Authors: Matthew Condon
Because of the prolific number of Italian families believed to have been involved in growing the marihuana, and profiting considerably from the enterprise – to the point where their grand houses were colloquially dubbed grass castles – Vassallo’s one-man operation became known as ‘the Italian desk’.
Fortunately, Vassallo had a brilliant mind for statistics and data. Already in his research he had delineated that particularly gruesome murders were occurring, year after year, at roughly the same times of year in places associated with the large-scale cultivation of marihuana, specifically Griffith in New South Wales and Far North Queensland. Why?
Vassallo worked out that the violence erupted around the time that crops of dope were being harvested and packaged for sale. There would be disputes over money. Fights over quantity. Vassallo would study these patterns, as a meteorologist might pore over weather data and make a forecast. What will happen tomorrow? What does all this mean? Vassallo’s investigation became known as Project Alpha.
Given his expertise, Vassallo was chosen to undertake an elite intelligence analyst’s course at the National Intelligence College in Manly, Sydney, in late 1984. His roommate for the duration of the course was Queensland Undercover Detective Jim Slade. Slade was probably Queensland’s finest intelligence officer, trained by and large by retired assistant commissioner and legendary detective Tony Murphy. ‘We were doing the intelligence analyst course that was run there,’ says Vassallo. ‘We were learning the actual processes involved in any form of discipline, in that there was conventions. We all had to learn the conventions of intelligence analysis, be it strategic intelligence or tactical intelligence.
‘[It] basically deals with … the Venn flow charts, link charts, entities, how you describe an entity. A confirmed link and an unconfirmed link – and we all take it for granted these days a confirmed link from one entity to another entity diagrammatically is described or depicted as a straight line. An unconfirmed link is a broken line.’
He liked Slade. And their work shared some common ground. ‘We got on there and we had a few beers and the bottom line was that Jim was really concerned about … a trip up north,’ recalls Vassallo. ‘Things had happened to him and he realised that he was being pressured by the administration. He told me certain things and I said, well, I’m your counterpart … he didn’t quite understand that I was a New South Wales copper. First of all, he thought I was a Federal copper and he realised he could not get help from within, right? He needed an outside ally and he was looking at … me, because I worked at the bureau.
‘We got on well, we understood each other … everything he was telling me was gold in that I’d read a lot about where the data was coming from, and there was nothing coming from Queensland.
‘So, I now had a fountain of information, and he’d just come back from a major exercise up there and he’s telling me all this shit. So I’m just sucking it in and I’m having my Southern Comforts and he’s having his beers and, you know, over the course of two weeks, apart from doing our courses and doing exams and … finally getting our qualifications, we partnered up often.
‘I was very interested in what he had to say but what I couldn’t tell is, you know, is this all bullshit? Was it fantasy?’
Vassallo quickly concluded that Slade was on the level. ‘In that first sense I believed everything he was saying because of the colour and detail of what he was saying,’ Vassallo adds. ‘The places that he had been, the fact that I was aware of certain things in certain places. And notwithstanding illegal things, I knew for example that in the southern states the growing of marihuana was seasonal; in the northern states you could grow it during the winter.
‘Well, the growing of tomatoes and the growing of marihuana have lots of parallels and our Italian mates started off in soldiers’ plots in Griffith growing tomatoes. And later on oranges, and putting marihuana plants between wine-grape vines or tomatoes was beautiful camouflage, and that’s what they used to do in the old days.
‘From Jim’s perspective, he had this skill with people … you know, he was a chameleon. I could see in his mannerisms, I could see the passion …’
Courtesy of the recommendations of the Williams and Stewart Royal Commissions, Slade had been tasked to investigate drug plantations and drug importation in Far North Queensland. His work was dubbed Operation Trek. Trek involved numerous bureaus and bodies, both state and Federal, including the ABCI, National Parks and Wildlife and the armed forces. It also utilised elements of the Queensland Bureau of Criminal Intelligence (BCI) under the control of Alan Barnes.
In early 1984 Slade and his partner Ian Jamieson went on patrol in the far north for more than three months, setting up a network of information sources. They included fishermen, boat skippers, property owners, pilots, teachers and local police. Both men gathered an enormous amount of intelligence. Much of it even stunned these two seasoned investigators. How had this corrupt industry been allowed to flourish for so long without coming across the radar of police?
When Slade and Vassallo came together, so too did some of the pieces of this monstrous puzzle.
Transfer
Mareeba Detective Sergeant Ross Dickson’s specialty was the drug trade, and he’d built up a vast network of contacts throughout the region. He knew who was doing what, and was making headway in the fight against drugs and organised crime.
It was incomprehensible to him to be directed to not investigate the drug trade, as he alleged he had been instructed by Inspector Bergin. Dickson was having some success in what was probably the capital of marihuana production in Australia outside of Griffith in rural New South Wales, and he and his men were told in unequivocal terms to back off. Why?
Dickson had known he’d wanted to be a policeman since he was a child. He was proud of his work. So, after typing up his concerns in a letter to the Commissioner of Police, Terry Lewis, asking why he had been given an instruction that he considered unlawful, he waited anxiously for an answer in writing.
He got one. Just weeks later he was notified that he was to be transferred to Townsville. The transfer officially came through on 30 April, the notification was signed off by then Acting Commissioner Syd ‘Sippy’ Atkinson.
Dickson immediately penned an ‘Application to have Unapplied for Transfer Cancelled’. He said such a move to Townsville would cause him and his family financial hardship, his daughter was receiving specialist treatment for an ailment and needed a further 18 months treatment, that he was accepted by the local community and that he still had some major court cases and investigations on the go. He also had another reason he should stay put: ‘Knowledge of the criminal element as a whole in particular, and organised crime in this area particularly relating to the Griffiths [sic] Drug Organisation plus the value of informants cultivated will be lost.’
