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  The drug dealer was due to leave Australia on a business trip. He was to meet a associate in Benin, West Africa, to buy 5.5 kilograms of high-grade cocaine.

  The plan was simple. Roberts would travel with his former girlfriend, Carol Brand, on a seemingly innocent holiday, first to Europe and then on to Africa. The cocaine, 65 per cent pure, would be specially sealed inside eight decorative wall plaques, and smuggled into the country inside the pair’s hand luggage.

  Brand was the innocent abroad. She believed the expenses-paid trip was a peace offering from Roberts after their less-than-amicable break-up a few years earlier. She thought that they might rekindle their romance.

  But the aspiring actress knew nothing of the cold-blooded Roberts’ plan to use her as the cover for the importation. She would be the unwitting ‘mule’ who would carry the drug-filled plaques through airports and who would, if necessary, take the fall for the real villains.

  Customs officers are trained to pick drug smugglers through nervous body language that betrays guilt.

  The best ‘mules’ are the ones with nothing to fear because they don’t know what they are carrying. But this mule would buck the system and was to give telling evidence against her former lover. She told the court how she had caught up with Roberts in early 1999, three years after their split.

  Believing they could become friends, she occasionally met him for coffee and conversation. One day, he gave her the holiday offer. ‘He explained to me that he would like me to accompany him on a trip overseas, since it was something that we never managed to do while we were together.’

  The day before the trip Fraser and Roberts discussed the plan, in between glasses of wine and lines of cocaine, cut and divided on the marble slate table of the lawyer’s seemingly private conference room.

  But the office was bugged as part of a covert police investigation into local drug trafficking, in which Fraser was the main suspect.

  It had not begun that way. In February, 1999, police started an investigation designed to trap a major drug trafficker in Melbourne’s north-west. The suspect was the head of a traditional Australian crime cell and he had repeatedly avoided arrest.

  The drug squad had gathered intelligence that the suspect’s family had become heavily involved in dealing in amphetamines, cocaine and ecstasy. One brother was the major suspect in an underworld murder. Another was the victim of a crime execution.

  Police had sufficient information to justify installing court-authorised telephone taps but while the main target was too cunning to implicate himself, detectives found repeated references to Fraser’s involvement with cocaine.

  Within three months, investigators shifted their attention to the well-known lawyer. Fraser believed he could keep his habit a secret, yet it was already the subject of conversation among many criminals. One said the lawyer had turned up at his home to discuss his upcoming case, and ended up sharing a line of cocaine with his client.

  Knowing that he had many contacts, and enemies, inside the force, Fraser was referred to in Operation Regent only as ‘Target A’ – both after his first name and as a bid to keep the investigation confidential.

  Investigators felt that if it became known in police circles that he was a target, it would spread through, and beyond, the department within days.

  Fraser had a reputation as a street-smart and cunning lawyer. He often used underworld slang picked up from his many high-profile, low-life clients. He prided himself on his knowledge of investigative techniques and made a handsome living advising suspects on the best way to counter police tactics.

  Yet when it came to drug dealing, Andrew Fraser was incredibly dumb. His was a high-profile case but, ultimately, he was an easy pinch for the drug squad. Like an animal raised in captivity, the private school-educated Fraser was not equipped for life in the wild. He realised too late that his wings and claws were clipped.

  In a Prahran restaurant-bar, Fraser slipped into the men’s toilet to do a deal. He had become so nonchalant that when he heard a mobile telephone ring in a cubicle, he yelled out to the occupant, ‘Don’t you hate it when that happens?

  The man from behind the locked door just laughed. He was a drug squad detective there to observe the deal.

  Police listening devices installed in his office recorded the damning meeting with Roberts. The conversation was pivotal in building the case against the man one detective admitted in evidence was not exactly ‘liked’ by ‘certain people’ in the force. It also showed how he was prepared to risk the freedom of an innocent woman to feed his obsession with cocaine.

  In a drug-fuelled, rambling conversation filled with obscenities, gossip, and schoolboy stories, surveillance detectives overheard Fraser counselling his ex-client on ways to avoid suspicion during the trip.

