I’m wondering what the “Occupy Boston Movement” have to say about the police officers who ran straight into the danger zone seconds after the marathon explosions, to rescue and tend to the victims of the dreadful incident? That’s right, the police officers. You know?…..those men and women the “Occupy Movement” spit on, abuse, assault and collectively place into the 1%.

- Police have all but given up on solving the broad daylight killing of standover man Brian Kane – gunned down in a Brunswick pub 30 years ago today.

In 2009 there was hope within the force they would cut through underworld allegiances and lay charges.

What sparked that hope is a mystery.

Victoria Police has chosen not to answer questions about its investigations.

Investigators firmly believe they know the two suspects who burst into the Quarry Hotel in Brunswick and shot Kane dead, but more than three years later the case is all but over.

Police resources, including interstate investigators, phone taps and other surveillance are costly, especially on a historical case involving crooks killing another crook.

The $100,000 reward – doubled in 2009 – was not enough for those with inside information to risk their lives.

Both men police have in the frame are destined to take their secrets to the grave.

The underworld veterans are among the hardest, connected and ruthless of all Australian criminals.

Firstly there is Melville Peter Schnitzerling.

It was not a fitting name for a career criminal with a penchant for disguises and rat cunning, so he changed it.

Re-badged as Russell “The Fox” Cox, he is regarded as a highly connected, feared and staunch underworld figure, but oddly he is remembered more commonly by his media given name – “Mad Dog”.

Living in a Queensland unit after a life in and out of jail, the one-time professional armed robber is close to his nephew and lives a quiet life – living beyond his means, but not with the lavishness of a gangster high on his own cocaine.

Despite being questioned over Kane’s murder in March 2010, the 65-year-old has not been charged.

It is believed he pulled the job with another slippery and ruthless character, Rod “The Duke” Collins, also known as Rodney Earle.

Collins, who is serving a life sentence for killing Ray and Dorothy Abbey at their Heidelberg home in 1987, is an associate of Tony Mokbel and Carl Williams.

A gun for hire and drug addict, he has known most of Melbourne’s hardest crims – Anthony Dowsley

- A former Catholic brother charged five months ago with hundreds of counts of sexual abuse against children and young adults is now living in Sri Lanka because authorities dragged their feet in seeking his extradition to Australia.

Former St John of God brother Bernard Kevin McGrath, who recently served two years in a New Zealand prison for sexually abusing boys there, had 252 abuse charges laid against him in a Newcastle court on June 27th.

The 65-year-old is alleged to have repeatedly raped, molested and abused dozens of boys at church-run institutions in the Newcastle-Maitland diocese during the late 1970s and ’80s.

It is understood that a number of the charges relate to McGrath’s time as a brother at the notorious Kendall Grange College in Morissett, New South Wales.

Fairfax Media revealed on Sunday that McGrath is one of three St John of God brothers being sued by Sydney’s so-called “playboy rapist”, Simon Monteiro, who is serving a jail sentence for aggravated rape and who claims that the abuse he suffered has left him with severe psychological disorders.

Among the charges faced by McGrath are 30 counts of homosexual intercourse with a male between the age of 10 and 18, 30 counts of homosexual intercourse between a teacher and a student aged between 10 and 18, and 102 charges of indecent assault.

NSW Police were meant to extradite McGrath to Australia from Christchurch where he had lived since being paroled in 2008.

But Fairfax Media has learnt that McGrath was allowed to fly out of New Zealand some time after the charges were lodged and is currently staying on a tea plantation in the highlands of Sri Lanka.

Sri Lanka is a known haven for paedophiles, particularly its rural areas, where criminals run large, organised child-sex operations. Australia does not have a direct extradition treaty with Sri Lanka.

McGrath’s New Zealand brother, Clem McGrath, said the accused man had flown out of Christchurch in early winter after a friend had told him: “Why don’t you come to Sri Lanka? You’ve got nothing here.”

When asked on Sunday, neither NSW Police nor the office of federal Home Affairs and Justice Minister Jason Clare would say when the process of extraditing McGrath had begun.

But a New Zealand police source said the formal extradition request had only come to them from Interpol on November 15th – nearly five months after the charges were laid, and many weeks after McGrath reportedly left the country.

It is understood that the extradition may have been delayed by the multiple levels of bureaucracy involved in the extradition process.

It is not known whether Sri Lankan authorities have been informed that an accused paedophile is living in their country.

Although Australia does not have a direct extradition treaty with Sri Lanka, it can extradite suspects from there under the London Scheme, which enables Commonwealth countries to extradite fugitive criminals to each other upon the presentation of prima facie evidence.

Fairfax Media understands that Australian federal police based in Sri Lanka have been made aware of McGrath’s presence and may have been following his movements.

According to the online Factbook on Global Sexual Exploitation, 10,000 to 12,000 children from rural areas in Sri Lanka are trafficked and prostituted to paedophiles by organised crime groups every year – Paul Bibby, Rory Callinan and Martin Van Beynen

- Drivers suffering the midnight munchies have been busted en masse in a cunning police operation designed to catch hungry drug and booze-impaired drivers.

Operation McBusted nabbed 95 ravenous drivers in the Elsternwick area as they left 24-hour fast food outlets and on nearby back streets last weekend, including 23 over the legal blood alcohol limit and a further five drivers tested positive for drugs.

State Highway Patrol Inspector David Griffin said the results were appalling and should send a strong message to motorists who thought they could avoid police by travelling home on back roads after a night out.

Operation McBusted, which ran alongside booze buses operating in the area, also detected four disqualified/unlicensed drivers, five unregistered vehicles, 12 mobile phone offences, 17 defective vehicles and 29 other traffic offences.

Victoria Police’s Summer Stay campaign will run statewide until January 9th – Wayne Flower

- A member of the Comanchero bikie gang has been arrested over the attempted bombing of a south-western Sydney hotel earlier this year.

There were about 20 people inside the Milperra hotel when the device was discovered on July 25th.

Police believe there was the potential for loss of life and serious injury, as well as extensive property damage, had the device exploded.

