Underbelly 4 Read online

  Many police now condemn Hicks as a traitor, but few were prepared to side with McCulloch when he first blew the whistle. The young detective who joined the job to catch crooks was being sucked into a world where he would become an internal investigator, a ‘toe-cutter’, and he would be unpopular because of it.

  Confused loyalties made him, to some, the enemy. Some saw him as obsessed and wondered why he was running a campaign against a harmless country copper and his drug dealing mate.

  But, after more than ten years in the job, McCulloch knew the consequences of what he was doing.

  Like the New York policeman, Frank Serpico, he was prepared to sacrifice his career to fight corruption and, like Serpico, he was made an outsider from ‘The Brotherhood.’

  The day I chose to begin this was the day I knew I would eventually have to leave the job. I decided that night I had no future in the police force and that I would declare war on whoever was behind this.

  I went up to a pub in Carlton with a group of detectives and told them where I was. I wanted them to join in and take them on. One said he wasn’t prepared to be involved. He said he might end up getting glassed at a police turn. Other members said they didn’t want to play because the stakes were so high.

  I got home from work, and feebly attempted to tell my wife what had happened. Of course this was useless as she is not in ‘The Job’, and cannot comprehend what I was going through, so I opened a cask of chablis and proceeded to communicate with it.

  I found myself sitting in the loungeroom looking out the window, thinking I don’t deserve this. I just want to catch a crook. But I’m now up to my arse in corruption. Who do I trust?

  Full of bad wine and melancholy he grabbed his diving gear and went to the beach, swum out and sunk to the bottom in five metres of water. It was nearly midnight. He lay on the bottom at peace until he ran out of air. When he was forced to surface he found himself yelling ‘Bastards’ in the general direction of the West Gate Bridge. There was no-one who could hear him.

  He knew his decision to fight Pilarinos would come at a price.

  It was detrimental to my future, personally and professionally. For some reason I took police corruption personally. I thought it was up to me to make a difference. I had seen so many people look away, walk away. I knew how damaging Hicks was. Every honest drug squad cop would be tarred by his actions.’

  Police launched an internal inquiry into Hicks and ‘Steve’, the detective sergeant caught talking to Pilarinos, but failed to gather sufficient evidence to justify charges.

  McCulloch developed his own strategy. He would pound Pilarinos and his colleagues until they cracked. He harassed them and used every trick he could think of. It there were rules he threw them out. He investigated anyone connected with his major target. It had become intensely personal.

  Pilarinos hated McCulloch. He was heard to threaten the detective’s life. In one phone tap from jail he was recorded suggesting sodomy wasn’t out of the question. He also wanted to know why this zealot couldn’t be ‘got at’.

  ‘Pilarinos was very affable and charming, the sort who would use you up then drop you like a hot cake. But he hated Lachlan like you wouldn’t believe,’ one detective recalled.

  But the young detective was now a man on a mission. In 1996 he formed another investigative team, code named Redalen, and in August arrested James Sweetin at an amphetamines lab in Bayswater.

  Sweetin finally admitted it was Hicks who was the corrupt policeman supplying information and drugs to Pilarinos. He said that Hicks had supplied the keys to the drug squad lock-up and they had burgled the containers to steal back chemicals seized in earlier raids.

  If McCulloch thought the admission was a breakthrough he didn’t know how hard it was to catch a bent cop. An ethical standards department taskforce, code named Guardsman, was formed. Lachlan was seconded to work for it and was branded as a toe-cutter and a traitor to the drug squad.

  ‘He was vilified by some who should hang their heads in shame now. People still backed Hicks. McCulloch was called a dog and a maggot. But he wasn’t the one who sold them out,’ an investigator from Guardsman said.

  McCulloch started to carry a gun twenty four hours a day and had a sophisticated security system installed to protect his home.

  But there is a more effective way to destroy a detective than using violence. A murdered copper is a martyr – a compromised one is toothless.

