Like most organised crime outfits, Anthony Perish's flourished because of the thriving market in illegal drugs. In what follows I've used the term methamphetamine rather than methylamphetamine, simply because it has one syllable fewer. The two words refer to the same thing, a more powerful version of ordinary amphetamine that has been popular since the 1990s.
The quotations at the start of each chapter are taken from the Bible. In true crime books it is easy to get distracted by the procedural and other details. But the importance of these stories lies in what they tell us about evilâabout badnessâand the Old Testament is a reminder of that.
But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die
.
It all began with a man and a woman and a big garden in the countryside beyond Sydney's south-west fringe, people and a place of an innocence that was destroyed, as innocence tends to be. It was destroyed from the outside, as the city swept out to engulf them, but also from the inside, by their own strange son and the boys he reared. In 1993 the couple, then in their nineties, would be killed, in a crime that was both terrible and odd, and remains unsolved to this day. The investigation that is the main subject of this book has its roots in those deaths, and the belief Anthony and Andrew Perish came to hold that a man named Terry Falconer had killed their grandparents.
Anthony and Frances Perish were born in Croatia in the first years of the twentieth century, in the fishing village of
Brijesta. Even as children they knew they loved each other, but the road to marriage was long and arduous. Lots of Croatians came to Australia in the 1920s, and they decided to be among them. They couldn't both afford to come, so Anthony steamed off first. He had trouble finding work in Sydney and spent two years cutting timber down at Bombala, and another five in New Zealand, to save the money to establish their future. In Brijesta, Frances spent the years of her youthful beauty waiting for him. Eventually he could afford to bring her out, and they married in 1931.
Anthony wanted a farm, and they came to own thirty-two acres in a place called Leppington, a flat, rural area some 50 kilometres south-west of Sydney. They were the first non-Anglos in the area, and Anthony was determined to fit in: they would speak English and adopt Australian ways. When many Croatians followed them in the years to come, and a Croatian church was built, Frances and Anthony continued to be Sunday regulars at their local Catholic church, St Mary's in Leppington.
The couple had three children, Albert, Elena and Jean. They made money from their land, first growing tomatoes and later rearing chickens, whose eggs they sold to the rapidly expanding metropolis to the north-east. They built a home at 116 Heath Road, which they later gave to Albert and his family. In 1966 they moved into a modest brick-and-tile bungalow just around the corner, at 15 Byron Road, and surrounded it with a garden that was not modest but bounteous, full of flowers and fruit and vegetables, all the produce and wonder of the earth. It included ponds full of goldfish and a long pergola covered in grape vines. When Anthony retired in the
late 1960s, handing over the egg business to Albert, Frances and he devoted their time to the garden and to their family, filling people's cars with fruit and vegetables whenever they visited, which was often. In 1974 the garden was awarded second prize in the
Sydney Morning Herald
's annual competition, in the large gardens section. By that point it had won the Camden Council's grand championship for homestead gardens five years in a row. With its conifers, flowering shrubs, roses and cactus, it symbolised much about the couple: hard work, connection to the land, and a certain simplicity. It was often opened to the public to raise money for the Red Cross and Camden Hospital.
Anthony and Frances became venerable figures for the many Croatians who emigrated to Australia after World War II, examples of what could be achieved here. Anthony would provide them with loans and advice, and he continued to be an advocate of assimilation. When the local community became preoccupied by the Croatian independence movement in the 1970s, illegally helping to train young men to go to Yugoslavia to fight, he refused to participate in or encourage this. It was not that he did not love Croatia, but he loved Australia more. The couple were never wealthy, but they had done very well and, as the city spread, their landholding increased in value and should have made a fine inheritance for their children and grandchildren.
But this was all brought undone by Albert. Born in 1933, he grew up to be an eccentric man who lived too much inside his head, and caused trouble for anyone unfortunate enough to be connected with him. At first he trained to be a priest, but then he met Thea, who wanted to be a nun, and they both
changed their minds. They married in 1964, and had seven children. Albert was a harsh and remote figure who would yell and scream at his children and make them work for hours in the chicken sheds when they came home from school. Thea reacted by pretending everything was perfect. She withdrew into her own world and didn't seem to notice or be concerned as some of the children went off the rails and engaged in dangerous behaviour, overlooking or excusing their actions.
