Underbelly 6 Read online

  He stayed for lunch then drove back to Melbourne for his next shift that night.

  He once said he would visit friends in Bendigo on a winter’s night and decided to ride his little Vespa motor scooter from Melbourne.

  He had a helmet without a visor but he saw that as more an inconvenience than a problem. He simply fished out his swimming goggles from his gym bag and wore them. He didn’t have gloves so he put a pair of thick socks on his hands.

  When he got to the Junction Hotel, about 10 kilometres short of Bendigo, he ran out of petrol. Billy walked in to the pub and persuaded a farmer to drain his chainsaw of two-stroke fuel to put in the Vespa’s tank. It was enough to get him up the last hill and he then rolled the rest of the way – walking in on his mates as he had promised.

  His friends could not believe that he died of recreational drug use. Some wanted to believe he had been drugged against his will by criminals he had been chasing.

  Eventually, they had to accept the truth. In May, 2002, State Coroner Graeme Johnstone investigated Gunn’s death without holding an open inquest. ‘The evidence supports a finding that Geoffrey Gunn died accidentally as a result of toxicity to amphetamines and narcotics,’ the coroner found.

  St Paul’s Cathedral in Bendigo can comfortably seat about 400. But for Gunn’s funeral there were 500 inside and about the same number out in the street. Three tour buses brought mourners the 800-kilometre round trip from Mildura. Gunn had left the town six years before, but they hadn’t forgotten him.

  Young men and women sobbed unashamedly as their mate was buried with police honours.

  Chief Commissioner Christine Nixon has observed that police are members of the community and can fall for the same traps as anyone else. That is why, she says, they must be subject to stringent drug testing.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Mickelberg stitch-up

  The gold swindle turned out to be an albatross around the neck of everyone connected with it.

  FOR a real-life crime, the Perth Mint gold swindle plays like a classic caper movie, beginning with the three dashing brothers accused of it: pilots, abalone divers and, one of them, a former SAS commando – a real-life Vietnam combat hero the way ‘Rambo’ Stallone never was.

  These were three of the four Mickelberg brothers, Ray, Brian and Peter. They were resourceful, fit, disciplined and with a taste for adventure. And they were also originally from Victoria, a fact that didn’t help their cause with police in the west, where suspicion of ‘the eastern states’ runs deep.

  The Mint caper – a brilliant heist of gold bars, worth $650,000 in 1982 – was carried out with military precision, no violence, no personal victim and few clues, if any. So few clues that the perpetrators might have seemed unlikely to be caught and convicted by conventional police methods.

  Which is where the perpetrators, whoever they were, got it wrong. In Western Australia in 1982, ‘conventional police methods’ belonged only in instruction manuals. Perth, like Dodge City a century earlier, was a Wild West town where lawmen tended to make – and break – the rules as they went along, unhindered by notions that evidence should be gathered and presented impartially to ensure a fair trial.

  And if there was ever a case that would attract the undivided attention of Perth’s toughest cops it was the Mint swindle, because the Western Australian Government – and by extension, politicians and police – had been made to look very foolish, indeed.

  Whoever masterminded the scam stole blank bank cheques from real estate agencies and then burned the agencies down, so that no one knew the blank cheques were missing. Then they arranged to buy gold from the Mint, paying by ‘bank cheque’. They then rented an empty office, and arranged for unsuspecting couriers to pick up the gold and hand over the fraudulent bank cheques. Once the gold bars were delivered, they disappeared.

  A non-violent fraud like this perpetrated on a wealthy private citizen might have raised eyebrows and a lot of laughs, but would never have prompted the furious full-scale response that the Mint swindle did.

  It was not just an audaciously clever crime, but a public affront to the power brokers of WA Inc., which gave already unscrupulous cops licence to do whatever it took to get a scalp. At least, that’s the way that Perth investigative journalist Avon Lovell saw it, and it led him to write two passionate books (and plan a third called Litany of Lies) putting a persuasive case that the Mickelbergs had been ‘stitched’ in a way that scandalised the legal process and raised serious questions about law and order in Western Australia.

