Bad (11 page)

Obtaining large quantities of so-called precursor chemicals is one of the keys to success as a drug manufacturer, and is very difficult as the law carefully restricts their import and sale. Some manufacturers have used crude means, such as paying
young people to visit pharmacies to buy products like Sudafed from which they extract pseudoephedrine, a key precursor chemical. But these so-called pseudo runs have become less useful since pharmacists, urged on by police, have introduced restrictions on purchases. The ideal way to obtain precursors is to import them illegally from places such as Russia—often using someone who specialises in this—or by stealing them from chemical companies here.

The television series
Breaking Bad
gives a good portrayal of the life of an amphetamine manufacturer, although it downplays the difficulties of obtaining precursors. As viewers of the program would know, the manufacture requires knowledge and premises. Knowledge can be obtained from experience aided by chemistry books and intelligence, and, although Anthony Perish did not do well at school, he was a natural ‘cook' from an early age. Just as significantly, he proved to be very inventive when it came to setting up premises—known as labs—for large-scale manufacturing.

Some of the problems with making amphetamines are that the process produces liquid waste and also a distinctive smell, resembling cat urine. These are some of the main reasons so many clandestine labs are discovered by police each year. In 2009–10, a record 694 labs were found around Australia, most of them in houses. It therefore makes sense to establish labs at remote rural locations, which is what Anthony Perish (and Terry Falconer) did. A large farm shed is big enough to house a lab produing hundreds of kilograms of drugs each year. Apart from the ingredients, some elaborate laboratory equipment is requried—a big lab will have up to $100,000 of
glassware—and, if ecstasy is being produced, an expensive, and now illegal, tablet press.

Perish sold most of his product to bikie gangs, who for a long time have controlled the distribution of amphetamines around Australia. One reason for this is they like using them themselves: heroin and marijuana have at different times had reputations as ‘hippie' drugs, whereas amphetamines are hard-edged, and also enable users to drink more alcohol than usual and stay awake for longer, which is of benefit to hard-riding and hard-partying bikies with an affection for beer and Jim Beam.

Outlaw motorcycle gangs are the closest Australia has to a mafia, even when not involved in the drug trade. They are closed and secretive hierarchies with codes of loyalty and silence and a propensity for violence. It is understandable that they have attracted criminals as members, and have entered into criminal activities. In 2010 there were 1,630 bikies in New South Wales, including nominees or ‘noms' (apprentices) but not the numerous hangers-on who cluster around each club and do a lot of the retail drug-dealing for members. At that time there were around twenty gangs throughout the state, some with many chapters, each of which had its own clubhouse. Most bikies, however, were in a few main gangs, most importantly the Rebels (600 members), the Bandidos (235), and the Nomads and the Comanchero (200 each). The Hells Angels, with only 60, were important beyond their numbers, because of their reputation and international connections.

Some people claim the clubs are just social groups, but their criminality is beyond doubt. In the decade to the end of 2008, 8,118 charges had been laid against gang members for
offences ranging from murder down. Allowing for members who'd died or left the gangs, this represented 4.1 charges per member. This, of course, would have been only a fraction of the offences actually committed. Police say members of most chapters of most gangs are involved in drug dealing. The gangs deny this when asked.

An important part of gang activity is to maintain a monopoly of drug sales within the gang's own area. Often this, or disputes when members switch clubs, leads to armed conflict between gangs, such as the Rebels–Bandidos clash at the end of 2008, and the Comanchero–Hells Angels dispute that culminated in the affray and killing at Sydney Airport in March 2009. In the first part of 2012, Sydney suffered a spate of drive-by shootings on account of an argument between the Hells Angels and the Nomads.