Gangs Squad detectives arrested a member of the Comanchero outlaw motorcycle gang at Liverpool. He was taken to Green Valley police station, police said.

The Mill Hotel, in Beaconsfield Street, Milperra, is infamous as the location of the Milperra bikie massacre in 1984 – AAP

- Managing director Mitchell Koroneos was right to suspect that increased overheads from poker machines were partly responsible for his Victorian hotel chain struggling financially in recent years.

But Mr Koroneos was unaware those overheads were loose change compared with the almost $8 million his trusted administrative manager Wendy Hope Jobson stole to gamble on pokies online.

The employee of 16 years with the Koroneos Group whom he had regarded as reliable, confident and friendly, who never made mistakes, had taken the money over almost five years until a year ago.

After police arrested Jobson and said her banking records indicated the amount taken, she responded: “Gee, that’s scary. I didn’t know that.”

She admitted she absolutely just fell into two internet games, including one called Doctor Love, “and I would just lose myself”.

When one officer conceded she might not have been aware how much she had gambled, Jobson replied: “No wonder they (the internet gambling site) thought I was a good customer.

“God help me. Does Mitchell know it’s that amount?”

Detective: “He does now.”

Jobson, 50, of Werribee, on Tuesday pleaded guilty in Melbourne Magistrates Court to more than 1400 charges of theft.

Mr Koroneos – whose company runs four hotels – said he never suspected Jobson and thought the financial problems stemmed from renovations and increased bank fees and poker machine overheads.

Jobson’s position allowed her access to the group’s 12 bank accounts from which she transferred money into her account.

Jobson was bailed to appear next month in the Supreme Court – Steve Butcher

- Police have busted an international organised crime gang that allegedly committed the biggest theft of credit card data in Australia’s history.

Computer hackers from a Romanian syndicate got access to 100 small retail outlets where the credit card details of up to 500,000 Australians were stored.

Investigators have not been able to establish how many of those card details were stolen from the Australian businesses, but about 30,000 of them have already been used to illegally buy goods worth more than $30 million.

A joint Australian Federal Police and Romanian National Police probe this week led to the detention of 16 gang members in Romania.

The joint operation has foiled what had the potential to be a $750 million fraud – with a recent Australian Bureau of Statistics survey showing the average fraud loss per stolen credit card is $1500.

One of those picked up in the Romanian raids was international martial arts and Greco-Roman wrestling champion Gheorghe “The Carpathian Bear” Ignat.

Ignat allegedly travelled to Australia in recent years and Romanian prosecutors are expected to argue his role in the gang included creating fake credit cards from stolen credit card details.

A senior AFP agent was at the Romanian command centre in Bucharest on Tuesday as more than 200 local police raided 36 gang-related properties in six Romanian regions.

Syndicate members exploited weaknesses in the security systems of 100 Australian small businesses, many of them in Victoria, to hack into computer systems and steal customers’ credit card details.

Each of the 46 businesses confirmed by police to have been hacked were small independent operators, including petrol stations, grocery stores and various other retail outlets.

Police believe a further 54 Australian businesses were hacked but there was insufficient evidence to include them in the Romanian brief of evidence.

The 500,000 Australian credit card details are known to have been available to the gang from at least June last year, when the AFP investigation began, and the gang was still active up to Tuesday’s raids.

Gang members this week tried unsuccessfully to steal more card details by trying to hack into a small Sydney business.

Most of the 500,000 Australians whose credit card details were exposed are still unaware their privacy was breached, but none will lose money as a result of the massive theft.

Australian banks and credit unions have already reimbursed the $30 million in financial losses suffered by the 30,000 Australians whose credit card details were used to commit frauds around the world.

The AFP’s manager for cyber crime operations, Commander Glen McEwen, said: “This is the largest data breach investigation ever undertaken by Australian law enforcement.”

MI5, the British intelligence agnency, was involved in the probe, as was the FBI - Keith Moor

- Police have been forced to deny claims they did not properly investigate the parents of tot Chloe Murphy after her death.

Babysitter Ketapat Jenkins, 28, yesterday was ordered to stand trial charged with manslaughter over the death of the 10-month-old after a three-day committal hearing this week.

Police have alleged Chloe received a fractured skull and three breaks in her left arm after being violently shaken while the babysitter at her Kensington home in December 2010.

She died two days after being rushed to hospital by parents Anthony and Phurithee Murphy, who alleged they found her limp and unresponsive when they picked her up from Ms Jenkin’s home.

But Robert Richter, QC, yesterday questioned police practice after Chloe’s death, alleging a comprehensive investigation of the Murphys was not conducted.

Instead, he said, disproportionate focus was placed on his client, Ms Jenkins.

Mr Richter alleged experts had made assumptions that deliberate violence led to Chloe’s death regardless of any evidence.

He said listening devices had been placed in Ms Jenkin’s home and family car, but the Murphys had not been under the same scrutiny.

Informant Senior Detective Justin Tibbett denied the claims.

He said Chloe’s parents had formed an important part of the investigation.

But he confirmed listening devices were not placed in their home.

On Tuesday, during cross-examination by Mr Richter, Mrs Murphy denied ever harming her baby or being part of any accident that happened to her.

Mr Richter later launched an explosive attack on forensic paediatrician Dr Maryanne Lobo, who prepared a medical report for the court.

The court heard Ms Jenkins had always maintained her innocence and she had pleaded not guilty to manslaughter. She will appear at the Victorian Supreme Court for a directions hearing on December 12th – Shannon Deery

- Victoria Police has begun interviewing witnesses in the Australian Workers Union scandal.

Fraud Squad detectives have contacted at least two people, including retired Greek-born builder Kon Spyridis, who said he spoke with police on Monday over payments he’d received from the AWU in the mid-1990s.

Police have also contacted former Slater & Gordon employee Olive Brosnahan, who in 1993 did the conveyancing on the Melbourne property at the centre of the affair.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard yesterday declined to say whether, as a lawyer 20 years ago, she vouched for the AWU Workplace Reform Association’s bona fides – Herald Sun

- A third person who had been sought over the racist abuse of a French woman on a Melbourne bus has been interviewed by police.

