Chapter 10

Putting together the brief

Back at the Major Drug Investigation Division offices, we were oblivious to the behind-closed-doors meetings conducted by the Ethical Standards Department.

On Thursday 2 October 2003, five days after the Dublin Street burglary, my colleague Detective Senior Constable Samantha Jennings gave a statement to ESD. She gave her background at the MDID, describing how she’d been leading Operation Galop and how she’d been allocated to bring the operation over to my crew about two months earlier. She gave a brief background of the investigation, then brought her narrative around to changing the tapes at the surveillance house. She wrote in her statement that on the Friday night, she was heading off for an appointment in Geelong and had Saturday off; she hadn’t had a day off for two weeks. She and Dave Miechel were the last at the office. Before she left, he offered to change the tapes the following day so that she didn’t have to drive back from Geelong to do it. She told Dave about the spare set of keys kept in my desk drawer and watched as he fetched them.

Sam talked about the night of the robbery. She’d received a phone call from a member of our crew asking her if it was some kind of joke that the Dublin Street house had been compromised. She recalled ringing me and said that I clarified that something had happened and that Dave was in the hospital, bitten by a dog. She said she assumed he’d been bitten by one of the dogs guarding the drug house.

Sam said that she’d been told of the possibility that there was a relationship between Dave Miechel and a woman involved in the drug scene. Sam said that she knew Dave had a girlfriend, but she’d never met her. ‘I would describe him as a real loner,’ she wrote in her statement. ‘He is a very hard person to talk to. He is just very quiet. I have never socialised with Miech or met his friends.’

Sam also said something of note in her statement: ‘We always expected that there would be drugs in the house, but weren’t sure how much money, if any, would be in the house. It wasn’t till the Saturday night when I reviewed the telephone intercepts that I ascertained that there would be a large quantity of money taken to Sydney in exchange for drugs. I don’t know whether this call was made on the Friday night or the Saturday night. I don’t know if any of my fellow crew members had listened to this call prior to me listening to it. So as far as what money or drugs would have been located at Dublin Street on the Saturday night, I would have had no idea and to my knowledge, neither would any of my crew members. We would certainly have expected something to be there, but as far as amounts, there was no way of telling.’

Later, drug dealer Azzam Ahmed would claim that he had hundreds of thousands of dollars in the drug house on the night of the burglary. No money was ever located, and the suggestion, often repeated in the media as fact, was that somehow I ended up with it. This non-existent money was rumoured to be the source of the huge amounts I offered for hitmen. But that would come later.

Sam finished her statement: ‘I would like to add that Operation Galop was an extremely complex and time-consuming investigation and although I was not daunted by the task of being given the job, I was nevertheless requiring a lot of guidance. I found Sergeant Dale to be extremely helpful, patient and thorough during the handling of this investigation. Sergeant Dale showed a lot of confidence in my abilities, by letting me make decisions, and assisted me with those decisions. At no time do I feel that any decisions made by Sergeant Dale were negligible or compromised the investigation. I feel confident in his abilities and leadership.’

Sam signed her statement at 2.26 p.m. at the Corruption Investigation Division at the Victoria Police Centre in Flinders Street.

Just over two hours later, at 4.44 p.m., Sam Jennings signed an amended version of her statement with the same senior constable who took her first statement. This one, however, was made at the offices of the Ceja anti-corruption taskforce. Sam began this new statement by acknowledging that she’d made a statement earlier in the day and now, only hours later, she wished to add more information. She didn’t state whether this was by her own choice or at someone else’s request.

As a detective, I always tried to get all of the information in the first statement, because the more statements and additions a witness made, the easier it was to discredit their ability to recall the facts. The time between statements also tested a witness’s memory. Sam Jennings would eventually make five statements over six years.

Sam opened her amended statement with a description of a reconnaissance mission our crew had done on the Dublin Street house a month earlier. She described how she’d accompanied Dave and me and two other crew members into the back yard of the surveillance house and looked over the fence into the Dublin Street house.

‘There was easy access to the address from this property. D/S/C Miechel jumped the back fence whilst I remained in the property behind. I kept watch whilst he listened at the back window of the address. He came back a short time later and said he could hear a sound similar to a hand-operated pill press in the back room. He was never out of my sight during this. We both attended back to Sergeant Dale.’

Sam Jennings described a couple of nights’ surveillance on the Dublin Street house. She described jumping the fence on a second occasion with other crew members and hearing the distinctive clunk of the pill press every few seconds.

She also said that the curtains were closed at the house and it was hard to get the lie of the land. She asked tech support at work if she could get copies of the house plan so that she could see the layout. She described showing the plans to Dave Miechel. She added that Dave had the numbers and passwords so that he could monitor the phone intercepts. She said that generally the location of drugs at the Dublin Street house was not mentioned, but on a couple of occasions, the phone intercepts had picked up that there were drugs hidden in the freezer, food cupboards and range hood. ‘Any person monitoring these calls would have knowledge of these locations where the drugs were supposedly kept,’ Sam finished.

