Chapter 32

The killing of Carl

On 19 April 2010, the Herald Sun, among other newspapers, made a startling revelation – Victoria Police was paying Carl Williams’s daughter’s school fees to the tune of $8000 per year. The provocative headline, clearly designed to outrage the average taxpayer, read: ‘You pay for Carl William’s daughter to attend top private college’.1 To those in the know, there is only one reason that Victoria Police starts paying your kid’s school fees – and, the Herald Sun added, offering your dad $750,000 for his tax bill. The police are getting something in return. In other words, he’s lagging.

At 12.48 p.m. on the same day as he was publicly outed, Carl Williams was recorded on the prison surveillance cameras sitting at a table in the Acacia Unit, reading a paper that looked like the very Herald Sun that had published the story.

Behind him, the large figure of Matthew Johnson appeared. In his right hand, Johnson held a metal pipe, which he raised against the unsuspecting Williams. Johnson felled Williams with a single vicious blow that knocked him unconscious, then he rained seven more upon his head – just to be sure.

Little Tommy Ivanovic looked on.

Johnson knew that the area was under surveillance and assumed that guards would come running once they saw what was happening over the monitors. But no-one came. He dragged Williams’s body into their shared cell and closed the door. Nearly half an hour later, after doing some laps of the exercise yard, the two remaining occupants of Unit 1 approached a guard and asked her to ring the alarm because Williams had ‘hit his head’.

Johnson would later claim that it was a kill-or-be-killed situation. He killed Williams before Williams could kill him.

 

If Carl Williams’s life was lived large, his funeral was befitting the man he thought himself to be. In a gold-plated coffin – reputed to have cost $50,000 – Williams was farewelled at St Thérèse’s in Essendon on 30 April, eleven days after his murder.

The funeral was like so many other gangland funerals: menacing folk, men in black, leggy women, bouncers, helicopters buzzing overhead and a stretch Hummer – the car of choice for Roberta Williams. While the gleaming gold-plated coffin was unexpected, no-one was really surprised.

Roberta spoke glowingly of the man she divorced in March 2007.2

Carl Williams was buried at Keilor Cemetery, only metres from the ornate grave of fellow hitman Andrew ‘Benji’ Veniamin. Newspapers reported a bizarre graveside occurrence. At the urging of family members, Williams’s nine-year-old daughter Dhakota gave up her dummy by throwing it into her father’s grave.

Williams’s grave would eventually sport a black marble monolith marked with gold lettering that said, ‘In life you were a loyal loving father, husband, son and friend. In death, you are a memory in our hearts forever.’

 

Given the size of the police media unit and the way I suspect it has worked in the case against me, a cynical person might ask how the information about Carl Williams being an informer was released. Because I’d been accused of stealing the blue folder to spread the word that Terry Hodson was an informer, there was talk that I’d also leaked information about Williams. But this time, the leak seems to have come from the rank and file of Victoria Police.

Regardless of the intentions of whoever leaked it to the media, the headlines achieved one purpose – they contributed to the death of Carl Williams. The day after the murder, astute journalist Steve Butcher from the Age was quick to suggest that the Herald Sun article might have played a role in the killing.

 

At Matthew Johnson’s trial in 2011, it was publicly revealed why Williams had been showered with incentives to talk to police. It had all been done to convict me. The circumstances surrounding Williams’s death made me look like a suspect, but I’d had no contact with anyone in the Acacia Unit since I was in there, and even then my only contact was with the Muslim terrorists I was incarcerated with. Having been an inmate, I know how impossible it is to contact anyone in the unit from outside.

A suspicious person might argue that conspiracy theories worked both ways: if I could be accused of having murdered Carl Williams with no evidence and no actual way of ‘getting’ to him, then couldn’t Victoria Police be accused of the same thing? They’d broken the golden rule by paying huge incentives for a couple of statements naming me before any conviction. Breaking this rule would rebound on them long after Carl Williams was cold in his grave.

It later emerged that Carl Williams had chosen Johnson as his cellmate. He was allowed to do it as part of the bargain he struck with Victoria Police. According to the Ombudsman’s report into his death, Williams had threatened to refuse to give evidence against ‘a former police officer’ – me – unless he was incarcerated with Johnson. Members of Taskforce Petra said his wishes should be accommodated, and their support influenced Corrections Victoria’s decision to put the two men together. The decision was made in spite of expressed reservations from senior people in Corrections Victoria about Johnson’s history in prison and the risk he might pose.3

It was widely known in the prison that Williams was providing information to police. As early as March 2009, a prison officer had reported on a conversation with a prisoner who’d said, ‘everybody knows that [Williams] is cooperating with Victoria Police in exchange for a reduction in his sentence and other benefits’.4

