Firebomb 04 | Operation Jackhammer

ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music, and more.

Just before we start, this episode contains some strong language and descriptions of violence.

The attack that turned this whole thing on its head was that bomb in the Ko Singh restaurant.

The one that was made from mine explosives, wrapped in little bits of wire.

And the man who set that bomb lived lived right nearby.

After I set the fuse, I ran back to my place, I sprinted, which is about three or four hundred yards away, and just as I've reached the front door, she's gone up.

And we've bolted through the front door and the windows are reverberating, the whole ground shaking.

It was a huge explosion.

Inside the house, he rips off the balaclava and army-style jumper he's been wearing.

He's got no idea that he's left the thread from this jumper behind at the crime scene.

It'll become clear later why you're hearing his voice.

We went straight through to the washing machine, took our clothes off, and started washing them straight away.

I never let the missus do that.

I didn't want to let her know what I was up to.

And promptly got into bed.

He struggles to sleep.

The adrenaline is pumping.

So when morning finally comes, he gets up and switches on the radio.

The latest attack happened just after three o'clock this morning and police say it's the sixth explosion at a Perth Asian restaurant in less than 12 months.

When I got up it was on all the major news items.

Damage was estimated at $50,000.

It's still early, only just light.

He gets dressed, gets in his car and drives towards the headquarters of the gang he's in.

On his way there, he swings past the restaurant he's just blown up.

That was quite eerie, watching what was going on at six o'clock in the morning outside the restaurant.

It was cordoned off by police,

you know, all the television stations there, interviewing the owners.

And I remember driving past that carnage and thinking to myself, if only they knew I was driving past.

And when he gets to the house, the front is fortified with sandbags.

And there's a man waiting.

It's the guy who orchestrated the whole thing, the leader of the Australian nationalist movement, Jack Van Tongren.

The first thing I saw of Jack was a beaming smile as soon as I walked through the front door of headquarters and his arms open and he embraced me and he said,

We've ended a new era.

Up until this point, Jack and his gang of racists had managed to avoid getting caught.

But all their secrets were about to come tumbling out.

Police raided homes of Australian nationalist movement members both in Perth and New South Wales this morning.

That's me, Gone.

I said, I've got some information for you.

They got more of a shock than anyone I've ever seen.

They realised then that we meant business.

This is Firebomb, the latest season of the ABC's Unravel Podcast, episode 4, Operation Jackhammer.

Hello, how are you going?

Good, man.

Yeah, yeah.

I'm just finishing up with some emails.

While I've been trying to talk to lots of people in the Chinese community, ABC reporter Alex Mann has been talking to police officers about how they'd crack this case.

And we got together so he could give me a bit of an update.

Okay, so basically, over the last few weeks, I've been speaking to a ton of police officers who were involved in this case.

And I've been able to figure something out that I think is going to blow your mind just a little bit.

Oh yeah?

Yeah, yeah.

So what I've been able to figure out is that this case, right, it's got this really, really specific breakthrough moment.

And it's actually got nothing to do with the fires.

It's more of like this amazing stroke of good luck that just gets delivered to the police kind of completely out of the blue.

Wow.

Okay.

So what's this breakthrough?

It's a tip-off, basically.

And the police hear that there's this mountain of stolen gear, right?

And it's just stashed away in a random suburban house.

And they go to this stash house and they suss it out.

And when they get there, they notice that it's deserted.

There's no one there.

The lights are off.

So they discreetly let themselves in.

They start having a little bit of a poke around inside.

And yep, sure enough, the whole place is just...

absolutely rammed with stolen electrical equipment.

And

so they decide to to wait for the thieves to come back to the stash house and to do that they basically just stay inside the house in the dark trying to be as quiet as they can they stay there for about 36 hours until

I know yeah for a long time until suddenly this car pulls into the driveway

the lights light up the lounge room the cops kind of go quiet they hear these men get out of the car and start heading to the front door.

And then the front door opens

and Jack Van Tongren's right-hand man, John Van Blitiswick

and Russell Willie walk straight through the front door.

All I heard was that unmistakable click.

of a semi-automatic weapon being chambered and

within an instant, there was a dark figure coming around the corner from the dining room into the lounge.