If you had to guess, reading both the statements, the extra information would have been as a result of the line of questioning being pursued at the time. Sam didn’t give a statement, then two hours later slap herself on the forehead, head back to a different taskforce and say, ‘Oh, I forgot a couple of things.’

Sam would give a third brief statement when she handed over the grainy surveillance tapes, and then it would be four years before she formally spoke to investigators again. Not, I assume, as a matter of forgetfulness, but rather in response to very specific questions designed to make me look guilty. I was a cop too. I know how it works.

 

In the two months after the burglary, we spent all our time putting together the brief of evidence for the Operation Galop players. The team worked closely together.

In light of Terry Hodson’s arrest, there was a mad scramble to look back on the paperwork to see that it was in order. All of a sudden, there were bosses scurrying around to make sure they’d dotted their ‘i’s and covered their butts. If Terry was in fact buying drugs from Lucky, was there a corresponding section 51 authorising him to do so? Given Terry’s nature and his rampant drug buying to keep us active on cases, we didn’t have all the corresponding paperwork up to date. In fact, I can’t think of any division – unless it was a pure paperwork division in fiction land – that would have all its paperwork up to date.

There were a lot of section 51 forms that allowed indemnity for a one-off drug buy. They had to be initiated by a senior sergeant or above, and technically there needed to be one for each and every time Terry had purchased drugs for us. Information reports were completed and filed in Hodson’s informer management file – which was no doubt looking a lot thicker than the one that Superintendent Anthony Biggin had given to ESD the day after the break-in.

Our bosses had always known what we were doing and when we were meeting Terry. My crew always told the bosses when Terry alerted us to his drug buys. He did have some indemnities to allow him to buy some drugs. I was confident my crew had followed the correct protocols.

I too spent time transcribing my day-to-day scribbled notes from an exercise book into my official diary. We all did this once a week and had to show it to our bosses in order to claim overtime and meal allowances. The official diaries were A4 sized and too bulky to carry – not to mention the fact that they were emblazoned with the official police insignia, which wasn’t good when we were in plain clothes trying to blend into the community. All of us carried smaller notepads to make notes on the fly. Some pages ended up with unrelated stuff. If my wife called me at work with a shopping list or a reminder to get nappies, I’d jot it down with my notes. When I finished transcribing my notes, I’d tear any nappy/shopping pages and chuck them in the bin. The rest were kept as a backup to my official diary.

A document examiner later said that the indentations under one of my torn-out pages looked like a running sheet, making it sound like I had something to hide by tearing out a page. But as a plain-clothes operative, I didn’t even use a running sheet.

There was a lot of police gossip surrounding Dave Miechel and his involvement in the Oakleigh robbery. Even the New South Wales detectives were ringing us from Sydney with the gossip they’d heard. When a police officer is pretty much caught red-handed at the scene of a major break-in, everything explodes around it. I guess we didn’t really question Dave’s arrest. We all knew that there was a close relationship between Dave and Terry, and I suppose we put two and two together from the fact they had both been arrested at the scene.

One problem that surfaced soon after the break-in was that detectives from the Ethical Standards Department began getting up in court and challenging our evidence. They were even asking for closed hearings that excluded MDID detectives from our own cases – hearings like those of drug-house babysitter Abbey Haynes and Azzam Ahmed’s girlfriend, Colleen O’Reilly.

There was clearly more going on than simply Dave and Terry being arrested. Deals were being done without our crew’s knowledge. Unbelievably, some of these people who were up to their eyeballs in trafficable quantities of drugs – which carried a life sentence in prison – were offered indemnities! We felt that ESD were sabotaging our hard work. I even complained to Superintendent Biggin that I was attending court only to be removed by Superintendent Dick Daly and Murray Gregor.

There was a feeling of unease around Daly and Gregor when they spoke to me. Because we saw ESD as the enemy, it was always a little strained anyway, but this was something more. I already knew that they’d tried to put words into Sam Jennings’s mouth, and now they were trying to do deals with the crooks we were trying to lock up.

Giving indemnity to Abbey Haynes would later come back to bite them.1 The young drug-house babysitter clearly knew more than she was saying in her statements. I wonder if they ever stopped to ask her why she arranged to go out on the Saturday night of the robbery when the house was full of hundreds of thousands of dollars in drugs. She hadn’t left the house before – it was her job not to leave. All of our reports and surveillance stated that we couldn’t install listening devices because she never left the house. And then, suddenly, a friend who she won’t name – despite the promise of indemnity – calls her and says, ‘Hey, come out for a drink,’ and without hesitating, she goes.

