by Gary Jubelin
It’s interesting. At least they are good crooks and we have some fun chasing them. They know we’re watching, so when we try to keep them under surveillance, they find ways to avoid it, or we might spend the night sitting in one block of units only to find out the next morning they have robbed the one next door.
But it’s not enough. Having committed myself to the cops following Isaac’s shooting, I want more. I want harder, more demanding jobs. The kind of cases that make my commitment worth it.
Looking for something that can give me more of the adrenaline I’d grown used to while working on violent crimes, I qualify for the State Protection Support Unit, who get called out wearing ballistic vests and carrying shotguns or semi-automatic rifles to armed sieges or high-risk arrests. Those jobs feel like real life. I guess at heart, I’m still the four-year-old who watched Combat! on television and used to sit out in the garden at night, wearing an army surplus uniform, telling my parents I was guarding the family.
But those jobs are always over quickly, then it’s back to Organised Crime and the pursuit of stolen fridges. At home Jake is getting bigger, while Gemma will soon be walking. Each weekend, I take them over to my parents, where Dad lets them climb all over him and play stupid games together, while Mum will spend hours with them cuddled up. My dad has mellowed as a grandfather, I think, and I understand him better now I am a parent. While Mum fusses over the kids – to them, my parents’ house is always ‘Grandma’s’ – he and I spend the days sitting on the back deck together, talking.
Debbie and I still don’t have much money, but my parents have bought a weekender up the coast in Port Macquarie, which means not paying for accommodation. We often head up there and spend our days on the beaches. Jake and Gemma show me just how much there is to live for as I hold their hands and we run in and out of the surf.
I meditate each morning. Through my qigong, I have started to see the benefit of these breathing exercises and the discipline of emptying my mind. It helps me find the same peace that I remember from sitting on my surfboard looking out at the horizon. Funny, I used to laugh at hippies meditating in the lotus position. Now it’s become something I rely on, before the next wave of work, or life with the kids crashes down on me again.
* * *
I don’t see it coming. Sure, there have been whispers for as long as I can remember, but I haven’t been listening.
Sometimes those hushed voices, hinting that certain cops were involved in something dirty, did get louder. Right through the 1970s and 1980s, when I was at school, out surfing, or starting out in uniform, there were State Government inquiries investigating police links to organised crime and allegations of corruption. But back then I was too caught up in what I was doing to pay them much attention.
Even during the early 1990s, when I was working with Geoff in the Hornsby detectives’ office, I managed to ignore the whispers. None of the cops who I respected, the people like Jim Williams, were ever mentioned and, unless somebody had the guts to stand up in public and speak plainly, I was not going to let it trouble me.
On 11 May 1994, an independent New South Wales MP, John Hatton, takes to his feet in the State Parliament and accuses the police force of corruption. He calls for a royal commission to investigate, saying we are ‘out of control’.
I read about it in the morning papers. The police top brass packed the public gallery in their blue uniforms to watch as the police minister, Terry Griffiths, called Hatton ‘paranoia personified’, ‘a poor man’s Sherlock Holmes’, and ‘a disgrace to parliament’.
‘There is no need to investigate the New South Wales police,’ said Griffiths. ‘I’ve said they are the best in the world. They are.’
Hatton called on Griffiths to resign.
After nine hours of debate, the motion to hold a royal commission into corruption in the police force passes. By a single vote.
Griffiths, along with several former premiers of the State and the police top brass, calls it a waste of time and money. Our commissioner, Tony Lauer, calls a press conference to say the force has reformed already. ‘We’re clean,’ he tells the reporters. We’ve dealt with any organised corruption.
Reading the next day’s paper at my desk, I am not so sure.
A Supreme Court judge, James Wood, is put in charge. He is a thin, precise man. A predator. His royal commission will not work like a trial, where the prosecution and defence make their arguments and the judge is strictly neutral; instead this will be an inquisition. Justice Wood gathers together an army of lawyers and cops hand-picked from the other states outside of New South Wales. They are serious detectives. This time, we’re the suspects.
But, it seems like nothing happens. There are no public hearings. No arrests. We sit, and read the newspapers, and wait.
Like every other detective, I keep on working. And while we do so, the royal commission begins its covert operations. They go to Kings Cross, where I used to work with my uncle. There, they find a bent detective sergeant, Trevor Haken, who is already under investigation over his dealings with a drug trafficker.
A detective with almost three decades in the force behind him, Haken had been part of the same work-hard, play-hard culture I’d seen at the Stick-Ups, but had given up the grog to help save his fractured marriage. At the Cross, he was introduced to what they called the Laugh, where the senior cops received regular payments from those running drugs and prostitutes through the nightclubs and strip joints in return for police protection.
Haken became the bag man, picking up money and sharing it out among the other detective sergeants. Most of the payments were for leaving those who had paid up alone. But the police could also gut briefs – removing evidence – to make sure someone got a not guilty verdict, provide tip-offs of impending raids, put on raids that were really done for show and made no real effort to search a property, or divert other cops to those crooks who hadn’t paid them.
