2009 has never been found, and neither has another drug factory believed to have existed on the south coast. But it is known that his life right up to his arrest involved frequent travel up and down the coast of New South Wales, attending meetings with a range of criminals who included his precursor suppliers, his hitman, the bikie gangs he used as his major distributors for many years, and the people who helped him launder his profits through property in Queensland. Among other things, Anthony Perish was a very successful businessman.

  Once Curtis had done the walk-through at Girvan, a good deal of searching and forensic work was carried out. The Field Operations Co-ordinator for the five-person crime scene crew was Detective Sergeant Glenn Williams. All obvious traces of criminal activity at Girvan, including the dismembering of Terry Falconer, had been removed, and it was their job to find any remaining forensic evidence. They examined the inside of the big shed using Luminol, and found blood traces at three places on the concrete floor. Now, although Luminol is very sensitive—it can detect blood diluted up to one in a million parts of water—it can produce false positive results for a few other substances, such as rust and cabbage. So swabs were taken from the three spots and sent to the lab to be tested for DNA. These tests, like so much of the hard work done over Tuno’s life, produced nothing useful.

  While the fingerprint officers worked over the house—finding Anthony Perish’s and Matthew Lawton’s prints—the others moved to an area behind the house where the ground had clearly been disturbed some time ago. A big excavator had been hired, and this was used to dig up the soil in an area the size of a swimming pool and put it through a mechanical sifter. Another area was checked, where there had obviously been a fire. These searches produced a blue garbage bag similar to the ones used to wrap Terry Falconer’s remains in, bits of plastic sheeting, and pieces of a large metal toolbox showing burn marks. Also found were a padlock, three saw blades and a ballpein hammer head, possibly the one used to smash Falconer’s teeth.

  Back in the shed, police strung a strap from the beam where Curtis said Terry Falconer had been strung up. Detective Nathan Surplice was suspended from the beam to ensure it would have been able to take Falconer’s weight. The experiment was recorded on camera.

  •

  There was one more killing to be solved by the interviews that took place after the arrests in January 2009. It was Michael Christiansen who told them the most about the murder of Paul Elliott.

  Thanks to the steroids and the training, Christiansen was a huge man, so Tuno took care with security on 20 January 2009 when he was picked up from jail, where he was on remand for the drug charges, and taken to Parramatta Police Station. Detectives Joe Doueihi and Matt Fitzgerald suspected he was Elliott’s killer—they’d found Elliott’s wallet in the Kennards lock-up, and their surveillance showed Christiansen taking out his gun and replacing it before and after Elliott’s disappearance. So now they hoped to rattle him, in the hope he’d confess, but it was a long shot—contract killers don’t normally crumble very easily. It was true that, like Curtis, he had no significant criminal record, but he’d been in jail a month now, and had had time to adj
ust to his changed circumstances.

  For the first time they told him they were aware of Paul Elliott. Christiansen knew Brad Curtis had been arrested the day before, and now he learned Tuno had just picked up several of his other accomplices and was interviewing them too. The detectives were pleased to see he was disturbed by the news, shaken by how much they knew and worried the others might roll on him. Even so he said nothing, so he was taken to the Crime Commission, put in the witness box in a hearing room, and offered the chance to make an ‘induced statement’—one that could never be used against him in court. The results were gratifying: he proceeded to confess that he’d killed Paul Elliott. Doueihi and Fitzgerald, watching on a screen in the boardroom upstairs, couldn’t believe their luck.

  And then it got even better. The detectives asked Christiansen if he would give them a cautioned interview, in other words a standard police one that could be used to charge him, and after some negotiation—the police agreed not to pursue his drug dealing—he agreed. He did this after taking legal advice. So the next day, 21 January, he gave a long and detailed interview. He described how his friend Lyle Pendleton (aka Lozza, or Penguin) had approached him in November the previous year to say he knew an Asian drug dealer who needed protection for a meeting he was to have with a Melbourne heavy, which might turn nasty.

  Later that month Christiansen had attended Curtis’ wedding in Newcastle, along with others including Anthony Perish and Jake Bennie. He’d asked Curtis to do the job with him. Curtis had agreed, and there’d been further discussion at the meeting at the Caltex/McDonald’s stop on the F3 observed by police.

  Pendleton dropped out of the deal after being arrested for a hydro house he’d set up in Queen’s Park to grow marijuana, so on 4 December Jeremy Postlewaight (of the BOC Gases job) took over as intermediary and introduced Christiansen to the client, an Asian man he called Tong.

  Tong, a short man in his early thirties, said he was having business difficulties with a Melbourne man named Paul Elliott, who was threatening to kill his mother. Tong had sold Elliott $600,000 of low-quality methamphetamine, which Elliott had returned and asked for a refund. The problem was that Tong didn’t have the money anymore—he was only the middle man in the deal, and the seller did not want to return the cash. Tong said Elliott was a notorious gangster and had even made it into a true crime book called Gotcha. Shaking with fear, he produced a copy of the book and opened it at a picture of Elliott. Christiansen already knew what he looked like, because he owned a copy himself.

  Tong said he was flying down to Melbourne the next day to try to resolve the issue. If this failed, he would ask Elliott to come up to Sydney the day after, presumably by making some false promise to him. That was the point at which he’d need Christiansen’s assistance. Tong gave Christiansen a new phone to use for future contact. He also gave him 2.985 kilograms of methamphetamine as prepayment for the job. This was some of the poor-quality speed that Elliott had been sold and rejected, but Christiansen either didn’t know what he’d been given, or thought he could do something with it anyway. The fact of the prepayment suggested Tong had no confidence his trip to Melbourne would fix things with Elliott.

