The Joe Walker Podcast - Lifting The Veil On Sydney's Crime And Skulduggery - Kate McClymont

Episode Date: September 30, 2019

Kate McClymont is Australia's most awarded journalist. An investigative reporter at The Sydney Morning Herald, she is famous...See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You're listening to the Jolly Swagman Podcast. Here's your host, Joe Walker. Hello there, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, swagmen and swagettes. Welcome back to the show. It's great to be back. I hope you are well. This episode might be one that's more for the Australian listeners, if I'm being completely honest. It is fairly parochial in parts, so sorry to my international audience, although of course, you're still more than welcome to listen. Just promise me that you won't get the wrong impression of our beautiful city of Sydney. My guest is Kate McClymont. Kate is an investigative journalist at the Sydney Morning Herald, where she's worked more or less continuously since 1985. Kate's

specialty is exposing crime and corruption. And in so doing, she has become the most awarded journalist in Australia since 1992. She has won no fewer than seven Walkley Awards, including Australian Journalism's greatest honour, a Gold Walkley, which she won for her coverage of the salary cap scandal that saw the rugby league team, the Canterbury Bankstown Bulldogs, thrown out of the National Rugby League competition. It's fair to say that Kate might understand Sydney's criminal underworld better than some of its own participants. Former Labor MP Eddie Obeid, a long-run bettanoir of Kate's who now resides in prison as a result of Kate's reporting, once said of her, quote, she has become the journalistic equivalent of a gun mole with glittering associations with the not so well to do. Kate often risks her own safety

in exposing Sydney's underbelly and in so doing receives death threats. She once said of those who she investigates who sent her death threats to cease her reporting that, quote, I would like people to know that it just makes it worse for you. If you're going to threaten to kill me, I will just keep going. End quote. How could you not love someone like Kate McClymont? So, without much further ado, please enjoy our conversation. Kate McClymont, thanks for joining me. My pleasure. Very happy to speak to you. One of the reasons I wanted to meet you was I have a real thing for investigative journalists.

Right. Yes. Had your colleague Adele Ferguson on the podcast. But there's some kind of skin in the game thing that I find very honourable about the profession. You take downside risks in your work. Oh, I wish there was more upside risks. But I mean, how many death threats have you had in your life? Can you count them?

Well, I think I've had three. I mean, three sort of serious ones. Right. And other ones, yes, other ones. I had a disturbing one about 18 months ago and it was a – somebody had set up a website with my name and had put all this stuff on there and had sent me a photo of myself with masking tape over my face. And it was – I have to say, that was kind of unsettling.

A bit visual. Yes. Yes. But I've had them, yes, we've had to move out of our home in the past. But now that my children are grown up, it's something that I don't worry about as much as I used to. I was more worried about anything that might happen to them. But about myself, I don't worry too much.

What's your protocol when you get a death threat? Look, you have to tell your work. And depending on the level of seriousness, you have to tell the police. Right. I read someone gave you this advice that it's the death threats that you don't receive. Well, those are the ones you should worry about. A police officer once said, look, if it's any consolation, it's the people that you have to worry about are the ones that aren't threatening you. I thought, oh, my God, there's a lot of them.

It's making me more worried. So I want to discuss some of the stories you've broken across your long and storied career and then draw out some of the principles and patterns that we might learn from them. But first, I want to ask you about when you were busking in King's Cross as a university student. This is kind of like your log cabin story, isn't it? I know. Well, I sort of think it's kind of funny that I'm sure that that's the only reason I got a cadetship at the Herald was because they thought that was really funny. And what it was, was that, you know, I have absolutely no singing or dancing capability whatsoever, but I can talk so I had the busking booth was questions answered 40 cents arguments 50 cents and verbal abuse one dollar and it was amazing how many young men would come

along and pay me a dollar to have their girlfriends abused so the first thing I would say was what a appalling taste they had in that boyfriend but But you never saw it the other way around. Girls didn't pay a dollar to have their boyfriends abused. I think very interesting. Maybe times have changed. It'd be interesting to see what the pattern would be now. But I mean, I don't want to make too much of that experience because I'm sure you were very good at talking to people

across all walks of life before that. You're a country girl, aren't you? Yes, yes. And look, I think that has been perhaps one of the secrets to my journalistic success is that I genuinely like people. I'm interested in them. I'm interested in what they're doing. And I like talking to them. It doesn't matter what kind of person they are. And I think it's that ability, hopefully, to put people at ease. Because the thing about journalism, especially when a lot of it is just over the phone, you have to make some kind of connection to the person that you're talking to. You have to weigh up pretty quickly

how you can relax that person, how you can gain their trust, and how you can keep them talking. And they're absolutely vital tools for any kind of journalist really. Do you have any tricks that you use consciously? I don't like to think of them as tricks. Sure.

But the most essential thing is to put somebody at their ease. And I find now that if I ring up and I say, oh, it's Kate McClymont here, you can hear. So you have to say fairly quickly, look, I'm just hoping that you might be able to help me. It's always better if you can, you know, seek input and information from another person. You know, it's, it's, that's something that people generally relax about, that they might be of assistance. Yeah, so I try to relax people by saying, you know,

I'm hoping that you might be able to help me. Got it. Did you kill your mother? How much skullduggery really lurks beneath Sydney's polite veneer? So much it's hard to even begin to tell you. And the thing is, is that like a lot of the people that I deal with, I mean, a lot of criminals are basically, they're criminals because they're not very smart,

but the white collar criminals get away with it because they are clever. Like the amount of insider trading, you know, swapping of confidential information, getting a tip off that, you know, such and such a land is about to be rezoned. That's the top end of town and that's where the real money is. But interestingly enough, a lot of, say, bikey gangs and things like that, they have partially moved their business from typical drug importations and drug distribution to things like mortgage fraud, which I find a really interesting development because it's harder to detect.