An insight into the involvement of bikies in the drug trade was provided by Strike Force Sibret, which in 2001 rolled up a major operation in which the Newcastle Nomads had been buying amphetamines for years from an illiterate cook named Tod Little, president of their Gold Coast chapter. Richard Walsh, the sergeant-at-arms of the Newcastle chapter, received a sentence of thirty-two years after pleading guilty to supplying four hundred kilograms of amphetamine, although he'd been charged with supplying a tonne. This was the longest sentence ever given for a non-importation drug offence in Australia. Tod Little received twenty-four years. Forty-two others were charged, including fourteen other Nomads.

The amounts of money involved were considerable—on his last pick-up, Walsh had paid Little $65,000 for half a kilogram. (He would have intended to dilute this before he sold it in
smaller quantities to members and other drug dealers.) The Nomads reacted violently to the arrests, at one point arriving in force at a Newcastle pub where police from Strike Force Sibret were known to drink and blocking off each end of the street before searching the premises. Fortunately the police were not there. Detectives learned the bikies had employed a private eye to locate their residences.

Anthony Perish flourished for years because of his close relationship with the Rebels. In this he was helped by the close connections he forged when he was a young man, and by the fact that his brother Andrew was for a while a senior member of the club. The Rebels gave Anthony both a market and, importantly, security.

Protection is an essential part of a drug manufacturer's professional life. In many ways that life resembles a legitimate businessman's, but of course Anthony Perish could not depend on the police when he was threatened. And he would be threatened, because he was a wealthy man in a world of violent criminals. What Perish did was cultivate a reputation for extreme violence, an important part of a drug manufacturer's ‘brand', and, as the Tuno detectives discovered when they started to look at him, he did this very successfully. That reputation was based on acts of violence that will be described later in this story, at the time police became aware of them. The important point for now is that Perish was a man accustomed to using violence to solve problems, which is one of the reasons he chose to deal with Terry Falconer the way he did.

The final part of a drug manufacturer's business is the way he disposes of his considerable income. The smart ones
employ lawyers and accountants who help them launder the proceeds of their crimes. They invest their money in legitimate businesses, and often the owners of those businesses are aware of the murky origins of the funds. As we shall see, enough is known about Anthony Perish to be able to say he dealt intelligently with his profits: but thanks to that, much of what he did with them remains unknown.

•

In 2005 the Crime Commission was given a reference to a matter that would eventually be closely connected to Tuno. It involved a DNA link between two shootings, one in Sydney and the other on the Gold Coast. The Sydney incident was an attempted murder at JB's Bar and Grill in Haymarket, where a New Zealander named Raniera Puketapu had been shot but not killed on 8 October 2002. He'd been sitting with his back to the big window in the bar when an unknown man stopped outside on Little Hay Street and fired eight shots at him at close range through the glass, hitting him three times. Puketapu was seriously wounded, but did not die.

The shooter had gone around the corner into Harbour Street and run towards Goulburn Street, showing a badge and yelling out, ‘Get down, police!' Soon after, real police were alerted to a burning van about four hundred metres from JB's Bar and Grill, in the direction in which the shooter had run, and recovered two 9 mm Norinco pistols from it, one of which matched cartridges found at the scene of the shooting.

Detectives who interviewed Puketapu in hospital a week later pursued various possibilities, including that the shooting might have been done by his girlfriend's former lover, a
member of an Auckland-based Islander gang named Black Power. The gang had no chapters in Australia, which Puketapu said was just as well because it was ‘way more intimidating than the gangs are here in this country, you know. So, I figure if they came over here they would just push all the other gangs out for sure.' But there was no evidence of a revenge shooting, or indeed of any other motive.

Puketapu's parents and aunt and uncle had been visiting Sydney to attend the rugby league grand final, the parents staying at the Holiday Inn, and in the evening he, his dad and his uncle had gone down to the bar for a beer. It had been a spontaneous decision, which made it even less likely the shooting had been planned. He'd been hoping to meet up with a former workmate, a Columbian woman named Martha, but she hadn't turned up. The police looked at the possibility he'd been shot by Martha's boyfriend, but found no evidence for that.

