OFFICER 'IGNORANT OF MATE'S DRUG USE'

A close friend of former police constable Rodney Podesta had slipped away
from him during visits to nightclubs and gone into toilet cubicles to take
cocaine and ecstacy, the Police Integrity Commission heard yesterday.

Ronald James Quin, appearing before PIC Commissioner Judge Paul Urquhart,
said Mr Podesta had not known about Quin's drug taking and it had not
occurred to him that Mr Podesta might have noticed anything strange.

Giving evidence in the PIC's inquiry into allegations surrounding the fatal
shooting of Roni Levi at Bondi Beach on June 28, 1997, Mr Quin denied he
and Mr Podesta had ever been in the same toilet cubicle when he had used
cocaine.

Counsel assisting the inquiry, Mr Peter Johnson, SC, asked: "It was not the
situation that when you wanted to use cocaine you went to the club with Mr
Podesta?"

Mr Quin: "I was very secretive about it."

The PIC is inquiring into whether Mr Podesta, who together with then fellow
constable Anthony Stephen Dilorenzo fired the shots that killed Mr Levi,
were under the influence of drugs at the time of the shooting.

Mr Podesta, who resigned from the Police Service last year, has told the
commission he had taken cocaine and ecstacy but had not been taking them at
the time of the shooting. His drug-taking, he said, had come later.

According to mobile phone records before the commission, Mr Podesta was in
frequent contact in the first half of 1997 with the brother of Mr
Dilorenzo, who had been jailed in 1988 for drug-dealing.

Mr Quin said he had not known Mr Podesta to take cocaine, had not talked to
him about taking drugs because it was illegal and Mr Podesta was a policeman.

On the night of Friday, June 27, 1997, he and his girlfriend, Ms Renee
Robertshaw, had gone with Mr Podesta to a Bondi restaurant where they
stayed about two hours. They then went to Bondi's Beach Road Hotel for a
drink before all going home before 10pm.

Mr Johnson said that according to phone records, Mr Podesta's phone had
been used at 8.13am the next day to make a call to a mobile in possession
of Mr Terry Voto, who shared premises and that phone with Mr Quin.

That was only about 45 minutes after the shooting on Bondi Beach.

Mr Quin said he could not remember the call, but had later rung Mr Podesta
and asked whether he was all right. He had later heard rumours Mr Podesta
and Mr Dilorenzo were under the influence of drugs and he had been upset by
them.

Mr Dilorenzo, who is appealing against his dismissal from the Police
Service, said that in the period when he was at Bondi police station he had
not been a drugtaker and had drunk very sparingly.

He agreed that he had been at Soho nightclub in Kings Cross in the early
hours of May 10, 1997, and that he had been involved in an incident when,
off-duty, he had arrested a man for purse-snatching. He did not know
whether Mr Podesta had been with him that night.

Mr Johnson: "Were people with you using any kind of drug?"

Mr Dilorenzo: "I do not know what they do. When people are with me, there
is nothing going on."Mr John Alexander Dilorenzo, publicity and marketing
manager, of Vaucluse, is not the brother of Anthony Dilorenzo, being
referred to in the PIC proceedings.