Liam Houlihan - Return to the Badlands. Twelve Enthralling True Cases Of Crooks, Cults And Crackpots

Liam Houlihan is an award-winning journalist and former lawyer. He has reported from New York (for the NY Post ), Washington, DC (including a stint in the White House press pool), from Sri Lanka after the Boxing Day tsunami, and has trailed Mick Gattos pursuit of missing Opes Prime money in Singapore. As a Crime Reporter with the Sunday Herald Sun , his police and underworld exclusives were regularly syndicated by other media around the country. He is currently Chief of Staff at the Sunday Herald Sun .

For Francine and Gerry Walsh for putting me up in fires, floods, lateness and other natural disasters.

PREFACE

When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realised the Lord doesnt work that way so I stole one and asked Him to forgive me.

Emo Philips

CRIME is as compelling for its practitionersthe dapper, the desperate and the diabolicalas it is in its own right. Those who dont play by the rules hold an endless fascination for the vast rump of us who do.

The people who populate these pages think nothing of wandering into a bank with a sawn-off shotgun to make some spare coin, breaking out of courthouse cells, or declaring to their congregationfor their own gainthat the End Times have arrived. They are lives livedand often prematurely extinguishedon the fringe. Theirs are stories of extremes: of plot, character, fate and coincidence.

The first Badlands (both books in this series are self-contained) was focused purely on murder storiesmodern Australian killings with a twist. While there are still plenty of unusual and befuddling homicides in this collection, Return to The Badlands extends to the bold and the bizarre in non-fatal contemporary crime around the nation. Many are remarkable stories I discovered while researching Badlands that I felt compelled to share. Murder is not a precondition in these stories but sometimes, as in Blood Worth Bottling, death follows from other gateway crimes as stakes get higher and higher.

Crime is at its essence about power, even when it is about money. Behind every successful drug dealers shiny Porsche there is someone in a basement with their hands tied, or another hapless victim. In these pages there are power plays between cops and robbers, crims and judges, con artists and their dupes. Some criminals maintain power by exploitation. Other crooks see themselves as powerless and justify their crimes as snatching back a bit of necessary reward for themselves.

The compelling stories of two cults feature here as well as hair-raising accounts of former followers. The damage done by one cult was mostly averted. The other was allowed to prosper for years. We dont traditionally conceive of the often charismatic and cruel cult leaders as criminals because their crimes occur behind high fences and their victims are often reluctant to identify themselves as such. Authorities have struggled to properly police, let alone prosecute, the crimes of cults. But the destruction they leave in their wake can make the most psychotic shotgun-wielding bank robber seem amateur.

So in these pages we have a criminal stew of jailbreakers, smash-and-grab merchants and cult fanatics. There are psychological and evidentiary riddles as in Badlands but in Return to The Badlands there is a little bit more action, gunplay and high-speed chasing. Looting, shooting, and romantic intrigue. Here, you will meet mum and dad armed robbers who bring the babysitters in to free t hemselves up for a good nights pillaging. There is a partly innocent serial killer and a partly-guilty police force. There are evil adults who think themselves righteous and there are tiny heroic children who stand up to the monsters in their lives. This second lap of Australias badlands starts with a jilted bride sending her grooms gonadssuspected of strayingto a fiery grave and it closes with a violent robber in a Tasmanian jail endlessly replaying how the worlds tiniest crime fighter caught him out. In between, there is the endlessly diverse parade of humanity on display: the good, the amusing, the cunning, the inept, and the truly disturbing.

I am again indebted to many people, not least a legion of Australian reporters. Acknowledgements follow the stories. Thank you to all the readers who made the first edition of Badlands a sell-out and demanding a second and third print run. For story ideas, feedback, tips, bouquets and brickbats, I can be contacted at tip.the.hack@gmail.com.

GLOSSARY

barkeep a barkeeper; barman or barwoman

bash artist a person who assaults others

dockethead a criminal with several prior convictions or a long docket

fuzz the police

hoodangers a party, festival or celebration

jacks the police

longarm a class of firearm with a long barrel, such as a rifle

mitochondrial DNA the genetic material found in mitochondria (membrane-bound structure present in living cells responsible for respiration and energy) that is passed down from females to both sons and daughters

noggin the head

on the lam on the run

packing heat carrying a gun

shtoom quiet

silk a senior barrister such as the Queens Counsel (QC) or Senior Counsel (SC)

Soggies a particular type of police squad; Special Operations Group (SOG)

soul patch hairy square, rectangle or trapezoid under the bottom lip of a male

to bell the cat taken metaphorically from an Aesop fable about a mouse who proposes to put a bell on a cat, so as to be able to hear the cat coming; to become aware of danger

took his lumps for someone to suffer the consequences of their actions

GOODNESS GRACIOUS GREAT BALLS OF FIRE

His penis should belong to me.

Husband-killer Rajini Narayan

A FTER Rajini Narayan used petrol and a psychics candle to flamb her Hindu husbands testiclessending him from the comfort of their Adelaide home to the uncertainty of his next life as a crispy eunuchher QC tried to explain: She just wanted to do something to save her marriage.

Twenty-two years earlierbefore the house, the marriage, the groom and his gonads went up in smokethe matrimony of Satish and Rajini started as it would conclude: in flames. It was a Hindu wedding and the old folks wished them well. The year was 1986 and a young Satish Narayan walked around a pit filled with fire and put a red sindoor dot on his new wife Rajinis forehead, marking her as his own. It was an echo of the Hindu love story of Lord Rama who used fire to establish the purity of his wife Sita after he rescued her from the hellish fury of the demon king Ravana. Rajini was a Fijian-Indian and, like 80 per cent of Fijian-Indian marriages, hers was arranged. She regarded her husband as a god and tried to be the proper Indian wife. By 2008 the couple and their three offspring had settled in the Adelaide suburb of Unley, having moved there from Canberra. They had been married for over two decades and the charms of domestic life were wearing thin even for subservient Rajini.

SATISH went out in a fluorescent blaze of fire and embers. The eulogies that ensued following his demise were substantially less glowing. The dead mans daughter Jessica described her father as a wife-beating monster. He was very oppressive, controlling and would often blackmail me if I didnt listen or if I disagreed with his theories, philosophies, politics or ideology, she said. He beat me at least a couple of dozen times a year my mother was abused every day. It was so hard to live in such a hostile environment that, eventually, I left home.