Prologue

Picture this: it’s 27 September 2003, the day of the AFL grand final in Melbourne. You’re a detective sergeant working at Victoria Police in the Major Drug Investigation Division, enjoying a day at home watching the game with a bunch of mates. You’ve been working non-stop on a big drug bust, and a couple of hours in front of the TV is just what you need to recharge the batteries.

The phone rings and you listen, perplexed. A member of your crew, Dave Miechel, is ringing you from the back of an ambulance. He tells you that something has happened near the Oakleigh drug house in Dublin Street – the house your team has had under surveillance for months.

‘What?’ you ask.

He tells you he has been attacked by a police dog and bashed by the dog handler.

‘What!’

You ring your bosses and tell them that something has gone down at Dublin Street and you’re on your way to see Dave in hospital. More cops phone, and you find out something unbelievable: Dave was caught at the scene of the break-in and arrested! Not only that, but he wasn’t alone. Your chief informer, Terry Hodson, was arrested at the scene as well.

It’s unfathomable. Unbelievable. You try to curse, but there just aren’t words bad enough for how you feel at that moment. You put your foot down a little harder on the accelerator and get to the hospital as quickly as you can.

Dave has some nasty injuries. He looks black and blue. And bitten. You don’t say much when you see him – just ask how he feels, because you know he’s up shit creek without a paddle.

On the way to meet your bosses at the drug squad, you wonder what the hell has happened. Terry Hodson, sure, he’s an old-time crook and drug dealer; he’s even done hard jail time. You’d kind of expect it from him, but Dave…

At the drug squad, you meet the bosses who are on duty, and you are all pretty much shaking your heads, going into damage control. As you watch the bosses clear out Dave’s desk and take all his stuff to lock up as evidence, you search your mind for any inkling of how this happened. How did Dave get so close to Terry? But then again, Terry is that kind of guy. He bombards you. He rings you every day with a new lead, a new mark. And his information is usually good. In fact, you know that if you allowed yourself, you could keep yourself in solid work forever just investigating his leads. But you try to keep some professional distance. You remember the phone calls: ‘No, Terry, we can’t talk right now; we’re sitting off a drug crop.’ Only to be told, ‘Drug crop! That’s nothing! I can give you cocaine! Kilos of it!’ It’s tempting to be drawn into it, but you know you also have to protect Terry from himself.

Before your time, the drug squad had let him dob in most of his mates; they even arrested some of them leaving Terry’s house. As an informer, Terry had police indemnity to sell small quantities of drugs, but if the Drug Squad kept arresting everyone who bought from him, but never arrested him, how long would it take for dealers to notice? When you joined the squad, you tried to change that because if you let him, Terry would keep dobbing people in until one day, someone would make the connection. Questions had already been asked. People who move in that world don’t forgive and forget. So you try to protect Terry from himself because he really is a likeable guy.

And while you can hardly believe it, you imagine how it must have happened. Senior Constable Dave Miechel, a quiet loner, must have been taken in by the warmth and hospitality of the Hodson family. It’s not the first time something like this has happened.

But aside from coming to terms with a wolf in the hen house, or in this case a detective in a drug house, you need to try to salvage what you can out of the operation. You’ve had the house under surveillance for months, the warrants are ready to go, and you just have to move.

The rest of the week is taken up, in equal measure, with rounding up the bad guys and performing damage control. In among that, you accept that Ethical Standards police are going to drag the rest of you in, but you don’t expect members of your team to come back snorting fire. Leading questions, the team members tell you. Trying to make you say stuff that didn’t happen. Twisting the bloody truth.

Bloody toe-cutters. Like everybody else, you dislike them, but even so, you can’t believe what happens next. You hear a whisper that they got Terry in a room, told him he was up shit creek and offered him a deal if he could finger any other cops. Terry, you’re done for. Terry, you’ll probably die in prison. Terry, you’re fucked. You can almost picture Terry, his mind clicking over, whirring with possibilities, the cornered rat coming out fighting.

And you can picture his eyes narrowing, brow furrowed mid-deal. ‘It’s Dale,’ he says. ‘Dale was in on it too.’ But while you can picture him saying it, saving his skin, wheeling and dealing, what you can’t picture is your colleagues leaning forward, eager for another cop’s scalp. Believing him when he says you were in on the deal to rob the drug house. Believing that Dave and Terry would agree to rob a drug house and take all the risk while you stayed safely at home. Believing that a deal like that could be struck.

Because this is what they would have to believe happened:

‘Hey Dave and Terry! You go rob the drug house and give me a share of the takings while I stay at home with my alibis.’

‘Sure, Dale. We’ll take all the risk and give you a third of the takings. You might end up with a couple of hundred grand for sitting on your bum. Hope you and your alibis enjoy the footy. Don’t worry about the risk to us. It will be worth it just to give you the money for doing nothing.’

Believing something that just didn’t make sense – would never make sense.

That’s what you can’t picture. Not in your wildest dreams.

You can’t accept that cops would believe a crook, a drug dealer, an arms dealer, someone who has served serious jail time, someone who was trying to decrease his time in jail – believe him over you, a decorated police officer with an unblemished record.

You can’t believe it because it defies belief.

But that’s not the end of the story. You will soon find out that the police Ethical Standards Department’s faith in Terry Hodson is only the beginning of your nightmare.

Over the next eight years, you are going to be dangerously duped by the Australian Crime Commission, and Victoria Police will offer millions of dollars in incentives to a lawyer and a couple of convicted killers in return for statements against you. You will be jailed for seven months in one of the state’s most notorious prisons without being found guilty of anything. You will be held in solitary confinement until you nearly go mad, and then – when your lawyer likens your conditions to those of Guantanamo Bay – you will be put in a cell with Muslim terrorists for company. The charges against you will be dropped and new ones manufactured only to be dropped. New charge. Dropped. The media will take creepy-looking pictures of you and splash them across the front page of their newspapers. Your parents will weep for you, and the public will judge you guilty, believing everything they read in the press because the media doesn’t lie.

Except that by then, you will know that it does.