Chapter 33

The new charges

In January 2011, Detective Senior Sergeant Boris Buick came up to Wangaratta and served me with a set of the most unlikely charges imaginable. Seven years after the Hodson murders, I was still being hounded by these people who had never been able to make a case that I’d done anything wrong.

Charge 1: The accused on the 7th of March, 2007, being a person summonsed to give evidence at the examination before an Examiner of the Australian Crime Commission, did give false evidence namely that he recorded all meetings that he attended with Carl Williams.

I believe I did record all meetings that I had with Carl Williams. I was never given the opportunity to refer to my diaries and daybooks, and the police and the ACC never suggested that I had a meeting with him that I didn’t record.

Charge 2: The accused on the 7th of March, 2007… did give false evidence namely stating that he was always ‘on duty’ when he met with Carl Williams and was not aware of any occasion when he met with Carl Williams when he was ‘off duty’.

They say that I was not aware of a meeting, so that’s why they were charging me.

Charge 3: The accused on the 26th of November, 2008… did give misleading evidence namely stating that he was uncertain if he had ever met Carl Williams at a time he was not on duty.

Huh? Isn’t that the same as Charge 2?

Charge 4: The accused on the 26th of November, 2008… did give misleading evidence namely stating that he could not recall any reason why Carl Williams would have contacted him while he (accused) was suspended from duty by Victoria Police.

Was I being charged because I couldn’t read Carl Williams’s mind?

Charge 5: The accused on the 26th of November, 2008… did give misleading evidence namely, evasive answers to questions relating to the frequency of meetings that he had with Carl Williams.

Evasive? Who makes that decision? Did they think they were reading my mind? If you say you can’t remember something from years earlier, is that evasive?

Charge 6: The accused on the 26th of November, 2008… did give false evidence namely, stating that all the meetings that he had with Carl Williams were in his (accused) professional capacity.

How many different ways could they charge me with meeting with Carl Williams? Six, apparently.

Charge 7: The accused on the 26th of November, 2008… did give false evidence stating that he never met Carl Williams at the Brunswick Club.

I never met Carl Williams at the Brunswick Club. And they never brought any evidence – aside from Williams’s paid statement – to say that I did meet him there. So how could they charge me with lying about it when their only evidence was the word of Carl Williams, whom Justice Betty King had described as ‘a most unsatisfactory witness virtually incapable of telling the truth’?1

Charge 8: The accused on the 26th of November, 2008… did give false evidence namely, stating that he did not ever meet Carl Williams at Noodle Box or Noodle Bar in Centreway in Keilor.

Was it Noodle Box or Noodle Bar? Did anyone see us? There was certainly a pattern to these allegations. No corroboration, just the word of a man ‘virtually incapable of telling the truth’ who by now was deceased and unable to tell anything at all.

And it went on and on.

Charge 9: The accused on the 26th of November, 2008… did give false evidence namely, stating that he did not ever purposely provide Carl Williams with information in relation to police operations.

Charge 10: The accused on the 26th of November, 2008… did give false evidence namely, stating that he could not recall ever meeting Carl Williams at the Centreway shops in Keilor.

Charge 11: The accused on the 26th of November, 2008… did give misleading evidence namely, stating that he was not sure that he’d ever met him at the Keilor Baths.

Charge 12: The accused on the 26th of November, 2008… did give misleading evidence namely, stating that he could not recall entering the water at a pool with Carl Williams in order to have a discussion with Carl Williams, however, he may have entered the water at the Brunswick Baths with Tommy Ivanovic.

Was I being charged as well with possibly entering the pool with Tommy?

Charge 13: The accused on the 26th of November, 2008… did give misleading evidence namely, stating that he could not recall ever meeting Carl Williams on his (accused) own.

Charge 14: The accused on the 26th of November, 2008… did give misleading evidence namely, stating that he was using a throw-away line when he said to Carl Williams during a phone conversation between himself and Carl Williams on 27th February 2004 that he (accused) wanted to catch up with him.

