ONE of the most expensive police investigations in Victorian history was founded on the word of a discredited killer and notorious liar.
The criminal’s own veteran lawyer also emphatically rejected one of his central allegations about police involvement in a murder.
The Weekend Australian can reveal that Operation Briars, which was strongly promoted from 2007 by the then deputy commissioner Simon Overland as a “show-stopper” to expose the leaks between corrupt police and Melbourne’s gangland wars, relied heavily on the testimony of third-generation criminal “Jack Price”.
This was despite Price’s lawyer, Bernie Balmer, telling police that a key aspect of the convicted murder’s story was nonsense.
“He is a very charismatic fellow, he has the ability to get people loyal to him,” said Mr Balmer, who has represented some of Australia’s most notorious criminals.
“It is sad where we have reached a period of time where prosecuting persons believe what people are saying — which affects good people’s lives — when they are saying it to obtain an advantage.”
Two former police who were targets of Operation Briars, which was run by the Victorian Office of Police Integrity, spoke out yesterday, telling The Weekend Australian they had been victims of a murder investigation that had morphed into a political witch-hunt.
Peter Lalor, a long-serving detective sergeant when Briars detectives accused him of colluding with Price over the 2003 murder of male prostitute Shane Chartres-Abbott, said he was the victim of a political campaign to discredit Paul Mullett, the former secretary of the police association.
“Once Jack Price’s first lie was exposed, they should have had grave concerns about the veracity of his account,” Mr Lalor said.
“Everything that Price has said, they have tried to corroborate.
Every person who could have corroborated it has discredited the story. Give him the facts and he will give you a story.”
Mr Lalor’s co-accused, David Waters, was more blunt. “What they have done is a $20 million taxpayer exploration on the lies of Jack Price,” he said.
Briars documents reveal that on September 12, 2007, Mr Overland, the current Chief Commissioner, was eager to lay charges against Mr Lalor and Mr Waters, despite the lead investigator warning there was not yet enough evidence.
Affidavits filed to the OPI show that Detective Sergeant Ron Iddles was not convinced there was as yet a solid case against Mr Lalor, a policeman for 32 years, and Mr Waters, a former cop who had faced and was cleared of criminal allegations.
Mr Overland’s affidavits reveal he was eager to press for an earlier resolution, and made his feelings known at a meeting with the Briars team on September 12. “My expectation was that things were going to move a little bit quicker and I wanted to clarify that,” he said.
Mr Overland declined to comment yesterday.
Mr Waters told The Weekend Australian he was convinced Mr Overland was gunning for him and Mr Lalor in a bid to advance his prospects.
Despite Mr Overland’s eagerness to press early charges in relation to Operation Briars, a three-year probe has failed to secure a conviction. Mr Lalor and Mr Waters have never been charged or cleared. According to Victoria Police, the investigation remains ongoing.
The tension between Mr Overland and Briars investigators about the strength of the case against Mr Lalor and Mr Waters follows revelations by The Australian that Mr Overland, by passing on covert information from telephone taps to his then media adviser, Stephen Linnell, in August 2007, may have started the chain of events that compromised the investigation.
The Victorian opposition has seized on further revelations that information about the police association’s enterprise bargaining strategy might have been passed to the state government through non-permissible uses of telephone intercepts. “There is no doubt that an independent judicial investigation is urgently required into allegations the law was broken by leaks of intelligence information during the course of operations Diana and Briars,” said opposition legal affairs spokesman Robert Clark.
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