A senior Victorian detective who was paid by an associate to resolve personal disputes used police stations to interview people, threatened to charge them with criminal offences, and used police databases improperly as part of the longstanding relationship, the state’s anti-corruption commission alleges.
Det Sgt Wayne Dean has admitted to being paid on multiple occasions by Basilios (Bill) Meletsis, who he met more than three decades ago through “the Carlton restaurant scene”, and to completing “jobs” for his associate as recently as February.
At an Independent Broad-based Anti-Corruption Commission (Ibac) hearing on Tuesday, counsel assisting Ibac, Catherine Boston, said Dean was also being investigated for his alleged association with Mick Gatto, a prominent figure in Melbourne’s gangland war who was associated with the “Carlton Crew”.
Dean, a 37-year veteran of the force, is on leave from his position at the Melbourne crime investigation unit, based in Docklands.
He met Meletsis in the 1990s, as Meletsis’s parents owned a restaurant in Carlton’s Lygon Street that was regularly visited by police.
After falling out of touch with him for a period, they became reacquainted through a Sydney builder, whose identity has been suppressed by Ibac.
Dean told Ibac that he had completed jobs for Meletsis, and that his friend had paid him on multiple occasions, but that the payments were not necessarily for the jobs.
He said he may have received payments as large as $200 from Meletsis on six or seven occasions.
Dean told the hearing that as part of this relationship he had used his position to obtain footage of a theft of illegal tobacco, and then given that footage to Meletsis, even though he was concerned that the people responsible for the robbery could be seriously injured or killed as a result.
Boston asked Dean about evidence which she said suggested he may have been paid thousands of dollars for obtaining the robbery footage.
The evidence includes a conversation taken from a recording device in which Meletsis tells an associate that Dean had asked for a “big coffee” for his help on the job and further conversations involving Meletsis in which he says he and Dean were paid $5000 for obtaining the footage.
Boston said other footage of Meletsis showed him “flicking through a bundle of cash”, and Meletsis meeting Dean meeting outside the Melbourne West police station and passing him an item.
Dean told the hearing that despite his previous denials about receiving a payment for obtaining the footage, it was “possible but I can’t recall” that he had actually been paid by Meletsis.
Boston said that in a private hearing Meletsis told Ibac investigators he had made no payments to Dean.
He denied suggestions made by Meletsis in an intercepted conversation with another individual that implied Dean was aware the stolen tobacco was worth $1.7m and that Dean warned Meletsis not to do any “kind of homicides” after receiving the footage.
On 17 February this year, two days after the meeting between Dean and Meletsis outside the police station, the detective’s house and office were raided by Ibac investigators.
There was $18,000 in cash found in a safe in the walk-in robe at Dean’s Moonee Ponds house and $1,300 cash was found in a desk drawer in his office at the police station.
Earlier in the hearing, Boston said that the Ibac investigation started after a Chinese migration agent made a complaint to the Australian Border Force alleging that she had paid $11,000 to Dean and Meletsis to recover a significant amount of money owed to one of her clients.
Boston said the agent alleged that Dean then conducted “mediations” at the Melbourne West station between her and the alleged debtor, and took a police statement from her, but that the money had not been recovered.
Dean will appear again before the hearing on Wednesday.