It's much harder to prove and to track down. But I think that that's an interesting movement in the criminal milieu. I was going to ask you if there was anything especially venal about Sydney. You might have hinted at an answer there. We do have a very frothy property market here. But that's the thing. Like where there is money to be made, you will find criminality. Yeah.

And I think Sydney with its land, its property prices, there's always money to be paid there. I mean, I think we're basically a town of speculators, really. Going back to the earliest days, Governor Macquarie put a ban on land speculation in the early days of the colony. Oh, yeah, and also on the rum trade. I think that was a big one too. And that's the other thing. As soon as you make something illegal, its value on the black market automatically rises. I mean, you just look at the bootlegging during the prohibition era in the US.

Because the supply is restricted. Yes. Once the supply is restricted, demand goes up and people are happy to pay for it. And I sometimes wonder about drug decriminalization, whether the rates of addiction I think overseas have not gone up when things like cannabis have been decriminalized. So it would be interesting to see what would happen here. A great economist, Charles Kindleberger, who was one of the original students of bubbles, he wrote a book called Mania's Panics and Crashes,

which is kind of one of the seminal texts in economic bubble literature, once wrote that fraud and swindling are demand determined. So all these people come out of the woodwork in a very frothy market. But it's interesting to hear you say that bikies have been exploiting mortgage fraud. How would a bikie profit from mortgage fraud? Okay, so what happens, and this happened to the head of the Hells Angels, Felix Lyle, who had been drummed out of the, well, in fact, he became the head of the Hells Angels, Felix Lyle, who had been drummed out of the – well, in fact, he became the head of the Bandidos, but he'd been drummed out of the Hells Angels for not being of good character.

I love that, that you can be expelled from a bikey gang for not being – perhaps it wasn't – yes. Anyway, so what he and a group of other people had done was that they realised that financial institutions wouldn't send somebody out to do a valuation on properties of less than, say, $250,000. So they would identify, you know, like a garage in Leichhardt. And they would, you know, falsify. They would get a loan. They would put it in Leichhardt. And they would falsify, they would get a loan, they would put it in somebody else's name. The valuation might have been worth $20,000.

Suddenly it would become $250,000. They'd get the money and then they'd run off with it. And then when the person defaulted, they would find that they'd actually lent money on a, you know, a tiny garage. And they did that also by stealing title deeds to people's houses, you know, doing all kinds of measures that basically just involves financial institutions, you know, perhaps not doing their due diligence. And, you know, that was what, in fact, eventually brought Felix Lyle down. He was jailed over that. So it wasn't the, you know, amphetamine trafficking or any of the accused standover work he'd done. No, it was mortgage fraud that, you know, brought him down.

And in the end, he was deported back to England for not being of good character. So, yes, so his character test failed him on many occasions. If there was one industry or sector in Sydney that you'd love to shine a spotlight on and know everything there is to know about it transparently, which would it be? Where do you think the most corruption is?

I think apart from property developing and land and local councils, which I think is absolutely rife, I think white-collar crime and insider trading, that would be just absolutely, you know, fantastic to have a good look at that. But of course that relies on whistleblowers and also on patterns of buying that would only really be able to be looked at by ASIC. So unless someone's going to leak you that information that's hard to determine really. I want to ask you about Eddie Obeid because you had a – I would love to talk about Eddie Obeid.

You can't? Look, the only thing is that he is about to face a criminal trial and he's just had his trial put off because of mentions of him and his behaviour. Can we talk about anything relating to Eddie Obeid? Look, I think it might be advisable as much as it is one of my all-time favourite subjects. I just think for the sake of not being in contempt of court and not – I think it would be best that, yes, we look elsewhere.

All right. All right. I don't want to be held in contempt. No. Or you. No. I want to ask you about your first ever death threat. I think you're about my age and you're working over in Bondi Junction,

where I now live. Can you tell us that story? I believe it involved a wedding. Well, yes. So as a cadet, you were dispatched to various rounds and this was when the Herald actually had, you know, like a vast empire. So we had a Northern Herald and we had an Eastern Herald. And they were basically supplements that appeared in the main Herald once a week. So I was dispatched to be the writer of a column called Chums,

which sort of was meant to be this, you know, eastern suburbs, you know, bouffant hair, shoulder pads, who was doing what at, you know, fabulous cocktail parties. And I soon became very tired of that. So I took myself off to the chapel at King Coppel Rose Bay where a major underworld figure, George Freeman, his sister-in-law was getting married and his wife was one of the bridesmaids and his son was the page boy. Anyway, I thought I was being hilarious by writing that the bridesmaids were wearing sequins, which was the closest fashion accessory allowable, you know, apart from wearing armour plating. And also we had a photo of George Freeman and his bodyguard who was this big, you know, meat-headed lump of a man.

And at the time there was a very popular British TV series called Minder. And there was a small time underworld figure that had a minder. And the theme song was I could be so good for you. And that was the title of our caption under George Freeman and his minder. But the other thing that made me laugh at the time was that we had a photo of George Freeman's son, Adam, carrying, you know, a beautiful embroidered pillow with the ring on it. And fast forward, sort of like, you know, 21 years, and there is Adam in jail for some offence. And I thought, oh, you know, and he started off so innocently. But anyway, so George Freeman did not see the humour in my story about the wedding of his sister-in-law.