Meanwhile police scientists and analysts went to work on the items recovered from the burning van. A fire-damaged mobile phone proved to be one of two phones purchased for cash a week earlier in Darlinghurst, using false buyer details. Police obtained call records and found the phones had been used exclusively to contact each other. The second phone—the one the police did not have—had been used mainly in the vicinity of JB's Bar and Grill. The last calls came from that vicinity just before the shooting, suggesting the person using the second phone might have been a spotter.

There was one tenuous lead on the shooter. As soon as news of the shooting had gone out on the police radio, security staff monitoring the City of Sydney Streetsafe CCTV cameras
had begun looking for the shooter. The camera at the corner of Liverpool and George streets showed him running east on Liverpool Street not far from where the van was burning. Once all other leads had dried up, police released indistinct footage of the shooter, which was published on the front page of the
Daily Telegraph
on 27 May 2003, under the headline ‘PERFECT CRIME'. It was the police's last hope, and when they got no response from the public the investigation fizzled out. It was hard to think of a motive, once the jealous lover angle was exhausted. Puketapu was, in his own words, ‘a good person, you know, and I don't do anything irrational to anyone. And pose any irrationalities to anyone really.'

Three years later, police received information that Dallas Fitzgerald, son of Felix Lyle, then president of the Bandidos, might have been the intended target of the shooting. He was interviewed on 11 August 2005, along with his father, and confirmed he'd been in JB's at the time, with two friends named Paul and Mark, whose surnames he didn't know. Fitzgerald was dismissive of the suggestion he'd been the intended target, for several reasons. He wasn't Maori or an Islander, for a start, and the shooter had had plenty of time to make a correct identification: ‘I saw him walking up to the window and then he just stood there and then he selected [his target]. It was definitely intentional on that person because he was only less than three feet away from him, it was a hundred per cent that's who his target was.'

Fitzgerald had left the scene immediately, and declined to be interviewed later. In the 2005 interview police asked if he'd had disagreements with anyone in the period before 8 October 2002.

‘No,' Fitzgerald replied. ‘Not that I can recall, no.'

‘So, you haven't been shot at all since then?'

‘No, not at all.'

He declined a police offer of protection.

The whole thing remained a puzzle, although it produced one thing of interest. DNA found on a glove in the burning van, and assumed to belong to the shooter, was matched using the national database to DNA recovered in similar circumstances at the time of the shooting of a man named Michael Davies on the Gold Coast in April 2002. There too DNA had been found on an item recovered from a vehicle burning nearby. In that case the shooter had managed to kill his victim, and with only one shot.

The Crime Commission looked hard at the two shootings, but couldn't match the DNA to any known person. It was thrown off the trail for a long time by the fact that someone had called a Sydney crime family from a public phone box near Davies' home around the time of the shooting. Naturally they assumed the family were involved in the killing, and looked into this with rising hope. But in the end it turned out to have been just a coincidence.

•

Not long after the success of the Bob Ljubic murder investigation, Jubelin's personal and professional life took a downturn. His relationship with Pamela Young broke up. She'd found it a rich and intense period of her life, but very hard. She believes a good homicide detective needs to be fearless in all sorts of ways, able to triumph over criminals and reluctant witnesses and lazy staff and bosses who don't want to provide
necessary resources and personnel. To do this often requires you to put aside personal needs, and this was something Gary was good at, but his private life suffered. It happened with many detectives, but more than most with Gary, so that it destroyed many of his relationships, not just with partners but with people he worked with, including some of his bosses. At times he seemed to view the police hierarchy as having no value except to help him with cases. ‘He's an extremist,' Young recalls. ‘His dedication to work was unusual even by the standards of homicide. It was like an addiction.'

When her relationship with him ended, Young felt exhausted, as though he'd taken everything she had. And yet, she acknowledges, this single-minded intensity helped make him such a good detective: ‘If I was murdered, he's the one I'd want to work on it.'