Andrew Rule: Could top cop Stuart Bateson be the next victim of the Underbelly Curse?

Most of the people whose stories were told in the original Underbelly books have hit a stone wall — or a bullet. Could this top cop be the Underbelly Curse’s next victim, asks Andrew Rule.

Victoria Police commander Stuart Bateson is fighting for his professional life. Picture Jay Town

It hasn’t been a great month for Victoria Police, even before the bashing of the top cop in charge of transport security by a pair of the (alleged) vermin it’s his job to contain.

As the royal commission into Lawyer X festers on, it is increasingly obvious the thin blue line is torching tens of millions of dollars by paying a thick navy-blue line of barristers to block the public from seeing or hearing too much embarrassing stuff.

In between ordering French champagne, German cars and Cuban cigars, a jamboree of lawyers living high on the public purse have added their own costly touches to the police mantra of “nothing to see here”.

It’s a variation on what some call “tortoising” — the reptile’s tactic of pulling necks and bums in under a hard shell, then staying very still indeed.

The state government could build a nice new bridge or maybe a section of tunnel with the dough wasted on trying to mop up the fallout from Lawyer X’s forked tongue, otherwise known as Nicola’s gob.

The appearance at the commission of her one-time client, the disgraced ex-cop (and once accused killer) Paul Dale is a bad look for the big blue gang.

But the latest twist in the saga, of course, is the mooted appearance of Commander Stuart Bateson in the box for questions over his lengthy professional interaction with Lawyer X. There will be extra interest in him because of the intriguing but unrelated fact that IBAC has pinged him for alleged disclosure of “restricted information”.

Until Bateson got the news two weeks ago that he’d been stood down, it was fun to be him. Since the now-fabled gangland war he has been VicPol’s very own Rocketman, a “jet” blessed with boy-band looks.

Stuart Bateson in 2001.

As a young cop he looked like Cliff Richard’s tougher twin brother, someone who could play the part of a hard man rather than just play hard to get.

Bateson took a star turn in the Purana taskforce whose exploits in the gangland war were dramatised in the original Underbelly miniseries.

But the Purana pin-up boy wasn’t just a pretty face: he once got a valour award for tackling an armed burglar, a test that’s hard to fake.

His role at Purana caught a scriptwriter’s eye and he became the model for the sexy Underbelly character Steve Owen, played by Rodger Corser. Bateson, according to a legion of mostly female admirers, is that rare creature: a real-life character better looking than the actor who played him.

After the series came and went, Bateson caught a few other eyes and became “the candidate”. He started being groomed for promotion, perhaps all the way to the chief commissioner’s office.

Part of his CV enhancement campaign included a “feel-good” role as the face of the force’s push to appeal to the African immigrant community.

This ambassadorial role led to his taking part in the ABC current affair panel show Q&A late last year, apparently to downplay the crime wave linked to youth gangs “of African appearance” which had become notorious in greater Melbourne — especially among Asian and Indian migrant groups too often the victims of the gangs’ robbery and violence.

One of the people watching at home that night was not your usual ABC viewer. His name was Wayne and he does not like Stuart Bateson one bit.

Wayne’s full name was once well-known to Brunswick police in the early 1990s because he was the type of street offender who’d started in boys’ homes and become a brawler and boozer.

Stuart Bateson because face of Victoria Police’s push to appeal to the African immigrant community. Picture Jay Town

Life was not kind to Wayne and the reverse is also true: he was the sort of larrikin who used up police time and patience. Which might explain why in 1993 three policemen and two policewomen turned up at the house where he was living with relatives after his brother-in-law complained of being assaulted by Wayne’s brother.

Wayne, asleep in a granny flat in the backyard, recalls being woken by being hit with batons, then hauled to the divvy van and taken to the station.

There, he says, a sergeant (not Bateson) who didn’t like him made sure he was “loaded up” with a “hamburger with the lot”, meaning the usual range of offences that go with resisting arrest. Wayne was so incensed at this perceived injustice that he briefed a lawyer.

He would eventually challenge the police in the County Court and win, a move prompted mainly by his dislike of Bateson.

He formed this view the day after his wrongful arrest by baton-wielding wallopers.

“I was standing on the corner of Sydney Rd and Dawson St,” he recalled last week, “when Bateson pulls up at the lights in a police car. He toots the horn and waves and laughs at me. I was ropeable.”

Let’s face it, no one loves a smart alec.

It is bad manners to dance on anyone’s grave, especially if they are not buried yet. Stuart Bateson could well emerge from his latest session of Q&A at the royal commission with his reputation as intact as his looks. But if mud sticks, Bateson’s star might lose its lustre.

If the worst happens, and Bateson is nailed for misconduct, superstitious observers could have something to whisper about. Because it turns out all three of the policemen who pulled batons on the sleeping Wayne in 1993 have struck big trouble.

Andrew “Benji” Veniamin, Lawyer X Nicola Gobbo and Carl Williams.

The most tragic fate, by far, is that of Timothy Richard Lewczuk, who stepped out of his police car on the Western Ring Road in 1997 and was killed by an oncoming vehicle.

Two years earlier, Lewczuk and Bateson’s former colleague at Brunswick, Constable Glenn Edward Forsyth, were hauled before the State Coroner to be questioned about the fatal shooting of a burglar, Frederick Lewis, when Forsyth and one Senior Constable Barry Coombs staked out an empty house in Geelong.

Forsyth and Coombs chose not to give evidence (on the standard grounds it could incriminate them) and so did not answer allegations by the dead man’s family that one officer had shot the man then connived to stage the scene to look as if the burglar had attacked police with a cheese knife.

MORE ANDREW RULE:

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TRICKY RICKY AND THE ROYAL RACING SCANDAL

The coroner, Graeme Johnstone, gave Forsyth and Coombs the benefit of some very grave doubts.

So much for the troubles of the trio who upset Wayne’s world. Just as intriguing is that most of the people whose stories were told in the original Underbelly books (which inspired the television drama) have hit a stone wall. Or a bullet.

The list is long but here are the highlights: four Moran men murdered and Judith Moran jailed; Graham “the Munster” Kinniburgh shot dead; his friend Alphonse Gangitano shot dead; hit man Andrew “Benji” Veniamin shot dead; Carl Williams killed in jail while serving life for murder.

And now Stuart Bateson is fighting for his professional life. Some might call it the Underbelly Curse.

But it is all a coincidence, of course. Rational people insist they are not superstitious. To admit any such thing would be bad luck.

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