September 2008: 23 years in
It’s Friday afternoon and the road is full of people heading up the coast to start their weekends as Flatline and I are battling through the traffic, trying to catch up with a contract killer.
We’ve had Brad Curtis (not his real name) under surveillance over the Terry Falconer murder long enough to know he’s tough and smart. Smart enough to talk in code over the phone even though he hasn’t realised we’re listening. We know he used to be an army commando, trained in weapons and surveillance. We’ve been told he now works as a hitman, so when we intercepted a call between Curtis and another man we haven’t yet identified, talking about a job that’s too good to refuse, we decided to pursue him.
When Curtis left his house in Merewether, south Newcastle, earlier today, an unmarked police car followed him onto the Pacific Highway, where we expected him to turn south, towards Sydney. Then I got a call in the office, saying he’d stopped at a McDonald’s. In the car park he met another man, someone the cops running the surveillance didn’t recognise. Curtis went to the boot of the second man’s car, took something out and shoved it in his waistband.
It had to be a pistol. The two men left the second car and got into Curtis’s together before pulling back onto the Pacific Highway, heading north, away from Sydney.
We had an armed hitman on the loose.
Glenn and I scrambled, leaving the office and driving into the pre-weekend traffic, while the surveillance team kept updating us on Curtis’s progress as he drove past the Myall Lakes turn-off, Port Macquarie and further north, towards the border with Queensland.
Glenn drives, while I handle the phone calls, liaising with the surveillance cops and our bosses at State Crime Command. We call Glenn Flatline, because his pulse never rises; he’s good when the adrenaline is running and can handle this kind of situation.
‘What do we do, Glenn?’ I ask him.
‘I’m not sure,’ he answers, looking at me with a faint smile, then back at the road.
The alternatives are clear: stop Curtis – which means letting him and every other target we’ve been chasing know they’re under surveillance – or let him go and risk having him shoot someone.
I call Chris, the current acting Homicide commander, who refers it up, to assistant commissioner Dave Hudson.
When Chris comes back, he says, ‘It’s your decision. Keep us informed.’
Great, I think. You heroes. I organise to get a plane up in the air to keep an eye on our target, and we keep on driving.
* * *
By now, it’s almost seven years since Terry Falconer’s body was dumped in plastic bags left floating in the Hastings River. Before my move to the Crime Manager’s position at Chatswood, we’d got Rocco’s evidence that the Perish brothers wanted to use his boat, but that alone was not enough to charge anyone over the murder. Rocco wasn’t there when Terry was killed and didn’t know how it happened.
I told the bosses that a team of six would need to work on it for six months to get to the point where someone could be charged, but no other detectives were put on it. Jason Evers left for Ballina, so Glenn and Nigel Warren – who’d both been part of the strike force from the beginning – took charge of the case. Then Nigel also got promoted elsewhere and was not replaced, so Glenn was on his own.
In late 2005, an informant revealed where Anthony Perish was hiding, on a semi-rural block in southwest Sydney leased from the State Government. He’d built a secure compound, complete with three-metre walls, electric fencing and 27 CCTV cameras. The police attempted to install listening devices in this fortress without success due to all the security in place, so in September 2006 they stormed it, arresting Anthony over drug offences from years before.
Inside, they found camouflage gear he wore to roam the property and surrounding land at night, as well as photographs of our police surveillance teams.
With Anthony, who’d been a ghost after going on the run over a decade before, now under arrest, the New South Wales Crime Commission hauled him in for questioning. They’d also been working with police, and their analysts had traced the phone networks of those thought to be close to Anthony, intercepting tens of thousands of phone calls, to see who was talking to who and what they were saying to each other.
The Crime Commission now went at Anthony, his brother Andrew and some of their other associates as hard as they could, but got little as the Perishes faced down their interrogators from inside the witness box.
An attempt to jail Anthony over the drug offences failed, and in March 2007 he was released and quickly disappeared.
That October, while I was stewing over the DPP’s refusal to send the Bowraville case to the appeal court, Glenn learned that it was now his turn to be rotated out of Homicide. By then, I’d finally got out of Chatswood and back to State Crime Command, having taken a position in the Gangs Squad.
Gangs meant bikies, warring outlaw motorcycle clubs who called themselves the one percenters, had names like the Nomads, Comancheros or the Gypsy Jokers and who fought with fists and knives and guns over pride, territory or control of the drug trade. Being in Gangs meant dealing with a lot of drive-by shootings, cowardly attacks where houses were shot up to send a message, with little regard for who was sleeping in them. On one shift I went to the scenes of seven different shootings in a single night.
Hearing Glenn was being rotated out, I went to see the squad commander, asking him to let Flatline join my team and bring with him the Terry Falconer investigation. This job will make your name, I told my boss. It’s big. Let us run it and we’ll lock up more murderers than Homicide.
Only, he didn’t want it, and we argued. I stormed out of his office, kicking the bin for effect and telling him the Perishes and their associates were major crooks who would only kill more people.
