Latest news with #GaryJubelin
News.com.au
3 days ago
- News.com.au
Former high-ranking Finks bikie Adam Smith opens up about moment that 'broke' him in Goulburn's Super Max
'You lose all concept of time,' recalls former high-ranking bikie Adam Smith, who found himself locked up in Goulburn Correctional Centre's infamous Super Max facility while awaiting trial for grievous bodily harm with intent, various drug charges and intimidation. 'From when I got in there, I was locked in for 14 days without them opening up the cage just to get a bit of air. No book, no pen, no paper, nothing.' Smith told ex-homicide detective Gary Jubelin in this week's episode of his podcast I Catch Killers that as soon as he entered prison there were politics at play that impacted his ability to stay safe inside. 'It's a fight for survival,' he says. 'One of the boys there was trying to cause big dramas,' he explains, referencing the fact that if you enter prison as a member of a gang, you are essentially beholden to that gang's alliances and enemies inside. 'I knew there was an issue straight away.' 'Is it fair to say that you have to align yourself with your crew, no matter what?' asks Jubelin, 'you came in as a Fink [OMCG member] so you needed to stick with them.' 'Yeah,' Smith agrees. 'It's a jungle, and it's a very, very volatile area. And to resolve things, sometimes you have to escalate things strategically.' It was as a result of one of these 'strategic escalations' that Smith found himself in Super Max - the maximum security area of the correctional facility. 'From my memory, it was circular, and from behind perspex screens, I remember seeing Ivan Milat strutting his stuff, patrolling like a caged animal, just staring at things and going back,' recalls Jubelin, who has experienced his fair share of visits to the prison in his role as a homicide detective. '[There were] terrorists, gang members, all sorts of people. It's sort of a graduation school from prison. If the rest of the prison system doesn't handle you, then you end up in Super Max.' Smith says his first few weeks of life in Super Max 'broke him'. 'They stripped me down naked, and came and gave me a pair of underpants, a pair of track pants, a pair of socks, a shirt and a jumper,' he recalls. 'I didn't even have shoes. When you go to any jail, you get issued greens. I go in there and I expect to get more greens. Anyways, nothing comes. I get given one blanket, a sheet. I had no pillow and one towel. The room was mouldy. [It was] just really dirty, old, dingy - you wouldn't put your dog in there - and I kept asking for an explanation for why I was there, because I was there without charge, nothing, not even an explanation. I didn't get one for three months.' Smith says his experience brought his mental health to an all-time low. 'At that point, if I had something to kill myself with, I probably would have, because I just didn't know what was going on,' he reveals. And it wasn't just the isolation. According to Smith, getting through the day without being seriously injured in the yard became a mission in itself. 'I'd never usually take a knife to a fight,' he says. 'I'll hold my hands up any day of the week - I don't need a knife to do it. But what are you supposed to do when someone else has got one, and if you go out into the yard you're gonna get stabbed?' Smith claims knives and improvised weapons are rife in the prison yard. 'I'm not just talking about a knife,' he says, 'Goulburn was falling apart - they were walking around with samurai swords.' He says inmates were quick to rid themselves of them any time police or guards were nearby so as not to be discovered with them in their possession. 'You should hear the sounds hitting the floor when the squad runs into the yard in Goulburn - it's like change hitting the ground, the sound of all the blades being dropped.' 'People got magazines around their stomachs [for protection],' he continues. 'It's a jungle, you know? And it's a fight for survival every day.' 'Our grandfathers would be rolling over in their graves watching us Aussies conduct ourselves in prison.' In total, Smith spent four months of his six-year sentence in Super Max, before being released. Now, he says he's left the life of crime behind him, but bears the mental scars of his time behind bars. 'I don't sleep properly,' he says, 'I suffer from night terrors. But now, when I wake up, they go away. In Super Max, it was just night terror after night terror. You've got no window, no way of telling what time it is.' Smith says that over time, he'd learn to call out to other inmates for support in his darkest moments, saying the inmates built a sort of support community amongst themselves. 'If it wasn't for the support of the boys down there that have been through it, I think most of the boys would break down there.'