I was being charged because they were judging the difference between ‘Let’s catch up, mate’, a phrase that people often use to finish a phone conversation, and ‘Let’s catch up, mate’, meaning let’s catch up.

Charge 15: The accused on the 26th of November, 2008… did give misleading evidence namely, evasive answers about his familiarity with Carl Williams.

Charge 16: The accused on the 26th of November, 2008… did give misleading evidence namely, stating he could not recall meeting with Carl Williams after the 27th February 2004 because he had so many allegations put to him over the years that his mind was ‘mash’.

So I was charged with saying my mind was ‘mash’.

Charge 17: The accused on the 26th of November, 2008… did give misleading evidence namely, stating that he could not recall asking Nicola Gobbo to pass on a message from him (accused) to Carl Williams.

Charge 18: The accused on the 26th of November, 2008… did give misleading evidence namely, stating that he (accused) did not know if he had asked Nicola Gobbo to pass on a message to Carl Williams.

Is it just me, or are these all starting to sound the same?

Charge 19: The accused on the 26th of November, 2008… did give misleading evidence stating that he could not recall asking Nicola Gobbo to have Carl Williams contact him (accused).

Huh?

Charge 20: The accused on the 26th of November, 2008… did give misleading evidence namely, stating that he could not recall ever having a discussion with Nicola Gobbo about mobile telephone numbers in use by both he (accused) and Nicola Gobbo in order that they contact each other without being detected.

Charge 21: The accused on the 26th of November, 2008… did give misleading evidence namely, stating that he did not know where Hillside was, or Goulay Road, and could not remember doing that, in response to a proposition put to him that he met Carl Williams along Goulay Road in Hillside on 6th May 2004.

I was being charged with not knowing where a street was, or with not remembering a demonstrably fictitious meeting with Williams there?

Charge 22 – The accused on the 26th of November, 2008… did give false evidence namely, stating that Mr Williams never paid him (accused) money for information.

And finally:

Charge 23 – That on the 7th day of December, 2008, being a person who was served with, or otherwise given, a summons containing a notation made under section 29A, disclosed the existence of a summons or any information about it namely by discussing the examination with Nicola Gobbo.

But you can discuss your appearance at the Australian Crime Commission with your lawyer. Right from the start, Nicola Gobbo had offered to be my lawyer and act pro bono for me. While I’d chosen the Police Association option, I’d always gone to her for legal advice and interpretation. I regarded her, therefore, as my legal adviser. And not only that, she even encouraged me in the taped conversation to say anything I wanted because I was speaking to her as a lawyer.

In the police force, we call charges like this a ‘hamburger with the lot’. While they charged me with all 23 charges, they never brought up any evidence to say any of my answers were false. This is especially relevant to my ‘can’t recall’ responses. Some of the questions were dealing with things from five years earlier. If you can’t remember and they can’t prove otherwise, then it shouldn’t be a charge. If they charge you with saying you can’t recall something, who can prove otherwise? You?

The charges are Commonwealth offences under the Australian Crime Commission Act, but the ACC itself wasn’t going to pursue them. Like a dog with a bone, Victoria Police wouldn’t let go. The Driver Taskforce, under Simon Overland, decided to proceed with the charges.

When I first got the brief, I couldn’t understand how I could be charged on the basis of allegations that Carl Williams had made with no other evidence. But unfortunately, that has always been a pattern with the charges against me. Induce a crook to say whatever the police want to hear, and then lay the charges.

At my next court appearance, the prosecution dropped twelve of the 23 charges – which to the average person might suggest that they were made without the evidence to back them up. A lot of the ones about Carl Williams were withdrawn because there was no evidence. The police and the Office of Public Prosecutions finally conceded that they couldn’t use Carl Williams’s statements against me. Once there had been a proper review, the prosecution informed the court that every charge relating to Carl Williams, unless otherwise corroborated, would be withdrawn.

The fact that the case was crumbling around their ears didn’t daunt the police officers determined to convict me.

