KEY POINTS:
For years, Nick Perry was one of the snipers in the police anti-terrorist squad.
By definition, snipers are low-key and work on their own. Their role is to take people out as quietly as possible.
It is a metaphor impossible to resist when describing Detective Superintendent Perry's role as head of Operation Austin - the investigation into Louise Nicholas' allegations of pack-rape and corruption by police officers. For Operation Austin, Perry headed a close-knit team out on their own, coldly assessing what was in front of them and taking people out.
The laconic Perry would never use such an image. He'll rattle off police labels like "objective", "open-minded", "professional" and "thorough." The nearest he gets to drama is to observe: "if it isn't the most complicated New Zealand police investigation ever ... then it would certainly be in the team photo".
He masters understatement when describing the extraordinary scenario of arresting assistant commissioner Clint Rickards at Auckland central - the very station Rickards commanded - as "a bit like any other arrest really. They all have the same process."
And he laughs when read his own words from the first press statement announcing he would head Operation Austin. "It will provide an interesting challenge," he said.
Millions of police dollars, seven major trials and fierce controversy later, and Perry has been proved right.
The 56-year-old is now New Zealand's police liaison officer to Britain, a sole-charge position with an office at the New Zealand High Commission in London. He lives in Wimbledon with second wife Melanie and 8-year-old Shannon, catching the Tube in early to make sure he gets a seat.
He likes it there and gives the impression he was more than happy to get away from 2 1/2 years where every day was punctuated with the names Louise Nicholas, Clint Rickards, Brad Shipton, Bob Schollum and John Dewar.
Now, with Dewar sentenced to 4 1/2 years in prison last week, the saga is as close to over as it will ever be for the Austin team. It is not known if its members will play a part in the disciplinary tribunal that will decide Rickards' future in the police.
For Perry, it all began with a phone call in February 2004. Steve Long, then deputy commissioner, asked if he could put aside his work heading the Southern police district to investigate allegations a woman by the name of Louise Nicholas was set to make public in the next day's newspapers. "There was no saying no," says Perry. "That's the way it is when you're in the police - you get asked to investigate something, and you start investigating."
Most of his 34 years in the force had been as a detective and he had a background with complicated cases sensitive to the police: he had previously handled the re-investigation of the Tania Furlan murder case after police paid rapist Travis Burns $30,000 to become a secret witness, then relocated him to the area where he killed Joanne McCarthy.
Running parallel to his career as a detective was his time in the armed offenders and anti-terrorist squads, rising from sniper to officer-in-charge.
Perry thought the initial "scoping exercise" with the Nicholas case would take a couple of months and he set to work reading two big boxes of files which held the bones of Nicholas' story. The allegations of sex with a baton with Rickards, Shipton and Schollum that had been raised in court trials. Transcripts of those trials. Investigations of other allegations by Nicholas. The way Dewar had conducted investigations. Other internal investigations into Dewar.
Over the years Perry had heard a few rumours. There, in those boxes that had always been held by the police, he found more than enough to go on. He began to build a team, hand-picking some detectives. Others came from around the country and non-sworn staff were pulled in.
The 20 staff, sometimes swelling to 30, were based in rented offices in Wellington's Ericsson House, with those working in the field based in the Rotorua police station from where the offending had emanated. These are good staffing numbers for a homicide investigation at its very height, let alone a long-term investigation.
The pace was frenetic; officers working away from their homes, 12 days on and two days off for the first nine months.
How did he motivate the team? "I didn't have to," said Perry, praising their "personal sacrifice".
He describes their investigations as "thorough". The families and lawyers of those in Austin's sights prefer "relentless".
Its scope can be seen with the 70 phases it spread to. Any tip-off, was investigating extensively.
"We had no forensics, no eye witnesses, and people who wouldn't come forward unless we went [to them] directly. Yes, we went deep.Yes, we spread the net wide We interviewed hundreds of people."
A Mt Maunganui victim with name suppression came forward with a separate historic rape allegation involving Shipton and Schollum. The alleged offenders were bugged and caught talking about it, and it spun off into a case of its own.
A second Rotorua woman was found during a trawl of Shipton's notebooks under the name "milk bottle".
The investigators had heard the milk bottle rumour but didn't know what it meant. They traced her and knocked on her door. She told them she had been raped and sexually assaulted with a whisky bottle, thus the nickname.