News.com.au
01-08-2025
- Entertainment
- News.com.au
The unassuming 71-year-old ‘ketamine queen' who changed Australia's drug scene forever
Kerrin Hofstrand used to have a foolproof ritual every time a package of ecstasy would arrive from the US. She'd head to a bar on Sydney's Oxford street, play the song California Dreamin', drink a Stoli and drop half a pill. If she wasn't high as a kite in 15 minutes, she'd know the drugs were no good. And if you think that's the most shocking thing you'll hear out of the mouth of a kindly-looking 71-year-old, you're in for a surprise. Known as the woman who introduced ketamine to Australia in the 1990s, Kerrin's life has been colourful enough to fill several books, and in this week's episode of Gary Jubelin's I Catch Killers podcast, she weaves a fascinating tale spanning decades - including stories of her time working as a stripper, selling cocaine in Hawaii, managing a brothel and taking LSD at the age of 12. 'It was just what we did in my group,' she explains candidly, referring to her childhood dalliance with LSD. 'I did acid before I ever even smoked a joint. It was very strange.' Despite the early indoctrination, Kerrin says her true 'drug days' didn't begin until she moved to the United States. An international move and an introduction to criminal life Kerrin's father, Gordon Stephen Piper was a household name in Australia. An actor, he was best known for playing Bob the plumber on the long-running television show A Country Practice. At 19, Kerrin's dad organised an opportunity for her to study at a prestigious New York acting school, a move she bankrolled with an inheritance she'd received from a great aunt the year prior. 'A girlfriend of mine, Sandra, was going to Hawaii,' she explains. 'She'd already been there, and she'd met this guy named Mark. She was in love with him. And I said, 'oh, well, I'll stop off in Hawaii with you' [en route to New York].' Mark, a semi-pro surfer with long blonde hair, lived in the penthouse of a 1930s building locals called 'the Hippie Hilton' in Hawaii. And as soon as Kerrin arrived, she fell for him. The pair quickly struck up a long-distance love affair between Hawaii and Sydney. 'Sandra went home after a month, I never went to acting school, and I ended up marrying Mark back here two years later,' she says. Once the pair moved together permanently to Hawaii, Kerrin began studying nursing by day, and working in a strip club by night, where she quickly progressed from cocktail waitress to fully fledged dancer. 'I was a tall leggy, good-looking person,' she explains. 'I was a size six on a 5'11 frame. I passed the audition.' Over the next few years, Kerrin achieved her nursing degree and made an extraordinary amount of money. In the process, she also developed a cocaine and quaaludes habit. Eventually, Kerrin's relationship with Mark ended, and she had to move temporarily back to Australia to nurse her mother, who died of cancer on Mother's Day in 1981. Cocaine, cruise ships and ecstasy Over the following decade, what Kerrin describes as her 'unusual' lifestyle took her through a career working on cruise ships around Hawaii (during which time she sold cocaine to 'everyone onboard, from the Captain down') to her eventual firing (because a guest saw her exit the bathroom without washing her hands, none the wiser that she'd actually been doing drugs), to her return to Australia, determined to detox. And it was here, in 1990, that Kerrin's role as a key player in Sydney's drug scene took off. During a night out on Oxford Street, a friend visiting from the States had suggested he begin sending her ecstasy from overseas. 'He said to me, 'Kerrin, if I sent you over 300 ecstasy a week, would you send me the money back?' I was like, 'yeah, sure, of course I will!' I was high as a kite! At the time, I just thought it was post-Mardi Gras, ecstasy talk.' 