Chapter 5

The Drug Squad

Our operations in Essendon focused exclusively on suburban-level drug dealers. While you enter the fight against drugs with fists raised, wanting to make a difference, it soon becomes apparent that there’s not much chance of stamping out the scourge at a grassroots level. We were dealing with a multi-million-dollar industry, but the police powers that be wouldn’t even give us a mobile phone. Ironically, the guys we were chasing were changing mobile phones as often as they changed their underpants. We were under-resourced, and there didn’t seem to be much support for this type of criminal investigation. Under Chief Commissioner Christine Nixon, all the policies and funding seemed to be directed towards new notions of proactive policing. At least, that’s what it seemed like from where we stood.

After my experience as a detective and my time at the Lorimer Taskforce, my CV was looking pretty healthy. I could manage a team and lead people, and after working on drug cases at a local level, the Drug Squad seemed the next logical step. I imagined a well-oiled machine with much bigger budgets, giving us the ability to hook much bigger fish. I went for a couple of interviews and was offered a position as a detective sergeant.

 

After a spotted history in the 1990s, the Drug Squad had been renamed the Major Drug Investigation Division – or MDID, if you’re in a hurry. It’s worth looking back at the troubles before my time, because what happened during my time echoed what had come before.

In 1996, highly commended Drug Squad detective Senior Sergeant Wayne Strawhorn had done a study tour overseas and returned home with an innovative idea: undercover operatives would sell police-supplied pseudoephedrine to illegal drug manufacturers, then detectives would follow the trail and nab those further up the chain. The difficulty for illicit drug manufacturers was always in the supply. If Victoria Police kept the supplies flowing, then the meth cooks, the dealers and the bigwigs were there for the catching. So the theory went.

While there were some great busts from the so-called Clandestine Laboratories program, there was a niggling view that Victoria Police was sort of in the drug business too. They were purchasing chemicals for a few hundred dollars, then members of the Drug Squad were selling them on for about forty times that amount.1

In January 2002, after a wave of adverse publicity, Victoria Police established the Ceja Taskforce, headed by Peter De Santo, to investigate allegations against the Drug Squad. The allegations included theft, the fabrication of evidence, drug use by squad members and the unauthorised purchase and distribution of chemicals.

By the time I got to the Major Drug Investigation Division later that year, the Clandestine Laboratories program had been shut down and some of the key officers involved were facing charges. Strawhorn himself had been transferred to another division and would later be charged with supplying Mark Moran with two kilos of pure pseudoephedrine without the approval of his commander. The pseudoephedrine cost $340 and was sold to Moran for $12,000 through an intermediary. After the shakeup came the horse-trading: a couple of officers who were caught up in the scandal agreed to give evidence against Strawhorn in return for reduced charges, which of course meant reduced jail sentences.

Any squad that requires its officers to mingle with crims and befriend them to get information is always open to failures in the system. Nonetheless, procedures had been put in place to ensure failures were minimal. There was a new commander, Anthony Biggin, who was highly regarded for his work during Operation Bart – the 1990s investigation into police taking bribes from window-shutter companies in return for giving them contracts to install shutters on damaged premises. Biggin’s fight against corruption and his ethical standards were well known, and his appointment meant that he’d run a tight ship.

When I moved to the Major Drug Investigation Division in June 2002, the scandal had died down and the people responsible for it had gone. New name, new era. Or so the thinking went.

 

Within the St Kilda Road police complex, the MDID occupied the twelfth floor. While parts of the Victoria Police complex had impressive views of the city, Albert Park Lake or the green oval of Melbourne Grammar School, our section looked inwards to the clutter of the office. We were surrounded by safes and filing cabinets, which were chock-a-block with blue folders from past and current cases.

As the fresh-faced new guy, I noticed a whiff of suspicion as soon as I arrived. I guessed that was the result of the place having suffered a recent siege. I half wondered if they thought I was a mole in the squad. I could understand it, because they’d been through such an upheaval. The only friendly face was a fellow sergeant called Graham Sayce. And while my former partner Dave Miechel was a familiar face, it wasn’t exactly a friendly one.

My first impressions of the Major Drug Investigation Division were a little disappointing. I suspected it might be a tough battle to stamp my authority as a detective sergeant – the guy with fresh ideas meets the brick wall of an established squad. Nonetheless, I was keen and raring to go. I pictured myself targeting the Mr Bigs of the drug world and making a difference.

The truth was a long way from that.

Experience had taught me that to run a good investigation, you needed a good budget and generous resources. I soon found out that resources were little better than they’d been anywhere else I’d worked. While we were officially called the Major Drug Investigation Division, I soon began calling us the Medium Drug Investigation Division, because even though we could run a good investigation and hunt down a chain of suppliers, budgetary constraints meant that we’d often be told to end an investigation before getting to the big fish. If we needed, say, $20,000 to do a big drug buy to facilitate an arrest, we’d be told we couldn’t have it. These figures were small change in the drug world, and it was impossible for Victoria Police to play in the big league without big bucks.

