Chapter 9
A Bolt from the Blue:
The Odyssey Begins

Be as great in act as you have been in thought.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, KING JOHN

“Fraser! Officers’ station, now!” It is five or six o’clock in the evening and I am in my room reading, as per usual. It is now mid-2005 and it’s a few months since I was moved from maximum security to Fulham Correctional Centre, a medium-and minimum-security prison outside Sale in Gippsland, Victoria. I had eighteen months of my sentence left to go when the command was given.

I thought What now? No doubt another piece of petty jail politics in which I’ve managed to become embroiled. No matter how hard I tried to keep myself away from such situations, crooks would come and speak to me and then would talk to the officers saying that I had given them advice. This often caused problems for me, starting with my first day at Fulham when I got off the bus from Port Phillip. The operations manager got hold of me, sat me in a small ante room next to the strip-search room and gave me a talking-to about what I would and would not do while at Fulham. What I would not do, according to him, was give anybody advice. I didn’t follow his instructions and constantly helped any blokes who needed assistance. Illiteracy in jail is breathtaking and you have no idea how many times a crook would come and knock on my unit door and ask me to read him a letter. Many of the illiterate prisoners were young and most were Aboriginal, and their lack of education is a sad indictment on our society. On one occasion I remember there was a letter from Legal Aid merely telling this kid that his case had been adjourned. It was a one-line letter and he couldn’t read it.

The minimum-security section of Fulham, “The Cottages”, is a horseshoe-shaped area with twenty-two cottages contained in a garden, four blokes per cottage, one small bedroom each, with a shared kitchen and lounge area, bathroom, toilet and laundry. A far cry from the stark conditions I had been used to for the first three years of my sentence. At least at Fulham I was able to run each day, and the job I had in the prisoners’ property store was one that provided long hours and some autonomy in what you were given to do. The screw that ran the store was also smart enough to know that I wasn’t going to steal anything and in return for me working in the store I was at least allowed to go for my run each morning.

My cottage was immediately over from the officers’ station, where the staff sat and watched television or read the paper all day instead of supervising the prisoners.

As I approached the officers’ station, the officer on duty came out to meet me in the garden area instead of waiting for me to approach the window, which is the usual procedure. All procedures in jail are designed to minimise the requirement for an officer to get up off his arse to do anything, so making the effort to walk out to me was unusual. He walked over to me and stood very close and whispered, almost inaudibly, that the Homicide Squad were on the phone and wanted to talk to me.

As a sentenced prisoner, you are not obliged to accept a visit from a police officer or talk to a police officer unless you consent and the screw indicated to me that, in view of my previous attitude to being interviewed by police about my former clients who were deceased as a result of the Melbourne Gangland wars, all I had to do was say the word and he would tell them I wasn’t prepared to talk. Surprising as it may seem, the instant I heard it was the Homicide Squad on the phone, I knew precisely what they were ringing about and I said I would talk to them.

Over the years I have had extensive dealings with the Homicide Squad. They are elite coppers doing a tough job and once they get hold of a case they keep at it with a tenacity that others can only dream of emulating. A couple of the blokes in the squad are easily the best investigators I have seen. One in particular, Detective Senior Sergeant Ron Iddles, is in my view the best investigator in the Victorian police force. Homicide cases, by their very nature, are usually highly emotionally charged, so my relationship with the Homicide Squad has been hot and cold to say the least. They’ve lost their temper with me, I’ve lost my temper with them.

The usual cases I had conducted with the squad were felony murders – for instance, where someone is murdered during the course of an armed robbery. The crooks charged with these offences were real old-fashioned crooks and the cases were always bruising court-room contests where emotions ran high. But there are many other cases that are tragic and then you see a human side to the squad members.

One such case was that of a woman who was psychotic and delusional. She had murdered her own five-year-old daughter because she thought she was the devil and she had disembowelled the child with her own bare hands. When the father came home and found this awful sight, he called an ambulance. The ambulance officers had to cut the child’s hair because they could not make the mother let go. That woman went to trial for murder in the Supreme Court and I think the trial lasted twenty-three minutes. The learned trial judge instructed the jury that they must retire and return a verdict of Not Guilty of murder by means of insanity. The woman was then certified as insane and sent to a secure mental facility. It was probably the most harrowing case I’ve ever worked on, to see this poor insignificant woman standing in the dock charged with murdering her own child. She was so distraught, as were the family. To watch the humane, caring way in which the Homicide Squad handled that case was a real eye opener for me.

