GARY Robert Whelan was never going to be a high flyer in the police force, but he was a goer. Whelan was the sort of officer experienced police love to have in every station and squad. He didn’t complain about the hours or the danger. He loved the work and did what was required, no questions asked. The sort so keen that if he had been a dog he would have chased cars, snapping at the tyres. Most of all, he wanted to fit in.
‘He was a keen kid who wanted to be the world’s greatest crook catcher,’ recalled a former colleague. He was desperate to get into the CIB.’
Whelan wasn’t one of those who look for a comfortable clerical job where they can wear cardigans and potter about in an air-conditioned office. For them, the biggest excitement is winning the office football tipping competition and the biggest danger they face is getting home late for dinner.
Whelan didn’t want to work in the comfort zone. He wanted to be at the cutting edge. He joined the Victoria Police Force in 1977 and within four years he had moved to the busiest crime area in the state, St Kilda in the inner suburbs. It was the early 1980s when drugs were taking hold.
St Kilda, like its Sydney equivalent, Kings Cross, was full of opportunities – and temptations – for police. It was a place where police earned reputations – one way or the other.
When Whelan walked into the chaotic St Kilda station he looked to those with experience who could guide him. One of his sergeants was Dick McLean, an accomplished officer on the way up. Although McLean was only four years his senior, he became a father figure to the ambitious, easily-led young policeman.
In May 1982, Whelan was called to a guest house in St Kilda over a complaint about the behaviour of one of the guests. It was a routine call, but for the eager young police officer, it was like winning Tattslotto. In the room he found 154 grams of heroin in condoms and caps. It was 75 percent pure, indicating this was no street dealer’s stash. This was close to the source.
For the early 1980s it was considered a huge bust, headline material. In the so-called war against drugs this was considered a victory. Whelan was congratulated by senior officers. It could have been his ticket to the fast track.
It wasn’t.
The following year, Whelan got his wish and was promoted to senior detective and was transferred to the Stolen-Motor Vehicle Squad.
Meanwhile, the heroin found by Whelan was supposed to be kept under lock and key in the drug security cabinet at the St Kilda station until the court case. In police and criminal circles it was widely known that security at the St Kilda station was a joke.
Property and drugs tended to disappear from the cabinet. It was suggested, though not proven, that some junkies who provided information might be rewarded with a ‘taste’ of seized drugs.
As Whelan was celebrating his promotion to the CIB, rumours reached senior police that all was not right at St Kilda. They decided to re-weigh the heroin from Whelan’s day in the sun.
It was 42.5 grams shy.
Whelan was charged with trafficking, selling and stealing heroin. The trial judge directed to acquit him of trafficking and the jury found him not guilty in 1985 of all other offences. He remained suspended until 1986 and was then found guilty before the Police Discipline Board with failing to account for property, fined $700 and demoted to constable.
In the police force, most coppers never live down that sort of black mark on their record. When Whelan returned to duty he was transferred to the Russell Street reserve, a pool used to fill holes in the force. It was generally considered the road to nowhere.
In 1989, Whelan was moved to the audio-visual section. His job entailed videoing crime scenes and crime re-enactments for later court cases. It was important, but hardly taxing work.
But, in 1993, there was a reorganisation in the crime department and Whelan’s section came under the Bureau of Criminal Intelligence, which dealt with organised crime. Whelan’s job was to set secret cameras to help build cases against some of Australia’s top gangsters.
The days where police could jump into the witness box and be instantly believed were gone, partly as a result of ‘verballing’ and other abuses by investigators who wanted to take short cuts to get a result. Now they needed irrefutable proof, such as video and audio tapes, to make their cases. Suddenly, the policeman with the questionable past was back in from the cold and privy to some of the force’s most confidential operations.
A touch of electronic expertise and a stroke of the bureaucratic pen helped Gary Whelan re-invent himself from suspected drug seller to top crime buster. He was back at the big end of town – and he was ready to run red hot.
DICK McLEAN was a policeman in a hurry. He was on the fast track for promotion and was openly spoken of as a future commissioner. But for him, that wasn’t enough: he wanted it all, and he wanted it soon.
McLean was a good policeman, so good that he was appointed in 1987 to the staff of the elite Airlie Officers’ College in South Yarra, where he instructed the future top-ranking members of the force on matters such as leadership and management.
His lectures were polished and informative and he excelled in the field during training operations, where his practical experience could be used to the fullest. He was a born leader.
McLean was seen as a shining example of the modern and progressive police officer. He had made his mark in the tough areas of the force, including St Kilda and the Homicide Squad, yet he was no rough diamond. He had the personal skills and diplomacy needed to deal with every stratum of society. He was as comfortable talking to career criminals as captains of industry. Sometimes they were one and the same.
But the policeman on the make was restless. ‘He saw himself as a bloke who could cut it in the business world,’ a former colleague was to say. ‘All during his career he dabbled in business.’
He had a furniture factory, a financial interest in a waterbed shop and even had an international diamond importer’s licence while a serving policeman.
