Killing Time (10 page)

Jail is really pretty simple. There are three rules: see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil – the three wise monkeys are alive and well. You particularly do not ask what somebody is “in” for. Being considered prying or nosey invites violence and I have seen that first hand. Also, serving huge sentences, like virtually everybody in Sirius East, makes people paranoid. Jail thinking is completely different to the thinking of the normal community. People see a conspiracy around every corner and see a police informer under every blade of grass.

One day when I had been moved out of protection and into mainstream I was in the same unit as a bloke called Liam Bernie, who was being given a trial run in mainstream to see if he could cope. Bernie had committed an armed robbery at a Kmart store and, while driving the getaway car through the car park, ran over an old lady. Most normal human beings would stop to render assistance. Not Liam. He got out, looked at her lying prone on the ground and then got back in the car and backed over her to make sure she was dead.

At the time when Bernie and I crossed paths, there was a huge amount of publicity about prisoners being able to ring the Crime Stoppers telephone number without charge and with supposedly total anonymity, which is bulldust because every telephone call is monitored. But we were all encouraged to ring Crime Stoppers and lag our little hearts out. Needless to say, this initiative was the talk of the jail. One morning I was sitting reading the paper in the library. Liam was there and I jokingly said to him that we'd all better get on the phone quick smart – clearly meant to be a joke. He got up and stormed out. Some time later that morning I was in my cell reading a book when the door was slammed shut. I looked up and there was Bernie. His eyes were nearly out on stalks with rage. He has no front teeth, he is covered in jail tattoos from head to foot, is fat but very strong – and to say that he is a loose canon would be an understatement. He came and stood over me as I was sitting on a chair and screamed abuse at me about suggesting he was a police informer. He said that's the sort of thing that could get me killed or, if the wrong bloke heard it, get him killed. The tirade went on for some minutes, and that is a very long time in the company of someone like Bernie. I was in real fear of being severely bashed or worse. I kept telling him that it was meant to be a joke and that I had used the word
we
instead of the word
you
when I talked about jumping on the phone. This did absolutely nothing to placate him and he kept screaming and shouting until I finally talked him into leaving my cell when I promised I wouldn't talk to him again. This is what you face in jail: irrational crazed outbursts by people whose medication probably isn't agreeing with them.

Not Peter Dupas, though – quiet, sneaking around, desperately trying to keep under the radar, everybody giving him a wide berth. After effectively not talking to anybody except my cell mate for the first couple of weeks and at the same time sitting back observing life in the unit, it became apparent to me that Dupas was the head of one of the two factions in the unit. As I said, a lot of the blokes in the unit are cave dwellers and don't get involved in the internal politics at all. They are too terrified. However, Dupas, Ray Edmunds (Mr Stinky), Paul Gorman, Andrew Norrie and Biff were all in the Dupas crew and Les Camilleri and Christopher Hall and other assorted dead beats made up the other crew. They all had a real John Howard attitude to life – you are either with us or against us; there are no half measures – so having witnessed a stabbing in the food queue after I had only been there a couple of days I decided it was probably best not to try to make friends with anybody, and if anybody was interested in talking to me they could come to me.

While not a daily occurrence, such stabbings were regular and there are plenty of blokes wandering around the jail system with more holes than a Swiss cheese, proudly mouthing off about how many times they have been shivved. Typically a number of fast blows were delivered with lightning speed, preferably to the neck or to the head. All hell would then break loose and a huge fight ensue, with the screws standing back and watching the excitement and letting the fight punch itself to a standstill. Then the screws would move in, call the riot squad and lock the unit down. The perpetrators would be taken away to hospital or to the slot.

