Hunting for the enemy within

thanks for listening to eye catch killers and subscribing to true crime australia as well as exclusive first access to episodes a week before anyone else your subscription means you can access bonus material at eyecatchkillers.com.edu the public has a long-held fascination with detectives detectives see a side of life the average person is never exposed to in this podcast series i catch killers with gary jubilan i'll be interviewing a whole range of people you come across as a detective including police bad guys and victims i spent 34 years as a cop for 25 of those years i was catching killers that's what i did for a living i was a homicide detective i'm no longer just interviewing bad guys instead i'm taking the public into the world in which i operated the guests i selected have amazing stories from all sides of the law the interviews are raw and honest just like the world they inhabited no one who steps into the world of crime comes out unchanged join me now while i take you into this world [Music] this episode of i catch killers contains conversations that some listeners may find confronting or triggering discretion is advised welcome to another episode of i catch killers today you're going to get an insight into policing from top to bottom i'm very excited about today's guest former homicide commander gang squad commander new south wales deputy commissioner and international man of mystery nick caldus i've known nick for approximately 25 years i think i first met you you're in the armed hold up squad detective senior constable i was detective senior constable you've come a long way since then your crew's been very impressive um i think it's fair to describe you as probably the country's most experienced police officer both domestically and internationally you don't have to comment on this stop it but uh really i've looked at your uh looked at your cv and what you've done just in new south wales talking about new south wales first of all um you've headed up the homicide squad uh gang squad you've been in counter-terrorism you also did work with the undercover uh police and uh all sorts of different things and retired at the rank of uh detective or the detective deputy commissioner sorry i keep looking at you and i keep saying the detective but we'll call you deputy commissioner um but that's just the start of your career in in policing because your career outside of new south wales is quite extraordinary some of the things that you've done and i'm just going to read through a few of the things that director of international oversight services in united nations relief work agency based in jordan are you also chief investigations in the un organisation for prohibition of chemical weapons leading the investigations into the use of chemical weapons in the syrian conflict chief of investigations united nations special tribunal for lebanon leading the investigations in the assassination of the lebanese prime minister rafiq harari and 21 others deputy chief police adviser of the coalition forces in iraq member of operation kanova's independent steering committee which is a scotland yard investigation of numerous murders allegedly committed by the ira during the troubled times in northern ireland you are also i'm starting to get tired you're also a graduate of fbi's hostage negotiation program fbi's leadership of counterterrorism and the fbi's national executive institute nick you're starting to annoy me have you actually done anything in your career no i just goof off look first of all welcome to uh the podcast it's a real privilege to uh to have you here thank you our history goes back a long long way and you were my commander at homicide and i think that was some of the the best years that at homicide when you were leading the leading the uh squad there um i want to ask you a few things but i want to know who you were before you joined the police what's your background okay um i'm uh egyptian born i was born and brought up in egypt my family comes from the south from a city called assyut which is about six hours south of cairo uh we're christians we're coptic orthodox so we're a bit of an oddity at christian arabs which a lot of people in the western world sort of struggle to understand but we migrated here when i was 12 years old came out in 69 i had a couple of jobs before i joined the cops mainly i worked in an insurance company uh but i knew i wasn't going to do that for the rest of my life but um the social life was fantastic and it took me a long time to decide to move on i also wasn't sure if i was tall enough to get into the police so i thought i'd give it a go and when i did um i was tall enough and i got in did you always have ambitions to join the police what was that what was that moment in your life when you decided you wanted to be a cop i i think i always did certainly my cousins and and my family have always said we knew you were always going to do it um apparently i had a pension when i was young to run around with guns and play cops and robbers yeah all that sort of stuff as all kids do but um i've got a friend who's a former senior member of a nypd who's done a lot of thinking about um why people join the police and he thinks i fit into that that sort of mold and it's it's about if you've been bullied at any stage in your life or if you've seen others bullied that you care about or whatever and you're anti-bully basically um he says that's that what you know subconsciously that's what motivates a lot of people altruistically to join the cops to stick up for those who can't stick up for themselves i i think that's interesting you should say that because i observed that within in the place but certainly uh since we've been recording these podcasts and i asked the question quite often why people have joined the cops and uh invariably it comes back to uh they don't like bullying yeah and and unfortunately i mean the police is like uh other sectors of society they do have their own set you know sex fair amount of bullies as well yeah and it's it's the tragedy when that happens because you know i always used to remind people in the job um about they should every now and then reflect on what they were thinking and how they felt when they actually joined and try and recapture that part of their life that moment in their life and and try and go back to those beliefs and altruistic aims and and you know the objectives of wanting to help people that's why we all join some stick with those sort of principles others move in different directions obviously do you think the the power that you get being a police officer like you come out of the academy and uh you're walking the streets and you're in charge and all that does corrupt people i wouldn't say corrupt but it's certainly it can have an impact and if you're a particular type of person which i think is a small minority putting on the uniform and walking around um and having being seen or instantly no matter what you're doing or saying as a figure of authority particularly in a crisis does can go to your head and it's the same with rank a lot of people cope when they get promoted and and um and they lose their way and then others in fact thrive on it sometimes and and use that that power or that that rank for good rather than their own ends um so the academy you would have gone through the academy at redfern yeah it was 81 yeah when you joined joined um where was your first station uh balmain which was interesting in the early 80s it was beginning to be gentrified but there was still a lot of painters and dockers activities and what have you and i got warned when i was young when i started there that there are some pubs in balmain which are still pretty much run by the painters and dockers and you don't gather unless you're looking for a fight yeah um there was another pub which is still there i think the town hall hotel which was a gay pub and and actually the cops used to go there because that's where they felt most comfortable yeah they weren't no one picked on them no one annoyed them they just had a beer and uh whatever yeah it had a reputation because there were so many pubs there and yeah you had people doing the pub crawls around the pubs of belmain yeah all up i think i did seven years in about eight division as it was it was balmain annandale like harding glebe um went to playing clothes there did my detectives training and all that and was there how long were you in uh uniform before you went across to detectives about three three and a half years i i knew what i wanted um i was never any doubt about going