  McCULLOCH could not be a dispassionate internal investigator. He had been fighting this battle for years and it could never be just another case for him. But Pilarinos was fighting for his freedom and a rat is most dangerous when cornered.

  Out of nowhere rumours started to spread that McCulloch was corrupt, that he had been selling out jobs, trafficked heroin, sold guns to crooks and organised two murders. He had a nice house in a bayside suburb and it wasn’t long before some started to ask how he could afford it

  He was at home cooking some sausages at a family barbecue one night when a Four Corners reporter walked in and began to ask questions about police corruption. From the tone of the conversation McCulloch could tell he was not considered a whistle blower but a crook. It is believed Peter Pilarinos was the source of the information.

  Even though no-one believed the rumours senior officers did not want Guardsman compromised, so they decided to move McCulloch. He was considered expendable.

  He could not go back to the drug squad so he was sent to a suburban CIB. Within days he was confronted by an older detective who said he was a friend of the Pilarinos family and there was no place for McCulloch in that office. Later, an inspector made it clear he should move on. A senior policeman chastised the inspector, but he kept his position while McCulloch was transferred.

  He was moved to the rape squad. ‘They put me in a place where there was no corruption. We just investigated serial sickos.’

  Some senior police didn’t have the stomach for a long and messy investigation into Hicks with no guarantees of success. One suggested they should gather just enough evidence to charge him with discipline and not criminal charges. He could then be just quietly sacked. Another suggested that police should just follow Steve, the detective sergeant suspected of being crooked, when he went the pub so they could breathalyze him on the way home. While it wasn’t exactly sweeping corruption under the carpet it would stop any damning headlines about bent coppers while quietly getting rid of them.

  But the investigators resisted and on 19 May, 1997, Pilarinos and Hicks were arrested. Hicks knew it was coming. He said nothing to the investigators, but he said plenty to others.

  He told any policeman who would listen that he was innocent. It was a frame up and he would fight it.

  One detective who is probably lucky he didn’t end up in the dock with Hicks said the case was a ‘souffle’ – a hard crust with nothing but hot air in the middle.

  So it came as a surprise when Hick pleaded guilty. He thought Pilarinos would roll over and give evidence against him and if that happened he would do ten years. Now he was told a deal could be done and he could look at six years with a minimum of four.

  Pilarinos was outraged. He, too, pleaded guilty but his bargaining chips had already been cashed. He made a statement on police corruption to investigators, but there were more allegations than substance. He may have known where the bodies were buried but he wouldn’t help dig deep. He told enough to try to save himself, but it wasn’t enough.

  Pilarinos had been the associate of police and criminals for many years and would have been able to stay out of jail by providing information.

  In certain underworld circles it had been alleged he had been more than helpful to police who were hunting ‘Mad Max’ – Pavel Marinoff, the Bulgarian Army deserter who shot six Victorian police in 1985-86.

  Several violent criminals in jail said they would welcome the chance to ‘catch-up’ with the former mate of many detectives. His actions over the years had turned him from a protected species to an endang
ered one. But McCulloch was also a casualty. He could not go back to being an ‘ordinary’ detective. He knew he was drinking too much and brooding. The fun had gone out of policing. He no longer felt he belonged, but he stayed loyal: ‘I loved my time in the drug squad and I don’t want people thinking there are crooks there. Hicks was a problem and he is now in jail. The good guys have won and the squad can get on with catching drug dealers.’

  In his resignation letter from November 1999 he wrote: ‘I have had an absolute ball over the last 16 years. I am proud to have been a member of the Victoria Police Force.’

  The irony is that if Hicks could have controlled his greed and not sold out McCulloch in Operation Cane they would both still be in the force. One is no loss. The other is a tragic one.

  IN late May, 2000, Lachlan McCulloch sat in the Supreme Court public gallery above court three and heard the cultured voice of Justice George Hampel as he sentenced the two men in the dock. One was Kevin Hicks – the other, Peter Pilarinos. Both were going to jail and McCulloch knew he was responsible for sending them there.

