Nervous, very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why WILL you say I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses, not destroyed, not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how heathily, how calmly, I can tell you the whole story.
– EDGAR ALLAN POE, THE TELL-TALE HEART
Muster up! Muster up! Stand by your open cell doors for count. Muster up. No drinking. No talking. No smoking. No farting (ha ha). Stand by your open cell doors for count.
Sirius East unit at Port Phillip Prison, one of Victoria’s two maximum security prisons. Here I am, placed in “protection from protection” along with thirty-seven of this state’s worst criminals, a number of whom have committed crimes so heinous that the perpetrators are never to be released. Protection from protection means blokes who need general protection in jail and blokes from whom the rest of the jail needs protection from.
How did I come to be here? Well may you ask! Unfortunately the answer is simplicity itself. As a lawyer of twenty-eight years’ standing I had worked hard to build a successful practice. I practised criminal law and was available to appear for people seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. During that time, needless to say, I made many enemies in the police force. But none more markedly than the now disbanded Drug Squad, and in particular Detective Senior Sergeant Wayne Strawhorn. While I have now been released for nearly two years, Mr Strawhorn has only just recently had his appeal against conviction and sentence dismissed for the corrupt activities of selling methylamphetamine precursor chemicals to Lewis Moran, a now-deceased client of mine, and his son Mark Moran. These men’s deaths came about during Melbourne’s notorious underworld war of the late 1990s and early 2000s.
When I realised Strawhorn was corrupt I took a large body of information regarding his activities to the National Crime Authority. Little did I know that to talk to the NCA was to set in motion my own demise.
To understand the full story we need to go back a few years, to when I first took cocaine in a social setting. Anyone who says they don’t like cocaine has, in my view, never tried it. Cocaine is a drug that seduces and destroys. It is all consuming. For many years I limited my cocaine use to the social level. It was only when I met Carl Urbanec, Werner Roberts, and Roberts’s wife Andrea Mohr that the wheels started to fall off my life. These three people, eventually my co-accused, were professional cocaine traffickers and importers around the world, and had been for many years.
I had acted on behalf of Werner Roberts in relation to a back injury claim. Upon settlement of the claim I agreed to meet Werner for a drink at a bar in St Kilda, where I used to live, so that he could pay me for those legal services. After a couple of glasses of wine he asked “Do you still like a snort”? – indicating that he knew I didn’t mind using cocaine. I told him I did indeed like a snort. He suggested I follow him to his home as he had a present for me. I followed him and there he presented me with a large lump – approximately a quarter of an ounce – of extremely high quality cocaine. The drug was suddenly readily available and literally around the corner from where I lived.
While I was acquiring for myself a nice little habit I foolishly went to the National Crime Authority to discuss Mr Strawhorn’s corrupt activities. The police officer I spoke to at the National Crime Authority was clearly corrupt himself as he then referred this matter directly to the Drug Squad. In other words, he told Strawhorn that I was onto him for his corrupt activities. By having a substantial cocaine habit, I stupidly gave Strawhorn my head on a plate. My whole world came crashing down. The problem with cocaine use is that it makes you feel that anything is possible; it makes you feel ten feet tall and bullet proof!
In a few short months I grabbed everything I had worked my entire adult life to achieve and tossed it all away in a drug-addled binge that landed me in the go-slow for a long time. It has not been lost on me, in the many years that I have had to ponder my fate since my arrest, how true it is that you can take many, many years to establish yourself but it only takes a short period of idiocy to come unstuck. This is precisely what happened to me and I have only myself to blame.
I ended up in the dock of the County Court in Melbourne where I pleaded Guilty to a charge of being knowingly concerned with the importation of a commercial quantity of cocaine. The judge showed me no mercy, notwithstanding the fact that I was fifty years of age, a father of two young children and without previous convictions and that I had been a lawyer my entire adult life. I received a crushing sentence of seven years with a minimum of five years to serve before being eligible for release on parole. All the lawyers advising me had suggested that, if I pleaded guilty, my sentence should be around six to twelve months. Even the Crown prosecutor told my counsel that the Crown would not appeal a twelve-month sentence.
Mr Strawhorn was still at the top of his game and, notwithstanding his corrupt activities, made sure that my life was in danger when I went to jail. Rather than being sent to a prison farm up the bush, as is usual in cases such as mine because I was not a risk of reoffending and I was certainly not a risk of running away, I was sent to Sirius East at Port Phillip, the worst of the worst. There I was chucked into a unit full of psychopaths and madmen who were likely to do anything at any time and often did. How the coppers must have chuckled with glee at the prospect of the rough ride they anticipated I would have!