to to playing clothes that's what i wanted to do and what was it about playing close um it's hard to put words around it but in reality i think you make more of a difference i mean all police do an enormous amount of good and i like you and everybody else i'm incredibly proud of what they do you know the women men and women out there every day slogging away but i felt you'd do a lot more and use your brain perhaps a lot more being a detective um and having a sort of doing a greater amount of good certainly in terms of fixing things for victims who are helpless and can't help themselves whether it's rape robbery murder uh whatever it is you do a lot of good um in that space that's how i felt and you can see things through from start to finish exactly which is the other thing yeah but i i also sitting here as two retired detectives i think we both acknowledge the work of the frontline troops of uh the uniform officers and and all that that uh quite often as detectives we get the profile or the glory but a lot of the work and the sharp end of the policing is uh is the people on the street very very very much so very much so yeah yeah because it is a tough gig yeah it is i mean i would argue detectives and other specialists crime scene people forensics um helicopter people whatever you're good at normally one thing but i would argue that the general duties police the first line of response actually are the ones that have to be experts at so many issues dog complaints domestic violence legislation um traffic you name it they have to deal with an enormously wide range of offenses legislation and regulations and in many ways they're the ones that should be getting a specialist allowance yeah all right look i i agree that it's a tough tough gig for them going into plain clothes what did you wear early early early mid 80s what uh what was the outfit um i had a beautiful big mustache yeah i noticed they're coming back and i'm very happy about that i don't think my wife is so much she says you try and kiss a toilet brush and see how you feel so i've i'm not allowed to have a big mustache anymore but um i bought a new suit and i started my first workmate or partner uh at balmain detectives was a fellow called jeff halliday who's an absolute legend and a police he passed away a few years ago he had motor neuron disease he'd also played um top level rugby league for canterbury bulldogs many years ago but just an absolute gentleman i'm fond of saying he's one of the people who taught me everything i know yeah um he's um he had just come out of the homicide squad uh which was a you know a big a big deal you know to have been he'd worked with people like roger rogerson and others and knew them all intimately i learned a great deal just working with him and i'm i was really blessed to have a workmate who'd been there and done it all and it's not so much necessarily what to do often as you know it's what not to do but certainly i i you know how to deal with victims how to deal with informants how to deal with other police um we're among the many things he taught me how to really do well i hope and you're fortunate enough if you do get a good mentor like that because it does make a difference doesn't it that's that sliding door moment different paths that you can go down yeah and uh if you get a good mentor showing you the way yeah and we were workmates for about three three and a half years i guess all up um before i went anywhere else but i i'd still feel and i've given a lot of young guys and girls advice over the years that they're better off doing their detectives training and designation in a normal station where you get to see a real wide variety of offenses and you learn how to deal with people in crisis and all that sort of thing before you move to a specialist area like drugs or armed robberies or i i share that view that that is so important you need that that base of uh cross-section of work and if you specialise too early i think you you cheap and you miss a few steps yeah you miss a few steps you've got to catch up um what type of holster did you wear um gosh ankle mainly because flares um those days no there were no flares but there was an enormous amount of safari suits um i may have a locker of them somewhere and just waiting for them to come back into fashion but um hawaiian shirts on weekends so we can work people with hawaiian shirts and safari suits and a big mustache a very good look i can just imagine like or think of tom seleck and there was nothing like that yeah well you've just described yourself very very close um so how long were you as a general duties detective we're you're working in belmont balmain and it also did stinsor down and down i think a lot of stuff at leichhardt as well so it's the a division as it was then um yeah and what made you go to a specialist era um what happened i'd i'd done a little bit of interpreting work on operational issues for the federal police and there weren't that many arabic speakers or other language speakers really in the police at that stage um i'm fluent in arabic and read it and write it and all that and the afp as you can imagine we're dealing with a lot of importations of drugs and there was a need for people who spoke arabic so i got quite involved with them and they had a close working relationship at that stage with the state drug crime commission which eventually transmorphed into the new south wales crime commission the word drugs was taken out of it and they recommended me to those guys the new south wales police who were working in that commission and i ended up doing a few um covert jobs undercover jobs for them and eventually they said we want you to come on board full-time and i was ready um so i moved across and so just on that are you doing undercover work you're the undercover officer yeah yeah yeah how did you find that um in those days this is bear in mind this is like the mid 80s there was no training there was no accreditation welfare was dependent on who you were working with and how sympathetic or empathetic they were so it was it was a little bit tough sometimes but um i quite enjoyed it we got some incredible results um for the community really um and ultimately what type of cases were you working on um large-scale drugs drug supplies um usually from the arabic speaking community unfortunately but um you know there's an enormous amount of support from the arabic speaking community for the police and a lot of them when you did have these arrests we said well thank god you know someone's done something giving us a bad name and all that so i don't mean to besmirch anyone let alone a whole community but there was certainly in the 80s a need for people to target that area um and to to do something about it so it was large-scale drug supplies it's a it's a delicate subject when you're talking about the specific ethnic um community and you're talking about crime within that but that's what i think people quite often don't understand that if you work in the middle eastern or it could be an asian community the community want yeah i just worked out sort of early in that part of my career that i didn't want to do pub jobs with long hair and earrings and what have you it just wasn't me yeah so i sort of found a niche for myself and sam i actually did master my work in suits right i'm driving a fancy car and i insisted on staying at the hilton and i wore a lot of gold that we had to give back at the end of the shift and um they used to joke that i wouldn't get out of bed for anything less than a kilo right okay so you were the high level you well i just didn't think i could pull it off being a drug user or a street level yeah yeah it just wasn't me and i was never gonna get my ears pissed yeah i've never had much hair so i couldn't grow that either so um so a respectable drug dealer yeah yeah okay that's interesting like you i'm sure you didn't think when you joined the cops that you'd be in end up doing jobs like that absolutely no clue i didn't even know anything about any of that that space and were you nervous going in for undercover jobs no i don't um no i don't think no i don't think i was nervous you don't want to fail obviously as with anything you don't want to go into something feeling well you know it's okay if i mess it up the thing with areas of law enforcement like undercover work is that a lot actually depends on the individual involved and you do feel that pressure and it's about you failing or succeeding you can't sort of blame anybody else much you can obviously in some circumstances but the reality is a whole lot more than