00:00:03
Speaker 1: Welcome to Law The Podcast. I'm Lex Lasry. I'm Greg Barnes. And Greg, today you'd have to say Australian true crime royalty. I know Michelle Laurie is in that category as well, but we really do have someone who stands out and as a podcaster stands out as a true crime podcaster.
00:00:20
Speaker 2: Well, not only that, he said that I said very sensible things once in his column.
00:00:26
Speaker 3: Yes.
00:00:27
Speaker 2: And people wanted to know whether I'd fed him that line.
00:00:30
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:00:30
Speaker 2: And I said I hadn't.
00:00:31
Speaker 1: Or paid him, even. No, no, no. John Sylvester, welcome to the podcast.
00:00:38
Speaker 3: Thank you. Well, Greg, I understand I really sort of shortened your friendship group when I actually.
00:00:43
Speaker 1: Gave you a rap. I said, you know, why are you in Sylvester's column? You know.
00:00:48
Speaker 2: I think it was petty jealousy on the part of some barristers.
00:00:51
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, that's a funny thing. You know, you wouldn't think that would happen in these barristers. John, I think you've said in the past that you are legitimately famous when you're known by one name, and I think at the time you were referring to Carl Williams. But Sly, is that you? Are you famous by being known by one name? Yeah.
00:01:09
Speaker 3: I'm called Sly of the Underworld, and that was because a legendary copper, Kim West.
00:01:15
Speaker 1: Oh, yes. Northcote CIB.
00:01:16
Speaker 3: Would refer to me because of the name Sylvester, like Sly Sylvester, Sylvester Stallone. On RRR, there was a program called Lawyers, Guns and Money.
00:01:24
Speaker 1: I remember it.
00:01:25
Speaker 3: In those days, lawyers weren't allowed to use their real names because it was seen as advertising. That's right. And Ross Campbell, who was a lawyer- became Ross Stevenson. That's right. And his partner, Dennis Connell, became Dennis Donoghue.
00:01:38
Speaker 1: Yes. From Donoghue and- From the famous Connell. From Donoghue and Stevenson. Yeah.
00:01:41
Speaker 3: So when he asked me to become a regular on his breakfast program, he wanted everybody to have a nickname. So I just took the one that Kim had given me.
00:01:49
Speaker 1: 30 books you've written? Would that be right? Around about that. Yeah.
00:01:56
Speaker 3: Some of them are crimes against literature. The Chopper Reed series was considered the most shoplifted.
00:02:05
Speaker 1: Yes. We'll come to Chopper Reed.
00:02:08
Speaker 3: And we did a book called Tough 101 Gangsters before Wikipedia. And in the back were, you know, like the serious notes of which page, references and so on of the 101 gangsters. And people thought we were taking ourselves seriously, but we knew every one of those gangsters, if they saw their name, would buy or steal 10 copies. And as a result, it paid for the print run.
00:02:32
Speaker 1: Looking at your background and how it all started for you, it reminded me of how it all started for me. I think you would say you fell into journalism to a degree. You were doing a double degree at La Trobe Uni and looking for something easy to do and then suddenly found yourself heading towards journalism in some form or another and ended up, I think, police rounds at Russell Street. Was that how it turned out?
00:02:51
Speaker 3: Well, the double degree was in drinking beer and sleeping in. Yes.
00:02:56
Speaker 2: And it was actually- That would have been a big class, John.
00:03:00
Speaker 1: I was getting on it.
00:03:03
Speaker 3: And it was Beverly Miller, Mick Miller's wife. Mick was to become chief commissioner. And she said to me, what are you going to do with your life? And I said, I don't know. And she said, you should be a journalist because- You've got an opinion on everything. So I put it, I thought, this is great because this is a job I won't get, but it'll keep my old man off my back.
00:03:29
Speaker 1: And that was Fred, then Victorian policeman, I think in the police force in England originally.
00:03:35
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:03:36
Speaker 3: And so I baked my way through the first interview. And then in the second interview, there was a particular question, which was actually about demonstrations and the guy in the middle, I remember in those days they could smoke, so there were three senior men or steer men. The guy in the middle kept saying to me, there's a copper named Keith Platfuss, he's really good at demonstrations. Virtually, don't you agree? And there was a bit of pressure for me to say yes, but I'd actually fluked reading a uni magazine which actually said he'd led a baton charge into peaceful demonstrators and the next day said, they've got baton today and they'll get baton tomorrow. So I repeated that story. And the guy in the middle looked down onto his blotter and said, well, the exact quote is. And I thought, you bastard, you're setting me up because my man's a copper. You would never ask anybody else that. So I sort of got on the balls on my feet. And he at one point said, I'm going to get the journalism course moved from RMIT to Melbourne University. And because he'd annoyed me, I just said, well, that'll be a mistake. It's actually a trade. It shouldn't be at a university. And He looked at me in a very patronizing way. He said, John, your attitude is fairly typical of someone who's not in the workforce. And I said, Mr. Howie, your attitude is fairly typical of someone who's never been to a university and I suspect never will. And the bloke on the left, his cigarette started to glow and ash went all over him. It took me 15 years to work out he was pissing himself laughing. And I nearly got up and walked out, but those blokes actually, I reckoned, Saw, okay, well, maybe he's not that intimidated by authority. Maybe he's worth a go. So two weeks later, the bloke who set me up rang me and said, you got the job. Well, where would you like to work, the Herald or the Sun? And I said, the Herald, Mr.
00:05:35
Speaker 1: Hoey.
00:05:36
Speaker 3: And he said, you started the Sun on Monday.
00:05:38
Speaker 1: What year was this, John? 78.
00:05:39
Speaker 3: 78.
00:05:40
Speaker 1: 78. 78. And police rounds straight away? Is that where you started?
00:05:43
Speaker 3: I was incredibly inept in the main office and then just on rotation, nothing to do with my background, I went up to police rounds, which was a little office inside Russell Street with its own entrance. And against it, it stunk. There was a scanner. People filed stories off the top to typists and Against the Wall were just these beautifully bound books with every story written and published in all the newspapers. They were cut out and with clag put into these books way back to the Squizzy Taylor days. So you actually, on the downtime, you actually got a history lesson of crime all the way back. Plus, it was exclusively male, exclusively young. Interestingly, the best crime reporter in the world at the time.
00:06:36
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:06:37
Speaker 3: Was a woman, Edna Buchanan from the Miami Herald, but he was still very sexist. You could drink beer during the day and drive a car very fast, so it fitted all the KPIs.
00:06:48
Speaker 1: That led, we'll just get the honours out of the way first of all, but there were quite a few of them. You won three Walkley Awards, I think, six Victorian Press Club quills. I love this, the Ned Kelly Award for true crime writing, pretty controversial. A Ned Kelly Lifetime Achievement Award, which is not something he managed to do. and nine Victorian Law Awards. And you were judged the Graham Perkin Australian Journalist of the Year and been commended a couple of times for the same award. So that's a pretty substantial career, John. Just on that, talking about Graham Perkin, when did you go to The Age?
00:07:23
Speaker 3: I went in 93. So who have your editors?
00:07:26
Speaker 1: You've had a few editors there, John.
00:07:28
Speaker 3: Lots of them. Graham, of course, was a legend. Yeah.
00:07:33
Speaker 1: He was well and truly gone by then. Yeah. Yeah.
00:07:35
Speaker 3: But, you know, his legacy lived on in the investigative side of things. He very much wanted to follow the Sunday Times Insight team. And he also sort of went around the country to get really, really good country and regional reporters and, you know, because the age, you know, it had all the real estate ads, so it made money.
00:07:57
Speaker 1: Mm-hmm.
00:07:58
Speaker 3: But it was a very tedious paper. And Perkin and Les Carlin, his deputy later, really energised the place.
00:08:07
Speaker 1: I think in about 1966 or 67, I went into the age, I was thinking of doing journalism. And in those days, you had to get a cadetship with a paper and then do a course at RMIT out of hours. I think Graeme Perkin might've been the person who interviewed me. And so I sat down at the desk and the first question he asked me is, have you noticed anything about today's age. And I hadn't looked at it, so I said no. That very day, they had completely changed the format of the front page of The Age. Right. Changed the banner, changed the layout. I hadn't seen any of it. That was the end of my journalism career.