A man, 35, from Doncaster East, was questioned yesterday after being identified by detectives investigating the case, which has become notorious around the world via the internet.

He was released pending further inquiries.

A man, 24, and a woman, 21, both from Hampton, have also been questioned by detectives from the Transit and Public Safety Command Crime Investigation Unit.

Fanny Desaintjores was subjected to a vicious tirade of threats and racist taunts by other passengers after she started singing in French during a bus trip between Mordialloc and Caulfield railway station about 9:30pm on November 11th.

Amateur video of the ugly incident went viral and has been viewed online by millions of people around the globe.

The video shows commuters abusing Ms Desaintjores, yelling at her to speak English or die.

One passenger hurled a rock through the window of the bus, smashing glass inside the vehicle – Mark Buttler & Wayne Flower

- Gangland detectives have been called into the fight against spiralling levels of car theft in Victoria.

The state’s Organised Motor Vehicle Theft Squad will be merged with the Santiago Taskforce in a significant escalation of the battle against syndicates stealing vehicles.

Groups under Santiago scrutiny – among them some violent Middle Eastern families – are suspected of being a key factor in the crime boom.

Santiago was formed in 2008 after dozens of non-fatal shootings, mostly in the northern suburbs.

Its members found widespread evidence criminals under investigation for shootings, drug trafficking and extortion were also heavily involved in car thefts.

Assistant Commissioner Steve Fontana said it was clear some of those involved in car theft outfits carried guns.

“We also know a lot of these incidents (shootings) have happened in panel shops,” Mr Fontana said. “The concern is that some of these people are armed.”

Vehicle thefts in Victoria rose by 8.2% on the latest available 12-month comparison, meaning a $12 million annual jump in the value of  cars stolen to $133 million. This followed years of decreases as improved security systems made the thieves’ task harder.

Melbourne’s north-west policing zone, where many of the crime gangs and families are based, has been identified as the biggest problem area.

More than half the cars that go missing in Victoria are stolen there.

Mr Fontana said there was an element of criminals stealing cars to order.

In one case earlier this year, one of the state’s most notorious criminals was found by members involved in a stolen car investigation.

Mr Fontana said he wanted police across the state to help gather intelligence on vehicle theft.

Police will today also announce a separate anti-car theft taskforce in the north-west policing region, which covers the CBD and municipalities including Hume, Brimbank, Moreland, Whittlesea and Maribyrnong.

Taskforce Rio is set to be launched after the offences in that area rose from 6645 to 7741.

Mr Fontana said there were significant issues with cars being stolen by burglars who used them to commit crimes and with offences by young joy-riders.

Stolen cars were frequently used in petrol station drive-offs.

Commander Jeff Forti of the north-west region said police were committed to driving down the car theft figure in the area.

Of 6645 stolen in the 12-month count, 29% were never recovered.

Commander Forti said the older model Toyota Camry was a big target of local car thieves, including young joy riders. In November, three young people aged 12 to 16 died when the stolen Camry in which they were travelling slammed into a wall – Mark Buttler

- A woman has pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of her baby daughter who died after being left inside a hot car.

Michelle Nguyen, 21, entered her guilty plea at the Victorian Supreme Court yesterday afternoon, before a jury had been empanelled to hear the trial over the death of her 10-month-old daughter, Thy Tran.

A court previously heard Thy was left in Nguyen’s car with its windows closed at a Glenroy house, as outside temperatures climbed to almost 27C on November 5th last year.

Nguyen took her two children for a drive to get them to fall asleep and, upon her return home, removed her older child from the vehicle, leaving the sleeping Thy.

Nguyen checked Thy after 15 minutes and then went inside, intending to return 15 minutes later, but she fell asleep watching television.

She later woke in a panic and ran out to find Thy unresponsive.

Paramedics could not revive the baby, whose temperature was found to be 41.5C.

Earlier this year, a court heard Nguyen had been warned countless times not to leave Thy in the vehicle alone, with the final warning delivered on the day the infant died.

Detective Senior Constable Tony Hupfeld told the Magistrates Court Ms Nguyen had a falling-out with her mother shortly before the tragedy about her lack of care for her children.

Senior Constable Hupfeld said Nguyen’s mother told police she had found Thy home alone on three occasions.

He said on another two occasions the child was found in the car after Nguyen had allegedly left her alone to sleep.

The court heard that on the morning she died, Thy was rescued from the car by a neighbour who heard crying – Emily Portelli

- An internationally renowned Australian children’s entertainer has been quizzed by police in Britain on suspicion of sex offences.

The man, aged in his 80s, was interviewed by Scotland Yard detectives for five hours yesterday in London.

He was interviewed under caution by detectives from Operation Yewtree, the taskforce set up after revelations British entertainer Jimmy Savile had sexually abused up to 400 people – mainly children – over 50 years.

The man’s home in Berkshire in south-east England has also been searched. He had not been arrested or charged – Herald Sun

- The aggressive drug ice and huge increases in reports of family violence and assaults are behind an extra 27,000 crimes committed in Victoria in the past year.

Drug offences have jumped a worrying 20.7%, assaults have shot up 14.2%, family violence skyrocketed 37%, and overall crimes against the person have risen 11.3%, according to Victoria Police statistics released yesterday.

Deputy Commissioner Lucinda Nolan said ice was use and family violence were major drivers behind crimes that have increased for two consecutive years after falling each year for the previous decade.

Detection of ice had ballooned 58%.

Police intelligence shows all high-purity ice is imported – though local traffickers reprocess lower grades – and there were efforts to curtail smuggling.

The overall crime rate across the state increased 5.9% – measured as a rate per 100,000 population – and the total number of crimes recording rose 7.5%, or up 27,516 offences to 395,406.

The statistics, comparing the year to September 2012 with the previous 12 months, showed other crimes, such as justice procedure offences (including intervention orders and bail breaches) and pubic behaviour offences (including drunkenness) increased 18.3%.

Motor vehicle thefts also increased, up 7.6% over the past year, while theft from motor vehicles was up 4.7% and overall property crime rose 1.7%.