'About a week later, I get a phone call from the United States. And he goes, 'OK, so I need you to go to Bondi post office, you're going to take this letter saying you are who you are, and you have the authority to pick this up, and there's going to be six macadamia nut canisters'.' And so it began. Soon, Kerrin was doing a roaring trade. 'Every couple of weeks I'd send him back $9,999 from a different bank each time, to keep it under that $10,000 mark [which would flag suspicion].' Swimming in cash, she was soon able to move from her one-bedroom apartment to a fancy three-bedroom house in Paddington. Asked whether she worried about the potential harm she was doing through selling drugs, Kerrin is decisive. 'I was not standing at a kindergarten gate selling heroin,' she says simply. 'I felt absolutely no remorse about selling ecstasy because it wasn't a bad drug in those days,' Kerrin continues. 'In those days, you couldn't get anything more pure as a party drug. You only had to do a half to have eight hours of fun with no alcohol, a Chupa-Chup in your mouth, and a lemonade.' 'Special K' One day, a few months into Kerrin's ecstasy-dealing career, her American contact got in touch to tell her he was sending something different in the post. It would arrive in liquid form, in contact lens containers. It was ketamine - a previously unknown drug on the Australian scene. Kerrin began cooking it up and selling it for $200 per half-gram. Because she was the only person supplying it, Kerrin made 'an insane amount of money', but in the back of her mind, she knew she could be found out at any moment. In June 1991, that's exactly what happened. Unbeknownst to Kerrin, she'd been under police surveillance for a month before they decided to arrest her. 'They came in at 7.30am, and I was up in the top bathroom,' she recalls. 'I lived with three guys, and I thought it was one of them wanting to use the bathroom. I was in my pink flamingo pajamas, and they knocked at the door, and they said, 'get out now'. And I said, 'just hold on a minute, guys'. And they said, 'it's the police'. And I was like, 'OK, I still gotta clean my teeth anyway.'' As police searched her house, seizing drugs and other evidence, they eventually came to the oven, where Kerrin had left a batch of 'Special K' (ketamine) she'd cooked the night before. It was worth $10,000. 'They said to me, 'what's that?'' she recalls, 'and I said, 'it's Special K'. And they said, 'what? Like the Corn Flakes?' I said, 'no, like the ketamine that you give horses, it's a dance party drug, yeah?' So I was the first person in Australia to be busted with ketamine, and they changed the law to make ketamine illegal.' Because the drug had not been on the list of prohibited substances at the time of Kerrin's arrest, she wasn't charged for the ketamine they found. She was, however, charged for the 300 ecstasy pills, 2000 hits of LSD and $100,000 worth of cash that police found. She was eventually sentenced to three years and two months in Mulawa Correctional Centre - an experience she describes as 'hell on earth.' Life after drugs These days, Kerrin lives life on the law-abiding side of the street, exploring a passion for French cuisine, caring for her adopted Maltese Terrier, Bowie, and making videos about her adventures on TikTok for her fascinated followers. And in spite of her former money-making activities, she says that these days, the stakes are too high when it comes to drugs. 'It's a war on quality,' she explains. 'If the drugs were the quality of what I was dealing with when the ecstasy I sold was around, when the Coke was around, when all the drugs were around in those days and nobody was stamping on it 100 times, then you could feel safe about people taking them now.' 'I wouldn't, wouldn't trust anything on the streets these days,' she says. 'And anybody who gets involved with ice is just a goddamn idiot. I see the effects of that every single day.'