And just the unmistakable words, freeze or I'll shoot.

Okay,

I think I know where this is going.

Yeah, and the police had a pretty good idea where this was going to.

I mean, they weren't quite sure yet what else Russell Willie was guilty of.

But given how much stolen stuff was in this house, I mean, they knew he'd been busy.

And he also was a key suspect in the bombing of the Ko Singh because he'd left that clothing fiber on the wire fence there as well, right?

And this arrest is just super important for that line of inquiry, right?

Because, I mean, he'd been caught red-handed here with all of this stolen stuff.

And that gives the police something special, you know, like this is for the first time some very powerful leverage that they've got over him.

And it gives them a way of finding out what else the gang had been up to.

I remember 24 hours after we were arrested, we were in the remand centre at Kenning Vale in Perth and I turned the corner and saw a group of about six or seven Asians crowded around my

cell and we're in the general population and obviously now they twigged who we were.

We were Asian hating A ⁇ M members and this was a perfect opportunity for them to get at us.

So Russell Willey at this point he's freaking out.

He's got a wife and a kid on the outside and he really, really doesn't want to stay in jail.

But you know, in jail you've got nowhere to run.

There's no,

you can't go home.

I want to go home.

I don't want to play this game anymore.

There's none of that bullshit.

It's for real.

And I thought I was finished.

The detectives can tell that Willie is scared.

And they really want him to talk.

So what they do is they just keep leaning on him.

So I was taken into Central Police Station in East Perth and told I would be charged with another $60,000 break that we actually did do.

But I was the only one being charged with it.

So Russell Willie has two clear choices here.

He can either stay the course and face a pretty serious jail term, or he can rat out the gang and save his own skin.

It was at that stage right there and then that I sort of, you know, put my hands up in the air and you know I just said look that's me gone I said I've got some information for you I think it's pretty pretty relevant information as to your A ⁇ M inquiries and I think I might be willing to offer some information to you in return for some consideration so is this the moment this is when Russell really breaks and flips exactly right so this is this is the bit where in exchange for indemnity from prosecution Russell Willie starts talking.

And when he starts talking, it's like he can't shut up.

You know, the hidden world of the AM is just suddenly this open book.

And Willie goes on to tell almost his entire life story to this documentary crew.

And I've spoken to them, to the filmmakers, and they've actually given us permission to use the interview.

And in it, he describes how he and the other AM members had just been on this epic crime spree right across Perth.

They stole cars, they robbed building supply stores, they stole and sold thousands of dollars worth of audio equipment.

I mean, like to give you an idea of the scale of this operation, in just a few months, the ANM committed over a dozen burglaries.

I remember reading about this, but I didn't realize it was like this massive.

Yeah, and then they used the money from all of those burglaries and the stolen goods that they sold to fund their propaganda campaign, like, you know, the printing of posters.

I just wasn't doing it for the sake of doing it.

I'm doing it for a political ideal.

You know, I'm a political soldier.

Russell Willie then says that the ANM used the city's skinheads to deal out violent punishments to their perceived enemies.

He says that they're like, and I'm quoting him here, he says, they're like plasticine that can be molded into whatever shape you want.

So if we had a couple of major assaults that we wanted performed on some people that were giving us a hard time in the media or some people in the Asian or Jewish communities.

Well, it was an option you could always fall back on or get in a group of skinheads and telling them what you wanted.

It was beautiful.

And remember that attack on Jack Van Tongren's house in the lead-up to the state election?

Well, that whole thing was just a complete stunt.

We thought that a nice little touch might be an assassination attempt on Jack the night before the election.

Oh God, these guys are desperate.

Staging their own fake assassination attempt.

I mean that's so lame.

Yeah exactly.

And so it was Jack Van Tongeren who told Russell Willie and the other guys to shoot at and firebomb his own house.

So we stole the car, came out the front.

They knew we were there.

They went into the back room, threw a molly at the front door to try and set fire to the place.

And

with me in the driver's seat, John let five shotgun shots go into the front room of headquarters.

And most importantly is that Russell Willie provides police with the key missing piece they've been looking for.

