Police are also convinced some of the dozen members of the outlaw gang were responsible for the stabbing murder of young schoolboy Edward Lee on a Punchbowl Street a few weeks before the Lakemba incident.
Karam had a 12-gauge shotgun in the back of his four-wheel drive but didn’t get the chance to reach for it because his assassination was so swift. Police linked the gun to shots that were fired outside the EPI nightclub at Kings Cross in September 1998 and another shooting at a panel-beating shop.
Karam’s shotgun was also forensically linked to a wild drive-by shooting in the inner-city suburb of Redfern, known for its indigenous population. As many as fifteen houses were sprayed with lead fired by shooters driving a stolen Mitsubishi Pajero later found torched in nearby Alexandria.
The attack was retaliation for a bashing in Lithgow Prison days earlier when Aboriginal inmates bashed Middle Eastern prisoners so badly that three had to be admitted to hospital.
The gunmen, who fired shotguns and rifles in the dawn raid, left an Aboriginal flag with a luridly painted message: ‘Fuck with our brothers inside and we fuck with your families outside. Blood 4 blood. P.S. Lithgow Jail 2 die 4.’
‘It was a most wanton act of indiscriminate shooting and at least fifteen homes were peppered with high-calibre projectiles. It is amazing no one was injured,’ police said.
Indicating the gang’s callous and casual attitude towards murderous violence, Assistant Police Commissioner Clive Small said not all of the incidents were against targeted people. Others seemed random and could have been just spontaneous thrill killings.
‘Some of the crimes were committed by a small number of people who we believe targeted the victims following their association with the group,’ he said. ‘Tragically, it would seem the shootings of Edward Lee, Michael Hurle and Adam Wright were not premeditated.’
He described the gang as a small group of very dangerous people without morals or compassion. ‘They are motivated by greed and have little loyalty to anyone around them.’
He said anyone associated with the group ran the risk of becoming the next victim. Just like Danny Karam.
– WITH RAY CHESTERTON
4
THE POLICEMAN’S DAUGHTER
‘He held a gun between my legs with the hammer cocked …’
BY the time the stripper starts, the men leering at her are half-pissed. Her moves to the taped music are not so much erotic as a parody of eroticism – but who cares? It does the trick for the mob of punters around her: they hoot, holler and whistle as the gear comes off. It’s a bucks’ night, a sleazy convention in their circles – a bogan brotherhood whose borderline criminal bravado is fuelled by booze.
The girl is in her twenties, more girl-next-door than vampy bombshell, not necessarily a disadvantage in a business with enough tricked-up transsexuals to make punters wonder what’s real and what isn’t.
But there are signs that not all her assets are natural and that at least one of the many contacts she has made since arriving in the Big Smoke is a plastic surgeon. Up close, the pert nose is a little too neat, the pert breasts a little too big, the teeth even and white. It’s not overdone – not a Michael Jackson nose above Pamela Anderson breasts but it’s obvious she has been ‘pimped’ in more ways than one. It’s the thing old school friends notice when they see pictures of her, especially other women. She’s instantly recognisable – but recognisably different.
She has the same, dark curly hair and white skin she had at high school but is more physical than the quiet, bookish schoolgirl she was back then. Not sporty as a teenager, now she flaunts the body of someone who works on fitness for a living, with the defined muscles that come from exercise and diet – strict vegetarian in her case – and with no signs of the drug use so common in her game. She looks like a professional and she is. And her profession, at least proverbially, is the oldest of all. That’s part of the attraction for the men crowding around, waiting for what they know will happen next.
She begins the strip wearing a version of police uniform: blue culottes, crisp white shirt and swinging baton. Off comes the uniform, piece by piece tossed among the tossers in the crowd, until she is naked, bar a tiny G-string. Then she gets down to some dirty work with the baton. The watchers are getting rowdy, making remarks ranging from suggestive to obscene but, some time in the years since leaving home and school, she’s been inoculated against that. Words are weapons but in a game where robbery, gang rape or bashing are occupational hazards, they can lose their sting.