The Herald Sun yesterday reported organised gangs were believed to be behind a spike in car thefts worth $12 million, taking the annual stolen vehicle cost to $133 million.

Commander Jeff Forti said Taskforce Rio had been established to respond to organised car thefts; 8000 vehicles were taken from the north-west.

Shadow police minister Jacinta Allen said the figures were alarming – Mark Dunn & Mitchell Toy

- A murder investigation has been launched into an attack on a man in Carrum Downs.

The 31-year-old local man was taken to the Alfred Hospital with head injuries after being assaulted in Cadles Road on Thursday night, but died yesterday afternoon.

Police last night had not made an arrest but believed the dead man and his alleged attacker knew each other.

They say the victim had been to a pub before he was attacked. It is not known whether any weapons were used in the assault.

Homicide detectives have urged witnesses to call Crime Stoppers – Herald Sun

- A prominent Australian entertainer was yesterday interviewed by Scotland Yard detectives investigating the Jimmy Savile child sex abuse scandal that has rocked the UK.

The man, in his 80s, spent the afternoon speaking with officers from Operation Yewtree.

Yewtree was established in the wake of revelations British entertainer Savile sexually abused and assaulted more than 400 people, mostly children, over five decades, in hospitals, schools and BBC’s London studios.

There are two strands to Yewtree: One directly related to Savile’s acts and the other simply called “others” related to sexual offences that had come to light during the overall investigation but not directly related to Savile. The latest man fell into the latter.

A former detective and child protection expert, Mark Williams-Thomas, who helped spark the Yewtree investigation after his shocking documentary that exposed Savile was shown on ITV in Britain, tweeted that the man was a prominent Australian children’s entertainer.

However, police will not confirm his name.

In Sydney, his brother said that he was not aware of events in London.

Another director of the entertainer’s company said at his city centre office he knew nothing about the matter.

The 84-year-old Savile died last year before the revelations emerged but police admitted there had in the past been a number of allegations made that were not fully acted upon.

The probe, which began two months ago, has so far led to the arrest of four men, including former pop star Gary Glitter and well known British TV and radio personality and comedian Freddie Starr. Both have denied wrongdoing.

News of the latest developments came in a statement from Scotland Yard, released soon after the man left Lewisham police station in London’s south at 5pm where he had attended by appointment and was interviewed under caution – meaning he was read his rights before he spoke with police.

Ne has not been arrested nor charged.

Police said they searched his home in Berkshire in south-east England last Saturday when they arranged for him to be formally spoken to.

A spokesman said he was asked to attend a nominated police station at a specific time, noon, and did so, and left around 5pm.

The entertainer could not be contacted last night nor could his London agent.

A large throng of British media were outside his house yesterday afternoon but it is understood that the man did not return there after meeting with police.

No mainstream media named him in news reports on the day the press was being hauled over the coals with the Leveson Inquiry report release into press irresponsibility and privacy breaches.

His name was published on Twitter and Facebook sites, with many expressing shock and disappointment at the claims.

In a major embarrassment, it has been alleged that several UK public bodies covered up Savile’s crimes, with numerous incidents alleged to have taken place on BBC premises.

The gravestone of Savile is now to be sent to a landfill after being removed from a Scarborough cemetery, while charities in his name have closed.

Glitter was arrested on October 28th at his home in Marylebone, north London.

It came after allegations he raped a girl aged 13 in the 1970s in his dressing room at the BBC’s television centre.

Savile was allegedly groping a 14-year-old girl in the same room at the same time.

The allegations were made by a woman named Karin Ward, 52, who waived her anonymity, on an ITV documentary.

Glitter was convicted in Vietnam in March 2006 of obscene acts with two girls aged 11 and 12, and returned to London in August 2008 after his release from prison.

Starr was arrested four days after Glitter and questioned about claims that he groped Ms Ward in a BBC dressing room during the filming of a Savile BBC show.

A statement issued by Starr’s lawyers said: “Freddie is now 69 and cannot be expected to recollect every show that he has appeared on and to remember every person that he has met. When the allegation made by Karin Ward was put to him, Freddie’s first reaction was that he would never grope a woman and never has.” - Charles Miranda, Janet Fife-Yeomans & Yoni Bashan

- It was 1am on board HMAS Bathurst tied up at the patrol boat wharf in the calm, warm waters of HMAS Coonawarra navy base in Darwin yesterday.

The sailor on watch duty, who is in his early 20s, was neither expecting nor prepared for the brazen assault.

He was taken in a head lock and bashed to the ground, then threatened with a knife before being tied up.

His attacker knew exactly what he wanted and soon had the keys to the armoury of the Armidale Class patrol boat.

He fled the base with a booty of up to half a dozen 12-gauge shotguns and possibly a dozen 9mm Browning pistols.

According to navy sources, the robber must have had inside information to gain access to the boat and its armoury. “It has all the hallmarks of an inside job,” one source said.

Fortunately the vessel’s 25mm deck gun and dual .50 calibre machine guns were bolted down and its Steyr automatic assault rifles and Minimi machine guns were locked in a more secure armoury ashore. The national security breach could have been much, much worse.

Navy chief Vice-Admiral Ray Griggs said the young sailor whose life was threatened was OK and being looked after.

He said he had initiated a review of security on board navy ships following the robbery.

Military base security hit the news in 2009 when a terrorist plot against the Holsworthy army barracks near Sydney was foiled.

A review of security led to a $200 million funding pledge and saw 16 of 88 military bases around the country provided with armed response teams, including Australian Federal Police.

The headquarters of Northern Command at Larrakeyah Barracks and the nearby patrol boat base at HMAS Coonawarra in Darwin were not deemed a high security risk and private security contractors were left in place.

