Leviathan (51 page)

The sixty-two faces pinned to the briefing room wall offered no argument. The command's frequent fliers, the ‘recidivist offenders', stared out blankly from their photocopied CVs, their criminal histories sketching their own coarse interpretation of Mac Fields's vale of tears. It was all there. Hundreds, maybe thousands of break and enters, assaults and robberies. Car theft, domestic violence, GBH, attempted murder, drug offences, empty eyes and random fury. The radioactive glow of social meltdown almost hummed off the wall. If fifteen, twenty years of decay could produce these fine specimens, you had to wonder what another couple of decades would do.

Donovan and Shorrocks were somewhat at odds over the calibre of their patrons. ‘We're not looking at the majors,' said Mick. ‘I'll be quite candid. The sort of criminal we have in this area isn't capable of anything requiring too much intelligence. The best they can hope for is a stick-up on a building society or video store, some quick money and off they go. You're looking at jobs that don't take a lot of planning, a lot of intestinal fortitude or a lot of brains. As far as I can see we've got no real high fliers out here. There may well be people of that ilk who live in the area but they're not working here.'

Dave Shorrocks, however, was not as quick to give up on the local talent. Sure, he nodded, ninety per cent of Mac Fields armed robbery is opportunistic. ‘A walk-in. Nobody around, four in the morning, give us your money. But we keep an eye on who's been arrested elsewhere and given our patch as their address. And when you look at it we've got some good crooks living here.' Dave cited a famous criminal clan, with the patriarch, his old mum and a couple of brothers all voting locally. ‘They were organised criminals,' he said. Charged with murder and armed hold-ups. The real deal too, with shotties and fast cars, not syringes and a skateboard. Another cop said later that an old mate of Lennie McPherson reported as part of his parole conditions to the Eaglevale lock-up where he just shook his head in disgust at the antics of the junkie amateurs.

In a possible karmic payback for Mick Donovan's poor opinion of the area's talent pool, he received a call asking him to observe a search on a nearby speed lab that afternoon. I'd signed my release forms saying it wasn't their fault if I got my head shot off or anything, so Mick asked if I'd like to come and watch. In the face of my indecent enthusiasm he pointed out that the bust had already been made and we were just going to turn the place over for evidence. I must admit I was a little disappointed, having signed that release form and all.

The lab had exploded in a house across the road from an empty sports ground. It was cold when we drove over, with a persistent, drizzling rain obscuring the blank battlements of a housing estate which stared at us across the boggy oval from a small rise of ground maybe a kilometre away. The speed lab had been set up in the garage of a private house, one of a row of nondescript bungalows, of sixties or early seventies design, which hunkered down somewhat sullenly on the edge of the sporting field furthest from the housing commission land. The alleged cook, a guy we'll call Fat Aldo, lived in a wide-fronted brick number with a peeling white balustrade running across the front of the property. The front garden was covered with a lush green matting of grass from which emerged two palm trees, one potted plant and a slate mail box with an warning to junk mailers to stay the fuck away.

I chatted in a desultory fashion with Donovan as we waited in the cold car for the others to arrive. Customs were sending a guy with some piece of Stars War technology to run a scan for drug traces inside the house. A scientist from the government labs was coming to perform the test. A couple of detectives with carriage of the case were due along with a couple more who'd grabbed Fat Aldo off the street. He was a bit of a rat, they said, with a history of going for his guns when threatened with capture. It had been considered safer to put the bag on him when he was away from home and any possible weapons stash. The assorted stakeholders were coming from all over western Sydney it seemed, and the afternoon began to leak away while we waited for them. The police radio crackled into life every couple of seconds, putting cars onto burglar alarms, domestics and four Aboriginal youths smashing their way into a home at Parramatta with baseball bats.

After so many years Donovan seemed oblivious to it. He had joined the force as a cadet in 1965 and had been sworn in four years later. ‘Being a cadet was like having an apprenticeship,' he explained. ‘You learned shorthand and typing and served in various parts of the force until you were nineteen. I enjoyed it. I learned a lot from it. I do wonder whether I should have got a trade so I'd have something to fall back on, but I'm still here and I don't begrudge the time.' He said he'd moved out to the western suburbs early in his career and never really made it back to the sea. I agreed that was a bit of a shame.