Abbey Haynes would later know two weeks before the Hodsons were murdered that they were going to die. But she wouldn’t share this with the police until long after they were dead.

When Abbey Haynes sat down for her formal interview on 15 October 2003, nearly three weeks after the robbery, it was clear that deals had been struck. The third paragraph of her statement included the following: ‘I also make it on the understanding that this statement will not be used as evidence in relation to the criminal [drug] charges pending against me or any other person as the result of an investigation conducted by members of the Major Drug Investigation Division known as Operation Galop.’

Asked to describe her movements on the night of the break-in, Abbey Haynes said that she was called by a friend to come and visit them, either in Prahran or South Yarra – she couldn’t remember which. She said she left the house at 6.30 p.m. and returned by 8.30. It’s not in her statement, but a quick look at the street directory shows the distance between East Oakleigh and South Yarra is around twenty kilometres – at least half an hour one way, or an hour to get there and back.

And she was only gone for two hours. To visit a friend for just an hour. Leaving a house full of drugs that she’d never left before.

What did Abbey Haynes know? Why did she leave?

But alas, having been given indemnity in exchange for a statement, in this case, she wasn’t pushed for details.

Abbey Haynes spent the bulk of her statement listing all of the drugs that had been in the house. It was later claimed that hundreds of thousands of dollars went missing during the break-in, but Abbey Haynes said at the end of the statement: ‘The Drug Squad located the only cash in the house when they did their search. There was no other money in the house on this day.’

 

In the meantime, Terry Hodson was talking to ESD at a covert location. At 4.15 p.m. on 7 October, ten days after his arrest, he sat down with Detective Senior Sergeant Murray Gregor and Detective Inspector Peter De Santo.2

Without stating the exact nature of whatever inducement they had given Terry, Murray Gregor referred to it nonetheless.

‘Terry, as previously explained to you, the inducement I gave you is still in place.’

‘Yes,’ Terry replied.

De Santo handed Terry a red pen, and the two cops encouraged him to mark on a map his movements the night of the Dublin Street break-in. Gone were the cagey responses from the previous interviews. Terry was fired up and prepped. For several minutes, the trio discussed some people Terry said he’d seen walking on the street as he and Dave left the drug house.

‘You couldn’t help but miss us, walking that way,’ said Terry. They were only about four metres away when they all passed each other.

‘Did he have a balaclava or was it a beanie?’ asked Gregor.

‘He wore – you know, the police one? The black one you’re supplied with,’ said Terry.

De Santo spluttered a bit when he heard that.

Terry said that he and Dave had gone up to the school, around the corner from the Dublin Street house.

‘That was where you were arrested, was it?’ prompted Gregor.

‘Yes, yeah. The exact spot.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Then we see the police van—’

‘You’re both at that location?’

‘Yes.’

‘And could you see it from there?’ asked Gregor.

‘Yeah, cos of his light. He had his spotlight on.’

‘And what did Dave say?’

‘He said, “No, don’t panic. Don’t panic.” He says, “It’s not unusual for a divvy van to put his spotlight on.” He says, “Get rid of the balaclava and the gloves.” I just threw the gloves and the bally into the back of the car,’ said Terry.

‘So you’ve left from where you’re standing?’ asked De Santo.

‘Yeah.’

‘Is it correct to say the police car’s driven past with the spotlight on?’

‘Yep. That’s come down here,’ said Terry, pointing to the map.

‘You’ve then left David. You’ve left Miechel and gone to your car… or you were at your car?’

‘No. I went to the car. He—’

‘Went to the car when he’s told you to do this?’

‘Yep. He stood by the sheds.’

Terry described returning to his car and throwing his gloves and balaclava in the hidden back compartment in his boot. ‘And threw it, pulled it down and threw it in there but I didn’t shut it up properly because you could see activity up on Dublin Street, with the police cars.’

Terry was a little vague about what happened next, and neither cop asked him why, if Terry was at his car and knew the Dublin Street house was swarming with cops, he didn’t simply hop in his car and drive off rather than walk back to the sheds, where he was nabbed a short time later. Or why Dave, who was up the road at the school, free and clear of the robbery scene, would go back to the house that had police cars with flashing lights out the front and be caught there.

Inspector De Santo said, ‘So he walked in the direction of the school and…?’

‘Yeah.’ After some to-ing and fro-ing, Terry added, ‘Yes, that’s the last I saw of him.’

Terry then described how he waited a good ten minutes at the school until a cop came and arrested him. ‘The next thing is, the police dogs charging at me and an officer telling me to get on the ground.’

Again, De Santo didn’t press Terry as to why, if he and Dave had escaped capture at the drug house, they both hung around to be captured shortly afterwards.

When asked about the small amount of cocaine found on him that night, Terry admitted snorting some to help him relax just before he met Dave.

