Ben Harvey: ‘My life in Crime’ reveals details of cases from John McKechnie, the real kingpin of WA justice

One of the great things about being a journalist is the opportunity to be in the company of interesting and successful people. The downside is you often feel like an underachiever who should have tried harder in life. Few West Australians are able to highlight my inadequacy as effortlessly as John McKechnie. His CV really blew the grade curve for the rest of us. Director of Public Prosecutions. Justice of the Supreme Court. Commissioner of the Corruption and Crime Commission. He has just finished up in that last post. I don’t imagine he is looking for another job but if he is you better hope your resume is not next to his on SEEK. You won’t get the gig. To make sure there is no doubt about his intellectual superiority to me, John has just authored a book, thereby extinguishing my only chance of professional one-upmanship through writing. “My Life in Crime” is a rollicking ride through the tapestry of cases that made up his more-than 50 years in law and order. It takes him 353 pages to chronicle the highlights of his career and he had exceeded my life accomplishments by page 23. Great. John has been playing a real-life game of cops and robbers since the 1970s. He got bitten by the crime bug when he was on a Rotary Exchange with a family in New York and started studying at the University of WA when he came back down under. He got his Bachelor of Laws in 1972, joining Jackson McDonald before taking on a role in what was then called the Crown Solicitor’s Office. He cut his teeth as a prosecutor before heading east for a stint as counsel at the National Crime Authority, where he chased down the genuine Mr Bigs of organised crime. In 1991, two years after becoming Queen’s Counsel, he was appointed WA’s first Director of Public Prosecutions, a position which, up until then, didn’t exist. No pressure. Over the next (almost) eight years he was ultimately responsible for more than 20,000 prosecutions, including against some of the scariest underworld figures and the biggest names in business and politics. The West Australian described his tenure as DPP as “a Wyatt Earp figure at a time when WA Inc was proving on a daily basis that the West was truly wild”. John’s 16 years on the bench, which started in 1998, saw him preside over some 700 cases. Many of them involved sickening, mindless violence. He jailed a lot of people who deserved to rot in hell — and at least one person, Andrew Mallard, who didn’t. He resigned from the bench in 2015 and could easily have called it quits there and then, retiring on a fat pension, but he decided to go once more into the fray as the head of the CCC. “At 65, Justice McKechnie is old enough to know where the bodies are buried but young enough to serve a full five-year term digging them up,” was how The West covered the appointment. I don’t know if he knew where all the bodies were but he certainly had an idea about who dug the holes. I don’t know if there’s such a thing as a grand unifying theory of organised crime in WA but if there is, John is the bloke who could crack the code. As someone who has covered crime closely in this State for more than 25 years now, I don’t say that lightly. In the course of reporting on bad people doing bad things, I have been drawn into some dark places and discovered truly terrible things about humanity. Maybe 10 per cent of what I know makes it into print because knowing — and proving to a standard that satisfies the defamation law — are two different things. There are many detectives who understand more about bikies and gangsters than I do. There are handfuls of ASIC investigators and Commonwealth prosecutors who know more about how white-collar criminals launder the money generated by those blue-collar clients. And there are lots of auditors-general who have evidence about how crooked politicians let the whole underworld circus go on and on. But not many people have a better understanding than me about how this sprawling spiderweb of crookedness all comes together in the great State of Western Australia. John McKechnie does. Which is why his book, which is hot off the press, is such as good read. I wish him well in what I hope will be a long and relaxing retirement. Mind you, given the number of very dangerous people he has pissed off over the past half a century, he better spend some of it looking over his shoulder.