A detective, nicknamed Scanners, arrived and pulled up next to us. He and Donovan knew each other and fell into conversation about that week's episode of ‘Four Corners' on the State's outlaw motorcycle gangs. It was, all agreed, a bit of a blowjob for the gangs. Lots of bikies ‘delivering pandas to sick kiddies in hospital', said Donovan. Scanners recalled a raid on one gang where they'd discovered ‘a zoo with a roo' out the back. One detective had become the object of a big red's affections, the giant marsupial constantly nuzzling and licking the man who could only try and push the animal away. But love could not be denied. The roo grabbed the man from behind and tried to mount him, to the great amusement of his colleagues. The wildlife rescue service was called to put the animal in a bag and as they were leaving the victim asked, ‘This him?' as he peeled off a round-house punch in revenge.

After nearly an hour of this, the last of the other cars arrived. Two cops cleared the house for boobytraps and lurkers while we waited outside in the chilly rain. Fat Aldo, who stood with us, did not live up to his fearsome reputation. He had red fleshy ears, drooping jowls, and unshaven he resembled a cartoon dog. Having been captured he gave the detectives no more trouble, shrugging and answering, ‘Yeah, whatever,' to most of their queries. He arrived with a windcheater thrown over his handcuffs, a middle-aged man, maybe fifty or more, with a big Roman nose, an enormous gut, short black hair going grey in places, and a splotchy red mark on his chin which became fiery when he was upset. He wore old, white leather runners, black track pants, a white T-shirt with some indecipherable motif, and his cheap sporty windcheater which he put on after his cuffs were removed. It seemed the lock-up grub was not agreeing with Aldo as he burped, hiccupped, grunted and excused himself throughout the afternoon.

With the search for boobytraps complete, everyone moved into the garage where the lab had gone up. It was crowded, with Fat Aldo, Mick Donovan, the government scientist, the customs rep, myself and half a dozen detectives, including two who videotaped the whole procedure, squeezing into the small space. The place didn't present as any sort of secret HQ for a Mr Big of the drug trade. False pine panelling covered one wall, coming away from the ceiling at one point. It was neat, however, with an old spare tyre, a whipper snipper, a cricket bat, a punching bag and a knee-high copper statue of a Spanish knight all stored away tidily. If Fat Aldo had been making any sort of money cooking up amphetamines, he had not spent it on fitting out his home in the harsh, sterile fashion invariably favoured by your successful drug barons on TV. The lounge room was not so much ‘Miami Vice' as ‘Roseanne', its white-trash battler aesthetic pithily expressed in the brown four-seater modular couch, the beige carpet, a Harley Davidson wall clock and a wine rack stocked with a few lonesome and dusty bottles of Passion Pop and Spumante.

An Abdominator, an expensive and pointless device for performing sit-ups which is generally purchased over the phone from late-night telemall shopping ads, had been abandoned on the brown couch. It was just one of many pieces of exercise equipment scattered throughout the house. There were so many weight stations, running machines and discarded pairs of jogging shoes that Fat Aldo's jumbo girth initially struck me as something of a mystery, until Mick Donovan explained the equipment had been left behind by the other members of the drug ring who cleared out after the explosion. Aldo had tried to explain their presence by claiming he had simply sublet the spare rooms to some mystery guys who, unbeknownst to him, had immediately set about brewing up industrial-sized tubs of dangerous drugs in the laundry. Apart from the athletic gear, the mystery guys had left almost no trace of their presence. The searchers moved through the house finding nothing until somebody turned over two thousand dollars and three bullets in the doona on Fat Aldo's bed.

‘Me savings!' he blurted out. ‘You're not getting that. That's me life savings! They come in here last week, little bastards, and went through the place but they missed me savings!'

The cops tried to convince him his ‘savings' were safe, Donovan saying, ‘We're not gonna take your money, Aldo; we have to log it though.'

‘But that's me savings,' he protested. ‘You're not getting it. You can't have 'em. That's all I got. Just leave 'em in the doona when you counted it.'

Donovan refused. The house had been burgled a week earlier, probably by kids from the estate, and as Mick pointed out, it wouldn't look good if they put the money back in the doona only to have it disappear after another B&E. Aldo was suspicious but calmed down a little when they placed the cash inside his bumbag. The three bullets went into an evidence bag. They finished up in the bedroom and returned to the garage where the boffins were busy taking swabs from the walls and floor. The garage roll-a-door was open and local mums, picking their kids up from the nearby school, were wandering past and staring. Fat Aldo, worried what the neighbours might think, asked the cops to pull down the door. ‘You know what people around here are like,' he muttered as the customs device chimed, alerting everyone to the presence of MDEA in the most recent swab. The cops brightened and Aldo slumped a little. When a few minutes later the computer toned an alert for THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, Fat Aldo made a play at suggesting his teenage son had been sneaking into the laundry for sly cones behind his back. Everyone smiled as if to say, ‘Yeah, Aldo, whatever'.

