Underbelly 4

CALL him Ross Stephens. It’s not his real name, just another one of the aliases he’ll need for the rest of his life. It takes a bit to surprise a man who’s been through what ‘Stephens’ has, but when the phone rang at 3am in the upstairs main bedroom of a nondescript rented house in a town near Manchester, England, he was surprised, all right. Not only by the unearthly hour – but by the fact it rang at all. Only about a dozen people on earth knew how to contact him, and then only in an emergency.

The man on the other end of the line was a senior policeman on the other side of the world, in Melbourne, with a message that couldn't wait for a more civilised hour.

His name was Superintendent Peter Halloran, and he was in charge of witness protection for the Victoria Police. The call was short and grim.

‘He said: “You have to get out of the house immediately. You have been compromised”,’ a disillusioned Stephens was to recall later.

Stephens wasn’t happy, but he didn’t argue. He knew Halloran was not the type to over-react. The policeman with more than twenty five years practical experience never took a backward step and was not prone to exaggeration. If he judged that being ‘compromised’ was a matter of life and death, then Stephens accepted it.

That didn’t mean he had to like it. He put the handpiece back in the cradle, composed himself, and woke his wife, their two sons and visiting mother-in-law, packed a few possessions and ordered a cab to take them to the railway station.

And he did something that had become second nature to him over the previous five years when talking to his family.

This time he told them they needed to leave the country for a few days because their permanent resident status had finally come through and they could now re-enter Britain as immigrants rather than visitors.

On the train to London the rest of the family chatted, happy that their future appeared to be finally secure. But Stephens was quiet, still thinking of Halloran’s call and what it really meant.

Not that he needed to dwell on it. He knew all too well that he was the most important witness in the prosecution case against Australia’s biggest amphetamines manufacturer – John William Samuel Higgs. The brutal truth was that he had been moved to the other side of the world to keep him alive long enough to testify.

The case that had taken eight years to build would live or die on the sworn evidence of Stephens, a man who stumbled into the investigation and was later manipulated into giving evidence against a drug cartel that had corrupt police on its payroll.

Now, in one of the biggest security breaches in policing, the electronically-protected drug squad office in St Kilda Road had been burgled in what was clearly an inside job. It was an appalling scandal of the sort that erodes the foundations of legitimate police work in a democratic society, and yet it happened just as blatantly as it might have in a South American cocaine republic.

The thieves ignored thousands of pages and hundreds of files stacked neatly on twenty-four shelves in three grey bookcases in the locked evidence room. There was no attempt to disguise what they wanted: the blue binders that contained more than one hundred statements that Stephens had made on the activities of Higgs.

The thieves also grabbed receipts and bills that gave away the secret witness’s not-so-secret address in Britain.

Higgs and the police knew that if Stephens was neutralised – as either a credible witness, or even a living one – the prosecution case would collapse.

The security breach, discovered in January, 1997, was not the first and would not be the last time that Stephens was to feel like a foot soldier whose generals were all too ready to sacrifice him as an unfortunate casualty in the war against drugs.

Over time he began to fear his enemies less and realise many of his problems were being generated by those who were supposed to protect him.

BACK home in Melbourne, Stephens had been a surefooted businessman who could make money and lose it just as quickly. A smart, savvy man with an eye for a dollar, he would latch on to an opportunity only to become bored and let his work drift.

During these lapses his social life revolved around playing cards, often all night, and in 1989 he was declared bankrupt after a long, lean run. But he was a great salesman and whenever he was in financial trouble he would return to his core business of selling cars to make quick bucks. By the early 1990s he had climbed back to making business deals outside the car industry and buying and selling produce on an international scale.

Through an old card-playing mate he was introduced to a man who wanted business advice. Enter John Higgs, a middle-aged man with a past. The two first met at the Britannia Hotel in North Melbourne in June, 1992.

‘He was involved in a fish shop in Geelong and wanted to get an export licence to sell fish,’ Stephens was to recall of that first meeting with the man who seemed part motorcycle gangster, part millionaire. Higgs was also exploring the viability of exporting stock feed to Asia and, apparently, making several overseas trips to set up the business.

The two were to meet many times in the following twelve months. It was the typical transition from social to business to friendship that Stephens had developed with others throughout his adult life. But, being gregarious by nature, he had friends on both sides of the law.