I answered the phone. The caller said, “It’s Senior Detective Paul Scarlett from the Homicide Squad here”, and before he could say another word I said to him “What took you so long?” Apparently Scarlett was flabbergasted at this response. He said, “Do you know what I’m ringing about?” I said “My bet is you’re ringing about Peter Dupas and Mersina Halvagis.” He said, “How did you work that out?” I said “I just thought that’s what you would be ringing about.” He said “Will you talk to me?” I said “Yes.” He said “When?” I said “Well, my diary is not exactly full at the moment.” It was a fair indication of how serious the coppers were about finding out what I might have to say that Scarlett was at the jail first thing the next morning, ready to see me as soon as I was allowed to leave my cottage.

I later found out that Scarlett had been given the Halvagis murder investigation to go over yet again and see whether there was anything that could provide fresh evidence. As a tribute to Scarlett’s detective and investigational skills, he is clearly able to think laterally. One thing that came out that hadn’t been investigated before was that I had been a gardener with Peter Dupas at Port Phillip and it had apparently been quite a talking point that the lawyer and the psychopath worked together in the vegie patch. It had no doubt appealed to some people’s sense of the ridiculous. Scarlett knew that I had been with Dupas and had worked with him. He knew that I had spoken to Dupas about the Halvagis matter. In fact, apparently Scarlett was pretty dirty on me, because I had been giving Dupas advice, but what choice did I have? Dupas could have topped me at any time if I wasn’t co-operative. What he didn’t know was that I had talked to Dupas about this matter for one reason and one reason only: that I wanted to find out about Halvagis. And then, once I did, I wished to God I’d never known. I knew this information would come back to haunt me, I knew that it would land me well and truly in the spotlight again if I gave evidence, and that was something I could do without. I had had enough of the limelight because to that date virtually all the publicity surrounding me and my prosecution had been negative. Apparently Scarlett thought I would probably tell him to piss off when he rang me. But being the true professional that he is, he still had to ask the question and get an answer one way or the other.

At Fulham to go and talk to the coppers is a very, very dodgy prospect because you have to walk through a no-man’s-land area where you are clearly visible to everybody in the cottages and one of the large units. I was apprehensive about this as I walked into the upstairs room and introduced myself to Scarlett. Being a no-bullshit sort of bloke, he cut straight to the chase and asked me what I knew about Dupas. I said, “Enough to have him convicted because he has made certain voluntary admissions against his interest to me.”

Being an ex-lawyer, I was well able to judge the value of those admissions. As a copper, Scarlett also knew the value of a voluntary admission against interest. He said, “Are you prepared to make a statement?” and I said “Maybe, but not here.” With that, he turned his open notebook around, pushed it across the table to me and proffered a pen. I said to him, “Not so fast. If you want me to stick my head in the noose for you, it will be a ride there for a ride back.” I had eighteen months of my sentence to go and there was not a hope in hell of my giving evidence while I was in jail.

During the trial, Dupas’s defence counsel, David Drake, kept demanding to know what “a ride for ride” meant. I kept saying to him, until I was blue in the face, that I did not say that, I said it was “a ride there for a ride back” – a colloquialism for “if you want me to do something for you, you do something for me first”. In other words, you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.

I told Scarlett that I would not make a statement there and then and would not give him any particulars, save to say that I had substantial evidence against Dupas. And I said that, by the way, I was still having difficulty with whether I wanted to give evidence. I knew giving evidence was the right thing to do morally but I really didn’t want to put myself or my family in any danger and I did not want a lot of unpleasant publicity and attendant media, which it was as sure as eggs I would attract.

The clincher for me was when Scarlett said to me, “You have a daughter, don’t you?” The answer to that was Yes. She was a young girl at that time and I sat and thought for a moment. I thought about the Halvagis family whose story it had been impossible to miss in the media, and I decided there and then to give evidence.