She finishes the strip but the show’s not over: stripping was only the entrée, a tease for ‘fans’ now lining up in an unspoken pecking order behind the unblushing bridegroom-to-be. He will have sex with her first. Then his mates will. Any or all of them: first served, first come.
‘There were hands coming from everywhere,’ she would later tell a reporter. ‘They were all drunk, throwing beer cans at me and out of control. They were fond of me dressing up in police uniform and I had the complete outfit. I had such an effect on them that they were literally lining up afterwards for sex.’
At one strip show ‘about 60 of them were lined up and there were even punch-ups out the back over who would be first,’ she remembered. There were two other girls in the show but some of the policemen would be furious if they were not ‘the first to get the girl of their choice.’
If she were getting cash from each man the sordid deal would have at least some crude equity to it. But there is something different about this scene. It is not only – or maybe never was – strictly commercial. The stripper-turned-hooker is not dulled by narcotics – or strung out and getting cashed up for her next hit. Her bright and brittle bravado obscures the fact that tonight she’s debasing herself for next to nothing: working at a ‘discount’.
Why would she do that? Because the men queuing up for her are police – and she wants to be like them. Wanted to, she sometimes said later, ever since reading her father’s detective manual when she was a child. ‘I used to mess around in my Dad’s shirt playing police with my sister,’ she once revealed. A lot of children play dress ups but this one was different: Daddy’s little girl turned into a cop groupie who’d do anything for police because she wanted to be one, like her father used to be.
It was only when the ‘big blue gang’ rejected her that the trouble started. That’s when everyone got to hear about Kim Hollingsworth, the stripper who took on the New South Wales Police Force – and proved the truth of the saying about the fury of a woman scorned.
SO how did a nice girl like Kim end up in places like that, spending the best years of her twenties stripping for mobs of men, sometimes providing sex for as many of them as wanted to line up?
And what sort of police force would tolerate the fact the men in the queue were often serving officers, given that she performed for at least 30 police functions for crowds of up to 300 cops and their mates?
No wonder, perhaps, that Hollingsworth thought she could leave the sex game behind to become a New South Wales police officer: after all, she knew from personal experience that members of the force weren’t fussy about matters of morality. In the end, of course, it wasn’t morality that got her. It was hypocrisy.
Given her profession, Hollingsworth’s view of police and the sex industry seemed oddly naïve. It began to sour when she felt the undertow of corruption as police put pressure on some of the brothels where she worked.
‘We thought we were earning a lot of money as prostitutes but the police were earning much more,’ she would claim later. She saw how brothel madams who paid protection money to police were given special treatment – and saw that police demanded special treatment in return, with some demanding free sex as well as the cash.
‘They expected it and got it for free. You wouldn’t dare refuse, after all. You do as a police officer tells you.’
One officer threatened to kill her when he didn’t get his own way, she would say. ‘He held a gun between my legs with the hammer cocked and there w
ere six bullets in it at the time. When it’s in that position a gun only needs a touch of pressure on the trigger to go off, so had his finger slipped I would have been dead.’
But Daddy’s girl was dogged. She still wanted to wear the uniform for real, not as a prop in a sleazy strip act. So she applied as a recruit in the New South Wales police service and began training in May 1995, when she was 28.
The public did not hear of Kim Hollingsworth until two years later but the events that led to her hitting the headlines happened in mid-1995. In July that year, Hollingsworth’s short career as a trainee police officer ended abruptly after a gruelling interview with her superiors in a suburban Sydney police station, Daceyville. When she went into the room she noticed a document headed ‘Termination of SPO Hollingsworth’. It was obvious the dice was already loaded against her: they were just going through the motions. Next day, little more than two months after joining the force, she was sacked.
Her offence, officially, was that she had failed to disclose her previous career as a prostitute and stripper on the application form to join the force earlier that year. In legal terms, this threw doubt on ‘her veracity’. In fact, the application form was the perfect Catch 22 booby trap, able to be used against her at the whim of anyone in authority.
