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What the criminals got up to over the next five years is largely unknown. In his statements Brad Curtis only told police about matters they already had some inkling of, and
they knew very little about the period from 2003 to 2008. The fact Curtis still had a relationship with Anthony Perish in 2008 suggests badness had been committed during those five years, but just what it was we may never know. The only exception—albeit a significant one—was that Curtis later pleaded guilty to distributing drugs for Anthony Perish on at least ten occasions between 2006 and 2008.

In 2009 Tuno continued to struggle to connect Anthony Perish and his associates with several deaths in Queensland. As we've seen, in 2008 the strike force had been given responsibility for the New South Wales end of the investigation into the deaths of Benita Forster and her young son, Tana Taui. On 29 June 2002 they had been found at the foot of the Twin Falls Waterfall in Springbrook National Park on the Gold Coast. According to the
Courier Mail
newspaper, a scrap of paper with the word ‘goodbye' on it was found in Forster's car nearby, and police initially treated the deaths as non-suspicious.

Forster, who had once worked in Sydney as an exotic dancer, had had a long-term relationship with Black Uhlans president John Niven until his death in a traffic accident in 1995. Tana's father was Fred Taui, a former member of the Black Uhlans, and club members paid for the funeral, were pallbearers, and gave the coffins a motorcycle escort from the church. The connection with Anthony Perish is that Forster had been a friend of one of his ex-girlfriends, and the suspicion was that she'd been involved in the theft of a large sum of money from Perish's home. This has never been proved, and no one has yet been charged in relation to the deaths of the thirty-two-year-old mother and her three-year-old child.

The other Queensland death Tuno was involved with was the shooting of Michael Cleaver Davies on 17 April 2002. He was killed while sitting at the kitchen table in his duplex at Paradise Point on the Gold Coast. We've seen how police connected Brad Curtis' DNA with samples found in burning vehicles near the scenes of Davies' shooting and the shooting of Raniera Paketapu at JB's Bar and Grill.

A source later told authorities that Davies had been paid a deposit of $200,000 by Anthony Perish to import some precursor chemicals from Russia by way of China. The chemicals were seized in China and Davies was unable to repay the deposit, so Perish paid Brad Curtis to kill him. Curtis did the job with another man, who cannot be named but confessed to his role in 2009. In 2012 Queensland police issued a warrant for Curtis' arrest for the murder of Michael Davies. So far no action has been initiated against Anthony Perish for the murder.

•

As men rolled over and more arrests were made, the amount of information pouring in to Tuno became a flood. It all had to be recorded and linked to what was already known, so its implications could be fully understood and pursued. As previously noted, all strike forces have their own investigation database on the police eaglei computer system. By the end, Tuno had more than twelve thousand records listed there, although not every one was accessible to all the officers involved: in eaglei, documents can be ‘caveated' so only certain ranks, or individuals, can read them. Now, as new information was matched to what was already there and produced more leads,
the virtues of the patient work done with the computers since those first days at Port Macquarie in 2001 became apparent.

Information not only came in: sometimes it had to be produced too. Jubelin had maintained an investigation log, updated monthly. It was particularly useful as a running record of the investigation's changing focus and strategies, and of important decisions made. One of its benefits was to help Jubelin justify his actions when the investigation was reviewed by senior officers, something that happens often in police work for all sorts of reasons. Given the almost unique length of Tuno, this record proved particularly helpful. There were plenty of other reports. In late 2008 and into 2009, Jubelin was reporting daily to his bosses on Tuno's progress. Later it became weekly. There was also a more detailed fortnightly progress report.

People think police work is about excitement and violence, and sometimes it is. But mostly it's about information, massive floods of it that threaten to overwhelm those involved. The struggle is with the crooks, but also with the information.

Be sure your sin will find you out
.

On 19 March 2009, Tuno took Brad Curtis up to Girvan so he could walk them through the place where Terry Falconer's body had been dismembered, in the same shed that had also been used as one of the country's biggest meth labs. The property had already been checked to confirm that the booby traps Curtis had described had been removed. Corrective Services were concerned he might escape, so they had him in handcuffs with manacles around his ankles.