usual depends on one person or two people if there's two role players in in the job and you don't want to let anyone down and you want to succeed obviously you want to get the job done did you find that a rewarding part of your career definitely yeah and and not only with the sense of achievement you get and getting drugs off the street or if it was guns or whatever it is you were purchasing and so on um you you also feel um you've made a contribution and it's it's a very personal contribution it's um it is a team effort for sure but unlike many other fields if not all of them in in law enforcement it's one what what you personally do um can make or break the whole operation yeah yeah and so after undercover work and and working with the fed federal police you've found your way into the armed hole up squad no um so the state drug crime commission which was actually a new south wales body not federal yeah but worked very closely with the afp most of the time um i went to the drug enforcement agency as it was then which was created out of so they effectively moved all the detectives and surveillance people from the state drug crime commission this the drug squad in the cib and all the regional drug squads and formed into one body which was the dea the drug enforcement agency i was there at the inception or the beginning of that in 88 might be 80 the beginning of 89 i think it was and what was the the major drugs that were uh you were doing um we so there were four task forces i think they announced all that at the time i was on task force three which was mainly looking at cocaine and sort of the eastern suburbs set and more you know sydney based there i say anglo-saxon types rather than any ethnic group other task forces had specific roles targeting particular uh crime types and ethnic groups right and do you think you made a difference i hope so yeah look there's a debate as you know and it's still ongoing it probably will be for some time about whether it's a war on drugs and whether we're winning it or not i i've never liked the term war on drugs um it's the the reality is it is a dreadful thing and we've seen you know far too many families and people destroyed by drugs so i don't for a minute advocate that we should rest and say well just let's just legalize everything and i don't i'm not in favor of legalizing much at all but i am in favor of decriminalizing some issues for you know for personal use yeah um and i think it's necessarily unnecessarily may drag um some people into the criminal justice system when you can avoid doing that and get them on a a better path to to you know to be better people but the reality is it's it's a huge problem it still is um the only thing that changes is a commodity we've gone from heroin our grasp to heroin to cocaine um up to amphetamines and and you know all different types and now i understand with sort of heroin we've had a drought for on and off for 20 odd years now thankfully um you never really know what's out there at the moment i think amphetamines are probably still the single biggest problems yeah problem but um i don't know really the key to solving all these those issues is educating and cooperating and harnessing the communities and the families that's the way the only way you're going to get in we don't belong in the lounge rooms uh trying to tell people what to do yeah it's it's a difficult one but it drives so much crime doesn't it and like in the 80s with the heroin and the break and answers it flowed on from that and yeah armed hold ups and and that type of uh type of crime yeah to feed the uh feed the addiction yeah but it is a battle it's a battle and from law enforcement point of view there's there's different ways that we can approach it but uh yep but i think it's a healthy discussion to have and we should never say we don't want to talk about it um whether it's a war whether we're winning it all of those things are worth discussing yeah okay um where did you go to after that uh then i went to the arm hold up squad north west region so what what years was was this 91 92 93 probably into 93. um i'd i'd been married and got married and uh it's just begun to sort of have kids and the thing with drug workers you you'd go out and wouldn't get home for two or three days yeah because you're following someone you end up in queensland or whatever um and i just i couldn't keep that up and i've done that for quite a few years um i felt it was time to sort of settle down a bit when especially having kids and and to be home a bit more often um and that's i decided to look around and the armhole that's got appealed to me so i was accepted and i went there and how did you find your time in the stick-ups very very good probably in terms of camaraderie it was one of the best offices i've ever worked at um there's a sense of humor um the guy who was the boss of the squad at the time um on my first day we've obviously had a chat about uh how things work and he just said um look this is one of two things are going to happen um if the guys in the squad and there were no girls at that stage you just said if they if they start putting on you pardon my language um you're going to be okay but in a few weeks if they ignoring you it's not going to work and we might have to look at what happens next yeah anyway it took two days and they started putting on me and everything was fine after that that's how you fit it yeah i fit right in it was a bit that way in the uh in the armhole up squads wasn't it because i was in north region in the in the early 90s and you either fitted in or or you didn't and uh it was yeah that was almost testing you to see if you uh fitted the uh the type of work yeah but i you know with squad work generally when you get a group of people together guys and girls and all that there would have to be there'd have to be something wrong with them if they didn't build a certain esprit de corps and pride in each other and protectiveness towards each other and all of that sort of stuff i don't see that as negative at all i think it's actually really positive in any team building textbook that tell you this is a good thing to nurture but we did go through a period in law enforcement particularly after the woodrow commission where they discouraged that they said you know you shouldn't be friends you should be dobbing each other in if someone does something wrong i'm not for a minute containing any wrongdoing but i think with in many ways we sort of threw out the baby with the bathwater the reason i'm bringing that up now is i think the arm holder squat is a classic example being a detective sort of had a bad name for a while um i don't think it does anymore hopefully never again but the reality is that some people felt they didn't want to go to plain clothes because it was some in some way was going to lead you to corruption which is far from the truth well we were um around that time after the woodrow commission and uh being a detective it was almost like a disgrace yeah it was looked upon by some the public um and some some police and it was all almost like it was something you should be ashamed of and i know throughout your career your pushback on that and so have i i'm proud of the work that we did as detectives and i understand what you're saying about creating that team environment and i think in homicide i worked under probably eight different commanders and i'm saying this very early and uh in regards to the podcast i worked under and i i know when you were running running the squad it was one of the happiest times in the squad it wasn't we weren't competing against each other it was it felt like you're there as a team and uh if someone took a hit we all took the hit and then we'd share each other's success as as it should be as it should be and is that is that an environment you deliberately yeah i think i think it's one of the reasons i gravitated towards you know squad work major crime um but also i've i hope i've done my best in the 35 odd years to nurture and and encourage people to go into plainclothes and to see it as an able cause it really is a noble cause because you really whether it's investigating rapes or murders or armed robberies or whatever it is um you're helping those who can't help themselves you're sticking up for those goodness to come for themselves yeah and that's that's the part that appealed to me obviously but i i'd you know without being too political and hopefully not too controversial i think out of the many good things that came out of the woodrow commission this was one of the worst because there was no thought