Chapter 4

The streets of Brunswick

After the Lorimer Taskforce, I took promotion to sergeant, which involved going back into uniform. While a lot of cops were critical of having to go back into uniform to get promoted, I loved it. With a detective’s background, I was able to be an effective uniform sergeant. As an example: if my young cops brought in a shoplifter, they’d have to come and brief me before they interviewed him. I’d go and have a look and recognise he was a crook from fifty paces.

‘Has he got a car?’ I’d ask the young constables.

‘Don’t know,’ they’d say.

‘Go ask him.’

So they’d ask the guy where his car was, search the car, find it full of stolen goods and get a bigger fish for their troubles.

I’d worked Brunswick both in uniform and as a detective, so I was comfortable to come back as a sergeant. Brunswick was a rough-and-ready northern suburb before a real-estate boom in the early 1990s made it trendy and pushed the rougher crowd a little further afield. When I was first there, it was still a little wild and a great place for a young policeman to learn his trade.

The northern and western suburbs were considered the harder suburbs to work, and of course, this was where the crooks were. The bright lights of Sydney Road burned 24 hours a day and in there somewhere lived the likes of Tony Mokbel, Mick Gatto and a weedy drug dealer called Carl Williams.

Because of my experience as a detective at Brunswick, I was asked to lead a group of young constables in a special duties team. Since I didn’t aim to stay in uniform anyway, I got back into plain clothes and did what I did best – catch crooks.

A successful method that I taught my small team of juniors was to talk to anyone we caught with drugs and see if we could wangle out of them who was dealing. We were mostly dealing with street-level junkies who’d tell us anything we wanted in order to get bail so they could go and score their next hit. The only thing we offered in return was that they’d be bailed on their own undertaking; since this was something that we’d do anyway, it was a win-win situation. Emanating from these junkies was the kind of intel that would allow us to catch low-level dealers or recover stolen goods. It gave me the chance to teach the young cops how to watch a suspect’s house and how to obtain information, then verify and utilise it.

During this time, we received information about a young crook called Little Tommy Ivanovic, who was rumoured to be growing marijuana at his parents’ house in Brunswick. With further investi-gation, we found out that he was the suspect in a shooting and had prior convictions for drug-related crimes. He also associated with well-known criminals from the so-called Carlton crew. I told my team that with Little Tommy, we weren’t dealing with a typical commission-flat crim – we’d found someone who had much broader connections.

We pursued Little Tommy enthusiastically, if cautiously – he was red-flagged on our system as someone with a propensity to carry firearms. On the strength of our intel, we got a warrant to search his parents’ house, but, disappointingly, we didn’t find the marijuana he was rumoured to be growing there. The only thing we found was a single ecstasy tablet in the pocket of a coat hanging in a wardrobe in a spare bedroom that used to belong to Tommy’s brother. Since the brother was studying in the USA, it was uncertain whose tablet it was. We’d been hoping for drugs or guns, but – on this occasion – Little Tommy was clean.

The crew and I took him in for questioning and released him soon after. Once we knew what he looked like, we were able to spot him in local watering holes. We’d do our Friday night drinks at certain pubs and if we happened to overhear certain things, all the better for us.

The Union Hotel in Union Street, West Brunswick, was notorious for the folk it attracted. On Thursday and Friday nights, it was famous for its topless barmaids and strippers. For any cop who worked at Brunswick in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Union Hotel was always a place we could go to find someone we were looking for – and if they weren’t there, someone would tell us where to find them. We also made it clear to the licensee of the hotel that it would be in the best interests of their licence that we find the people we were looking for. Within 24 hours, we’d normally get the information we were after.

The Brunswick CIB had a corner at the Union Hotel on a Thursday or Friday night, and we kept an eye on the crooks while they watched the motley strippers, who mostly looked as if they were dancing to support their drug habits. Most of the time, I stood with my back to the performers, keeping an eye on what was perhaps the cream of Brunswick’s crop of criminals. The lifeblood of detective work is information, and you can’t get that at a computer. While we’ve received a lot of criticism about watching crooks there, we had to be where the crooks were to find out who they were associating with and what they were up to. You drank for a couple of hours in your CIB corner, then went to the men’s room, where you’d stand next to a bloke you might have arrested or had dealings with. Sometimes these side-by-side urinal meetings were deathly uncomfortable, but other times a conversation would start up.

