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‘Yeah, yeah.'

Daley pretended to get angry about this, and again demanded to know who'd been talking to the police.

‘It's that fuckin' Fuck Off,' Andrew said, giving the nickname of a bikie. ‘That Fuck prick.'

‘I don't need this shit, mate,' Daley said. ‘Just sort it out.'

‘It's fuckin' Fuck Off, mate. I'm telling you.'

Daley referred to the previous conversation in which Andrew had acknowledged Falconer's murder, but this had not been caught on tape because of the faulty recording device. ‘Remember the conversation we had?' he said. ‘At the back of the place? And you said nobody knows who done it?'

‘Yeah.'

It was close, but not close enough to get a conviction by itself.

In November 2003 Daley left Sydney with a one-way ticket provided by police. It wasn't much for what he had lost and all he was risking. The last few months had been traumatic for him, but Jubelin felt that on the whole he'd handled them with commendable mental strength.

Daley gave police an eighty-seven-page signed statement, which was taken over a week in a safe house north of Sydney. Over a series of ten- to twelve-hour days, Jubelin did the talking while Glen Browne, Jason Evers and Luke Rankin
typed or looked after security. It was a tense time because Daley was emotional: he realised that once the statement was done and signed, there would be no turning back.

On the day before his flight, he came into the building where Tuno's office was located to collect his plane ticket. A detective met him in the foyer and took him through security and into a meeting room where Jubelin was waiting. When the ticket was handed over, Daley looked at it with surprise, almost as though he'd never believed this would happen.

‘Thanks,' he said. ‘I suppose you can have this now.'

He reached beneath his shirt and produced a loaded automatic with a laser sight on top, and laid it on the table.

Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall
.

Gary Jubelin was frustrated by the lack of progress. Fortunately he was in the relationship with Pamela Young and so had something to take his mind off the job, but sometimes they didn't see much of each other. She'd come to realise that even in a group of colleagues who were extremely dedicated to their work, Gary was an extremist. At home he never turned off his phone, no matter what they were doing. Sometimes she would ask him to, but he refused. It was as though being available to anyone who wanted him—bosses, staff, witnesses—was a compulsion, maybe even an addiction. This created tensions in their relationship. He found it difficult to be still, to go out to a restaurant and have a meal, or even just to sit and have a cup of coffee with her. All his talk was about work. And then there was the constant exercise, whether it was running or the
gym or martial arts. She still admired his intensity, and liked it when this was directed at her. But always it was at a time of his choosing, not her own. He was a hard man.

From the end of 2003, Tuno went into a lull, for several reasons. It had run out of leads, and there was no great enthusiasm left from management. As Luke Rankin recalls, it did not have a high media profile because the victim was not someone many people would have much sympathy for. It also happened that at this point some of the detectives had to devote serious time to commitments from previous investigations. Jubelin, Jason Evers and Nigel Warren got tied up with the Linda Wilson trial in October and November.

Another thing that took them away from Tuno was that the homicide officers on the team (who now included Glen Browne and Luke Rankin, who had transferred into the squad) spent one week in six doing on-call work. One job that Nigel Warren remembers with horror involved a paedophile named Jeffrey Hillsley, who, after many years in prison, had written to the Parole Board, ‘A message to the community: I'll be back. Thank God for little girls.' It was signed ‘The Walking Evil'. He was released anyway, and on New Year's Day 2004, Warren, Jubelin and Rankin were on call when they received notice that there'd been a murder near Burwood. A man's head had been destroyed by what at first seemed to have been a shotgun, although later they found the damage had been caused by a frenzied hammer attack. The detectives arrived and learned the man's ten-year-old daughter had disappeared. Her mother told police that Hillsley had befriended the family. After killing the father, he kidnapped the girl and sexually assaulted her. Later she escaped, and police caught Hillsley. The
homicide team was up for thirty-six hours chasing him—not unusual with on-call work. Warren later recalled how the need to work closely with the victim's family, ‘Rather than making the task of investigating their misfortunate easier . . . added an exhaustive element to the investigation, leaving an indelible imprint on my memory.'

