Chapter 12

A dangerous game

When Acting Superintendent Dick Daly spoke to Terry Hodson on New Year’s Day 2004, three months after the break-in, Terry told him that other members of his family wanted to ‘provide information’ to the police, just like he had.1 By that stage, they had had three months to come up with a story.

On Monday 5 January 2004, Terry Hodson spoke to Daly again, this time about a security concern. He said that a guy named Frank had come to his house a few days earlier looking for him, but a woman at the house had told Frank that Terry was locked up and wasn’t at home.

When talking to the superintendent, Terry was a little cagey about Frank’s real identity, but he admitted that Frank came from Brunswick and had connections with the Mokbel family.2 This had to be a real threat to Terry; although it took police a long time to establish that Tony Mokbel was the distributor for the drug house, Terry himself would have known that he’d crossed Big Tony big time.

Frank wasn’t the only man who came looking for Terry in early January 2004. Terry also told Daly that the same woman had spoken to Jayson Rodda in the street outside his Harp Road house. Apparently, he’d given Terry ‘advice about his security’. Jayson Rodda and Terry had a long history – most of it revolving around Terry informing on Rodda over and over, and Rodda falling for it over and over. And not only that, Jayson Rodda – like a lot of other crooks – had made allegations against MDID detectives arising from an operation in which Terry Hodson had been the informer.3

As well as muddying the waters after an arrest, pointing the finger at a cop also delayed any court cases arising from the arrest, and the crook was virtually guaranteed bail rather than waiting a couple of years in jail while the allegations against so-called ‘crooked cops’ were investigated.

By 2003, this had almost become a spectator sport. When Underbelly aired on Australian TV screens, the question was asked: how come all these crooks were still on the street? The answer is that a bunch of them used cop finger-pointing to get bail.

According to Superintendent Daly’s statement, Gregor took the woman to the CID office for an interview on 7 January 2004 – right after Terry Hodson had told the police of two threatening men she had headed off outside the Harp Road house. Yet her subsequent statement mentions nothing about these threats that were literally at the front door.4

 

On 22 January 2004, the woman gave another statement to Murray Gregor at the Balwyn police station. In it, she spoke about her relationship with Dave Miechel.

She explained that in August 2001, she’d been arrested for trafficking ecstasy. She said she’d never met Senior Detective David Miechel before the arrest.5

She saw him again at Christmas celebrations in 2002. She said she could tell by Dave’s behaviour that he was interested in her that day, and a week later, he attended a New Year’s Eve celebration at her house. Things didn’t go well, she explained to the police interviewing her. ‘I got drunk and for some reason I told Dave to piss off and he left.’

But the good thing about telling someone that you don’t know very well to piss off is that it gives you something to talk about next time you meet. When she saw Dave again, she was able to apologise for her behaviour.

A couple of weeks after that, Dave arrived at her place, having packed a picnic lunch. She said he wanted to take her for a picnic on the back of his motorbike. Not liking bikes, she refused, but she offered to cook him dinner that night instead. She made risotto.

She described her feelings for the police officer who had arrested her: ‘At first, I wasn’t really interested in Dave, but I found him to be a really nice person, so I got more interested in him as time went on. It was obvious that Dave was very interested in me. Dave was a person with few words. I did nearly all the talking. He was very secretive regarding his personal life. Dave talked about doing up his Valiant Chargers and Mini Minors he had back home in Cobram. Dave also told me he had a trail bike. I asked Dave if he had a girlfriend. Dave said he had one about two years ago.’

It was during this statement that the woman introduced the nickname ‘Killer’ when referring to me. I have never been known by anyone as Killer, nor have I ever met her, but she didn’t let this get in the way of her carefully established back-story.

‘Dave used to train at the gym with Paul Dale, who Dave referred to with the nickname “Killer”. Dave told me he was having a competition with Killer in who could reach 100 kilograms in body weight. Dave told me that Paul was on steroids. I never met Killer, but Dave showed me a photograph in which Dave pointed out Killer with other detectives.’