  He advised Roberts that it might be risky having both his and Brand’s name on the same itinerary if she was eventually to take the fall, and tried to discourage him from giving her $8000 for accompanying him overseas. Fraser believed it would arouse suspicion and instead suggested that $2500 would be enough of a gesture to entrap the innocent woman in drug trafficking. The once rich and generous lawyer had turned cheap and nasty.

  ‘Look, I understand, mate. I’ve done this. I’ve given pertinent advice before in these situations …’ he was recorded as saying.

  He also made sure Roberts had his correct contact details, and that he, in turn, had a copy of his itinerary. He also advised him to be careful coming back through customs when he returned with the drugs, but stopped short of agreeing to meet him when he arrived because it would look too much a like a ‘conspiracy’.

  Instead, he told him to call from a pay phone to let him know that he had returned safely. And, according to the prosecution, he agreed to be the ‘legal backstop’ if things didn’t go according to plan.

  Roberts left Melbourne the following day, leaving his wife, Andrea Mohr, and long-time friend, Carl Heinze Urbanec, to supply Fraser with his much-needed cocaine.

  Mohr was a younger woman, about 15 years Roberts’ junior, and prone to fits of jealously. She was a devoted wife – and a chronic heroin addict.

  Urbanec was Mohr’s former boyfriend and had become one of the couple’s oldest friends. He was also a drug user. They were a cosmopolitan modern family unit.

  The drug deal seemed to go according to plan. On September 8, 1999, a man named Cornelius arrived at the Hotel DuPont in Cotonou, Benin, to meet Roberts and Brand.

  There, he delivered eight wall plaques, about 13 centimetres long by 18 centimetres wide, with tribal faces carved on them. The cocaine was sealed in the hollow interior of each item.

  Shortly after returning to Sydney, Roberts called Mohr to let her know he had arrived. At about 8pm, he notified Fraser, with the cliche message ‘The eagle has landed’, which some critics consider was alone worth an extra three months’ jail.

  According to Brand’s evidence, she and Roberts checked into the El Toro Motel, in the Sydney suburb of Liverpool, at about 11pm. They had decided on staying overnight before driving back to Melbourne in a rental car, a vehicle Australian Federal Police had secretly bugged in order to track the pair’s movements.

  Brand said they ordered breakfast, arranged a wake-up call and went to sleep. But about 4am, an agitated Roberts woke her up, wanting to leave immediately.

  ‘I was woken abruptly and quite rudely by Werner. I remember asking why,’ Brand told the jury. ‘We had agreed to a 7am wake-up call. He had agreed to breakfast. I remember asking what the hurry was and why he was being so rude and he didn’t elaborate.’

  It was early September 11, 1999, when the couple headed south for Melbourne. It was a long, tense trip and it didn’t get any better. Soon after they got to Melbourne, police raided Roberts’ Elwood apartment and arrested him and Mohr. The eight plaques were seized from the boot of his rented car.

  The drug dealer was taken into custody and, following their emergency plans, he requested Fraser as his solicitor. Detectives told
him he would need a different lawyer because his first choice had just been arrested during raids at his beachside home and city office.

  The group was charged and remanded but unlike his co-offenders, who have spent more than two years in jail since, Fraser was granted bail and continued working as a solicitor until September 4, 2000, when he voluntarily gave up his practising certificate and pleaded guilty to the charges against him.

  Many detectives were furious that Fraser was allowed to continue to appear in criminal courts while facing serious charges. Police who are charged with criminal offences are immediately suspended from duty.

  Mohr also pleaded guilty, but Roberts and Urbanec fought the case over a four-week trial.

  On the surface, it appeared to be a straightforward case. Crown prosecutor Richard Maidment told the court that Roberts, both a drug dealer and drug user, was the principal importer of the cocaine.

  Meanwhile, Fraser, Mohr and Urbanec formed the ‘support crew’ to the scheme, were ready and willing to receive the cocaine, and provided advice, encouragement and logistical support to aid its importation.