00:08:41
Speaker 2: John, just to fast forward a bit, you've said some very interesting things over the years about the war on drugs and the futility of it, with which I agree. Tobacco, illegal tobacco, and the the gang wars that are going on there, is that a product of a similar policy setting? I mean, it's slightly different, but similar problems arising because of the super profit that's available?
00:09:07
Speaker 3: Well, the federal government has effectively signed a partner with organised crime. It's created the market. The iron law of organised crime is where there is a demand, there will be a supply. No question. And we put the excise on tobacco, I will say, for noble reasons, to lower smoking rates. But then they kept doing it and doing it and doing it. And they even came out with a survey saying, oh, there's less smoking because we've done a survey and people say they're not smoking. Well, they're hardly going to admit that they're using illegal tobacco. And the wastewater samples show that nicotine is up. So by creating this massive excise, people are turning around and smoking the illicit stuff And because it's cheaper, they're actually smoking more. So the excise is totally counterproductive.
00:10:01
Speaker 1: I can't resist asking you about some of the underworld stuff because I think people love to hear about it. And there are a couple of things I want to ask you, but one of them is to do with Chopper Reed. And in particular, the occasion when you went out to Pentridge, he was in H Division, and arranged to have a meeting with him. Just tell us how that how that developed when you got out to Pentridge.
00:10:23
Speaker 3: Mark had just been acquitted of the murder of Siam Ozakan, which was slightly embarrassing because he was informing to the armed robbery squad. So the armed robbery squad got him a ballistic vest and so he went straight down to Bojangles and shot someone wearing a police-issued vest, which was difficult to explain. So Mark went into court and he later said, and he told false allegations against the armed robbery squad, He said, if there's a body in a swimming pool, if you throw enough dirt, it becomes mud and you don't see the body. So he's acquitted, and I wrote a double-page piece for the Herald Sun explaining what a manipulative ….
00:10:57
Speaker 1: Defended by Colin Lovett, I think.
00:10:59
Speaker 3: No doubt.
00:11:01
Speaker 1: Well, Colin Lovett and Boris Kayser represented him in that trial, and no one was more surprised by the verdict than them, I don't think.
00:11:08
Speaker 3: And in gratitude, Mark named his very large and loyal dog Kaiser after Boris. Boris, yeah.
00:11:14
Speaker 1: Yes.
00:11:15
Speaker 3: And so I wrote this piece explaining that he was a dangerous manipulative so-and-so and I was happy and the editor was happy. But Mark wasn't happy because I went to the pigeonhole and there was a Christmas card. It surprised me because it was July and it was a lovely card and inside it said, Dear John, may the Yuletide log fall from your fireplace and burn your house down. The perfect Christmas for me would be to own a 1,000-room hotel and find a dead Herald Sun reporter behind every door, seasons greetings and jingle bells, regards Chopper Reed. I felt particularly special until the then head of the parole board, Frank Vincent, said he got a card. And it was a lovely nativity scene and said, Jesus loves you. And inside, Mark had written, but personally, I think you're an arsehole.
00:12:09
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a great story.
00:12:11
Speaker 3: So why you would do that to the head of the parole board is not tactical. Frank would have seen the humor in that. I, for some reason, felt particularly brave, so I wrote to him and said, you can't talk to me like that. He wrote back and said, why don't you come and see me? And to my surprise, the prison authorities allowed it. And I, of course, had watched the movie, so there was going to be a telephone and a Perspex screen and he'd be on the other side and he'd say bad things to me, I'd say bad things to him, I'd write them down and get another story. And next thing they walk me into 8th Division and there's what appears to be a card table and there's Mark sitting there.
00:12:49
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:12:50
Speaker 3: And the prison guard goes, Mark, this is John. John, this is Mark and shut the door, which surprised me. And he stood up and grabbed my hand, grabbed my thumb and stuck it in a hole in his head and said that's where the ice pick went in. Then he did what and You two know so often that these crooks blame someone else. I had a poor childhood. My mum didn't love me. The police made up the evidence. Everyone was against me. Mark said, you've only just touched the surface. And he told all these bleak and black stories.
00:13:24
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:13:25
Speaker 3: And long story short, afterwards, he was happy, but Frank Vincent probably wasn't, so he got another six months. But the secret with Mark is... He never thought he was the best crook. He always wanted to be the most famous. And he said, you know, it wasn't the fastest gunslingers in the West that were remembered. It were the ones who piled up with the drunken journalists from the Penny Dreadfuls who got their stories told.
00:13:52
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:13:53
Speaker 3: And that's what he wanted. So then he told his story and I suspect many other crooks' stories as his own, but he did it with pathos and humour. And, of course, it was a runaway bestseller.
00:14:04
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, that's right.
00:14:06
Speaker 1: Yeah. Your other interest is, and you've done a series, I think it's more than one series too, on hitmen. And you and I have talked on that series, particularly about Christopher Dale Flannery, who even now I think is still pretty well known as being a professional hitman.
00:14:19
Speaker 2: There are lawyers who, if you mention his name, they just shiver.
00:14:24
Speaker 1: Did you know him, John?
00:14:26
Speaker 3: I knew of him and I spoke to Lex because Lex was part of the prosecution team in the murder of Roger Wilson, the businessman.
00:14:34
Speaker 1: Roger Wilson, yeah. He was a barrister, wasn't he? Yeah, he was.
00:14:38
Speaker 3: He took the contract to kill Wilson, a man with children and a wife who was just going home. And they concocted a police sign on the highway near Narre Warren and waved him over. And he'd already had a blasted collision on his way home, a minor fender bender. So he thought, oh, it's a terrible day. And Roger's body was never found. And there was a young witness, Debbie Boundy, just a 19-year-old girl. And she was effectively lured from a pub on Christmas Day, probably by Alphonse Gangatana, the notorious Black Prince of Liger. And she was never found. So we've got witnesses being popped off. And we've got to go back to the Mick Drury case. Here's a case where Mick Drury, an undercover officer from New South Wales, who's a key witness in a Melbourne drug case, the notorious corrupt detective Roger Rogerson, attempts to bribe Drury not to give legit evidence in Melbourne. Drury refuses the bribe, and then they hatch a plot to murder an undercover officer. And Roger Rogerson is the middleman. He's like Colonel Tom Parker with Elvis Presley. I think the fee was to be $ 150, and Roger was going to keep $ 120. And at the meeting with the crook who'd been charged, Alan Williams, they're sitting there and Roger goes to the toilet and Williams says to Flannery, you must trust this Jack to be talking like that. And he said, don't worry, he'll be there when I do it. And they attempt to kill Drury. Drury is shot in his home in front of his family. Standing at the sink, wasn't he? Washing the dishes. Washing the dishes.
00:16:32
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:16:33
Speaker 3: And everyone... knows he's going to die. So he makes a deathbed statement of Roger attempting to bribe him. And miraculously, Drury survives. And that's the statement which eventually brought him down. But that's the cold blood of nature.
00:16:51
Speaker 1: This is when, John?
00:16:53
Speaker 2: The 1980s?
00:16:54
Speaker 3: Yeah, 1980s.
00:16:55
Speaker 1: Because Flannery went to Sydney after being tried and acquitted of the murder of Wilson and then was taken to Sydney, tried for the murder of Ray Loxley.
00:17:05
Speaker 3: Lizard Loxley.
00:17:06
Speaker 1: Lizard Loxley and was acquitted of that as well.
00:17:08
Speaker 3: And then he became Murder Inc. working for George Freeman.
00:17:11
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's right.
00:17:12
Speaker 3: But then he started coming up to people and said, well, there's a $ 50, 000 contract on you. You give me 60 and I'll make it go away. So he was playing both sides. And when he said to a senior copper, you're not a koala, you're not a protected species, that was the end of it. And There was a task force looking at all this and Roger Rogerson contacted the head of the task force and said, Flannery wants to see you. So they organised a meet at a bar and Flannery arrived and clearly didn't want to be there and didn't say anything. But Roger was there. Now, Flannery at the time was moving about to ensure he couldn't get hit. Well, that's when Roger followed him home.
00:17:57
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right.
