I Catch Killers podcast with Gary Jubelin: Inside Sydney’s gangland war
At just 20 and only six weeks into his police career Mark Zdjelar looked frantically around for his partner as he encountered an offender covered in petrol, holding a knife and a lighter. It was the start of a career that took him to the heart of Sydney’s drug gangland. Listen to Gary Jubelin’s latest episode of I Catch Killers.
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The man was drenched in petrol, covered in gash marks, clenching a lighter in one hand and a knife in the other, advancing across the backyard.
20-year-old probationary constable Mark Zdjelar, just six weeks into his new job with NSW Police, pulled out his gun and pointed it.
“Can I legally shoot him? Should I? I’m only six weeks out. It’s too soon,” Zdjelar thought, looking frantically around for his partner.
“I’m in there on my own with this guy and I’m backing away,” he reveals in a thrilling new episode of I Catch Killers with Gary Jubelin, Australia’s number one podcast.
NEW PODCAST: Encountering a petrol-soaked offender holding a lighter was Mark Zdjelar’s introduction to policing before a career that took him to the heart of Sydney’s drug gangland and the disturbing world of child protection. Click play to listen to “I Catch Killers” with Gary Jubelin.
Running through Zdjelar’s mind was a video his class of police trainees had watched at the Academy, where a man with a knife takes just milliseconds to launch himself at an officer.
Earlier that morning, the call-out had seemed routine: a hospital reporting a missing mental health patient.
“We went to his house and (asked) the teenage kids: ‘Have you seen your father?’ They weren’t aware that he left the hospital,” Zdjelar says.
“We were walking out to leave and see blood on an al fresco area. There’s a trail of blood. So we follow that around to a chicken coop, kind of half-bike shed in the backyard and we see a body lying there.
“From first glance, it looks like he’s dead, covered in blood, leaning up against the mesh, kind of a seated position.
“Then we’d go in around the corner. Touch the fence and he springs to life and he’s locked inside this thing. And he’s got a knife. He’s got jerry cans in there and gas bottles and (he) turns on the gas bottles, stands up inside this so you can see he’s poured petrol over himself, a lighter in one hand and a knife in the other.
“And there you can see these gash marks all over him. That was self-inflicted. So he emerges out of here. Opens up this chicken coop and emerges out.
“I’ve got my firearm out. It’s a revolver, the six-shooter. I’ve got that drawn at him and he’s coming at me with the knife, and it’s all happening pretty fast, but it’s almost in slow motion because I’m thinking to myself I could shoot this guy because my life’s in danger.
“I’m justifying all my powers. But I’m also thinking I’m only six weeks out. It’s too soon to be using a firearm. And my partner’s actually kind of left the backyard. I’m in there on my own with this guy and I’m backing away.
Zdjelar was also thinking of the potential blowback for his career if he did use deadly force.
“The connotation of the rookie, you know, ‘he’s panicked’. So lots of pressure.
“Things are pretty loose. We didn’t have batons on us. One of the detectives is there; he’s got a broom that he’s holding up and there’s almost an unspoken thing, we’re going to take this bloke down.”
They crash-tackled the man _ Zdjelar was a former first-grade rugby union player _ and took him back to hospital.
And then the next job came over the radio and Zdjelar and his partner just had to get on with another day of policing in Wetherill Park in the late 1990s: the start of a career that took him to the heart of Sydney’s wild drug-fuelled gangland wars and later into the most confronting police-work of all: locking up child sex offenders.
In April 1997, Zdjelar got another stark insight into the personal danger of his new job: the shocking murder of young policeman David Carty, who was stationed at neighbouring Fairfield.
It was a quiet night in the area and Zdjelar, working an afternoon shift, dropped into Fairfield with his partner to say hello to the local cops. He met Carty, a friendly country boy from Parkes, and within hours was hearing that Carty had died in a horrifying mob attack.
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The same day he met Zdjelar, Carty, just 25, knocked off at midnight from Fairfield police station and went to the nearby Cambridge Tavern with colleagues for a drink. He was the last to leave, after seeing a female police officer safely to her car.
But at 2.10am, Carty was surrounded, stabbed in the heart, partially scalped and kicked as he lay dying. The attackers were members of the Assyrian Kings, a notorious gang, and several had encountered Carty earlier that day when he spoke to them in a Fairfield street for using obscene language.
When Zdjelar returned to the station later that morning, some of Carty’s colleagues who’d attended the scene were still wearing their uniforms, soaked with Carty’s blood.
“One guy I knew committed suicide since. It was a pretty dark time for that whole area,” Zdjelar says. “There’s a large Syrian population and church and community hall in Wetherill Park, and they were having fundraising rallies in our patrol for the (attackers’) legal defence. It wasn’t great.
“(I realised) this is a job where you might not come home. It cemented that for me. This is full-on.”
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