One of them was Ian Tolson, who had been a policeman for twenty-five years, with more than ten of those spent investigating organised crime for the Bureau of Criminal Intelligence and the National Crime Authority.

As soon as Stephens told Tolson of his new business contact the detective saw the opportunity of tapping into a drug network that up until then had always stayed one step in front of the law – often with inside help. Tolson was a recognised expert in cultivating informers and, believing the businessman with a wide network of associates could be of value, registered Stephens as an intelligence source.

The understanding was that Tolson would use Stephens to gather any information that came his way. It would be a long way from hard evidence but it could be useful. It certainly couldn’t hurt. But he warned Stephens not to get out of his depth because Higgs was a heavy gangster – a man with a reputation for being able to make enemies disappear.

Stephens fronted Higgs about his past and the former bikie freely admitted his prior convictions for drug dealing but said he was now interested in making money legitimately. Then, in a meeting in early 1993 in Stephens’ office, Higgs spotted some paperwork on the desk over a fertiliser deal with the chemical giant ICI.

It was enough to spark a new level of interest by Higgs in his new pal. The drug dealer had fallen out with his chemical supplier in Sydney, ‘Kiwi’ Joe Moran, over a failed amphetamines cook and needed a new contact. Stephens looked promising.

Within weeks an associate of Higgs arrived at the office and asked Stephens if he could provide bulk chemicals. It didn’t need an industrial chemist to tell Stephens he was being asked to become a partner in the amphetamines business.

He went to Tolson, who was about to leave the police force to set up his own travel agency. The soon-to-be retired policeman put him in touch with Wayne Strawhorn of the drug squad – an investigator with a long term interest in Higgs’ activities.

On 18 June, 1993, the three men met in a North Melbourne coffee shop. Strawhorn told Stephens he was interested in the activities of Higgs and would be grateful for any information. It was all low key. Nothing was written down and Stephens agreed to chat with the detective if he found out anything interesting.

As a card player, Stephens should have known that Strawhorn was playing his hand close to the chest. The truth was that Higgs was the biggest amphetamines dealer in the country and, significantly, had proved to be untouchable for years.

He had been targeted by the National Crime Authority, Australian Federal Police and the drug squad since 1984 and nine separate operations into allegations from massive drug dealing to murder had all failed. It was a pattern that screamed one thing to a knowledgeable observer … and that was: Higgs had inside help, the best police money could buy. This was dangerous ground indeed for an informer, but the man they called E2-92 probably wasn’t to realise that until later.

The drug squad started yet another probe into Higgs and his vast network in July, 1991, but it too appeared to be going nowhere. Only eleven days before Strawhorn met Stephens for the first time the drug squad, Detective Chief Inspector John McKoy, wrote in a confidential report, ‘a concerted effort has been made to obtain a reliable informer against Higgs by targeting his known associates. To date detectives are no closer to charging him with drug matters.’

‘He had an amazing network and was able to provide information that was useful to ASIO, Federal Police, Customs and the DEA in America. I still scratch my head and wonder why he did it.’

But, according to someone who knew the new recruit best – Stephens’ wife, Julie – it was typical of him to agree to gather information. Not because of any noble anti-drugs sentiment, but because he was always looking for a new distraction or interest. ‘I don’t believe he had an altruistic motive. I believe he was attracted to the thrill of police work,’ was her blunt summary, much later.

Years later, Stephens still doesn’t know why he agreed to be involved. He shrugs his shoulders, smiles and says: ‘It just happened, who knows why?’

Higgs was a leviathan in the drug world. When street dealers deal in grams and major traffickers move kilos, John Higgs talked of tonnes. In 1992 police were told his syndicate had successfully completed a $48 million amphetamines cook.

A career criminal with prior convictions for theft, assault, carnal knowledge, manslaughter, assaulting police and possessing cannabis, he was looking to monopolise the speed market. He would become the Bill Gates of amphetamines.

The one-time member of the Black Uhlans motorcycle gang bragged that he had taken amphetamine production out of the hands of bikies and turned it into an industry. Like the international diamond cartels, he even held back hundreds of kilos of ‘product’ to ensure the market was not flooded and the price remained stable.

He was relentless in his pursuit of base chemicals, stockpiling them for his ‘cook’, Brian Alexander Wilson, a failed New Zealand industrial chemist student who could produce top-class speed on demand.