The woman said that she’d never been to Dave’s house and didn’t even know where he lived. So I guess we need to assume that Dave carried around photos of the cops he worked with to show his girlfriend. Inventing the nickname ‘Killer’ also made me sound ruthless, and she used the nickname throughout the rest of her statement. When Terry told her that he had been caught doing a burglary with Dave, she said, ‘I was really angry. I went home and cried for four hours solid and I threw some of the things Dave had given me over the back fence.’

Some days later, she discovered that Terry was helping out the police investigating ‘the burglary that he did with Dave and Killer’. After that, she said, ‘I decided to cooperate as the police thought I was somehow involved in the burglary, which I am not.’

Is it just me, or is this another Hodson associate dealing her way out of charges?

And to add further weight to Dave’s complicity, just in case ESD believed his story about being caught doing legitimate surveillance of the Dublin Street house, the woman told Murray Gregor that Dave had come into the shop where she worked in late November.

‘That was the first time I had seen or heard from him since his arrest. I was very surprised by Dave’s visit. I told Dave to sit down and wait for me to finish… I was pretty angry with Dave. I said, “I should bash you – what you have put me through – you’re a fuckin’ idiot – why did you do it?” Dave just shrugged his shoulders and goes, “Phrww.” And I said, “No, not phrww.” I said, “…How fucking stupid can you be?” Dave said, “Oh, this is going to sound a bit stupid, but I probably did it more for you…” I said, “What’d you do it for me for? Have I ever asked anything from you other than your love and affection?” Dave replied, “Nah.” I then said, “Then why did you do it?” I then got upset and cried and Dave cried as well…

‘I said to Dave, “You know you’re fucked – you’re probably looking at ten years – like is it really worth it?” Dave shook his head and said, “I’ve gotta do what I’ve gotta do.” I said, “Do you know anything of a bag containing money going missing?” I had heard this in the news reports. Dave replied, “Nah, they got everything.” I said, “Well, apparently, according to the paper, they didn’t find this bag with the money in it.” Dave replied, “Well, I haven’t got it.” I told Dave I still loved him and that I might see him again one day. I then gave him a kiss on the cheek and he left.’

So, all up, the woman’s statement implied that Dave had sat with her, cried with her, listened as she told him she loved him, and left never to be seen again.

Sound realistic?

 

Superintendent Dick Daly again acted as chauffeur when Terry Hodson had to attend the committal hearing on the Oakleigh burglary charges. On Wednesday 17 March 2004, the superintendent along with Senior Sergeant Murray Gregor collected Terry from his house and took him off to court, via a cafe near the Victoria Market. Over coffee, the three men talked about expediting the completion of the court proceedings of the charges that Terry was facing. Terry was keen for this to happen.6

Two days earlier, Gregor had received a phone call from Terry. Someone had smashed a bottle against his front door. Terry also thought someone had moved the sensor on his side fence. The surveillance tapes didn’t show anything.

At the Wednesday hearing, the next court date was set for 19 August.

But Terry Hodson would be dead by then.

Murray Gregor would later write in his statement that ‘Hodson was to appear at the Supreme Court for a plea of guilty on 19 August 2004… Terry Hodson had verbally agreed to give evidence against Dale and Miechel. Hodson had been advised via OPP to his solicitor that his assistance in the matter would be communicated to the court at his plea, which would obviously substantially reduce any sentence he would receive.’

I wonder just how ‘substantially’ his sentence would have been reduced in exchange for a statement against me?

 

On Tuesday 20 April, Superintendent Daly visited Terry Hodson at the Harp Road house to discuss security issues surrounding his court case. While the superintendent was there, Terry told him he’d received two calls to his secure mobile phone – an unusual occurrence. Daly made a note of the numbers. Terry also told the police officer that he’d received a visit from an acquaintance named Brett, who’d come to the house and stayed quite some time. In the end, Terry asked him to leave, using the excuse that his wife needed to vacuum the house.7 If Daly was worried at the line of crooks beating a path to Terry’s door, he didn’t detail it in his statements.

