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Daley had first met Anthony and Andrew Perish through their connections with the Rebels, in the early nineties. He was sentenced to jail for murder (later reduced to manslaughter) in 1996 for his part in a fatal brawl. One day in Long Bay jail in 1999 he briefly met Terry Falconer, whom he knew of but had never spoken to. He'd heard rumours that Falconer had
killed the Perish grandparents. The main topic of conversation was Rob Institoris, another Rebel, who was going out with Falconer's daughter Linda. Falconer believed, rightly or wrongly, that Linda had given him up to the cops for manufacturing amphetamines, and resented the fact Institortis was in a relationship with her. To make matters worse, they were living in Falconer's house and not paying rent.

At one point, Daley changed the subject and said, ‘Rumour has it you killed Rooster's [Anthony Perish's] grandparents.' In fact, Daley had heard the rumour from Institoris.

‘Yeah,' Falconer said. ‘I heard that one too.'

Then the conversation moved on.

In 2000 Daley again met Rob Institoris, who had just started a sentence for forging not very good $100 notes. Institoris tried to be friendly, recalling incidents from their past, but Daley was deeply upset because Institoris had given the police information about the offence for which he was in jail. Members of the Rebels were not supposed to cooperate with police if a brother was under investigation.

In the end Daley said, ‘You wrote a fuckin' statement against me.'

‘What can I say? I fucked up.'

‘If I did to you what you did to me, you'd want me dead. As far as I'm concerned, I want a new bike [as reparation], and you've got two weeks to get it.' Daley looked around the yard and saw two big blokes he didn't know. ‘If I don't get it, those two blokes over there are going to cut your fuckin' head off.'

Institoris said he was broke, but eventually agreed to give Daley his major asset, a boat. It was a 4.9 metre Markham Whaler with twin Evinrude 70 horsepower engines.
Ownership was signed over in jail, and Daley arranged for it to be collected.

Daley got out of jail in 2001, and it was a condition of his parole he not mix with the Rebels. He did arrange some casual meetings, to try to gauge their attitude towards him, but generally he was happy to be away from the club. He was nervous because members knew he'd been to the Crime Commission, and he believed he was a marked man. At one social gathering, a Rebel sang along to the song ‘Skunk Dog', implying Daley was an informer. When the music stopped, the man mumbled, ‘You're living on borrowed time, cunt.'

‘What did you say?' Daley demanded.

‘Nothing, nothing. I'm just singing.'

In October a woman Daley knew as Denise aka Delirious (at one stage the wife of Anthony Perish's driver Matthew Lawton) came by the house where he was living in Bringelly and told him, ‘I got a message from our mate.'

‘Who? Which one?'

‘Rooster.'

‘Oh yeah, how's he going?'

‘Yeah, he's going good.'

Denise gave Daley a thousand dollars and said, ‘Buy yourself some decent clothes to go to dinner in.'

‘When?'

‘Andrew will come and see you in a couple of days.' And she drove off.

A few days later, Andrew Perish turned up in his four-wheel drive and told Daley, ‘Be ready [at 7 tonight]. We'll go and have dinner with our Mate.' He did not mean just any mate: Mate, like Rooster, was one of the nicknames of Anthony Perish.

Andrew returned in a Commodore and drove Daley into the inner city, telling him when they parked that they were in Newtown. They met Anthony, who was waiting for them on a corner, and after they'd greeted each other and hugged, they went into a small restaurant. Anthony ordered a bottle of wine and there was small talk. At some point he raised the subject of his grandparents, and asked Daley if it was true that Terry Falconer had told him in jail that he'd killed the old people.

‘Given we have mobile phones in jail,' Daley said, ‘don't you think you would have known pretty much straight away if I'd been told that?'

Anthony thought about it and agreed. Daley said, ‘Who told you this shit?'

‘We got a phone call from Liz.'

Daley had never met Elizabeth Falconer.

Later Anthony got down to business and said, ‘So, mate, what can you do for the company?'

Daley, who was mystified, said, ‘What would the company have me do for them?' At first he thought that by ‘company' Anthony might mean the Rebels, but that was not it at all.