After the recent troubles, a tightening of the rules had occurred. The MDID could no longer supply pseudoephedrine to drug dealers, but Strawhorn’s technique of supplying some of the elements required in drug manufacture was still used. We could supply things like a pill press and then arrest the dealers who used it. If we knew of crooks who had a pill press, we might hook them up with an informer who could supply key ingredients of ecstasy. Then we’d come in at the end of the operation and arrest all the key players. This meant that Victoria Police were no longer supplying drug chemicals; we were simply introducing crooks to crooks who needed each other.

 

When I got to the MDID, I spoke to the bosses about Little Tommy Ivanovic. He was still waiting for his case to go to trial, and I discussed the possibility of continuing to court him for information. They agreed, and I went to see him again in prison.

On the first visit, I got a sense of some potential. If you didn’t work it, you never got anywhere. On the second visit, Little Tommy mentioned a very good friend of his called Carl Williams.

‘You wanna know what’s going on out on the streets, go meet Carl,’ Little Tommy said. He gave me Williams’s phone number.

I’d never heard of Carl Williams – crooks weren’t household names until Underbelly hit our TV screens – but I was happy to meet him to see what he had to say. I took this information back to the MDID bosses. When I typed his name into the police LEAP computer system I found out that he was on bail after a large drug-trafficking arrest: he’d been caught with a couple of hundred thousand dollars in cash, and the corresponding crooks had been caught with drugs. I could see from Carl Williams’s record that he was the type of crook we could possibly use.

‘What do you reckon?’ I said to the bosses. ‘I’ve got his phone number.’

‘Go meet him,’ they said.

When I rang Carl Williams, he was expecting my call and agreed to meet me at a shopping centre out Airport West way. He sounded friendly. Before the meeting, we had been briefed by some other detectives who also wanted intel from Williams, but at this early stage, the fewer people who knew about our meeting, the better.

I asked Dave Miechel to go with me. Dave filled me in on the background of Carl Williams and his history: Williams had an ongoing feud with the Moran brothers; one of them had even shot Williams in the guts during a confrontation in a park. At that stage, the big question was who had shot Williams – Jason or Mark Moran – so that was on our list of conversation topics.

We met in the food court of the shopping centre. Carl Williams was alone, but we wondered if he had support out of sight nearby. Williams would later be portrayed on TV as the dumb-arse from Broady, but he wasn’t as silly as he looked. As much as we had a game plan and strategy, so did he. We sought information from him, but he wanted it from us too. The police, however, had a strategy of providing misinformation. At the first meeting, we talked about historical stuff. I think, in hindsight, that first meeting was a bit of a credibility test. Fortunately, Dave was a wealth of knowledge on the past, and he was able to keep the conversation going.

We talked about Tommy Ivanovic, since Tommy was our intro-duction. When the conversation finally came around to the Morans, whom Williams clearly hated, I asked the big question.

‘We know one of them shot you,’ I said. ‘So which one?’

‘Jason,’ he replied.

We’d got what no other cops had been able to – the name of the shooter.

Once we’d established a rapport, we told him that we’d like to chat with him further if he was happy to.

‘Yeah, no worries. Any friend of Tommy’s is a friend of mine,’ he said.

And that was that.

Back at the office, we met with the bosses for a full debrief and gave them everything Williams had given us. We wrote up our notes from the meeting into statements, which were handed on to the bosses.

And after that it was business as usual.

 

When David Miechel was allocated to my crew, I was happy to have an experienced investigator on my team. The fact that we’d worked together years earlier was good, and I thought Dave would be a great asset. Dave was still as private a person as he’d ever been; he’d be happy to sit for an eight-hour shift and say nothing at all. His head was full of intel, but he would share very little of it.

One pattern that quickly established itself was that I’d run a meeting as the sergeant and invite input. Dave, a senior constable, would say nothing. Then I’d make a decision about something we were going to do, and I could sense that Dave was fuming. It became really frustrating; he was happy to sit there and add nothing to the decision-making process, but when others made decisions, he’d feel resentful.

I half wondered if he resented the fact that I’d got my sergeant’s promotion and become a detective, which effectively meant that I was two steps above him. It was the only thing I could think of to explain our new lack of rapport. I remembered Dave as a team player, but something had changed in the intervening years that had closed him off. It was almost like our days of catching crooks at Moonee Ponds never existed. I wondered if he resented me as a newcomer. A small part of me also wondered if Dave Miechel saw me as a plant, since he’d been part of Wayne Strawhorn’s team. Or maybe Dave thought, who is Dale to come in here and tell me how to work drugs when I’ve been doing this for five years and he’s been doing it for five minutes?

It took a good twelve months from when I started in MDID in 2002 for Dave Miechel to relax and some of our old rapport to return. I probably got as close to him as anyone could get, which wasn’t close at all.

I guess most of us felt that Dave was strange because he didn’t talk. So much of policing is about teamwork, and for him to be so solitary within the team was odd. Still, he’d been at the MDID for years and had a good arrest record.

There was a measure of paranoia in MDID, and this was something I inherited. After they’d been targeted ruthlessly by the Ethical Standards Department, the MDID began doing things a little differently to protect itself. One thing they did was to bypass the ISIS computer system used by Victoria Police. You were supposed to record jobs you did or information you received so it could be accessed by other people in other squads. But because the MDID was paranoid about ESD second-guessing their investigations, detectives decided not to make it easy for the toe-cutters, and a lot of information wasn’t added into the system.

Information about Terry Hodson was a prime example.