Underbelly 4 Page 7

  He took him on head on. And, as with most collisions at terminal velocity, there would be no survivors.

  BEFORE he became a policeman Lachlan McCulloch was a private school boy from a privileged background, more interested in a good time than a career. He was a pleasant enough young bloke who did not take advantage of the many opportunities offered to him at Mentone Boys Grammar.

  Each year in my late teens my father bought me a plane ticket to anywhere I wanted to go. I mostly chose exotic fishing locations in Northern Australia.

  I went fishing for two weeks at a fishing lodge in the Gulf of Carpentaria on my eighteenth birthday. For my nineteenth birthday I got a return ticket to London – originally for three months. At my going-away party, I overheard my father tell my uncle that I wouldn’t last ten minutes over there because I couldn’t look after myself.

  Maybe McCulloch wanted to prove something. He worked in hotels through Europe, was a tennis coach at a private club in England, and sold cars, fishing tackle and even pine plantations before returning to Australia.

  At the age of twenty-one, he wanted to be a policeman and, more than that, a star detective. But, to the casual observer, he seemed to lack the rat cunning and the streak of ruthlessness required to make a first-rate investigator.

  ‘I made the decision and ended up getting in. I walked into the Victoria Police Academy in January, 1984. I did my five months there, I came just about last in my squad – twenty second out of twenty-five. It was not a brilliant start.’

  If detectives are supposed to be distant and impersonal types who can deal with disasters and crime without emotion, then McCulloch was always going to struggle.

  But, whether by design or necessity, McCulloch took his own path. Instead of trying to be something he wasn’t, he used his own personality to be his type of policeman.

  ‘As a kid I cried during every episode of Lassie and Kimba the White Lion. I get emotional about most things. I never had the makings to be a hard-boiled copper, but being a round peg that didn’t fit in the police department square hole proved to be a great advantage.’

  Although he was different, like most young police he quickly found the sense of power seductive.

  Inside the police station a new trainee is the lowest in the food chain, but outside he wears the recognisable uniform of authority and carries the ultimate trapping of power – a loaded gun.

  He had been out of the academy for just two days and was on night shift when he was told to pick up a Chinese supper for the station crew.

  I picked it up and found myself in the city driving a real police car. I was all by myself. I stopped the marked police car in the middle of the road at the very top of Bourke Street. I looked down the hill towards the Mall.

  I turned the blue lights and both sirens on, planted the foot and roared down Bourke Street. It was fantastic … all the large shop windows reflected the blue lights back towards me and the sound bounced off the concrete arcades … it felt good. I was a cop.

  About a month later he was trusted to go out on patrol and pulled in to a 7/11 store. As he parked he saw three hotted-up Holdens and ‘a dozen or so young bucks milling around.’

  ‘I walked in to the store and did the toughest thing I could think of. I purchased a large multi-coloured, multi-flavoured Slurpie.’

  McCulloch walked out with his Slurpie and hopped into the police car knowing he was being watched. He spun the wheels and completed a ‘reverse donut’ covering the onlookers in a cloud of tyre smoke.

  ‘I only did it because I could. I didn’t think I represented the law in the early days, I tended to think I was the law.’

  He’d fallen into his career by a quirk of circumstance, but he soon became entranced. It was real-life drama that gave him the sense of direction that he had lacked earlier in life. He broke up with his girlfriend and spent most of his waking moments being a cop. But he was soon to learn that not every policeman shared his enthusiasm and that not all problems could be solved by the law.

  I was driving past a park and there was an old, grey panel van pulled over on the side of the road with two people in it My partner asked me to check them while he ran the registration through D24.

  I looked in the driver’s door window. There was a young bloke, about twenty – he was leaning over and in the passenger seat was a young girl of about fifteen. She was leaning back in the seat looking at the ceiling, The guy in the driver’s seat was injecting a syringe into her eye.

  I couldn’t believe it and just froze. I couldn’t grab him because he had the needle in her eye and I was scared that I would cause her more damage. I was torn between grabbing him and not grabbing him. Anyway, it felt like ages, but it was probably only a few seconds before he finished.

