On Tuesday afternoon Al Sharp, assisted by a police technician, set up a projector in a meeting room with raked seating. He stacked the carousel with slides from his intelligence file and turned on the projector, then he sat back and lit a cigarette while he waited for his audience to arrive.
He watched the smoke drift through the projector’s beam until it swirled in the light, film noir style. He clicked the remote control and the carousel shuffled around to the first slide. It was a black-and-white photo taken clandestinely at a closed meeting of Croatian extremists.
The subject was leaning forward, one arm holding the bunched weight of his heavy shoulders, the other raised up and ending in a fist. The face still held traces of the handsome man he must once have been, but it was now thickened with age and alcohol and contorted with a passion that might, in another context, be mistaken for hard, unyielding pain. In his dark, deeply recessed eyes there was a wildness that could easily inspire fear.
‘Who’s that dickhead?’
Sharp looked up in surprise, recognising the sardonic voice. It belonged to Bill Lonergan, the homicidal homicide detective.
‘Lonergan! I didn’t expect you to be the first one here.’
‘Don’t get your hopes up. I didn’t bring you an apple. So, who’s the dickhead with the crazy eyes?’
‘His name is Ivo Katich. Take a seat. I’ll explain who he is when we get a quorum.’
Other men were arriving now, filling up seats in the back of the auditorium, and Sharp called to them. ‘Move down the front if you can, fellows, so the latecomers can take those seats.’
Most moved grumbling to the front.
‘A quorum? Quor—umm,’ Lonergan mimicked a posh accent. ‘Never heard that one before. A pack, a herd, a bunch of cunts or whatever—but a quorum?’
‘A pack? That’s for dogs, isn’t it?’ Sharp said. ‘A bit disparaging. I suppose we could say a murder of detectives.’
Lonergan squinted at him. ‘What’s your fucken point?’
‘No point. Let’s go with a quorum of cunts. And we just about seem to have one.’ Sharp stubbed his cigarette out. ‘I think I’ll get started.’
The front seats were almost full now and the flow through the back doors had slowed. Sharp stood up, grimacing from a spasm of back pain.
‘Thanks for coming. Detective Lonergan here asked the obvious question a moment ago.’ Sharp gestured to the screen. ‘Who’s the dickhead with the crazy eyes?’
A few people laughed. Lonergan had slumped with his feet on the barrier between them. Sharp glanced down. The Balinese regard pointing your feet at someone as an insult. He assumed in this case it was mere coincidence.
‘His name is Ivo Katich and he’s definitely a dickhead, but make no mistake: he’s a dangerous one. This photo was taken at a secret meeting. The man who took it was working for us—an informer we had on a string for a short time after we picked him up with two pounds of heroin. He was one of the few ins we’ve ever had with these blokes. But he disappeared a few months ago; we assume he’s dead. They have a habit of murdering informers.’
Sharp hit the button once and the carousel clattered on to the next image. It was Katich again, but a younger version, wearing a black uniform with a peaked hat. The letter U was emblazoned on both the cap and the shoulder of the uniform. The young Katich was smiling into the camera, his right arm bent and holding a pipe, which he was about to light.
‘This is Ivo Katich in 1941,’ Sharp told them. ‘It was taken in the city of Sarajevo, which you may know is in Yugoslavia but which wasn’t called Yugoslavia at that time. Back then Sarajevo was part of the newly formed Independent State of Croatia.’
There was an audible groan from some detectives.
‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to give you too much of a history lesson. Just to say this: the new Croatian state was set up under the authority of Adolf Hitler. Historians describe it as a Nazi puppet state. And that black uniform young Katich is wearing tells us he was an officer of the Ustasha. That’s the military arm of the wartime Croat state, a force so brutal that even the German SS considered them to be inhuman killers. During the war Ivo Katich commanded a group called the Mobile Court Martial in the region of Bosnia. Their job was to travel the countryside and murder suspected enemies of the new state. This photo you’re looking at—of this happy, pipe-smoking fellow—was taken at an execution site where he had just hanged twelve people.’
There was a swell of angry chatter and Sharp paused. Many of the policemen in the room, like Lonergan, were homicide detectives, and he understood their outrage.
‘How did a monster like this get to Australia?’ a man called from the back of the room.
‘That’s a good question,’ Sharp said. ‘It’s a long story. To start with, our immigration authorities never looked too closely at good anti-communists. In Katich’s case, we know that he was indicted for war crimes by the Nuremberg Tribunal in 1946; but he never stood trial and somehow his papers got cleaned up. He emigrated to Sydney with his wife, Samira, in 1953 and got a job as a rigger on the Harbour Bridge.’