00:17:58
Speaker 3: That night there's a phone call on his beeper. from the notorious George Freeman saying, Mercedes wants to see you. They organized to meet because he says he's got a machine gun for him. Flannery goes into the apartment block where he's staying and his favorite valiant is disabled. He tells his wife, go and get Marshall to get a new battery. He would ring her every hour. He goes outside. We don't know for certain, but almost certainly it was Roger. And another corrupt New South Wales cop picked him up, took him to Freeman's. And when Marshall arrived, the car works. So the wife, Kath Flannery, goes across the road to police headquarters and says, my husband is dead. He has not rung me. He is already dead. And it happened at the Freeman place. Eventually, the police bowl out there and knock on Freeman's door and say, can we come in and have a look?
00:18:56
Speaker 1: No.
00:18:57
Speaker 3: So they go away. And it's two weeks later they get a warrant. So if you don't think the fix was in.
00:19:03
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. That was the forerunner of a number of things. You talked about Alphonse Gangitano, who was a mate of Flannery's and a young mate of Flannery's in the early days. So, I mean, the learning is that Gangitano knocked Debbie Boundy because she was going to be a crucial witness in the trial against Flannery in Melbourne. and I don't think there's any doubt that it was Ganjatana who killed her. And then he went on from there, didn't he? Because the next thing we know, he's popped up, as you say, as the Black Prince of Ligon Street and arguably started the gangland war in 1995 when he shot Greg Workman, although I'm not sure that's the killing that really kicked it off. But you wrote a book about it called Lead Belly, which became the Underbelly series. What an amazing saga. Yeah.
00:19:52
Speaker 3: Well, Alphonse was interesting because he was a private school boy and he actually had a physical fight with Flannery down at Mickey's Discount. Down at Mickey's. And Flannery was screaming to his wife, get the gun, get the gun. And he thought she was too slow, obviously didn't want to be part of a murder. And he actually belted her. It was only time because Kath was pretty fierce in herself.
00:20:17
Speaker 1: Yes.
00:20:18
Speaker 3: And in the end, they all pal up together. And the Workman case was the first time I could see organised crime really manipulate the system because with the Workman murder, there were two sisters who had a party. One day Crescent, I reckon.
00:20:37
Speaker 1: In St Kilda.
00:20:37
Speaker 3: In St Kilda.
00:20:38
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:20:38
Speaker 3: So they had a party and they heard what went on. So they were key witnesses. And witness protection was so bad in those days that the police said, well, look after you. First thing they did is they drove them down Ligon Street. So that made them really scared. They were put into a caravan park at Warrnambool and were given a 24-hour number. They started to panic. So they ring the number. It rings out. So they ring Alphonse's then good friend, later his murderer, in Jason Moran and say, we're in trouble. Oh, sweetheart, of course you're not. We'll come and pick you up. Took them to St. Kilda Road. They made a statement recanting what had happened. And then Alphonse paid for a round-the-world trip, which included stopping at Disneyland, which was probably right. They went to Fantasyland because that's what their statements were.
00:21:30
Speaker 1: Yeah. Things really got going in 1999, I think, when the Morans shot Carl Williams in a park in Gladstone Park.
00:21:38
Speaker 3: October 13, 1999. And it was Carl's 29th birthday.
00:21:44
Speaker 1: So at this stage of proceedings, what are you doing? Are you following this at the time?
00:21:48
Speaker 3: Didn't care at all. Didn't know who Carl Williams was. Didn't know about the shooting. Mad Richard Bladnitz gets murdered in about, 2000, I don't put anything together, but Mad Richard was working for Mark Moran and Carl wanted Mad Richard to work for him and he knew how fearsome Richard was. So they kill Mad Richard down at the Esquire Motel in St Kilda. Six weeks later, Mark Moran is murdered. I'm still not geriatric. There's a man in Everfeldy who's been murdered and I don't know why, I rang a particular homicide detective who was in the house. And he said, it's Mark Moran. And I'm saying, you know, so what? He said, it's Jason's brother. And I said, oh, hello.
00:22:36
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:22:36
Speaker 3: This has started to.
00:22:38
Speaker 1: Add up a bit.
00:22:38
Speaker 3: And then working backwards, I found out about the shooting at Gladstone Park. And that's when Carl came up. Now, I wrote the story saying this all started in a park in Gladstone Park. And Carl rang me. And he said... you can get someone killed writing that stuff.
00:22:54
Speaker 1: Yes.
00:22:55
Speaker 3: But he wasn't threatening me. No, no. He was actually saying, in his own way, he confirmed it.
00:23:00
Speaker 1: They'll know who it was.
00:23:01
Speaker 3: If you know it, it means either I've told the police and they've told you, or I've told you.
00:23:07
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:23:08
Speaker 3: And so ironically, he was frightened then of being identified as a police informer, which ultimately gets him killed when he is a police informer in 2010.
00:23:19
Speaker 1: The thing that most concerned me, about it all was the link between the murder of the Hodsons and ultimately what followed because Paul Dale was a suspect for those murders as having organised Carl Williams to get Rod Collins to do the job. That was never proved, of course. Followed, of course, in the end by the killing of Carl Williams himself and I was the trial judge in Johnson's trial. I thought that whole part of that saga was really disconcerting. It really brought the system together. to the edge.
00:23:49
Speaker 3: Well, like we were talking about, you know, the penny-pinching regarding the two women who were the witnesses in the Workman case. You've got the Hodsons who were offered witness protection and decided against it.
00:24:01
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:24:01
Speaker 3: But just to be cheap, the security system that was put in had a VHS tape instead of being, you know, offline.
00:24:11
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:24:11
Speaker 3: So the killer, who almost certainly was professional hitman Rod Collins, took the tape. If that tape existed or the vision existed, we don't have this situation. But right the way back to Prubert, this was a case of Terence Hudson being killed to silence him as a witness in a police corruption case, and his wife was collateral damage because she was there. Now, that's how cold-blooded it all is.
00:24:40
Speaker 1: That's the thing that most unsettled me. And, of course, when there was a risk that all that would come out through the evidence of Carl Williams, that was the end of Carl Williams.
00:24:48
Speaker 3: Carl made the mistake of believing I'm only giving up a corrupt copper. Yeah. And so therefore I'll be okay. And when he had Mad Richard as his bodyguard in prison, he thought Matthew Johnson would be the right one. But if we go back to the murder of Mad Richard, there were others involved and they thought pretty logically if he's tipping in corrupt coppers, it'll only be a matter of time If he's going to get a discount for that, why will he not tip us in for the Mad Richard thing? So it was organized by somebody who was close to Carl who wanted him silenced. And the key to that is the third person in that cell block was Tommy Ivanovic.
00:25:36
Speaker 1: Yes.
00:25:36
Speaker 3: And you can imagine if someone dropped a glass down and smashed, we'd all start.
00:25:42
Speaker 1: We'd all look.
00:25:43
Speaker 3: Tommy had his back to the events. And the vision that you've seen last.
00:25:48
Speaker 1: Yes, I've seen it.
00:25:49
Speaker 3: He does not jump. He doesn't start. He doesn't look. And the noise had to be sickening.
00:25:54
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:25:54
Speaker 3: So he knew exactly what was happening.
00:25:56
Speaker 1: And there's the famous call to the prison officers after, I don't know, 20 minutes saying, you better send someone. Carl's not in a good way, but don't send any women.
00:26:07
Speaker 2: We could have you here all day, but we have to finish at some point.
00:26:11
Speaker 1: Yes. But. I've got two more things I've got to ask about. I've got one, John. The.
00:26:16
Speaker 2: The decision by the DPP not to charge anyone.
00:26:21
Speaker 1: That was the Gobbo case, wasn't it? Yes. Jeff Nettle. Yes.
00:26:24
Speaker 2: So Jeff Nettle, former High Court judge, says there's something to see here.
00:26:28
Speaker 1: Prepares briefs. Prepares briefs.
00:26:29
Speaker 2: Kerry Judd, the then DPP, says no, now on the Supreme Court. Your take on that?