  I reached in and grabbed the hand holding the syringe, knocking the syringe onto the floor. I put my left arm around his throat, my elbow under his chin and dragged him backwards out the driver’s window onto the road. I then knelt on the back of his head pushing his face into the roadway, and handcuffed him. I dragged him over to the grass by his hair; I couldn’t hear him screaming. By this time my partner jumped out to see what’s going on.

  As for the girl in the passenger seat, the heroin had basically gone straight into her brain and she was unconscious. We carried her limp body onto the grassy verge next to the park. Next thing I remember two girls pulled up in a passing car and jumping out asked if they could help. I said, ‘No, no, please get in your car and leave’. They explained to me that they were nurses and could actually help, so I asked them to check the girl as she ‘d overdosed or something.

  A few minutes later the ambulance arrived and injected her with Narcan, which instantly reverses the effects of the heroin. I wanted to kill the man who had done this to her.

  I dragged him over to the back of the divisional van, my partner grabbed me by the arm and said, ‘Hang on a second. ‘I let him go. I put him on the ground again and walked back to the car to talk to my partner.

  He said, ‘Listen, have a look.’ He held up his watch and said: ‘Come on, we’ve got ten minutes till we knock off, it’s Sunday. ‘He directed me to uncuff the guy and let him go. I uncuffed him, walked back to the car and sat there in total disbelief. Letting him go was against everything I ever dreamed and believed in.

  I was there to fight crime, not finish work on time. I truly believed. I believed I could make a difference. Letting him go was condoning everything I was against. To a young cop like me – it was devastating.

  The inexperienced police constable was sent to work at one of the busiest stations in Melbourne – Richmond – and got a crash course in street policing.

  As a keen angler, he knew the value of finding a productive fishing hole to which he could return again and again for a bag. As a policeman he soon learned that the same principal worked in the underworld. If he stayed close to the house of a notorious drug dealer called Dennis ‘Mr Death’ Allen (who died in 1987) he would catch as many criminals as he could handle.

  ‘Every shift you just drove around looking for taxis and things in the area, just pulling over anybody that looked suspicious. Nearly every time they either had $90 to buy heroin or they had heroin in their possession they had just bought. They’d also take heaps of stolen goods and jewellery to various places. They’d be in stolen cars at times; the area was full of crooks.

  ‘You just caught crook after crook and the only thing that held you back was the time it took to process them, either lock them up and remand them or, if they gave you information, they somehow got bail.’

  When McCulloch left the academy he was seen as a plodder, but he adapted quickly on the street. He was the first in his squad to make detective.

  He worked at Richmond, Reservoir and the City traffic branch, but he had his eye on a position in the toughest, and sometimes dirtiest, stations in the state: St Kilda.

  One of Victoria’s most experienced policeman was working at the station and remembered McCulloch when he first
arrived. ‘He was as green as grass and keen as mustard. He never stopped.’ Another recalled: ‘He always reminded me of a little Jack Russell. He would clamp on to something and wouldn’t let go.’

  McCulloch worked in uniform for about twelve months before he moved into plain clothes, let his hair grow and began to hone his natural skills as an undercover operative.

  He was eventually to develop his own street character – an unwashed street vagrant known as ‘Dean Collie’.

  ‘I really tried to look like the loser from hell – a drop kick. I thought I looked like a dog, a collie, so Dean Collie was born.’

  He bought a long brown wig and streaked it with animal fat to look like unwashed hair, wedged strips of toilet paper under his lips to give the puffy look of an alcoholic, wore an old fishing jacket, oversized pants and worn-out snow boots.

  He learned to rub his eyes to redden them so that he looked like a drug user and developed the habitual sniff of an addict. He could walk the streets observing activities that would escape most police – in uniform or plain clothes. He would then return ‘on-duty’ to use that information to make arrests. He found work to be fun but was reminded time and again that it was life and death and no act. He could only watch as a young female addict he knew slowly killed herself with heroin. The most he could do for her was to adopt her three-legged cat, Indi.

