Underbelly

by John Silvester

  Within a week, she was doing surveillance.

  FOR someone who was starting to feel persecuted, Locke was going pretty well for a while. The surveillance gig meant wearing casual street clothes, driving a new sports car supplied by the office, and being issued with slush fund cash to splash around to help develop a cover – which was pretty well all the time. Surveillance detectives worked from home, to avoid being seen coming out of police buildings. They would meet at a coffee shop or McDonalds that was close to that day’s target, then split up. Overtime was virtually unlimited. One of her new colleagues regularly filled his car from the police bowser, and found enough spare time to run his DJ business after hours.

  There were funny jobs. Sometimes, female undercovers would go to male strip shows to ensure that no pubic hair was revealed. On another job, Deborah’s friend Mandy was sent to a brothel to apply for work. During the interview, Mandy agreed to a request to strip and pose for some erotic photographs. After she revealed this at the debriefing later, the boss ordered the crew to raid the brothel to recover the photographs in case they ended up in court – or in the newspapers.

  For a while, it seemed better than working for a living. But, as usual, there was a catch.

  In late 1986, Mandy and Deborah moved into a motel room at Bondi as cover to infiltrate an illegal gaming house at Kings Cross. They chatted up an ‘old guy’ called Ernie who ran the front counter of the gaming house, called the Barclay Club. He gave them the job of minding the security system designed to keep police out while illegal games were on. It was putting the foxes in charge of the henhouse.

  Ernie liked the girls. They must have seemed more trustworthy than most he met. Unwisely, as it turned out, he showed them his collection of stolen jewellery in a small chest under his bed. He had been a ‘fence’ for years, and had picked over the best gear stolen from luxury houses around Double Bay. To Deborah’s untrained eye, a lot of the jewellery seemed old enough and valuable enough to be family heirlooms, which could never be replaced. ‘My family’s home had been broken into and I knew what it felt like to lose irreplaceable family things,’ she would write. ‘I was more interested in getting this stuff back to its owners than in a bunch of Lebs playing cards.’

  A few nights later, she was working the counter when who should walk through the door but ‘Grimy Graham’, a heroin addict and one of her street contacts when she had worked at Kings Cross the previous year. He laughed to see a cop working security for the gaming house. She was terrified he would sell her out, as he always needed money for heroin. She called her boss to say she had been ‘burnt’ and didn’t feel safe. He said too much money had been spent on the operation to abort it, and to finish the shift and to call him next day. She was scared that if the crooks were tipped off, she would be dragged out the back door and made to disappear. But ‘Grimy Graham’ must have remembered how she had treated him kindly, and kept his information to himself.

  Next night Deborah called in sick and Mandy took over the spot. When the police raided, she opened the door for them and then ran off, making it look as if she were frightened and had left the door open accidentally.

  The raid was a success. The club was closed down. The detectives searched Ernie’s room for the jewellery Deborah told them about. But when they came back they said that the chest was empty. She never knew whether to believe it or not.

  It was back to the Gaming Squad. That’s when she met the honest boss she would always admire, Kimbal Cook. The man who knocked back a bribe and then nailed his bent colleagues for taking it. And had to live with the fallout. She believed in him and his code but she knew he was hopelessly outnumbered. She did not want to work in a squad so dominated by corruption and went to Parramatta and found out that corruption was everywhere. By that night in April 1988, listening to veiled threats to an honest cop being broadcast on the police radio, she was screwing up her courage to break ranks and tell the truth.

  THE longest journey starts with one short step, the saying goes. For Deborah Locke that step was a telephone call to the home of her former Gaming Squad boss, honest Kim Cook. There were good reasons to think twice about making this move. An officer called Phil Arantz had been thrown in a mental institution after speaking out about falsified police statistics. And, more notoriously, a detective called Michael Drury had been shot as he stood washing dishes in his kitchen in front of his wife and two small children. Although no one has ever been charged with Drury’s shooting, the consensus is that former Melbourne hit man Christopher Dale Flannery pulled the trigger on the orders of corrupt police – not long before Flannery himself disappeared because of his potential to turn on his Sydney ‘patron’ George Freeman.