  Even though it was his moment McCulloch felt no sense of triumph – just a wave of relief that his eight-year battle to expose police corruption was finally over.

  Many former police colleagues who had branded him as obsessed over his fight to find out who had sold out his investigations into Pilarinos, were now silent.

  McCulloch had often felt alone and wondered who he could trust. Now, nearly seven months after he quit the force, he was vindicated at last. He had been right all along – no-one would be able to doubt what he had done.

  In the Supreme Court McCulloch drew comfort from those around him. He was flanked by drug detectives, including the head of the squad, Detective Chief Inspector John McKoy.

  About a month earlier McKoy rang his former detective. He said that if McCulloch intended to go to the sentencing, ‘I would be proud to walk into court with you.’

  The public act of solidarity was not lost on McCulloch. He knew he had the support of the vast majority of police in Victoria. The snipers who had turned on him had been discredited. A policewoman he didn’t know wrote to him to say she was ashamed of the way he had been treated. Others contacted him to congratulate him.

  A woman wrote to The Age: Take a bow Lachlan McCulloch. What courage you have, your integrity is impeccable. Your family must be proud of you. You are a wonderful role model.’ But the senior policeman who kicked him off the Guardsman taskforce and the inspector who didn’t want him at his suburban CIB were not among those who wanted to pat McCulloch on the back.

  ‘It has been a difficult time for me and I appreciate the support I have had from Mr McKoy, other members of the drug squad and the ethical standards department. Mr McKoy always encouraged me to investigate the corruption,’ he said.

  As the drug squad chief and his whistle blower sat in the gallery, the corrupt detective and his partner sat in the dock below – neither acknowledging the presence of the other.

  The discredited policeman, and the career crook would not look at each other. They could have been strangers waiting for a bus, not the core of a corrupt group responsible for stealing drugs from a police storage depot and reselling them.

  They would have got away with it, if it hadn’t been for McCulloch and his campaign to find out who was the rat in the drug squad ranks. It allowed Ethical Standards Department investigators such as Wayne Taylor, Adrian White and Keith McManamny to build the case that resulted in the arrest of Hicks and Pilarinos in 1997.

  Hicks pleaded guilty. Yes, he had sold out police operations and yes, he had helped Pilarinos sell drugs. Now he sat in the dock, wearing his grey suit, steel rimmed spectacles, and Blundstone boots. He had been led to believe that he was likely to get six years with a minimum of four years jail and seemed resigned to it.

  George Hampel is not considered the toughest sentencer in the Supreme Court. Some police complain he can be too compassionate and lenient for their tastes.

  But Justice Hampel is his own man. The defence and prosecution thought they had a deal. but they forgot that the judge calls the shots. Hicks was sentenced to seven and a half years with a non-parole period of five years.

  As Hicks heard the sentence details and realised he was getting more jail time than he expected he let out a little sigh and blinked slowly. It reminded onlookers of his old nick-name – ‘Koala Bear’.

  Pilarinos came next. Justice Hampel said claims that he was an important witness in ongoing police corruption matters had been ‘overstated’. He made the point that while the defence had told him Pilarinos was feeling ‘genuine remorse’ for his life of crime and was prepared to expose corruption, the defendant had chosen to remain silent on his own involvement in the drug squad thefts.

  Justice Hampel said the person who offered the bribe and the one who accepted were equally culpable.

  He sentenced Pilarinos to eight and a half years with a minimum of six.

  Chief Commissioner, Neil Comrie, said later: ‘This result sends a clear message that the Force can police itself and weed out unprofessional and unethical officers.

  ‘The force will do everything possible to ensure any corrupt officers are removed from the ranks of the Victoria Police. The public would expect nothing less.’

  As the two guilty men were led out of court Pilarinos’s youngest son ran to embrace him. The young man’s grief turned quickly to anger as he swore at a court guard and punched the door on his way out.

