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shutdown of traditional sources of information was to hamper Tuno for years.
    Even the New South Wales Crime Commission was unable to break through this silence. It was working on some bikie killings at the time, and one of the people it had talked with was Terry Falconer. In 2001 and 2002 it assisted Tuno on the investigation into his murder, and tapped a number of phones and held hearings of people including Liz and James Falconer, and Rob Institoris. But despite its special powers and deep knowledge, the commission was unable to indentify Falconer’s killers.
    One thing on Jubelin’s mind from when he first heard about the murder was that it would have been much easierjust to shoot Falconer dead. The fact he’d been abducted could suggest a desire to extract information from him, and this guided Tuno’s thinking as the detectives pondered the long list of persons of interest. There was a strong possibility Terry Falconer had possessed information someone else wanted to know. But what?
    In the first half of 2002, little progress was made even though an enormous amount of work was done. The packages in which Falconer’s body had been found were examined minutely. Every piece of tape and wire and plastic and flesh, every hair found in the parcels, was pored over by experts in the government analytical laboratories at Lidcombe, a job that was to take years and—unfortunately—yield absolutely nothing of significance. In April 2002 someone found Falconer’s anklet on a vacant block of land at Ingleburn, cut through and wrapped in an old singlet. This too told them nothing.
    Jubelin’s bosses in homicide began to wonder about keeping Tuno going. Unfortunately for the investigation, Crime Agencies, the Homicide Squad’s umbrella group in the New South Wales Police Force, was undergoing a budget crisis, and resources dried up. For a period in 2002 there was limited overtime and it was difficult for officers to travel out of Sydney. Tuno didn’t even have its own permanent office, and was first placed in an office of analysts who spent their days looking at computers. The noisy homicide detectives were not a welcome addition and were soon asked to move on.
    The investigators talked to most of the seventy persons of interest and dozens of others they thought might know something. After a few months they had spoken with a majority of the state’s toughest criminals. They went in hard, tellingthe crooks this was a personal one: ‘They’ve dressed up as police, so now people are pointing their fingers at us. They think they can fucking get away with that and make us look bad, especially after the Royal Commission? We are going to come after them hard.’ Jubelin wanted the word to get around that he and his team were determined to solve the crime no matter what.
    Often when several people are involved in a serious offence and realise it is being pursued by police with especial vigour, one will get nervous and roll over to avoid jail. Or one will talk to a criminal associate not involved in the crime, who will give the information to police to gain some advantage such as avoiding prosecution for his own criminal activity. The investigators thought one of these outcomes might occur here, because the kidnapping had been so well planned and complex that more people than just the three kidnappers might have been aware of it. They were trying to increase the chance of this happening by keeping the pressure on. But the months rolled on and no one was offering anything.
    Jubelin and some of the team went out to Lightning Ridge to talk to a man who’d cooked with Falconer. They didn’t have much luck—they’d pull up in an unmarked car at a mine where he was supposed to be working, and all the blokes hanging round would disappear into the mine shaft like rabbits down a hole. On one occasion Jubelin looked at the desolate surrounding countryside and then into the black