He tells them that it was the ANM who'd been systematically firebombing Chinese restaurants across Perth.

It was them behind this whole terrorism campaign.

And it wasn't just Jack Van Tongren's idea.

Jack was sometimes the one who threw the Molotovs himself,

including the one that set fire to your family's restaurant.

The fact that this guy is literally doing it himself with his own hands, like that's that's pretty personal.

Jack would always say, you always quote Napoleon, he who saves his nation breaks no laws.

And that was drummed into us day after day after day.

And that was part of the ethos for us going out and committing know acts of terrorism on chinese restaurants blowing them up and bashing people senseless he who saves his nation breaks no laws beautiful let's go you know let's go and do another day

that's the political soldier

so when russell willie rolled over and then told police what the gang had done

This is the breakthrough that they'd been looking for.

But then to actually ensure a conviction, they still needed evidence.

So they got Russell Willie, they wired him up, and then sent him back into the gang.

Now, this is obviously a very risky operation, and it goes on for more than a month.

And it's during that period that Russell Willie records Jack Van Tongren and the others, basically admitting to everything that they'd done.

Willie leads police to stashes of stolen goods that helped corroborate what he'd been saying, and he tells police about the firearms that he and the gang had buried in public parks around Perth.

And he tells them about that rural property up in Bindun.

So

that's the place up north of Perth where they'd been shooting the guns and stuff, right?

And the neighbour thought there was like a war was going on or something like that.

Yeah, and so then Russell Willie goes on to explain why they were hearing those guns going off and what else was going on up there.

We had underground bunkers, we had a lot of cachets in and around the farm, we had a small firing range so you know we used to take skinheads up there and train them and train the ones that did know about firearms, train them and those sorts of skills.

So around this time Jack was spending a fair bit of time at this countryside stronghold.

John Van Blitiswick and his kids actually lived there and so in August of 89 when the police finally felt like they had enough evidence to make an arrest, a lot of the gang were actually there gathered at the property.

And so, with so many of their targets at the one location at the same time, police decided it was time to strike.

They meticulously planned a raid and they called it Operation Jackhammer.

We had over 40 staff.

We actually went in clandestinely

to make sure that there were no surprises for us.

David Parkinson and this group of elite tactical response group officers, they set up a kind of perimeter and secured the property while it was still dark.

We had everyone secreted in bushes and everything like that.

Four o'clock in the morning of the raid, we had that place secured tight as a drum.

And then it was just command go.

So

one lot came through the back door, one lot went through the front door, and they were the guys who cleared the scene but also had guys behind that who were to take the prisoners.

As the lead team barged into the house this second convoy of vehicles came up the driveway and with them was the Arson Squad detective George Putland.

And I'd figure just emerged from the bush, cut the padlocks on the gate and then just morph back

into the bush again.

Meanwhile the first team, the guys from the tactical response group, grabbed Jack Van Tongren, John Van Blitiswick and two other AM members and then led them outside in handcuffs.

Jack was defiant until they were separated and that knocked the wind right out of their sails and they weren't the big brave bloody tough bullies that they thought they were.

I can vividly remember Jack Van Tongren being held by both arms by two big burly TRG fellows and his feet were about two feet off the ground and sort of kicking and they just sort of brought him out and said here he is and it seemed quite amusing.

You can see the look on Jack's face and John's face.

They never expected this in a million years.

They got more of a shot than anyone I've ever seen and this was just a nightmare from hell for them.

They realised then that

we meant business.

So the gang's leaders were led away.

And this place, this property, it was like an informal military base.

There was a watchtower and this fortified underground bunker packed with sandbags that the gang had stolen from a building supply store.

Over time, the police...

searched the place and found caches of firearms, a buried safe with thousands of dollars of cash in it, and a pet gala.

But of all the crazy stuff that detectives saw at the property, David Parkinson said that it was just this small thing, you know, that disturbed him most of all.

And the sight of this thing has just like stuck with him ever since.

The first thing that I saw above the kitchen table hanging from the ceiling ceiling,

there was a hook in the ceiling and a lump of string coming down from that hook.

And just above the table, there was a child's doll.

It was dark brown, black curly hair, and had a noose around its neck and had a bullet hole in its forehead.