Usually Albert was preoccupied with long-running disputes related to the egg business, or with a 2,300 acre block of timber country he'd purchased at Coolongolook near Bulahdelah on the mid-north coastâa restless man, he dreamed of building a mill there and making his fortune. He helped form a rebel group of egg farmers opposed to the government's quota system, a struggle he was involved in, often publicly, for many years. In 1966 he stood as a candidate for the seat of Macarthur in the federal election. He represented the conservative and largely Catholic Democratic Labor Party, and did not win. His preoccupations meant he had little time for his growing children, including Anthony, born in 1969, and Andrew, born in 1971. Anthony developed a stutter in infancy and was never taken to a speech pathologist to correct it. He did poorly at school and left just before his fifteenth birthday, to start an apprenticeship in panel beating and spray painting. Beth, the oldest, died in 1983 in a car crash at the age of sixteen. The car had been driven by her boyfriend.
Andrew and Anthony clashed with Albert and spent a lot of time at their grandparents' place, becoming close to Anthony senior. There were many guns in Leppington and
the grandfather gave Anthony junior a (non-working) rifle because he liked the Daniel Boone character on television.
In 1988, Albert Perish told the
Sydney Morning Herald
he'd lost a great deal of income from siding with the rebels in the still-running egg war, which would have come as no surprise to his relatives. His quota to produce eggs had been greatly reduced, and he took the matter to the Supreme Court. He represented himself and lost. In the same year he helped blockade a friend's farm when the Egg Board turned up to seize the man's illegal hens, accompanied by his daughter Kathleen. Albert parked his car across the driveway and when police arrived and tried to remove it, Kathleen pulled out the spark plug cables and allegedly threw them away.
The boys became involved in criminal activities in their adolescence when there was plenty of that going on in the area. The population around the nearby centre of Campbelltown boomed in the 1970s and 1980s as Sydney's inner city was gentrified, with lots of poor people being moved to new housing estates in the south-west. The government promised jobs would follow, but they never did. Over the next decades the area became a welfare sink. Changes were made much laterâfollowing the Macquarie Fields Riots of 2005, some of the public housing estates were pulled down and rebuiltâbut for a long time the area was out of sight and mind for most of Sydney. The boom in fatherless families, plus long commutes for those men who stayed, saw many boys in the area grow up untamed. Anthony and Andrew Perish were among them, although their father was absent emotionally, not physically. They started with petty crimes such as car theft and, in Anthony's case, car rebirthing.
When a boy graduated to serious badness in the south-west, he entered an alternative world, a sort of parallel suburban universe with its own society and economic basis. At the top sat the Rebels outlaw motorcycle gang; with some 2,000 members, it was the biggest bikie group in the country. Formed in 1969, its national headquarters was just up from the Perishes, in Bringelly Road, Leppington. The long-term president of the organisation is Alex Vella, a former boxer of Maltese extraction. Like most bikie groups, the Rebels have members who specialise in making and distributing illegal drugs, mainly ecstasy and methamphetamine.
The two oldest Perish brothers found places for themselves in this world. Andrew, who left home at seventeen and became a plumber, joined the Rebels in 1991 and would later become president of their Campbelltown chapter. Anthony never joined, but he associated with them and became a skilled cook of amphetamines, which he sold to the Rebels and other bikie gangs. In this way he came under their protection and gained a distribution network, but did not have to suffer the annoyance of walking around with club colours, a target for police, on his back. Anthony was always to be extremely effective at avoiding police attention, and it seems his thinking on this began at an early age. Until he was convicted of murder in 2011, his only adult conviction was for using offensive language in 1990.