Higgs moved truckloads of chemicals without problems, provided two hovercrafts for a syndicate planning to smuggle cannabis from Papua New Guinea into the Northern Territory and, like many big crooks, was involved in race fixing as a means of laundering black money as race ‘winnings’.

When police finally moved on Higgs they seized $371,000 in cash, $415,000 in counterfeit US currency, properties, cars, guns and eight tonnes of chemicals capable of producing amphetamines then valued at more than $200 million.

Police were told that at one stage he had $18 million invested in Queensland real estate and was able to lose $600,000 in a failed rock concert without blinking. Police found that $1,733,439 went through his hands between 1982 and 1993, not that this was a big proportion of his actual turnover. At one stage he owned an ocean-going trawler in Eden, NSW, a fish processing plant in Geelong and a retail outlet.

He also owned a string of trotters and an excavation business and used a former town planner with corrupt contacts to organise building permits. One of his companies won a lucrative contract to remove soil from the Crown Casino complex.

He also had a horse feed and supplement business with connections in Malaysia and Singapore.

‘Higgsy wanted to control whatever he did. He wanted to make a billion dollars worth of speed. Why did he want chemicals that could have made $580 million worth of amphetamines? He wanted to corner the market. He had been king for so long people always came to him,’ Stephens said of him.

STEPHENS was to talk to Strawhorn virtually every day for three and a half years. Along the way, he became the single most important intelligence gathering resource for Australian law enforcement.

Operation Phalanx was to last eight years, result in 600 intelligence reports, sixteen separate task forces, the arrest of 135 people and destruction of the country’s most sophisticated drug syndicate.

A police undercover operation rarely goes to plan. The targets are usually cunning, disposed to violence and often erratic. Usually, the inside man is a policeman who has completed the covert operators course. They are volunteers who at least know exactly what they are dealing with.

The police department maintains it has an obligation to the detective above the operation and will cancel investigations that get too risky.

Stephens, not being a police officer, was allowed to take unbelievable risks in unbelievable circumstances. In many ways he survived because he didn’t know what he was doing. He didn’t show fear because he didn’t comprehend all the dangers.

At most meetings he wore a tape to gather evidence, even though discovery could mean death. Once, for instance, he was to meet convicted murderer Eris Censori in Brunswick. ‘I got out of the car and for some reason I went back and ripped the tape out,’ he recalled later. Censori met him with the words: ‘Someone’s been lagging.’

He took Stephens to a Brunswick park and stripped him to his underwear. He found nothing and Stephens went home alive yet again.

The agent was given a new mini-tape recorder to gather evidence. Detectives assured him it was ‘state of the art’ and ‘foolproof.’ He went to a meeting with some drug leaders with renewed confidence. As he sat there he caught his own reflection in a window and could clearly see the red light from the recorder blinking under his shirt. Horrified, he slipped his left hand under his shoulder to hide the light that would have given him away.

In Operation Phalanx the undercover was an amateur and the investigation just evolved. Decisions were made on the run and Stephens had to rely on his ability to think on his feet to keep from being exposed. As long as he kept Higgs onside, the others would follow.

Higgs surrounded himself with family and mates he had known for years. He was confident they would not betray him. But he needed Stephens or, more importantly, Stephens’ contacts in the chemical industry.

Even as his associates were being arrested Higgs didn’t want to believe the leak was his chemical supplier. He needed his new mate and was blind to the mounting circumstantial evidence that Stephens was a double agent.

Police supplied their inside man with tonnes of chemicals he provided to Higgs – utes, cars and trucks full of the stuff. Higgs could not afford to believe his golden goose was a police canary.

For the last year and a half I wanted to stop. I had had enough, but the thing had taken on a life of its own. I don’t even think the police knew where it would end,’ he was to recall.

The near misses, mostly due to police carelessness, were terrifying. Once he was supposed to have driven to South Australia to pick up barrels of chemicals to deliver in Ballarat. He met his police contacts near the drop-off point. They were waiting with a Holden utility complete with the drums on the back.

They borrowed it from a local dealership and there was three kilometres on the speedo. If they had seen that I would have been in trouble so I smashed it with a coke bottle.’

He said the rumour started to go around the syndicate that he was a police informer. One crook, Les Burr, claimed he found a police bug behind the radio of a car provided by Stephens.