There were other alleged victims and offenders linked to what Perry describes as the "core group" or "rogue element" of the Rotorua police station in the 1980s. Perry revealed "about 10" alleged victims were uncovered. He says there were women who gave "tacit acknowledgement that something had happened but the time had passed; there were kids, careers - they didn't want to know about it". And other cases where the women were ready to go to court, but they didn't have quite the right evidence.
In short, other alleged victims who did not get their day in court, and other men who did not have to defend themselves either.
Of those that did, there were links and a similar modus operandi - evidence of batons used in sex.
There was a clear and big picture but it could not be "choreographed" together. There was a suppression order on the Mt Maunganui case, and the Nicholas and Rotorua woman cases were separated.
Perry is philosophical about fitting the complicated cases into the strait-jacket of the courts and says the defence and judges had just as difficult a job. "Those are the rules."
If Rickards had been a plumber would the investigation have been pushed this far?
"I don't buy into that," says Perry in response to an oft-cited theory of the accused's supporters.
He concedes that high-profile investigations "do make a difference" with resources. Perry points to the actions of Dewar, and "the way there was something seriously wrong there", a "unique" case of police corruption that merited the scale of the investigation.
He talks less about Rickards, Shipton or Schollum but continually returns to Dewar, and the "incompetent" , "extraordinary" , "fundamentally flawed" and "astounding" investigation of Nicholas' claims.
They were both Detective Inspectors at the time of the offending and had known each other in the anti-terrorist squad ("We didn't cross each other's paths much, I was a sniper, he was in the assault team or something.")
Operation Austin could not gather a case of conspiracy between Dewar, Rickards, Shipton and Schollum to take to court, "but the public can judge that for themselves".
Dewar's cover-up was so clear, Perry says, in the first boxes he received "75 per cent of the evidence was there already."
Why then if this information was there, mainly in an inquiry by Detective Chief Inspector Rex Miller in 1995, was Rickards able to be promoted so rapidly? Perry described the promotions by police chiefs - including former commissioner Rob Robinson - when they knew about Nicholas' allegations, as "naive" and "dangerous".
"All I can say is that anybody reading [the Miller inquiry] who is an experienced police officer would have to have had some reservations about [the] conclusions that were reached, and certainly not be prepared to take them on face value."
Robinson retired before the cases went to court and has refused to comment on his involvement with Rickards' rise from detective inspector to assistant commissioner.
Perry concedes his team "got knocked over a couple of times" with the not guilty verdicts in some of the trials. He'll have you believe the spirit of the Operation Austin team was just like that of any other investigation unit, but anyone who saw those trials and the officer's reactions will tell you otherwise.
It felt like a war at times. Had he felt for the families of the accused, like Schollum's daughters, of a similar age to the sons from his own first marriage?
"Of course I did - not that they will believe me. You wouldn't be human if you didn't. They were victims too."
The Operation Austin investigation saw Perry move from an "open mind" on Nicholas to "I believe her"; something that stretches to her allegations about abuse by police in the Murupara days.
Yes, he was glad to get convictions in the Dewar case. And yes, he was proud when he heard Nicholas say Operation Austin restored her faith in the police.
On the big picture, Perry says changing how historic sex crimes are investigated would involve looking at fundamentals of the justice system such as an offender's right to silence. Rickards opted to state his case but Shipton and Schollum stayed quiet. Perry suggests a model where the alleged offender be put in the stand and cross-examined as the victim is.
Perry finds it hard to find the words to describe how he felt when he came to grips with the magnitude of the corruption Operation Austin uncovered.
"I'd had 35-40 years in the police, spending that entire time doing my best to make the police credible.
"And to be credible, the integrity has to be there; that's the cornerstone of policing as far as I'm concerned and they had taken that away.
"If you don't have integrity, you don't have credibility, and you stop functioning as a police force. And that's what they'd done ... I felt let down, they let down the police."
So what's next for Perry? A conversation with him displays enthusiasm for policing. New ideas, what they are doing in Scotland, the American take on things, the latest methods.
Will it be back to New Zealand to one of the top jobs? The question gets a response worthy of Winston Peters.
"Right now I'm just happy developing the police liaison role."