And that was hanging above the dining room table where the kids and they ate.

And that was

pretty raw to see something like that because it just reinforced the bloody hatred that these people had.

And, you know, I don't think I've ever heard or seen anything like that ever in my life.

So police took the gang's leaders back to the police station.

And in total, they charged Jack Van Tongeren and the other ANM members with more than 150 offences between them.

News quickly broke that the Chinese restaurant firebombers had been caught and that Jack Van Tongren was behind bars.

Police raided homes of Australian nationalist movement members both in Perth and New South Wales this morning.

Leader of the ANM racist movement Jack Van Tongren has been charged with conspiracy to commit indictable offences along with John Van Blitiswick and three other ANM members.

These charges are the culmination of a six-week police operation codenamed Jackhammer, involving more than 40 officers.

I don't know about you, Crispian, you know, listening to those stories, but when I hear them now, I can't imagine what it would have been like for your parents to hear them, you know, to be watching the TV, listening to the radio, and hearing that news break.

Yeah, look, I think it was a massive relief for them, you know, like...

And probably a total surprise for them as well, considering the extent of what these guys did and what was uncovered from these investigations.

And I think it was a surprise for the whole Chinese community in some ways.

I think no one really kind of had time to gauge what was really happening at all.

But interestingly, you know, when the stories hit the news, this was actually the first time that my parents had a face and a name to the guys who burned our restaurant.

They didn't actually know who these guys were.

When I first saw the news, and that police arrested him and then that's the only time I can see him, what he looks like.

Jet Wen Tongren.

He burned our arrest.

He did that personally.

After those arrests, the A ⁇ M was in complete disarray.

And they knew that they had been betrayed, but they just didn't know who by.

And in the confusion, some of those remaining A ⁇ M associates and hangers-on who hadn't already been locked up, they started getting paranoid.

And what happened next showed just how volatile and violent some of them could be.

It's something that still haunts Arson Squad detective Maury Tom.

I'm a police officer

to this day that has a filing cabinet in my head that's labelled horror.

And I have the capacity to store crap away in there that I don't choose to visit again.

And I don't visit it because it upsets me if I do.

But one of the things that upset me to the point of breaking down and crying after it happened was that there was a kid that was swooped up in the net.

This 22-year-old kid had been arrested during the big A ⁇ M police raids and Maury could tell he was just a minor player.

His name was David Locke.

He was just a bemused, befuddled, simple-minded hanger-on of this mob.

He just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

And I gave authority for him to be released without charge, without even thinking about it.

One of the A ⁇ M's associates became suspicious.

Without telling the group's leaders about his plans, he and another guy lured the young man into a park.

Because they thought he was

the snitch.

They thought he was

the person

who had

dobbed them into us, and they killed him.

I felt personally responsible for his death, and it still makes me sad to this day.

David Lott's killers were sentenced to life in prison.

Meanwhile Russell Willie, the real snitch, was preparing to give evidence against his former comrades in court and when he heard about the murder of David Locke

he knew full well that the attackers were actually aiming for him.

It all makes me cringe today because

That should have been me.

They got the wrong man.

Should be a user.

When Russell Wheelie eventually stood up in court, he was wearing a bulletproof vest, and his evidence was crucial in bringing down the AM.

And

without him rolling over, I mean, who knows how many more fires there would have been.

The trial wrapped up on the 14th of September 1990, and the minor players received sentences of between three to ten years jail.

But the leaders got more.

The judge said Van Bitterswick's criminality was on a grand scale, second only to Van Tongren's.

John Van Bitterswick told the court that he acted in the belief that there was a conspiracy against the Australian people and that he'd been saving his nation, his family and his way of life.

He said he'd always be an Australian nationalist.

Judge Hammond sentenced him to a total of 14 years' jail.

We sent John Van Blitiswick questions, but he declined to respond.

Russell Woolly escaped any punishment.

In exchange for his efforts, he was given indemnity from prosecution.

We haven't been able to contact him or track him down.

When it was Jack Van Tongren's turn to be sentenced, he gave this kind of long-winded monologue about how he was doing this for Australia.

The judge dismissed it and labelled his actions a departure into the black depths of terrorism.