The $200 million earmarked for cameras, gates, fences and other security measures has been deferred under the Government’s defence budget cuts – Ian McPhedran

Kade Shipkowski

This is a picture of my grandson, Kade Shipkowski, who has been missing from the Lyndora, Pennsylvania area (near Pittsburgh) since Friday. No family members have seen or heard from Kade since Friday, and although there is police involvement in the search, it has not been successful. I am asking all my friends to copy and paste or share or whatever you have to do to get this post out, particularly if you have friends or contacts in the Pittsburgh or Butler County area. Today is Kade’s 17th birthday, and we are heartsick that none of us can share this day with him. If you think you know where Kade is, or if you have seen Kade, contact his father, Ryan Shipkowski at 412-260-7739. He is offering a cash reward for information of Kade’s whereabouts or send me a private message via Facebook. Please help and spread this post across Pennsylvania. I am a very worried grandmother. Thanks for your help - Denise Jacobs

- Just after dark one night in June 2009, a small crowd gathered in Lane Cove, on Sydney’s north shore, for a special screening of the award-winning documentary “Kanyini”. Hosted by Lane Cove residents for Reconciliation, the film, by Sydney director Melanie Hogan, told the story of the Mutitjulu indigenous community near Uluru, in Central Australia, through the eyes of traditional owner and elder Uncle Bob Randall. Randall wasn’t at the screening, but Hogan’s partner, another Aboriginal man by the name of Wadari “Wadi” Wiriyanjara, was. A slim 37-year-old, Wadi wore dark trousers and open-necked shirt; he had short dark hair and light skin. “He was the kind of person who could have blended in anywhere,” says Lorraine McGee-Sippel, an author and member of the stolen generation, who was in the audience.

After the film, Wadi took to the stage, having been introduced as a Pintjantjatjara man from Mutitjulu. He addressed the audience, answering questions about his culture before singing a song in language, a performance that brought some in the audience to the verge of tears.

Also at the screening was Wadi and Hogan’s five-month-old baby daughter. To the audience, the family seemed perfectly happy, the very embodiment of reconciliation. “It was just a lovely night,” McGee-Sippel says.

And yet Wadi and Hogan were guarding an extraordinary secret. Soon after they had started a relationship in July 2007, Wadi told Hogan he was a member of the SAS. He had seen active service, been tortured overseas, and now suffered crippling post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Indeed, he often awoke from terrible nightmares, screaming “Enemy Attack!” and “Get Down!”, even issuing what sounded like battlefield commands. At one point, a woman claiming to be an army nurse rang Hogan, confirming his condition.

Wadi was a complex person. Apart from the PTSD, he had suffered brain damage – a result, he said, of special drugs the army had given him in an attempt to turn him into a “super soldier”. What he longed for now was a discharge, but he knew too much about a drug syndicate he had uncovered operating inside the army. The top brass wanted him dead, and continued to send him, against his will, on missions to Afghanistan, from where he would text Hogan, telling her when he was about to go into combat. Hogan suggested they tell her father, who was a director of the NSW Treasury Corporation, but Wadi said no, adding: “You want your father to be killed?”

According to Wadi, the only way out of the army was to bribe them. He needed $2.5 million, money he would raise by conducting a rescue mission to Nigeria, where a British woman and her daughter were being held hostage. But to put the mission together he needed $30,000, money Hogan volunteered. When he returned, in March 2008, however, Wadi was furious. He accused Hogan of having talked: her indiscretion had not only cost lives on the Nigerian job, but now the US military were also after him. To escape them, he would need to travel to Thailand, again at Hogan’s expense.

Throughout 2008, Wadi’s stories became increasingly outlandish, his demands for money more urgent: there were helicopters to be hired, bribes to be paid, reconnaissance missions to be undertaken, all of it on Hogan’s tab. At one stage, Hogan paid for Wadi to travel overseas to locate a sympathetic ex-CIA operative, code-named “G”, who, as it happened, promptly turned against him. In June 2008, after a series of threatening texts, “G” demanded Hogan pay him $175,000. A month later, she paid a further $125,000, this time supposedly to the Russian mafia, which had also become involved. Whenever she suggested they go to the police, Wadi refused, insisting she and her family would die.

By the time of the Lane Cove screening, Hogan was broke. She had burned through most of her savings from her previous career in corporate finance at Macquarie Bank; she had even sold shares worth $30,000. Wadi then suggested she get a loan for $45,000 against her Surrey Hills home. When this ran out, he convinced her to sell the property, with $300,000 again going to the Russian mafia. By June 2010, Hogan had, according to police, paid $997,490 to Wadi, who by this time was largely absent, leaving her alone with their daughter.

On the last day of July 2010, Hogan walked into Sydney’s City Central Police Station. “She was upset, and very emotional,” Detective Sergeant Warwick Brown, of the City Fraud Unit, says. “She said, ‘I think this bloke has taken all my money.’”

In August this year, Wadi appeared in Sydney’s Downing Centre District Court, charged with thirty counts of fraud. Only this time, Wadi wasn’t Wadi, son of an Aboriginal magic man from Uluru; he was Dallas Gwilliam from Neutral Bay in Sydney. As soon became apparent, Gwilliam, who is 40, was not Aboriginal and had never served in the military. As part of the case against him, DPP lawyer Steve Higgins accused Gwilliam of having constructed an elaborate web of lies, a statement which, though true, seems dismally inadequate. Gwilliam’s con was ever-evolving and wildy improvisational, a 20-year jazz solo of A-grade bullshit in which he posed not only as Aboriginal royalty and a special forces veteran, but as a Shaolin monk, seeded tennis player, telco millionaire, martial arts expert, UN peacekeeper and Chinese racing-car driver.

Newspapers described Gwilliam as a “Casanova Conman”, since his victims were often women. Yet he wasn’t conventionally attractive, he has pitted skin, and is slightly built, almost boyish. “It felt like I was in bed with a teenager,” one woman told me. Yet he had a powerful presence and colossal personality. “He was funny,” says Lisa Rochelle, who met Gwilliam in 2004 and, like Hogan, had a child by him. “His jokes would have whole tables of people rolling in laughter, he could have made a brilliant stand-up comic.” Within days of their meeting, says Rochelle, “I was in awe of him and totally in love.”

In matters of money, however, Gwilliam was a moral vacuum, accumulating a small mountain of debt in his mother and brother’s names (both were subsequently bankrupted). “Dallas will tell you anything to get,” says his younger sister. “Once, when I was in high school, I’d saved up $500, which he borrowed and never gave back.”

