Charlotte Lindstrom confidently strode up to the Sydney Town Hall steps holding a bulging envelope and an ice-cold demeanor.
Clad in blue jeans and dark sunglasses, the blonde model from Sweden looked like she should be on a catwalk – but she had other business in mind.
The 23-year-old was there to meet a hitman, who was actually an undercover cop, to offer him $200,000 to murder two drug trial witnesses.
Charlotte Lindstrom, then 23, was jailed for three years for offering an undercover cop posing as a hitman $200,000 to kill two witnesses
She handed ‘Rob’ the envelope containing photos of the targets (one of which was the wrong person), their addresses, and where they worked
Charlotte Lindstrom, then 23, was jailed for three years for offering an undercover cop posing as a hitman $200,000 to kill two witnesses
‘I’ve got to know exactly what he wants done. Does he want these people in the hospital or in the cemetery?’ the man asked her.
‘I think more so the cemetery,’ she replied, Rob recalled to the Daily Telegraph of the fateful meeting on May 25, 2007.
Lindstrom was appeared cold and determined but was well out of her depth making a desperate bid to get her fiancé out of jail.
She had arrived in Australia in 2003 as a teenage backpacker and within a year was dating drug kingpin Steven Spaliviero.
He was more than 20 years older than her, but she was attracted to the fast cars, piles of cash, and exhilarating criminal lifestyle he offered.
‘He fascinated me. He made me feel important and special. He knew so much about everything, and he was manly. I felt really safe with him,’ she told a psychologist while in jail.
By 2007 they were engaged and she was so devoted to him she would stick her own neck out to spare his as he faced doing serious prison time.
Spaliviero was one of Australia’s biggest meth and ecstasy producers, mixing batches so big his men needed a forklift to tip in the chemicals.
Everything was going smoothly but by his own admission he got too greedy and left himself exposed when a drug lab blew up.
The two witnesses could tie him to the massive enterprise and needed to be silenced, Lindstrom later told a court.
Police alleged Spaliviero was having trouble arranging the hit and his cellmate cut a deal to set him up for conspiracy to commit murder.
With few options, she agreed in September 2007 to testify against her fiancé and in return got four years and nine months jail
He put him in touch with the cop posing as a hitman and Lindstrom was asked to arrange everything outside the prison walls.
After sifting through the envelope’s contents at the Town Hall, Rob asked her for $5,000 or $10,000 in expenses to get the job started.
Her agreeing to pony up the cash, which he said was for surveillance, gear, and a flight out of the country, was what the police needed to show her intent and secure a conviction.
Lindstrom showed up the next day empty handed, but promised to have the cash and everything else he needed ‘by Monday’.
‘He definitely wants them in the cemetery?’ Rob asked. The young woman replied: ‘Yep. He definitely wants it done.’
Just a few dozen steps after she left the meeting, Lindstrom was arrested by officers watching her every move, and thrown in jail.
The case immediately made headlines in Australia and her native Sweden, and all but guaranteed Spaliviero would be done for drug manufacturing.
Lindstrom (right) at the Taronga Foundations 2007 Establishment Dinner at Establishment Hotel on May 24, 2007, just a day before she met the ‘hitman’
Spaliviero’s mother offered to put up $2 million bail money to get her out of jail and pub baron Justin Hemmes pledged that she could keep her bartending job.
They were refused amid fears Lindstrom would abscond back to Sweden, or worse.
With few options, she agreed in September 2007 to testify against her fiancé and in return got four years and nine months jail.
On August 2008 she testified at Spaliviero’s trial, emaciated from developing anorexia behind bars and bulked out only by a bulletproof vest.
She testified that the hits were Spaliviero’s orders and even read out a love letter she wrote to him in February 2007 as she cried on the witness stand.
Spaliviero managed to wriggle out of the murder charge by producing tapes of prison phone calls where he told her not to meet the hitman.
Lindstrom met the supposed hitman on the Sydney Town Hall steps on May 25, 2007, and again the next day when she was arrested
He argued he only wanted to find information on the witnesses to discredit their testimony, not have them bumped off.
The drug charges stuck, however, and Spaliviero spent 11 years in jail and now ironically works as a bartender on a friend’s boat.
Lindstrom was released on May 25, 2010, three years to the day after the Town Hall meeting, and deported back to Sweden.
They exchanged letters in prison, the last one from her begging him to find her when he got out of jail: ‘I still want the fairytale’.
Spaliviero tracked down his former flame on Facebook under a different name months before his release, but messages he sent via her friends were never returned.