It was reasonable to assume that if she had volunteered every detail of her employment history on the form – as most shrewd people would not – it would have jeopardised her chances of entry into the force despite her physical fitness, engaging personality and higher than average intelligence.
Like a lot of police recruits her age, Hollingsworth had plenty of jobs on her resume – she had worked in shops, as a model, a flower seller, waitress and pharmacy assistant and on horse properties and in stables. In fact, she would later tell the authors of this book, her main motive in signing on was to join the mounted police. This was slightly at odds with her claim to journalist Ben Hills in 1997 that she wanted to work with dogs, but that doesn’t matter. Either way, it reflected her professed love of animals.
One of her friends was a mounted policeman. The friendship didn’t bring him luck. He would later commit suicide after being questioned about writing her a reference on police letterhead. But Kim Hollingsworth was made of sterner stuff. When she was faced with the prospect of being humiliated and rejected, she didn’t kill herself – she did something braver. She killed any chance of safe anonymity – of quietly reinventing herself away from the sex industry – by airing her grievance on the most public of stages.
The irony was this: the real reason for her sacking was not for her supposed dishonesty in airbrushing her past on the application form – but her honesty in blowing the whistle on a fellow police recruit with bad intentions and shady connections.
It happened like this. When she applied to join the police force in early 1995, she was routinely vetted by a sergeant assigned to that mostly tedious task. The sergeant would later claim to have checked police records, spoken to her neighbours and her landlord, as well as interviewing the would-be recruit herself.
The sergeant could find ‘nothing of an adverse nature’ and reported the applicant was ‘of good character’ and ‘a suitable person for police employment’. For her part, Hollingsworth left out colourful details of periods of ‘self employment’ over several years. She would later say there was no space to do so on the form, the sort of answer any serving police officer would be pleased to make under cross examination by a pesky lawyer. If she was not specifically asked details of her self-employment, why volunteer them? No copper in their right mind would. As the daughter of a detective, and street smart from time spent working variously as a stripper, as an escort and as a $400-an-hour pro in expensive brothels such as Sydney’s famous Touch of Class, she knew when to shut up. Although not enough, as it turned out, to bury her past.
She had been inducted into the police academy at Goulburn in May, 1995. For a few weeks, all was well. Fit, friendly and good-looking, with a breezy line of chat, Recruit Hollingsworth seemed to fit in. Had she gone to Perth or Darwin to join up, she might have been a police officer to this day, perhaps a good one. But to imagine she would go unrecognised – or that it wouldn’t matter if she were – was optimistic, if not naïve or even a touch arrogant. Sydney was too close for comfort. It was inevitable that the past would point a grubby finger at her.
It happened when a young detective who had seen her working at police strip nights recognised her. It wasn’t as if he were shocked – or motivated by altruism to identify Hollingsworth’s past to his superiors. He was (name deleted) later identified by the Commission as MK2, and a man with an eye for an opportunity. Hollingsworth said he asked her to act as a madam in a brothel he said he was planning to open in Sydney’s western suburbs, a fact that would imply he was probably associated with the Lebanese gangsters who were expanding from their western suburbs strongholds into the more profitable fleshpots of Kings Cross.
At first she thought it was a joke, she would claim. Then she realised she was being forced to make a choice. Faced with the unspoken but explicit threat of her past being revealed, she decided to fight. She had wanted a clean break from the sex industry but now, dragged back to face her past, she decided to tell the truth. She blew the whistle on the dodgy detective. This, she would tell the Wood Royal Commission (and the New South Wales Industrial Commission), was the real reason for her sacking. Her sin was that she wouldn’t play the game by joining ‘the joke’ to become a bent cop moonlighting as a brothel madam, an outrageous dual role to which the force might well have turned a blind eye at the time.