  Outside the court, McCulloch walked down the stairs. The son turned his anger on the whistle blower. ‘You are nothing but a f…… dog. I hope you rot in Hell.’

  McCulloch did not respond – he didn’t need to. He had won. Mrs Valerie Pilarinos, not long released from jail after completing a sentence for perjury venomously referred to McCulloch as ‘Australia’s Serpico’ and wishing him an unpleasant after-life.

  The son stood about three metres from the man who blew the whistle on his father. He glared with a hatred born from years of watching his father slowly reduced from an untouchable to just another crim going to jail in the back of a van.

  McKoy and others from the drug squad were close by. They weren’t going to allow McCulloch to be put in any physical danger.

  Later, investigators from Operation Guardsman, who had built the case that exposed the corruption, took him for a coffee away from the biting cold and the bitter Pilarinos family. But many of the police who had loudly supported Hicks after he was charged with corruption were not in court to hear the final sentence.

  The message was clear for McCulloch.

  After fighting corruption for eight years and sacrificing his career of sixteen, the battle had been worthwhile.

  He was not alone after all.

  POSTSCRIPT: The day after the sentencing Neil Comrie rang McCulloch and asked him to lunch to thank him in private. Within a week, a senior policeman rang to ask the former detective to rejoin the force. McCulloch refused but said he would love to lecture new recruits on the ethics of policing.

  He had also decided to try his hand at writing a book. The result turned out to be a blockbuster – The Street.

  CHAPTER 6

  Falling Down

  ‘Within seconds of me tossing the parcel I heard a huge bang, which was similar to a huge firecracker being let off in a small space.’

  NOBODY who knew Colin Dunstan was surprised that he finally flipped out. It was the way he did it that shocked people.

  In America, they call it ‘going postal’ – blackly humorous shorthand for the murderous madness that can make someone take out a gun at work and start shooting until the ammunition runs out and the SWAT team runs in. The ‘postal’ tag comes from the fact, which has entered urban folklore, that several US mail workers have done such a thing, wreaking revenge for real or imagined grievances of the sort that fester in the souls of little people toiling for giant organisations.

  Variations on a theme of being mad as hell and not taking it any m
ore are not new, of course. They have infiltrated popular culture, feeding the revenge fantasies of loopy loners who see themselves as some sort of persecuted suburban heroes – like the out-of-control everyman that Michael Douglas plays in the film Falling Down, which has become a reference point for describing outbursts of extraordinary violence by otherwise ordinary men.

  But Canberra is not California and, thankfully, Colin Dunstan wasn’t marching to a beat that demanded an AK-47 assault rifle. When the prim and proper public servant ‘went postal’, he did it literally … he made letter bombs. Not that Dunstan would agree with the ‘bomb’ word. At his trial, he maintained that while the twenty-eight ‘devices’ he posted might have resembled realistic letter bombs, they wouldn’t actually explode. And, even if they did, they wouldn’t hurt anyone. Much, anyway.

  The problem with running that defence is that one of the devices had detonated when being handled even before it was opened. And if that hadn’t happened in time to warn the authorities, then twenty-six other identical packages would have ended up in the letter boxes of people high on Dunstan’s long list of ‘enemies’. Any one of them, according to the police and the prosecution, had the potential to injure. And all were calculated to terrify.

  It’s all a long way from trouble around the tea trolley in the Australian Tax Office. But that’s where Colin Dunstan’s fall began.

  COLIN George Dunstan’s origins are as prosaic and stolid as his name suggests. The middle child – but only son – of five children born to a respectable Wollongong couple in the 1950s, he was by all accounts a conscientious boy who helped his father with his vegetable garden and hobby of breeding birds and small animals.

  Young Colin worked hard at school, apparently as a way of gaining his father’s praise, which he craved but felt he didn’t get, a psychiatrist would later say. The diligent boy grew into a self-absorbed young man who shone in maths and science subjects, finishing in the top fifty science students in New South Wales in his final year.