It risked making more enemies among the senior ranks, but I was putting the case first and politeness second.
Eventually, Glenn came to Gangs and we started work, only to be told by one boss that the case wasn’t going anywhere and we’d been chasing rabbits down holes for years. There was pressure to shut down the investigation.
Despite this, the investigation kept expanding: soon there would be tentative links to nine other suspected murders or attempted murders in total in New South Wales, including the disappearance of Ian Draper, a cellarman who worked at a club in Sydney’s southwest, in August 2001. Ian had given evidence against Andrew after witnessing a brawl in which a man had died. Andrew was found not guilty. Six week after his disappearance, Ian’s car was found abandoned outside the Rebels national headquarters in Leppington.
There were three more open cases in Queensland, including one, a fatal shooting on the Gold Coast in April 2002, which was linked by DNA to the attempted murder of a man in Sydney later that same year. While there wasn’t always a link between the Perishes themselves and all these crimes, as the connections between the men and their associates began to be uncovered, so did the evidence of killings.
We didn’t have enough cops on the strike force to follow all these rabbits, and our bosses weren’t going to give us any more support. Eventually, in early 2008, I went to see Phillip Bradley, the boss of the Crime Commission, who I’d got to know from working with them on the Bob Ljubic murder case. They knew about Anthony Perish, and had also been running their own investigation of two of the cases now being looked at by Strike Force Tuno; the shootings in Sydney and the Gold Coast linked by the same, unidentified, DNA.
I asked Phillip to make some calls. It worked. Suddenly, senior cops were asking how many people we needed on the strike force.
In my office, I stuck the Perish brothers’ photos on a whiteboard: Anthony, well-groomed, with his sharp, raptor’s eyes; Andrew, rougher around the edges, with his sullen face and haunted expression. I wanted to make it feel personal between us. As a cop, you’re taught not to let that happen, but sometimes I think it has to. It’s important to focus on real people during these long investigations.
Anthony was out there somewhere and, for him, this wasn’t a 9–5 job, it was his life. If I treated it as just my 9–5, then I wouldn’t catch him. If he had murdered Terry, then he might kill again.
In June 2008, we got a break. A member of the public contacted a cop he knew, saying he had information about Terry’s murder. He told us a man called Brad Curtis had been contracted by Anthony to carry out Terry’s kidnap. He said Curtis boasted about it in a bar weeks after the killing.
Listening to his account, we realised Curtis was a man we already knew, but only by his nickname, Redmond. Redmond was an enforcer for Anthony, someone we’d been told had an appetite for violence.
We learned about Curtis’s military background, and that he had a family, and kids, at his home in suburban Merewether. It was like he had a double life.
To me, he sounded like a stone-cold killer.
* * *
As night falls and the traffic thins out, Glenn and I are still chasing Curtis’s car up the east coast. We need to know more about what’s going on inside his car – right now, we don’t even know the identity of the second man inside it, who Curtis met at McDonald’s.
By now, Glenn and I are a long way from home, in the north of the state where neither of us know the local police. I call Coffs Harbour Police Station and ask to get put through to their traffic cops.
A sergeant answers the phone and I can tell from his voice that he’s a real policeman.
‘Mate, this is the go,’ I tell him. ‘We’re Homicide, we’re working this case we’ve been working a long time, there’s a car heading towards Coffs and we think this bloke could be a contract killer. I need to find out who he’s in the car with. Can you set up a traffic stop to pull him over for a random breath test and just check the licence?’
‘That’s a difficult one,’ he says.
‘It gets worse. He’s possibly armed. I’m telling you everything I know about it. I want you to make the decision, and if you don’t want to do it, I fully understand. There’s a lot of risk associated with this.’
‘Mate, I get what you’re saying. I’ll do it.’
Thank Christ, I think.
‘We’ll stop them as they come into Coffs. I’ll do it myself.’
‘Mate, if you’ve got a vest could you put it on for me? It will just make me feel better.’
Glenn looks at me again, then turns back to the highway. We both know a ballistic vest is only of limited use. It won’t stop a headshot, which is what you’re most likely to get if you’re a cop leaning down towards a car window to ask a driver for their licence and the people inside the car start shooting.
Glenn speeds up. By my guess, we’re still half an hour from Coffs.
* * *
Inside the car, it feels like I’ve got three phones and all of them are ringing. I’m speaking to Coffs Harbour, speaking to the bosses back in Sydney, speaking to the pilot of the surveillance plane, and now Tracy keeps on calling. She’s at home in Copacabana with my kids. We’ve got friends coming over for dinner. She first called about 7pm to ask me where I was, then called back almost hourly.
The two of us have been living together for about a year by now but she’s still learning what life with a detective working a murder case involves. To begin with, when I tell her what’s going on, she thinks it’s exciting. An hour later, she wants to know when I’m coming home.
‘Look, yeah, I wish I could be there, but I’m trying to make sure no one gets killed,’ I say.