  Not that Lovell necessarily believed the brothers were innocent – a question he wisely leaves to one side – but he does put a compelling case that they were the targets of an orchestrated abuse of power that denied their legal rights. Lovell’s bottom line being the unassailable fact that once legal safeguards are trampled, it allows the innocent to be swept up as easily as the guilty, making the law something used to oppress people rather than to defend them against oppression.

  This view is shared by Bob Falconer, a former Victorian policeman who became Western Australia’s police chief in 1994 with a brief to clean up Perth’s cowboy cops – and who quietly relished the chance to return there to give evidence at a Royal Commission set up, among other things, to probe the force he left in 1999. It would allow him to set the record straight about certain matters. And about certain police – some of them well-connected politically, others well-connected in the underworld, and some connected at both ends.

  In early 2002, before the Royal Commission hearings began, Falconer predicted he would have plenty to tell ‘with the protection and privilege’ of the inquiry. It was no secret, he said then, that the WA police union had wanted to see him ‘west of Rottnest Island or east of the rabbitproof fence’ because of his efforts to uproot corruption in the force during his five years in Perth.

  All of which supports a view that a dark side of police work, exposed and partly eradicated in the eastern states by the 1980s, went unchecked in the west.

  The practice of ‘bricking’ was one example – meaning the fabrication of evidence and false ‘verbal’ confessions that, even if denied and unsigned by those tough enough to resist ‘flogging’ during interrogation, were sworn by police to be true.

  The cynical lawyers’ maxim about police taking the oath – ‘The higher the Bible, the bigger the lie’ – wasn’t funny for Western Australian defendants, whether guilty or innocent. Among the innocent was an inoffensive man called John Button, who spent five years in jail after being fitted up in 1963 for running over his girlfriend in a car, despite a later confession by serial killer Eric Cooke, who admitted the killing (and another one) just before he was hanged.

  Button’s name wasn’t cleared until early this year, after a long investigation by a journalist who wrote an acclaimed book about the massive injustice done to a man who happened to be a convenient and ‘obvious’ suspect at a time when Perth was gripped by fear during a spate of serial killings (committed by Cooke), which meant that police and politicians desperately needed an arrest.

  The result of this pressure was outrageous: evidence that could have cleared Button was omitted or slanted to suit a predetermined view that he was guilty. For instance, a vehicle accident expert could find no sign that Button’s damaged car had hit a person, but the witness was intimidated into tailoring his evidence to suit the prosecution’s cynically-constructed case.

  Bashing suspects, fabricating confessions, planting evidence and committing perjury was an easy way to put accused people behind bars: what is known in the trade as ‘noble cause corruption’, a variation on the theme that the end justify the means.

  The late Don Hancock, who led the controversial investigation that jailed the Mickelbergs, was almost certainly an exponent of ‘noble cause corruption’ – and, cynics might hint, not-so-noble corruption too, given his unexplained wealth after his sudden early retirement. Hancock, known variously as ‘the Silver Fox’ or ‘the Grey Fox’, had a double-storey house
with swimming pool in a inner Perth suburb near the Burswood casino, and a historic hotel and gold-stamping battery at Ora Banda, near Kalgoorlie. He also had mining lease interests and was involved in horse racing.

  He had been a tough and charismatic detective with friends in high places and low, but his defenders lost face in June, 2002, when his one-time colleague Tony Lewandowski, since retired and ill, admitted that he and Hancock, convinced of the Mickelbergs’ guilt, had fabricated the case against them. This, he admitted, had including stripping and bashing the youngest brother, Peter, at a suburban police station – precisely as the Mickelbergs and their supporters had claimed for 20 years.