I told Scarlett that I was a man of my word and now that I had committed to it, I would do so. However, there were pre-conditions. He said “What about the reward?” As I said earlier, as a matter of policy I don’t read newspaper stories about cops and robbers and it follows that I don’t read about rewards. I said to him “I assume there is a reward.” He said “Do you know how much it is?” I said “No, but once again I’ll have a guess and say its a hundred thousand, which is the usual reward posted for a murder.” He said “Well, try a million dollars.” I nearly fell off my chair. That was not, and I repeat not, the motivation for my giving evidence. The fact that I too had a daughter was. I then pointed out to Scarlett that his having come to the jail and my talking to him was highly dangerous and that I would under no circumstances make a formal statement or give evidence while I was in custody. I wanted to be released a year early. Scarlett indicated that he would take that back to his superiors but his preliminary view was that he wouldn’t have a problem with that proposition.

I gave Scarlett a very scant oral outline and he left our first meeting at Fulham with a few notes and nothing more. I was now highly excited yet apprehensive at the prospect of an early release. But I was most concerned about the involvement I would have to have with the police in giving evidence at a trial and about all the attendant dangers. The reward was not a major part of my thinking. Obviously the prospect of a large sum of money, when I had lost everything, was attractive but as I write this book, I have been home for more than two years, my parole has expired and I have not received one cent from anybody as a result of giving evidence because Dupas, after his conviction, appealed.

I contacted my lawyer immediately and received a visit during which we discussed the matter and particularly the prospect of my going home early. Later I discussed with my then wife the prospect of coming home early but having to stick my neck out. The general consensus was that it was something I should do and they would support me. I contacted Scarlett and he came and saw me again and I told him I was prepared to make a “Can Say Statement”, which means that the contents of the document are indicative of the sworn evidence I could give if I were called upon to do so but it is not a formal statement. The only basis on which I participated at all in the Can Say Statement was that the Petition of Mercy to get me out early could not be considered until there was evidence before the Director of Public Prosecutions that would indicate that granting that Petition of Mercy would be beneficial to the trial.

A third visit to Fulham was organised for me to finalise my Can Say Statement. I told the police that having coppers wandering in and out of the jail to see me was far too dangerous. I didn’t care what pretence they used; news spreads like wildfire in the jail environment and I was trying to avoid having any awkward questions asked of me. The screws talk and loose lips can land you in all sorts of bother.

To cover my tracks, the Homicide Squad issued an application pursuant to Section 464 of the Crimes Act, which, as I’ve mentioned before, allows them to remove a prisoner from jail to make an application to a court for the prisoner to be questioned further. This application was made to a magistrate at Sale and was made suggesting I had been involved in a fraud. Only the magistrate and the Homicide Squad knew that the 464 was merely a ploy to get me out of jail. I was taken to the court and then directly to the Sale Police Station, where the Homicide Squad were waiting for me. I then spent some time making my Can Say Statement.

Once the statement was finished and I had signed it, a copy went to David Grace QC, my lawyer, and he made an application for a Petition of Mercy to the Attorney General but it had to be the Attorney General in Canberra because I was charged with a Commonwealth offence. For the Petition of Mercy to have any hope of success the Victorian Director of Public Prosecutions, Paul Coghlan QC, also had to support the petition being granted. The Can Say Statement was finalised on 28 June 2005.

I asked to be released in November 2005, one year early. Nothing happened. It then turned out that the coroner had been given a brief of evidence for the Halvagis murder a year before and had gone no further because there was insufficient evidence to potentially support a finding of guilt against Dupas. All the witnesses who ultimately gave evidence had come forward by then and it was considered that the brief of evidence wasn’t strong enough to secure a conviction. November 2005 came and went. I wasn’t getting out a year early. Then the Homicide Squad told me that I would probably be out in February 2006, as that was when the inquest was starting into Halvagis, and Dupas was the only suspect.

The inquest began in February amid a media frenzy and Coghlan himself was prosecuting. He made the unusual statement in open court that he was sure that Dupas was the killer but there was insufficient evidence for him to be charged. The inquest came and went. I was still not released. I was really starting to wonder whether all of this was a windup. Each time the Homicide Squad spoke to me they said I would be released yet I wasn’t. I’m not blaming them but I’m most unhappy with my treatment by the Director of Public Prosecutions.