And so I started getting these threats at my house. And I told the, you know, I eventually told the police and, you know and I had to tell work and they put a trace on my – at the time we only had landlines. They put a trace on my phone. I never got one more call and it later turned out that George Freeman had been tipped off by the police. So I sort of felt at the time, you know, maybe people thought I was making it up but my flatmates complained

because they were answering the phone as well with, George is not happy. Have you ever had your phone tapped? Yes, yes. How do you know when a phone your phone tapped? Yes, yes. How do you know when a phone's been tapped? You don't. But sometimes you can hear sort of like a double echo at the beginning. But also my calls have appeared on other people's tapped phones as well.

Like, you know, you're ringing up and, you know, suddenly, you know, in some inquiry later on, you know, there's your voice on the phone. But there was a very funny moment when I was covering the murder trial of Ron Medich and they played this phone tap and his assistant, a lucky Gattolari who'd carried out the murder on his behalf, said, hey, Ron, your number one fan's been on the phone to me, that Kate McClymont. And Ron, in his high-pitched squeak, says,

ah, she never writes anything but rubbish about me. It's all rubbish. And Lucky said, you know, hold on, hold on. She's actually making inquiries about me. So after that, when I used to see, you know, hold on, hold on, she's actually making inquiries about me. So after that when I used to see, you know, I'd pass Ron, I'd say, hello, Ron, it's your number one fan here and he never thought that was the slightest bit funny. Let me ask you about that whole saga.

So you just have a book out called Dead Man Walking. That's right. About Ron Medich's contract killing of Michael McGurk. Who was Michael McGurk? Michael McGurk was a very upmarket, shifty shyster from Cremorne. He was a spiv in a suit. And, you know, the things that he had on the boil, you know, just about all of them involved a degree of criminality.

So at the time of his death, he was actually blackmailing the Sultan of Brunei, you know, the world's richest man. And previously he had tried to sell the Sultan a matchbox-size miniature Koran that he'd bought from a KGB colonel in Moscow and then tried to sell it to the Sultan for $8 million. And at the time the Sultan was about to marry a, I think it was wife number three, who was a beautiful young Malaysian newsreader and McGurk was trying to get him to buy it as a wedding gift

for his new bride but the wedding came and went and there was no such sale. So McGurk did what he always did which was start suing people and it was the most ludicrous suit ever because another typical thing of not just Michael McGurk but Ron Medich, there never seemed to be any paperwork involved in any of their deals. So he claimed that he had an oral contract to sell the miniature Quran to the Sultan of Brunei. And so he started a lawsuit in the New South Wales Supreme Court that sadly it went all the way to the High Court. He lost at every turn. But that didn't stop him.

And I can't tell you the details of what he was trying to blackmail the Sultan over because it's still the subject of a worldwide suppression order that the Sultan took out in jurisdictions all over the world. Wow. Yeah, so that was just one thing that he had on the boil. He's a fascinating character. I mean, so he's a Glaswegian originally?

Yes. Yeah. Yes. And he also had, he was embroiled with standing over good friends of Felix Lyle, as we mentioned, the former bikey boss. Yeah. He'd, you know, fraudulently – you know, like even his own house, he had borrowed – you know, the house was mortgaged about eight times over

and, you know, he was always desperate for money. So he'd gone to get another loan against the house was mortgaged about eight times over. And he was always desperate for money. So he'd gone to get another loan against the house. But of course, there were caveats on the house. And a caveat is a legal title that expresses that the caveator has an interest in that house. So he just simply made up the name of a solicitor, made up the name of a JP, fraudulently removed those titles so he could borrow more money. There was absolutely no skullduggery that was below him. And at the time of his death, he was actually embroiled in legal actions with Ron Medich. And Ron Medich, I soon discovered, lived up to his nickname, which was Cotties, because he was like the thick and rich ice cream flavoured topping. As in stupid but wealthy.

Stupid but wealthy. And Ron Medich had made an absolute fortune when he was in business with his younger brother, Roy. And it soon turned out that you realize that Roy was the brains of the operation. dispute and fell apart, so did Ron. You know, Ron just became this magnet for a whole lot of ne'er-do-wells eager to get part of his fortune. And in Ron's life, there was always a central acolyte, but a new acolyte would come along and what they had to do was to get rid of the previous one. Kind of like the Sith. Yes, exactly. So McGurk had done that to the previous one and then, you know,

Medich had stupidly given McGurk his power of attorney for a week. And McGurk went out and bought not one but two properties, lied to Medich, you know, with Ron's money and said that, you know, he'd bought them for, you know, say $6 million when he in fact bought them for $3 million. He'd pocketed the difference. And it was only when Ron's much smarter wife, Odetta, cottoned on to this, that McGurk came unstuck as Medici's favourite. And at the time of his murder, they were embroiled in legal actions about this rip-off. These two former friends. Yes, the two former friends. But, you know, how I got onto the story in the first place was that somebody had tipped me off that there was a firebombing in Wolseley Road in Point Piper.

Now, Wolseley Road is the most expensive strip of real estate in Australia. So, you know, you can imagine, you know, firebombing. And it turned out that… And the 10th most expensive strip in the world. In the entire world, exactly. So it turned out that McGurk, I'm sorry, Medic had moved from the western suburbs at the bequest of his, you know, second wife, Odetta, who'd come from Lithuania.

And they'd bought a house in Wolseley Road and then as you do do you haven't even moved in when you find an even better house in the same street so that left Ron to offload the first house so he sold it to Adam Tilly who didn't have the money to buy the house so Ron lent him the money to buy his old house and when he didn't pay back the money Ron employed McGurk to get it from him. So at first McGurk tried what he liked best was lawsuits and then he went on to what he liked second best which was extortion, firebombing, and he'd actually been charged with the firebombing of not only that house, but also the house of a valuer that McGurk had been trying to get to revalue properties for twice their value, and also the Balmoral house of a high-profile real estate agent, Justin Brown.