The testing procedure ate up two or three hours, a major improvement on the twelve hours it used to take in the days before mobile crime labs and superpowerful laptop computers. But it was still cold and wet and after a while the cops began to shift from foot to foot, stamping as the chill crept up through their legs from the cement floor. The procedure was slow and painstaking, swabbing walls, doors and ceilings, running the test, dropping the swab into a bag with a note of the location where it had been taken. The swabs had to be handled with tweezers and could not be allowed to fall on the floor. During the many hours needed to tag and bag the evidence, the men grew bored and like any public servants they fell into discussing promotions and postings. When that petered out they were reduced to remarking on how much time this new technology saved, about how awful it had been having to stand around for up to twelve hours on jobs like this. ‘Yeah,' said someone, ‘it's great technology, but think how much trouble we'll be in when it can test for semen and lipstick.' Everyone laughed for the first time that afternoon. Even Fat Aldo.

 

Fat Aldo's place was what the cops and the tabloids call a ‘drug house', which conjures up images of reinforced steel doors and firing loops to poke your AK-47 through. But Sydney's drug houses are not like crack houses in New York, said Donovan, where you have to drive a battering ram through the front door. ‘Anywhere drugs are sold or stored is a drug house. There could be thousands out here. Most are very low level.' It's a righteous certainty that every one of the frequent fliers on the wall upstairs at Mac Fields lives in a drug house. Without the resources to send people in undercover, the command, like most others in the city, relies on a form of tactical harassment, sending squad cars past, parking random breath-test units outside the house, noting the details of everyone who comes and goes and passing the information on to Dave Shorrocks's intelligence section. ‘We chase away the customers,' shrugged Donovan.

Most of the work done by the constables takes place at this bargain basement level. Although they are encouraged to follow through on simple investigations, they are rarely if ever involved in gigs like Fat Aldo's. Their shifts, which last twelve hours, are a catherine wheel of speed and movement. The command is huge and crisscrossed by thousands of kilometres of roads, streets and cul de sacs. They run through the sprawling blighted public housing estates, the newer denser private developments and even a tiny millionaires' enclave where the descendants of the Macarthur clan have circled their wagons. So large is the command that officers stationed there for three or four years still get lost. I was riding along in a wagon one afternoon when a call to assist a lone female officer wrestling with a man outside a bank came through. Our driver kicked in the afterburners for nearly ten minutes and still couldn't get to the scene before it was over.

Misery's fallout generates the bulk of police business; break and enters, domestic violence and assaults. ‘I have people here who've been victims of domestic violence fifteen times,' said Wales. ‘I have two people out knocking on doors, looking at repeat victims. But some won't listen, won't talk to us, won't let us in the front door. I don't even know if we're scratching the surface. The community groups tell us the women accept it as a fact of life. Dad did it to mum, they just expect it themselves. There is a resistance to change.'

That resistance or apathy (or acceptance of ‘a lot not now to be altered' to recall Watkin Tench's phrase), is one of the greatest frustrations of the uniformed constable. Late one afternoon, with the last of the day's warmth rapidly disappearing, two of them, Paul Doyen and Matthew Sheahan, were taking me through Mortimer Street, widely thought of as the worst in the command. Every New Year's Eve for the past couple of years the locals had stolen a car and burned it to celebrate. The blaze was usually so hot it melted the bitumen, and as we drove through I could see the outlines of previous bonfires in the surface of the road, like the ghosts of New Years past advancing down the street. Doyen, the senior cop, was trying to explain the learned helplessness so prevalent amongst the poor, telling me how, a few months after the Housing Commission installed smoke detectors in its properties, the police started taking calls to come fix them because the batteries had run down and the warning chirps were driving everyone crazy. His young partner, who had moved down from Queensland, was recounting a story about a guy who was always using his ‘emergency dial out only' phone for requesting emergency pizza deliveries, when the radio crackled out a request for a unit to attend the first domestic of the evening.