How the police caught the rat on the cold tiled roof

An element nearly took over the small Irish town of Rathkeale, swelling the local population of 1500 to several thousand when they returned from their crime missions abroad.

Johnny Dooley, Michael Dooley and Joseph Ball won’t be spending much time indoors under the law. They get cut sentences because they plead guilty and in a world of multimillion-dollar scams, their offenses don’t make headlines.

But the damage they do to their victims exceeds the money. They strip a lot of their trust and confidence. And they make good people feel stupid.

In Melbourne, they perfected the fly-in, fly-out model, hitting multiple targets around the usually affluent suburbs and moving forward before the police caught the magnitude of the sting.

As a young detective, about eight years ago, Steve Sinclair discovered “there were 70 to 80 jobs in which they used leaflet drops with fake companies or businesses they had set up to promote. They seek out vulnerable targets and use aggressive sales promotions.”

But they moved from Victoria to another state and back to England before police could identify them.

That was until 2019, when at that point Senior Police Lead Detective Sinclair was placed on the Eastern Regional Crime Team and saw similar reports pouring in. Instead of leaving the suburban detectives to deal with the scams on their patch, the job was assigned to Sinclair under Operation Sundial.

Police Senior Lead Detective Steve Sinclair got the man. Joseph’s ball rolled.Credit:Victoria Police

Detectives discovered that over the course of five months in 2020 this crew pulled 37 scams leaving 43 victims, the oldest being 93 years old. They swindled their way to $434,000, the money their target had saved to secure their future. And there will be other victims who are too shy to come forward. “Some don’t even want to tell family members,” said Sinclair.

“The victims included a blind person, a deaf person and someone undergoing cancer treatment. Ninety percent of their victims are over 60 years old,” he said.

All of these scams are different but very similar: earn the trust of the victim and then steal as much as you can, from Black Rock to Templestowe.

For a crook who would go to court that they had the intelligence of an average garden gnome, they were surprisingly cunning. When a victim’s check took too long to cash, they helped him set up an online banking account to transfer over $100,000 in the blink of an eye. If someone struggles to get to the bank, they will go with them.

They set up five fake roof repair companies, recruited unqualified workers, plastered them on roofs without scaffolding, advertised through online sites and stole identities to launder money. In some cases, they start repairs on perfectly fine roofs, then flee from unsafe locations, forcing victims to pay again to hire legitimate contractors.

On March 26, 2020, a 76-year-old man was returning to his home in Glen Iris after a walk when “Joe” approached to say he had been working on a nearby roof and noticed loose tiles on the man’s roof. He said he could jump in there and fix it for $5.

Joe is Johnny Dooley.

We all know where this is going. Joe went up to the roof and came down to say the problem was a little worse. It costs $970. Then it got even worse – it cost $16,000, then $68,000. Then they claimed to have found asbestos and demanded an additional $60,000.

Intimidated, the man paid a total of $102,000 – $101,995 more than the original quote.

One tile cracked into 100 broken tiles, the rafters under the roof rotted, more wood was needed, a crane had to be rented or the house would collapse.

On March 6, a Wheelers Hill resident hired one of the gang’s fake companies, Approved Contractors, to fix a leak on his roof. Ball and the two Dooleys arrive to inspect the roof, stating that the repair will cost $6000. The man smells a rat (or three) and seeks a second opinion. Another company, another inspection and that company replaced one cracked tile for free.

On May 14, the gang attacked at Sandringham, telling a man they were working nearby and saw the roof needed repair. They helped him create an internet link to his Lloyds bank account and as he was leaving the room to go to the toilet, someone jumped into his computer chair and managed to transfer $147,888 in the time it took the victim to flush and wash her hands.

Their method is to hit and move, believing that they will get out of Australia before the police settle the related counters. But this time the Sundial team is working in the background – discovering fake identities, hidden cell phone records, and shadow companies.

Sinclair said: “They will persuade prospective workers to take screenshots of their licenses, then use those details to register a car with that name, charge a fine with the stolen identity.”

One in another hit-and-run roof gang changed his name four times in five years to enter and exit Australia using a new passport.

The investigation, which began at a suburban detective’s office, eventually involved Australian Border Force, Home Affairs, the UK High Commission, Consumer Affairs and NSW and WA police.

“When we caught them at one workplace in Black Rock, they still thought they could talk freely. They were arrogant enough that we issued search warrants on a number of properties. Then the look on their faces changed.”

Faced with overwhelming evidence, they plead guilty and produce crying-baby pleading material saying they weren’t bad people, had a hard time in their home country, England, and fell into crime because they were mistreated in life. Tell that to their victims.

So do criminals use the money from their crimes to drag themselves out of poverty or pay for their children’s education? No, they buy designer watches, luxury handbags and fashionable shoes – because they don’t need to be announced when they leave Australia and can be resold for cash. Put $10,000 cash in your carry-on bag, and you may be stopped at the airport. Waltz with a hand bag of ten thousand, and you’re free to take off.

For these gangs, everything is a con. The group was previously caught on CCTV camera at a fast food restaurant negotiating to buy a used car. “After the test drive, one distracted the owner while the second, pretending to check the engine, sprayed what we believe to be oil to make it smoke. They’re talking about going down from $8000 to $3000,” said Sinclair.

In May of this year, Judge Michael O’Connell spoke on behalf of the victims: “They were always old, they felt the dire need of a solid roof over their heads … because so many of them were lamenting, their fault was to believe that You’re honest.”

He sentenced Johnny Dooley and Michael Dooley to a minimum of two years and nine months and Joseph Ball to a minimum of two years.

COVID-19 has halted international travel and police are hoping there will be a resurgence of rooftop scammers. The difference is, with Sundial’s model of investigation, detectives will wait.

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