00:26:36
Speaker 3: The Gobbo thing was really interesting because Nicola Gobbo had been an informer off and on. for 20 years. And so she was charged over drug matters as a student. That conviction was recorded because it would affect her legal career. So she couldn't have been the most junior constable. And yet, during the whole process, everybody knew that Gobbo was way too close to her clients. And there were people from magistrates to senior barristers to judges who would take her aside and say, got to stop doing this. But I don't understand why this matter never went to an ethics where she didn't get a supervisor and she was allowed to continue doing this. She becomes a police informer. The question being, was she a criminal barrister or a criminal who was a barrister? Because she was very close to being charged as an accessory in the Hodson matter. And then the rest we know, she becomes a secret informer. The police would have got away with it, actually. if there wasn't this desperation over the Hodson case, which is when the then Chief Commissioner Simon Overland turned her from a secret source into a witness. So let's forget about the moralities of it. I found the inquiry that brought commission interesting because Nicola Gobbo said, I began informing as a barrister because the firm I worked for was laundering money for organized crime. Well, immediately there was a suppression order put on the name of the firm. Well, we can't say that. A respected police officer from Burrana, Jim Coghlan, produced an affidavit naming a barrister who was, he alleged, laundering money at Jupiter's Casino for Tony Mokba. Well, we can't possibly name that person. When Nicola Gobbo said, I had a consensual sexual relationship with a police officer, the police officer denied it. Who knows whether it's true or not, but he was named. So he has to go home and explain to his family why his name is on page one. for sleeping with Nicola Gobber. The head of Piranha was in the witness box for three weeks. The prosecutor was allowed to make a statement and was not cross-examined. There was a real suggestion that the investigation didn't actually go into the court to say who really knew and why did this happen. Added to that, we are still suffering because the disclosure laws became so draconian now that in a serious investigation, let's say there's four people looking at a homicide, senior investigators, one of those will be a disclosure officer whose full-time job is to produce masses of documents to go to barristers who will never read them and will slow the process down even further. And that results in people being bailed because their trials is two years away and further crime. So there's a real problem out of that and human sources. informers, they don't exist because now there's a document that you have to sign. And it basically says on the last page, we can't protect your anonymity. You are nuts to sign up for that sort of thing.
00:29:53
Speaker 1: Absolutely.
00:29:54
Speaker 3: There's a murder trial that was aborted. because within those documents was a name, and that person would have got killed.
00:30:04
Speaker 1: I want to finish on this topic. You recently talked about the judicial system, and you said it was complex. Of course, it is complex. The cases are becoming more complex, and you pointed to the unfairness of that on everyone. You pointed to the unfairness on witnesses and the accused, particularly in the circumstances where an accused is charged. waits ages for a trial and then is acquitted. No one apologises for the time he's been in custody or the interruption to their life during that time. Is the system now getting to the stage where it's really breaking the limits and there are too many victims of this complexity in the justice system?
00:30:44
Speaker 3: It is so change averse. I don't know whether it's because everybody's invested so much time at university to learn the system. There's a 2001 white paper out of the UK called Swift Justice.
00:30:57
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:30:57
Speaker 3: Go and have a look at that. Yeah, I agree. Now, I was a minor. My only dealings in this, I was a very inconsequential witness in a case against Roberta Williams. A fellow comes to me, emails me, and he says, Roberta Williams abducted me and tortured me, and I don't owe any honest police. So I made two calls, put them together, and there we go. Roberta ends up getting charged. Now, for some reason, I become a witness. I have no knowledge of the veracity of the charges. It's during COVID. Now, I can work from home. I'm not on the tools. And for six days on a committal, I had to be there. And on each day, I was told I was no longer needed. On the Friday, it was a hot day. And I went to the supermarket. My phone rang, and it was the informant saying, the magistrate wants you on now. I said, well, unless I can swear an oath on a box of fish fingers, we're in trouble, aren't we? But why am I being called?
00:32:01
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:32:02
Speaker 3: I have no evidence.
00:32:04
Speaker 1: I'm with you, John. I'm with you.
00:32:06
Speaker 2: I agree with the complexity and criminal procedure rules. But you only have to have a look at the Bail Act and the Sentencing Act. They're becoming to look like the Tax Act. They're so complex. You have to have diagrams and flow charts in them.
00:32:25
Speaker 1: But only in a sense matched by the sheer volume of paper that's now churning out of the Court of Appeal so that everything's complicated. Yeah, every brief you get now is just, you're right, volumes. And I'll say, most of it you don't read because you flick through it and say, I don't need that. And there it is sitting in your chambers in a great big folder for months on end.
00:32:46
Speaker 3: Well, the blindingly obvious, you go to the Melbourne Magistrates' Court and there's a dozen coppers sitting there waiting to give inconsequential evidence as I mentioned.
00:32:56
Speaker 1: Exactly.
00:32:57
Speaker 3: They're all behind on their paperwork. So on this particular day, we have hubs and the copper is there doing his correspondence and then he gets a text, you're on in five minutes. You do it remotely. You swear and you say, yeah, I arrested him on August 18th and you go back to your work. So we get all those days. How many times do prisoners not turn up when they're transported? Because they've got to be strip searched. Why doesn't the magistrate go to Barwon and just deal with everything at Barwon on one day? Then we're going to go off here and we have a magistrate go to the main prisons.
00:33:36
Speaker 1: All these things are just mind-blowing. I totally agree.
00:33:38
Speaker 2: But also, I think you could get rid of a lot of those drink-driving cases, speeding cases. The fault position that this is the fine you get if you want to, or the loss of licence. If you've got a couple of priors and they say, well, it's going to be nine months, not six, you can appeal it. But why waste court time with one.
00:33:58
Speaker 1: Drink driving employee after another? Well, because it used to keep barristers in. I know. I used to do that. I mean, in my early days, the Sandringham Magistrates Court. That's right. Traffic day.
00:34:06
Speaker 3: No, no.
00:34:06
Speaker 1: It was a devoted traffic court. That's what I mean. So you'd get down there and there'd be, I don't know, 100 cases on, all speeding, drink driving, 0.05, whatever. I know. And we all made a brief fee and we all made exactly the same.
00:34:18
Speaker 2: But in this day and age, with the capacity to, you know, deal with those matters much more.
00:34:24
Speaker 1: Efficiently, take them out of the court.
00:34:26
Speaker 2: The other things that should be taken out of the court are minor drug cases, possessions.
00:34:32
Speaker 3: Well, there is the report sitting there somewhere. Paul Coughlin, Justice Paul Coughlin did a report and this is his words to me. And this is about all these arrest warrants.
00:34:41
Speaker 2: Hmm.
00:34:41
Speaker 3: That come from Bode to appear. He says, you've got some poor daft soul who goes to a 7-Eleven every day and he steals a Mars bar. The owner of the 7-Eleven eventually gets annoyed and the police come and he's charged. And he's told to be at court on August 16th. Coughlin says, well, he would have lost the bit of paper before he'd gone around the block. Correct, yeah. So he doesn't turn up and a warrant's issued. And he doesn't turn up and he doesn't turn up and he ends up getting jailed for stealing a Mars bar.
00:35:09
Speaker 2: I know.
00:35:09
Speaker 3: So you have it like you say. You turn around and say, you have been charged with minor theft. If you don't turn up, it is taken that it is a plea of guilty. He'll be fined $ 20. He'll never pay it. But the police will not be going 20 times trying to find him for this purpose.
00:35:28
Speaker 1: Totally agree.
00:35:29
Speaker 3: 60,000, 60,000.
00:35:30
Speaker 2: And this is what government should be focusing on. Not just continually jacking up. Constantly locking people up.
00:35:37
Speaker 1: We could spend the whole morning, John, but we do have to wind it up. But maybe we should do a second chapter at some stage. We'll do volume two. It's been fantastic. Yeah, thanks, John.
00:35:46
Speaker 3: Thank you.
00:35:46
Speaker 1: It's been a real pleasure and it's endlessly interesting stuff. Thank you. And read Naked City. Read Naked City, yes. In the nine years. Does it go to the Sydney Morning Herald as well, John?
00:35:57
Speaker 3: Yeah, sometimes.
00:35:58
Speaker 1: Sometimes, yeah. But certainly in the age. Yeah. All right. Thanks, John. Thanks, Greg. Thanks, Greg. Thanks, Lex. Next time. Next time. Don't forget to like and subscribe. This episode was produced by Bravecasting Media, edited by Michael Tankard, original music by Justin Humphries from Phoenix Sound Studios. This podcast is recorded on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. We pay our respects to their elders past, present and emerging. Thank you for listening. See you next week.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Law The Podcast. I'm Lex Lasry. I'm Greg Barnes. And Greg, today you'd have to say Australian true crime royalty. I know Michelle Laurie is in that category as well, but we really do have someone who stands out and as a podcaster stands out as a true crime podcaster.