‘You've got a boat?'

‘Yeah. It's fucked at the moment.'

Anthony asked what the problem was, and Daley went into details.

Anthony said, ‘So, if it was fixed, would it make it out to the shelf and back?'

Assuming he meant the continental shelf, Daley said, ‘Yeah. Fucking oath.'

‘You know what you're doing? You can handle a boat all right?'

‘Yeah. I've been a captain for a long time.'

‘How much would it cost to fix it?'

‘At least a couple of grand.'

‘If I gave you a couple of grand tomorrow, you'd put it in and get it fixed?'

‘Yeah.'

‘You won't go to town and blow it?'

‘Mate!'

Anthony turned to Andrew and asked if he could give Daley a few thousand dollars that night. Then he said to Daley, ‘I want you to put the boat in and come up the Karuah River to Bulahdelah. There's a wharf up there. Come up to the wharf and I'll be waiting for you, just like a fisherman with an esky. A couple of eskies, because the cunt might be in a few pieces.'

So now Daley had an idea of what was going on. He said, ‘There'll be people everywhere.'

‘Mate, nobody will know any different, we'll just look like a couple of fishermen going out for a day's fishing.'

Later in the conversation, Daley said, ‘Well, who is he?'

‘Don't worry, it's no one in the club.'

‘Who is the cunt?'

‘Don't worry. It's not you.'

‘What's the pay like?'

‘Twenty grand.'

Daley just stared at him, and Perish thought about it. ‘Tell you what, I'll pay you thirty.'

‘Half up front?'

‘No, no. I don't work like that—'

‘Standard practice, isn't it? Well, you pay me half up front and I'll incur the expenses.'

‘No, I don't work like that. We'll give you the money for your expenses.'

Anthony said a mobile phone would be delivered to him, to be used for communicating about the job. When the meal was finished, Anthony paid the bill in cash and said goodbye. Andrew drove Daley home via his own house in Eagle Vale, where he went inside and came back with $2,000.

The next day Daley hooked his boat up to his vehicle and drove to Marine Scene in Campbelltown, where he left it for repairs. They later called to say the power head on the left engine needed replacing, which would cost $4,000 by itself. Daley rang Andrew, who said the extra money would be forthcoming.

A few days later, a mobile phone was delivered to Daley by a man he subsequently learned was Matthew Lawton.

‘Here's the phone from Steve,' said Lawton.

‘Who?'

‘Rooster.'

Lawton told him to keep the phone charged and on at all times, and not to use it except for contacting the Perishes.

Daley was nervous and confused about what was happening. On the one hand, he wanted to get his boat fixed, and in any case was reluctant to say no to Anthony Perish. On the other, he did not want to commit a crime and risk going back to jail. He was also concerned that maybe he was being set up, because of his contact with the Crime Commission. In his worst dreams, he wondered if he was actually the intended victim and it would be his body dumped off the continental shelf.

Daley had an interest in surveillance devices—his late father had been a private investigator. He set up two video cameras covering the front of the house, connected to a screen in the lounge room. This enabled him to record visitors, and to see who was outside without having to open the front door. The equipment captured images of one of the three or four visits Anthony Perish made over the next few weeks, in each case having been driven by Matthew Lawton. The purpose of the visits was to check on the progress of the boat repairs, and to discuss the trip up north. On one of the visits, Perish showed Daley a copy of the police running sheet indicating Falconer had been prepared to give information to the authorities about the drug dealings of the Dubbo Rebels.

In late October, Daley and his girlfriend drove up to Port Stephens via Newcastle. Along the way they dropped in at the Waterways office in Newcastle and bought a duplicate set of rego papers for his boat and some maps. He later said he wanted to leave a traceable trail of his trip, to cover himself in case the Perishes were trying to set him up. This is confusing, but Daley is a confusing man, a mixture of paranoia and intelligence and muddled thinking. He seems to have been concerned to keep his options open, to some extent making it up as he went along. A serious consideration was still that he might be the Perishes' intended victim—in which case, it made a certain sense to stay close to them by pretending to cooperate, in the hope of learning more.