These various distractions continued into 2004, which also saw the second Bowraville inquest, this time into the death of Evelyn Greenup and the suspected death of Colleen Walker. It ran in fits and starts from February to September. Jubelin and Evers attended, and the work of Strike Force Ancud was scrutinised by the court. The coroner found that Colleen Walker had been killed although there was not enough evidence to convict her murderer, but that a jury might well find a known person had killed Evelyn Greenup. The matter was referred to the Director of Public Prosecutions to consider a prosecution.

Nigel Warren was tied up with the Kerry Whelan case for some of the year and then, to cap things off, Jubelin was told he had to leave homicide as part of the rotation policy. This had been introduced to the specialist squads after the Royal Commission, to reduce the chance of corruption—although there'd never been much chance for corruption in homicide anyway.

By this time—late 2004—the Tuno team was a little jaded. Despite Tod Daley's information, which they'd now had in its complete version for over a year, they did not have enough to charge anyone with Terry Falconer's murder. All the obvious leads had been chased up and there was nothing pressing left to do. It was not that the detectives hadn't been working hard—in fact they'd been working so hard that it had prevented them
from going for promotions. Their careers were passing them by, and they agreed they needed to take a step back and play the promotion game more effectively.

Within a year they'd all been promoted, but this took some of them away from homicide, and from Tuno, forever. Nigel Warren and Glen Browne stayed in homicide as sergeants, but Luke Rankin ended up at Mudgee and Jason Evers at Ballina. Gary Jubelin moved to a surburban police station.

When he left, he handed Tuno over to Warren and Browne. He told his bosses it would need a team of six for six months to get it to the point where someone could be charged, but no extra officers were allocated. You have to feel some sympathy for the bosses—it would have been easy at this point to decide Tuno had failed and that there was little point in wasting more resources on it. Soon Warren was taken off the investigation, and two years later rotated out of homicide himself, to sex crimes. Tuno continued to be run by Glen Browne and a senior constable named John Edwards.

Around 2004, Tuno's analyst Camille Alavoine learned she had cancer, and transferred back to Campbelltown, near her home, to reduce the amount of time she spent commuting. She received treatment for her illness, which went into remission, and still spent some of her time doing analysis for Browne.

Jubelin would happily have stayed in homicide for his whole career, but when his time for rotation approached he decided he would prefer to jump than be pushed, and when an opportunity came up for him to apply for a promotion to inspector as crime manager at Chatswood, he took it and won the position.

The environment at Chatswood was very different to what he had been used to in homicide for the past decade. He found it a shock at first, and there were long days when he wondered what he was doing there. Until he got to Chatswood, human resource issues were something other people dealt with, but in his new job he found himself dealing with all sorts of matters that were important to the individuals concerned, such as details of rosters or of the tea room, but just about as far removed from the sort of work he'd previously done as could be imagined.

Jubelin was reluctant to wear a police uniform. It was not that he was ashamed of the uniform or felt he was too good to wear it, but he was proud to be a detective, and detectives wore suits. He felt that detectives had been shamed during the very public Royal Commission hearings, and some within the job had come to think all detectives were an embarrassment to the organisation. Jubelin wanted to make a stand against this attitude, and so he continued to wear a suit, even when asked to don a uniform by his commander. There were rumours he hid or gave away certain key parts of his uniform, but in the end there was a compromise and Jubelin was spotted on rare occasions wearing the blue.