‘He was having coffee in Ringwood when they (the police) knocked off his car to fit the bug but when they drove back there was no parks so they dumped it about two miles away.

Les came out and reported the car stolen and the police said it was parked up around the corner and he must have forgotten where he had parked it.

Stephens said that when police learned the bug had been spotted they grabbed Burr in the country.

They took him around the corner and he thought he was going to be flogged. Then they let him go, so he went back to the car – and there was a screwdriver on the floor and the bug was gone.’

Burr told Higgs the police were on to them but, amazingly enough, the ‘King’ refused to listen. ‘Burr was a nutcase. He was paranoid and always thought the army was after him so no-one believed him.’

Stephens at times was on a high as he gathered evidence. Too high, sometimes. ‘I remember sitting in Brunswick at the back of the old water works. I was with Higgsy’s son (Craig, who was later murdered) and two other guys. We took delivery of thousands of packets of Sudafed (which can be used to produce amphetamines) and we had to unpack them and peel them from the packets. We were in a disused shed and the police had video cameras across the road. Sharon (Senior Detective Sharon Stone) said we needed some light and I said, “No worries. I’ll burn the packets.”

‘Well, they were made of wax, weren’t they, and when I put a match to them the whole joint nearly went up. You could see it from Sydney.’

He said two brothers under investigation through Operation Phalanx found a bugging device and drove to the Australian Federal Police headquarters and gave them the device. ‘They thought the Feds were working on them.’

At one stage Higgs was sitting in Stephens’ office when Strawhorn rang for an update. ‘I said I couldn’t talk but he said he needed to know what was happening. I said to Higgs “John, this is the bloke from the chemical company – talk to him. So they had a chat”.’ Strawhorn managed to pass himself off as the insider.

As the investigation reached a climax and many of the main players were being arrested, Stephens became convinced he was about to be exposed. Just as he was arranging to join the witness protection program and fly out of Australia Higgs rang, demanding a meeting. Would this be the final, fatal confrontation?

‘I had to go. We met in a coffee lounge in Carlton. But he just wanted to introduce me to a guy who wanted to import pineapples from Thailand.’ To the end he was looking for new deals, unaware that his career was over.

Stephens was in the drug squad signing statements less than forty-eight hours before fleeing overseas when his mobile telephone rang. It was Eris Censori wanting to meet him.

‘I told him I was tied up but I had to go in case he went to my house and saw the furniture was gone. I got Strawnie to grab his gun and we met him in Punt Road.

‘All he wanted was directions to get to Lakes Entrance. I got the Melways from Wayne and told him how to get there. It was all getting unbelievable.’

WHEN Stephens first got involved with the drug squad he understood he was going to be in the background providing the odd tip. But, slowly, he was drawn in from a bit player to be the star of the show.

‘Higgs just kept introducing me to more people and that is why the net kept getting bigger. He kept telling me that when it was over he would give me a million.’

He said that in many ways he became fond of the number one target. ‘He could be quite charming.’ But he knew underneath it all that Higgs’ rough charm disguised naked greed.

‘He was buying these chemicals from me at unrealistically low prices and making a fortune. He feigned friendship to make money. He treated me as a mug from day one.’

At first Stephens loved the role of the undercover agent. Julie says her husband was always easily bored and looking for a new thrill.

The original plan was to try and catch Higgs at one of his twenty-two clandestine amphetamine lab sites, but ‘The King’ was either too smart or, more likely, too well-connected to place himself at the scene.

In 1993 he delayed a planned ‘cook’ because he was aware police were about to launch an orchestrated blitz against five motorcycle gangs suspected of being involved in trafficking the drug.

Without knowing it, Stephens rose from an informal intelligence gatherer to a pivotal evidence source. He had always been promised that his name would be kept out of it but it would prove to be a promise police could not keep.

A court decision in another drug case meant police had to hand over certain internal documents, including day books. This meant that Stephens’ name would eventually reach Higgs.

Secondly, prosecutors said that the man who wanted to stay in the background would have to get in the witness box to corroborate the masses of tapes and documents gathered over the previous three years.

This meant that Stephens and his family were now in serious danger. Higgs may have been charming but he had been involved in killing a man years earlier and could afford to pay whatever the market dictated for heavy hired help.

