Dead Man Running by Dead Man Running

Author:Dead Man Running
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781741754636
Publisher: Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd

Unfortunately, I really do have to say this. Anybody that contemplates giving evidence against major drug importers where their lives are in danger would be silly in coming forward until such time as legislation is in place to protect their rights . . . It’s absolutely awful. Like all it’s going to do is stop key witnesses coming forward in the future. The only explanation that I can think of is that his usefulness is now finished. The bean-counters have moved in and they are just trying to get out of it as cheaply as possible . . . leaving ethics and morals out of it.

It was a prescient warning indeed, but not one that Stevan Utah was aware of as his lawyers negotiated with police for the best deal in return for his cooperation. There was and still is no such legislation to regulate how protected witness informants should be treated by Australia’s premier crime-fighting body. By October 2004, whatever deal Utah thought he might have had was not legally binding on the police. He was already starting to get worried because the police had not raided the properties he had tipped them off as containing illegal drug laboratories and heroin. What he did not know was that Queensland police had not even passed his information on to the Australian Crime Commission. His tip was lying in an in-tray somewhere in the Queensland police drug squad.

Utah was also unaware of what the Queensland police also doubtless knew: that Tony Thatcher was finally about to make his pounce to get Utah talking about Mooring’s murder. The Victorian detective had been patiently assembling the limited evidence they had against Utah in the case, but the fraud charges had helped provide enough of a whiff to get a murder arrest warrant across the line. In early November Thatcher turned up at one of Utah’s Dalby Court appearances for the fraud charges, a bevy of Queensland police in tow, with a murder warrant and an application for his immediate extradition back to Victoria. ‘It was issued on the grounds that I was supposedly likely to abscond. The fraud charges were used as a leverage to persuade the magistrate to allow my extradition to Melbourne and he didn’t even want to hear the police case. He just signed the papers and I was on the plane with Thatcher’, Utah recalls. ‘Thatcher later said to me that that was the first time he’d never had to give evidence to support an extradition.’

At this stage Utah still believed he had a deal with the ACC. As he cooled his heels in the Dalby police station, his lawyer arrived to discuss the arrest with Detective Tony Thatcher. The notes he made of that conversation clearly record police offering a deal: ‘Know that he is not the main player. Prepared to drop fraud charges, re-location overseas and witness protection if he cooperates.’ The one complication had been the fraud matters on which Utah had been charged earlier in the year.

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