Since 2001 the hilly track to the house had deteriorated so badly the police needed four-wheel drive vehicles to get in. (For some reason Anthony Perish seems to have stopped using the property by 2006; he simply abandoned it.) Curtis was accompanied by Gary Jubelin, Glen Browne and Nathan
Surplice, a large contingent of Corrective Services officers, and various others including a video cameraman.

Curtis recalled some more details from the night of 16 November 2001, when Anthony Perish arrived in his Toyota Land Cruiser. Lawton heard him coming up the hill, and went out and opened the gate for him. Perish, Curtis recalled, had been very agitated, perhaps on drugs. As Curtis told police what had happened, he used the term ‘Mr Falconer' to refer to the dead man in the box, an odd attempt to show respect, or maybe just a way to distance himself from what he'd done by the use of formal language. The party moved into the shed, where it was very hot, and the interview continued. Curtis described how once the body was out of the box, Perish had pulled the teeth out and smashed them on the concrete floor, with a hammer. Then the men cut up the body. Curtis' memory of this part, and precisely what he had done, remained vague.

After explaining what had occured in the shed, Curtis took the police party outside and showed them the area where he thought the toolbox and other items had been burned. It was all covered now, by soil and vegetation, so the police recorded the location for excavation. While they were outside, Curtis also showed them where he'd erected various security devices around the house and shed when he'd worked there later on security for Perish's drug lab. These had included trip flares, remote-controlled explosives, cameras and various weapons. A gun had been set up in an old chook shed pointing at the gate in the internal fence, and could be operated from the house by a wire.

The party went into the house, and Curtis explained where he, Perish, Lawton and another cook had slept. There was a screen next to the television that showed the vision from the four cameras outside, so they could be monitored whenever anyone was in the lounge room. Other items still in the house that Curtis recognised included camouflage gear worn by Perish and Lawton when walking around the property, and explosives. Curtis said that when he'd lived here in 2003 he'd had a map of the area, with an ‘escape and evasion' route marked on it, just in case. All the men there had had weapons.

The scale of the operation was impressive. Curtis said while he'd been there he was told two hundred kilograms of methamphetamine and ecstasy had been produced in a period of eight months. There is other evidence for the scale of Perish's activities. One informed source says that in a two-year period Perish purchased millions of dollars of precursor chemicals, which were presumably used to make drugs worth many times that. The source says Perish's lifestyle was lavish; for example, he would sometimes invite people to lunch and send a helicopter to collect them and bring them to an expensive restaurant in the Hunter Valley. There is unconfirmed information that on another occasion Perish hired a helicopter to fly himself, another man and two prostitutes to Pepper Tree Estate in the Hunter Valley.

Police still don't have a comprehensive picture of Perish's activities. He was extremely good at evading surveillance: he was on the run for fourteen years and, after being caught and released from jail, managed to evade police again for several more years. His phones were tapped but this was not much good because he always used code. His Sydney base at
the time of his last arrest in 2009 has never been found, and neither has another drug factory believed to have existed on the south coast. But it is known that his life right up to his arrest involved frequent travel up and down the coast of New South Wales, attending meetings with a range of criminals who included his precursor suppliers, his hitman, the bikie gangs he used as his major distributors for many years, and the people who helped him launder his profits through property in Queensland. Among other things, Anthony Perish was a very successful businessman.

Once Curtis had done the walk-through at Girvan, a good deal of searching and forensic work was carried out. The Field Operations Co-ordinator for the five-person crime scene crew was Detective Sergeant Glenn Williams. All obvious traces of criminal activity at Girvan, including the dismembering of Terry Falconer, had been removed, and it was their job to find any remaining forensic evidence. They examined the inside of the big shed using Luminol, and found blood traces at three places on the concrete floor. Now, although Luminol is very sensitive—it can detect blood diluted up to one in a million parts of water—it can produce false positive results for a few other substances, such as rust and cabbage. So swabs were taken from the three spots and sent to the lab to be tested for DNA. These tests, like so much of the hard work done over Tuno's life, produced nothing useful.