Stephens says he was taken to the Office of Public Prosecutions in Lonsdale Street in March, 1996. The meeting left him angry, disillusioned and with the clear message that his welfare now ran a distant second behind nailing Higgs.

He said a lawyer at the meeting had implied that if he was not prepared to give evidence he would be left exposed to the criminals he had pursued. The meeting with the team who were supposed to be on his side lasted less than five minutes.

Several police involved in the case advised him to walk away from the mess but others raised the possibility of witness protection.

Although retired, Ian Tolson was called back for advice. They believed there was no reason that he had to jump the (witness) box. They talked him into it.’

Then there was a meeting in early autumn, 1996, that was to remain a sticking point for years. According to Stephens, a solicitor from the prosecutions office met him in a Melbourne hotel and brought up the case of Peter James Cross – the son of a former judge who gave evidence about co-offenders in a cocaine smuggling syndicate. ‘He said Cross was given $500,000 after he gave evidence and that was the minimum I would get if I agreed to testify.’

Former drug squad senior detective Sharon Stone was present at the meeting. ‘I heard the offer being made,’ she said later. There was all sorts of talk of approaching the government or getting it from drug funds but the offer was definitely made.’

She says the figure of $500,000 was discussed by senior police. At no point did she hear anyone express concerns over the amount.

Witness protection in Australia is nothing like the movies. It isn’t designed for honest members of society who stumble upon crime. With few exceptions it is used for minor co-offenders who turn on their former associates to avoid jail.

But Stephens didn’t want a new life. He just wanted his old one back. And there was one other problem. He had been a police agent for three years but he hadn’t told his wife or children.

‘JULIE Stephens’ is an eloquent, passionate woman in her late forties who didn’t approve of her husband’s new rough friends and was determined to keep her independent lifestyle.

Having been successful in several areas of business, she returned to study in her early forties and embraced university life with gusto.

She had met Stephens when she was eighteen, living in Adelaide, and had watched him develop a business pattern of financial boom and bust.

She was still deeply in love with her husband, but she started to explore her own intellect and broaden her horizons.

‘He is actually a brilliant businessman, a fantastic negotiator and has a gift for putting deals together. He would set up a business until it ran well, become bored and then take to all-night card games. He would neglect the business, go back to selling cars and then move back into management.

She wanted financial stability, so she bought her own house, a cottage in outer Melbourne where she planted roses to watch them grow. ‘I would tell him, “I can imagine myself as a ninety-year-old here”.’

She threw herself into university life and a new social circle while her husband began to associate with increasingly questionable characters.

When she queried his new friends – ‘We had terrible rows’ – he would snap that she had some objectionable friends that he had to tolerate. He said it was business and he was selling them cars. There was some truth in that. When Higgs had a car that had a flat tyre he would buy another one.’

She said she wasn’t going to try and pick her husband’s friends. ‘Just because you are married to a guy doesn’t mean you have the right to try and change him into what you want him to be.’

Some of the men who would arrive at her little home would frighten her. Of one, she said: ‘He was an animal, I don’t think he had any boundaries. He was capable of anything.’ But she found Higgs always to be polite. ‘Even now I can’t say I dislike him.’

One day in early 1996 she was driving with her husband when he started to talk about moving to England to start a new business career.

Julie was horrified. She had lived overseas for years and really wanted to settle in Melbourne. ‘I was having a great time and was more settled than at any other time in my life.’

But she began to think that she was being selfish if her husband wanted a new start, perhaps she should consider it. ‘He was working six days a week until ten at night. I started to think about where we were going. I didn’t say anything to him and I hoped it would all go away. It didn’t, of course.’

He had planted the seed. A few weeks later he mentioned that he had been doing some ‘work’ for the police. ‘I thought he must have been selling them cars.’

He drip fed his wife information over a few weeks, culminating with the admission he had been working on Higgs and the family might have to move. Typically, the salesman sold the move as an opportunity, saying that police would help set them up with enough money to establish a business.

They met Sharon Stone in a Greensborough hotel. Julie was furious with her husband for having risked the family, and she was hostile to the police who had dragged her into a complex and dangerous investigation without her knowledge.

‘We wrote a list of what we wanted. Everything we said we wanted they wrote down. Nothing would be too much trouble. I said I wouldn’t go anywhere without our dog and they said there would be no problems.’