Looking back now, the irony of all this is clear. While in Sirius East I met Peter Dupas, a notorious serial killer and mutilator of defenceless women. As the cards fell, after my release I was to give evidence against Dupas as Crown witness and it was my evidence that was pivotal to the prosecution case and helped secure his conviction.
Here I am, still shell-shocked at where I have ended up, standing by my open cell door for my first muster with my new cell mate, one Andrew Davies, a serial paedophile who, upon conviction for the offences for which he was then in jail, received no minimum sentence – which means he was never to be released. Luckily for him, on an appeal he received a minimum term of fourteen years for his horrific offences, which I will come to later.
Before muster, I was taken from the Melbourne Remand Prison in shackles (a humiliating experience indeed) and was unceremoniously chucked into a cell with this person. For somebody like me, who had acted for crooks all my adult life and had been in and out of probably every jail in this country as a professional visitor, it was a rude shock to be sharing accommodation with somebody like this. Paedophiles were the only category of offender that I actively avoided acting for as a lawyer. This particular cell had been converted from a single cell to a “two outer” – jail slang for a shared cell – and was filthy.
As the door was slammed shut on me by the screws (the prison officers even refer to themselves as “screws”) I stood wondering what would happen next. It was then that I was first hit by the all-pervading stench that I will take with me to my grave. It was a mixture of stale White Ox roll-your-own tobacco, stale unwashed male body and clothing, cheap disinfectant and stale semen. It turns out that Davies was a serial masturbator and frankly didn’t care if I was in the cell or not when he indulged himself. This man’s IQ would just make room temperature and on any assessment he was bereft of all human dignity. His entire existence revolved around Commodore motor cars and scavenging discarded cigarette butts from rubbish bins around the jail and then re-rolling them into cigarettes to smoke. Never having smoked myself, I find cigarette smoke offensive at the best of times, but being stuck in a cell with this bloke who habitually rolled cigarettes out of other people’s butts and then smoked them nearly drove me to distraction. In the end I had to threaten him physically that if he didn’t stop smoking in the cell there would be trouble.
At this particular time Davies was in custody for the abduction and digital rape of two young girls aged six at Nagambie in country Victoria. At this time my son was ten and my daughter was eight years old. The very thought of being cooped up with somebody such as this revolted me. But there was no point in asking for a relocation. One screw in particular, when asked any question, delighted in standing up and grabbing himself by the crutch and yelling at the top of his voice: “Suck my big fat one!” End of discussion! Makes asking for anything rather pointless, doesn’t it?
When I was first banged up with Davies he refused to acknowledge that he had ever been in trouble. He merely stated that he’d been wrongly charged with the current offences, that he was not guilty and that he had been illegally refused bail in relation to these charges. Well, that turned out to be complete and utter rubbish. Having checked out his criminal history since, it seems to have started in about 1993 when he had raped a seven-year-old girl in a toilet block only one day after being given an intensive corrections order for another crime against a child and while serving that community-based order.
A couple of weeks later, and then again in 1998, Davies was found inside a school toilet block. He was given community-based orders in relation to all of these charges, judgements that allow criminals to serve a sentence while remaining on the street. It is unbelievable that he was given such sentences because the significant aspect of all his offending is that he refused to partake in any sex offenders’ programs. How in heaven’s name can the Corrections Commissioner, the Office of Corrections, the courts and the Parole Board allow these sorts of people on the street if they refuse to undergo sex offenders’ programs?
Towards the end of my sentence I was at Fulham Prison with another rapist by the name of David Lakeman and he refused parole – that is, to be released early–because it would require him to undergo a sex offenders’ program. Instead he served his parole period in jail, the logic being that once he had completed his full sentence he would not be subject to any sex offenders’ programs. It came to pass and he was allowed out the door without the Parole Board having any hold over him at all. This is an outrageous situation and society should be rightly outraged. Once again this man maintained throughout the entirety of his sentence that he was wrongly charged and convicted and was not guilty. Does anyone notice a pattern emerging with these blokes?
Davies asked me to read his brief, which I did because I was new in jail, didn’t know the ropes and was frankly scared stiff. I was revolted by the brief and the statements of the two young girls. Davies was clearly identified by them because he looks somewhat like a chimpanzee and that’s precisely how they described him. He said that it was all bullshit and that it wasn’t him, he had been wrongly charged, he’d been singled out for special treatment by the coppers – blah, blah, blah.