42-year-old neo-Nazi leader Jack Van Tongren will spend the next 18 years in jail.

He was convicted of 53 offences, including conspiracy to harm Asians and drive them out of Western Australia.

Passing sentence, Judge Kevin Hammond said Van Tongren had waged a guerrilla campaign against the public.

He said, You have brought into Perth a taste of terrorism we thought was not possible.

He described Van Tongren as a fanatic and ruled he not be eligible for parole.

And that was the end of the AM.

Or so everyone thought.

I gotta say, the WA Police General did a pretty good job.

They put the AM's leaders away for over a decade.

My parents even became pretty good friends with some of the Arson Squad detectives that helped get Jack Van Tongren locked up.

If Mum and Dad had any trouble, they didn't have to call Triple O anymore.

They actually had direct lines to some of the detectives.

But it's worth remembering that after the fire at Mum and Dad's, it did actually take 11 months to catch the guys.

And looking back on it, it seemed like a pretty long time to me.

Like, I mean, imagine if Islamic terror groups started blowing up pubs in the middle of the night.

They wouldn't have been able to get away with it for the better part of a year.

So I still don't really get why there wasn't more done to surveil or even raid the A ⁇ M members and their properties at an even earlier stage or even after the third or or fourth fires.

Initially the A ⁇ M were viewed as a misguided group and they weren't treated as that harmful.

George Putland says that to begin with the WA police and maybe the rest of the community too just underestimated the group's appetite for violence.

The A ⁇ M sort of went under the radar there for quite a while because people thought they were just out there putting posters out and promoting their political beliefs.

No one sort of thought that they were resorting to absolute violence.

Under the radar, but in plain sight.

That's right.

They were

pretty well out there and

operating with that sort of immunity.

When Alex Mann and I asked Maury Tong about it, he said, you have to understand the context.

It just is hard not to look back on all this and think, why didn't somebody just watch them a bit earlier?

No, it's not really hard because it comes down to pragmatism.

So

the greater public thinks that the police have these unlimited resources that at a flick of a finger you can call in and barring ad breaks, solve your crime in an hour.

A.

I don't think that's what I'm suggesting, though, here.

No, no, no, but

it...

Looking back,

first thing you need to understand that the Arson Squad

as a team was during that period 88-89, we were dealing with the Fremantle Prison riot.

That was six weeks out of our life.

And also during that period in 1988, I abandoned ship and was overseas on the Churchill Fellowship for 10 weeks.

Maurice says the Arson Squad was also a really small team at the time with only about six detectives working around the clock.

So

if I'm to understand it correctly, essentially, the reason why the Arson Squad or WA police didn't have surveillance on the ANM earlier, in spite of this

established trend of firebombing attacks against Chinese restaurants, was because

they were overworked and under-resourced.

Is it as simple as that?

Well, it's a combination of things, Alex.

As I said,

for the first two or three, a trend was being established.

The fourth one sealed it, and I'm pretty sure it was after the fourth one that we started to decide to go a step up in the investigation and what we were doing.

Do you think people would have waited for four restaurants today?

Do you think people would have moved earlier?

Yeah, it's easy for you to put that premise to me sitting in my lounge room.

But at the time, you have to understand that there was a considerable interval between each of these things.

So, if we were getting a fire bombing every two days or even once a week, we would certainly have cranked up everything and bearing in mind that urban terrorism was a brand new animal that was rising up in our midst.

Apart from the 30s riots and things during the gold rush, etc.

But in Western Australia, this was a brand new phenomenon.

You know, we didn't even use the word terrorism.

Our family reopened the Man Lin on Boxing Day of 88, nearly four months after the fire attack.

And the place was fully booked before the doors even opened.

On the night itself, the kitchen was flat out trying to keep up with all the dining and takeaway orders.

The dining room is full

and people had to...

Why?

You're so busy.

My Uncle Kelvin remembers speaking with some of the regulars between those crazy shifts cooking meals with my dad in the kitchen.

Some of the regulars who come in back, they also all say, Oh, so nice, so uh, glad and so happy to see you.

We will come back regularly to your restaurant.

And these regulars, they're all white people, they're white Australians.