‘You’re fucken joking!’ Lonergan exclaimed, swinging his feet back to the floor and sitting upright.
Sharp looked down at him, pleased to at least have his complete attention. ‘I’m not joking,’ he said. ‘He’s still there. He’s got a bigger job now, managing the bridge maintenance crews.’
‘That’s fucken sacrilege.’ Lonergan’s outrage was unfeigned. ‘A Nazi wog workin’ the Bridge. Shouldn’t be allowed. Are you telling us this is the bloke we want for the Sydney bombs?’
Sharp didn’t answer immediately. He pressed the remote control again and the carousel shifted, throwing up another slide.
This time three men were pictured together, inside a large nineteenth-century hall. Behind them were banners and tricolour flags with an odd chequerboard design. The man in the middle was Ivo Katich, older and considerably thicker set, but unmistakably the same man as in the Ustasha uniform. His arms were draped over the shoulders of the men who flanked him.
Sharp glanced back to the screen. Hard, ferocious faces; big bodies locked together like the three-headed dog, Cerberus, at the gates of hell.
He gave the audience a more prosaic assessment. ‘It’s Ivo Katich again in the centre. The big thug on his right is Branko Kraljevic and the scar-faced fellow on his left is Vlado Bilobrk. These three: Katich, Kraljevic and Bilobrk are revered among extreme Croat nationalists because they were actually there in 1941 when the Ustasha formed their first independent state. They had their own führer, who was called the Poglavnik.’ Sharp paused and pointed back at the screen. ‘See that portrait up high in the right-hand corner of the room? That’s him.’
He clicked the remote again and a close-up of the portrait appeared. A haughty, hatchet-faced man stared out from the screen, wearing a more elaborate black uniform with the familiar U insignia.
‘The Poglavnik, Ante Pavelic,’ Sharp explained. ‘Another indicted war criminal, who escaped to Argentina with the help of the Catholic Church. Pavelic is dead now, but the reason this history and these connections are important is that the command structures of the old Ustasha are still in place in Australia.’
He clicked back to the shot of the three men. ‘Katich, Kraljevic and Bilobrk were all members of the Poglavnik’s Ustasha bodyguard during the 1940s. They were members of the Ustasha’s Black Legion. They are hardened warriors. Fought alongside the German Wehrmacht against the Soviet troops during the siege of Stalingrad. Today they make every new recruit take a blood oath of loyalty to the Ustasha and its permanent obsession, which is to overthrow Tito’s communist Yugoslavian government and create again an independent state of Croatia. They are fanatical believers in a cause that we can barely comprehend. This is what we have to deal with when we try to track down the Sydney bombers—fanatics who will remain silent on pain of death when we question them, and whose leaders don’t think twice about executing suspected traitors.’
Sharp paused again to let this sink in. ‘Now, I know this is a lot to take in at one time, so are there any questions before I go on?’
‘Was that photograph taken in Sydney Town Hall?’ called a man from the front row.
‘It was,’ Sharp replied. ‘They’ve been building their Ustasha networks for more than two decades right under our noses. The city council rents the Town Hall to them every year for their independence day celebrations.’
There was a palpable sense of outrage in the room and Sharp knew he had them. He clicked the remote again, and the carousel clattered around and threw the next slide up on to the screen.
It was a naked woman draped across a chaise lounge. She was busty, with rouged nipples and a dark triangle of pubic hair. She winked at the camera, blowing a lascivious kiss to the audience. A roar came up from the roomful of detectives—whistles and cheers.
Sharp turned to look at the screen; Manet’s Olympia she was not. He feigned embarrassment.
‘Oh shit, how’d that get there?’
He fumbled for the remote and clicked on to the next image, an organisational flowchart. Boos and jeers came from the audience now, and cries of ‘Bring her back!’ and ‘Show us your tits!’
‘I’m so sorry,’ Sharp said. ‘I can’t imagine how that happened.’ He waited for the booing to subside. ‘But at least you’re all sufficiently awake now to study this chart. By the way, a file of all this material will be available for the investigative teams.’ He pointed. ‘What you can see here is the organisational structure of the Ustasha in Australia.
‘It’s not simple because they’ve had to learn to hide themselves. They’ve divided into splinter groups and cells to avoid detection, but as you can see, at the top of the pyramid is the HRB—the Croatian Revolutionary Brotherhood. The three key leaders of the Brotherhood, as you might expect, are Katich, Kraljevic and Bilobrk. At the pointy end of the pyramid is Ivo Katich. He’s the real leader. The other two are his key lieutenants. We believe that Katich signs off on every significant Ustasha action. He is our primary target.’
Sharp clicked to the next slide. ‘Now, as you can see from this family tree, Ivo Katich has two sons.’