Organized Crime and Corruption - Absent Justice

THE ARBITRAITOR — A MEMOIR IN SIX PARTS

Part 1 — The First Crack in the Line

I didn’t know, on that quiet morning in 1992, that my life was about to split clean down the middle. Most turning points arrive with noise — a slammed door, a shouted warning, a sudden jolt that tells you the world has shifted. Mine arrived as a silence. A phone that didn’t ring when it should have. A customer who didn’t call back. A booking that never came through. A silence so small you could almost miss it, but so persistent it began to feel like a presence in the room.

Back then, I was still the man who believed in systems. I believed in the fairness of process, the decency of institutions, the idea that if you told the truth and followed the rules, the rules would hold. I had lived a life built on that faith — at sea, in kitchens, in unions, in business. You don’t survive shipboard life without learning to trust the chain of command. You don’t run a restaurant without trusting suppliers, staff, and the invisible machinery that keeps a community functioning. And you don’t build a small business in rural Victoria without believing that the phone — the lifeline — will work when you need it.

But the phone didn’t work. Not properly. Not consistently. Not when it mattered.

At first, I blamed myself. Maybe I’d written the number wrong. Maybe the customer had changed their mind. Maybe the weather had knocked something out. You learn to be resourceful at sea, and resourcefulness often begins with self‑doubt. Check your own gear before you blame the ship. But the calls kept dropping. The line kept going dead. Messages never arrived. Faxes vanished into the ether. And the silence grew heavier, more deliberate, as if someone had turned down the volume on my life.

I didn’t know it yet, but that silence was the first sign of a fault buried deep inside the national telecommunications system — a fault that would swallow years of my life, strip me of my business, and drag me into a legal and moral labyrinth so dark and so dishonest that even now, decades later, I can still feel the cold of it.

The first crack widened slowly. A customer told me they’d tried to call all morning but couldn’t get through. Another said the line rang out endlessly. A third said they’d been cut off mid‑sentence. I rang Telecom — as it was then — and they assured me everything was fine. “No fault found.” The most dangerous phrase in the English language. It means: We don’t believe you. The problem is yours.

But I knew what a working line sounded like. I’d spent years on ships where communication was life or death. You learn to hear the difference between static and sabotage, between weather and negligence. Something was wrong.

I kept calling. They kept denying. The silence kept growing.

Then came the day that changed everything — the day I realised it wasn’t just me. Other small business owners were experiencing the same thing. Lines dead. Calls missing. Complaints dismissed. Lives unravelling in the quiet. We were scattered across the country, unaware of each other, each of us thinking we were alone in the dark. But we weren’t. We were the early casualties of a fault that Telecom already knew about — a fault they had documented, studied, and buried.

I didn’t know that yet. All I knew was that my business was bleeding, and the people responsible were telling me it wasn’t happening.

There’s a particular kind of madness that comes from being gaslit by an institution. It’s not like being lied to by a person. A person’s lie has edges — you can see where it begins and ends. But when a system lies, it’s like fog. It surrounds you. It gets into your lungs. It makes you question your own senses. You start to wonder if you’re imagining things. You start to apologise for problems you didn’t cause. You start to shrink.

But something in me — maybe the shipboard instinct, maybe the stubbornness of a cook who’s had to feed a crew in a storm — refused to shrink. I kept records. I wrote down every dropped call, every complaint, every denial. I didn’t know it then, but those notes would become the backbone of a fight that would last decades.

The first time I heard the term “COT Cases,” I didn’t know I was one of them. I didn’t know I was about to become one of the central figures in a national scandal. I didn’t know that the government would erase records, that ministers would lie, that arbitrators would betray their oaths, that evidence would vanish, that lives would be destroyed.

I didn’t know that the silence on my phone line was the opening note of a symphony of institutional betrayal.

All I knew was that something was wrong, and no one would admit it.

Looking back, I can see the moment the ground shifted. It wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t loud. It was a technician — a good man, an honest man — who came to check the line and whispered, almost apologetically, “There is a fault. But I’m not supposed to say that.”

That was the moment the fog thinned. The moment I realised I wasn’t mad. The moment I understood that the silence wasn’t natural — it was engineered.

And once you know that, you can never go back to who you were before.

That was the beginning. The first crack. The first betrayal. The first step into a fight I never asked for, against an enemy I couldn’t see, in a system designed to exhaust, confuse, and break people like me.

But I wasn’t broken yet.

And I wasn’t alone — not for long.