'Shoot him and put a bullet in her'
Debt collection is as important in a criminal business as a legitimate one. The work is particularly arduous for drug dealers, with their notoriously unreliable client base, and displays of violence are an important part of maintaining a dealer's brand. Here is one story from the annals of credit control, typical of the sort of thing that happens in Sydney every week.
Just before dawn on November 3 last year, the occupants of a unit in Dalmeny Street, Rosebery, were awoken by loud banging on their front door. Someone was yelling, "Open the f------- door." Moments later, Felicity Pederson and her partner, Lance Iorangi, heard someone outside saying, "Look, there's a window open", and a man they recognised as Michael ''Mad Mick'' Shrimpton stuck his head into their room. When Iorangi protested, she told the court this week, Shrimpton said, "Shoot him and put a bullet in her."
Shrimpton had two companions, one allegedly an Aboriginal man. The occupants thought this man had a Taser and was about to fire it, so Iorangi agreed to open the front door. Shrimpton and the others came into the house and knocked on the locked door of another resident, Dave Allen. Shrimpton wanted Allen to give him some ice and cash, and also the address of another man, a drug dealer known as Gee, who owed him money.
When Allen didn't open the door, Shrimpton kicked it in, smashing the surrounding woodwork, and booted Allen in the side of the head and proceeded to work him over. Allen was slashed on the leg with a hunting knife, but a lot of the damage was done with a full bottle of Gatorade. This week in court, Felicity Pederson described what Allen looked like afterwards: "His face was just black and blue, if you imagine, like swollen. His ear was just, blood [everywhere], there was just gunk and stuff just leaking out of his ear … His eye was just red like he couldn't open it."
Allen, who did not give Shrimpton the information he wanted, was concussed. For several months his vision was blurred and he could not hear from one ear.
No one reported the attack to police. ''I just didn't want to get the other people in the household caught up with it if there was a re-occurrence from Mick," Allen told the court this week. "He's a nutcase … I just figured that there was a little bit of drug use going on at the house. I decided to get away from it all, go back to my family house on the northern beaches".
This was wise, because at 5am on December 21, Shrimpton had another go, rushing into the unit with four other men and attacking occupant, Wayne McMillan, punching him and threatening him with a knife. One of Shrimpton's men had a gun in the front of his jeans. This time they were successful in obtaining Gee's address. Shrimpton then demanded that Felicity Pederson ring a woman who knew Gee. She persuaded her to come to the unit by pretending a mutual friend was there.
When the other woman arrived, she was punched, tied up and gagged, taken by car to another block of units where Gee lived, and released and told to stand before the security camera and talk her way in.
This ruse succeeded and Shrimpton and his men gained access to the flat and assaulted Gee. His girlfriend, who was also beaten, escaped and called police. They found Gee at St Vincent's Hospital, with knife wounds to his head and back. He has declined to provide a statement or otherwise co-operate with the authorities. But his girlfriend's action had broken the cycle of silence that so often surrounds cases of this sort, and enabled the police to act.
Later that day they visited a house in the western suburbs to arrest Mad Mick. The woman who answered the door said he wasn't home, but a search revealed him hiding in the ceiling cavity. Shrimpton didn't want to come down, and in the altercation that followed was sprayed with capsicum and fell through the ceiling's plasterboard, landing painfully on the concrete floor below.
The Dalmeny Street occupants identified most of those they thought had been involved in the home invasions, and one of those named was Wesley Patten, an Aboriginal man and former first-grade rugby league player with Souths and Tigers. David Allen later said in court that Shrimpton and Patten had been in the unit simultaneously some months before the home invasion, on a social visit.
Last week Shrimpton and his fellow debt collectors, all pleading not guilty, appeared in court. All were in custody except Patten, on bail thanks to $10,000 provided by the sportsman Anthony Mundine.
The ringleader, Michael Shrimpton, is a solid fellow in his mid-30s, with a pudgy red face that did not look happy as he stood in the dock. There was an unusual pause in the proceedings when the judge, Paul Lakatos, announced that years ago he worked in the Aboriginal Legal Service with Wesley Patten's father, and had met Wesley when he was a toddler. Neither the crown prosecutor, Kara Shead, nor the defence barrister, Peter McGrath, thought bias would be an issue, and the trial was due to proceed when Shrimpton and the other accused men - except Patten - pleaded guilty.
Wesley Patten went on trial this week. As is his right, he had not made a statement to police and did not give evidence in court, and his barrister made no mention of an alibi. David Allen said in evidence that both Shrimpton and Patten had been in the unit simultaneously some months before the home invasion on a social visit.
Patten was up against three eyewitnesses: Felicity Pederson, Lance Iorangi and David Allen. In a forceful closing address to the jury, Peter McGrath pointed out that about the time of the home invasion, David Allen was a heavy drug user and a dealer, and the other two were recreational drug users. (The latter two were also holding down demanding full-time jobs. All denied having used drugs on the night before the invasion). It would, McGrath said, be "farcical" to think their drug use hadn't had some effect on their ability to observe and recall what had happened, and to make statements to police and give evidence. According to McGrath, "You couldn't trust a word any of them said."
In his summing up, observed by Anthony Mundine from the public gallery, Judge Lakatos gave reasons why eyewitness identifications - even from non-recreational drug users - have to be treated with great caution. After five hours, the jury found Patten not guilty.
-- Sydney Morning Herald, 12 December 2009