She says she’s cancelled the dinner with our friends, but when will I be back?
I tell her I don’t know.
‘But what am I supposed to do all weekend?’ she asks me.
Please just give me some peace on this one, I think. I barely have a minute to spare as it is with everything that’s going on. I’m in a car speeding away from home, chasing a killer north towards the State border, I can’t stop and think about our life together now. I can’t just move between the different worlds that easily.
Coffs Harbour call. The stop has gone like clockwork. The second man inside the car with Curtis was driving when they pulled them over and produced his licence. They did a breath test and let him go, but they have got his details.
I copy them down. It’s late but I call Bill, my old police academy classmate, at home. He now manages e@gle.i, our internal computer system.
‘Bill, I need this done,’ I tell him. I give him the name and licence details.
He looks them up. He says the man’s linked to the Russian mafia. We keep driving, heading north.
* * *
In the small hours, Curtis’s car approaches the State border, which means the other New South Wales police surveillance will have to drop off. Once Curtis crosses into Queensland, no matter what he does, Glenn and I will have no power to arrest him.
I call Queensland Police’s headquarters. By chance, the on-call officer is a detective sergeant, Darren, who’s worked on their own investigation of the Gold Coast shooting that Strike Force Tuno is investigating, so we know him. When I tell him what’s going on, he is able to talk down his bosses, whose first reaction to the news an armed hitman is heading over the border is to want to force Curtis’s car off the road for fear he’ll carry out a killing.
That would ruin our investigation. Telling his bosses what’s at stake, Darren arranges for a local police team to take over the covert surveillance, as Glenn and I are still too far behind on the road to do it ourselves. We’re also given the OK to keep following Curtis, though now I have to keep the Queensland cops informed of what’s going on, as well as my commanders in Sydney. At least, in Copacabana, Tracy’s gone to sleep. I’ll try to repair that damage when I manage to get home.
Finally catching up with Curtis’s car on the Gold Coast, we watch as the two men inside it pull up outside a string of pubs and nightclubs, walk in and come back out soon afterwards. Every time they disappear from view I tense, fearing the worst.
Around 5am, Curtis and the second man stop at Jupiters Hotel & Casino, go inside and book a room. Still playing cat-and-mouse, we get access to it when they leave a few hours later, and find they’ve left behind the packaging for a new mobile phone. All the identifying details, which we could use to trace their calls, have been cut from the packaging and taken with them. I’m impressed at how professional they are.
By now, Glenn and I have been up for over 24 hours, are still wearing the suits we wore to work yesterday, haven’t washed and have barely eaten. We book into a cheap motel and put our heads down for a couple of hours, while the Queensland Police surveillance team keep following Curtis. After a short and broken sleep, as more phone calls come in to tell me that the two men are now heading for Brisbane, Glenn and I get back in our car and follow them again, relying on the stream of updates from the surveillance team in order to stay close, but always out of sight in the city’s back streets, ready to respond at any moment.
This game goes on through Saturday afternoon. Curtis and the second man visit a series of pubs, walk inside, come out a short time later and drive on. It goes on through the night. Glenn and I battle with exhaustion, taking it in turns to drive. At one point, our targets drive about an hour out of Brisbane to visit a few more pubs before heading back into the city.
It continues through a second night. On Sunday morning, I get a call saying the surveillance team are watching Curtis on Brisbane’s South Bank. ‘He’s meeting someone. It looks like Anthony Perish.’ We’ve shared our information with Queensland Police, including Anthony’s photograph. ‘They have exchanged a bag. Do you want us to take them now?’
I feel excitement, and, again, a kind of professional respect. Anthony had disappeared again following his arrest over the drug charges. We’d no idea he’d even left Sydney.
We’ve got a new sense of the scale of his operation. We’ve found a string of pubs and clubs to which he’s linked through the visits of Curtis and the second man over the weekend. The second man, himself a connection to the Russian mafia, suggests Anthony’s business also has international links.
They’re organised. They’re smart. They’re proper crooks.
‘No. Let them go,’ I say. ‘We’ll keep gathering intelligence.’
Curtis and the second man drive south, back home. Over the coming months, our investigation will suggest this trip had been to deliver drugs and pick up money owed to Anthony by the managers of several businesses he owned.
Glenn and I know this is big. It’s every detective’s dream. I’m coming for you Anthony, I think. But first, I have to go home and apologise to Tracy.
* * *
On 21 November 2008, I’m in the headquarters of State Crime Command, working on the Perish gang, when I get a call to say the jury is coming back in the trial of Gordon Wood for the murder of his fiancée, Caroline Byrne. It’s now 13 years since Caroline’s body was discovered.
I head for the Supreme Court in Darlinghurst, and hear the news on the way in: guilty.
When I get there, Paul Jacob, who led the investigation, says they’re in a nearby bar with Caroline’s father, Tony. I join them and we raise a glass to his daughter.