And so the police charged him because they were worried that he was actually going to kill somebody. But it was that, you know, and we couldn't work out at the time why McGurk had originally tried, you know, to sue Adam Tilley and then somehow it had all turned around and now Medich and McGurk were at each other's necks and Medich was now suing Tilly himself so it was all over this one house but the way all the you know the finances were done and people falling in and out of favor with other

people it was all craziness and I can understand why it took the police a year to make the arrests because as people told us at the time like there were so many people that wanted mcgurk dead could have been you know any number of people um you know were suspects so you know when you are the police not only do you have to prove who did do it, but the defence is going to offer up a whole lot of other suspects. So you have to have done enough work to eliminate them as a suspect. So there was quite a lot of work done, you know, along those lines. I imagine that would slow things down in McGurk's case. Yes. I want to come back to McGurk's character briefly

because just the incredible chutzpah of this man would shock many of us. So he's born in Glasgow in 1964. Correct. Difficult childhood, alcoholic parents, kind of quite a distant abusive mother and father for that matter. Yeah. Well, I think his parents split up when he was small and he went off to um so his mother only took um you know two children with her and left

the older two children with the father so um he's two older brothers yeah the two older brothers stayed with the father and i think one became a became a rather feared standover man whose name was Jake Hatchet McGurk. It's a very Scottish nickname. I know, exactly. But it was interesting because I think that McGurk definitely seemed to have sociopathic tendencies. And early on, he moved to a town in Germany that was Kaiserslautern or otherwise known as K-Town, and there was a big American military base there. And he was selling Mercedes-Benzes. This is in his 20s?

Yeah, this is in his 20s. So he told this serviceman that he would give him, you know, there was a huge discount on the Mercedes if you paid in cash. So the guy, you know, gets the cash, comes in. McGurk basically takes the bag of cash and scoots straight out the back door. It's like 50,000 US dollars. Yes, it was an enormous amount of money and wasn't seen for dust. And the same thing happened here.

His first job, he arrived in Australia in his late 20s and his first job was at a Jaguar dealership in Hornsby and he was fired for basically giving false promises to clients saying, if you buy this car, I will throw in an air conditioner or, you know, what do you call those open roof things? What are they called? On a car? Yeah. Yeah, I can't remember.

Well, we know what we mean. Anyway, sunroof. He would throw in those things and, of course, they would buy the car and then he would renege on the deal. And that's what he would do his entire life. He was this extraordinary salesman who just lied and cheated his way. But he also did it to fellow parents. There was this... Of his children's

school. Of his children's school. Apart from flogging knock-off Louis Vuitton handbags to the mothers at the school. He had two of his oldest sons, you know, fathers from Riverview, had given him money for a business deal and the money had disappeared. So they organised to have coffee to basically say to him, look, enough's enough. We need our money back. And he just slid across the coffee table a piece of paper that was a timetable of where their children had been the previous week.

You know, the daughter, you know, at ballet, you know, the son at soccer training and then just said, do you really want to pursue this? Like, it was extraordinary. And at the time of his death, he'd been let off the firebombing charges. And that is still a great mystery because even though it was circumstantial, the three people and a couple of assaults all had one thing in common, and that was Michael McGurk. And I sort of feel if the DPP had proceeded with those criminal charges, he might not have been murdered. But, you know, be that as it may. So at the time he had been charged with these firebombings, he had hired thugs to stand over and assault people he was trying to get money from. This was even while he was facing criminal

charges for firebombing and assault. He was still doing it. And all of this beneath this veneer of a successful Sydney businessman with a lovely mansion in Cremorne. Yeah, the four children, the fancy cars. I read your book had the perfect description of his house, which is where he was ultimately murdered. We'll come to that eventually. And you described the dog's leg road and also the tennis court in the pool,

which you put in despite council restrictions. Illegally, yes. I went on Google Maps on, it was Campbell Avenue. Cranbrook Avenue. Cranbrook Avenue, sorry. And straight away, that's the house. Oh, yes. Tennis court, the pool and the dog's leg road, yeah.

But when I was reading your book and reflecting on this extraordinary character, I mean, there's almost a sense in which someone like McGurk, as much as I hate to say it, is eventually going to end up dead and not due to natural causes. If you take enough of these little risks in life, the probability adds up. But I was thinking about, I realized when I was reading your book, the historical analog for Michael McGurk is John Law, who was another Scotsman on the make. He was born in Edinburgh, not Glasgow. And Law was a murderer. He challenged one of his neighbors, a neighbor who was disgruntled with Law and his wife, to a duel and killed the neighbour and fled Edinburgh to Amsterdam in his, I believe, his early 20s.

Law was a flawed financial genius, a compulsive gambler and a bit of a scallywag. That is very similar. Yeah, I don't think... And what time period are we talking about here? So this is the early 18th century. Right, okay. But Law's story gets more interesting because he eventually, the chutzpah of Law, he persuaded the French government to some scheme which became the Mississippi Bubble.

So, the word bubble comes from French boule, B-U-L-L-E, and that word comes from the Mississippi bubble, which broke down in May 1720. So, that was law. And then he was on the run again from the French government. Actually, funnily enough, the word millionaire came from, it was originally used to describe the beneficiaries of law's scheme in France back in 1719. But I 1719 um but but i thought yeah michael mcgurk is a is a john law um but but something striking about both characters is their ability to i mean they they need to move on to new targets because they they burn the bridge yes they need to find new new sources new targets but every time they are incredibly charismatic and persuasive until they milk someone dry. Right.