00:00:20
Speaker 2: Well, not only that, he said that I said very sensible things once in his column.
00:00:26
Speaker 3: Yes.
00:00:27
Speaker 2: And people wanted to know whether I'd fed him that line.
00:00:30
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:00:30
Speaker 2: And I said I hadn't.
00:00:31
Speaker 1: Or paid him, even. No, no, no. John Sylvester, welcome to the podcast.
00:00:38
Speaker 3: Thank you. Well, Greg, I understand I really sort of shortened your friendship group when I actually.
00:00:43
Speaker 1: Gave you a rap. I said, you know, why are you in Sylvester's column? You know.
00:00:48
Speaker 2: I think it was petty jealousy on the part of some barristers.
00:00:51
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, that's a funny thing. You know, you wouldn't think that would happen in these barristers. John, I think you've said in the past that you are legitimately famous when you're known by one name, and I think at the time you were referring to Carl Williams. But Sly, is that you? Are you famous by being known by one name? Yeah.
00:01:09
Speaker 3: I'm called Sly of the Underworld, and that was because a legendary copper, Kim West.
00:01:15
Speaker 1: Oh, yes. Northcote CIB.
00:01:16
Speaker 3: Would refer to me because of the name Sylvester, like Sly Sylvester, Sylvester Stallone. On RRR, there was a program called Lawyers, Guns and Money.
00:01:24
Speaker 1: I remember it.
00:01:25
Speaker 3: In those days, lawyers weren't allowed to use their real names because it was seen as advertising. That's right. And Ross Campbell, who was a lawyer- became Ross Stevenson. That's right. And his partner, Dennis Connell, became Dennis Donoghue.
00:01:38
Speaker 1: Yes. From Donoghue and- From the famous Connell. From Donoghue and Stevenson. Yeah.
00:01:41
Speaker 3: So when he asked me to become a regular on his breakfast program, he wanted everybody to have a nickname. So I just took the one that Kim had given me.
00:01:49
Speaker 1: 30 books you've written? Would that be right? Around about that. Yeah.
00:01:56
Speaker 3: Some of them are crimes against literature. The Chopper Reed series was considered the most shoplifted.
00:02:05
Speaker 1: Yes. We'll come to Chopper Reed.
00:02:08
Speaker 3: And we did a book called Tough 101 Gangsters before Wikipedia. And in the back were, you know, like the serious notes of which page, references and so on of the 101 gangsters. And people thought we were taking ourselves seriously, but we knew every one of those gangsters, if they saw their name, would buy or steal 10 copies. And as a result, it paid for the print run.
00:02:32
Speaker 1: Looking at your background and how it all started for you, it reminded me of how it all started for me. I think you would say you fell into journalism to a degree. You were doing a double degree at La Trobe Uni and looking for something easy to do and then suddenly found yourself heading towards journalism in some form or another and ended up, I think, police rounds at Russell Street. Was that how it turned out?
00:02:51
Speaker 3: Well, the double degree was in drinking beer and sleeping in. Yes.
00:02:56
Speaker 2: And it was actually- That would have been a big class, John.
00:03:00
Speaker 1: I was getting on it.
00:03:03
Speaker 3: And it was Beverly Miller, Mick Miller's wife. Mick was to become chief commissioner. And she said to me, what are you going to do with your life? And I said, I don't know. And she said, you should be a journalist because- You've got an opinion on everything. So I put it, I thought, this is great because this is a job I won't get, but it'll keep my old man off my back.
00:03:29
Speaker 1: And that was Fred, then Victorian policeman, I think in the police force in England originally.
00:03:35
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:03:36
Speaker 3: And so I baked my way through the first interview. And then in the second interview, there was a particular question, which was actually about demonstrations and the guy in the middle, I remember in those days they could smoke, so there were three senior men or steer men. The guy in the middle kept saying to me, there's a copper named Keith Platfuss, he's really good at demonstrations. Virtually, don't you agree? And there was a bit of pressure for me to say yes, but I'd actually fluked reading a uni magazine which actually said he'd led a baton charge into peaceful demonstrators and the next day said, they've got baton today and they'll get baton tomorrow. So I repeated that story. And the guy in the middle looked down onto his blotter and said, well, the exact quote is. And I thought, you bastard, you're setting me up because my man's a copper. You would never ask anybody else that. So I sort of got on the balls on my feet. And he at one point said, I'm going to get the journalism course moved from RMIT to Melbourne University. And because he'd annoyed me, I just said, well, that'll be a mistake. It's actually a trade. It shouldn't be at a university. And He looked at me in a very patronizing way. He said, John, your attitude is fairly typical of someone who's not in the workforce. And I said, Mr. Howie, your attitude is fairly typical of someone who's never been to a university and I suspect never will. And the bloke on the left, his cigarette started to glow and ash went all over him. It took me 15 years to work out he was pissing himself laughing. And I nearly got up and walked out, but those blokes actually, I reckoned, Saw, okay, well, maybe he's not that intimidated by authority. Maybe he's worth a go. So two weeks later, the bloke who set me up rang me and said, you got the job. Well, where would you like to work, the Herald or the Sun? And I said, the Herald, Mr.
00:05:35
Speaker 1: Hoey.
00:05:36
Speaker 3: And he said, you started the Sun on Monday.
00:05:38
Speaker 1: What year was this, John? 78.
00:05:39
Speaker 3: 78.
00:05:40
Speaker 1: 78. 78. And police rounds straight away? Is that where you started?
00:05:43
Speaker 3: I was incredibly inept in the main office and then just on rotation, nothing to do with my background, I went up to police rounds, which was a little office inside Russell Street with its own entrance. And against it, it stunk. There was a scanner. People filed stories off the top to typists and Against the Wall were just these beautifully bound books with every story written and published in all the newspapers. They were cut out and with clag put into these books way back to the Squizzy Taylor days. So you actually, on the downtime, you actually got a history lesson of crime all the way back. Plus, it was exclusively male, exclusively young. Interestingly, the best crime reporter in the world at the time.
00:06:36
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:06:37
Speaker 3: Was a woman, Edna Buchanan from the Miami Herald, but he was still very sexist. You could drink beer during the day and drive a car very fast, so it fitted all the KPIs.
00:06:48
Speaker 1: That led, we'll just get the honours out of the way first of all, but there were quite a few of them. You won three Walkley Awards, I think, six Victorian Press Club quills. I love this, the Ned Kelly Award for true crime writing, pretty controversial. A Ned Kelly Lifetime Achievement Award, which is not something he managed to do. and nine Victorian Law Awards. And you were judged the Graham Perkin Australian Journalist of the Year and been commended a couple of times for the same award. So that's a pretty substantial career, John. Just on that, talking about Graham Perkin, when did you go to The Age?
00:07:23
Speaker 3: I went in 93. So who have your editors?
00:07:26
Speaker 1: You've had a few editors there, John.
00:07:28
Speaker 3: Lots of them. Graham, of course, was a legend. Yeah.
00:07:33
Speaker 1: He was well and truly gone by then. Yeah. Yeah.
00:07:35
Speaker 3: But, you know, his legacy lived on in the investigative side of things. He very much wanted to follow the Sunday Times Insight team. And he also sort of went around the country to get really, really good country and regional reporters and, you know, because the age, you know, it had all the real estate ads, so it made money.
00:07:57
Speaker 1: Mm-hmm.
00:07:58
Speaker 3: But it was a very tedious paper. And Perkin and Les Carlin, his deputy later, really energised the place.
00:08:07
Speaker 1: I think in about 1966 or 67, I went into the age, I was thinking of doing journalism. And in those days, you had to get a cadetship with a paper and then do a course at RMIT out of hours. I think Graeme Perkin might've been the person who interviewed me. And so I sat down at the desk and the first question he asked me is, have you noticed anything about today's age. And I hadn't looked at it, so I said no. That very day, they had completely changed the format of the front page of The Age. Right. Changed the banner, changed the layout. I hadn't seen any of it. That was the end of my journalism career.