Some criminals were given the green light to do what they wanted on the basis that at least the local cops knew who they were and could keep a leash on things. If the Kings Cross detectives stood up and sent these guys to prison, according to this thinking, whoever came in to replace them might be uncontrollable.
I guess, maybe, it didn’t seem so wrong, at first.
With my uncle, I’d seen what the world of the Cross was like inside the strip clubs, with their free-flowing booze and gaudy lights that hid what was sitting in the shadows. I’d learned the sense to stay away.
But when Haken started out in the police, as a traffic cop, he learned that tow truck operators and undertakers would pay kickbacks in return for getting a referral from the scene of a local accident or a grieving family. Later, doing plain clothes work at 21 Division, he watched as one businessman who was linked to over two dozen gambling clubs would visit each week with a bag of cakes for the detectives and a bag of money for their bosses.
I guess that when you do take that first step and find you don’t get caught, while the world seems to keep on turning, it must become easier to keep on walking downwards.
Then the further down that slope you walk, the more acceptable each little sin becomes, until you’ve fallen headlong down a pit where anything’s allowed.
The royal commission waits until Haken is at his lowest, when he is being questioned by another law-enforcement body, the New South Wales Crime Commission, over his dealings with a man called Robert, a former club doorman who’s now selling cocaine out of a budget motel above a strip club known as the Pink Panther.
As their interrogators go hard at Haken, asking, ‘What do you know about Robert?’ ‘Have you ever taken money from Robert?’ ‘What do you know about Robert’s operation in the Cross?’, the royal commission’s lawyers are sitting in a separate room, watching a live feed of his denials play out on a TV screen.
On the afternoon of Friday 2 September 1994, the royal commission speak to Haken in person. They say, ‘You are in a very serious position.’ They talk about a possible indemnity
from prosecution if Haken agrees to cooperate with them in their investigation of corruption.
Haken says he will.
His car is fitted with a microphone and camera that record his meetings with criminals who hand over thousands of dollars, which he then shares out among the other bent detectives, who call themselves the A-Graders. The camera mounted in Haken’s dashboard records their faces and the banknotes changing hands. It also records Haken and the other Kings Cross detectives as they drive themselves to work each morning to do a few hours in the office, then drive to the pub at lunchtime to drink into the evening. Each day the pattern is repeated. Bribes are taken. Criminal investigations thwarted. Crooks are given the green-light to keep on selling drugs, running extortion rackets or carrying out shootings.
In late 1994, Haken starts to approach more senior police officers, including the superintendent in charge of a drug task force, and records the conversations. After listening to the tapes, the royal commission begin to gather evidence against cops up to the level of chief superintendent and assistant commissioner.
As detectives, we know nothing. In the pub after work, we shrug our shoulders. Then, at the end of 1994, the royal commission holds its first public hearing. The TV cameras show that it is set up like a courtroom. James Wood sits, angular and attentive, facing the ranks of lawyers opposite. Only, in court, criminals have a right to silence. Not so the cops brought before the royal commission.
Instead, police brought into the witness box can be compelled to answer questions. If they decline, they can be arrested. If they lie, they can be jailed for perjury. The media pile in and, once again, police corruption is back on the front pages.
During those early hearings, I recognise some names, although none of them are cops I’ve worked with. I feel that sense of shame I remember from when my old partner, Geoff, was arrested at Hornsby. At the Blue Gum, no one wants to talk about the royal commission.
In April 1995, almost a year since it was established, the royal commission begins a public hearing on the Kings Cross detectives. We follow it on the nightly TV bulletins and in the morning’s papers, as detective after detective is called to give evidence and denies any knowledge of corruption.
On 5 June, the head of the detectives, Graham ‘Chook’ Fowler takes the witness stand and is asked if it is his position that he never received corrupt money.
‘That’s correct.’
‘Corruption and you are strangers?’ one of the royal commission’s lawyers, Gary Crooke QC, asks him.
‘That’s correct,’ says Chook.
Crooke says he wants to play a video, making clear that this is just one excerpt from some of the royal commission’s holdings – meaning they have a lot more evidence. The black and white film shows Chook sitting in the front seat of a car, facing towards the hidden camera. It shows Chook’s face and the bare legs below his shorts. It shows the banknotes as Chook takes them. Afterwards, in the hearing room, there is a moment of silence. People are stunned.
Chook says they must have got an actor to play him.
‘Why can’t you be man enough to admit your involvement?’ Crooke asks.
This is Not Right
1995: 10 years in
Am I man enough to admit my involvement?
Like those Kings Cross cops, I’ve been drunk on duty. On my first day as a probationary constable, a busload of us were driven up to Brooklyn, in the north of Sydney, where the wide Hawkesbury River flows down towards the ocean. The officer running our induction asked us, ‘Who’s going to buy the beer?’ so I went into the pub and bought a carton. We spent the day on the police boat, drinking. But I was never on the take.
Throughout 1995, the royal commission starts to expose another kind, where cops weren’t simply allowing crooks to break the law but were themselves committing crimes to make sure crooks get caught.