Gregor filled in the next bit about Terry being taken to the Oakleigh police station. He asked Terry about the story he’d told that night when Gregor and Daly had first interviewed him.

‘Yeah, that was bare-faced lies,’ Terry admitted.

‘How’d you come up with that story?’ asked Gregor.

‘Well, I’d been arrested with the coke and I knew I’d been working on Lucky for three months and not realising that Dave had been pinched, I thought, well, here’s a good reason why I should be here.’

‘Something which might stand up to scrutiny or an argument later on?’

‘Yeah.’

Terry said that he’d seen an ambulance arrive and one of the arresting officers had told him that Dave had been bitten.

‘I thought, I’m in big shit. That’s the truth.’

It was at this stage of the interview that my name came up. Terry said he’d asked the sergeant at Glen Waverley to get in touch with Paul Dale. ‘I told him that I was a registered informer and I couldn’t discuss anything, but if you could get the sergeant.’

‘And you were released – have you had any contact with Dave Miechel or Paul Dale, directly or indirectly?’ asked Gregor.

‘I haven’t had any contact with Dave Miechel, but I got a call on Saturday night at 5 p.m. and I believe it was from Paul.’

‘And what was said?’ asked Gregor.

‘They asked to speak – my wife answered the phone. They asked to speak to me. They had an urgent message.’

‘To speak to who?’ interrupted De Santo. ‘Terry or Terry Hodson or?’

‘Terry,’ said Terry.

‘So the person indicated it was an urgent message?’ repeated Gregor.

‘Yes. Yes. The guy said I – I never – I didn’t recognise the voice, let’s put it that way. And the message was – we’re – we’re all family, and we look after each other and there’s no reason to go on board with anyone.’

‘Did you respond?’ asked De Santo.

‘Yeah. I says, “Everything’s fine.”’

‘Any response from that?’

‘No,’ said Terry.

‘What? They just hung up?’

‘Yep.’

Terry said that his wife, Christine, had thought she heard STD pips when she answered the phone.

Gregor brought the questioning around to the reason Terry had come forward. ‘Just to clarify things, Terry, you agree that a message was communicated to you via a third person? As a result of that, you attended at the ESD offices last Friday on the third of October where we had a conversation about ESD’s interest in pursing David Miechel and any other police member that was involved in this.’

‘Yes.’

‘As a result of that, we agreed on, I’ll say [a] “game plan”, in the event that anybody asks us what was the purpose of your attendance at ESD and what the outcome of that meeting was?’

‘Yes.’

‘And the agreement by all parties, being the three of us here, was that we would say that you politely told us that you didn’t want to assist us and you were prepared to take your chances.’

Murray Gregor went over what they’d discussed at the previous meeting. Terry had apparently told them that he’d met with Dave and they’d discussed the drugs that were being kept at the Dublin Street house.

‘He said that they were bringing in 20,000 Es down from Sydney.’

‘You were aware that these dealers in this target address were large-scale dealers?’ said De Santo.

‘Right,’ Terry agreed.

‘It wasn’t a bloody two-bit operation!’

‘And the investigation that the Major Drug Investigation unit had underway had a lot of police resources into it and it was one of their major investigations.’

‘Well, Dave did tell me that – no, sorry – Paul told me that Jim O’Brien – it was his biggest job. He – and when it was gonna get done, he’d be pissed right off.’

‘That Jim O’Brien would be pissed right off when it had been – the place – the job had been – I won’t say sold out but the target house had been burgled?’ asked Gregor.

‘Yes. Yes.’

‘Do you know what the operation was called?’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘All right.’

‘I really don’t.’

‘All right.’

‘They didn’t tell me. They only told me what they wanted me to know.’

‘All right. Just recapping. There was an agreement between the three of you that the proceeds were gonna be split—’

‘Three ways,’ Terry added.

‘And that they expected at least a couple of hundred thousand in there?’

‘Yes.’

Murray Gregor took the interview back to the specifics of the robbery. He and De Santo tried to pin Terry down on the size and weight of the bag used in the break-in. Terry admitted carrying one of the bags, but he said that once inside the drug house, he didn’t see Dave.

‘I only saw him when we went in the door and when we come out.’

Minutes later, Murray Gregor decided to stop the interview. ‘We had grand plans to be doing a statement straight after this, but I don’t think any of us are in the position to do that because we’ve been going for a fair while and we’re all probably pretty mentally—’

‘Drained?’ Terry finished.

‘Drained,’ Gregor agreed. ‘So what I intend to do at this stage is, from my notes, I will draft a statement up cos I’ve taken fairly – quite extensive notes just in relation to what we discussed and obviously I’m gonna have to then sit down with you and go through it again to make sure we’ve got everything right as per the script, as you’ve told it.’

‘Yep.’

Inspector De Santo closed the interview.