It was in this pub that I bumped into Little Tommy again. He knew the owner. The way things worked was that the owner of the pub was a conduit between the cops and the crooks. He’d come over and chat with the cops, but he usually perched in his spot at the end of the bar. Most people would pay their respects to him, then split off into their own separate groups: bikies, burglars, thieves and drug dealers. And cops.

When I spotted Little Tommy, I waited for him to greet the owner, and then went over to him to play cat and mouse.

‘How ya goin’, Tommy?’ I asked, taking a sip of beer. ‘What brings you to this pub?’ I hadn’t seen him there before and I’d certainly spent enough time there scanning the faces.

Little Tommy’s response was cautious but friendly. He knew the lie of the land; no hard feelings. He seemed pretty confident that the one ecstasy tablet we’d found during the raid on his house couldn’t be used against him.

And he was right. On the brief of evidence, I’d recommended that no charges be laid on the one tablet we’d found in the brother’s bedroom, since there was no way of proving who it belonged to. My senior sergeant agreed with my assessment and signed off on it.

After that, I saw him occasionally at the pub and always made a point of saying hello. One time, I spent a few minutes chatting to Tommy and the owner of the pub, and after Tommy had left us, a drunk guy came over and asked what we were doing talking to Little Tommy.

‘He’s a fuckin’ dead man walkin’,’ the man slurred.

You hear that kind of talk a hundred times a night in that pub, so I just told him to bugger off. But on reflection it was strange the guy said it so early in the evening – most death threats came later, when everybody was pissed. I didn’t think anything of it at the time. I didn’t make a note of it or put it in an information report, because there was nothing to indicate that the guy was serious. You hear this every day of the week, especially at the Union.

 

The more I learnt about Little Tommy, the more I saw how connected he was. After a couple of months, I was moved to the Broadmeadows Regional Response unit, based in a covert location in Essendon. There were about thirty plain-clothes police supported by a surveillance unit of about a dozen members. For me, this was a step closer to getting back to detective work. I was put in charge of a small crew. We were pretty much doing drug operations, because that work dominated our area.

I had a knack of talking to crooks and getting information, and I decided to target Tommy Ivanovic because he kept appearing on my radar. I’d see him drive past if we were doing a raid, and he seemed to be on the periphery of some of the jobs – not just those my squad was working on, but ones all the squads were working on.

All along, I was looking for promotion. I wanted to work my way up past the small-fry Brunswick junkies and topless bars. A detective is only as good as his information, and I knew that I had to be innovative in my approach. I wanted to court Little Tommy as a possible source of information. This was a delicate process: Little Tommy would run a mile from the very notion of helping police.

But that didn’t mean he had to know about it.

I registered Little Tommy as an informer, so if he did let anything slip that I could later use, he’d have a registered number that would protect his identity. In those days, registering an informer meant that you needed to let your bosses know, and then the informer’s name would be written on a sheet that was kept in the safe of the local detective superintendent.

I didn’t know if he’d ever provide any information, but it was worth listing his name anyway. Registering informers was a detective’s job. When you went for promotion, the board would always ask about the informers you had registered. The fact that I could tell a future promotions board that I’d listed Tommy Ivanovic would be good for my career. When I read off his list of associates – which consisted of some big names – it would sound even better.

Only a day or two after I officially listed him as an informer in 2002, I got a phone call telling me that Little Tommy Ivanovic had been arrested for murder. He’d been involved in a shooting outside his parents’ place. Apparently, a motorbike rider had followed Tommy home after a road-rage incident. Fearful and suspicious, he’d shot the guy because he thought he was after him. The security cameras Tommy had installed at his house had captured the shooting on film.

After his arrest, Little Tommy had asked to speak to me, but the arresting officers refused his request. I was glad. While I’d developed a bit of a rapport with him the couple of times we’d met, there was nothing I could do for him, and I had nothing to say except ‘Bad luck, mate, they got you on video. Better ’fess up to your sins.’