Fortunately for his peace of mind, he soon found a murder with which to occupy himself. In March 2005, a woman came to the front desk at Chatswood to say her husband, Bob Ljubic, a luxury car dealer of Mosman, had disappeared. He'd received a phone call the night before asking him to go out to inspect a Ferrari 355 Spider that was for sale, and had not returned. The police database COPS showed his own car, a Porsche, had been found that morning at The Gap at
Watson's Bay. An officer told Jubelin about the notification and he was interested, because he knew who Ljubic was: he had been a suspect in an on-call murder Jubelin had dealt with at homicide the year before, of another car dealer named Franco Mayer.

Five days later, Ljubic's body was found floating in the sea off Kurnell. The case was being treated as a possible suicide, even though police had established that the phone from which the call about the Ferrari had been made had been bought under a false name. Jubelin found this suspicious, and managed to take over the matter and turn it into a murder investigation. He ran it himself—while still performing his duties as crime manager—with staff including two very junior but capable officers at Chatswood, Andrew Brennan and Ben Walsh. It was an unusual thing to do, and one gets the impression Jubelin's bosses let him do it simply because it was easier than arguing with him.

Almost all vehicles in Sydney use electronic tags to cross the Harbour Bridge, and records are kept whenever a tag is activated. The detectives established exactly when Ljubic's car had crossed on the night he disappeared, and then looked at the owners of all the cars that had crossed around the same time. One belonged to a Jason McCall, who had a criminal background and had reported his car as having been broken into that evening.

Fortunately the Crime Commission had been conducting an investigation into Ljubic while he was alive, and was able to provide essential assistance to the police investigation. Starting with the phone numbers of Ljubic and McCall, it identified other people involved in the case, and police began
surveillance. The targets didn't all like each other—soon the $800,000 house of one of them in Goulburn was destroyed in an arson attack. Jubelin suspected another of the group had set the fire, and wondered how he could prove it. Figuring the arsonist might have stopped for petrol on the drive down from Sydney, one keen member of Jubelin's team suggested he and a colleague visit every service station on the way to Goulburn and get the CCTV footage for the night in question. Jubelin didn't like their chances but approved the show of keenness and told the young detectives to go ahead. They returned with a pile of tapes and Jubelin looked at it pessimistically, realising that watching them all would be like looking for a needle in a haystack—a needle that was probably not even there. But on the first tape they viewed, they found images of their suspected arsonist going into the service station and buying a box of matches.

Eventually they interviewed this man, who was shattered when he saw the photographs from the service station. He rolled and gave evidence that Jason McCall had thrown Bob Ljubic off The Gap. There was a trial and McCall was convicted of murder.

The man who rolled became a registered informant, and one day when they were talking, Jubelin asked him to name the biggest criminal he knew.

‘Anthony Perish,' was the answer.

At this point it might be helpful to give an outline of the industry Anthony Perish was involved in, as it affects and helps explain a lot of the behaviour to be revealed in the pages to come. The first point to be noted is that amphetamines (including more potent variations such as methamphetamine)
and ecstasy are the only major illegal drugs, apart from marijuana, that can be produced in Australia. The other two most common types, heroin and cocaine, must be imported. This has helped create a vibrant local industry for the production of amphetamines.

From about 1990 to 2009, Anthony Perish was a manufacturer of various forms of amphetamine and ecstasy, which involved five main types of activity: obtaining the ingredients, combining them using chemical processes, selling the resulting products, protecting himself from police and also criminals wanting to rip him off, and spending or investing his profits.

The market for these drugs is enormous, with surveys suggesting that over the past decade about ten per cent of people aged twenty to twenty-nine used them, with lower but still significant rates for the age groups either side of that. In recent years ecstasy has become less popular, amphetamines more. In 2009–10 the retail price for a gram of amphetamine or methamphetamine varied from $50 to $1,000, depending on a number of factors including the type. Many people with no other criminal behaviour and who consider their use purely recreational spend several hundred dollars a week on the drug. It is this participation in the market by hundreds of thousands of otherwise law-abiding Australians that supports a major underground industry that employs thousands of people and turns over hundreds of millions of dollars a year, all of it untaxed.