Immigration law is a very tricky thing. You are dealing with people’s lives. If you are an immigration lawyer, people look to you as the person who can come up with a solution. If you don’t succeed, they can become upset and angry. Hence Teddy’s brush with the law in the late 1990s.
Around 1997, Teddy began attracting the attention of Department of Immigration authorities. The authorities believed Teddy was party to lies told by would-be immigrants on their applications for refugee status. Gaining refugee status from the Philippines is quite difficult. Despite the occasional activity of members of the New People’s Army, a communist guerrilla group, in the southern provinces, the country as a whole is generally considered safe by Australian immigration authorities.
A number of Teddy’s clients were refused visas on this basis, and appeared before government tribunals to appeal against the decisions.
One such case was that of Lilia Gaculais, which went before the Administrative Appeals Tribunal on 25 August 2001. Lilia Gaculais was the aunt of a would-be Australian citizen from the Philippines, Mr Blas, who had approached Teddy Gonzales while in Australia on a visitor’s visa in August 1996, seeking advice on how to get Australian residency.
Gaculais said that Teddy had been paid a fee of $1500 by her nephew to assist with the preparation of a protection visa application, and a further sum of $1500 upon a subsequent review of that application by the Refugee Review Tribunal.
She said Mr Blas had told Teddy he wanted to get permission to work in Australia legally, and that Teddy had said he could get him a work permit without any trouble and in a way that would be allowed by the Australian Government. Mr Blas’s application read:
I was a professional nurse by occupation while in the Philippines. While I had a full-time job, I had spare time after work and I wanted to have additional part-time work.
It was at that time I again met Ben Claraval, a friend I had met a few years back. Ben said they were in need of a nurse to participate in their rural projects. Ben said they had a privately funded corporation that looked after the needy communities. Ben was willing to get me part-time work, so I accepted the job. Early in our visits to the town I was shocked to see how difficult life was in many of those areas. There were really small villages with just very few people in them. There was neither water nor electricity in these places. As time went by, Ben and I became even closer. We had several discussions about our work but it always puzzled me why he would request that I keep everything we did in confidence. I thought that we were doing something great which deserved to be talked about and probably duplicated by others. But it was his request and I respected this. At one time, though, I was approached by Catherine Gomez. She was part of Ben’s team. She said that we would not see Ben any more and that the project was to stop. I insisted on getting information from her as to Ben, because I felt that something was wrong. I would not let her go. After a while she said that she would disclose to me the situation because she did not want to endanger me. She said that the villages we visited were where families of New People’s Army members lived and that Ben was a communist leader. She said Ben had been shot and killed. This disclosure left me in shock. I was in the midst of communists and I did not know about it. Even more shocking was the news about Ben’s death. Two nights later Catherine came to see me. She was visibly upset. She said the communists had come to the conclusion that I had something to do with Ben’s death. She said that an order had been sent to a liquidation team to have me killed. She said she did not believe I was involved and therefore wanted to forewarn me. It is for this reason that I had to leave the Philippines.
Mr Blas signed the document, knowing it was not factual. It was the decision of the Tribunal’s Deputy President, Dr D Chappell, that Mr Blas’s visa application be refused. However, Dr Chappell went further, stating that the allegations made against Teddy in this case were almost identical to those in a previous case brought before the Tribunal. He proceeded to make the comments about the conduct of certain migration agents:
It does not require the skills of a Sherlock Holmes or Dr Watson to discern the nature of the systematic pattern of immigration fraud and abuse emerging from these cases. It is very disturbing, however, to realise that it is a pattern which appears to have been allowed to continue over a substantial period of time without effective actions being taken to investigate and prosecute those responsible.
In fact, by that time Teddy had been investigated by the Department of Immigration. In July 1998, he had been charged with four counts of ‘being knowingly concerned in the offence of providing false documents to an officer exercising powers under the Migration Act’.
Two of these charges were later dropped, but the other two went to trial in St James Local Court in central Sydney. Teddy maintained his innocence and fought the charges. Two of his female clients claimed Teddy had charged them $1500 each, and stated in court that Teddy had provided them with false typewritten statements to copy, in their own handwriting, into their applications for protection visas. Both the applications revolved around the women being unwittingly tangled up in communist activity and leaving the Philippines because they were fearful they would be killed by communists.
The women claimed Teddy left them high and dry after their applications were refused. One had complained to the immigration authorities. She told the court Teddy arrived on her doorstep when he found out she had lodged the complaint and coerced her into signing a statutory declaration that she had no complaint against him.
The problem for the women was that if their own versions were to be believed, they had cooperated in writing down the statements, knowing them to be untrue. They also had an axe to grind with Teddy Gonzales. They were therefore hardly reliable witnesses. The immigration charges against Teddy Gonzales were dismissed on 15 March 1999. Teddy was able to continue practising.
Undoubtedly, Teddy had made a number of clients unhappy. The question that would be asked after the murders was whether this provided sufficient motive for him to be killed. But too much time had passed between this period of Teddy’s legal troubles and the murders, it seemed, and the police soon abandoned this line of investigation.