Matters became so protracted that the Attorney General’s office in Canberra rang Coghlan wanting to know what was going on with the DPP’s support because they were ready to grant the petition. All that was required was a letter from Coghlan. I’d love to know why it was delayed for a year when it was clear that nothing was happening until such time as I was out and about.

I spoke to David Grace regularly and it got to the stage where, with a couple of months to go, he told me that I might as well get my head around doing the lot and that there would be no discount. The question for me then was whether I would still be prepared to give evidence. The Homicide Squad were justifiably anxious that I might change my mind if I got no reduction in the sentence. I was still prepared to give evidence and told the police so on a number of occasions.

You cannot receive calls in jail unless they are from lawyers or the police. Late in the evening on Thursday 5 September 2007, David Grace called the jail and asked to speak to me. The screws couldn’t find me, so Grace left a message that I should ring his office urgently, which I subsequently did. He said “You are going home on Monday, a mere two months early but better than no early release at all.” I hung the phone up and cried, the wait and speculation was over.

I was to be released on 9 September 2006, a mere two months before my due release date of 11 November 2006. Coghlan had sat on my application for twelve months. This whole thing had been held up inexplicably for over a year by the DPP’s reluctance to say that I should be released early. The Homicide Squad were among the losers: they knew full well that I would not give evidence until I was released. And they could not charge Dupas until I was released.

What followed was a complete and utter bun fight. My release was supposed to be, as arranged with the Homicide Squad, what is known as a “controlled extraction”. This means nobody was to know that I was going. My parole papers were to be faxed through to the jail to the intelligence section. That was run by Ms Kaye and she is about the only person at Fulham who seems to know which way is up. I was supposed to be taken from my work in the property store to my cell, pack up and be put out the door without talking to anybody or anyone being any the wiser until I was gone. This was all designed to minimise any chance of harm befalling me on the way out.

Instead, on the Friday about lunchtime, I was called to the Shift Office, which is right in the hub of the jail, next to the canteen, the library and the medical centre. At this time on a Friday there are hundreds of prisoners milling around the area waiting for their weekly canteen visit. As I walked down to the Shift Office a couple of prisoners said to me, “You’re going home on Monday. Good on ya, well done. What’s happened?” Blah blah blah. I was horrified.

I walked into the Shift Office and rather than seeing Kaye for a controlled extraction, a prison officer started reading out all the stuff about what I’d had to say and that I’d been granted a Petition of Mercy by the Commonwealth and I was to be released early on twenty-six months’ parole. I told him that this was highly sensitive and he shouldn’t be reading it out in front of all these other officers and crooks. He said “Bad luck. That is the way it’s being done.” I then had to sign the form and wandered off. For the remainder of Friday, all of Saturday and until late on Sunday, I was left in the mainstream prison population. If, during that time, the slightest whisper had got out that I was giving Crown evidence, I would have been dead.

The operations manager, Andy Walker (aka The Barrel), then came and saw me on Sunday and said that he was going to slot me until Monday morning as I was in danger. In the entirety of my sentence, I hadn’t been in solitary and I jacked up and refused to go. He said “If you don’t go, I’ll drag you.” I still flatly refused. By this stage, there was a constant stream of blokes in and out of my cottage enquiring as to how come I was going home early. The story I put about was that I had got two months off because of the length of my sentence and a Petition of Mercy had been successful.

I demanded to know why I had been left in the prison population since Friday lunchtime when it became general knowledge that I was going home and why there hadn’t been a controlled extraction. Amazingly, in relation to my going home early, he said “I didn’t know.” I was flabbergasted. I had nothing to lose now. I leant across the desk and I said to him, “That is a bloody joke. You are supposed to know.” With that he said, “I’ll do a deal. I’ll put you in the hospital rather than the slot. The hospital is next to the slot. And you will be released at 5 am to avoid a media scrum because let-out time is usually 7 am.”

I was unceremoniously escorted to the hospital where I was placed in a single room, which may as well have been a solitary cell. I was finally given a small television to watch. I asked for dinner. Dinner time came and went. I am still waiting. I then asked for a cup of tea. I am still waiting. At five o’clock the next morning, after a sleepless night, the screws came and got me and took me to the discharge. I was unceremoniously shoved out the door with the words “Fuck off” ringing in my ears.

Four years and ten months were now over and I was a free man. The party was about to start.