to how long the commission went for i mean the the marlin commission the nap commission commissions of inquiry into corruption in nypd who had a lot more problems than we did um they both said the same thing you do it in 12 months and you get out of there because you destroy the the the spirit of the organization if you go for too long now justice wood went for nearly five years as i remember and i don't think there was any thought given to how demoralizing and how bad it was the amount of deliberate media coverage that they fed to the media that was very sensationalistic and there were people police and lawyers and others who worked for uh in the woodrow commission who were bragging about having paid off their houses and what have you while we had double-digit suicides yeah uh and you know i don't think anyone does anything perfectly but certainly the woodrow commission for all the good it did made some very serious mistakes yeah it was savage wasn't the way the way it came through and the impact it had on people and i saw people that i i knew had just been caught up with it that didn't deserve what the what uh had happened and there was also an air of um you know papal infallibility about what they did uh they had an unquestioning media a docile compliant union movement at the time yeah um and there were mistakes made i mean justice wood to his credit went on 60 minutes a few years ago and had to admit that they'd let drugs run they didn't know what they were doing the concentration was so high that it does a lot people died on the street now if that was the new south wales police that had committed that sort of mistake um people would have gone to jail yeah those those mistakes wouldn't have been accepted we would have been judged on on those mistakes but uh yeah it was a it was it was a difficult time but uh we we came through and it changed it changed uh it changed a lot of things um after um the armed hold up squad where did you go from there uh homicide okay north west as it was then 1993 i guess yep uh that was then and um not long after that i had entered the race to get promoted to sergeant yeah and i got promoted i went to the senior constable and got promoted to sergeant yeah there um so you went in as a sergeant at homicide no senior constitutional right all right and there's a year or so a year and a half or something got your sergeant spot that uh while i was on there yeah okay um north west region as it was at that stage the new south wales was split into four regions in terms of the police northwest was one but we had areas like cabral matter and blacktown man drew it and so on but we also had the country location so we had burke and mauree and walgett we had some pretty rough towns where a lot of things happened and um again i think that the esprit de corps was excellent in that team and again you feel like you're actually doing some good um the the rank at uh the detective senior council detective sergeant i i think is one of the best roles in the cops i used to say that i think the best job in the police would be detective sergeant on deputy commissioners money that would be perfect can you get that job that'd be good find it one day um but detective sergeant you get to run run the jobs you run the homicide you're at the at the coalface you're at the crime scene and you're involved in all the exciting stuff yeah there's pressure there but it was a good uh a good uh role to have yeah absolutely yeah um one of the murders that and i'm not sure whether you were a sergeant was the murderer of um um uh newman the politician yeah i was a sergeant when it started yep um ironically i think i was bordering on assistant commissioner by the time we finished i i personally as you know like like dedication and commitment and sometimes it takes a bit of time to close close the case but um can you tell us about about that crime because it is um being referred to as australia's first uh political assassination um and there was a lot of controversy about the whole investigation and a lot of pressure for the people working on it so could you just talk yeah it certainly was at time certainly high profile um we had to investigate it under a really intense glare of media and public attention um member of parliament killed for we didn't know why but we certainly knew he had been a controversial figure he advocated deporting criminals who were not australian born um and he was the hard individual who you know he had strong beliefs and by all means by all accounts you know really decent fellow but he had fallen foul or had clashed very badly with a fellow called fung no and fung was a vietnamese migrant newman himself was actually of migrant stock he was the austrian austrian uh heritage i think his real name was nomenco from a really decent family and um uh and then they both were competing for with each other in the cabramata area and i think essentially when you say competing what the like well i think fung now coveted the seat in parliament okay there's only one in cabaret matter and and newman was in the way yes and newman um you know had worked out very early in the piece that full now it wasn't a good person so he essentially said to him you'll never get anywhere as long as i'm around so it looks like prongman decided well if that's the case i'm going to make sure you're not around and that's what they did they killed him and how did how how was he killed he was shot as he got home one night in september 1994 from memory uh there was a lot of pressure on the investigators i didn't lead the investigation initially i was only a sergeant one of one one of a number of sergeants but as the months went by um mike hagan led it initially and then i felt like bob mckean led it initially and then eventually i took over and then we ran with it it took us seven years from murder to conviction we had three supreme court trials there was a mistrial in the first one after about two months we had a hung jury after the second one eleven one we know and then the third time we convicted him the shooter ultimately got off uh there's a whole other story with that but um the bottom line is out of all of that um it was more or less a a test of tenacity uh on base on everyone's part yeah um we were blessed we had uh mark dodesky with my viewers the best homicide prosecutor in the country if not the world oh second that view i think he's exceptional yeah and uh he he really he he said this is going to be a test of wills with some very high profile barristers um acting for fungi to this day we don't know how it was funded certainly couldn't have been from uh public defense defenders and we we convicted him in the end he appealed as is his right all the way to the high court of australia my memory is uh the high court of australia refused to hear the appeal there wasn't enough uh substance in his appeal um a few years after that he was granted a uh a royal commission into his conviction which became a very personal sort of nasty thing and i accept we're in a contact sport um you can't say um you know countless did a good job but the investigation is no good so they have to say caldus is no good any investigation is no good and that was this judicial inquiry yes justice patton did was commissioned to do an inquiry and was this uh just putting it in context was this after the after he was convicted yeah okay yeah so it's an inquiry into his conviction right okay uh and that he the allegation was that i and others had framed him right uh the murder weapon that we found where his mobile phone had gone after the murder uh we planted it apparently okay so they're serious allegations they were yeah and that we turned a blind eye to others who should have been uh suspects um ultimately we proved it was a eight or nine month inquiry it would have cost the state a few million dollars um but we proved that pretty much or every other avenue of inquiry had been investigated and exhausted and shut down and the only line of inquiry that remained was and then we proved he had approached three different groups to commit the murder all of whom had rejected it ultimately we used the powers of the new southwest crime commission to squeeze the truth out of those people and most of them did give evidence against him that they had been approached to kill newman um there were a number of other issues but the the his use of his mobile phone led us to um voyager point in the george's river and we found the murder weapon there after we dredged it right um and it was matched ballistically ultimately by a german expert because it had been in the water