Melissa Caddick’s widower says police tricked him over alleged Vaucluse assault

The widower of conwoman Melissa Caddick has argued he was lured into answering allegations that he assaulted a 73-year-old woman in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, having thought it was related to his dead wife’s property.

Anthony Koletti is accused of “shoulder barging” the woman at Vaucluse’s clifftop Lighthouse Reserve in July last year, causing her to fall over, and ignoring her calls as she lay on the ground.

The victim did not require medical treatment.

His high-profile lawyer, Zali Burrows, described the nature in which the 43-year-old was called into a police station and questioned over the incident as “an entrapment in the grossest form”.

Facing Downing Centre Local Court as a two-day hearing started on Thursday, Koletti told the court he was contacted by an officer who was “dealing with a matter regarding my wife’s belongings” and was asked to attend a police station.

When he was called into an interview room and asked questions about the alleged Vaucluse assault in a recorded interview, he said he “felt threatened”.

“I had just assumed it was because he had some stuff of my wife’s,” he told the court.

“I had no idea why I was there.”

Koletti added that he would have called a lawyer if he had more context.

Following the incident, police publicly released a photo of a man they wanted to speak with.

Having admitted to being the man in photos shown to him during the police interview, Koletti was charged with common assault.

In body-worn footage of the initial police interview played to the court, Koletti agreed with an officer that he was in the relevant area at the time.

He denied “walking past two ladies” or seeing anyone “knocked over”, or shoulder barging one woman and walking off as she called out from the ground. The officer suggested he turned around walked back past them minutes later, which he again denied.

Burrows had argued against the police interview footage being admitted as evidence due to Koletti being “intimidated” into participating. She said the officer’s suggestion the woman called out from the ground was based on a “false statement”, as her police statement said that she quickly got back to her feet.

The prosecutor argued proper police processes were followed.

Judge Scott Nash admitted the evidence, finding that the footage was not improperly obtained.

The alleged victim’s friend, who was present during the incident, testified that they were walking along the path with two dogs when she felt the woman “fall into” her and onto the grass.

“She fell sidewards, and she said to me ‘he shoved me’,” the witness said.

She later said that her friend made a shoving action with her elbow, though accepted this detail was not in her original police statement.

She told Burrows she did not actually see the man shove her friend, and it was possible that she could have tripped over one of the dogs.

The witness said she looked up and saw a man walking away in the “distance” and she took a photo from behind. After the pair briefly spoke to a nearby bystander who did not see the incident, the witness said she took two more photos of a man walking back towards them.

She said it was not sure if it was the same man that she earlier photographed, but that he was “walking in a similar manner”.

Caddick vanished in November 2020 following a raid on her house by the corporate watchdog. Her partial remains, contained in her running shoe, washed up on a beach three months later. In 2023, a coroner concluded she was dead, but the manner of her death remained inconclusive.

Koletti and Caddick married on New Year’s Eve in 2013. Following Caddick’s disappearance, Koletti claimed he was entitled to millions of dollars of his wife’s proceeds of crime, including her Gucci wedding dress, $7 million in shares, $2 million worth of jewellery, artworks, $360,000 in proceeds from the sale of their luxury cars, as well as two properties he said were valued at $20 million.

Koletti later abandoned his multimillion-dollar claim on his wife’s estate, with the court ruling he could keep his wedding ring, a watch and two of his wife’s dresses.

Koletti has not been accused of any wrongdoing over Caddick’s death or fraud.