LEVI CASE PUTS BONDI POLICE CULTURE UNDER MICROSCOPE

ON the face of it they are an odd couple. Rodney Podesta, a ladies man
given to spending his evenings in an array of trendy clubs, and Anthony
Dilorenzo, dedicated husband and father, the highlight of whose week is the
Friday night fish dinner with his family.

It may sound like a treatment for a buddy cop series, but in the early
hours of June 28, 1997, the two police officers shot and killed Frenchman
Roni Levi on Bondi Beach.

Initially the shooting was accepted as justifiable self-defence Levi was
armed with a carving knife and was clearly deranged at the time and the
pair were hailed as "true-blue heroes".

But gradually rumours circulating around the pair's Bondi haunts leaked
into the wider community raising the disturbing question were Podesta and
Dilorenzo affected by drugs or alcohol when they pulled the triggers?

For the past two weeks the NSW Police Integrity Commission has been
investigating these allegations with a view to examining the wider
implications that, if the two policemen were under the influence, the
police investigation of the shooting may in some way have been corrupt.

High on the list of priorities for counsel assisting the commission, Peter
Johnson SC, was to establish what the two officers had been doing on the
evening before the shooting.

Dilorenzo says this is easy. For the past few years, he and his family have
a regular Friday night fish and chip supper at their Bondi home. On Friday
June 27, 1997, 12 hours before he received the call to proceed to Bondi
Beach to deal with a deranged, armed man, Dilorenzo says he was at home and
he has the testimony of his wife, Annabel, and her aunt and uncle, John and
Noela Preston, to back him up.

Also there, say the Dilorenzo family, was long-time friend Angelo
Astudillo, a regular at the dinners. Curiously, when questioned about the
evening this week, Astudillo said he was at home all evening and had not
gone to his friends' house for dinner.

Dilorenzo, however, says Astudillo is mistaken. He got home from work on
the after more than two years, they are not sure who drove up to Ocean
Foods inVaucluse to pick up the fish and chips.

When the Prestons left at about 8pm, Dilorenzo sat watching TV with his
four-year-old daughter Claudia on his lap. As usual when he had an early
shift the next morning, Dilorenzo went to bed at about 8.45pm, he says. A
few streets away his partner was having an early birthday celebration with
a couple of friends at Terrific Thai.

He says he finished his shift at 7pm and met his two friends, a couple
whose names have been suppressed by the PIC, at about 7.45pm.

Podesta says the three of them had a quiet dinner they may or may not have
had a couple of beers, nothing silly though.

His friends say he accompanied them to the nearby Beach Road Hotel for one
beer. He maintains he drove straight home.

Although Podesta had a flat in Waverley at the time, he was staying with
his parents. His father had terminal cancer and it was his habit to help
his mother to get his sick father to bed. He retired at about 11pm, ready
for the early shift.

Roni Levi's movements on the night before he was shot were canvassed at the
inquest in February last year. He had dinner with friends Tina Dalton and
Daniel Hagege and Freddie and Caroline Atlani at Hagege's home in the
eastern suburbs. He arrived, according to Hagege, looking preoccupied and
by 9.30pm his mental state had deteriorated.

His friends took him to St Vincent's Hospital where Elizabeth Meagher, who
examined him, found him "exceedingly pleasant" and "quite happy". However,
she noted his confused state and referred him to registrar Frank Brennan
who examined him and put him to bed at about 2.30am. By 4.30 he was
discovered missing.

At 6.30am, Warren Brunner, with whom he shared a flat in North Bondi, was
alarmed to see Levi run out of the apartment having first snatched a
black-handled carving knife. Brunner made a short detour to Bondi police
station to alert them of the possible danger.

At 6.58am the call went out to Dilorenzo and Podesta: "Male gone berserk
with a knife." The partners headed to the beach. Half an hour later, Levi
was dying from four gunshot wounds.

Levi's movements in the hours before the shooting have not been challenged,
but in the PIC this week the versions of events offered by Podesta and
Dilorenzo have been called into question with a series of disturbing
revelations.

Witnesses called by Johnson have testified to Podesta's regular drug use
and his habit of staying out all night before going on duty.

One witness, SA2, a woman who testified from a remote location with her
features obscured, said that in the time she was dating Podesta he would
regularly give her cocaine, drugs he seemed to have in abundance and which
he boasted he would often confiscate from hapless partygoers and sell at
nightclubs.

SA2 says she saw Podesta at about 10pm on the night before the shooting.
The young policeman appeared to be high on cocaine, she said. "He looked
very agitated," she said. "He couldn't sit still." After the shooting, she
claims, Podesta rang her sounding very distraught. "I've done a very bad
thing," she alleges he told her.

The woman said she had also seen Dilorenzo take cocaine on occasions.

Podesta's brief, Sydney lawyer Ken Madden, sought to control the damage by
suggesting SA2 was merely a one-night stand, the classic woman scorned. Two
other witnesses, Kieran O'Connor and Easton "TC" James, who owned and
managed Liberty Lunch, where Podesta was a regular at the time of the
shooting, sought to discredit the woman still further, suggesting yesterday
she was a prostitute they had barred from the restaurant for soliciting.

Podesta, who since the shooting has been charged on one count of supplying
cocaine, has tried to control the damage by insisting that his drug use did
not start until November 1997, well after the shooting and as a result of
his father's death. However, witness after witness has challenged this,
with tales of after-hours coke-sniffing parties at Liberty Lunch.

This despite being warned to stay away from the Bondi restaurant by his
patrol commander, retired former superintendent Richard Baker, whose
concerns about Podesta's associations with a suspected drug hangout led him
to advise internal affairs to have Podesta put under surveillance.

As for Dilorenzo, his family-man image has been tarnished by tales of
late-night drinking at a variety of haunts, not to mention surveillance
tapes of he and Podesta in which the pair discussed "business" at Liberty
Lunch and how it had been "f--ked" by the new proprietor, Stan Dowse, who
told the commission he had seen signs of drug-taking among the staff and
would not tolerate it.

Commissioner Paul Urquhart will take final submissions on Friday after
which he will consider his findings before moving on next year to examine
the manner in which the incident was investigated by the police themselves.

In the absence of hard evidence of drug or alcohol abuse (the two officers
mandatory drug tests in such cases were brought in as a result of the
shooting) the commissioner will be forced to sift through reams of
transcript with literally hundreds of allegations and counter allegations.

But to a casual observer of the PIC this past fortnight, listening with
wide eyes to tales of wide-boys, cops and casual drug use, what was put
under the microscope was not simply the actions of two Bondi police
officers, but the entire police culture along Sydney's most celebrated
stretch of sand.

were not drug tested at the time of the shooting Friday in question at 5pm,
had a shower and got into a pair of shorts. Someone