Prison life affects people. They are without hope and have nothing but the boredom of prison life to look forward to. Your every movement is monitored. You are told when to get up, when to shower, when to eat and when to shit. It's stifling, suppressive and depressing. Blokes who are doing life have nothing to look forward to so the unimportant becomes life and death to them. Who gives a bugger if you are first or last in the queue for your meal? They do. Things that don't matter in the real world are blown out of all proportion. I've seen blokes bashed over a can of coke and stabbed over a pouch of tobacco. On the outside they wouldn't bother. All these blokes see are walls for the rest of their lives. You have a volatile situation where they have nothing materially and so they have nothing to lose.

Dupas didn't get himself involved in any of these fights. He didn't need to. He was quiet, secretive, calculating and bloody dangerous. I would go as far as to say that he is probably the most dangerous person I have ever met – and that is really saying something, having been a criminal defence lawyer for over twenty-eight years and having acted for many murderers and other violent offenders or people just plain off their nuts.

Dupas always sat at a particular spot to eat his meals and he always ate with Ray Edmunds and Paul Gorman. You didn't dare sit at that table unless invited. Camilleri and his crew ate at another table on the other side of the unit and the cave dwellers usually grabbed their meals and scuttled back to their cells as quickly as they could.

Dupas did not actively seek anybody's company; rather, people sought him out obviously as a protection move. Camilleri was the exact opposite. He was a large man. He was loud. He had a real “look at me” attitude and spat the dummy whenever something didn't go his way. Camilleri wanted to enlist blokes into his crew because, when it came to the power base within the unit, they were severely undermanned.

For the first couple of weeks in the unit I said nothing to Dupas – we just made a nodding acknowledgment of each other whenever we made eye contact. It was in fact Ray Edmunds who first spoke to me and introduced himself, but he needed no introduction as I well and truly knew who he was and the despicable crimes he had been convicted of. Then, one day while walking back to my cell with my lunch, I had to walk past Dupas's table on my way. He looked up and said “Hey, Andrew, why don't you sit here and join us?” At that time only Edmunds and Dupas were sitting at the table. I'd already made a calculated judgment that the Dupas crew was far stronger than Camilleri's and when I was invited I thought I might as well get with the strength – it might at some stage come in handy if the shit did hit the fan with Camilleri. I sat down. Dupas formally introduced himself and we chatted about nothing in particular. That was the start of the ride that was going to take me into the Supreme Court of Victoria in July 2007 when I was to give evidence against Peter Dupas in his trial for the murder of Mersina Halvagis.

In Sirius East there is a garden area and within that is a vegetable patch. Dupas's only passion in life was this vegie patch. He would head out there to spend every available moment that he was allowed. He was the unit gardener, assisted by a Chinese prisoner who was in for trafficking huge amounts of heroin and blowing the proceeds at Crown Casino. My cell had a view of this garden and I used to sit and watch the two at work out there. The Chinese bloke was in protection because it was perceived in the jail community that he had a lot of money. Common sense plays no part in the thought processes in jail. What prisoners knew was that this man had lost a lot of money gambling at Crown Casino. It illogically follows in jail that, if he had that much cash to blow at the Casino, he must still have a large amount which could be scared out of him. The reality was that this bloke's assets had been seized under Proceeds of Crimes legislation, so he was effectively penniless. However, he had been hassled so much in mainstream for money that he had to be put in protection.

Dupas would get very anxious if he couldn't get out into the garden for some security reason or if he was denied anything for the garden, which regularly happened. To give you an idea of the rehabilitation deliberately withheld in prison, even though we had a vegetable garden it was virtually impossible to obtain seeds. My sister was prepared to pay for some packets of vegetable seeds to be sent in to the jail via the horticultural teacher so we could have something to grow, but her offer was declined. So we saved the seeds out of tomatoes, capsicums and chillies. Dupas would painstakingly remove the seeds and fastidiously dry them on toilet paper on his window sill. He would then sort them and plant them the next season. That was how we got our seeds.

Dupas continued in the garden and I continued doing nuts and bolts. At the end of each afternoon, the nuts and bolts workroom was left empty – no more screaming and shouting or smoke-filled air. It was deserted, quiet, relatively fresh and somewhere you could be somewhat at peace.