  He was present when a fellow policeman shot and killed a Canberra jail escapee, Arthur Nelson, in St Kilda on 27 July, 1988.

  He received a Chief Commissioner’s Commendation for bravery when he saved a child from a dangerous man in September, 1990.

  He was commended for initiative and diligence and again praised when he ran an operation in Carlton that resulted in the arrest of thirty-five offenders on 184 charges, including attempted murder.

  McCulloch, the former under-achieving schoolboy, was on his way to being a star. He policed with a passion and got results.

  In 1991 he transferred to the drug squad and became an undercover operative with the code number 004.

  ‘I spent the whole time trying not to act like a cop, and not to think like one. This meant that my whole demeanour was not one of a typical cop. This meant that to many cops, I didn’t fit in.’

  IF THERE was one crime family in Australia considered beyond infiltration by undercover police it was the Pettingills. The mother, Kath, had been around crime for thirty years and knew most of the tricks. Two of her sons, Victor Peirce and Trevor Pettingill, had been charged and acquitted of the 1988 Walsh Street murders of Constables Damian Eyre and Steven Tynan.

  To investigate the Pettingills was seen as dangerous on two fronts. They were blamed for Walsh Street and were seen as capable of killing and they were likely to claim harassment if they were targeted without water-tight evidence.

  But McCulloch had an informer connected with the family and was keen to try. Senior police were concerned about the risks, but eventually gave their boyish-looking undercover the nod to set up some meetings. McCulloch didn’t try to out-macho the crooks. He became Lenny Rogers, a shy former public school boy who wanted to sell drugs to yuppies on the ski slopes. His investigations resulted in two taskforces, Earthquake and Tremor. Fifteen people, including Kath and Trevor, were arrested and marijuana, heroin and amphetamines rings were smashed.

  Again he was highly commended for ‘dedication to duty, covert skills and exceptional courage.’

  Policing was turning out to be as good as the detective he met at the fancy dress party had described. It was fun and you could make a difference. But there was to be a downside.

  IT WAS 1.22pm on 8 April, 1992, when McCulloch received a message to ring the Selby Medical and Scientific Supplies. A man named James Sweetin had made some questionable purchases that needed checking.

  The next day he went to the company’s Mulgrave office and was given a list of chemicals and lab gear the man had bought. Sweetin was clearly setting up to produce speed.

  Quickly McCulloch gathered evidence and was able to trace Sweetin to Peter Pilarinos, a gangster figure well known to police. His brother owned a St Kilda nightclub often used for detective functions and fund raisers.

  McCulloch went to Pilarinos’s huge home, spread over three big blocks on a hill in Doncaster. On 13 June at 4.35am he ratted through his suspect’s wheelie bin and found two recipes for speed that had been ripped up and stuffed in tin of dog food.

  Next to the chemical ‘methylamine’ was written ‘$0.00’. What McCulloch didn’t know was this was because it had already been stolen from the drug squad compound in Attwood in a scheme authorised by a corrupt police officer.

  But while he did not yet know about the drug break-in he was soon to learn he was being sold out. Sweetin’s phone was being tapped and on 29 September police monitored a phone call from Sweetin to drug associate, Ken Milton, who said he was about to find out if the phone was bugged. When he rang back he was in no doubt. ‘Don’t say my name, treat your rear vision mirrors like guardian angels, treat this thing like everybody is listening.’

  The next day police broke into a house in Ferntree Gully which was being used as the speed lab. All the equipment had been reboxed. The gang had been tipped off and had cancelled their ‘cook’.

  McCulloch was disappointed but not heart broken. There were more crims to catch and he wasn’t going to dwell on the one that got away. But what sometimes kept him awake at night was that he was sold out and that Pilarinos and his gang had at least one detective on his payroll.

  McCulloch had two Polaroid photographs taken from a surveillance video and stuck one of Sweetin on his grey locker to the left of his desk. During Operation Cane it mysteriously went missing.