In hindsight, Gwilliam’s claims appear ludicrous, even laughable; at one point he described himself as a hired assassin whose hands had been registered as lethal weapons. But he was also a gifted illusionist, carefully propping up his fictions with lots of tiny truths. He often wore army uniforms, complete with medals; Rochelle says she once saw a pistol in the back of his car. He also used accomplices, none of whom has been caught, and spoke both Mandarin and Pintjantatjara.

Dallas Gwilliam was born in Sydney, in 1972, to Dennis Gwilliam and an unemployed 23-year-old named Lynne Rootsey. Rootsey’s mother had died when she was 10; she had never completed high school. At the time she met Gwilliam, Rootsey was living in a boarding house in Summer Hill. After the birth, the pair lived on the streets, pushing Dallas around Kings Cross in an old cane pram. They eventually found a place in a boarding house in Paddington, but by then the relationship, such as it was, had fallen apart. “Dennis drank,” Rootsey says. They split, and Rootsey and Dallas moved to Brisbane.

Over the next 15 years, Rootsey would have four more children by three different men. The family moved around a lot: by the age of 15, Dallas had moved house at least eight times. He also had a testy relationship with one of his stepfathers, who would hit him, according to Rootsey, but only when he deserved it.

Dallas left school at the end of year 10 and went to live with his uncle on the Gold Coast. Now and then he’d drop in on Rootsey, boasting of having been adopted by a rich Chinese family, the Chans, who lived in Brisbane. “They were giving him lots of money,” she says. “He stayed with them for a while, but then he said the father had cut him off because he was spending the money stupidly.”

It was at about this time that Gwilliam, who had changed his surname to Chan, began to go, as Rootsey put it, “right off the rails”. One night when he was 18, he got caught speeding in an unregistered car. Soon he was passing valueless cheques and doing break and enters.

By 1994, however, Gwilliam was in Sydney, working for a telemarketing company in Leichhardt, where he met a woman called Penny Fischer. Fischer was almost 20 years older than Gwilliam, but the two became friends (platonic, according to Fischer). Within a year, he had moved into Fischer’s home in Woollahra. “Dallas said he’d grown up with the head monk of a Shaolin temple in the west of China, who was like a grandfather to him,” she says.

He also seemed very “in” with Sydney’s Buddhist community. One weekend, he took Fischer to visit a temple in the western suburbs, where they had a meal and chatted to the monks. Gwilliam’s time in China had clearly been well spent: he not only knew Qigong, the ancient Chinese meditative practice, but was a martial arts expert. “He showed me some moves, which were convincing enough,” Fischer says.

As a result of injuries sustained in training, however, he required special Chinese medicines, which Fischer gave him money for. Then one day Gwilliam received some terrible news: the senior monk in the monastery had died, and he needed to travel to China for the burial. “I actually had to sell something to pay for that,” Fischer says. Gwilliam was gone for a week. “When he got back he had a little burning ceremony in the backyard for the spirit of his grandfather. He also gave me a coin which was part of it, which I’ve still got.”

Despite being what Fischer describes as “bone lazy”, Gwilliam had big dreams, one of which was to be an air force pilot. Another was to be a racing-car driver. Fischer wouldn’t be part of this, and made it clear that no more money would be forthcoming. Not only that, she wanted what she’d given Gwilliam to be paid back. He agreed to do so. The next night, however, he went to Chinatown to meet some friends and never came back.

“I met Dallas in 1997, through a friend,” says lawyer Stuart Austin, who lives on Sydney’s northern beaches. “My involvement with him was brief and not very pleasant.”

Back then, Austin ran a sponsorship research company, “Dallas hired me to help raise money, about $1 million, which he needed for his team, which he called Dallas Chan Racing.”

Gwilliam claimed to have a rich uncle in Hong Kong, Leung Chan, who would eventually fund the operation. In the meantime, Austin and his friend would have to foot the bill. “We wanted validation that he was a racing driver,” Austin says. “So he took us to racing circuits and introduced us to people like (veteran driver training instructor) Ian Luff and his son Warren, both of whom seemed to know Dallas and took him seriously.” (Warren Luff says he met Gwilliam when he completed some driving courses with his father.)

Gwilliam then proceeded to dazzle Austin with his driving skills, which he demonstrated at Amaroo Park Raceway. “To this day, I genuinely believe Dallas is or was a racing driver, because he definitely knew what he was doing on that track.”

After six months and $25,000, however, it became apparent to Austin that Uncle Leung was never going to come through, and he pulled the plug.

These days, Austin is out of the racing game, but still keeps an ear to the ground. “You know what I heard?” he tells me, sotto voce. “That Dallas isn’t Chinese at all – he’s actually Aboriginal.”

Writer Dave Eggers once remarked that the stories you tell about yourself are no more than snake skins that cease to be you as soon as they are shed. Gwilliam, however, never fully shed his skins, always retaining bits and pieces he could rearrange for future use.

“When I met Dallas , he was incredibly caring,” says 41-year-old Brisbane woman Amanda Elphick. “He wasn’t my type – he had terrible teeth, for a start. But he latched onto me, always making sure I was okay, always getting me anything I needed.”

It was 2003, and Elphick, recovering from a brief drug addiction, was staying at a girlfriend’s house in Adelaide, where Gwilliam was also living. The adopted daughter of strict parents, Elphick had spent the early 2000s in Sydney, where she had become involved in an abusive relationship with an underworld figure. She had moved back to Adelaide to start afresh when her brother, Craig, died unexpectedly. “Craig had left me $75,000,” says Elphick, a vivacious woman with olive skin and sea-green eyes. “The money hadn’t come through yet, but Dallas got wind that it was on its way.”

Gwilliam was extremely thin and had some unusual scars on his body, particularly one on his ankle, which he said was a spear wound – “payback from the elders”. He didn’t drink alcohol or do illegal drugs but lived on coffee and cigarettes, and could get by with very little sleep. His personal habits were unsavoury: Elphick calls him “a bit of a grot”. And yet he gave off an air of authority, “like he was going to take care of me”.

