It wasn't the journalists' fault. For example, in one case Helen
Meredith had asked Gill for verification and he had referred her to
Superintendent Tony Warren, of the Victoria Police, who had backed him
up. A reporter couldn't ask for better verification than that.
And why wouldn't Warren back Gill? A registered ISU informer, Gill also acted as a consultant, adviser, confidant and friend to various members of the Victoria Police. He was close to both Warren and, later, to Inspector Chris Cosgriff. From 1985 to 1987, Warren had worked at the Bureau of Criminal Intelligence (BCI). After that, he was transferred to the Internal Investigations Department (IID), where he worked with Cosgriff who joined IID in 1988.
Over a six-month period in 1992, Tony Warren received more than 200 phone calls from Stuart Gill—45 of them to his home number. Over an eighteen-month period in 1991-92, Chris Cosgriff made at least 76 personal visits to Gill's home address and recorded 316 phone calls with him.3
The Internal Security Unit (ISU) investigated corruption within the police force. If you had access to ISU, you knew everything that the Victoria Police officially knew about corruption within its ranks. Its information was highly sensitive, particularly since it could involve one police officer dobbing in another. However, a 1993 Victorian Ombudsman's report concluded that Cosgriff leaked a large amount of confidential ISU material to Gill, and that Warren's relationship with Gill was inappropriate.4
When Craig Bowen (aka Thunderbird1) came to believe in 1989 that he had been duped by Gill, he retreated into a state of denial and depression. The PI community had trusted him. He entered his friendship with Gill a bright-eyed, innocent young man looking for adventure. He left the friendship betrayed and gun-shy.
Sad-eyed and feeling dark on the world, Craig Bowen turned off PI and
Zen forever.
Sitting at his computer sometime in the second half of 1989, Force stared at his screen without seeing anything, his mind a million miles away. The situation was bad, very bad, and lost in thought, he toyed with his mouse absent-mindedly, thinking about how to deal with this problem.
The problem was that someone in Melbourne was going to be busted.
Force wanted to discount the secret warning, to rack it up as just another in a long line of rumours which swept through the underground periodically, but he knew he couldn't do that. The warning was rock solid; it had come from Gavin.*
The way Force told it, his friend Gavin worked as a contractor to Telecom by day and played at hacking at night. He was Force's little secret, who he kept from the other members of The Realm. Gavin was definitely not part of the hacker BBS scene. He was older, he didn't even have a handle and he hacked alone, or with Force, because he saw hacking in groups as risky.