  The officer who was in charge of that station, Belmont, in 1982 is now a West Australian cabinet minister. Peter Mickelberg alleges that on the night in question he appealed to that officer for help, but the future minister told him nothing could be done for him. Mickelberg has always claimed that Hancock forced him to strip naked and then bashed him. After years of standing by the perjury that he and Hancock apparently committed, Lewandowski now supports Mickelberg’s version of those events.

  Many, including the Mickelbergs, are surprised Lewandowski has blown the whistle on his old boss, but few were genuinely shocked by his claims about ‘the Silver Fox’.

  Even before Hancock (and a friend, Lou Lewis) was killed by a car bomb in Perth last September, the top cop’s reputation had been under a dark cloud. His violent death has added to the speculation about his past – the bombing was allegedly set up by a bikie gang as retribution because one of its members was shot dead by a mystery sniper after an argument at Hancock’s hotel, near Kalgoorlie, the previous year. An argument which had erupted after one of the bikers had sworn at Hancock’s daughter, who was working behind the bar.

  The case became notorious after Hancock fled several hundred kilometres to Perth after the shooting, consulted a prominent criminal lawyer, and was markedly unhelpful to detectives. Even in retirement, Hancock behaved like a man who thought he was above the law – perhaps because, for several decades in the force, he had been exactly that.

  The Mickelbergs have protested since 1983 that Hancock and his crew ‘stitched’ them up with fake confessions and evidence, notably a fingerprint conveniently found on a fraudulent bank cheque used to pay the Mint for gold. The case against their conviction has so far spawned two controversial books by Avon Lovell, the first of which (The Mickelberg Stitch) was banned from sale and drew defamation actions by several police, backed by their union. Hancock and others, represented by a lawyer who is now also a member of the WA Parliament, scored cash settlements from the book’s embattled distributor and retailers.

  But that was when Hancock and his mates were running the town. Now, it seems, the boot is on the other foot.

  After Lewandowski’s bombshell in June, 2002, the Mickelbergs stitched up a deal of their own with a commercial television network – a hefty fee in exchange for their exclusive story. Despite that, Ray Mickelberg – Vietnam veteran, elder brother and spokesman – couldn’t resist the odd angry shot about the case that has wrecked his family.

  Originally sentenced to 20 years, he served a little more than eight before being released – a concession he reads as a sign the authorities were uneasy about the conviction, and similarly with his brothers. Which is an interesting suspicion, given that John Button served only five years for what was purported to be a cold-blooded murder. It looks as if some people in authority didn’t believe the police case against the Mickelbergs, nor Button 20 years earlier, and leaned over backwards to release them at the earliest opportunity.

  Not that Mickelberg takes any comfort from that. ‘I got out of jail with $40 to my name,’ he told the authors the day the Lewandowski revelations became public. ‘I lost everything my wife, my family, the lot. It’s a hick state and the police here are a cunning, conniving lot of arseholes. They’ve killed, raped, handled drugs, anything they like.’

  Mickelberg’s aged parents – who once ran the hotel at Quambatook in central Victoria – are still alive, but his brother Brian was killed in a light aircraft crash in 1986, after being released from jail on appeal. Another brother, Graeme, a respected army officer not implicated in the case in any way, has stood staunchly by his brothers throughout.

  When Hancock was killed in 2001 the Mickelbergs thought any chance of the truth about the ‘stitch-up’ died with him. Ironically, the opposite was true, Mickelberg says – Hancock’s death allowed Lewandowski to tell the truth.

  Perhaps Lewandowski’s conscience had pricked him. Mickelberg doesn’t think so. He suggested his old foe was spooked by rumours that other police officers with dirty little secrets had already ‘rolled over’ for the Royal Commission in exchange for immunity. Lewandowski, perhaps anxious about what others could reveal about him, might have wanted to put in his own version of events before it was too late to claim at least a little credit.

  In the end, the gold swindle has turned out to be an albatross around the neck of everyone connected with it.