  As Locke would tell reporters, she called Cook at home and asked to meet him. She poured out her story to him in an Oxford Street coffee shop. He told her she had no choice but to go to the Internal Police Security Unit and offered to make the arrangements and accompany her. Days later she found herself, heart pounding and palms sweaty, in a small office with two senior officers from the internal security unit. To her surprise, after introducing her to the officers, Kim Cook left. She was on her own.

  Again she told her story. None of it surprised them. They seemed to know every character she mentioned but they seemed uninterested. One of the stories she told them was about being tricked by ‘Ron’ the dodgy detective into filing a report for a supposed break and enter at the house of a man who turned out to be Ron’s brother. The report, almost certainly the basis of a bogus insurance claim, was filed in triplicate. Yet the internal security officers wanted her to retrieve a copy of it from the busy Parramatta Detectives’ office, where she risked falling immediately under suspicion. It was downright dangerous – but that didn’t worry the men from headquarters. A whistleblower’s lot is not an easy one. Which is exactly what she found out when she returned to Parramatta and waited for a chance to raid the records to get a copy of the dodgy report. One of the detectives saw her and asked her, point blank, if she were waiting around to ‘get a copy of your report’. They knew. She couldn’t believe it. Later in the shift two detectives told her they had a source at the Internal Security Unit … and the source had leaked about her interview there. It had taken less than a week. The boss of the office warned everyone that the phones were tapped and glared at her as he said it. And another detective told her she was ‘a silly little girl’.

  Locke was terrified, with good reason. Her life could have been in danger. She called the senior officer at internal security. He made soothing noises but when she said she’d been told ‘they’ had an informer in the security unit, he went quiet. Then he offered her a transfer to the Commissioner’s Policy Unit at police headquarters – starting 36 hours later.

  When she started the new job, a superintendent told her that ‘we’ should not bother the Commissioner, John Avery, with her problem. Instead of seeing Avery, who was soon to retire, she would talk to the assistant commissioner in line for the top job, Tony Lauer. It was the first Locke knew that Avery was going and Lauer was taking over. Suddenly, she was at a high altitude – but not enjoying the view.

  She waited for what seemed like a long time for the interview with Lauer. When it came, she blurted out her whole story of corrupt activities with names, places and dates. His reaction, she would later write, was mainly what to do with her. After she again attempted to tell him how bad things were, he told her that police ‘don’t like whistle-blowers’, which was true.

  It was the first time she’d heard the term ‘whistleblower’. It would soon become part of her everyday vocabulary. By the end of the interview she was quietly convinced that Lauer thought she was – if not exactly at fault – then certainly taking a risk by dobbing in other cops.

  ‘I felt like a silly little girl who had done something that everyone else knew not to do,’ she would write of the scene in the office high in the sky. Finally, Lauer told her she would be put with Michael Drury, the other ‘outcast’ who had been shot in 1
984, apparently for his refusal to bend to bent police. Together, they ran Task Force Wave, a faintly bizarre scheme to trap car thieves by setting up cars fitted with sophisticated thief-catching gear. The electronic gear was worth a huge amount of money but the ‘bait’ cars were old bombs no self-respecting thief would want to pinch from a supermarket or railway car park. It was a miserable time for Locke. Because Drury had his office in another building and was preoccupied writing a book, In the Line of Fire, with Darren Goodsir, she spent much of it working alone from a desk in an old hat factory in Surry Hills. At home, meanwhile, she started to drink with her parents. She was only 25, and felt as if her life was over.

  It wasn’t. After swinging a transfer to the comparative normality of the Fraud Squad, she met the man who would change her life – and her surname – Greg Locke. She took notice when a detective warned her not to trust him because ‘if there’s money to be found, he won’t take any.’ A backhanded compliment that first aroused her interest, then her feelings. She started a relationship with him a month later but was still a long way from being saved from the dark hole in which the police force – and her alcoholic parents’ dependence on her – had left her. First she attended meetings of Alanon, a group for relatives of alcoholics. It was good, but it wasn’t enough. That didn’t happen until a little old lady at one meeting told her she had to give up drinking completely or she would end up a hopeless alcoholic like the rest of her family.

