‘You’re right, I’m a cop. Now kill me’: The undercover officer who bluffed his way past a shotgun

As an undercover cop “Donny Wilson” wanted a hero’s death – anything to stop the pain that infected his real life.

In a perverse way, his desire to die kept him alive. With a shotgun pointed at his head and accused of being an undercover agent, his reckless response convinced the gunman he was clean.

“You’re right, I’m a cop. Now do your end and kill me, you coward,” Wilson yelled back in a potentially fatal game of brinkmanship. The bikies who surrounded him burst out laughing. He had won this round of Russian roulette.

A less convincing response would have led him to be searched and the discovery of the secret body wire that would confirm the truth and seal his fate.

Now clear of the fog, the real Donny Wilson, Queensland police officer Todd Maguire, admits as an undercover he was looking for the reverse of suicide by cop – death by crooks.

“I can’t ever remember thinking that but looking back, that’s what I was doing,” he says.

It wasn’t the job that led him to the cliff (more of that later) but the suicide of his life partner, Karen, a death that still haunts him.

It was on New Year’s Day 2000 in their Gold Coast house. Todd was having a day nap after night shift when Karen’s four-year-old son woke him saying he couldn’t find Mum.

Todd found her. She had hanged herself. She was 31 years old.

Maguire was riddled with grief and guilt. The cop who prided himself on reading people kept asking why he hadn’t seen the signs.

Later he would find her prescription antidepressant medication that made him doubt himself even more.

Years earlier Maguire was a Brisbane lad, a handy rugby league player, who turned his talent for drinking and yarning into half a career, working in pubs and clubs until a session on the beers with a mate, an enthusiastic and persuasive Queensland policeman.

“I was in the hospitality business and was whinging to a mate about the long hours, and he suggested I join. I said, ‘Why would I do that? I don’t even like cops.’

“After the fifth beer, I said ‘If you stop talking about it, I’ll apply’.”

The selling point was when his mate told him he would still be able to play football once in the job. (He did, representing Australia in international police games.)

True to his word he applied and was accepted. “I never looked back.”

A natural cop with physical strength, courage, the pub gift of talking angry people around, and a talent for catching crooks, he excelled until his world fell apart.

That’s when he chose to lose himself in the world of undercover policing.

“I was living in my sister’s garage and everything had gone to hell,” he says.

The way back was to invent Donny Wilson – to be anyone but the grieving Todd Maguire.

The fact the mentally broken policeman managed to fake his way through a series of psychological tests to make the undercover course shows why he was a natural. If he could convince senior cops he was mentally fit he could convince crooks he was one of them.

“I now realise why I was drawn to that world so fiercely. It wasn’t just the thrill or the danger. It was a chance to disappear,” he writes in his raw memoir, Donny: An Undercover Cop With a Deathwish.

“Donny didn’t carry pain. He didn’t love or grieve, or feel he was broken beyond repair.

“Living undercover was as though Todd was slowly erasing himself – one lie, one beer, one job at a time. And truthfully, that didn’t seem such a bad thing.”

When I asked him to describe the character he had become, Maguire naturally drifts into the third person. “Donny was a happy man, hanging out with crooks, driving stolen cars and buying drugs and guns. Donny had a great time.”

Four weeks after graduating as a covert, Donny was sent to the Queensland town of Caboolture to work on a notorious meth cook rumoured to cut the ears off those who defaulted on their debts.

He posed as a criminal everyman – the type who would buy and sell drugs, stolen property and guns – anything where he could skim his slice off the top.

Donny arrived in town in a banana-yellow Commodore Vacationer with cow-patterned seat covers. It got him noticed by the right people. He was there for seven months, as part of Operation Icepick, fighting lower level drug dealers, intervening after a stabbing and finally getting the main man who was arrested and sentenced to 12 years.

In two years from January 2001, Donny went deep undercover on 11 drug jobs, resulting in 52 people being charged with 530 offences. His police citation read, “Senior Constable Maguire infiltrated criminal networks to gather evidence and intelligence used in the arrest and prosecution of individuals involved in major and organised criminal activity.”

Not all cases were neat wins. With Donny’s name becoming uncomfortably familiar in criminal circles he was sent to Bundaberg as “Renno” to try and dig up leads into the murder of 19-year-old English backpacker Caroline Stuttle, who in April 2002 was pushed off a bridge by a drug addict trying to steal her bag.

Renno played the same game, hanging around pubs making it clear he was into anything if the money was right.

Undercover police are method actors without a script and a bad review can be fatal. Renno became dangerously exposed in a forest trying to buy stolen guns from drug-affected lunatics. “They were unhinged. One was off his head on pills. He put a cane cutter to my throat and said I was a cop. I settled him down by putting a cone in his mouth. That took the edge off him.”

Renno was making slow progress when a loudmouthed city detective with more ambition than ability came to town trying for the glory of solving the case. Maguire says the detective, who had previously tried to pinch the undercover officer’s informer money, let it be known Renno was an undercover.

The operation was aborted, but the case was eventually solved with two of the crooks Maguire had identified testifying they were under the bridge when the victim was thrown to her death.

With his two-year undercover stint ending he was offered one more job – the most dangerous of the lot.

An anti-corruption agency needed an undercover to infiltrate a drug syndicate run by two Sydney detectives but knew NSW officers could be recognised. It went to Queensland and Donny was selected.

“They wanted me to go to Sydney to work on two detectives who had their own pill press. The alternative was working behind a desk at Crime Stoppers, so I said yes.

“Initially, I didn’t want to work on cops, but they were just crooks in blue uniforms, so I thought stuff them.”

Like a good cop can smell a crook, a bent one can smell an undercover.

Donny used his proven method working up the chain buying three 1000 batches of pills for around $23 a pop.

Then there was the meet. “It was on a superyacht on the harbour. The cops pushed me into a toilet looking for a wire. Then they were saying, ‘Have a pill, have another one.’ I ended up off my head.

“The next day there was a phone call from the agency, they must have had their phones off. I was told they know you are a cop and the job is off.”

This tells you a little about Donny. Undercover police are not supposed to take drugs, but Maguire says sometimes you can’t talk your way out of a corner. “I would never use a needle, but I took pills to keep a job alive and to keep me alive.”

Then there was the moment he stepped away from the cliff.

It wasn’t even a big job. Lorenzo, the drug dealer he caught on Fortitude Valley, was easy pickings – Donny was one of his first customers. “Lorenzo was a lovely fellow. I felt bad (setting him up). I liked him.

“He rang me – I thought to give me a spray. He was crying, I said, ‘What’s doing brother?’ He said, ‘Tell me family I can’t do jail time’.

“He was at a cliff at New Farm. I raced there and grabbed his hand and said, ‘Let’s do it together on the count of three’. He ended up dragging me back, and we fell on the grass then sat on a park bench for three hours laughing and crying.

“After that, I thought, ‘Stop being a dickhead, stop being that person who runs through the door when there are bad things on the other side’.”

For Todd, it was a long road back. The nightmares, the flashbacks to Karen’s suicide and the nips from the black dog of depression.

With his supportive wife, Peta, and son Fletcher, Todd has ditched his self-destructive life and in 2023 stepped away from policing after 27 years.

If you want an unvarnished version of undercover policing get his book, Donny: An Undercover Cop With a Deathwish. It will take you places few have ever visited.

John Silvester lifts the lid on Australia’s criminal underworld. Subscribers can sign up to receive his Naked City newsletter every Thursday.

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