When the prosecution withdrew so many of the charges, I claimed three-quarters of my costs, because much of the preparation with my legal team was on charges that had then been withdrawn. The court agreed. The charges that still stood were mostly the ones to do with the tape recording made by Nicola Gobbo, even though her lawsuit against Victoria Police made it pretty clear that she wouldn’t testify.

The only other witnesses were George Williams and another old crook, Witness B, whose identity the police wanted to hide. These two witnesses gave conflicting evidence at my committal. I think I walked past George Williams at a cafe once, and I think I arrested Witness B once, years ago, so I knew that the only evidence they could give was jailhouse gossip.

A tape recording without context and the word of George Williams, perjurer and drug dealer, is what the prosecution’s case hinged on. George Williams had been convicted of lying to the ACC and was fined $3000. Not to forget Witness B, who was a triple murderer and drug dealer.

When the Police Association was paying for my legal team, I could afford to look into why people were willing to give statements against me, and weeks were spent going back and forth to get information. But these charges weren’t from my time in the force, so I had to finance the defence myself. I had to look at these charges as a defendant, not a detective.

 

Around the time Victoria Police was offering inducements to crooks to make statements against me, a case was being heard in Queensland that was about to change everything.

In 1997, lawyer Julian Moti was charged with raping the thirteen-year-old daughter of his business partner in Vanuatu. The charges were thrown out of court, and an out-of-court settlement was reached, which marked the end of the matter. A decade later, there was talk that Julian Moti might be appointed attorney-general of the Solomon Islands. It was known that he was opposed to the continued presence of peacekeepers in the islands. In a move that had a strong whiff of political interference, the Australian High Commissioner resurrected the 1997 case under the Child Sex Tourism Act.

Between February 2008 and November 2009, the girl and her family had received around $150,000 from the Australian Federal Police. The girl’s father later said he didn’t realise the political implications of the investigation, which dug up allegations that hadn’t seen the light of day for a decade. The family ended up being so disillusioned with the Australian police and the Australian government that they refused to testify. The girl’s father called the police ‘superficial’ and ‘artificial’.

There were several unsuccessful attempts to extradite Julian Moti to Australia to face charges, but in December 2009, Justice Debbie Mullins of the Queensland Supreme Court ruled that there had been an abuse of process and stayed the indictment against Moti. She questioned the integrity of the investigation ‘when witnesses who live in a foreign country, expected to be fully supported by the Australian Government until they gave evidence at the trial in Australia’. The payments to the girl’s family were judged to be ‘a sum far in excess of regular subsistence witness payments’.2

While it may have been ‘far in excess’ of what people were paid in Queensland, it seemed a little on the low side compared with what people were offered in Victoria to testify against me.

What the Moti judgement effectively meant was that if large inducements were offered to witnesses, there could be a fair assumption that their evidence was tainted. After the Moti judgement, Victoria Police quickly withdrew the $750,000 payment they had made for George Williams’s tax bill. In what must have been a red-faced moment, on 22 February 2010, the Assistant Commissioner of the Ethical Standards Department, Luke Cornelius, wrote to the Australian Tax Office and said in part:

Victoria Police has reviewed the provision of assistance to Mr George Williams following the recent decision of Justice Mullins in the Supreme Court of Queensland R v Moti (2009)…

It is now clear that the proposed arrangements relating to the taxation affairs of Mr Williams are no longer an option for Victoria Police as it is unlikely to be considered by the courts appropriate for a witness in a criminal prosecution to have the benefit of such an arrangement.

I can advise that any arrangements of undertakings for the Victoria Police to provide monies on behalf of George Williams in regard to any tax debt owing to the ATO have been withdrawn…3

 

I love the bit about withdrawing the money – not because paying George Williams’s $750,000 tax bill was just plain wrong, but because it was ‘unlikely to be considered by the courts appropriate for a witness in a criminal prosecution’.

I don’t know what you reckon, but shouldn’t the Ethical Standards Department have higher, er, ethical standards?