By the way, although smoking is banned just about everywhere in this country now, it is still permitted in jails. At Sirius East the common areas of the unit were the only places you were not allowed to smoke. One senior officer once said to me that jails run on nicotine and caffeine and it is just too hard to stop both the inmates and the screws from smoking. Each cell is full of cigarette smoke, which obviously permeates the entire unit. People also smoke outside and they smoke in the workroom. So to be able to go out to the workroom after hours and sit there in a smoke-free environment was, for somebody like me who has never smoked in his life, a blessing.

One afternoon I was sitting out in the workroom, facing the door, quietly doing nuts and bolts – lost in my thoughts, lamenting the disastrous state of my life – when Edmunds, Gorman and Dupas all wandered in over a span of a few minutes and sat down to do nuts and bolts too. At that stage I didn't socialise with anybody in the unit. I'd only been in jail a relatively short period compared with these blokes, who had done well over fifteen years each, and I didn't want to sound like I was whinging. In jail, if you have a short sentence and you complain about it to a long-termer, you are told in no uncertain terms that you copped a “drunk's lagging” and to kick along with it and stop whinging. The origin of this expression is that anyone charged with drunk and disorderly is locked up for four hours until they are sober and then they are discharged without conviction.

As a distraction from the mind-numbing activity of assembling Dynabolts, we all started talking about our respective crimes. This was the first time I'd had any discussion with any of these blokes about their offences and I was somewhat apprehensive, but, like anybody, I had a morbid fascination for what they would have to say about themselves. I stuck my hand up first, saying that I had pleaded Guilty and therefore I was guilty of what the Crown had alleged. It would have been most unwise, at that stage, to express any other view of my own culpability.

Ray Edmunds volunteered that he had committed some terrible crimes and reckoned he had paid a hefty penalty for them. He was still paying that penalty, as he had been in jail over twenty years. He said he regretted what he had done. Frankly that didn't carry much weight with me because Edmunds was now around seventy and his crimes were serial rapes and murders carried out in the most audacious manner over some years. He was clearly a recidivist who, if given the chance to be back in the community, would probably reoffend despite his advanced years.

Paul Gorman, chatting along with us, had served well in excess of ten years and was still unrepentant: he boasted that he would get out and reoffend in a very short space of time. As an example of the duty of care
not
shown by the authorities, this was the man who always volunteered to share a cell with young blokes sent to protection precisely
because
they were young and vulnerable and had malleable personalities. He would do this under the guise of helping them through a difficult period – and guess what would happen! Within a couple of days, the young bloke had been moved because he had made complaints against Gorman for unwarranted sexual advances and in some cases sexual assault. All that happened was that these blokes were moved. I understand Gorman was subsequently convicted of a jail rape and had an extra few months added to his sentence. He once said to me, in a group, it doesn't matter where you put “it” as long as it's out of sight – at which we all laughed. Now I am home, away from the jail atmosphere, I find that type of comment disgusting in the extreme.

The other person at the table on this day, Peter Dupas, sat on my right, fiddling with the nuts and bolts and just staring at the table. I can still see him now. Edmunds said, “What about you, Pete? Spit it out.” Dupas continued to look at the table. Then he said words to the effect that “I've been convicted so I've got to wear it.” That was in relation to Nicole Patterson's murder only. No other matters had reared their ugly head at this stage, even though I knew full well that the police were investigating Dupas for further crimes and that he was a red-hot suspect in at least two and probably more murders.

Time drags in jail so I don't know how long it was after this that I applied for a job in the garden. I was told by the supervisor of the unit, Mr Fox, that he would consider my request but the other blokes had the job at the time and I would be a candidate for it only if one of them left. Surprisingly he asked me whether I would be able to work with Dupas. In every other job I had in jail, I was
told
what I would be doing, not asked, and I find it significant that this officer was so concerned about Dupas that he asked me whether I could work with him.