The application was rejected.
Dickson stood his ground, and by doing so set himself on the same perilous path as many before him, those who had dared to upset the status quo in the Queensland Police Force, including Kingsley Fancourt, Bob Campbell, Bob Walker, Lorelle Saunders and others. His fate was sealed when he gave a series of media interviews.
One of the first was to the veteran reporter Mike Willesee who hosted the popular Channel Nine program,
A Current Affair
. Introducing his report, Willesee referred to a Queensland policeman ‘who appears to be paying a penalty for being too good at his job’.
Willesee posed the question – how did Dickson get a reputation for being a ‘crime buster’ in a town as small as Mareeba, population 5000? In answer, he went on to inform viewers that Mareeba was the police base for an area approximately the same size as Victoria. ‘It’s close to South-East Asia, it has disused World War II airstrips, it has properties so large that the owners often haven’t seen all of what they own,’ Willesee informed his audience. ‘Accordingly, it’s an area which has attracted drug growers, drug smugglers, drug dealers and smugglers of illegal immigrants.’
Willesee explained to viewers that Dickson was now being transferred from Mareeba against his will. When Willesee asked Dickson why this was so, Dickson responded, ‘I don’t know, nobody will tell me.’
Willesee: So you have a high rate of crime, a high rate of clean-up, but you’re being transferred. It seems to me that something is terribly wrong.
Dickson: I say that myself. I’ve been trying to find out what’s been going on. I’ve been put under a lot of pressure all of this year. I’ve put a report in to the Commissioner and I have made sure it was hand-delivered to him, asking him if he knew what was going on.
Willesee: Was there a reply?
Dickson: Yes. I was transferred.
Willesee: How do you read that?
Dickson: Well, I don’t read anything sinister [in]to it. I said in the report to the Commissioner about the pressure that was being applied to us not to investigate major offences, but I suspected that we were perhaps too close to the executives of certain organised criminal activities and perhaps they thought we knew more than we did know.
Willesee: Do you mean you were asked not to investigate certain alleged offences?
Dickson: Yes, I was instructed on the fifth of April, under no circumstances were we to investigate any further drug matters at all at Mareeba.
Willesee: How can you possibly explain that?
Dickson: I can’t explain it, it’s an unlawful instruction and I went straightaway and typed a personal letter to the Commissioner telling him this and telling him that if he wanted me to … obey this instruction, that I required that instruction in writing.
Willesee suggested that the action was almost an open invitation to drug dealers to head to Mareeba and set up shop, so long as they didn’t work regular office hours. Dickson added that trying to contain the drug industry was an almost impossible task.
‘We’re all trying to work in together, we’re trying to stretch a thin blue line around an enormous area and, unfortunately, there’s a lot of gaps in it and we’re just doing the best we can,’ said Dickson.
Dickson believed his imminent transfer was a way for the police administration to set an example. It suggested: ‘Pull your head in or the same will happen to you as happened to Dickson.’
In Channel Nine’s Brisbane studio, Willesee crossed to Queensland Police Union spokesman Detective Sergeant John ‘Bluey’ O’Gorman. Was the transfer good news for Queensland criminals? Willesee asked.
‘I’d say that if I was an executive, if you like, of a large drug-growing, marketing venture,’ said O’Gorman, ‘I couldn’t have achieved a better result … than if I’d gone out and shot Ross Dickson personally.’
Problematically, Dickson continued talking to the newspapers and television reporters. The night after the Willesee story, he popped up on Channel Seven’s current affair program
Today Tonight
, and was interviewed by Mark Suleau.
During the interview Suleau asked Dickson: ‘Are there men in the marihuana industry powerful enough to put external pressure on the police force?’
‘Yes, well, going from experience where we’ve seen the rest of Australia we all realise that there are people with a lot of influence connected with the drug industry …’ Dickson replied.
Dickson’s name also began to light up in Commissioner Lewis’s diary. On 1 May he fielded a call from Police Minister Glasson ‘re D/S/Dickson transfer’. Three days later Lewis took a call from
Tablelands Advertiser
journalist Ken Pederson who confirmed there was ‘little support for D/S Dickson in Mareeba’. On 6 May he sat down with union representatives and told them Dickson’s transfer was ‘to stand’. Old friend Ron Edington also appeased his boss by phoning Lewis and discussed ‘general poor image of D/S/Dickson’.
But the media interviews just kept coming.
The young Opposition Police Spokesman Wayne Goss told journalist Chris Allen of Channel Seven’s
State Affair
that another police officer – Constable Hurrell – had been transferred after investigating a cattle stealing case that involved a former police officer and two other serving officers. ‘The clear message coming from the Commissioner to police is that if you move into, if you investigate sensitive areas, then this government will sack or transfer you,’ Goss said.
Goss then appeared on Seven’s
Today Tonight
on 6 June. Reporter Chris Adams asked Goss if he thought there was corruption ‘at a very high level’ in the Queensland Police Force.
‘Well, it can only be one of two things,’ Goss replied. ‘It can only be corruption or it can only be some misguided notion of mateship – a friend of a friend – that is protecting people who have been involved in activities warranting investigation by police.’ Goss openly wondered if the whole affair wasn’t ‘a question of incompetence at the administration level’ of the force.
The conflagration grew, and on the day Goss did his interview with Adams, Commissioner Lewis noted in his diary: ‘With A/Dep Comm McDonnell saw Messrs Chant, McCaul, O’Gorman and Hannigan [of the Police Union] re D/S R. Dickson – transfer to stand.’