And it's even become this kind of a dark joke in our family that the restaurant fire was the best thing that happened to our business.

We even

do better than before the fire.

It's somehow ironic that the actions and intentions behind the arson attacks by the AM did exactly the opposite of what they had set out to do.

I don't want to say that the gang wasn't dangerous though.

They were dangerous, but they were also kind of amateurish and stupid.

At one point, it even came out during the court case that Jack actually lit his arm on fire when he spilt petrol on himself trying to burn down a restaurant.

I mean, what an idiot.

And then he hurt his arm.

He burned himself.

Didn't we even know that later?

During the court case.

In so many ways, the gang just failed.

The fire at our restaurant didn't divide our community.

It actually brought everyone closer together.

We just said it doesn't matter what happened

to a restaurant.

We can start all over again.

And so I said to not that those people, those races,

there's no way you can

get us done.

We will not get up and start all over again.

And with all those people

supporting us, we will do it.

I wish that was the end of the story.

But to be honest, if that was the end of the story, I wouldn't be making this podcast.

Yes, we did survive and we did thrive.

But what the A ⁇ M's firebombing of the restaurant showed me is that this group was just a reflection of a really horrible and scary part of our society.

You know, I could never see Perth the same way again.

And I think I realized this, you know, as a young kid.

that just because the gang got locked up, it didn't mean their ideas were locked away.

In fact, these ideas were already festering in Perth's suburbs.

And the massive postering campaign had just empowered racists across the city.

It validated their views.

Now, Jack Van Tongren has always said that his gang never intended to physically hurt anyone.

He said the AM had always been sure to firebomb restaurants after hours when no one was there.

But their posters didn't just incite racial hatred, they called for a race war.

Do you see a link between the posters and the activities of the ANM and what happened to your dad?

Yeah, I think it kind of enables people who kind of might go, oh yeah, I don't like those people, whatever.

And you see some posters and things right in an organization, then you start to feel that you have maybe the right to behave like this and to beat people up.

In the same year that my family's restaurant was burnt down, Heidi experienced something so much worse.

She's never really spoken about it much, even with her friends, but she decided to tell her story to me and my co-reporter, Alex Mann.

Her mother, Tradle, also spoke to us.

The night that this terrible thing happened to Peter was a very hot night, an exceptionally hot night.

Peter was Heidi's dad.

He was a taxi driver who was originally from Malaysia.

And I remember going to bed quite late and

not being able to sleep very well at all.

And

then

I heard

a car pull-up in the driveway.

Truddle's daughter, Heidi, was 13 years old at the time and was supposed to be asleep in bed.

Because my bedroom was at the front of the house.

I think I got up and looked through my bedroom window, pulled the curtain aside and had a look and I could see a man who didn't look like someone I knew was opening the gate to come inside.

There was a man who introduced himself and said, look, I'm a taxi driver.

I knew instantly that the news was really bad before he actually even verbalized it.

The taxi driver told Trottle that Peter was in hospital.

Something had happened during his shift and he was in a bad way.

So yeah, the shock was immense.

and I think I was crying most of the time.

And I also had lots of questions like why is he in this state?

How did he end up like this?

Truddle's husband Peter was on life support and it didn't take long for police to figure out what had happened.

It turns out Peter was driving his taxi.

when it broke down on the side of the freeway.

He went to use the emergency phone, but when he got there, two men were waiting.

One of them started goading Peter, saying, what's your problem?

The police told Trottle the rest.

Peter said, no, he didn't have a problem at all, and he just needed to make the phone call.

And I think they just got stuck into him.

Witnesses said they walked across the overhead bridge and saw a body on the freeway and a person jumping on the chest of that person.

He realized that he was in trouble.

At one stage, he was on his knees

crying.

I think he might have known by then and that he wasn't going to get away.

When the attacker was asked by police why he did it, his answer was shocking.

He said, I hate Chinese to start with and so I beat the shit out of him.

So that put it in a nutshell.

You couldn't say it any more clearly, could you?

So.

In the days after the attack, it became clear Peter wouldn't survive.

Heidi and her little brother went to the hospital to see their dad one last time.

But before they went, their elder sister tried to prepare them for what they would see.