A detective who worked with him said: ‘He was generous and always would give police furniture and beds at cost. He was always being touched for a cheap deal. He was never around the office to do any mundane stuff but when there was a major job on he would be as hard working as the next bloke.’
McLean once interviewed a murder suspect for 16 hours until he cracked her story. ‘Dick was a good investigator, there was no doubt about that,’ a senior policeman said of him.
From the time he joined the force, in 1969, there was never any suggestion he was anything but squeaky clean. But being a good policeman and a future leader was not enough to hold McLean. Business called and, in December 1989, McLean, then a Chief Inspector and a 20-year veteran, left policing to make his fortune in the outside world.
The first sign for McLean that private enterprise was not a guaranteed road to wealth came when his waterbed business sprang a leak.
He may have been lacking a little on the cash front but he certainly wasn’t short of ideas. He moved straight into the restaurant trade.
A former colleague recalls ‘There was a lovely fellow we all knew from the St Kilda days. He had a little pizza parlour in Fitzroy Street. Dick was always at him with big plans, to extend it into the next shop and turn it into a flash restaurant. Eventually he went along with Dick and they became partners. They both ended up broke.’ It was a humiliating experience for the polished policeman. ‘He was on top of everything when he was in the job,’ a detective said later, ‘but it all went wrong when he got out. He ended up with the Midas touch: everything he touched turned to mufflers.’
However, the financial disasters and a marriage break-up didn’t destroy McLean’s confidence. He was a big picture man and he was convinced that if he persisted, his luck would turn. He moved into the electronic-security industry and, finally, his big break came in 1995.
In the global field of new technology, teenage computer experts were making fortunes overnight. If McLean could combine his knowledge of policing and security with state-of-the-art software, he calculated, he would be on his way.
Finally, he was in on the ground floor of a promising deal. He was going to invest in a mobile ‘smart phone’ designed to provide immediate access to a stream of security functions for the elderly. It was going to be manufactured in an Ararat factory, and it seemed set to make a millions.
McLean had the idea, the market, the contacts and the business plan. What he didn’t have was the money. So Dick McLean, businessman and entrepreneur, turned back to what he really knew, crime and corruption. But, this time, from the other side.
It was time to talk to his old protege, Gary Whelan.
DOMENIC GISONDA was a police groupie, the sort who always buys the beers and hangs on every word of detectives’ war stories. Too quick to laugh at a bad joke and too slow to go home at the end of the night, the former bouncer and painter was always present at any social event run by the St Kilda police.
‘He was a smarmy user,’ a St Kilda policeman said. ‘He would always drop coppers’ names when he got a speeding ticket or a parking ticket. Every station’s got one.’
Many police were irked by his too-smooth approach but tolerated him as part of the social rat-pack. One detective with a short fuse and a quick trigger finger once took offence at Gisonda but the coat puller didn’t know when to leave well enough alone. He kept asking why the policeman disliked him. The detective punched him to the ground in a car-park, then pulled out his gun and fired several shots over the bleeding victim. The drunken detective was ushered into a cab and the incident covered up.
McLean, however, was one of the minority of police who liked Gisonda. ‘We warned Dick about him but he wouldn’t listen,’ a former colleague said. It was to Gisonda that McLean turned for help to set up a corrupt venture which would eventually cost the former police high-flyer his reputation, and his freedom.
In April 1995, a police task force from Heidelberg found a drug gang was using a Thomastown factory to grow a crop of potent ‘skunk’ cannabis hydroponically. Police formally requested a secret surveillance camera be set up to gather evidence.
Enter Gary Whelan, who joined the operation as the video expert. He checked the area and positioned a camera and recorder at a nearby building. The operation was expected to last three weeks.
Two days later, police from the task force were stunned when a local criminal was able to tell them about their investigations, including details of target premises in Preston, Coburg and Thomastown. The criminal matter-of-factly pinpointed the exact location of the camera and the drug factory being watched by police.
Local police found the criminal was connected to a notorious ‘run-through’ gang, a group that raided and ripped off drug crops. Marijuana plantations are the perfect target for such gangs because the product is easy to sell and the victims can hardly complain. The rip offs have become so regular that some cannabis growers build man traps near their crops and police fear it is only a matter of time before a bush walker is killed after stumbling on to a remote drug property.
Police were told that information on drug properties was being passed on by a former detective known only as ‘Dick’ to Domenic Gisonda, who then passed it on to the rip-off gang. The original leak was suspected of coming from the technical section. The was a potentially catastrophic blow, as the section was privy to every major crime investigation underway. Modern police rely on video and audio tapes as their predecessors relied on fingerprint dust as an essential tool of trade. The lives of undercover police and informers would be put at risk if the technical section leaked.
The then Assistant Commissioner (Ethical Standards Department) Neil O’Loughlin, said the local detectives immediately contacted internal investigators with their suspicions. ‘When they believed they were being sold out, they took the appropriate action,’ he said. ‘It was police who discovered the leak, police who investigated it and police who found the offenders.’