After Little Tommy had been locked up for a while, facing a trial and long jail sentence, I changed my mind about seeing him. I discussed this with my bosses and they agreed it was worth visiting him to see if he wanted to do any deals. He was connected to all the good crooks, and there was no telling what a desperate man might give up. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

The first time I saw him in jail, we had a general chat about the Union Hotel and the owner. I told him who I’d been locking up and we discussed people we knew.

Tommy Ivanovic didn’t give much away, but rapport must be built slowly and carefully. At no time did I ever tell Little Tommy that I’d registered him as an informer – he’d never have agreed to take the risk. Being an informer from prison was as good as painting a big red target on your forehead. Murder might have carried a stiff penalty, but being an informer carried a death sentence.

 

It took about a year for Tommy Ivanovic’s murder case to come to trial. Tommy’s barrister, Robert Richter, a top criminal lawyer, flagged a claim of self-defence. After the road-rage incident, the L-plater motorcyclist had followed Tommy to his home and a scuffle had broken out. Tommy later said that he shot the unarmed man in self-defence. He said that he lived in fear of his life. The surveillance cameras that had caught the shooting on film certainly seemed to suggest either fear or paranoia.

One day, a detective from the Homicide Squad approached me and asked if Tommy had ever told me of any threats made against him.

No, I told the detective, Little Tommy never said anything to me about being in danger, but the conversation reminded me of the incident in the pub where the guy had called Tommy a dead man walking. I explained that I didn’t take the threat seriously and nothing had changed in the meantime to make me think any differently. Nonetheless, I was asked to make a formal statement and include the threat. The pub owner, who’d been standing with me at the time, corroborated my story.

The Homicide detectives weren’t happy. Here was a cop who could potentially provide the defence with corroboration that there were threats against Tommy Ivanovic.

To counterbalance this, the detectives wanted me to name Tommy as a police informer in my statement. They knew that if I did this, then Tommy and his lawyers would never use my statement in court. If it came out that Tommy was an informer – a ‘dog’ in prison parlance – it would be dangerous for him.

I flatly refused to add it to my statement for two reasons. First, Tommy had never agreed to be an informer – I’d put him down as one in the hope of getting intel out of him, and he never even knew. Secondly, if Tommy was outed as an informer, it could get him killed.

I wrote my statement and made it very clear I didn’t consider the threat at the pub a serious one, then or now. I was called into the Office of Public Prosecutions and questioned by a senior detective and senior prosecutor over that bit of my statement.

‘But that basically gives him an out!’ the prosecutor said.

I shrugged. ‘It’s the truth,’ I replied, in the mistaken belief that the truth was the right thing.

‘But why are you only saying this now?’ he asked.

‘Hey, mate, no-one’s asked until now,’ I said. ‘Homicide came to me. I never knew anything about this.’

When the murder happened, I’d rung a mate at Homicide and told him that I’d registered Tommy as an informer. At the time, the detective told me that because the whole thing was caught on film, they wouldn’t need a statement from me. No worries, I said.

I explained all of this to the OPP guy, but I sensed that all was not well. I went out, leaving behind a senior prosecutor and a senior detective looking very upset. Next thing I knew, Ethical Standards detectives were down in the Homicide Squad copying all my records. Gossip being what it is in the police force, I heard almost immediately, but I shrugged it off. I knew I’d done nothing wrong, and knew they wouldn’t find anything.

Despite being pretty career driven, I knew that I’d shot myself in the foot by refusing to do what was asked where Little Tommy was concerned. But there was an integrity line that I’d never cross. I sat down with Superintendent Tony Biggin and told him what was happening. He told me not to put in the statement that Tommy was an informer.

‘And if the guy threatened him in the pub, that’s what happened,’ Biggin said.

‘It’s not going to make them happy,’ I told him.

The superintendent shrugged.

Little Tommy’s defence barrister, Robert Richter, wanted to meet with me, but I didn’t feel comfortable meeting with the defence, and in the end, I wasn’t called as a witness on either side.