When the Herald Sun published its story, Matthew Johnson already knew his cellmate was an informer. At the end of February 2010, Williams had been taken out of prison overnight to prepare his evidence claiming I’d had him arrange for Rod Collins to kill Hodson. Less than a week later, on 5 March 2010, Victoria Police had provided Williams with an electronic version of his statements, and the next day Johnson had downloaded a copy of the file from the computer they shared.5

The Ombudsman also found that Corrections Victoria had failed to follow its own procedures in granting the permit for Williams to leave prison. Prison authorities had accepted police assurances that they had conducted a risk assessment, although there was no written evidence that they had.6 The decision to issue a permit was also influenced by the prison authorities’ belief that there was ‘a community interest in assisting the authorities to prosecute high level corrupt activity by a serving police member’.7

Johnson claimed at his trial that Williams had told him he was never going to testify against me and was simply stringing the police along. He said that Williams was ‘pulling the wool over the eyes of police’ and was going to ‘shaft’ them.

But once it was front-page news that he was sharing a cell with a dog, Matthew Johnson had a reputation to consider. Did prison etiquette dictate that he make a public statement of his displeasure?

 

Matthew Johnson claimed that Carl Williams was plotting to kill him because he was the head of the Prisoners of War, who were well known for assaults on ‘dogs’.8 As the Victorian Ombudsman summed up Johnson’s background in his report after Williams’s death:

Mr Johnson was a leader of the notorious ‘Prisoners of War’ gang, a group of prisoners operating within Victoria’s correctional system responsible for a series of violent assaults on prisoners and prison officers, with a hatred for police informers. Mr Johnson was known to Corrections Victoria to have participated in two serious assaults on fellow prisoners in the past, with one assault in retribution for a prisoner’s cooperation with police.9

The Ombudsman also pointed out that lax arrangements within the prison made it easy for information to circulate among inmates. Prisoners often shared legal documentation, including some that identified informers. And it was official policy to place no restrictions on prisoner-to-prisoner mail – which I suppose was how Tommy Ivanovic’s threatening letter had got through to me in prison.10

 

On 21 April, after the murder but before Carl Williams’s garish funeral, Police Deputy Commissioner Ken Lay announced the formation of the Driver Taskforce, which he promised would investigate Carl Williams’s murder. In a press conference that used lots of words to say very little, Lay said, ‘there are a number of identities around Carl Williams and his cohorts from some time back that we will actually be investigating as well’. He acknowledged the enormous public interest but asked the community to give Victoria Police time and space to conduct a thorough investigation. He said he’d instructed the taskforce head, Detective Superintendent Doug Fryer, to ‘leave no stone unturned’.11

 

On 5 June 2010, the prosecution notified my lawyers and I was called before the magistrate. When I stood before him, the magistrate told me that Victoria Police had withdrawn the charges against me.

I turned to glare at the defeated faces of Cameron Davey and Sol Solomon. How could they have been so sucked in by this farce? They didn’t meet my eyes. They looked embarrassed and ashamed. On reflection, I think that maybe Cameron Davey knew the extent of the wheeling and dealing done behind his back. He quit the police force soon afterwards.

I walked from the court a free man. For the time being, I had no outstanding charges against me. The media reported that police had also dropped the charges against my co-accused, now outed as Rod Collins. One article mentioned the difference between the smiling faces from my side of the court and the glum faces on the Victoria Police side.

Journalist Steve Butcher, covering the case for the Age, alluded to the so-called mystery surrounding my case – meaning that the public had no idea about the house of cards it actually was.12 He wrote, ‘But why one of Victoria Police’s biggest investigations collapsed and, more importantly, what shut it down, cannot, and may never, be told – for “legal reasons”.’

But it was simple – one by one, the testimonies that Victoria Police had paid good money for were proving their true worth: nothing. Despite this, every article mentioned me as remaining a person of interest.

Of course, I was happy to be free, but it was frustrating that nothing was really over – and while this case remains unresolved, I’ll never really be free.

 

On 19 August 2010, Superintendent Fryer led a press conference announcing that the Petra Taskforce was to be wound up, and the investigation into the Hodsons’ murders would be taken over by the Driver Taskforce.13

The following day, media reports clearly designed to keep my name linked with the death of the Hodsons – and by association, with the death of Carl Williams – rehashed the inaccuracies: the so-called $1.3 million Oakleigh drug house robbery, and the charges against me that had supposedly been dropped after the Hodsons and Carl Williams had been killed. Put these comments together and the whole world believes I’m in the business of knocking off anyone who makes statements against me.

Unfortunately, people believe what they read in the papers.

 

On 9 September 2010, three judges in the Supreme Court dismissed Dave Miechel’s appeal against his conviction and sentence.

His fifteen-year sentence was upheld.