00:08:41
Speaker 2: John, just to fast forward a bit, you've said some very interesting things over the years about the war on drugs and the futility of it, with which I agree. Tobacco, illegal tobacco, and the the gang wars that are going on there, is that a product of a similar policy setting? I mean, it's slightly different, but similar problems arising because of the super profit that's available?
00:09:07
Speaker 3: Well, the federal government has effectively signed a partner with organised crime. It's created the market. The iron law of organised crime is where there is a demand, there will be a supply. No question. And we put the excise on tobacco, I will say, for noble reasons, to lower smoking rates. But then they kept doing it and doing it and doing it. And they even came out with a survey saying, oh, there's less smoking because we've done a survey and people say they're not smoking. Well, they're hardly going to admit that they're using illegal tobacco. And the wastewater samples show that nicotine is up. So by creating this massive excise, people are turning around and smoking the illicit stuff And because it's cheaper, they're actually smoking more. So the excise is totally counterproductive.
00:10:01
Speaker 1: I can't resist asking you about some of the underworld stuff because I think people love to hear about it. And there are a couple of things I want to ask you, but one of them is to do with Chopper Reed. And in particular, the occasion when you went out to Pentridge, he was in H Division, and arranged to have a meeting with him. Just tell us how that how that developed when you got out to Pentridge.
00:10:23
Speaker 3: Mark had just been acquitted of the murder of Siam Ozakan, which was slightly embarrassing because he was informing to the armed robbery squad. So the armed robbery squad got him a ballistic vest and so he went straight down to Bojangles and shot someone wearing a police-issued vest, which was difficult to explain. So Mark went into court and he later said, and he told false allegations against the armed robbery squad, He said, if there's a body in a swimming pool, if you throw enough dirt, it becomes mud and you don't see the body. So he's acquitted, and I wrote a double-page piece for the Herald Sun explaining what a manipulative ….
00:10:57
Speaker 1: Defended by Colin Lovett, I think.
00:10:59
Speaker 3: No doubt.
00:11:01
Speaker 1: Well, Colin Lovett and Boris Kayser represented him in that trial, and no one was more surprised by the verdict than them, I don't think.
00:11:08
Speaker 3: And in gratitude, Mark named his very large and loyal dog Kaiser after Boris. Boris, yeah.
00:11:14
Speaker 1: Yes.
00:11:15
Speaker 3: And so I wrote this piece explaining that he was a dangerous manipulative so-and-so and I was happy and the editor was happy. But Mark wasn't happy because I went to the pigeonhole and there was a Christmas card. It surprised me because it was July and it was a lovely card and inside it said, Dear John, may the Yuletide log fall from your fireplace and burn your house down. The perfect Christmas for me would be to own a 1,000-room hotel and find a dead Herald Sun reporter behind every door, seasons greetings and jingle bells, regards Chopper Reed. I felt particularly special until the then head of the parole board, Frank Vincent, said he got a card. And it was a lovely nativity scene and said, Jesus loves you. And inside, Mark had written, but personally, I think you're an arsehole.
00:12:09
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a great story.
00:12:11
Speaker 3: So why you would do that to the head of the parole board is not tactical. Frank would have seen the humor in that. I, for some reason, felt particularly brave, so I wrote to him and said, you can't talk to me like that. He wrote back and said, why don't you come and see me? And to my surprise, the prison authorities allowed it. And I, of course, had watched the movie, so there was going to be a telephone and a Perspex screen and he'd be on the other side and he'd say bad things to me, I'd say bad things to him, I'd write them down and get another story. And next thing they walk me into 8th Division and there's what appears to be a card table and there's Mark sitting there.
00:12:49
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:12:50
Speaker 3: And the prison guard goes, Mark, this is John. John, this is Mark and shut the door, which surprised me. And he stood up and grabbed my hand, grabbed my thumb and stuck it in a hole in his head and said that's where the ice pick went in. Then he did what and You two know so often that these crooks blame someone else. I had a poor childhood. My mum didn't love me. The police made up the evidence. Everyone was against me. Mark said, you've only just touched the surface. And he told all these bleak and black stories.
00:13:24
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:13:25
Speaker 3: And long story short, afterwards, he was happy, but Frank Vincent probably wasn't, so he got another six months. But the secret with Mark is... He never thought he was the best crook. He always wanted to be the most famous. And he said, you know, it wasn't the fastest gunslingers in the West that were remembered. It were the ones who piled up with the drunken journalists from the Penny Dreadfuls who got their stories told.
00:13:52
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:13:53
Speaker 3: And that's what he wanted. So then he told his story and I suspect many other crooks' stories as his own, but he did it with pathos and humour. And, of course, it was a runaway bestseller.
00:14:04
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, that's right.
00:14:06
Speaker 1: Yeah. Your other interest is, and you've done a series, I think it's more than one series too, on hitmen. And you and I have talked on that series, particularly about Christopher Dale Flannery, who even now I think is still pretty well known as being a professional hitman.
00:14:19
Speaker 2: There are lawyers who, if you mention his name, they just shiver.
00:14:24
Speaker 1: Did you know him, John?
00:14:26
Speaker 3: I knew of him and I spoke to Lex because Lex was part of the prosecution team in the murder of Roger Wilson, the businessman.
00:14:34
Speaker 1: Roger Wilson, yeah. He was a barrister, wasn't he? Yeah, he was.
00:14:38
Speaker 3: He took the contract to kill Wilson, a man with children and a wife who was just going home. And they concocted a police sign on the highway near Narre Warren and waved him over. And he'd already had a blasted collision on his way home, a minor fender bender. So he thought, oh, it's a terrible day. And Roger's body was never found. And there was a young witness, Debbie Boundy, just a 19-year-old girl. And she was effectively lured from a pub on Christmas Day, probably by Alphonse Gangatana, the notorious Black Prince of Liger. And she was never found. So we've got witnesses being popped off. And we've got to go back to the Mick Drury case. Here's a case where Mick Drury, an undercover officer from New South Wales, who's a key witness in a Melbourne drug case, the notorious corrupt detective Roger Rogerson, attempts to bribe Drury not to give legit evidence in Melbourne. Drury refuses the bribe, and then they hatch a plot to murder an undercover officer. And Roger Rogerson is the middleman. He's like Colonel Tom Parker with Elvis Presley. I think the fee was to be $ 150, and Roger was going to keep $ 120. And at the meeting with the crook who'd been charged, Alan Williams, they're sitting there and Roger goes to the toilet and Williams says to Flannery, you must trust this Jack to be talking like that. And he said, don't worry, he'll be there when I do it. And they attempt to kill Drury. Drury is shot in his home in front of his family. Standing at the sink, wasn't he? Washing the dishes. Washing the dishes.
00:16:32
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:16:33
Speaker 3: And everyone... knows he's going to die. So he makes a deathbed statement of Roger attempting to bribe him. And miraculously, Drury survives. And that's the statement which eventually brought him down. But that's the cold blood of nature.
00:16:51
Speaker 1: This is when, John?
00:16:53
Speaker 2: The 1980s?
00:16:54
Speaker 3: Yeah, 1980s.
00:16:55
Speaker 1: Because Flannery went to Sydney after being tried and acquitted of the murder of Wilson and then was taken to Sydney, tried for the murder of Ray Loxley.
00:17:05
Speaker 3: Lizard Loxley.
00:17:06
Speaker 1: Lizard Loxley and was acquitted of that as well.
00:17:08
Speaker 3: And then he became Murder Inc. working for George Freeman.
00:17:11
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's right.
00:17:12
Speaker 3: But then he started coming up to people and said, well, there's a $ 50, 000 contract on you. You give me 60 and I'll make it go away. So he was playing both sides. And when he said to a senior copper, you're not a koala, you're not a protected species, that was the end of it. And There was a task force looking at all this and Roger Rogerson contacted the head of the task force and said, Flannery wants to see you. So they organised a meet at a bar and Flannery arrived and clearly didn't want to be there and didn't say anything. But Roger was there. Now, Flannery at the time was moving about to ensure he couldn't get hit. Well, that's when Roger followed him home.
00:17:57
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right.