‘One day I was told I was a human being by senior staff at the police academy but after blowing the whistle it was a very different story,’ she would say later. ‘It was the end of my career. The police knew that I had a wealth of knowledge about corrupt police officers, having been involved in the sex industry.’
The Commission had no choice. It had to be seen to act. Its investigators came up with a faintly farcical scheme to set up Hollingsworth’s flat with a hidden video camera to mount a sting on the bent detective. It took a month, and the cast included a tow-truck driver pretending to be a crooked police inspector and Strip-O-Gram operator, a mechanic with ambitions to open a brothel above his garage, and a maintenance man from a Sydney escort agency. Eventually they filmed the detective accepting $100. He was dismissed from the force but denied being charged with taking a bribe or anything else. Nor were any of the other twenty police that Hollingsworth had named as having links with the sex industry.
Supposedly, her background as a stripper was not officially ‘discovered’ by the police hierarchy until half way through the sting operation. She was kept on until the sting was done, then sacked at short notice after the interview at Daceyville.
It was a cruel lesson about being a Crown witness – especially against police. The investigators had promised protection, support and a new identity, but now that they’d used her and the fun was over, it seemed they didn’t love her in the morning. In fact, they treated her as if she were just a hooker with a big mouth; she had done her trick for the boys and was now an embarrassment to be bundled down the back stairs and out of sight. Literally out of sight, in this case: they gave her a one-way ticket to Adelaide and (she would later testify) encouraged her to go back to work in a brothel to repay money she had borrowed from the Commission.
Realising her life could be in danger, she spent a couple of months ‘crying myself to sleep’ before sneaking back to the bright lights of Sin City, angry and determined. That’s when she decided it was payback time.
She engaged a lawyer and, ignoring threats, demanded that the authorities make her case public. Having run foul of bent police, it might have seemed that the safest place to stand was right in the spotlight – or maybe it was just that part of her craves publicity. Either way, she got it: an army of journalists turned up at the hearings of the New South Wales Industrial Relations Commission to catch the jilted stripper’s ta
le. She didn’t disappoint.
Among the onlookers was veteran investigative reporter and author Ben Hills, who was bemused but not quite convinced by the stripper’s spirited performance. To him, the young woman suing the Police Department seemed more happy hooker than bitter whistleblower. There was a pattern to the coverage. Another hardbitten reporter, Ray Chesterton, wrote at the time that she worked the crowd, flashing ‘a smile that would empty your wallet at twenty paces.’
Hollingsworth could be alarmingly frank. Once, sitting outside the court room, she told Hills that her breast implants enabled her to move her breasts independently – and offered ‘to demonstrate this phenomenon to me’, he noted later. (He politely ducked the demonstration, but accepted a short-lived invitation to write a book. The negotiations didn’t end well.)
Anatomical entertainment was in the court room as well as outside it. Hollingsworth’s artificially enhanced breasts weren’t the only ones before the bench. In what one reporter called ‘theatre of the absurd’, the police service engaged a transsexual attorney to represent it.
The barrister, formerly known as Terry Anderson, had swapped regulation dark suit and tie for a dress, handbag and frizzy ginger hair and asked to be called ‘Teresa Anderson’. If briefing Anderson were an attempt by the police brains trust to prove its broad-minded equal employment credentials, it didn’t work that well. When not alarming natural-born women by using the female toilets at the court, the new Ms Anderson scored a few points along the way. She said Hollingsworth had admitted ‘lying’ on her application form and scoffed at her portrayal as a whistleblower motivated by conscience. Instead, she painted Hollingsworth as a cunning and manipulative liar who would ‘say anything at any time to achieve what she wants.’
But after a nine-day hearing, Industrial Relations Commissioner Peter Connor decided that most of the lies and manipulation had not come from Hollingsworth’s side. He found that she had been denied natural justice and ordered that she either be reinstated as a trainee police officer – or paid compensation. The compensation figure was later set at $35,000 – but Hollingsworth wasn’t going to be brushed off with that. She wanted to be back in uniform as a police recruit.
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