  She gave up drinking, one day at a time. And she married Greg and had her first baby.

  She had tried to clean up her troubled life. But there was still the small matter of cleaning up the police force.

  SIX years is a long time. World War II lasted for six years. That is how long it took from when Deb Locke first went to the Internal Security police in 1988 to when the Independent MP John Hatton aired her damning evidence in State Parliament in 1994. The New South Wales Premier of the day, John Fahey, apologised for the treatment she’d suffered at the hands of other police.

  It was this, more than anything else, that forced the Wood Royal Commission, which exposed entrenched police corruption as well as organised paedophile activity. It was in its way a great victory against overwhelming odds. But nothing could repay her for what she had sacrificed. As Maree Curtis would write much later, Locke’s career was in tatters: ‘She had endured 10 years of emotional and verbal abuse and sexual harassment; had suffered a miscarriage; been treated for depression; was a recovering alcoholic; and she was struggling to hold on to her physical and mental health.’

  There was good reason for the fears playing on her mind: speaking up had put her life at risk. Once, while at the Fraud Squad, she was called to an interview with the Independent Commission Against Corruption when a disturbing thing happened.

  ‘As I was putting things in my handbag ready to leave, one of my colleagues strolled up and said “Have you got your gun with you?” When I asked him why, he said, “You better take it with you or someone here might use it on you”.’

  Was it a veiled threat – or a genuine warning from a colleague who sensed that something evil was in the wind? The fact is that if she had been found shot dead with her own gun, it would easily have been dismissed as a ‘clear cut’ case of suicide to fellow police investigating the death of someone easily painted as an alcoholic, prone to depression and obviously under great strain. In fact, a senior New South Wales police officer had been found in just such circumstances some years earlier. Officially, he shot himself – but the rumour is that bent police lent him a hand.

  By the time Locke wrote Watching the Detectives, published in 2003, she was 39, had left the force well behind and had two more children. She and her husband were surviving on police pensions after taking medical discharges from the job that had turned them into pariahs. Despite everything, she told Curtis, she had no regrets about what she had done.

  ‘If you decide to take a stand, you can’t stop,’ she said. ‘You just have to keep going and see it through.’ Of her book, since republished to catch the wave of publicity surrounding the Underbelly drama series, she said: ‘In a way, it’s closure. Those bastards did a lot of bad things to me.

  ‘If I found myself in the same situation, I would do it all again. It has taken a huge toll – on my life and on my health and on my family – but at least I feel as if I’ve done my bit.’

  The Wood Royal Commission started on 24 November 1994, and sat for 365 days. It adversely named 200 police officers, among others. At least ten people committed suicide, including police members, school principals and paedophiles. Three people were arrested for failing to answer questions. The Commissioner’s main recommendations were the setting up of a Police Integrity Commission, random drug and integrity testing and the abolition of the New South Wales Police Board. The Police Commissioner was given increased powers to hire and fire.

  Beach boys: ‘Teflon John’ Ibrahim (right), Adam Freeman and a young friend. DAVID FREEMAN: MYSPACE

  Tough love: John Ibrahim clowns with David Freeman and a mate. DAVID FREEMAN: MYSPACE

  Tough tummy: Fadi Ibrahim, who survived being shot five times.

  Tough head: ‘Sam’ Ibrahim, a bouncer, biker and big brother.

  Posers: Adam Sonny Freeman, Paris Hilton and David George Freeman, doing what they do best. DAVID FREEMAN: MYSPACE

  Happy days: John Ibrahim (left), David Freeman and Todd O’Connor, who died in 2008. DAVID FREEMAN: MYSPACE

  At the funeral: John Ibrahim (second left) with mourners and minders. COURTESY THE DAILY TELEGRAPH

  Missed: Louie Bayeh shows off bullet holes made by people who don’t like him. BEN RUSHTON: FAIRFAX

  Gotcha: Bayeh holed up in hospital after being shot several times. BRENDAN ESPOSITO: FAIRFAX