News.com.au
05-07-2025
- Entertainment
- News.com.au
Bikie WAG turned comic spills on secret club hierarchy and life inside the Coffin Cheaters
When Nikki Justice knocked on the door of the Coffin Cheaters bikie clubhouse for a strip gig she'd been booked for, she wasn't expecting to find love. 'In my head, all the bikie's I'd been around were these old, fat, scary men,' she told Gary Jubelin's I Catch Killers podcast this week. 'And the guy who answered the door didn't look like that at all. He was younger, in his early thirties, and I suppose I was a little surprised that he wasn't this big dirty bikie that I was expecting.' The 39-year-old has turned her colourful past - the daughter of a drug-dealer who went on to marry into a bikie gang - into a career in standup comedy, quipping that when it comes to trauma, 'if you don't laugh, you'll cry'. Nikki - who describes herself as 'the Ray Gun of stripping - seriously, I was so bad at it,' had initially not wanted to accept the gig at the clubhouse, but was happily surprised by what she saw. She didn't realise it then, but she'd just met the man she'd marry - a card-carrying member of an outlaw motorcycle gang. 'We hit it off quite quickly,' she reflects, 'and we were living together a few weeks later.' 'I think at first I found the whole bikie thing exciting,' she admits, 'when they'd go on the runs, or any time there was a funeral, there would be hundreds of bikes, and there was something exciting about being part of that procession.' And while initially, the carefree Nikki and her bikie beau relished their party lifestyle, it wasn't long before things changed. 'Within seven months of being together, I was pregnant,' she says. Nikki, who has since left the heels and pole behind to pursue a career in stand-up comedy, draws a lot of comedic inspiration from her life as a bikie wag. She paints a picture of a club run 'more like a footy club', where 'family nights' were the norm and the occasional topless waitress would play temporary nanny to Nikki's kids. 'I had to work, and I'd left my kids with their dad. I walked into the clubhouse and my little, two-year-old son was being bounced on the knee of this stripper,' she laughs. 'I know she had her boobs out and her boobs were just bouncing up and down and she's got my kid and I'm like … oh. This is cool.' 'Did you consider what being the partner or wife of a bikie might entail?' asks Jubelin, to which Nikki replies: 'I don't think I really did until I was already in it.' And just what did being a bikie wag entail? 'All of a sudden [after the pregnancy] instead of us being young and partying, I was in a serious relationship and we were settling down and having kids,' she reflects, 'and that's when I realised - oh, this is gonna be hard. Because I settled down and stopped partying, and he didn't.' 'And you know that old adage,' says Jubelin, 'the club comes first.' 'And I HATE that saying,' Nikkie responds, 'and you hear it all the time. It's something that gets said a lot, and it would be upsetting, but I think that if there was a family emergency or something, most of the guys in the club would want their members to go and sort that emergency.' Nikki says that while most of the other bikies in the club were 'lovely' some could definitely test her patience. 'There were definitely some that I despised,' she admits, 'there's some members that would be sleazy and you'd be like, 'how can you be sleazy? I'm your friend's wife!' For Nikki, getting her head around the double standard was always a struggle. 'They go on about loyalty and respect, and it's like, well, that's not loyal or respectful [to make advances at another member's wife]. 'You just kind of have to laugh it off.' Nikki says some of the most difficult challenges came when she discovered what some members had done in their pasts. 'There were some members who I knew had done some really bad things and I didn't respect or like that,' she explains. 'So it was definitely hard knowing that you were around some people who went against your own moral values. You kind of just had to swallow things sometimes and suppress it, I guess,' she continues. 'But there were good and bad. It's like in any industry, I think there's good and bad. Even in the police force, there are good cops and bad cops. Most of them were good people in a moral sense, apart from the little crimes they might commit here and there.' And while initially the 'bad boy' allure of her bikie beau, along with the excitement of being part of the club, kept things interesting, she says becoming a mum quickly led the shine to wear off. 'I had this idea in my head of what a happy family was gonna be like when I had one,' she explains. 'I was trying so hard to make it like that. But it is really hard when your partner's a bikie and he isn't prioritising your family the way that you want him to.' Although, she admits, the club she found herself part of was quite the family affair. 'We used to have family nights,' she explains.'They'd have a monthly thing where each month a different member would be in charge of bringing in all the food and we'd have a family night where the kids and everyone would all come. Those parties, at least earlier, would be kid-friendly,' she continues. 'They wouldn't bring the strippers out till later.' There was a hierarchy among the women in the club too, says Nikki, albeit a brutal one. 'A lot of the wives didn't like the strippers,' says Nikki, 'and because when I met my ex-husband I was the stripper, it took a while for them to warm up to me, because I was the enemy. It was b***y - it was very b***y.' But 'bitchy' was the least of the grim realities for some women associated with the club. 'The derogatory term is 'moles', but there was a hierarchy among the moles too,' says Nikki. 'There were women called 'onions' - women who would sleep with the bikies but didn't 'belong' to anyone in particular, and were just kind of passed around.' 'Was there a sense of menace in the air?' Jubelin asks. 'Oh yes,' Nikki replies. 'Almost every party would end with someone getting punched. And I used to worry, because my brother used to hang around, and I was always worried he was the one who was going to get punched.' And while Nikki has since split from her ex-husband and left the club life behind her for a career in stand-up comedy, she admits that she was, on occasion, part of the drama. 'I slapped a stripper with a thong once,' she chuckles. 'A foot thong. She'd stolen it from me, so she deserved it.'