While the fingerprint officers worked over the house—finding Anthony Perish's and Matthew Lawton's prints—the others moved to an area behind the house where the ground had clearly been disturbed some time ago. A big excavator had been hired, and this was used to dig up the soil in an area
the size of a swimming pool and put it through a mechanical sifter. Another area was checked, where there had obviously been a fire. These searches produced a blue garbage bag similar to the ones used to wrap Terry Falconer's remains in, bits of plastic sheeting, and pieces of a large metal toolbox showing burn marks. Also found were a padlock, three saw blades and a ballpein hammer head, possibly the one used to smash Falconer's teeth.

Back in the shed, police strung a strap from the beam where Curtis said Terry Falconer had been strung up. Detective Nathan Surplice was suspended from the beam to ensure it would have been able to take Falconer's weight. The experiment was recorded on camera.

•

There was one more killing to be solved by the interviews that took place after the arrests in January 2009. It was Michael Christiansen who told them the most about the murder of Paul Elliott.

Thanks to the steroids and the training, Christiansen was a huge man, so Tuno took care with security on 20 January 2009 when he was picked up from jail, where he was on remand for the drug charges, and taken to Parramatta Police Station. Detectives Joe Doueihi and Matt Fitzgerald suspected he was Elliott's killer—they'd found Elliott's wallet in the Kennards lock-up, and their surveillance showed Christiansen taking out his gun and replacing it before and after Elliott's disappearance. So now they hoped to rattle him, in the hope he'd confess, but it was a long shot—contract killers don't normally crumble very easily. It was true that, like Curtis,
he had no significant criminal record, but he'd been in jail a month now, and had had time to adjust to his changed circumstances.

For the first time they told him they were aware of Paul Elliott. Christiansen knew Brad Curtis had been arrested the day before, and now he learned Tuno had just picked up several of his other accomplices and was interviewing them too. The detectives were pleased to see he was disturbed by the news, shaken by how much they knew and worried the others might roll on him. Even so he said nothing, so he was taken to the Crime Commission, put in the witness box in a hearing room, and offered the chance to make an ‘induced statement'—one that could never be used against him in court. The results were gratifying: he proceeded to confess that he'd killed Paul Elliott. Doueihi and Fitzgerald, watching on a screen in the boardroom upstairs, couldn't believe their luck.

And then it got even better. The detectives asked Christiansen if he would give them a cautioned interview, in other words a standard police one that could be used to charge him, and after some negotiation—the police agreed not to pursue his drug dealing—he agreed. He did this after taking legal advice. So the next day, 21 January, he gave a long and detailed interview. He described how his friend Lyle Pendleton (aka Lozza, or Penguin) had approached him in November the previous year to say he knew an Asian drug dealer who needed protection for a meeting he was to have with a Melbourne heavy, which might turn nasty.

Later that month Christiansen had attended Curtis' wedding in Newcastle, along with others including Anthony Perish and Jake Bennie. He'd asked Curtis to do the job with him. Curtis
had agreed, and there'd been further discussion at the meeting at the Caltex/McDonald's stop on the F3 observed by police.

Pendleton dropped out of the deal after being arrested for a hydro house he'd set up in Queen's Park to grow marijuana, so on 4 December Jeremy Postlewaight (of the BOC Gases job) took over as intermediary and introduced Christiansen to the client, an Asian man he called Tong.

Tong, a short man in his early thirties, said he was having business difficulties with a Melbourne man named Paul Elliott, who was threatening to kill his mother. Tong had sold Elliott $600,000 of low-quality methamphetamine, which Elliott had returned and asked for a refund. The problem was that Tong didn't have the money anymore—he was only the middle man in the deal, and the seller did not want to return the cash. Tong said Elliott was a notorious gangster and had even made it into a true crime book called
Gotcha
. Shaking with fear, he produced a copy of the book and opened it at a picture of Elliott. Christiansen already knew what he looked like, because he owned a copy himself.