Having acted for a number of sex offenders over many years, I’ve noticed one common thread running through all their offences, and that is a complete denial of any wrongdoing, even after conviction and imposition of a prison sentence.
A classic example of such a mindset was many years ago when a young bloke was referred to me by the senior partner of one of Australia’s more prestigious law firms. The senior partner rang me, introduced himself and said that a dear old friend of his had a son who had got himself into a little trouble. I asked what sort of trouble. He said that the son was a scout master, to which I replied “How many scouts have complained?” He was surprised that I had hit the nail on the head.
A couple of the scouts had made a complaint about sexual assaults by the scout master. The young man attended my office and sat down. He was incensed that he had been charged and strident in proclaiming his innocence. He explained to me that he and another scout master had taken a large number of scouts away for the weekend. When they arrived at the camping ground it was raining so heavily that they only had time to put up two tents, not all of the tents that were required, and as a result the accommodation in the tents was very, very tight and, guess what, when he woke up the next morning he had a scout’s penis in his mouth!
This is a true story and this was put to me in deadly seriousness. I sat there in my office absolutely dumbfounded that anybody would think that any court or jury on this planet would be stupid enough to accept that fiction as a defence. It was all I could do not to burst out laughing at the absurdity of it all. I told the young bloke that he would have noticed that I hadn’t made one note during the interview and that if he thought I was going to court to run that defence for him he’d better think again.
He went away and came back with his parents, who were equally outraged at his having being charged. I had to give them the bad news in words of one syllable so that there was no misunderstanding, and he ended up pleading Guilty. He got a short jail sentence, as he should.
Davies, likewise, was adamant that he was not guilty, so much so that he then pleaded Not Guilty, went to trial and, surprise!, was convicted. He was then sentenced by his Honour Judge Bill White in the County Court at Melbourne to an indefinite term because it was clear that this man refused to accept responsibility for his actions and that the prospect of any meaningful rehabilitation was negligible. Unfortunately, on appeal, that indefinite term of imprisonment was reduced to sixteen years with a minimum of fourteen before Davies was eligible for parole. Having lived in the same cell with Davies for a few months, it was apparent to me that he had absolutely no intention of ever changing, because you can’t change until you come to terms with and admit your own transgressions.
Polonius, in Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, said “This above all: to thine own self be true.” This is the key to not reoffending. This man will be released and will reoffend. The logic from the Court of Appeal was that he will be in jail for such a long while that he well may think about taking sex offenders’ counselling while in jail. In my view the chances of that happening are a million to one and drifting. Davies had a record of twenty-nine prior offences, which included offences against three small children. I believe people with this sort of background do not deserve to live in our society again. Davies was in protection because in jail paedophiles (known as rock spiders because they can creep into very small crevices) are despised by the mainstream prison population. He would in all likelihood have been killed by other inmates in mainstream. The incomprehensible part was that I was in protection with him!
It was interesting to note, however, that rapist/murderers such as Peter Dupas or Raymond Edmonds were not in the same danger within Sirius East because their offences weren’t considered by inmates to be as bad as those against children. Work that one out for yourself!
The only thing I saw Davies do to fill his day while I was living with him was to work on nuts and bolts, which is the rehabilitation all inmates receive in jail. The work involved the assembly of a bolt with a sleeve and a nut, known by the trade name of Dynabolt. You take the bolt, you put the sleeve on, screw on the nut and throw the Dynabolt in a tub. Try doing that for hours per day without going nuts yourself. The other thing Davies did was take all the drugs prescribed for him, and they must have been substantial because he would be lucky to get past eight o’clock at night without becoming comatose. That is how people are treated in jail. Not once while I was in protection, which was fifteen months, did I see Davies speak to a counsellor or a psychologist about his problems, even after he had been convicted for the umpteenth time.
The first thing you notice about jail is the complete futility of it all. Despair is all too common and some blokes opt out permanently. The rest of us are left to “kick along with it”, as they say in jail. It was during this period that depression and panic attacks first became known to me. All my life I have had been a bit of an optimist, with the view that the glass is half full rather than half empty, and depression hit hard. The panic attacks are the worst: an attack often hits as you lie awake in the middle of the night. You say to yourself that there is logically nothing to worry about, there is no reason to panic, yet it still goes on and you have to hang in there and sit it out.
So here I stand completely bewildered, terrified. I’m like a rabbit caught in the headlights. I don’t know what’s going to happen here but this place is full of mad and bad bastards and anything could happen to me. I hold very real fears for my safety.
I look around the cell block and try to get a grasp on who’s who at the zoo.