News.com.au
28-06-2025
- News.com.au
Moment that unearthed one of Australia's worst murder cases
When Gordon Drage opened the plastic lid of an old olive barrel inside the abandoned State Bank in Snowtown, a town whose entire population could fit inside your average school assembly hall, he didn't know he was blowing the lid on what would become one of the worst serial killings in the country's history. 'I remember the first one I opened, I could see a semi-mummified foot with some soil on it and the jeans the victim had been wearing,' he recalls on the latest episode of Gary Jubelin's podcast, I Catch Killers. 'I didn't know it'd been dismembered at that stage, I looked in the top and I thought, well, someone's just been shoved in here headfirst and their feet are sticking out.' And yet only hours earlier, when Drage had woken up on the morning of May 20, 1999, he had no inkling of the bizarre and horrific events that were about to unfold. Watch Gary Jubelin's interview with Gordon Drage in the video player above 'I started my shift in Kadina, and my opposite member in the Barossa Valley was on holiday,' 'So when he was on holiday, I would go across and do some jobs in his area, if they urgently needed to be done. So I had this lovely, pleasant country drive across from the York Peninsula across to the Barossa Valley.' Drage had been called out to inspect an abandoned vehicle, and had just arrived at the scene. 'It was just an abandoned car chassis, stripped down to nothing, just dumped at the side of the road,' he recalls. 'So I remember I was looking at that at the time, trying to identify it. And I got a phone call from the bosses in Adelaide who said, 'look, we've got this job at Snowtown. Is there any chance you can be there for 11 o'clock? Because we had a whole team teed up to come, but they've had another murder overnight in Adelaide'.' When Drage arrived, investigators in Snowtown still believed they were working on a series of missing persons cases, and primarily needed Drage's expertise to photograph a number of potential crime scenes. 'They said, 'we just need you to go over there and meet with the rest of the detectives. They're going to take some photos and videos and photograph a house'. They handed me an A4 piece of paper. The top half of that had a list of names, about 10 names. And on the bottom half was a whole list of property. Things like green, three piece leather lounge suites, televisions, that sort of stuff.' Drage was tasked with photographing the car and home of John Bunting (who would later go on to be convicted of several of the murders), in order to ascertain whether any of the missing items were located there. 'No one had any idea of what we were about to find,' he explains, 'at this point, it was just a photo job. And then a detective called me outside for a chat.' A local had been speaking with detectives, and dropped a bombshell. 'He said, this guy's just told us that John Bunting has turned up here in that car that they were going to take, and at one time it was full of barrels, which were full of smelly stuff. And he's told us those barrels are now over at the old State bank.' Drage, who had been due to move to Queensland in two weeks time, had just made the discovery of his career, in a case so disturbing it would become forever entwined with the town in which the discoveries were made. That day, the bodies of eight victims were discovered in the disused bank vault. Two more bodies were found buried in a backyard in Salisbury North, a suburb of Adelaide, with police later linking a further two deaths to the case, bringing the total number of known victims to 12. Eventually Bunting, the primary perpetrator and ringleader, would be convicted of 11 murders and given 11 life sentences without parole. Robert Wagner, a key accomplice, was convicted of 10 murders and received 10 life sentences without parole, while James Vlassakis pleaded guilty to four murders and became a key Crown witness, receiving four life sentences with a non-parole period of 26 years. Mark Haydon was later convicted for assisting in the disposal of the bodies, receiving a 25-year sentence with an 18-year non-parole period. Many of the victims, socially vulnerable people targeted for their social isolation, drug addictions or perceived transgressions (such as being homosexual or pedophiles, according to Bunting's twisted ideology) were known to the killers, who continued claiming Centrelink benefits in many of the victim's names long after their murders. Of all the horrific cases Drage worked in his career, the particular horrors of Snowtown remain with him, even now. He says the realisation that they'd eaten lunch on the floor before opening the vaults and discovering what they were dealing with was particularly disturbing. 