for quite some time before we got to it and the allegations were that you planted that there the whole thing was it was a fabrication and that he had done nothing wrong there were a couple of activists refugee activists who in my view had very very um dubious views that weren't based on fact the four corners program at the abc did a big expose which i think led quite significantly to the royal commission um and i think they won a walkie award we tried to tell them that a lot of the information they used was simply not right they ignored us they refused to give back their walking when they were proven completely wrong in the end and a lot of my guys were pretty upset about it actually afterwards who was the crew that you had on that because i i know with a change one running that long yeah towards the end you had a core group of uh yeah there's four or five of us are stuck with it pretty much all the way through yeah including the uh the royal commission uh afterwards um we'll go in the name yes yes greg newberry who was my work mate or partner for five years in the homicide squad um ian mcnabb wayne walpole uh fred trench and mark jenkins yeah because all very experienced uh detectives that have really the thing is if we will probably discuss you know leadership aspects and so on and one of the qualities i think anyone looks for in a leader is tenacity you're not going to be good at anything if you're going to give up when the going gets hard i didn't hear any of those guys say it's too hard let me out we copped a lot of personal complaints against us that were investigated by internal affairs and so on um originated or at least spurred on by fungi and his supporters there was a group set up called free fung and they were trying to get him released it was led by a fellow called tim anderson timothy john anderson who had his own grudge against mark tedeschi and we were sort of collateral damage really um and you know there were a lot of people that gravitated towards that group and they saw it as some kind of anglo-saxon plot to frame this poor migrant um when in reality i mean mark tadisky is a italian migrant stock i'm i'm a migrant we're all migrants so i don't there was no anglo-saxon plot there but um that didn't matter to those who were making the allegations they painted him as a victim of a white racist society that only arrested him because he was of a different ethnic group and going through that sort of scrutiny and allegations and that did that take a toll on your personal absolutely all of us i think um the the the the the tables turned completely once we charged him we found out later on that fung now um was in fact very much involved with particularly a triad gang called 5t um i won't say he was directing them but he had a very very strong relationship with him now they're in these gangs yeah and but the vietnamese community themselves had been bastardized robbed and and treated very badly by the gang and by forno um and um so when we come to them and fung had painted himself as you know the gatekeeper theory so he wanted to be the gatekeeper between his community and and the police and the government in fact yeah and um in fact he had one stage he had his picture taken with the local police commander alan leak and he got the picture put on his business card alan leake when he found out obviously was you know very unhappy and he caused it to stop but um that's how he painted himself from now to the community if you have to come through me i own the police and then we come to them and say can you give us any information and they were never going to tell us anything and you can't blame them they felt you know there was a gang running around extorting and killing it yeah and then he's they know how connected he is and that's not unique to asian crime because in my experience dealing with asian asian crime the community don't want to come forward and whether it's a cultural thing or or whatever but they have concerns about that they do and i think that's replicated in most ethnic communities um unfortunately these gangs that come out of a community tend to pick on their own community which is a disgrace yeah now what happened with fung is once the table's turned once we arrested him people realized that we were serious that we weren't in his pocket and that we were investigating it properly and had all the evidence came out about everything we'd done that proved that he had done it so when he once he was arrested the vietnamese community completely changed her out i learned a great deal in that investigation about community engagement communicating with them regularly at a time when there is no crisis and then it's like a bank account you deposit goodwill and you can draw on it later on and uh so it's an interesting lesson in policing absolutely yeah so when fulham was arrested um we he i'm happy to say he has not seen one day of freedom since the day we arrested him he was bowel refused all the way through there were some very spirited supreme court bail applications led by brett walker qc and but when he was ultimately refused bail in the supreme court there was a petition handed up to the judge with about a thousand signatures on it or maybe five or six hundred signatures i can't remember the number um vietnamese community leaders and people who were begging the judge not to give him bao the judge said i can't take that into account it's not appropriate so but they filled the court and when he was bowel refused we got a standing ovation from the community well that's pretty telling and that's a a rarity isn't it in a placing career it was very rare um and the other thing that meant a great deal to me is the victim's family who were really decent people mrs nomenco his mom and his brother uh who had their doubts about us and had been critical of us in the media which i understand um came to us that day at the supreme court and we said you know we can see now that how much work you've done and we have a great deal of respect for you i know we're still you know i'd call them friends to this day that that's interesting i'd like to talk about that just a bit how important it is that that relationship and bond that uh as a homicide detective you have with the victims families because you come into their life at probably the worst time of their life and they're confronted with just sheer horror there's no other way to describe it yeah and you're the person that's responsible for solving it to not uh you take on their pain to a degree would you think that's a fair way to do it and and it's it's if you're a decent human being it's almost impossible not to build those bonds and to feel their pain and it you can harness that it helps you get the job done it makes you motivated to to get to solve it for them and you take a great deal of satisfaction from being able to tell them what happened to their loved ones particularly in you know nobody murders where the body hasn't been found yeah um but you know you've also got to remain balanced and you have to finish you have to do the job you've got to do it professionally you can't let it influence your judgment but i think you'd have to be inhuman not to feel for people in that grieving situation yeah and i i think you can combine the two you can still be professional and not uh impact on the integrity of the investigation but still show some empathy for the victims because i think i think that's important and you talk motivation and i think that's very important in a homicide investigation and i've always said if you're not prepared to bleed for the investigation you've probably got no business being there you're probably right that's not very well received sometimes but that's the reality and that's a good point that it's not received and i i sometimes used to get raised to despair a bit when senior people in the organization little land particular squads didn't get that and they didn't see that homicide is not a case where if you don't solve it you can't just box it up and archive it you actually have whether you arrest someone and solve it or you don't there is a judicial review a judicial process that's going to look at what you did and what you didn't do if you don't arrest anyone you go to the coroner's court if you arrest someone you go to the supreme court so and i think a lot of senior people didn't quite get that the fact that you can't just for the numbers sake box it up and put it away yeah yeah and then there's the issue of telling the parents that you've stopped investigating their son or daughter's murder or their loved one's murder and and