But that's the thing. And I think to be a successful fraudster, you do need to have superficial charm. You do need to have that chutzpah to convince people to do what you want them to do. Did you find McGurk charming? Look, I think I have dealt with so many people, not like him, but I felt I could see through him and I could tell that he was trying to use me and my colleague, Vanda McGurk, Vanda McGurk, Vanda Carson, sorry. And I'll just step back a bit. So Vanda and I, and at the time Vanda Carson was a business reporter

at the Herald, we'd both hit upon exactly the same story, which was about the firebombing of the house. It was about a $17 million lawsuit. And it was about the funny, strange relationship between Michael McGurk, Ron Medich, and the fight about the Adam Tilly house and the mortgage. So this is how you entered the picture? Yes. So we did a front page story on this and we hadn't been able to get onto Michael McGurk despite our best efforts because he was down at the snow. So when he came back from the snow, he wanted to talk. And I was expecting this,

you know, him to be incredibly angry because he had featured as a fire bomber and a lender of last resort. So we met him for lunch and the things that he told us over that lunch later transpired to be absolutely spot on, like details of corruption and things that were happening. But I could tell he was using us, he was trying to get on our good side to divert attention away from himself and towards his nemesis, Ron Medich. Everything that he was telling sort of was pointing towards, you've got to look at Ron Medich, you've got to look at the rezoning of his land at Badger East Creek, you've got to look at the Medich. You've got to look at the rezoning of his land at

Badger East Creek. You've got to look at the fact that he had, you know, Graham Richardson, the former Labor power broker, on his payroll as a lobbyist. You know, these are all things that are worth looking at. Anyway, so in between publishing the story and having lunch with him, the thing about secret that earlier in the year of his death, McGurk had secretly recorded a conversation with Ron Medich. So sometime early 2009. Yeah, it was in February 2009. He was murdered in September 2009. So he'd secretly recorded this conversation

and he was using that as an attempt to blackmail, stroke, extort money from Medich. So, you know, we asked him about the tape and he sort of said, oh, what do you know about it? And so we said, oh, well, we've heard this, we've heard this and he didn't dissuade us from any of that. He just said, look, you know, yes, I have a tape, but the time's not right yet.

Anyway, so over the next, that was the 29th of July we had lunch and then over the next couple of weeks he kept ringing. You know, he'd drop off, you know, title deeds to Badgerys Creek and he'd do this and he'd do that, all trying to get us to look at Ron Medich. And I kept saying to him, but look at him for what? Oh, you know, the man's a criminal. And I said, yeah, but you haven't given any evidence. It's all very well for you to say that.

Can't write a story. We can't write a story. Anyway, so on August, I think it was the 19th, the charges against him for the firebombing were dropped. And we had written a story saying, OK, still a mystery. The firebombing charges have been dropped. If McGurk didn't do it, who did? And we repeated the curious story about the house and we now had more information about McGurk and Medich and their fights.

Anyway, he rang up that morning and he was really angry and said, you don't get it. Ron Medich has a hit out on me. He's going to have me killed and lucky Gadolari is going to do it. And I just thought, you know honestly people will say anything to get you to do a story so you can imagine my shock when 10 days later i get a call at home half an hour after the incident has happened to say that mcgurk's been shot dead in front of his nine-year-old son outside his house. You just think, oh, you know, it was just terrible,

like really terrible. Take us through the day of the murder. You mean from the point of view of what the participants were doing? Yes. Well, the funny thing is that we actually thought that the murder was a professional hit. But when it all came out later, it was anything but. So Lucky Gadolari had said to the hit man was, in fact, a guy called Hassam Safetli, who was a 43-year-old accountant. Oh, he wasn't an accountant, sorry.

He'd been working as the general manager of a Pimble accountancy firm only in the months leading up to becoming a paid assassin. And his co-accused, as it turned out, was a 19-year-old kid called Christopher Estefan, who was a friend of Sir Fetley's nephew. So this was, I think, the third time on the 3rd of September that there'd been an attempt to kill McGurk. Only a couple of weeks earlier, there'd been three car loads of potential hit men. One car load with Saffetly in it, one with Estefan in it, and one with these two other brothers who Saffetly was paying to try and do the hit for them. So the three car loads had all met outside McGurk's house, but the house was dark. And then they decided perhaps they wouldn't break in because they didn't know where the bedroom was.

So then they all packed up and went home again. So we fast forward to this day and Lucky Gattalari had said to them, you know, I need you to give me 24 hours notice of when you're going to do it so we can make sure that we're in a public place. So Sir Fetley texted him the day before and said the tyres are about to be delivered but I think you know they were so stupid they kept getting confused as to what the codes were so they'd forgotten that the tyres being delivered was the code for the murder happening. Anyway, Lucky and Ron and Lucky's right-hand man, a former Bosnian soldier, Senad Kamenic, that had lunch at the same restaurant that is now the centre of an ICAC inquiry where the Chinese friends of Labour had dinner.

So they had lunch there. Then they went downstairs in the same Haymarket. It's Market City down in Sydney's Chinatown. They went downstairs to where they went most days, which was to the Babylon Massage Parlour. So they went down there where they, you know, enjoyed themselves. Yes, got a massage, had a happy ending. And then I think Lucky and Sennard drove home and Ron went to have drinks with his stockbroker, Gerard Farley, in Bly Street. Now, so while all this is happening, Sir Fetley and Estefan are outside McGurk's house

in Cremorne. And Sir Fetley, you know, becomes quite agitated. You know, neither of them have done this before. So they need a drink to soothe their nerves so so fetley dispatches the 19 year old down the street you know to there's a little group of shops and there's a bottle shop down there to buy a bottle of bourbon but the kid gets down there he's not old enough to buy alcohol and because he hasn't got an id they say look I'm terribly sorry but we can't serve you so back he goes and then Sir Fetley goes to the bottle shop so here are the two would-be murderers both seen at the scene just before the murder so Sir Fetley comes you know buys the bottle of bourbon is swigging it as he goes back to the car.