The Perish brothers (when I use this term I am referring to Anthony and Andrew only, and not their younger brothers) and their criminal associates adopted their style from the surrounding society. They wore shorts and drove utes, and their approach to business reflected that of the many tradesmen in the burgeoning building industry of the area,
where in the 1990s a new suburb seemed to be created each year. The business model for the building of thousands of new brick bungalows was not corporate, but based on contracting and sub-contracting arrangements made possible by the fact that Australia was a prosperous place where many young men could afford a house on a block of land, with a big ute and a shed in which to store the tools and materials of their trade. Supported by changes to the law that made it easier to be an independent contractor, this created a world in which the small businessman could flourish. Independence and flexibility were important qualities, which Anthony Perish possessed to an extreme degree. He'd never done well at school, but by the early nineties he'd worked out there was more money in drugs than in eggs, and was cooking in a shed on the family farm.
He didn't just sell to the Rebels. On the evening of 5 August 1992, an associate met a woman in her car near McDonald's in Bondi Junction. The woman had $92,500 and was keen to buy some drugs. The associate counted the money and told the woman to drive to Fairfield railway station, where two more accomplices got in the car. They then motored out to Leppington, onto a property that from the smell housed a lot of chickens. Anthony was waiting out front, next to his Holden ute. When they drove through the gate, he locked it and showed them a bag of speed. At that moment a car came roaring up the road outside and the woman declared herself to be an undercover police officer. Anthony took off into the night and would stay on the run for the next fourteen years.
It was a traumatic event for the Perish family, which despite its problems was still close-knit. But it was nothing like what happened less than a year later, when someone came to the
home of Anthony and Frances Perish on a Monday evening in June and shot the old couple dead in their backyard. Anthony died from a .22 bullet in the front of his chest, while Frances was shot in the back, possibly while lying on the ground.
The day before, at 2 pm, Anthony called his son, Albert, who was then fifty-nine, and asked if he would come around, as there was something he wanted to talk about.
âIs it important I see you now?' asked Albert, who'd just got back from a trip out west to buy some grain. âI'm behind on the feeding.'
His father said it could wait.
Two days later, on 15 June, when his parents did not answer the phone, Albert drove around to their house with his wife, Thea. It was about 5.15 pm. There was no answer to his knocking, so he forced an entry and found his parents' bodies. Anthony and Frances were not out back anymore. They had been moved into their bedroom and placed on the two single beds there, with a certain amount of respect. Each was wearing a cardigan. Anthony also had on a green flannelette shirt and blue King Gee trousers. Frances' clothing included an apron now stained with blood. Each was face-up, their slippers arranged neatly beneath each bed, Frances with her dress pulled down modestly to her knees. It was as though the killer had cared, and yet he'd made a strange mistake for someone who caredâthe bodies had been placed in the wrong beds.
There were bloodstains on the patio and some of the outdoor furniture behind the house. Inside was a mess, with trails of tissue and toilet paper throughout and mineral turps, methylated spirits and cooking oil splashed around. Some of the kitchen hotplates were on, and what looked like a
crude timing device of candles taped together was lying on the floor. Although the autopsies showed neither of the old people had drunk alcohol recently, there were also five empty beer bottles in the house. It seemed the murderer had either socialised with the couple beforehand, or stayed around for a few drinks after the killings. A bloodstained jacket was found in the laundry.
After Albert found the bodies, many members of the family turned up. His daughter Colleen came with her boyfriend, David Taylor. Andrew arrived and ran up the drive, crying. Then there was a lawyer named Justin Birk Hill, who rolled up in his silver Mercedes 300E. Birk Hill had gone out with Colleen a few years earlier and remained a family friend. He had been a property developer in Queensland and, since 1982, a solicitor in New South Wales, running his own practice in Kogarah. He was an unusual lawyer, one who claimed to have been a founding member of the Mobshitters outlaw motorcycle gang, and did work, then and later, for the Black Uhlans, the Finks, the Rebels and the Nomads. He'd done some work for the Perishes, too, and had been advising the grandparents on their wills in the weeks before they died. This was not the first time clients of his had died violently: two years earlier, a man named Peter Wade and his girlfriend had been shot dead in a Surfers Paradise apartment Birk Hill owned.