I Catch Killers: How Nick Kaldas became one of the world’s most respected cops
In his most candid interview ever, former NSW top cop Nick Kaldas opens up on one of the police force’s biggest controversies and why he believes it’s a scandal that goes all the way to the top. Don’t miss Season 2 of Gary Jubelin’s “I Catch Killers” podcast series.
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How does an Australian “wog” kid become the world’s go-to top cop, called upon to hunt down supervillains from IRA assassins to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad?
Nick Kaldas makes it all sound easy.
Australia’s most experienced international investigator, Kaldas is a former NSW deputy commissioner who rose through the Gangs Squad and Homicide to become the UN and Scotland Yard’s go-to cop for war crimes and political assassinations.
In his most candid interview ever, the Egyptian-born, Marrickville-raised Kaldas reveals how the skills he honed chasing drug gangs and wannabe jihadis in Sydney’s suburbs have taken him around the world.
EXCLUSIVE: As a subscriber you have early access to Season 2 of I Catch Killers with Gary Jubelin. Immediately below are Parts 1, 2 and 3 of his gripping interview with former NSW deputy police commissioner Nick Kaldas.
Part 1 (above): Nick Kaldas reveals to Gary Jubelin how he became the No. 1 target of an Internal Affairs witch-hunt and the toll it took on him and his family.
Part 2 (above) Dodging mortars in Iraq, hunting monsters in Syria and unearthing an IRA double-crosser, Nick Kaldas on the bad guys he has helped to take down around the world.
Part 3 (above) Taking down a Christchurch mass murderer – and how an Arabic-speaking Aussie rose above police racism to become the world’s most sought after investigator.
In 2004 as an Arabic-speaking experienced investigator, Kaldas was scouted by the US Government to help the Iraqi police rebuild in the aftermath of the allied invasion and toppling of Saddam Hussein, while the post-Saddam insurgency was still raging.
Kaldas and other international police advisers worked in the heart of Baghdad’s Green Zone — in Saddam’s most glittering palace — which was ringed with razor wire and high concrete walls with checkpoints patrolled by American soldiers.
“It’s fenced off and reasonably secure, but it cannot protect you from mortars. Rockets actually have an engine in them and they’re aimed at something, whereas mortars rely on gravity.
So you’d hear the whoosh when they fire — they go up and then they’ve got to come down, and you can’t predict exactly where. They were mortaring the Green Zone 24/7 to keep us awake.”
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The Iraqi police, he found, were much like cops everywhere else in the world.
“It’s a big club. And once you belong it doesn’t really matter where you are, you have an instant empathy with police; you have a secret language.”
The police were widely feared and mistrusted as Saddam’s enforcers, and also suffered from the same grievances as cops ever — wariness about the top brass.
It was Kaldas’ job to help restructure the fractured force to create a single national major crime squad and criminal intelligence centre, as well as creating an inspector-general to build the trust of civilians and officers alike.
“That’s a topic near and dear to my heart, instilling fairness in those processes that way where cops are investigated,” Kaldas says.
That brings Kaldas to his involuntary starring role in one of NSW’s greatest police controversies: how he and dozens of other cops were secretly bugged by their own force for years.
In Kaldas’ view, the secret NSW internal affairs operation that put him and other senior cops under surveillance, but found no evidence of misconduct, is a scandal that goes all the way to the top.
“I used to be on the executive of the police union. I represented all the commissioned officers for quite some years. And wearing that hat, I had cause to clash quite badly with Internal Affairs and with some individuals in internal affairs and around them. They didn’t take it very well. And I essentially became sort of target one,” Kaldas says in the interview for the smash-hit podcast I Catch Killers.
“I was improperly targeted — completely. There have been warrants sworn to bug my phone and my ex-wife, my children and so on, completely and inappropriately.”
Police investigators convinced judges to issue warrants for the listening devices. But they did not give the judges any evidence to support the granting of warrants, Kaldas says.
“There was no evidence about me supplied to any judge to justify the bugging. The judges were simply signing things without reading them. So there was a failure on a number of levels. The safety net, which should have been our judicial system, let us down badly.”
He said judges have never been questioned about what they did.
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