Julie was to find that despite her strong character, her world standard tertiary qualifications, her links with the state’s intelligentsia and her financial independence, she had been reduced to a chattel. Her future would be decided by police she had not met because of actions her husband had taken without her knowledge or approval.

She was now a dependent, subordinate to the wishes of her husband and virtually being deported from her own country.

‘How could this happen? Do these people just get so caught up in what they are doing, chasing criminals, that they just don’t care? We have been manipulated and I feel betrayed.’

More than three years after being unwillingly scooped up into the witness protection scheme she sits in a bad bistro in an outer Melbourne twenty-four hour poker machine barn and picks at a tired chicken salad. Worldly and bright, she still has no understanding of how police investigations work. She finds it hard to grasp that police can be as ruthless as the criminals they chase and that sometimes innocent people get hurt.

She cannot understand how her life plan has been ripped from her without her permission or knowledge and that, to the authorities, she is merely an attachment to a man with a code name.

It was late in 1999 when she slipped back to Australia to see some old friends for a few weeks before Christmas.

Few of them know her story. They are envious that she is able to move overseas. They think I am the luckiest person alive.’ Some see her as churlish not to appear excited. They are hurt she does not offer them the opportunity to visit their new location.

A friend breaks down and confides that her husband is having an affair. Julie remains unmoved. She can’t help but think that if only her husband had betrayed her with another woman rather than jumping in bed with the detectives investigating Higgs, her life would be much easier.

Julie says they have made new friends overseas. Ross is charming and affable. She can be cold and remote. She knows that at times she says things to punish her husband for what he has done. They must think I am some sort of spoiled bitch but I can’t tell them the truth of why we are there.

‘I need to learn to manage my anger. I feel as though I can no longer trust him. Every time he walks out the door I don’t know what he will bring back.

‘We have had some really black times. It has been intolerable. Even now I don’t know how this all could have happened.’

AT FIRST, Stephens was given top priority. He would meet witness protection police in top-quality hotel rooms and at one stage he was guarded around the clock. A senior policeman told Stephen’s lawyer, Paul Duggan, ‘As long as I am in control here we will not abandon him.’

Much later, the policeman would not recall the comment, says Duggan bleakly. Stephens says he was promised resident status in the UK and a green card to the US. Now he says that few promises were kept.

The family, including their two sons, who still don’t know why they had to leave Australia, were to move through seven countries and were never allowed to settle.

Julie temporarily returned to Australia with Stephens to seek counselling for their problems. ‘I still cannot come to terms with what has happened.’

Even though promises were made to Stephens in 1996, four years later he was still waiting. He arrived back at the start of March 2000 – police had said they would settle by the end of February.

It was to take another five weeks to finally settle their claim with the police department. Meeting after meeting was cancelled. The lawyers squabbled over clauses. The promised amount of money didn’t eventuate.

At least one senior policeman thought Stephens was making outrageous demands. He believed the drug squad had become too close to their informer.

Police had spent almost $400,000 on him already and now he wanted more. Some police seemed to have forgotten that they had gone to him and asked for his help.

Meanwhile, Stephens was left in Melbourne – the very place he was most at risk. The day he was supposed to finally settle, the police cancelled three meetings.

Senior police had more pressing problems that day. He was yesterday’s hero, yesterday’s man and yesterday’s problem.

Finally, on 4 April, 2000, he was asked to drive into the city to sign the documents. He did not have enough petrol to get home.

AS they sit in the autumn sun near the Yarra River, watching families rowing in hired boats and a dog splashing in the water, Stephens tells stories of being caught in the middle of Operation Phalanx.

He has the voice of a smoker, the accent of a man who has lived in many countries with a just a touch on English Midlands to it. Stocky with grey curly hair, he can become angry over his circumstances but, moments later, can laugh at himself. He is always mulling over his circumstances, looking for a way out.

What if I go public? Ring the Premier? Front at police headquarters to see the Chief Commissioner or walk into a suburban station and try and take hostages? Would Sixty Minutes buy my story?

But while he sits in the sun he momentarily loses his sense of bitterness at how he believes the authorities have betrayed him. He is back in a world where he is the star and a major police investigation rests on him.

As he tells his stories he chain smokes, hunches forward and unconsciously plays with his mobile phone. He laughs and shakes his head as he recalls the crazy risks he took and how often he was nearly exposed. He appears not to notice his wife sitting next to him as she stares intently, hanging on every word.