um because our numbers are bad this month i mean i i could never cop that approach and i think i did a great deal to fight it and and to entrench in the systems processes so that wouldn't happen yeah um but i understand you know there's there's always an enormous demand on resources and they're limited so i i get i get that too but unless you've walked the path of a homicide detective and um you could be a local detective or experience the pain that families go through you've got to understand that they just don't walk away from it and it might be for the years down the track but they're going to feel like it happened yesterday and that's the reality of it and you mentioned the families where the body's never been found and i've got so many sad cases where families are out searching for the for the bodies and um yeah it's you can't walk away from it no um so with homicide the times in in homicide you also were involved in um undercover work yeah in while still in homicide i think you were still uh had an active role in the undercover work i dabbled yeah you do a lot of dabbling in your career i'm looking through your career and there's an overlap so you've been pretty busy but uh what's uh we talked about your undercover experience when uh in your early days but uh you also uh were involved in um the different types of training for undercover um operatives and learning from overseas uh yeah undercover operations yeah do you want to talk us about sure yeah without giving away methodology which i won't do but and i'm sick of being in trouble and probably you are [Laughter] um i i won a scholarship called the michael o'brien memorial scholarship which is like a churchill scholarship for police uh it's fun funded and began in in memory of a uh a very famous new south wales detective called michael o'brien uh who died way prematurely of cancer um very respected um and i was really humbled to win that uh award and so i traveled to canada and america and just had a look at how they conducted operations generally training reassimilation um welfare was very important to me and and fixing all of that up so that um that the people who do that sort of work i looked after and i brought back a whole bunch of ideas and training material and so on um and i hope one of the things i did is to actually build bridges between the australian uh you know covert policing areas and a lot of the overseas ones and those relationships as far as i know are still in place they still liaise regularly and discuss methodology equipment training accreditation all of those sorts of things it nothing stands still and i think in some ways where police can go wrong is if they do something and it goes well and they say well we're going to do it that way forever nothing stands still and you've got you've got to stay abreast you've got to look at what others are doing and certainly in that space it was important that we caught up we're a little bit behind well i know when you came back with that expertise that you'd picked up from overseas it was implemented uh across the state on various cases without going into the details yeah but it was something that just upskilled everyone and it's actually accepted nationally i made 10 recommendations and all of them were accepted nationally which i'm pretty happy about and without without going into details it was all about using um undercover police and non-drug investigations yeah i saw them as a tool that could be used in a much more wide array yeah and that that that is such an interesting concept because the the perception prior to that was you use the uc's to buy the drugs and the drug deals and all that yeah but bringing me into other investigations and there was no there was no reason other than uh we didn't see it we've always done it that way that's which really used to upset me sometimes and in all spheres when people say we've always done it that way that's a horrible that is a horrible saying when you you hear that that makes me think well that's why we're going to change it but uh yeah it was changed from that so when when you came back and there's a whole generation that's come up i mean i'm i'm old now but there's many many others followed in my footsteps i happened and pursued those relationships uh pursued the learning and and and being able to cooperate with other agencies and so on and um yeah they've got it brought a degree from what i saw from within that brought a degree of professionalism into it and uh some strategies that uh seem to really uh you know make sense when it's explained yeah um what was done but i know we don't want to talk too much about the methodology so we'll move on from there yes thank you yeah yeah a couple of questions there um negotiate this yeah you weren't doing enough in homicide armed hold up drug work and undercover so you decide to be a negotiator yeah um it's a part-time role being a hostage negotiator um i think i started when i was in the arm hold up squad and um you used to go on call uh probably one in five weeks one on four weeks i think when i started but it became one in five or one and six as more people came on board there's a team of four you have a primary negotiator a secondary who backs you up the team leader who's doesn't negotiate himself but he's an experienced negotiator and he's the liaison between the negotiation team and and the tactical elements and so on the the swast element and so on and then the fourth member is they call him the gopher unkindly him or her but it's it's really somebody who just has just begun in the process and and eventually you move your way up to secondary then primary and then team leader hopefully um and it's it's not about only about uh hostage negotiation it's really crisis negotiation yeah so it's about someone on a ledge who's about to jump off or someone in a cliff who's about to jump off as well as people who may be holding hostages and and um you know threatening lives and so on um and you train for all of that the training in that space is incredible firstly you've got to go through a selection process and then the psychology testing which is quite appropriately you can't have people who are struggling themselves in that in that sort of role um and then you begin to get to go on and then if you stick with it for long enough you eventually work your way through the the ranks in in in that sphere and then there's a national level and a national counterterrorism level which a few people are usually selected for and i was lucky to get to that level right and uh did it for a few years you have a national course which is more focused on terrorism yeah uh and rather than what they call domestic uh incidents of you know people who are just um got drunk and holding a knife against someone's throat or whatever so a lot more more layers yeah well look i'm going to um attest to your skills as a negotiator from personal experience and i've got two stories just bear with me there was one particular investigation you may have heard of it uh the murder of terry falconer it was a rather big investigation i had a strike force uh running who can forget yeah who can forget you can't you're the commander and i said to my strikeforce i'm sick of this we need this and i forget what it was but it was resources of some type whether it was more staff cars or whatever and i told my whole strike force i'm going to go see nick and i'm gonna make sure i'm not coming back until we get what i'm after so let's say it was resources so i come into your office knock on the door because i'm always polite and you said hello jubes how are you i said good thanks nick nick we need more staff i can't possibly do this organized crime murder blah blah blah and went at you and ten minutes later i turned around i thanked you and walked out of the office i didn't get any more stuff i didn't get any more cars and i walk back to my strike force and they go how'd you go i said good i thanked him but i got nothing i don't know how he did that was that part of your negotiating skills i honestly don't remember that but uh i'd still see one thing it wouldn't have been 10 minutes it would have been more like 20. yeah okay well that's probably the closer closest to that you know some of the things the decisions you have to make as a commander or a leader of any sort really is he you simply can't give everyone everything they they need and probably should get yeah um you've just got to do your best with what you've got shuffling pieces around and that's right and i i think like i accept that i still don't know why i thanked you i shouldn't have