The internal investigators set up Operation Filter, which soon established there were links between Whelan, McLean and Gisonda, who was connected to a stand-over group. They baited a trap, giving bogus information on a fabricated drug target to Whelan. When he went straight to McLean, the watchers knew they had found their leak.
At one point, Whelan gave McLean a status report on the hydroponic marijuana investigation. Telephone taps proved the gang planned to steal the drugs before police moved in to arrest the growers. Early on the morning of Friday, 2 June 1995, the Special Operations Group arrested two burglars as they were attempting to break into the factory.
Soon the phones were running hot among gang members as they queried whether they had been set up. Whelan soon learned the truth when, three days later, an internal investigator, Colin Farnsworth, arrested him in the old Russell Street police complex. In simultaneous raids, McLean and Gisonda were arrested. It was a textbook operation, the same text that McLean used to lecture police at the officer’s course only a few years earlier.
‘If we had not had the full co-operation of the technical branch where Whelan worked then we wouldn’t have got anywhere near him,’ Inspector Farnsworth said. ‘It showed that police will not tolerate corruption where members sell out investigations.’
Police in the section knew that fake information was being fed to Whelan to see if he was the leak and no-one warned him. It was an integrity test both ways. The suspect cop failed it badly, but his colleagues passed brilliantly.
Late in 1996, McLean, then 45, was sentenced to two years jail with a minimum of 15 months over the attempted burglary. The man who could have been a commissioner was forced to spend his time with convicted public officials and child molesters. Whelan, 41, was sentenced to three years jail with a minimum of two years three months at the same jail. Gisonda was sentenced to 12 months jail.
However, many police believe the Thomastown job wasn’t the first Whelan had sold out.
One group of drug growers believed they had found the perfect spot for a marijuana crop, and for seven years they had quietly been reaping millions of dollars in profits. The place was protected from the air by a canopy of 60-metre mountain ash trees and it was at least four hours’ walk through the thick bush from the nearest road. But there is strong evidence that soon after police found it, criminals moved in and ripped off the plantation.
The question which almost certainly will never be properly answered is this: was the gang tipped off by crooked crops?
When police found the property, at Fumina South in the Tanjil state forest near Warragul, there were camouflaged tents, drying areas and a pump-driven watering system connected to nearby Good Hope Creek.
The area was so rugged that police had to be winched in from a helicopter. They counted about 10,000 seedlings planted in rows. Half would later be pulled out to let the healthiest grow to their maximum size. The estimated street value of the crop was $30 million.
A drug task force of Gippsland police started Operation Snow White, which involved the special operations group camping out in the area, waiting to catch cultivators when they returned to the property.
It was a four-hour march for the SOG to get into position and a nine-hour return trip. Local police also notified the technical branch of the bureau of criminal intelligence for a video recorder to film the offenders. Gary Whelan got the job.
In late 1994, Whelan was briefed three times on Operation Snow White. He videotaped the area from the police helicopter.
In February 1995, Whelan walked to the property with other police. They spent two days trying to find a ‘hide’ for a secret camera but decided it was impractical. Later, a suitable spot was found.
The leaders of Operation Snow White decided it was likely the cultivators would tend the crop at weekends, so the SOG would pack up and go home every Monday. Whelan knew their movements.
When police moved in on 30 March 1995 and arrested one man present, Zeljko Duricic, there were only 1600 plants left. The original crop was 5000 mature plants, each up to four metres tall.
‘There were certain indications there had been a rip-off,’ an investigating officer said.
Duricic pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 12 months jail. Police believe he knew more than he said and refused to implicate others. Some detectives believe the profits from the drug crops were used to buy arms for an international conflict.
Police are still not sure how the cultivators managed to bring in several tonnes of machinery and equipment, including petrol- driven pumps, gas heaters, fertiliser and a rotary hoe.
After Duricic’s arrest, police used a helicopter to air lift about 593 kilograms of cannabis to the Warragul police station, where it was stored in a shipping container.
An informer told police that a drug rip-off gang, known to have been tipped off by McLean and Whelan on other crops, received information on Operation Snow White. The gang was told the SOG was pulled out every Monday and it was promised a diagram of surveillance positions.
At a meeting in North Coburg, the go-between, Domenic Gisonda, told the rip-off crew the information was solid and came from a policeman involved in installing cameras at the property. The informer said the gang expected to make $140,000 profit after a payment of $60,000 for the corrupt police. Later, according to the informer, the plan was changed after Duricic’s arrest.
This time, the gang plotted to raid the Warragul police station and steal the stored marijuana. They were told the exact location of the cannabis and when the least number of police would be on duty. The plan was to make a hoax call to the station, ensuring patrols were tied up and leaving only one officer in the building.
The plan was for the gang to raid the station, lock up the policeman and steal the drugs. It was abandoned because of fears about consequences if they harmed the police officer on duty.