  A few months earlier Kevin Hicks had arrived at the squad after being sacked from the major crime squad for laziness. The majors were in terminal decline and were about to be disbanded.

  Hicks was now the assistant property steward in charge of drug exhibits. It was a catastrophic fall down the pecking order, but Hicks still had a wealth of experience and McCulloch liked to talk to the older detective. Hicks would stop and chat to the operational detectives, asking them what was going on. Most thought he was just missing the action. What he was really doing was selling them out for envelopes of cash ranging from $500 to $2500.

  McCulloch asked Hicks if he knew Pilarinos. The former major crime squad detective looked him in the eye and said no.

  He examined surveillance photos of the Doncaster house and showed a great deal of interest in a case he was not involved in.

  Some detectives see rats in the rank as an occupational hazard. They try to work around suspect police without confronting their suspicions. For a man like McCulloch, who wore his heart on his sleeve, the idea of being sold out was shattering.

  In 1993 McCulloch learnt that Hicks had known Pilarinos for years and was lying. It was then he started to think the detective’s interest in his case may have been more than passing.

  ‘I trusted Hicks. He went out of his way to ask me about my Operation (Cane). I told him everything. I considered him a friend. I also wanted to impress him with my investigations. He betrayed my trust. In my investigative detective world selling out my job to the main target, Peter Pilarinos, was about the worst thing one detective could do to another.’

  The open and talkative McCulloch started to chip away at Pilarinos, but keep some of the information to himself. It was to be three years before it began to come together.

  IN APRIL 1995 McCulloch was upgraded to acting detective sergeant and was able to start his own investigations. He immediately targeted Pilarinos in Operation Austin.

  By May he had enough information to have a tap put on the home phone of his target. A man named Steve started to ring regularly. He was a man who was clearly close to the target, but his identity was a mystery.

  McCulloch was driven but not obsessed with the case, and when he came to work early one Thursday morning his thumping hangover meant that Panadol rather the Pilarinos was th
e first thing on his mind. He had been to a huge drug squad party the previous night. It was to be the last turn at the old Police Club in Mackenzie Street and for Lachlan it had been a big one. He reported to the Special Projects Unit at St Kilda Road to monitor Pilarinos’s phone. He was glad that duty that day would be quiet rather than involving arrests and raids.

  On the phone he could hear Steve talking. He, too, was hung-over and he was telling Pilarinos what a big night it had been. ‘It slowly dawned on me that ‘Steve’ had been to the same party and was probably a copper.’

  McCulloch identified a pager number that belonged to Steve and rang it. The polite woman at the paging service said she could not pass on the name of the client as he was a detective sergeant of police. Years later, that man was still in the force.

  McCulloch listened to many calls where Steve and Pilarinos discussed the man they called ‘K’ or ‘Fat Boy from up north.’ It was Hicks, who had moved from the drug squad and was stationed at Benalla. Within two days of McCulloch identifying ‘Steve’ and Hicks as dealing with Pilarinos his drug squad office was burgled.

  If he needed any confirmation that he was being sold out it came when he heard Pilarinos planning a drug drop off in St Kilda in one hour. This was the break he wanted and McCulloch raced to Wellington Street for the triumphant arrest. As McCulloch moved in to make the grab his man Pilarinos turned, smiled and said, ‘So you’re Lachlan.’

  There were no drugs. ‘He just wanted to see who was after him.’

  What began as an interesting and challenging drug investigation was turning into a murky corruption investigation. Many police weren’t quite sure where it would lead and just as many didn’t want to find out.

  If McCulloch was going to fight he knew he would be opposed to corrupt police who would do anything to destroy him and a culture where few would stand up for him. The police culture is often referred to as ‘The Brotherhood’ and for good reasons. Families protect their own – even the black sheep. Police will only turn on their own when the evidence is overwhelming. Loyalty makes them believe the lamest alibi if it means they don’t have to confront the fact that a colleague is bent.