Hate Mail

The riveting inside story of the Sydney parcel-bombing case.

Sydney, 1998. Personal trainer Brett Boyd arrives home to find a package waiting in the driveway. It’s addressed to his girlfriend, model and part-time escort Simone Farrow. Hours later, Boyd is in hospital, fighting for his life. The parcel was a bomb that had exploded in his face, leaving him badly disfigured and lucky to be alive. Who was behind such a violent and calculated attack? What did they want? And why was the parcel addressed to his girlfriend?

Suspicion immediately falls onto Boyd’s former business partner, a rising TV star named Roberto de Heredia. But it turns out that there was much more to their ‘business’ than anyone had imagined, and the investigation leads straight to Kings Cross, the beating heart of Sydney’s organised crime scene that has just descended into chaos in the wake of a royal commission into police corruption.

De Heredia is soon arrested for the bombing, but while out on bail, he fakes his death and flees the country using a false passport. It’s not until years later, long after he thinks he is safe living under a different name on the sunny coast of Spain, that two Aussie cops unearth the cold case file and decide that it’s not over. And so ensues an international manhunt to see de Heredia extradited to Australia and brought to justice.

Veteran crime reporter and bestselling author Mark Morri has followed these extraordinary events since the very beginning, and this book is filled with extensive interviews with detectives, crooks and the star witnesses. Hate Mail is a gripping account of one of Sydney’s most unbelievable and notorious cases, a story twenty years in the making.

About the Author

Born in October 1961, Mark Morri grew up on Sydney's lower north shore, attending St Leo's college before joining News Limited as a copy boy in 1980 after finishing his HSC. As a crime reporter in the '80s, he worked at the Daily Mirror, covering the Sydney gangland murders, the Father's Day Bikie massacre and the abduction of Sydney schoolgirl Samantha Knight.