Slowly but surely, Gwilliam won Elphick over. He said they were soulmates. He would massage her legs, which ached from detox, for hours at a time. He also told her he belonged to a secret special forces unit, and that his teeth had been damaged in Somalia, where he’d taken part in the “Black Hawk Down” incident. Late one night, a man in a Commodore pulled up to the house to deliver some paperwork which Gwilliam , with a show of reluctance, allowed Elphick to read: they were instructions, stamped TOP SECRET: AUSTRALIAN DEFENCE FORCE, on how to detonate a bomb. Gwilliam also claimed to be very spiritual, on account of his Aboriginality: one windy night, he even used his ancestors to contact Craig.

A couple of weeks later, Gwilliam mentioned that he found out his father was a direct descendant of Uluru, and that he was entitled to royalties, back payment of which ran into millions. Until the money came through, he and Elphick decided to go travelling, driving a car she had bought with her inheritance to Alice Springs, where Gwilliam could visit his Aboriginal family. In Alice Springs, however, one of the first things he did was visit the casino, gambling with money borrowed from Elphick. “I remember he ran out of money and asked me for more. I said no, and he became furious. He said it was really his money and not mine because he was paying me  back.”

This would become a familiar refrain. As the couple moved around, always staying in nice hotels, it was Elphick who was paid the bills. At the beginning, this seemed reasonable: they were a couple, after all. Gwilliam talked of buying a house together in Tasmania, near Elphick’s birth mother. One day, while staying in the Blue Mountains, he even proposed – using a ring he’d had Elphick buy, for $2,500.

He also happened to know things , mainly about Elphick’s ex-boyfriend. One day, while driving near Launceston, Gwilliam took a call on his mobile. It was from his Uncle Bernie, whom Gwilliam described as “head of National Security”. When Gwilliam got off the phone, he looked worried. “He said Bernie had found out that my ex, in Sydney, had discovered I was going out with Dallas and had put a $250,000 contract out on my life,” Elphick says. Elphick now believes there was no such threat; at the time however, she was terrified.

Gwilliam immediately turned Elphick’s phone off: from now on, she was to contact no one. (His phone was left on, as it was a secure line.) Elphick was due to attend a girlfriend’s wedding in Adelaide in a few days’ time, but Gwilliam ruled that out: “Uncle Bernie will call your friend and explain everything,” he said.

By this time, Elphick’s $75,000 inheritance was long gone, and so, at Gwilliam’s urging, she began pawning possessions: a gold-and-diamond ring worth $5700, two watches ($4500), and, of course, her engagement ring. They also sold he car for $14,000. (“It’d cost me $30,000 four months before.”) According to Gwilliam, the money went to Uncle Bernie for protection. “I never met Uncle Bernie,” Elphick says. “But I did talk on the phone to someone who said they were Uncle Bernie.”

Apparently, Bernie had urged Gwilliam to leave Elphick – “to cut her loose” – but he refused. And so Bernie came up with a plan: he would get Gwilliam a job with the United Nations, in London, where Elphick could join him. Not only that, but Bernie had organised for the UN to repay Gwilliam’s debt to Elphick.

Alas, the United Nations job was held up. In the meantime, Uncle Bernie found Gwilliam some detective work in Cairns. Using money from the sale of Elphick’s car, the two flew north, where they booked into the Floriana, an art deco guest house on the Esplanade. A week later, however, he received bad news: Elphick’s ex had tracked her to Cairns. “It’s your card!” he said. “They’re tracking you through you key card!”.

According to Elphick, Gwilliam then took the card, claiming he would pass it on to Bernie, who would install an anti-tracking device on it. “When I got it back, every cent I had in it, $5500, was gone.”

Elphick was furious, and let Gwilliam know it. But she was in no shape for a fight: she was hardly eating and had lost weight; she spent most of her time in the motel room, feeling trapped and terrified. (She ultimately made two suicide attempts while in Cairns.) To help her cope with the stress, Gwilliam began giving Elphick morphine tablets. “I’ve got no idea where he got them,” she says. “He’d give me enough to give me a slight addiction, them leave me hanging and sick while he took off, sometimes for hours, sometimes days.”

She considered going to the authorities, but Gwilliam had warned her against that. “The people I work for, they can make people disappear,” he would say. “And besides, the cops would never believe you. You’re just a drug addict.”

Lynne Rootsey isn’t the wordiest of women. Mention her son, however, and she produces a veritable thesaurus of insults. Dallas, she says, is evil, crazy, a liar and lazy; a crim, crook and a con artist. He is also, she concedes, “very clever, especially when he talks. He will tell people what he thinks he can get them to believe. Sometimes I think he really believes it, too, and that’s how he convinces other people.”

In the early 2000s, prior to meeting Elphick, and for reasons that are unclear, Gwilliam turned up in the campground at Yulara, 15 kilometres from Uluru. With its mystical connotations and sacred heritage, Uluru is known for attracting misfits and drifters; many of Yulara’s 880 residents are either from overseas or interstate. Yet no sooner had Gwilliam arrived than he was family.

Dallas, or Wadi as he now called himself, spent much of his time looking after a local elder, Daisy Walkabout. “It was an aunty-nephew relationship,” Uncle Bob Randall, Star of Kanyini explains. “Wadi would stay with her, buy her groceries, give her money when she needed it. He picked up lots of language that way. So we just accepted him, and looked after him the same way as family.”

Wadi’s time in the desert would come in handy when he started knocking out Aboriginal art works for European backpackers in Cairns, and holding $475 a person “Aboriginal healing” workshops on Sydney’s northern beaches. It particularly helped when he met Lisa Rochelle, a single mother, artist and massage therapist in Mullumbimby in northern NSW, in late 2004. By this time he had left Elphick, virtually destitute, in Brisbane, on the understanding that he was going to a safe house to monitor her ex-boyfriend. In fact, he was enjoying a whirlwind romance with Rochelle. At first, Wadi seemed a true renaissance man, a gifted piano player (a legacy, he claimed, from his wealthy mother, who had been a concert pianist), and a seeded tennis player. “I’ve certainly never seen anyone run as fast as he could,” Rochelle says. “He would just bound through the air. He said it was because he’d grown up chasing kangaroos.”