And then at 6.35, McGurk comes home with his child, his nine-year-old boy. And the thing is, is that to this day, the police aren't sure which of them pulled the trigger. But one of them kills McGurk and then the 19 year old who's lost his license almost crashes the car at the first roundabout they then get on to military road where there's CCTV footage of them driving along they don't have an e-tag, so they're photographed going across the bridge. And then, as Basim Safetli was later to tell people, this is Hayes' brother, Bas, Hassam and Basim, as they were called. He tells people that on the night of the murder, they throw their clothes in to a bin when they get home to burn them.

And then his brother remembers that some of the murder money is in the back pocket. So he burns his fingers trying to get his clothes back out again. And as his brother said to Senator Kamenich, and people thought that this was a professional hit. Look at them. And you do think, you know, it was like the very next morning. So it hasn't even been 24 hours and Sir Fetley is still so pumped up. He pays for his girlfriend, Crystal,

pays for a taxi to come from Annandale out to Elderslie. It was like a $300 cab fare. And then shows her that morning's paper and basically says, I did that. So she knows. Like everyone seems to have known. And not only that, both Lucky and Hassam Safetli had offered the contract killing to almost everyone they met.

Like Hassam Safetli only did it in the end because he'd accepted the money but then he'd paid one person $100,000 to do the hit and they'd used it as a deposit on a house. So they were just like really like idiots. So is that how much you get paid for a contract killing in Sydney, a hundred grand? Look, I think it depends on who you want killed and why you want them killed.

But I think the entire cost for, it wasn't just the contract killing of McGurk, it was also the subsequent intimidation of McGurk's widow, Kimberley. And I think that was a crucial part of the conviction of Ron Medich for the murder, because the defence had tried to say that Lucky Gadolari had done this on his own because Ron Medich, as you do, had invested $16 million into Lucky's failing electrical businesses. He'd already invested money into Lucky's failed winery, into Lucky's failed function centre, Lucky's failed Aboriginal funeral fund. Everything that Lucky touched was a financial disaster, but it never stopped Ron Medich from ploughing more money in. But the thing that didn't make

sense was that the only person who was chasing Michael McGurk's widow for money was Ron Medich. And there were phone taps with Ron Medich saying to anyone who would listen, she's got to be taught a lesson. You know, she can't go on doing this. You know, she's a crook like her husband. So he was the only one with the motive to intimidate Kimberley. Lucky had no motive to do that. So I think that was important for the jury to intimidate Kimberley. Lucky had no motive to do that. So I think that was important for the jury to see not only the murder

but the intimidation as, you know, two linked crimes. Now, how many years did it take the police to eventually charge and arrest Medich? Well, it took them 13 months to charge and arrest Lucky, Senad Kamenich, Estefan and Sifetli. But the funny thing was they didn't arrest Ron Medich. And at the time I kept thinking, well, have we been wrong all this time, presuming that Ron Medich was the mastermind? But what had happened was that the police had initially got enough information to charge Sir Fetley because the girlfriend, he'd started harassing the girlfriend.

She had taken an AVO out and she said, the reason why I'm frightened is this is what he did to Michael McGurk they also had one of the um uh one of the enforcers that Sir Fetley had paid the hundred thousand dollars to to to do the hit um he had been caught doing something else and in order to minimize his sentence he said i will give you the murder of michael mcgurk so they had they basically had sefetly but they needed to put pressure on him to bring in other people so he wore a wire and he taped Senate Kamenich and Lucky Gadolari. So they had enough information to charge them. What they were hoping to do was then to wire up Lucky Gadolari to bring in Medich, but they were worried that Lucky and Ron and Kamenich might kill Sifetli because he was

capable of bringing them all undone. So they made their arrests and at that time, they didn't have enough information to arrest Medich because Lucky had handled all the arrangements. Saffetli, the murderer, had only one meeting ever with Medich and that's when a month before the murder, Lucky had introduced him to Ron and said, you've just got to say you're the new guy, even though he was going to be doing the contract killing for months but just couldn't bring himself to do it.

So there was only that one meeting. So Saffetli really couldn't give evidence enough to implicate Ron in the murder. So it was interesting what happens when you have money, what justice can buy. Because upon his arrest, Lucky got a message to Ron Medich saying, I'll need a million dollars for both bail and for my defense. And Ron walked away. And, you know, Gadalari couldn't believe it. He'd done this murder for this man.