The newspapers call it ‘noble cause’ corruption. Looking back, I realise we were first warned about it at the police academy, when I was training to become a police constable and they asked us, ‘If a child has been murdered and you find the offender standing over the dead body can you bash him?’ The instructor winked.
It was accepted – even laughed at. If somebody was bad, we made sure he got punished. In plain clothes, I heard stories about suspects being loaded with false evidence. When I was studying for the detectives’ course, there was an old joke going round about a magistrate telling a cop in court that he’d seen the same gun used as an exhibit once too often and didn’t want to see it again.
Later, when I rode out with the Stick-Ups, I sometimes had doubts about the strength of the evidence we collected, but it still seemed to get convictions. When I went back to Hornsby, working as a detective, I’d learned from these experiences. I sat with the older cops in the back bar of the Blue Gum Hotel, and started to hear more in the silences between people than in what they were actually saying.
To be honest, I don’t think there’s a cop who signed up when I did who hasn’t heard something, whether it’s detectives holding a scrum down to agree what version of events to give in court, or carrying a spare pistol on certain jobs, so they can plant it on a suspect.
But there’s a difference between hearing things and acting.
At Hornsby, I arrested a real hard head over a break-and-enter. When I asked, ‘Are you prepared to make a statement?’ he said he wouldn’t mind a last beer before prison. He knew he was going down. We also had a stack of reports of other local break-and-enters we suspected he might have been involved in. That night, the station supervisor came into the interview room to check on us and nodded; the crook was sitting having a beer, I had another open bottle beside me on the table and he was signing up to all the offences he’d committed. He got four or five years.
I am happy to sit in an interview room for eight hours, telling a suspect I’m not going anywhere until I get a confession. One afternoon shift, the uniformed cops arrested a man who took a machete to hold up a shop. Two days before, another store got robbed in the same way and whoever used the blade had taken chunks out of the shopkeeper. After one unsuccessful attempt to get our suspect to confess to the earlier attack, I told my partner ‘This is not right. We’re going back.’ I was let into his cell and lay down on the floor to talk to him. I wasn’t going away, I told him. He confessed.
I arrested a firebug over a series of arsons at a nursing home, a hospital and at a block of units, where a blaze was set at the bottom of both stairwells, preventing people from coming down the stairs. I didn’t have the evidence to charge him so I led him on, leaning close to him in the interview room and pretending that I really liked him, that I was getting just as excited about the fires as he was, until he said, ‘I can really trust you, can’t I? I feel a strong connection to you. We’re the same.’ This was going one step further than what Jim Williams taught me about shaking a crook’s hand if he offers it, but I led my suspect on. I let him believe I was just like he was.
He admitted the attacks.
If I get called before the royal commission could they say I was wrong to offer a crook a beer, or that I had pressured a suspect? At the time, I saw all this as good police work. I’ve never seen a cop use a phone book on a suspect. I’ve not seen a suspect loaded up, but I can see how it happens. I understand the motive. I can also see how you might take that one, first step, like Trevor Haken, and then think, Well, that wasn’t so bad, so you do something worse.
But if those detectives who verbal suspects, or load them with false evidence, are corrupt, then so are their bosses. I once heard of a task force formed from every known lunatic from different regional squads and sent out to hit a crew of violent crooks. The officers above them, all the way up, must have known that if you put those cops together they were going to get the job done, but not according to the rule book. And they let them.
I’ve also gone into court for cases where a suspect has confessed but, because police interviews were not routinely recorded, their lawyer is
now saying they deny it. More often than not, the prosecution lawyer ran with the case anyway and the magistrate accepted my evidence over that of the accused man.
It’s this hypocrisy I cannot stomach. Those prosecutors and those magistrates, just like the reporters sitting in those courtrooms, all want the bad guys to be punished. Those guys were in on the giggle as much as the cops were. Yet, after the royal commission, they shake their heads, or write their articles condemning ‘fat, beer-swilling cops’ and ‘the code of silence’. And they pretend they didn’t know what was going on back then and silently allow it?
That’s bullshit.
* * *
It’s March 1995, and 81-year-old Eileen Cantlay has been strangled. Her hands and legs are bound and her body left lying on the floor of her home in Asquith, north of Hornsby.
Jim Williams will lead the investigation. I am sent from the Organised Crime Squad to help him out. And we think we’ve got a suspect dead to rights for the murder.
The force is now using DNA technology, and the forensic technicians explain to us that, as Eileen’s attacker masturbated on her either before or after he killed her, we now have DNA from the crime scene to compare with our suspect’s. They tell us everyone has a unique DNA code and show us what it looks like – a vertical strip of horizontal black lines, a little like a bar chart printed out on a slip of paper.
But when we get our suspect’s DNA, we’re told it doesn’t match.
‘Hold it,’ we say to the technicians. ‘Everything else is telling us it’s him, but because this chart is telling us it’s not, we just have to accept that?’
They tell us, yes. You have to.
We shake our heads. After more work we come up with another suspect: Salvatore Previtera, a 35-year-old still living with his mother, who was Eileen’s neighbour. We get his DNA, and this time the forensics guys say: ‘That’s the person. That’s his semen.’ We wonder at this new technology.