thanked you but that must have been the negotiation skills but there was one other example and you know people might perceive me as being a little bit stubborn on certain things but no no yeah i know i'm joking but the bearable uh investigation and there was a parliamentary inquiry and people aren't aware of three aboriginal children that were murdered up in barraval in the early 90s and it's a case i've been on for a long time and there was a parliamentary inquiry and i was asked to do a submission and so i did a submission and i put in exactly what i'd learned over the 20 years and it wasn't i didn't pull any punches on it and i passed it up the chain of command and it went to a few people and they've all gone my god what has he done we can't sign off on this and i i've wanted to signed off on a commissioner level and i went up the chain of command and everyone that said to me we're not going to sign off on that look what you've put in there i said i'm not changing and then i get a phone call from you and i still remember i was sitting in the office in the unsolved office i was sitting in my office and you phoned up and dubs how are you and i said good nick thank you he said this report you've done and i said nick i'm not changing it if you don't let me put it in as a cop i'll put in as a private citizen but you managed me to talk me off that cliff as well and you got me you got me into the commissioner's office and we we um made some adjustments massaged where i was happy with it so i thought that was achieving something that was impossible because there was no way i was going to change it so obviously you picked up some skills as a uh negotiator i i think negotiation skills are handy in many ways and my wife accuses me of trying to negotiate her on different topics and says she can pick it so i shouldn't bother but um i don't think she does all the time anyway it's um i i think it's one of those things in in the police that teaches you skills that are actually useful in life it's about finding compromised consensus and so on where people say there's no path forward yeah there's no way we're going to get through this that two two sides of you know vehemently opposed and whatever entrenched positions and so on it teaches you how to resolve all that it's sorry for interrupting but that is a good skill of a police officer too i think most police i used to say this often most police are actually negotiators yeah it's just that they haven't done the course and they're not labelled as negotiators but every domestic you go to every violent confrontation between neighbours or or whatever it is that you might go to you actually use negotiation skills yeah and you hone them and some people are better at it than others and hopefully the system is such that they pick up those who are good at it and they get a get a run in that particular space to develop them even further and because you do you see good police officers just the old sergeant in the charge room with the angry prisoner that can turn the prison around to the point where they they sit down and they're laughing and joking and happy and the cop hasn't conceded anything they've just had the schools the person's been charged and they're going to court yeah yeah to turn them around so i think it's a way uh a way that you approach situations which is really it's important because for police generally it's the whole point of your interaction with the public is how you treat them and how you make them feel about yourself and about the police and everything else that's what really matters it's about you've got to get the job done we'll always get the job done but if you do it sometimes quite unnecessarily where you rub someone up the wrong way and it actually makes your job harder as you go forward it's much better to be polite when you can be unless there's a reason not to be um and to treat people as human beings and most even crooks recognize that and and they treat you with the respect that you're treating them with um but you know that doesn't always happen and we're in you know it's a hot house environment and you can understand sometimes that things get um quite heated and and people can lose their temper but police above all have a responsibility not to lose their temper and in the negotiators they say if you can't control yourself how can you control anybody else that's what you're talking about there is such an important key to good policing because you're going to get provoked people are going to deliberately provoke you and that's how you deal with that yeah and and change it but in uh negotiators you told me or a while back with a funny story you had a regular customer [Laughter] someone that you got called out to quite a few times so you got on first name basis we pretty much did there's a fellow who had had a really rough life and and um he ultimate sadly he got deported in the end from australia but there was a period of time where he's literally homeless uh his wife had left him and everything had gone wrong for him and he became it was almost like every third day he'd be on a building somewhere threatening to jump off and he actually got to know all the negotiators by by name and his favorite was the legendary terry dalton who's that he passed away fast away great again a few months ago but um and he used to ask for him he knew all the negotiators by name and he had his favorites and if we had a frequent flyer program for uh hostage takers he would have really he would have topped it i think he's um so so he got to the point where he knew which negotiation he wanted yeah yeah yeah um your time as um commander of uh homicide were they good years through your career yeah definitely um i had a short stint of about um i was 12 months or so with the olympics just doing the security stuff for the olympics and the crime management framework uh and then i came back to homicide as the boss taking over from a legend ronnie smith yeah uh and i i'd look back on us probably three or four years i was a commander there and i look back on it very very fondly i'm incredibly proud of the work that went on in that time i'm proud of the camaraderie and and the spirit that that was in the office um we're all human beings there was always conflicts you'll always get conflicts in the heat of battle but the bottom line is and and i think you know happily the results we achieved in that period i'm not sure how they're doing now but i know that was outstanding and it was all because of the work that you and others did in that period our solve rate the conviction rate um you know the satisfaction that we need to get yeah it's hard to hard to quantify but it just seemed to be a good period it was a period where we'd come together because we came in from the region so you've got people from different areas across the state coming from working under one roof but for whatever reason i don't know maybe we were younger and just happier those days but it seemed like a good time didn't you really positive vibe the other thing is i mean we had come out of the woodrow commission where detectives were you know detective was a bad word and so on yeah and i've got to give credit to clive small who was the assistant commissioner for crime after the woodrow commission they said you'll never have a cib again uh clyde said not only can we do it but we can do it in a way that there's checks and balances parameters and it will work the system that he built with progress reports with the post operational assessments uh right at the beginning of any investigation of having a clear terms of reference everyone's clear as to what their role is and how much it's going to they're going to be allowed to spend everything was in that that process at the beginning and i'd argue that in any major investigation whether it's internal affairs or otherwise if you're not clear at the beginning if you haven't laid the ground the groundwork the foundation stones at the beginning and everyone's clear about what it is it's supposed to be doing and and that the charter and and everything else then all is lost um we did that in in crime agencies as it was then it's now state crime command and the system that he built has stood the test of time many other states have come and looked at it yeah and not only did it resurrect and revitalize the the profession of criminal investigation major criminal investigation but i think it stood us in very good stead and you know people don't get enough they don't give him enough kudos on credit clive small for seeing that and having the vision to say we can do major crime