HE may have a new passport, he may have a new name and he may well have a new face, but here’s one inescapable fact about Sidney John “Snot” Reid — he’s a dead man walking.
Once Australia’s most protected high-security inmate, Reid is out and looking over his shoulder after spending 15 years giving police unlimited intelligence on one of the world’s most secretive criminal organisations; the impenetrable Gypsy Jokers motorcycle gang.
Crime fighting bodies have been trying unsuccessfully to break the bikie’s code of silence for generations — not just here but around the world — yet in the end Reid did it relatively easily to save his own skin.
Given his background, it was hardly surprising. His miserable, lonely life was one of survival.
Born in Queensland to a drifter mum who had numerous children with numerous partners, they moved from school to school, town to town, State to State.
Leaving school at 15, Reid ended up working in menial jobs in the Northern Territory and South Australia before finally settling in the Goldfields where he got work as a truck driver.
But he wasn’t a home body. Reid had three children with two de facto partners before walking out on all of them, hardly surprising considering his upbringing.
Reid warmed to Kalgoorlie. Working as a Boulder-based truck driver, he began dealing speed as a side business and became mates with two local bikies, Billy Grierson and Graeme “Slim” Slater.
They urged him to join the Jokers and within a year, “Snot” had his patches. He had finally found his spiritual home.
Then, on the night of the closing ceremony of the Sydney Olympics, an off-the-cuff argument in an outback pub would lead to an extraordinary series of events.
Don Hanco*ck had retired as head of the CIB six year earlier and had returned to his beloved Goldfields birthplace to continue his family’s rich connection to the gold mining industry. Some years earlier he had bought, then renovated, the historic Ora Banda Inn, just outside of Kalgoorlie, along with a nearby gold battery and a small house.
A no-nonsense, old school detective, Hanco*ck’s running battles with the Mickelberg brothers of Perth Mint Swindle fame, along with a range of high-profile criminal cases including the Shirley Finn murder, had made him a household name in WA. Big, intimidating with a booming voice, you did not mess with The Silver Fox.
Reid, Grierson and Slater and their mates had ridden into the small hamlet on an October afternoon in 2000 and parked their Harleys outside the charming single-storey stone building. Hanco*ck, who had been drinking during the afternoon with a couple of mates, watched warily from a distance as the hours rolled on.
But when one of the rowdy bikies swore at his daughter, Alison, Hanco*ck, known for his short fuse, exploded and kicked the bikies out. Words were exchanged, but no blows. The bikies retreated to a campsite on an abandoned racetrack and lit a bonfire about 250m away.
Later that night, as the men sat around a fire drinking, one of them heard a loud snap and dived to the ground. When he said someone was shooting at them, the rest laughed.
But within a few minutes, Billy Grierson had slumped forward. He had been shot in the back by a sniper. Reid and his mates loaded Grierson on the back of a ute and raced to nearby Cawse nickel mine for medical help.
Despite their frantic efforts, Grierson was dead when the car pulled up in a cloud of dust.
Hanco*ck did little to help investigators who swarmed on to the crime scene, disobeying direct police requests to stay put (he left to have a shower) and refusing to answer questions about his movements during the night.
His arrogant attitude to the incident — and the seeming indifference shown by other police in their failure to lay charges over Grierson’s death — only reinforced Reid’s belief that Hanco*ck shot his mate in the back.
Within weeks, the retribution had begun. Hanco*ck’s pub was bombed, along with the battery. The damage was considerable. Senior police urged Hanco*ck to go under witness protection, or at least consider a long overseas holiday. He refused both requests, saying he would rather die than live a life in the shadows.
Then on September 1, 2001, as Hanco*ck and his bookie mate Lou Lewis were returning from the Belmont Park races in Lewis’ 1981 Commodore, a massive explosion ripped apart the car as it was turning into Hanco*ck’s Lathlain driveway, killing both men instantly.
The crime shocked the nation. The last assassination of its kind was the murder of Federal Police assistant commissioner Colin Winchester in 1989. No one blew up cops on the streets of Perth. The outrage was palpable.
Operation Zircon was launched and headed by Supt David Cap*rn, a rising star within the WA Police who would also lead the hunt for the Claremont serial killer.
Reid obviously came into detectives’ view early in the investigation and was interviewed numerous times, often by Det-Sgt Jock Robertson who was slowly but surely building a relationship with Reid as part of a “good cop, bad cop” routine.
But when Reid was again pulled over in Forrestfield the following February by Zircon detectives, the Kalgoorlie bikie knew the tide had turned. Robertson was nowhere to be seen.