  Louie: more minders than Madonna but it didn’t block the bullets. BEN RUSHTON: FAIRFAX

  Last laugh: stripper turned police whistleblower Kim Hollingsworth wows another audience. ANDREW TAYLOR: FAIRFAX

  A class of her own: schoolgirl Kim (third row from top, second from right) in Year 12 at Wodonga West High School, 1984. BORDER MAIL

  Daddy’s girl: the policeman’s daughter who became a stripper, hooker and attention seeker. Go figure. ANDREW TAYLOR: FAIRFAX

  Ratty: Hollingsworth with best mate Caspar, one of many rats at the Wood inquiry – but the only one with a tail. PAUL MILLER: FAIRFAX

  Sleeping with the enemy: police poster girl Wendy Hatfield before being exposed as a gangster’s girlfriend. DEAN SEWELL: FAIRFAX

  Mad as a Hatfield: Wild Wendy seconds before assaulting the photographer. Who could blame her? NICK MOIR: FAIRFAX

  Fouling the nest: ‘Chook’ Fowler leaves the Wood inquiry after telling more porkies. JESSICA HROMAS: FAIRFAX

  Stuffed: ‘Chook’ cops a quid on candid camera and stuffs his career. ROYAL COMMISSION SURVEILLANCE

  Dud: even among bent police, Fowler had a reputation as a ‘dudder’. ADAM PRETTY: FAIRFAX

  Colourful racing identity George Freeman, 50, marries third wife Georgina, 24. Enough said. FAIRFAX

  Regrets: a heavily-disguised Trevor Haken reflects on the role reversal of the rolled-over cop. ABC TELEVISION

  Braces and belts: a young John Ibrahim and friend practise casting long shadows at the Cross in 1991. PEOPLE OF THE CROSS

  Gangster glamour: John Ibrahim and two new best friends, Tahnya Tozzi and Tallie Nagel, at Bondi Icebergs on New Years Day, 2007. KRISTJAN PORM: FAIRFAX

  Multicultural: Ibrahim and David Freeman on holidays together. DAVID FREEMAN: MYSPACE

  8

  THE CHRISTMAS CLUB

  There was enough money hidden in the garage to buy a family size house – and the police were going to steal every dollar of it.

  BENT cops, crooked lawyers and crims have a saying: ‘It’s only a rort if you’re not in on it.’ This explains why the police that missed out on a ‘whack’ of $200,000 lifted from a cocaine dealer in an operation codenamed Pickup were jealous of those who split up the cas
h.

  The cops with empty pockets called their bent brothers ‘the Christmas Club.’ It had nothing to do with Santa Claus, reindeer or carol-singing, and any goodwill between the bent officers who shared the money would prove short-lived.

  The theft – brazen enough to impress career criminals – would bring nothing but trouble to those who pulled it off. Trevor Haken was one of them and it is his inside account that exposed the anatomy of a classic police scam.

  ‘The name (Christmas Club) was because it all (happened) around Christmas and was a nice little present,’ Haken writes in his biography Sympathy for the Devil.

  It happened in 1983. Despite (or because of) the massive amount of money involved – the equivalent of a million dollars in today’s currency – splitting the take sparked much bitterness among corrupt police. Only a dozen or so got a cut. Those actively involved in the sting – plus Haken – got $13,000 each. Others in on the joke got $1000 each. But plenty who knew about it didn’t get any.

  Among those who got payouts was a future assistant police commissioner, Ray Donaldson, who would later be forced to resign when faced with evidence of his 20 years of corruption. But he wasn’t alone.

  Sharing top billing with Donaldson as the most senior policeman to leave the job in disgrace was the police commissioner’s chief of staff, Bob Lysaught, whose career was wrecked by the tears of a colleague’s distraught teenage daughter.

  For Donaldson, Lysaught and the rest, Operation Pickup was the beginning of the end. It all started with the Joint Task Force, known as the JTF. It was supposed to be the most elite crime-fighting force Australia had ever known. But it had a hard core of arrogant opportunists who grew bloated with corruption until the group was disbanded after five years. And of the scams they pulled, Operation Pickup looked the easiest score of all.