This had been his closest friend, and he was just letting him take the rap for the murder. So it was only after he realised that Ron was just abandoning him that he started to talk to police. and it was about a fortnight after his arrest that they then charged Ron Medich with the murder so you know really lucky Gadalari was the key and you know perhaps the only witness that the jury relied on to have a guilty verdict against Medich. Wow. I really want to ask you some general patterns and principles now, but I actually think it's worth stopping at one other story briefly before we do that. In, I think it was 1995 or thereabouts, someone leaving court spat on your

leg and said, you've ruined my life. Who was it and why did they do that? Oh, that was one of my favorites. That was in fact, very famous jockey, Jim Cassidy. And what had happened was that I had been leaked what became famously known as the jockey tapes. And what it was, was that it was phone taps and surveillance of a major organised crime figure called Victor Spink, who not only was importing large quantities of drugs, he was also on the phone to jockeys, getting them to fix races. However, in the end, the three jockeys, while they received lengthy bans from racing, in the end, it was decided just to charge them with pretending to tip, not with actually giving information. Anyway, so Jim Cassidy was banned for three years and he was banned right on the eve of the Golden Slipper. And he was the

jockey on the race favourite. Anyway, so at the tribunal where he'd just been banned, you know, we came outside and he saw me and he spat on me. And I laugh, you know, it wasn't actually on the back. It was only on the back of my legs because he was so small. But and he just said, you know, you effing bitch, you've ruined my life. And I sort of turned around and I thought, why is it that journalists are always blamed? No one ever blames themselves for the fact that they've been caught. It is always somebody else's fault other than their own. How did you gather your information and evidence? Were you walking around the racetrack following people?

No, no, no. Look, I can't say who, but I leaked the tapes themselves. But it was funny at the time because we faced or I faced a two-year jail sentence because the tapes had been made by the Australian Federal Police and under the Telecommunications Interception Act they could only be used for the prosecution of that particular matter. They couldn't be used for a newspaper story. If we'd been sued for defamation we couldn't rely on the tapes either and in fact it was a two-year jail term to be using information from that tape. And I can remember our lawyer being just surprisingly

enthusiastic about going ahead and publishing these tapes. And at the time, I was pregnant. And he said, Oh, no, no, he said, see, they're never going to jail a pregnant woman. They'll jail our editor in chief, John Alexander. He was seemed to be rather enthusiastic at this prospect. So no charges came to pass. Let me ask you one final story. Craig Thompson and the Health Services Union. Were you the one who brought all that undone and exposed it? Look, one of my other colleagues at the Herald had done the initial story about Craig Thompson using Health Services Craig Thompson, sorry, Craig Thompson using health services union money for prostitutes. So he was the secretary at the time? He was the, no, that was Michael Williamson. At the time, Craig Thompson had been one of the officials

in the health services union. But at the time of the story, he'd actually become the Labor member of Federal Parliament. So then what had happened was that a parent at school with Michael Williamson had rung up and said to me, forget about Craig Thompson. You should be looking at Michael Williamson. And I said, oh, I've never heard of him. Who is he? And he said, oh, God, he's the boss of the Health Services Union. And he's also the federal president of the Labor Party.

And I said, yeah, why should I be looking at him? And he said, look, you know, union bosses get – it's the salary of their highest organiser. He said, so say that's $120,000. This guy has got five kids at private schools. He and his wife drive top of the range Mercedes. They travel first class and they outbid us at the school charity auction. Right. It doesn't add up. It doesn't add up.

And you know what? That is as good a reason to look at something as any. Anyway, so after, look, honestly, it only took about a week and I think people heard that I was making investigations. I then got information that both Craig Thompson and Michael Williamson had been given American Express cards that were attached to the account of the union's printer. So basically that could be seen as a criminal offence in providing, you know, an inducement for a contract. So they're inflating the price of the printing contract and they're being paid by getting an American Express card. It's a secret commission, in fact. Anyway, so, and not only that, Michael Williamson was, you know, he secretly owned the company that was providing the telecommunications and computer contracts for a year. He'd used the union's architect to renovate his house and his beach house look it just went on and on but i remember the night before writing the stories

or the day before ringing um michael williamson and i remember getting back a legal threat that if you write one word of this and we'll have no hesitation but suing you and i remember sort of feeling absolutely sick about doing the story because um you know we'd got somebody at amex to say yep we've got the card details here but i had not seen a single piece of paperwork which is like really unusual to to do a story without having cited it yourself but my source was really good. Anyway, we ran the story and then it just opened the floodgate. As I was saying to you before, one story then brings in, you know, a whole lot of other stuff. Like he was, you know, he had a mistress in the union and she was getting kickbacks and he'd given his son, the union had bought an $800,000

building that his own son was using as a recording studio. And in the end, Michael Williamson went to jail for five years and they found that he had taken, he was charged over having taken a couple of million dollars from the union. But behind the scenes, the police thought he might have taken up to $20 million. Wow. And he's now out of jail. And interestingly, he and his wife divorced just before he went into jail so she could keep the house and various things. And guess what?

They're back together. Well, yeah, but it's funny that isn't it and uh craig thompson for his part i think he was originally given a 12-month sentence but that was taken down to a 25 000 fine there was and look there was a problem with the prosecution this is in victoria he'd been prosecuted he'd been prosecuted under a different form of the act because he was facing criminal charges and possible jail. And in the end, he got a good behaviour bond. But he has recently had to hand in his practising certificate as a solicitor because the courts determined that he wasn't a fit and proper person. And I think he's facing, I think he might be facing bankruptcy because I think the union is still pursuing him trying to get back his,

the money that he took. I remember watching him weeping in parliament when he was using parliamentary privilege to speak about, you know, the people going after him. It was painful to watch. Look, it was painful to watch because I knew that he was an out and out liar. Right. And it's funny that you, you know, you meet people

and they can look you right in the eye and lie to your face. And, in fact, you know, one of the fascinating things was that he had initially sued the Herald over our first claims that he'd used his union card to pay for prostitutes. So during the course of discovery for that court case, not only was it revealed that he had used the card, more information had come out about his signatures, about his bills, and in the end he folded.