He was also an Aboriginal kudaitji, or wise man, and a fully initiated Pintjantjatjara, who, according to Rochelle, had even undergone the traditional circumcision. Soon after they met, Wadi bestowed upon Rochelle a sacred chant that she claims had the power to induce out-of-body experiences. “Time and time again he would show me amazing things. At one stage my spirit was flying around Uluru with the eagles.”

He also reprised the fantasy of his military service, with slight variations: he was a genetically engineered super soldier, but he was dying because the experiment had failed and his DNA was breaking down. When Rochelle fell pregnant to Wadi, in early 2006, she too became “part of the experiment”, along with their unborn baby.

For 3 1/2 years, the pair were almost constantly on the run or in hiding, ostensibly from the Australian Army. Rochelle was kept isolated from friends and family, and threatened with a bullet in the head if she talked. In fact, they were in hiding from Wadi’s other victims, principally a man named Byron Smith, who wadi had met in Brunswick Heads in April 2006. When they met, Smith had recently turned 18 and inherited $100,000 from his mother, who had died when he was five. Unfortunately, he had also just had his car stolen. He mentioned this to Wadi, who told Smith he could use his UN contacts to get the car back. First, however, he needed money for tracking equipment, and a car, and laptop computers. Within three months, Smith, described by police as an unsophisticated young man, had handed over $76,000 and a plasma TV and stereo system, which Wadi promptly pawned.

It’s thought a lot of this money went into gambling, but it also paid for the Pocket Rainforest Retreat, a boutique resort in the Byron Bay hinterland where Wadi and Rochelle lived for six months at a cost of $1400 a week. (“When I asked where the money was coming from,” she says, “Wadi told me he’d had a communications company in Geelong, and sold part of it for $4 million.”)

But when Smith found out where Wadi was, they were forced to flee. “As I drove out of town, Wadi hid in the back of my car,” Rochelle says. “He said it was so the CIA didn’t see him. But later I found out he was terrified of Byron.”

These days, Rochelle makes lino prints that reference her time with Wadi, who ended up taking $75,000 from her. She is also writing a book about it. “I know it sounds silly, but at the time I really thought I was saving his life,” she says. “Then hearing in court that he was not Aboriginal, for me that was the final twist.”

Gwilliam pleaded not guilty to all the charges, claiming the plaintiffs, including Hogan and Rochelle, had, in essence, made it all up. The jury didn’t buy it. Particularly damning was the evidence showing at the same time he was texting Melanie Hogan asking for $10,000 to pay a guide to take him through the Burmese jungle, he was actually staying at Bangkok’s five-star Grand Millenium Hotel. “Most of the money went on high living,” says Detective Sergeant Brown. “He also bought motorbikes, two speed boats. There was a multi-thousand-dollar bill for staying at (Sydney’s) Star Casino. It goes quickly when they spend on anything and everything.”

In August this year, Gwilliam was convicted of 27 counts of obtaining money by deception. Sentencing is scheduled for February. When Good Weekend told his mother this, she laughed. “I hope he goes away for a long time.”

Gwilliam faces five years in prison. He hasn’t lost his touch, however. Last year, he got married to an Indian-Australian woman named Carol Sequiera. In March, while awaiting trial, his lawyer applied to have Dallas Gwilliam’s passport returned, so that he could accompany Sequiera to meet her family in India. The request was denied -  Tim Elliott

-  Australian law enforcement and government agencies have sharply increased their access without warrant to vast quantities of private telephone and internet data, prompting new calls for tighter controls on surveillance powers.

Government agencies accessed private telecommunications data and internet logs more than 300,000 times during criminal and revenue investigations in 2011-12, a 20% increase on the level of surveillance activity in the year before.

Figures from the federal Attorney-General’s Department show that on average, these agencies obtained private data from telecommunications and internet service providers 5800 times every week.

The data available to government agencies under federal law includes phone and internet account information, outwards and inwards call details, phone and internet access location data, and details of Internet Protocol addresses visited (though not the actual content of communications).

Data access is authorised by senior police officers or officials, rather than by a judicial warrant.

New South Wales Police were the biggest users of telecommunications data, with 103,824 access authorisations in 2011-12. Victoria Police accessed data 67, 173 times in the same period, while the Australian Federal Police did so 23,001 times.

Victoria Police has said that the increased data access could be attributed to investigator knowledge becoming more widely known, technology changes and auto processing that has simplified the process.

Federal government agencies using telecommunications data include the Australian Crime Commission, the Australian Securities and Investment Commission, the Australian Taxation Office, numerous government departments, Medicare, Centrelink, and Australia Post.

It is also used by all state police and anti-corruption bodies and a growing number of state government departments and agencies, including the Victorian Department of Primary Industries, the Victorian Taxi Directorate and WorkSafe Victoria.

Data is also accessed by the RSPCA in Victoria, Queensland and Tasmania, and by local governments, including Wyndham City Council in Melbourne’s west. The RSPCA has investigative powers in respect of animal cruelty.

Australian Greens senator Scott Ludlam said the increase in access authorisations demonstrated the current data access regime was out of control and amounted to the framework of a surveillance state.

Statistics for access by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation are security classified and not published.

The federal government’s proposals for a further expansion of law enforcement access to telecommunications data, including a minimum two-year data retention standard for phone and internet providers, have generated public debate and controversy.

However, Attorney-General Nicola Roxon did not issue any media release to accompany her department’s report, which was tabled in Parliament without debate on Thursday, the final parliamentary sitting day for the year.

A spokesperson for Ms Roxon said “these new statistics show telephone interception and surveillance powers are playing an even greater role for police so they can successfully pursue kidnappers, murders and organised criminals”.

However, the latest statistics also show a 7.7% jump in the number of telecommunication interception warrants issued to law enforcement agencies, with 3755 phone taps being authorised in 2011-12 - Philip Dorling