investigations in squads and we can do it in a way that will not encourage or nurture any corruption yeah i'm not aware of any major corruption issue within state crime the crime command since those days and you're quite right and that environment at that time that's was when there were calls for all of us like detectives to be disbanded and everyone got back to everyone yeah go back to uniform yeah it was uh tough times but yeah certainly the structure that was put in place then uh has held us in uh in good studies so we've got we have got so much to cover so i am going to um recharge your drinks and get you some nibbles if you if you need it because i don't want you i don't want to lose you on this because there's so much i want to cover with you i'm fading away to a block of units you've been a bit harsh on yourself um operation prospect yep i'm familiar with it okay i thought you thought you might be do you want to and we don't have to delve too deep but uh it's obviously a thing that was um critical in your policing career or a time critical in your policing career and it's impacted on you personally and professionally um do you care i'm happy to talk about it in general terms so what happened essentially i um it all started with i used to be on the executive of the police union i represented all the commission officers for quite some years and wearing that hat i had cause to clash quite badly with internal affairs and with some individuals in internal affairs and around them um they didn't take it very well and i essentially became sort of target one i think for quite some years i have argued and i think i've been proven right that i was improperly targeted completely um there have been warrants sworn to bug my phone and and my ex-wife my children and so on uh completely inappropriately and when it all came out in the end it turned out that the affidavits that supported the warrants that the judges had relied on i'm not even mentioned in the affidavits there was no evidence about me supplied to any judge to justify the bugging the judges was simply signing things without reading them so there was a failure on a number of levels um the the safety net which should have been our judicial system let us down badly and those judges have never been asked one question about what they did this went for three or four years many lives were ruined uh and so on but the the at the end of the day you get to a point where sorry i'll finish off on the story yeah we all complained we didn't have the material the material turned up anonymously and we ended up lodging complaints that were then given to the ombudsman's office to investigate which was a sham to this day i've never been asked a question about what actually happened with the bugging all they were interested in was uh how dare you reveal the wrong doing and i was again target one i was probably the most vocal visible and high ranking official there's 114 of us yeah and we're not all the same some guys probably had a problem nine seventy or eighty of us are not even mentioned in any of the affidavits yeah well i i it's astounding i i was on the warrant too so i know what it's been quite disappointing that after all these years when the government finally got around to saying well we can't let it happen again um instead i mean the problem here has been the judges the judges signed warrants without reading anything yeah um so unfortunately they've set up a position of someone to monitor that he's monitoring the police not the judges yeah anyway at the end of the day the ombudsman's investigation was a sham in my view and they didn't even seriously look at anything that happened they targeted the complainants um i still feel that the thing is unresolved but i got to a point in life where i had to move on um i've put it behind me it is not what defines me i would hope it's one chapter in a in my life uh and i'm i'm not shirking it yeah uh but but the bottom line is i have to move on for my own well-being really yeah and the well-being of my family yeah yeah because it didn't put it behind me took an impact and and would you say that cost you your career in the new south wales police it i don't know i don't i wouldn't say that it um in the early days when when they were investigating me and so on and ultimately they were proven they've never couldn't even put a serious allegation to me i've never been actually had an allegation put to me that i could answer but they did hold me up internal affairs and otherwise from being promoted for three or four years ultimately i cleared all the hurdles and and went through but what happened next i had to complain about what the ombudsman's office was doing and i felt i was doing it on behalf of many people not just me there were those in in political circles and otherwise who said if you do this you might win but you'll never be commissioner and i thought about that deeply and i thought you know it's about looking at yourself in the mirror in the morning and i did what i did i lodged complaints the minor political parties and labor backed it we had an upper house inquiry in the parliament of new south wales which i in my view conclusively showed that the ombudsman's inquiry had run off the rails um was completely biased and didn't look at what they were set up to do barrier farrell who was premier at the time who set up the inquiry referred it to the ombudsman has written at least one or two letters to the editor saying it completely thwarted the intent of parliament now at the end of the day though i did i have absolutely no regrets and if i had my time over again not only would i do it again i'd go harder yeah well i i like that attitude that if you've stood for something that you believe in and uh you accept the consequences either way yeah yeah at least as you said you can look at yourself in the mirror i mean there were a number of people and the ombudsman himself gave evidence before the parliamentary committee about a a very very incredible well-known assistant commissioner who they bastardized in hearings to the point where he fell out of the witness box collapsed and they had to get an ambulance for him that was someone who was very near and dear to my heart and he had nothing to do with any of it yeah um i mean the the thing that upsets me i guess and i'm sorry i'm digressing but these oversight bodies that get given royal commission powers and we effectually throw effectively throw out one of the pillars of our justice system the right to silence you throw out the right assigners they can compel people to answer questions and incriminate themselves and so on with extraordinary power should come extraordinary checks and balances that's not what happens either in new south wales and many other places and i think there's a salutary lesson here those who are calling for an icac style body in the federal sphere must have a good look at what has gone wrong in new south wales not just with the police integrity commission not just with the ombudsman's office with icac anybody that has super judicial powers must have a hell of a lot more oversight than they do at the moment yeah i'll get off my sight box now got it off my channel no no it had to be said and i can see and hear it uh it has had an impact on you but i think you held held your head high throughout and uh congratulations on that on a personal level i and many others decided to simply put it behind us and move on at the end well i think you've got to make that decisions in life on on different things where you do have to move on yeah um speaking of moving on yes segway so i'm getting getting used to this nick you've become a professional no let's not carry away we know i'm gonna trip over soon um we will have a break and when we come back we'll talk about your career outside the new south wales police your international career and basically how you became a man of international mystery thanks very much nick provides an interesting insight into the politics and pressures associated with being a working detective join us for part two of nick caldis on eye catch killers where he takes us on the journey across the globe to war zones investigations into political assassinations the use of chemical weapons and ira murders speak soon [Music] this podcast series is brought to you by true crime australia visit eyecatchkillers.com.iu for additional materials such as articles on what you heard videos and galleries you can search for the eye catch killers with gary jubilan official group on facebook and join in with discussion see you for the next episode of the podcast you