He paid our legal costs and yet he told his parliamentary colleagues and he told another inquiry that the Herald had paid him money, that he'd secretly won the case because our own handwriting expert had determined that it wasn't his signature. That was all complete lies, but also easily proved that it was lies so it was like just i mean remarkable and and in the end i think his lawyer said um his lawyer had admitted in his you know criminal case that um he told those lies because he was under a lot of public pressure and his marriage was in difficulty. And you think that's, you know, you told those lies for about five years consecutively.

But anyway. Okay, so general principles and patterns, finally. I think in analysing crooks and frauds and swindlers, it's worth distinguishing two broad sort of categories of people, the sociopaths and the non-sociopaths, just to begin with. Yes. Now, you clearly think Michael McGurk was a sociopath. How many of the other people you've exposed or gone after over the years, including, you know, the jockey and Craig Thompson,

Williamson, fit into that sociopath bucket? Look, I think quite a lot do, and especially those who perpetrate fraud. I think fraud has a special attraction for sociopaths. Just because of that ability to ruin the lives, often, you know, financially of other people and never lose a moment's sleep. I mean, other crimes are opportunistic and people do it because they can. But I just think those sort of fraudsters and murderers, they are like your true sociopaths. And there's also, I think, quite a few of them in suits in high places in our public companies. They're just that they have that degree of ruthlessness to get ahead.

They have no trouble in, you know, crushing rivals, in stepping over people, in just having those blinkers on. You know, they don't care who they destroy to get to the top. So I think there's a lot more of, you know, sociopathic tendencies in business and crime than people think that there is. What do you think the inner emotional life of a sociopath is like? I think there's not much of an inner life at all. I think that there's superficial charm, but there's not actually much attachment. It's all, everything is a means to an end.

And it's also that inability to stick at one thing. It's, you need to keep perpetuating, I think, those certain thrills of, you know, like rather than having a good business and sticking at it, there's that lack of attention, that need to be going on to do something else. It's that constant need for basically the, I don't know whether it's the thrill of the chase or the thrill of the chase or the thrill of the crime, but it never seems to be able to be satisfied. The reckless thrill-seeking is a really interesting tell for sociopaths.

I think that's often an overlooked red flag. Yes, yes. Yeah. And I think you were right when you were saying about John Law, I think it was, about the gambling, often the use of prostitution. It's that risk-taking, thrill-seeking behavior. It's living life on the edge.

At which point in your interactions with McGurk did you cotton onto the fact that he was probably a sociopath? I have to say certainly not sitting across the table at lunch because he was, you know, superficially very charming. It was only when the extent of what he'd been doing, you know, later emerged and you realised that, you know, he was having people threatened. He was doing all these, like, astonishing amount of criminality. But to meet him, you would never pick those things just from having lunch. Right. You know, you would have to observe someone for a while

to get the full idea of what he was like. For the non-sociopathic fraudsters, have you met many people in that category? There seems to be almost a tragic quality to those people. Look, I don't know. Right. Yes, I think there's there's all all manner and there's borderline a friend of mine distinguishes between fraud by necessity and fraud by design and a lot

of people begin their careers as fraudsters due to necessity and it's usually small fraud and then eventually they realize i can get away with this, do a little bit more. And when you follow that chain of rationalization, it evolves into something which the end product looks like the work of a sociopath, but really it's quite a, for want of a better word, tragic circumstance. Well, also you look at, you know,

like say people who've done insider trading or have stolen from their employer. You know, you'll see that they'll, as you say, they'll start with a little bit and a little bit more. And then I think it just seems really easy. And once you've done it and you've you have seemingly got away with it rather easily I think it's sort of it escalates and often those people do have a conscience and do feel really bad when they have been caught as opposed to other people

who are only sad that they've been caught they're not sad about what they actually did what's the biggest tell for you that someone's been involved in dirty dealings whether it's in their body language or it's kind of in the circumstantial evidence when do you when you know you're triaging which stories to work on when do you think there's probably something here i'm going to keep working on it? Look, it's more you look for patterns. Right. It's like anything else.

You look for patterns of behavior. Like, for instance, if a property development company has closed down one company and then has phoenixed it, as in all the debts, all the money you owe to the tradesman has gone down the gurgler with that company. Once you start doing other searches, they've done it before. So it's that pattern of behavior. And if you've ripped off one person, you've ripped off others. And it's the same with even the Me Too movement. If you have sexually assaulted or harassed one person, there's every chance that there is a Harvey Weinstein, or perhaps not to that extent, but there is a pattern of behavior. So it's always looking for those patterns that as a journalist you try to follow or you just follow the money.

If there's a cockroach in the kitchen, there's usually more than one. Very well said. Kate, this has been absolutely fascinating. I can't thank you enough. Jo, it's been absolutely fascinating. I can't thank you enough. Jo, it's been my pleasure. I thought finally we would end on a quote from a very distinguished person about you, in fact. And the speaker was Australia's former Prime Minister, Paul Keating.

I know you've heard this one many times before. He once said about you, is this woman a stalker or is she just underemployed? Will we find her next sniffing bicycle seats in Darling Harbour? You know what? And I always think... He's always good for a zinger. What was that about?

I think that was about... Because I've written about Paul Keating and his piggery, Paul Keating and his, you know, various things. But I think that says a lot more about him than it does about me. I mean, who would even think of saying such a thing? You know, sniffing bicycle seats. I mean, really? I don't even go through garbage bins.

Kate McClemmont, thanks for joining me. Thank you, Jo. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. For links and show notes for everything we discussed, you can find those on my website. It's www.josephnoelwalker.com. That's my full name, J-O-S-E-P-H-N-O-E-L-W-A-L-K-E-R.com.

You can also find me on Twitter. My handle is at Joseph N. Walker on The Bird Place. And until next time, thank you for your time. I appreciate you. Ciao.