And what did I uncover?
The Mess is defined by secrecy, it’s defined by power, and it’s defined by influence. In that sense, it is profoundly undemocratic. It operates in the shadows, away from media scrutiny and public knowledge. There is something intrinsically unAustralian about it.
And yet, at first, I could find no sign of corruption or abuse of power. A stockbroker sharing a market tip, a unionist spruiking the benefits of a favourite racehorse, a real estate agent agreeing to look out for a suitable property. In short, nothing criminal.
Or so I thought.
For now, the Mess finds itself inextricably linked to murder. In particular, one member of the Mess, mafia captain Danilo Calabrese, known by the alias Harry Sweetwater, has been playing a sinister double game. Just as I had an ulterior motive for joining the Mess, so did Sweetwater. He used the Mess to grant organised crime access into Australia’s leading political and business circles, the city’s power elite.
It must be stressed that of the thirty members of the Mess, the great majority are innocent of any wrongdoing, any criminality, guilty of nothing more than granting an occasional favour to a friend.
For that reason, I will not yet name the full membership, although I possess the list in its entirety. It would be unfair to traduce the reputations of fine Australians in some sort of media-fuelled witch hunt. It is up to individual members to make that difficult decision: to stay in the shadows or make public their membership and risk being judged guilty by association.
There are some I can name.
Justice Elizabeth Torbett of the New South Wales Supreme Court was a member.
I can reveal she was murdered, shot dead, as she worked to expose the Mess with revered former Herald editor Max Fuller.
There are others I can name, with their permission. Federal Labor Senator Janine Trelore and State Liberal MP Samson Fielding are still living. They have shown considerable courage in giving me permission to name them and should be commended for it. They have denied all knowledge of Sweetwater’s true agenda and have categorically denied assisting him in any way. They are to be believed: I have found no evidence of systemic corruption within the Mess. Rather, it’s likely individual members may have fallen under the corrupting spell of Harry Sweetwater. I will be writing more on this in the coming days and weeks, exposing what I have found about the Mess and its members. The Mess may be secret, its secrecy may be undemocratic, but at the end of the day, it is merely a private dining club. The great majority of its members, almost all of them, will have never known of Harry Sweetwater’s mafia ties. They do not deserve to be pilloried for going to dinner.
For a moment Martin is swept with … what? Irritation? Anger? Amusement? This is his story, and D’Arcy has gazumped him, got it out there into the public while he cools his heels in a police station. That’s not good. But something else rankles him.
He re-reads the story, this time with more objective eyes. Now he sees what he didn’t the first time around: this has none of the gravitas, the logically laid out, thoroughly legalled work traditionally associated with a major Herald investigation. It starts with a bang and ends with a whimper. D’Arcy at his best is a fine reporter and a great writer, convincing and articulate. This isn’t one of his best. Far from it. The only Mess members named are Harry Sweetwater, a fugitive wanted for killing Joshua Spitt; Elizabeth Torbett, who is already dead; and the two politicians, Fielding and Trelore, who have agreed to out themselves. It has all the signs of a quickly cobbled together yarn, produced under pressure. But pressure to get ahead of the media pack on a breaking story? Or the pressure to put a spin on his own membership of the Mess before the media lights the whole thing up like a Christmas tree? Martin puts his phone down, walks over to a seat where someone has discarded a hard copy of the Herald. The Goods Line shootout dominates the front page, together with an inside spread, Bethanie pushing hard to compile what they could learn before deadline. But there is no mention of D’Arcy’s major investigation; not only is the story itself absent, there is no tease.
Martin smiles. He knows how much work goes into one of these stories; they don’t get rushed out without good reason. He can picture the newsroom, live the logic. Once D’Arcy learnt Sweetwater was wanted for murder, he would have realised he needed to get the story out there, in part to get in first for fear Martin or someone else would break the story of the Mess, but also to inoculate himself, to make sure everyone knew his own intentions in joining the Mess were honourable. D’Arcy was no fool; he could see the approaching media storm and had decided to pre-empt it. And by voicing support for some Mess members, even as he condemned Sweetwater, he was already setting himself up as the arbiter of which members were above reproach and which should be condemned. Clever D’Arcy; no doubt those he exonerated would be most grateful.
Mandy wonders about Martin, sitting next to her, giving a running commentary on the contents of his phone: laughing, swearing, guffawing with derision. Last night, he was shaking, overwhelmed with the violence of the shootout, withdrawn and reflective, falling into long silences, eyes unfocused and staring. It took her hours of consoling, of pampering, before he spoke, opened up to the horror of it: a man bleeding to death before his eyes, the keening as an innocent woman lay dying