'We sat there on the floor and realised the carpet was damp,' he says, 'We then later found out that the reason it was damp was because they had hosed down that floor after killing [one of the victims, David Johnson] the night before.' 'We just didn't know at the time, and that leaves a weird feeling in there,' Drage continues. 'You think, 'I'm sitting on the floor exactly where this person was probably lying at one point before they've put him into a barrel. It's just macabre.' 'There's still an eeriness to the bank. I went back last year, first time I'd been back into that bank in 26 years. And I could still remember it like it was yesterday. Still visualise everything though it's changed a bit inside. A lot of the counters and stuff have gone, but the vault is still there. It was bizarre. It just sticks with you.'
Daily Mail
26-06-2025
- Daily Mail
Top cop in William Tyrrell investigation reveals heartbreaking text from missing boy's foster mum almost 11 years after he disappeared
The former lead detective in the William Tyrrell case has revealed the tragic text message he received from the missing boy's foster mother. Gary Jubelin led the investigation for four years after the three-year-old vanished while playing in his foster grandmother's front yard in the NSW Mid North Coast town of Kendall on September 12, 2014. Mr Jubelin left the force in 2019 after being accused of illegally recording a suspect in the Tyrrell investigation. He was convicted of the offence and fined $10,000. Mr Jubelin, who now hosts the podcast I Catch Killers, said earlier this year that he 'can't let it go' when talking about William's case. And this week, he revealed a text message sent to him from William's foster mother. 'Another birthday has come and gone; William would be turning 14 today (June 26) and it's been almost 11 years since we last held him, kissed him goodnight and told him we loved him,' it read. Mr Jubelin disagrees with some NSW Police staff who believe the foster mother had something to do with the boy's disappearance. Gary Jubelin led the investigation for four years after the three-year-old vanished while playing in his foster grandmother's front yard in the NSW Mid North Coast town of Kendall on September 12, 2014 'I have consistently and publicly stated I do not believe the foster mother was involved,' he wrote. 'There has been no evidence I have seen presented at this inquest into William's disappearance that suggests the foster mother's involvement.' In April 2022, William's foster mother was charged with giving false or misleading information about the boy's disappearance to a NSW Crime Commission hearing, but was found not guilty in November 2022. William's foster mother's text message continued on: 'With the passage of time, our love for him has not diminished; our determination to find out what happened to him has not diminished; our fight for those responsible to be held accountable has not diminished.' She also asked that Mr Jubelin share another message to anyone who has any information at all about the case. 'Please don't give up on William; he deserves more. Someone knows something; don't let the opportunity to help find William slip by. Please report any information that may assist Police find William directly to Crimestoppers on 1800 333 000 or whereswilliam@ Make the report today. Help us find our beautiful boy,' it read. 'That is a message from someone who wants answers to what happened to William and for people to be held accountable. She is not giving up hope,' Mr Jubelin wrote. The former top cop said he thought the case, which has nearly gone on for 11 years, could still be solved. 'Time and again, you see police crack cases that were previously unsolved,' he wrote. 'In William's case, I am aware of information obtained when I was working on the investigation that might provide answers. 'I have suggested that there should be an independent review of the investigation and let facts decide if mistakes were made.' An inquest into the disappearance of William finished up earlier this year, but no date has been set down for Deputy State Coroner Graham to hand down her findings.