00:17:58
Speaker 3: That night there's a phone call on his beeper. from the notorious George Freeman saying, Mercedes wants to see you. They organized to meet because he says he's got a machine gun for him. Flannery goes into the apartment block where he's staying and his favorite valiant is disabled. He tells his wife, go and get Marshall to get a new battery. He would ring her every hour. He goes outside. We don't know for certain, but almost certainly it was Roger. And another corrupt New South Wales cop picked him up, took him to Freeman's. And when Marshall arrived, the car works. So the wife, Kath Flannery, goes across the road to police headquarters and says, my husband is dead. He has not rung me. He is already dead. And it happened at the Freeman place. Eventually, the police bowl out there and knock on Freeman's door and say, can we come in and have a look?
00:18:56
Speaker 1: No.
00:18:57
Speaker 3: So they go away. And it's two weeks later they get a warrant. So if you don't think the fix was in.
00:19:03
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. That was the forerunner of a number of things. You talked about Alphonse Gangitano, who was a mate of Flannery's and a young mate of Flannery's in the early days. So, I mean, the learning is that Gangitano knocked Debbie Boundy because she was going to be a crucial witness in the trial against Flannery in Melbourne. and I don't think there's any doubt that it was Ganjatana who killed her. And then he went on from there, didn't he? Because the next thing we know, he's popped up, as you say, as the Black Prince of Ligon Street and arguably started the gangland war in 1995 when he shot Greg Workman, although I'm not sure that's the killing that really kicked it off. But you wrote a book about it called Lead Belly, which became the Underbelly series. What an amazing saga. Yeah.
00:19:52
Speaker 3: Well, Alphonse was interesting because he was a private school boy and he actually had a physical fight with Flannery down at Mickey's Discount. Down at Mickey's. And Flannery was screaming to his wife, get the gun, get the gun. And he thought she was too slow, obviously didn't want to be part of a murder. And he actually belted her. It was only time because Kath was pretty fierce in herself.
00:20:17
Speaker 1: Yes.
00:20:18
Speaker 3: And in the end, they all pal up together. And the Workman case was the first time I could see organised crime really manipulate the system because with the Workman murder, there were two sisters who had a party. One day Crescent, I reckon.
00:20:37
Speaker 1: In St Kilda.
00:20:37
Speaker 3: In St Kilda.
00:20:38
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:20:38
Speaker 3: So they had a party and they heard what went on. So they were key witnesses. And witness protection was so bad in those days that the police said, well, look after you. First thing they did is they drove them down Ligon Street. So that made them really scared. They were put into a caravan park at Warrnambool and were given a 24-hour number. They started to panic. So they ring the number. It rings out. So they ring Alphonse's then good friend, later his murderer, in Jason Moran and say, we're in trouble. Oh, sweetheart, of course you're not. We'll come and pick you up. Took them to St. Kilda Road. They made a statement recanting what had happened. And then Alphonse paid for a round-the-world trip, which included stopping at Disneyland, which was probably right. They went to Fantasyland because that's what their statements were.
00:21:30
Speaker 1: Yeah. Things really got going in 1999, I think, when the Morans shot Carl Williams in a park in Gladstone Park.
00:21:38
Speaker 3: October 13, 1999. And it was Carl's 29th birthday.
00:21:44
Speaker 1: So at this stage of proceedings, what are you doing? Are you following this at the time?
00:21:48
Speaker 3: Didn't care at all. Didn't know who Carl Williams was. Didn't know about the shooting. Mad Richard Bladnitz gets murdered in about, 2000, I don't put anything together, but Mad Richard was working for Mark Moran and Carl wanted Mad Richard to work for him and he knew how fearsome Richard was. So they kill Mad Richard down at the Esquire Motel in St Kilda. Six weeks later, Mark Moran is murdered. I'm still not geriatric. There's a man in Everfeldy who's been murdered and I don't know why, I rang a particular homicide detective who was in the house. And he said, it's Mark Moran. And I'm saying, you know, so what? He said, it's Jason's brother. And I said, oh, hello.
00:22:36
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:22:36
Speaker 3: This has started to.
00:22:38
Speaker 1: Add up a bit.
00:22:38
Speaker 3: And then working backwards, I found out about the shooting at Gladstone Park. And that's when Carl came up. Now, I wrote the story saying this all started in a park in Gladstone Park. And Carl rang me. And he said... you can get someone killed writing that stuff.
00:22:54
Speaker 1: Yes.
00:22:55
Speaker 3: But he wasn't threatening me. No, no. He was actually saying, in his own way, he confirmed it.
00:23:00
Speaker 1: They'll know who it was.
00:23:01
Speaker 3: If you know it, it means either I've told the police and they've told you, or I've told you.
00:23:07
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:23:08
Speaker 3: And so ironically, he was frightened then of being identified as a police informer, which ultimately gets him killed when he is a police informer in 2010.
00:23:19
Speaker 1: The thing that most concerned me, about it all was the link between the murder of the Hodsons and ultimately what followed because Paul Dale was a suspect for those murders as having organised Carl Williams to get Rod Collins to do the job. That was never proved, of course. Followed, of course, in the end by the killing of Carl Williams himself and I was the trial judge in Johnson's trial. I thought that whole part of that saga was really disconcerting. It really brought the system together. to the edge.
00:23:49
Speaker 3: Well, like we were talking about, you know, the penny-pinching regarding the two women who were the witnesses in the Workman case. You've got the Hodsons who were offered witness protection and decided against it.
00:24:01
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:24:01
Speaker 3: But just to be cheap, the security system that was put in had a VHS tape instead of being, you know, offline.
00:24:11
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:24:11
Speaker 3: So the killer, who almost certainly was professional hitman Rod Collins, took the tape. If that tape existed or the vision existed, we don't have this situation. But right the way back to Prubert, this was a case of Terence Hudson being killed to silence him as a witness in a police corruption case, and his wife was collateral damage because she was there. Now, that's how cold-blooded it all is.
00:24:40
Speaker 1: That's the thing that most unsettled me. And, of course, when there was a risk that all that would come out through the evidence of Carl Williams, that was the end of Carl Williams.
00:24:48
Speaker 3: Carl made the mistake of believing I'm only giving up a corrupt copper. Yeah. And so therefore I'll be okay. And when he had Mad Richard as his bodyguard in prison, he thought Matthew Johnson would be the right one. But if we go back to the murder of Mad Richard, there were others involved and they thought pretty logically if he's tipping in corrupt coppers, it'll only be a matter of time If he's going to get a discount for that, why will he not tip us in for the Mad Richard thing? So it was organized by somebody who was close to Carl who wanted him silenced. And the key to that is the third person in that cell block was Tommy Ivanovic.
00:25:36
Speaker 1: Yes.
00:25:36
Speaker 3: And you can imagine if someone dropped a glass down and smashed, we'd all start.
00:25:42
Speaker 1: We'd all look.
00:25:43
Speaker 3: Tommy had his back to the events. And the vision that you've seen last.
00:25:48
Speaker 1: Yes, I've seen it.
00:25:49
Speaker 3: He does not jump. He doesn't start. He doesn't look. And the noise had to be sickening.
00:25:54
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:25:54
Speaker 3: So he knew exactly what was happening.
00:25:56
Speaker 1: And there's the famous call to the prison officers after, I don't know, 20 minutes saying, you better send someone. Carl's not in a good way, but don't send any women.
00:26:07
Speaker 2: We could have you here all day, but we have to finish at some point.
00:26:11
Speaker 1: Yes. But. I've got two more things I've got to ask about. I've got one, John. The.
00:26:16
Speaker 2: The decision by the DPP not to charge anyone.
00:26:21
Speaker 1: That was the Gobbo case, wasn't it? Yes. Jeff Nettle. Yes.
00:26:24
Speaker 2: So Jeff Nettle, former High Court judge, says there's something to see here.
00:26:28
Speaker 1: Prepares briefs. Prepares briefs.
00:26:29
Speaker 2: Kerry Judd, the then DPP, says no, now on the Supreme Court. Your take on that?