And it wasn’t just the lightweight disgruntled crooks from the seedy drug world who were closing in on Terry. There were some real heavyweights in the running as well. It is worth having a look at just who came into Terry Hodson’s orbit, because Terry was playing the dangerous game of providing police with information about his rivals, and apparently dabbling with Lewis Moran in a proposed hit on Carl Williams. In the shifting sands of loyalties, it’s sometimes hard to see all the connections, but with the people Terry had crossed, it was pretty clear.

Journalist Adam Shand had been recorded talking to Carl Williams on a phone tap. Williams was miffed because he found out that Lewis Moran had put a hit out on him, and somehow Terry Hodson was involved. But it wasn’t just the hit Williams was miffed about. It was the price.

According to Shand, Williams was most displeased at the paltry sum Lewis Moran had been prepared to pay for his death. Williams imagined he’d be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. The bargain-basement hit price of $50,000 was insulting. That’s only 400 bucks per kilo, Williams complained.8 He felt he should be worth at least double that. Indeed, he’d paid $140,000 to have Lewis Moran killed just weeks earlier.

While Williams didn’t sound too worried when he was talking to Adam Shand on the phone tap, that didn’t mean that he’d take the Moran–Hodson threat lying down. He wasn’t like that. If he felt threatened by anyone, that person didn’t tend to live very long. And if he didn’t feel like raising a sweat to exact his own revenge, he was in almost daily contact with a notorious hitman, Rod Collins, whom Williams had known since he went to school with Collins’s daughter, Leonie. The two had remained friends and caught up all the time.

In 2004, Rod Collins’s girlfriend was a woman called Joan McGuire, mother of Danielle McGuire, the girlfriend of Tony Mokbel.9 So if Big Tony was upset about Terry Hodson robbing the drug house and – if the rumours were true – doing him out of a lot of money, he only needed to have a chat to his father-in-law for advice.

Then things get a bit tangled. Nicola Gobbo admitted a Hodson–Mokbel connection. In a police statement, she wrote: ‘I first met Terry Hodson when I appeared for his son Andrew Hodson at his bail application over drug charges in early 2002. Andrew had been referred to me via Tony Mokbel. Terry attended the County Court for Andrew’s bail application which is where I first met him.’10

But it wasn’t just major players in the Victorian gangland who may have wanted Terry dead. He’d given the MDID information about a big drug cartel in South Australia with connections to South America and the Colombian drug cartels. The South Australian detectives utilised Terry’s information and made some big arrests in one of the largest cocaine seizures in Australian history.

Mokbel. Carl. Collins. Colombians. The list was endless.

Because the police had listening devices and phone taps in place on all of Carl Williams’s phones, Detective Chief Inspector Dick Daly heard about the conversations between Adam Shand, Carl Williams and David McCulloch on Tuesday 11 May. The men were recorded discussing a leaked document in which Terry Hodson was named.

In the press it’s been hinted that I was the source of every leaked document and the possessor of the elusive blue folder that went missing after the Oakleigh break-in, but the particular document discussed by Shand, Williams and McCulloch, which the cops thought they could tie back to me, was found to have been ‘provided to persons outside of Victoria Police legitimately for an unrelated legal matter’, according to the later statement of the guy running the case, Detective Cameron Davey. Which was my point right from the beginning: Terry’s informer number was on all the defence briefs, and people had been putting two and two together for ages. But now, every document that surfaced about Terry and his informing – documents supplied legitimately, if unwisely, by Victoria Police – was blamed on me.11

Daly acknowledged in his statement that Carl Williams was talking about Terry Hodson, but he didn’t say whether or not he was worried about it, though Carl Williams’s enemies by now were dropping like flies.