After the reconnaissance trip, Daley told Anthony Perish the Karuah River was ‘crawling with cops' and had a speed limit of four kilometres per hour. (It also does not run through
Bulahdelah.) They discussed other places where the boat might be put in.

On Perish's last visit, which occurred on 9 November 2001, the boat had been repaired and was back at the house on its trailer. Daley said it needed to be run in.

‘Get on to it,' Perish replied impatiently.

‘What do you think I've been doing, mate?'

‘Hurry up, because this cunt goes this Friday, regardless.'

Daley learned the plan had changed. ‘You'll come up,' Perish said, ‘you'll pick up a couple of eskies, you'll go out and take them out to the continental shelf, you'll empty out the contents over a big hole [located] using a depth sounder. On the way back, wash the eskies out halfway back and throw them over the side. When you get back, wash the boat out with ammonia.'

‘Huh?'

‘If you do that, they can tell there's been blood in the boat, but they can't tell whose it is. It fucks the DNA.'

Daley thought about what he'd just heard, and said, ‘What, you're not coming with me?'

‘Nah. That's what I'm paying you for.'

With the job now imminent, it was time to drop out. After 12 November Daley did not take any calls on his mobile phones, so attempts by Andrew Perish to call him were unsuccessful. The brothers did not visit him again—presumably they realised something was wrong and decided to cut all contact.

Once Daley had told the short version of this story to detectives Browne and Rankin, he used the television set and VHS player in the granny flat to play them the video he'd made of Anthony and Matthew Lawton arriving at his house
to inspect his boat. When the video was finished, Browne, who'd been taking notes, asked Daley why he'd decided to talk to them.

‘I just looked at you and decided I could trust you,' Daley said.

It was a surprising statement and, as it was to turn out, not totally honest. In fact, Daley was to harbour fears of the Tuno detectives throughout his dealings with them, at times convinced they were corrupt and meant him harm. There was nothing personal in this: it was only five years since the Wood Royal Commission, and many people still mistrusted the police in general; Daley would not have been reassured by the fact that Terry Falconer had been killed after being kidnapped by men who might have been police. And yet, in Daley's mind such concerns coexisted with the feeling that maybe Browne and his colleagues
could
be trusted. It was complicated, but his was a troubled and dangerous world.

There followed a series of meetings—in excess of fifty—over more than a year. Daley remained nervous, especially after the detectives asked him to make a statement and give evidence in court one day. He knew this would mean relocating and starting a new life, and that was something he was still in two minds about doing, despite his desire to turn over a new leaf. But gradually the police convinced him this was the only course of action he could take if he wanted the information he'd given them to achieve any effect.

It took a great deal of skill and patience on the part of Browne and Jubelin to deal with Daley, to meet him again and again, to always answer his phone calls, and to listen to his rambling paranoia over the long months. Fortunately, each
of the detectives could draw on experience that had equipped them with patience and empathy where difficult witnesses were concerned. Browne had grown up with a lot of people who went on to be criminals. As for Jubelin, he'd learned about patience at Bowraville.

Strike Force Ancud had been big at first and Jubelin gained an education in major investigations from watching OIC Rod Lynch, a quietly spoken man with a great grasp of detail. One thing he noted was how Lynch would give a detective a job and expect him to do it but nothing else—Jubelin's own natural tendency was to go racing off in pursuit of further information, but Lynch would say, ‘No. I just want you to do the task I gave you.' Jubelin came to see how this was essential for control of a complex investigation, where only the person at the top had a complete overview.

Once the publicity circus had moved on, Ancud lost most of its resources (as was to happen with Tuno a few years later). Lynch was promoted and left, replaced as OIC by a sergeant who had other jobs that distracted his attention. Jubelin became the de facto head of the investigation, which before too long had just one other officer, Jason Evers. Born in 1969, Evers was a rugby league player who worked as a bricklayer on leaving school. He joined the police in 1989 after it had rained for two months. He became a detective because it was a chance to use his mind more, and also for the challenge: he figured it was an opportunity to move up to a higher level of effort. He realised that Jubelin shared this ambition.