Eaton never wanted to be a cop. In his view, the police force was a destination of lowly ambition. In 1960s Australia, it was. Policing employed muscle, rather than cunning. It reflected not only the predominate domestic view, that the law cast no shades of gray, but also the country’s sporting culture. Australian rules football was the sport of choice, a game that developed a man’s ability to wear down his opponent in barely legislated brutality. Football, the thinking man’s game, a sport of deft artistry, was the province of European émigrés, awkward souls stranded Down Under who gathered now and again on the patchy turf of neglected fields, communicating in this foreign language of strategy.
It was Eaton’s older brother, Ian, the firstborn of the family, who wanted to wear blue. At eighteen years old, he was the right size, six foot two and 200 pounds, big and rangy enough to succeed with aggression in the Victoria Police, but he failed the police exam.
Life’s path navigated away from Ian’s control, while Chris was certain that he would draw his own. The family spent its Christmas vacations at Mornington, outside Melbourne, bunking together in a mobile home, where Chris would break out pencil and paper. He had inherited a talent for sketching from his father, an architect, who encouraged him toward the profession. But Chris was interested in the human form. While he sketched the outlines of a face or a torso, he felt a person take shape in his understanding – how a well-placed stroke could manipulate them to one position or another. He thought that he would attend art college in Melbourne.
Ian’s path carried him to the army, though it always meandered back to Mornington every summery December. Ian would pack into a car with two of his friends, headed for nearby Cape Schanck, where the nineteenth-century lighthouse brought in the tourists, while the girls in bikinis attracted their own local attention. One clear afternoon, the boys wandered along the cliffs that overlooked the beach, the waves elapsing along the rocks, and the sandy pathway crumbled underfoot. Ian fell the full seventy feet to the rocks, causing the brain hemorrhage that killed him.
Sixteen-year-old Chris watched his mother sink into depression. Regret consumed his father, a career man who had known his oldest son only passingly. Chris’s younger brother, Anthony, was neglected. Chris put away his pencils and drawings, and he abandoned school in favor of the police academy. This would be his way of memorializing Ian. He didn’t see himself as a cop, but by sacrificing himself so that his family might emotionally recover, he displayed the character of the ideal policeman – shielding the victims, even if he didn’t realize, in his youth, that he was a victim, too.
At Melbourne’s St. Kilda precinct, Eaton looked the part physically, like his brother big enough to handle himself. But the difference in temperament between his colleagues and himself was so striking that Eaton was certain he was in the wrong profession. By the 1970s, St. Kilda’s nineteenth-century seaside mansions had been sectioned into apartments for low-income families, and the neighborhood became a dim environment of drugs, violence, and prostitution. Crime was such a part of life in St. Kilda that police could apply no lasting solution to it. They could only identify “natural criminals,” night-sticking them into temporary submission. “We were really the thin blue line in those days,” Eaton says. “I learned quickly that policing was there to repress the troublesome in society from those who didn’t want to be troubled by them.”
This was no element for the righteous or the philosophical, or even the merciful. One afternoon, police detained an offender, who arrived at the St. Kilda precinct. The man had groped a girl on the beach, but by law Eaton had to let him free. There was not enough evidence. Eaton later learned that the man had gone on to rape and murder. And so while the roughhouse nature of St. Kilda policing offended Eaton’s cerebral disposition, experience broadened his view. “By taking no action, you exude weakness,” he says. “Criminals only respect authority. And authority doesn’t come from the uniform. It comes from a style.”
In a place beholden to gangs, the police were St. Kilda’s biggest gang of all. As Eaton looked through the bars of the precinct’s back window and out onto Port Phillip Bay, he realized that he hadn’t signed up to be part of a posse. Each night, he felt for a solution, as he transited from the charged environment of the St. Kilda streets to his wife, Debbie, back home.
Debbie was the slim, brown-haired girl next door, laughing and animated. She was also sixteen, and the two married in a shotgun wedding in 1972 when Chris was nineteen and a rookie in the Victoria police force. They named their son Ian. A daughter, Sarah, came along in 1976.
As if compensating for the education that he had relinquished, Eaton became a reader of great hunger and interest. In the pages of the books that he read in his young family’s two-bedroom apartment, he encountered mention of an organization that might serve as a model for his own. It was the FBI’s cerebral approach to crime prevention that agreed with the ideas Eaton was rapidly developing. He admired the work of J. Edgar Hoover, if not the man himself, and Hoover’s vigorous application of the law to the influential, whereas police had before applied it only to the impoverished. In Australia, Eaton saw a mirror image. “The people who were committing the big crime in Melbourne, the people with money, the people who were committing enormous frauds on society, police didn’t even pay a note’s attention to them,” he says. Eaton understood that the crime that was visible on the streets of St. Kilda was the result of greater forces, grand manipulators hidden from view. He realized that it wasn’t enough to cultivate authority, but to apply it to effect.
Eaton wrote about his progressive ideals in the police journals. This gained him notice and promotion into the Australian federal police, working in Canberra, the Australian capital. Not yet thirty years old, Eaton had achieved all of the things that his brother Ian had hoped he would in a lifetime.
He was enjoying a cool respite in 1981 as he steered his Ford Fairmont north along the M31 highway, on his way home from Melbourne, where he had just served as best man at the wedding of his brother Anthony. The kids were asleep in the backseat. Debbie was slouched against a pillow in the passenger seat, her eyes closed. The fog in the air wisped in spirals around the rushing frame of the Fairmont coupe. It wasn’t a long trip from Melbourne to Canberra – five hours if you drove like you meant it – and Eaton was taking it slow. There was no rush. He steered along the highway’s winding curve, enjoying the way that felt, to be in control. Headlights roused him from his thoughts.
KUALA LUMPUR, 1990
Rajendran Kurusamy would stride into the raucous stadia of the Malaysia Cup like he was the tournament commissioner. In many ways, he was – controlling which players saw the field, determining winners and losers, paying referees and coaches from an ever-renewing slush fund. The Malaysia Cup was a competition between teams representing Malaysian states, along with the national teams of Singapore and Brunei. It was the early 1990s. Talking on his clunky, early-model mobile phone, Kurusamy would attend a game long enough for the players on the field to notice that he was there, remembering the money they had taken from him, understanding that the fix was on. Kurusamy would leave the match as forty-five thousand fans celebrated a goal, unaware of the man who had set it up. Those who knew him called him Pal. Those who made money with him called him the Boss. Those who owed him money often didn’t have the opportunity to call him anything at all, Kurusamy’s muscle engaging in one-sided conversations. Kurusamy was the king fixer in the golden age of the pre-Internet racket.
As Kurusamy walked out of Stadium Merdeka, with its view of the Kuala Lumpur skyline, Wilson Perumal was just walking in. The Petronas Towers were elevating into the sky, soon to be the world’s tallest buildings. Perumal was also rising in the estimation of those around him. His Chinese contacts from the small-time Singapore action respected him for the lumps he had given them. They pulled him along to the livelier action of the Malaysia Cup.