So she drew them a picture of his face.

She showed them how Peter's face was horribly swollen from the beating and the surgeries, how he was barely recognizable.

And

I really remember that she drew

his eyes as just

a slit, that they were so swollen that

they wouldn't open and that's all that was there.

The children arrived at the hospital and met their mum Tradle.

It's just really not nice to look at somebody that suddenly doesn't look like themselves anymore.

And Heidi said, no, I'm not going to go.

I think I was

a bit afraid that this wasn't something that I wanted to see.

But Heidi's brother decided to enter the room.

And when he did, Truddle was there by Peter's side.

So he came in, and he came in by himself, and he could see me sitting there, and he sort of had that expectant look on his face.

And when he came close,

like maybe as close as I am now to you, or maybe even a little closer, the look oh, that's so hard,

the look on his face just changed

completely,

completely,

and it was one of absolute horror.

And he just turned on his heel and ran as fast as he could out again.

And I think

his sister was waiting on the other side of the door.

My memory is just of how distressing it was.

Oh, he was bawling.

Oh boy, that was so bad.

No child should ever be exposed to anything like that just because somebody doesn't like the look of somebody else.

It's so evil

and absolutely bloody stupid.

Peter Tanzatako was only 17 years old.

He wasn't a member of the A ⁇ M.

I don't know where he got his ideas from.

I don't know whether he'd seen one of the thousands of A ⁇ M posters across Perth at the time.

But somehow, he'd grown up in my hometown thinking that Chinese people's lives meant less.

In court, Peter Tan's attacker denied that he was racist.

despite what he'd said to the police.

Although Peter's injuries from the assault were horrific, the judge found that at some point, Peter had fallen back while being punched and had knocked his head on the road.

And that was what killed him.

In sentencing notes, the judge made no reference to the attack being racially motivated.

His attacker was convicted of the lesser charge of manslaughter and sentenced to three years in prison.

It was a crushing verdict for the family.

I remember the sense of disbelief.

I really felt, and especially the outcome, not being very positive for a person who paid for all of this with his life.

And so, really, that reflected on the place in general, on the whole of Australia.

The impact of the racist attack has stayed with them ever since.

I

think that the attack did make me

question whether I was welcome in the place that I felt that I actually belonged.

I think I learnt and my, well my whole family but my siblings especially that at

way too young an age that really, really horrible things can happen to

good people and that's quite an unnerving thing to realise I think when you're so small

and

yeah and I think that's that's something that you carry with you it doesn't really leave you

I think Perth is a place where you can kind of feel like this kind of thing doesn't happen wouldn't happen to us doesn't happen here

and

Unfortunately, the reality is that it can happen anywhere and even in a relatively peaceful place like Perth.

It hit me hard what Heidi said, because, in a way, what happened to her dad was what we all feared could happen to us.

Our safety didn't feel guaranteed in this place, a place that for so many others seemed peaceful.

And as I got older, I realized that just because the gang had been locked away didn't mean the story was over.

I wasn't done with Jack Van Tongren yet.

And he wasn't done with us either.

An apparently unrepentant Jack Van Tongeren today returned to the public spotlight.

At each of the crime scenes, pamphlets and posters promoting the Australian nationalist movement were scattered.

Okay, it's just clicked over to 5.32 a.m.

This is the closest that we've got to somebody who kind of was in the circle with Jack.

There was harm being caused and it was attracting this attention and I could be a part of that.

How does it feel for you to say sorry about your past?

I want as many people as possible to hear this story and you can help.

It actually makes a really big difference for us if you just take a second to leave a review or post about the podcast or even just mention it to your friends.

This series is hosted and reported by me, Crispian Chan and Alex Mann.

We've been making this podcast on Garaguland and Wutjaknunga Land.

Our producer and researcher is Dunya Karagic.

Research and fact checking by Johnny Liu.

Our theme and music composition is by Martin Perolta.

Sound design and additional music by Simon Branthwaite.

The commissioning editor was Alice Brennan.

And our executive producer is Tim Roxburgh.

To make sure you're the first to get the next episodes, follow the Unravel podcast.

You can find it on the ABC Listen app.