  But on the second day of the trial, Roberts’ barrister, George Traczyk, presented the jury with a 90-minute line of defence that alleged that police had hated Fraser for years and wanted to set him up. Traczyk suggested his client was being used to get the despised criminal lawyer.

  He claimed Fraser was disliked by police for his role in defending Anthony Farrell, one of the men accused, and later acquitted, of the 1988 Walsh Street police murders of Steven Tynan and Damian Eyre.

  Many police felt Fraser had crossed the line when he represented Farrell and was no longer just a lawyer doing his job.

  On September 3, 1988, Fraser was taped in the Melbourne watch-house urging his client to stay strong.

  The notorious section of transcript seems rather damning, given that Fraser’s first sworn duty was to the court.

  Fraser: ‘We’re going to blow these c.… out of the water on this … so you just keep your trap shut, mate, this is the rest of your life here … We’ve put the word out that you’ve said nothing … They’ve fucking nailed you because they reckon you’re the weak link in the chain. They’re putting enormous pressure on you in what they are doing. They want you to be the one that cracks and gives everybody up. We’re stronger than that.’

  More than 13 years after the conversation was recorded Traczyk asked one drug squad detective, Senior Constable Paul Firth, if police still felt a sense of anger or betrayal towards Fraser after the Walsh Street acquittals.

  ‘It would be fair to say that certain people didn’t like him as a person,’ the witness replied.

  It took two days for the jury to dismiss Roberts’ version of events and find him guilty of the importation. Urbanec, who had argued that his involvement was limited to sending $900 to Roberts after he had lost his luggage and plane tickets (and not, as the Crown suggested, to help facilitate the deal), was found guilty of being knowingly concerned with the importation.

  Roberts returned to the County Court three weeks after his trial for pre-sentencing plea. The division between him and his former solicitor could not have been more apparent.

  They sat at opposite ends of the criminal dock and, on the second day of the hearing, a security guard sat between the pair.

  Heliotis, a softly-spoken, yet robust and convincing barrister, urged Judge Hart to impose a ‘short, sharp’ minimum sentence of about six to 12 months against Fraser.

  He told the court that his client would ‘do it hard’ in jail, partly because he was an outspoken person, partly because he might have disgruntled ex-clients in the prison system and mostly because he had given evidence to police against his co-offenders, agreeing to testify against them on behalf of the Crown in expectation of a lesser sentence.

  The prosecution, however, submitted that a six to 12-month minimum term would be an inappropriate punishment, given Fraser’s role in the importation.

  The prosecution argued that the disgraced lawyer might not have been an essential part of the plan, but he actively encouraged the deal in the expectation that he would benefit from it.

  It was clear that the seriousness of the offence, particularly because Fraser knew that an innocent person could take the fall for a crime she did not commit, was aggravated by the fact that he was a solicitor at the time.

  Outside the court, a group of lawyers and detectives ran an informal sweep on Fraser’s likely sentence: a minimum of about four years was the most popular guess.

  Fraser lost his job, his reputation and his dignity. The family home, his car and even the wine collection he had started when he was 18 all went. But there are no excuses. As an officer of the court he knew very well the consequences of drug trafficking.

  Days before his sentencing, Fraser was telling friends he was still hoping on a suspended jail term, showing that the once street-smart lawyer had lost touch with courtroom reality.

  Judge Leo Hart was waiting to bring the high flier back to earth. On December 3, 2001, Hart sentenced him to a minimum of five years. ‘You had bound yourself by oath to uphold the law and to conduct yourself honestly. To behave in the illegal, dishonourable and disgraceful way that you did … involves a degree of public scandal, which reflects on the profession as a whole,’ the judge said.

  Such conduct warranted a sentence that would act as a deterrent to others, including lawyers who might be tempted to commit such crimes, he said.

  ‘A legal practitioner must not succumb to such temptations,’ he said. ‘A legal practitioner must not cross that line.’