She goes to interrupt, to ask a question. He doesn’t look at her and continues talking – he wants to finish the story. Her face changes as she narrows her eyes with a mixture of fascination and amazement.

It is clear that, even now, he has not told her all of what he has done. He believes she would not understand because he does not understand it all himself.

She snorts with outrage and ask questions that betray her naivete. ‘Why would police let you do that? You could have been killed.’ He doesn’t look at her. ‘It just happened. It was nobody’s fault.’

She remains angry and sometimes wants to punish him for the way her life has been hijacked. ‘We have met people who see him as really considerate and charming and they see me as a spoiled bitch when I treat him badly. They don’t know why I am furious and I can’t tell them.’

STEPHENS was secretly flown back to Australia to give evidence at the committal hearings. The fears that he would be killed were so great that the government changed the law to allow him to give evidence via a closed circuit link up from another court.

Police were considering using an armoured car to bring him to court after they received information that two motorcycle pillion passengers, armed with shotguns, were to kill Stephens as he was to be driven to court.

In 1997, when he was back in Australia to give evidence, police believe two detectives were followed to Southbank, where a private investigator photographed them meeting the star witness.

He was cross-examined for a month by seven barristers in 1997 before he flew out of Australia again. Associates of Higgs were still making inquiries in South Australia and the Middle East, trying to find where E2/92 had been relocated.

But, by 1999, Higgs knew he was likely to be convicted and agreed to plead guilty to conspiracy to traffic methyl amphetamines between 1 January, 1993 and 30 June, 1996. He was sentenced to six years with a minimum of four.

Stephens now wonders why police and prosecutors devoted so much time and money to catch Higgs, only to accept the guilty plea on a reduced charge.

‘He was supposed to be the king-pin. The prosecutors said to me “with your evidence we are going to put him away for thirty years”. In the end they copped a plea because it was all too hard. It was all too much.’

As an outsider Stephens was able to watch how the criminal justice system ran, and he didn’t like what he saw.

He uses the case of former footballer Jimmy Krakouer as an example. The former North Melbourne footballer became an associate of Higgs and was burned badly by him – twice.

Stephens provided the information that put Krakouer in jail and he now regrets it. ‘He was a very nice, simple man. He had given all his money from football to Higgsy, who lost it all.’

Krakouer, the former star player who had earned $870,000 on the football field, was broke when Higgs suggested he take some drugs back to Perth.

Stephens provided a Bluebird sedan to be used to take the drugs across the Nullarbor but the syndicate ended up using another car.

In January, 1994, police caught Krakouer taking twelve plastic freezer bags out of the door wells of the car in a Perth garage. The 5.3 kilos of amphetamines was only five percent pure, having already been cut by Higgs’ crew from its original eighty percent.

While Stephens does not condone what the former footballer did, he points to the case as the way the system is a raffle. Krakouer, the messenger boy, ended up being sentenced to sixteen years – four times the penalty that his boss received.

‘It was a disgusting sentence,’ Stephens said. ‘He did a mate a favour and hoped to make a quid on the side. Higgs was the boss and Jimmy was just the little guy.’

WHEN Stephens was gathering evidence he was vitally important to the drug squad. When he agreed to testify he was the jewel in the crown for the prosecution case. When the drug squad was broken into he was, for a short time, the highest priority in the force.

Someone wanted to find him so badly they were prepared to break into the drug squad and steal the files. If he was killed as a result it would destroy the credibility of the witness protection program, scuttle the case against Higgs and badly tarnish the reputation of the Victoria Police.

But, now the case is finished, he is like a fading and difficult pop star who can’t draw a crowd. He is no longer to be indulged and no longer seen as worth any special treatment. People who were once available to him twenty-four hours a day no longer answer his calls. His request for police to pay for his accommodation while in Melbourne was rejected.

He says he has not been able to establish a new home and has not been paid the $500,000 he still claims he was promised to start a new life.

He has borrowed from friends and family and has been given $50,000 as a part payment from the police. ‘Even with that they waited to the last possible day until they paid it.’

Stephens says he has been told that one senior policeman has deliberately slowed any possible settlement. One senior detective confirmed a high ranking officer had made disparaging and racist remarks over E2/92.

At one point Stephens was told that money spent on his protection would be deducted from any final payment but the police department will not take into account that he was partially responsible for recovering far more than the $500,000 he claims he was promised.