  Christiansen kept trying to call Curtis to give him the details, but couldn’t get onto him. Unbeknown to him, Curtis had fallen off his pushbike and cracked some ribs, and was in John Hunter Hospital with his phone off. Christiansen realised if the job was to go ahead, he’d have to do it himself.

  The Melbourne meeting achieved nothing, and Tong contacted Christiansen to say Elliott was coming up. According to Christiansen, Tong asked him to buy a toolbox and take it to the meeting. Christiansen purchased the toolbox, a big wheel-equipped model closer to a square than a rectangle, from MW Sheetmetal, on the Princes Highway at St Peters. Unlike the toolbox used in the Falconer abduction, this one had the familiar checked pattern on its galvanised surface.

  On Saturday 6 December, Christiansen, driving a white van with the toolbox in the back, collected Tong from Belmore and took him to an address in General Holmes Drive at Brighton-Le-Sands. Christiansen drove down the driveway past the side of the house and unloaded the toolbox in the garage at the rear. Then he parked the van out in the street and went into the house, using the back door as the entrance point. Elliott was supposed to arrive at 1 pm, but he was late.

  They waited several hours. At about 3.40 pm they heard a car pull up in the driveway, and Christiansen went into the front room, telling Tong to do his best to resolve the dispute. Tong met Elliott outside, and the two began a conversation and came into the house.

  ‘Why are we meeting here?’ asked Elliott.

  ‘I have some money for you.’

  They discussed the amount, and Elliott grew angry. He said, ‘That’s not good enough.’

  He seems to have suspected it was a trap, and unwisely began to search the house, getting closer to the room where Christiansen was waiting. Before long Elliott entered the front room, saw Christiansen standing holding a pistol, and went for his own weapon. Christiansen shot at him three times, hitting him once in the chest and once in the head.

  The men put Elliott’s body into a large plastic bag. Tong went out to the backyard and washed his hands under the tap, and then his face. Then he helped Christiansen bring in the toolbox from the garage. They put Elliott’s body inside, closed it and took it back out and loaded it into the van. Christiansen took the box home with him to Annandale and left it in his garage. His friend Jeremy Postlewaight was there, and they arranged for him to borrow a boat for tomorrow so they could dump the box at sea. This way of getting rid of a corpse has a long tradition in the Sydney underworld and is, as the Perishes had discovered to their cost, superior to other methods.

  With Tong’s help, Christiansen moved Elliott’s hire car to Alexandria, an inner-city suburb not too far away from his house. That night Christiansen’s friend Marcelo Urriola came by. Christiansen said he’d ‘done a job with the Asian guy’ and had been paid with twelve pounds of ‘base’ (methamphetamine). He added, ‘Po was supposed to help me, but he didn’t.’ Christiansen and his friends used nicknames for each other adapted from the children’s television program Teletubbies: Curtis was ‘Po’, Christiansen ‘Twinky’, and Jay Sauer ‘Laa Laa’.

  Urriola was another young man, like Postlewaight, who’d come under Christiansen’s influence. Born in 1985, he’d grown up in a close family in Forestville and became a qualified landscape gardener, although his intention was to be a professional rugby league player. This ambition was thwarted in 2004, just as major clubs were discussing his future with him, when he suffered a serious knee injury. He took this badly and after meeting Christiansen at a Surry Hills gym, began to train with him in order to compete as a bodybuilder. He received steroids and cocaine from the older man, and eventually became Christiansen’s driver for his drug business. For this he received somewhere between $200 and $500 a day. By 2008 he had a loyalty to and even a great regard for Christiansen, whom he lived near and saw almost daily.

  The morning after Elliott was shot, Jeremy Postlewaight arrived at Christiansen’s place in a truck towing a large boat, a Haines Hunter 650 Horizon. Urriola was there again, and Brad Curtis turned up at the front door, having driven down from Newcastle with his ribs strapped up. Christiansen met him and they walked around the block to the back laneway.

  ‘I did that thing,’ Christiansen said, making the shape of a gun with his hand.

  They kept walking until they reached the garage, where they found Urriola. Christiansen went back to the house for a moment and Urriola said to Curtis, ‘He did good,’ and also made the gun shape with his hand. Obviously it was catching.

  Postlewaight put a tarp on the floor of the boat and Christiansen opened the back door of the van in the shed to reveal the large metal toolbox. Christiansen and Urriola got the box out of the van and lifted it up onto the side of the boat. Blood somehow dripped out onto the boat and the roadway, and was cleaned up by Postlewaight and Christiansen.


  Curtis soon left, and the others headed off to dispose of the toolbox. They launched the boat at Drummoyne and motored east, beneath the Harbour Bridge, past the Opera House and out through the Heads, and kept going until they could no longer see land. Christiansen and Urriola were seasick.

  ‘How far do we have to go?’ Urriola asked Postlewaight.

  ‘A hundred and thirty metres [deep],’ was the reply.

  Christiansen had brought a cordless drill with him, and when they were out to sea he drilled two holes in the box to help it sink. An anchor was attached to the box, and finally they dumped it over the side. Postlewaight said a prayer as Paul Elliott’s makeshift coffin quickly slid beneath the waves.

  It was a long haul, and they didn’t get back to Drummoyne until about 3 pm. That night, Christiansen and Urriola went to Alexandria on motorbikes and Christiansen ‘turned and burned’ Elliott’s hire car. He brought some petrol in a tin can, splashed it around inside the vehicle, and set it alight using a Zippo lighter.

  About a week later, Christiansen and Curtis were doing some Christmas shopping together at the Broadway Shopping Centre, and passed a bookstore.

  ‘Do you want me to show you that guy I did?’ asked Christiansen. ‘He’s in that Underbelly book.’