There were several long interviews in the early hours of the morning of February 15 in which Reid insinuated that he was open to negotiation, or at least trying to cut a deal, that would see any punishment he received reduced.
He confessed to placing an explosive device under Lewis’ car while the victims were at the track and playing his part in detonating it. But he wanted something in return.
While Reid was charged with the murders of Lewis and Hanco*ck, processed and taken to Casuarina Prison, Cap*rn and his team made trips to both then-director of public prosecutions Robert co*ck and Police HQ.
Over the next week, Reid would receive two letters of comfort, one from Mr co*ck, the other signed by assistant police commissioner Tim Atherton, politely asking the sentencing judge to consider a reduction in Reid’s sentences due to his “unprecedented” co-operation he’d been giving police.
Happy that he had cut a deal, Reid signed his life away on March 15. His deposition claimed that Graeme “Slim” Slater helped him place the explosive under Lewis’ car.
Reid claimed Slater used a mobile phone to detonate the device, whispering “Rest in Peace, Billy” in honour of his dead mate.
Three days later on March 18, Slater was arrested by Zircon detectives and charged with the murders of Hanco*ck and Lewis. The arrest made national headlines.
Reid became the gift that just kept on giving.
Six days after Slater was arrested. Reid told Cap*rn that he had witnessed another murder — one police knew nothing about — involving a local drug dealer called Anthony Tapley in a Maddington industrial yard in August 2001.
Police immediately launched a sub-operation of Zircon and tagged Andros to investigate Reid’s claims.
He said he saw Gary Ernest White, a mate of Joker boss Les Hoddy, chase Tapley around White’s trucking yard and shoot him with a stub-nosed hand-gun; once in the shoulder, once up Tapley’s bottom as the drug dealer was frantically trying to clear a high fence, and finally once in the head at point blank range as Tapley lay dying on the ground.
On March 25, Reid pleaded guilty to the two murders and was sentenced by Justice Robert Anderson via video link from the secure unit at Casuarina Prison.
“It was a cold-blooded, premeditated, planned bomb attack intended to take the life of one man for reasons of revenge without regard for who else might be killed or maimed in the process,” the judge said.
Another letter of comfort, as they are known, signed by assistant commissioner Atherton, was presented to Justice Anderson asking him to take into consideration Reid’s “unprecedented” help in the investigation and breaking the bikies’ code of silence.
Anderson gave Reid a minimum of 15 years for the wilful murder of the former CIB boss and eight years for Lewis’ murder.
While both sentences were to run concurrently, Justice Anderson warned Reid that if he stopped helping investigators in any way during that time, he would be brought back before the courts and re-sentenced.
But there would be one last twist to the tale.
In October the next year, Slater appeared before Justice Anderson to fight the murder charges.
His high-flying Victorian QC Colin Lovitt took Reid’s evidence apart and convinced the jury that if it were not for the incentives given to Reid to roll over, then he would never have claimed Slater helped him murder Hanco*ck and Lewis.
In the end, a jury refused to believe Reid and acquitted Slater in a bombshell decision that rocked the WA justice system to its core.
Reid’s evidence against White is now central to yet another in a series of petitions for clemency that are filling up Attorney-General John Quigley’s in-tray like never before.
White’s team wants the case back before the Court of Appeal, especially after claims by fellow inmates of Reid’s on the east coast who said Reid boasted that he murdered Tapley and fitted up White for the crime.
In a petition rejected by then-attorney-general Christian Porter in 2009, the inmate gave a sworn affidavit that read: “Sid confessed to me that he killed a guy and didn’t even get caught with it. He told me Anthony was screaming like a bitch and that he enjoyed every bullet he put into him.
“It wasn’t until (later) that I found out he had set up another fella for the murder because he didn’t like him (Gary White).”
There is also evidence that Tapley may have actually been alive at the time Reid claimed to have watched White kill him, throwing more doubt on to the reliability of Reid’s evidence.
Even Mr Quigley, when in Opposition, said there needed to be a “high-level inquiry” to test Reid’s evidence to see whether he had lied to gain special privileges in his sentencing.
Whatever the eventual outcome of the White case, Reid should keep in mind fellow Gypsy Joker Steve Williams, a South Australian who disappeared about 12 years ago.
They haven’t found his body yet, but the stories suggest Williams has either been put in a hammer mill and fed to the pigs, jammed in a fridge and dumped at sea or put in the boot of an old car and into a wrecker.
Reid is now free to do what he pleases. But a day won’t go past without him wondering whether it’s his last.