Assets recovered from Operation Phalanx include the $371,500 cash, a large country property, several vehicles, $50,000 in toys and $30,000 in clothes. He even handed over cash provided by Higgs to buy chemicals.

Higgs and several of the main players in the syndicate pleaded guilty, largely because they knew that Stephens was prepared to give evidence. Lawyers involved in the case said the guilty pleas saved millions that would have been spent in protracted trials.

The irony is that the more effective the police operation is, the more expensive it becomes. If Higgs had not been successfully targeted by the drug squad then the force would not have to find the money to protect and pay for E2/92. While the court system was able to save millions because of the guilty pleas, the police still get left with the bills.

Serving police would be disciplined if they were to express their frustration over the treatment of their star witness, but ex-detectives are not forced to remain silent.

‘He has been treated as if he was expendable. He put it on the line on a daily basis. He was in daily contact with the drug squad for more than three years. As far as I am concerned he was an unpaid employee of the police department and they have a duty to him and his family.’

Sharon Stone resigned from the force in August, 1998, largely because she was disillusioned with a department she felt had failed to be just to a man who had done more than anyone could reasonably ask.

They have reneged on a moral obligation. They have used him up. I feel there is some personal jealousy involved. At least one senior officer has said he would end up getting more than he (the senior officer) gets paid.’

‘If he hadn’t given evidence for seven weeks at the committal there would have been a contested trial which would have cost a fortune. They won’t take that into account.

The former Premier, Jeff Kennett, promised to investigate the case but lost government before he received answers from senior police. Senior ministers in the Bracks government were also aware of the case. But no-one has actually done anything.

Stephens and his wife were in Melbourne for all of March 2000 – even though they were advised by fax by the witness security unit not to come.

Senior protection police say they would prefer the couple remained out of the country for their own safety but, sick of waiting, the pair decided to stay until the deal was done.

Stephens says negotiations were protracted and perverse. ‘Each time we got close they changed the offer. We had meeting after meeting. I want to settle this and get on with what is left of our lives.

They sit in their offices playing with our futures. We are hanging by a thread. I just don’t know why it all went sour. I did what they asked and now I am treated like the enemy.’

Stephens became so frustrated he talked of walking into a police station and trying to take hostages. He said he was promised $500,000, offered $400,000, then $350,000. He accepted in the end, he says, because he had no choice.

It may seem like a big lump sum but, he says, he and his wife were earning more than $150,000 a year before he became a police witness. And Australian dollars shrink alarmingly in many other countries.

He says members of the drug squad have attempted to help him, including one detective who has lent him $10,000 and later $5000 just to survive overseas.

‘The irony is that he has been investigated by his own department for lending me the money when I needed it, while the official channels have done nothing for us.’

Throughout the world, police recognise there is only one way to judge the effectiveness of a drug operation. To check the price and purity of drugs on the street after a gang is smashed. When Higgs was operating, speed on the street was sold around five percent pure. After his arrest the purity dropped to between one and three percent, effectively halving supply.

Police who know what really happened say Stephens is a hero who has done more than any other Australian citizen to destroy a major drug syndicate. They say he and his family were manipulated so he was forced to give evidence and then squeezed to save dollars because he was no longer of value.

On 7 April, Julie and Ross Stephens flew out of Melbourne. They have lost their home, their country, their jobs, their future and their faith in the criminal justice system.

The same day the Victoria Police released a statement on E2/92 in response to media inquiries. It said, in part:

The Victoria Police Force has invested a substantial six-figure sum of money into protecting this witness, relocating his family overseas, supporting and caring for them for almost four years.

The witness gave evidence that helped put behind bars some of the most notorious criminals in Victoria. Police did not force the witness to give evidence in this case.

The force has absolute confidence in the effectiveness and integrity of its witness protection program and the way the person was protected throughout the case. The witness was not enticed to give evidence with any promise of a reward.

‘It is important to note that the witness has told police of the family’s total satisfaction with the operation of the Victoria Police witness protection unit.’

Meanwhile, Higgs was in the medium security Fulham Prison near Sale – waiting for his release on 30 January, 2003.

A confidential report into Higgs’s drug operation admits police need a ‘reliable informer’ to tackle the syndicate. Then along came E2/92.

CHAPTER 9

Yesterday’s Man