  Judge Hart said Fraser was ‘a hardened user’ of cocaine, and rejected submissions by his defence counsel that he was so ‘off his face’ at the time of his conversation with Roberts that his judgment was severely impaired.

  While he accepted that Fraser had freely given time to pro bono and community work, Judge Hart questioned his previous good reputation. ‘For the last 12 to 13 years you have not had a good character at all,’ he said. ‘On your own admission, you have been breaking the law with increasing frequency by possessing and using cocaine.’

  Werner Roberts, 54, was found guilty by a jury of the importation and was sentenced to 13 years, with a minimum of 10; Andrea Mohr, 38, was sentenced to eight years with a minimum of five; and Carl Urbanec, 46, was sentenced to nine years with a minimum of six.

  – with Farrah Tomazin

  CHAPTER 12

  Occupational hazard

  Dismembering bodies was surprisingly hot work.

  FOR more than 13 years, Kath Pettingill waited for the call she always knew would come – the call that one of her sons had been shot and left to die.

  It finally came at 9.45pm on Wednesday, May 1, 2002. Victor Peirce was dead – shot less than 30 minutes earlier in Bay Street, Port Melbourne, in what police suspect was a drug-related killing.

  Peirce, his half-brother, Trevor Pettingill, and two family friends, Peter McEvoy and Anthony Farrell, were charged and acquitted over the 1988 murders of two police in South Yarra.

  Constables Steven Tynan and Damian Eyre were ambushed when they went to make a routine check on a car dumped in Walsh Street on October 12.

  Investigators maintain the four murder suspects killed the police as a revenge attack after Peirce’s best friend, Graeme Jensen, was shot by armed robbery squad detectives in Narre Warren only 13 hours earlier.

  The detectives said a group of criminals had formed a pact to murder two police in an ambush attack if police killed one of them.

  Ever since then Kath Pettingill knew how it would all end. ‘Without a word of a lie every day since Walsh Street I have expected this to happen to Victor or Trevor,’ she said.

  The matriarch of the Pettingill crime clan had six sons and a daughter. All have, or had, criminal records.

  Victor was the third of her sons to die young – but not necessarily prematurely.

  The eldest was Dennis Allen, known as ‘Mr Death’, who was a s
uspect in 11 murders and kept out of jail by providing information to police. He was also suspected of paying a corrupt cell of detectives for protection.

  Allen made between $70,000 and $100,000 a week from drugs and was on bail for 60 different offences in the early 1980s.

  ‘Mr Death’ killed a Hells Angel’s associate, Anton Kenny, in Allen’s Richmond home. He took the body into the garage and used a chainsaw to amputate the legs before stuffing the remains in a 44-gallon drum. Allen stopped in the middle of the job to swig beer because, he would later claim, dismembering bodies was surprisingly hot work.

  The drum was later dumped in the Yarra. Allen was later to tell homicide squad detectives where the body was, blaming others for the murder.

  Allen used to stand in his street in Richmond and fire shots at police surveillance posts set up to monitor his activities. Although he had the social skills of a feral pig, Mr Death was sometimes seen in the company of the upwardly mobile. His seemingly endless supply of drugs allowed him to overcome his more obvious social inadequacies.

  He used a small local hotel as his business headquarters, once chaining an enemy from a rafter in the ladies’ lounge; he drank in the bar and every time he walked past he would beat the man hanging from the beam.

  Others offered to help Dennis with the beatings but, on this occasion, he refused to delegate. Sometimes the boss has to lead by example.

  He was on a murder charge when he died in 1987 from heart disease. One death notice read: ‘Dennis the Menace with a heart so big. Sorry you’re gone, you were such a good gig.’ This, translated from crim slang, suggests that he was an informer. Which was, of course, true.

  Another of Kath’s sons was Jamie Pettingill. As a teenager he was involved in the armed robbery of the United Kingdom Hotel in Clifton Hill. A barman was shot and later died from a blood clot. When detectives threatened to charge him with murder he calmly told them he had read in the papers that the worst offence he could face was grievous bodily harm. He remained silent and walked free. Jamie died of a drug overdose in 1985.