  For a start, whoever was holding the gold returned it anonymously – no longer in ingot form – to a Perth television station in 1989, by which time it was worth more than $1 million.

  Some would argue that the return of the gold is the most persuasive evidence that the Mickelbergs had something to do with the swindle. It makes at least some sense for the Mickelbergs to arrange to return the gold – to ‘square the ledger’ or to try to embarrass the authorities – but it is hard to believe that anyone else would hand it back for no better reason than a guilty conscience, something few successful criminals indulge.

  Hancock is dead, his memory disgraced. Lewandowski is ill, his reputation in tatters. The surviving Mickelbergs, once prosperous abalone divers and pilots who drove Porsches, are broken and bitter men trying to salvage something from the wreckage of their lives. Even Avon Lovell, the journalist who embraced the Mickelberg cause, has spent too many years and too much money on a quixotic fight for justice.

  So far, all that’s been proved is that crime doesn’t pay. Anyone except lawyers, that is. The Royal Commission is sure to produce several new millionaires before it’s over. And the only time they’ll serve is 10am until 4pm on sitting days. It’s better then robbing the Mint.

  CHAPTER 6

  Thrill killer

  ‘I did not know how good it would feel shooting people. I do now.’

  ANDREW Mark Norrie was dangerously bored with life. He wanted it to be like a movie – but not one with a happy ending.

  He loved watching Rambo and Dirty Harry-style videos – he just wished he could make them real.

  For almost 10 years Norrie played his imaginary film again and again inside his head. In his script, he was the star of an action thriller – in which he was the gunman and strangers were expendable extras.

  From the age of 14, he would later admit, he harboured a desire to kill strangers. Just to feel what it was like to take human life.

  When he was having fun – camping, shooting, swimming and drinking, his fantasies would recede. But when he was bored, his dark, make-believe world would return.

  By the age of 23, the unskilled plodder with the uneventful past and no real future decided to break his mundane routine by playing out his dreams.

  He spent just a week working out the backdrop for his real-life adventure. He would travel around Australia shooting anything that crossed his path: signs, cars, houses … and people.

  Norrie would take with him his only friend (a dim-witted teenager of questionable character and sexuality named Scott Thompson), some tinned food, two semi-automatic rifles and nearly 2000 rounds of ammunition.

  Dressed in camouflage gear, Norrie and his initially enthusiastic and later unwilling partner, embarked on a shooting spree that covered four states and would leave two men dead.

  Norrie said he decided to kill people at random because he was bored with ‘doing the same things each day’. He was to say later that killing people
was ‘good fun’.

  His grossly-disturbed ideas were based loosely on scenes from films he’d watched as a teenager, such as Rambo and The Terminator.

  He was fascinated by the idea of random shootings. ‘I imagine going to Kmart with a couple of other people with shotguns and just shooting people. It would look really good, a lot of people running around screaming,’ he would tell one of the many psychiatrists who interviewed him, trying to work out why this seemingly simple man had become evil.

  NORRIE was born in Bournemouth, England, in May, 1962. His father left when he was two and never returned. His mother worked in a local hotel with her own father.

  Mother, child and grandparents migrated to Sydney when Norrie was 11. He was an only child, and an odd one.

  He moved to Brisbane with his mother and stepfather until he was 16, then, when his mother could no longer control him, he moved in with his grandparents.

  His mother and stepfather split when he was 18. His mother moved to China with her new partner, who worked for an American hotel chain. For the next five years she had little contact with her brooding son.

  Geoffrey William Gunn … why did he take drugs?

  Billy Gunn, the first-class undercover operative and (inset) days before his death.

  Always the best man … Billy Gunn on the morning of a mate’s wedding.

  Incognito … Billy with his phantom mates at the races and (inset) doing his favourite party trick.

  Billy, cruising the Pacific.

  As a young activist, football enforcer and prize fighter.

  Geoff Clark, chairman of the board.