00:26:36
Speaker 3: The Gobbo thing was really interesting because Nicola Gobbo had been an informer off and on. for 20 years. And so she was charged over drug matters as a student. That conviction was recorded because it would affect her legal career. So she couldn't have been the most junior constable. And yet, during the whole process, everybody knew that Gobbo was way too close to her clients. And there were people from magistrates to senior barristers to judges who would take her aside and say, got to stop doing this. But I don't understand why this matter never went to an ethics where she didn't get a supervisor and she was allowed to continue doing this. She becomes a police informer. The question being, was she a criminal barrister or a criminal who was a barrister? Because she was very close to being charged as an accessory in the Hodson matter. And then the rest we know, she becomes a secret informer. The police would have got away with it, actually. if there wasn't this desperation over the Hodson case, which is when the then Chief Commissioner Simon Overland turned her from a secret source into a witness. So let's forget about the moralities of it. I found the inquiry that brought commission interesting because Nicola Gobbo said, I began informing as a barrister because the firm I worked for was laundering money for organized crime. Well, immediately there was a suppression order put on the name of the firm. Well, we can't say that. A respected police officer from Burrana, Jim Coghlan, produced an affidavit naming a barrister who was, he alleged, laundering money at Jupiter's Casino for Tony Mokba. Well, we can't possibly name that person. When Nicola Gobbo said, I had a consensual sexual relationship with a police officer, the police officer denied it. Who knows whether it's true or not, but he was named. So he has to go home and explain to his family why his name is on page one. for sleeping with Nicola Gobber. The head of Piranha was in the witness box for three weeks. The prosecutor was allowed to make a statement and was not cross-examined. There was a real suggestion that the investigation didn't actually go into the court to say who really knew and why did this happen. Added to that, we are still suffering because the disclosure laws became so draconian now that in a serious investigation, let's say there's four people looking at a homicide, senior investigators, one of those will be a disclosure officer whose full-time job is to produce masses of documents to go to barristers who will never read them and will slow the process down even further. And that results in people being bailed because their trials is two years away and further crime. So there's a real problem out of that and human sources. informers, they don't exist because now there's a document that you have to sign. And it basically says on the last page, we can't protect your anonymity. You are nuts to sign up for that sort of thing.
00:29:53
Speaker 1: Absolutely.
00:29:54
Speaker 3: There's a murder trial that was aborted. because within those documents was a name, and that person would have got killed.
00:30:04
Speaker 1: I want to finish on this topic. You recently talked about the judicial system, and you said it was complex. Of course, it is complex. The cases are becoming more complex, and you pointed to the unfairness of that on everyone. You pointed to the unfairness on witnesses and the accused, particularly in the circumstances where an accused is charged. waits ages for a trial and then is acquitted. No one apologises for the time he's been in custody or the interruption to their life during that time. Is the system now getting to the stage where it's really breaking the limits and there are too many victims of this complexity in the justice system?
00:30:44
Speaker 3: It is so change averse. I don't know whether it's because everybody's invested so much time at university to learn the system. There's a 2001 white paper out of the UK called Swift Justice.
00:30:57
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:30:57
Speaker 3: Go and have a look at that. Yeah, I agree. Now, I was a minor. My only dealings in this, I was a very inconsequential witness in a case against Roberta Williams. A fellow comes to me, emails me, and he says, Roberta Williams abducted me and tortured me, and I don't owe any honest police. So I made two calls, put them together, and there we go. Roberta ends up getting charged. Now, for some reason, I become a witness. I have no knowledge of the veracity of the charges. It's during COVID. Now, I can work from home. I'm not on the tools. And for six days on a committal, I had to be there. And on each day, I was told I was no longer needed. On the Friday, it was a hot day. And I went to the supermarket. My phone rang, and it was the informant saying, the magistrate wants you on now. I said, well, unless I can swear an oath on a box of fish fingers, we're in trouble, aren't we? But why am I being called?
00:32:01
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:32:02
Speaker 3: I have no evidence.
00:32:04
Speaker 1: I'm with you, John. I'm with you.
00:32:06
Speaker 2: I agree with the complexity and criminal procedure rules. But you only have to have a look at the Bail Act and the Sentencing Act. They're becoming to look like the Tax Act. They're so complex. You have to have diagrams and flow charts in them.
00:32:25
Speaker 1: But only in a sense matched by the sheer volume of paper that's now churning out of the Court of Appeal so that everything's complicated. Yeah, every brief you get now is just, you're right, volumes. And I'll say, most of it you don't read because you flick through it and say, I don't need that. And there it is sitting in your chambers in a great big folder for months on end.
00:32:46
Speaker 3: Well, the blindingly obvious, you go to the Melbourne Magistrates' Court and there's a dozen coppers sitting there waiting to give inconsequential evidence as I mentioned.
00:32:56
Speaker 1: Exactly.
00:32:57
Speaker 3: They're all behind on their paperwork. So on this particular day, we have hubs and the copper is there doing his correspondence and then he gets a text, you're on in five minutes. You do it remotely. You swear and you say, yeah, I arrested him on August 18th and you go back to your work. So we get all those days. How many times do prisoners not turn up when they're transported? Because they've got to be strip searched. Why doesn't the magistrate go to Barwon and just deal with everything at Barwon on one day? Then we're going to go off here and we have a magistrate go to the main prisons.
00:33:36
Speaker 1: All these things are just mind-blowing. I totally agree.
00:33:38
Speaker 2: But also, I think you could get rid of a lot of those drink-driving cases, speeding cases. The fault position that this is the fine you get if you want to, or the loss of licence. If you've got a couple of priors and they say, well, it's going to be nine months, not six, you can appeal it. But why waste court time with one.
00:33:58
Speaker 1: Drink driving employee after another? Well, because it used to keep barristers in. I know. I used to do that. I mean, in my early days, the Sandringham Magistrates Court. That's right. Traffic day.
00:34:06
Speaker 3: No, no.
00:34:06
Speaker 1: It was a devoted traffic court. That's what I mean. So you'd get down there and there'd be, I don't know, 100 cases on, all speeding, drink driving, 0.05, whatever. I know. And we all made a brief fee and we all made exactly the same.
00:34:18
Speaker 2: But in this day and age, with the capacity to, you know, deal with those matters much more.
00:34:24
Speaker 1: Efficiently, take them out of the court.
00:34:26
Speaker 2: The other things that should be taken out of the court are minor drug cases, possessions.
00:34:32
Speaker 3: Well, there is the report sitting there somewhere. Paul Coughlin, Justice Paul Coughlin did a report and this is his words to me. And this is about all these arrest warrants.
00:34:41
Speaker 2: Hmm.
00:34:41
Speaker 3: That come from Bode to appear. He says, you've got some poor daft soul who goes to a 7-Eleven every day and he steals a Mars bar. The owner of the 7-Eleven eventually gets annoyed and the police come and he's charged. And he's told to be at court on August 16th. Coughlin says, well, he would have lost the bit of paper before he'd gone around the block. Correct, yeah. So he doesn't turn up and a warrant's issued. And he doesn't turn up and he doesn't turn up and he ends up getting jailed for stealing a Mars bar.
00:35:09
Speaker 2: I know.
00:35:09
Speaker 3: So you have it like you say. You turn around and say, you have been charged with minor theft. If you don't turn up, it is taken that it is a plea of guilty. He'll be fined $ 20. He'll never pay it. But the police will not be going 20 times trying to find him for this purpose.
00:35:28
Speaker 1: Totally agree.
00:35:29
Speaker 3: 60,000, 60,000.
00:35:30
Speaker 2: And this is what government should be focusing on. Not just continually jacking up. Constantly locking people up.
00:35:37
Speaker 1: We could spend the whole morning, John, but we do have to wind it up. But maybe we should do a second chapter at some stage. We'll do volume two. It's been fantastic. Yeah, thanks, John.
00:35:46
Speaker 3: Thank you.
00:35:46
Speaker 1: It's been a real pleasure and it's endlessly interesting stuff. Thank you. And read Naked City. Read Naked City, yes. In the nine years. Does it go to the Sydney Morning Herald as well, John?
00:35:57
Speaker 3: Yeah, sometimes.
00:35:58
Speaker 1: Sometimes, yeah. But certainly in the age. Yeah. All right. Thanks, John. Thanks, Greg. Thanks, Greg. Thanks, Lex. Next time. Next time. Don't forget to like and subscribe. This episode was produced by Bravecasting Media, edited by Michael Tankard, original music by Justin Humphries from Phoenix Sound Studios. This podcast is recorded on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. We pay our respects to their elders past, present and emerging. Thank you for listening. See you next week.
