Bent Uncensored

by James Morton

  JAMES MORTON & SUSANNA LOBEZ

  MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS

  An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited

  Level 1, 715 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia

  mup-info@unimelb.edu.au

  www.mup.com.au

  First published 2014

  This edition published 2016

  Text © James Morton and Susanna Lobez, 2014, 2016

  Design and typography © Melbourne University Publishing Limited, 2016

  This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers.

  Every attempt has been made to locate the copyright holders for material quoted in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked or misattributed may contact the publisher.

  Cover design by Nada Backovic

  Typeset by J&M Typesetting

  Printed in Australia by Ligare

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  Morton, James, 1938– author.

  Bent: police corruption in Australia/James Morton and Susanna Lobez.

  9780522870855 (paperback)

  9780522870862 (ebook)

  Police corruption—Australia.

  Police misconduct—Australia.

  Judicial corruption—Australia

  Organized crime—Australia.

  Crime—Australia.

  Lobez, Susanna, author.

  364.1323

  But that was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.

  Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta, Act IV, i.

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgements

  1 From ‘Bent for the Job’ to Downright Criminal: The Five Stages of Corruption

  2 Doomed to Be Bad

  3 Spooks, Strikes and Scandals: Victoria 1920–1946

  4 Chief Commissioner William John MacKay: Police Reformer, Crooked Bully or Both?

  5 Ray ‘Gunner’ Kelly and Co: Princes of the City

  6 MacKay’s Legacy: Cops and Crooks in Cahoots

  7 Whistleblowing v The Brotherhood: And the Winner Is …

  8 Victoria from the 1960s: From Abortionists and Bully Boys to Zebra and Zulu

  9 Two Coppers, Two States: Paul Higgins and Roger Rogerson

  10 Noble Cause Corruption and the Art of Extracting a Confession

  11 Drugs: An Irresistible Temptation

  12 Sir Terence and Co: The Long and Winding Road to Fitzgerald

  13 The Fitzgerald Commission and after

  14 In and out of the Wood

  15 The Twenty-First Century: Dangerous Liaisons

  16 Controlling Corruption: Where to from Here?

  Postscript

  Notes

  Select bibliography

  Index

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This is another of our books which could not have been completed without the endless hours of research, advice and encouragement of Dock Bateson. To misquote, ‘This poor thing is not ours alone but hers as well’.

  Our thanks are due to many people. They include in strictly alphabetical order: Gary Adsworth, Sunil Badami, JP Bean, Bob Bottom, Keith Bottomley, the late Clive Coleman, Sean Cowan, Nicholas Cowdery QC, Professor David Dixon, Michael Drury, Walter Easey, Dr Richard Evans, Tim Girling-Butcher, Sally Heath, Simon Illingworth, Barbara Levy, Damian Marrett, Bernie Matthews, Brian Murphy, Christine Nixon, Sybil Nolan, Leonard ‘Nipper’ Read, John Rigbey, Russell Robinson, the late CH Rolph, Geoff Schuberg, Adam Shand, Clive Small and Joe Swickard, as well as many others who have asked not to be named.

  Our thanks are also due to the staff at the National Library of Australia, the state libraries and archives of New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Victoria and Western Australia, as well as the National Archives in London, the British Library and the Newspaper Library formerly at Colindale.

  1

  FROM ‘BENT FOR THE JOB’ TO DOWNRIGHT CRIMINAL: THE FIVE STAGES OF CORRUPTION

  Over the years and around the world there have been many examples of brilliant cross-examinations. They include the destructive opening question of prosecutor Norman Birkett, ‘What is the co-efficient of the expansion of brass?’, put to a self-proclaimed engineering expert in the 1928 Rouse murder trial in England. He was unable to answer and the defence case was destroyed. But there can be few which have matched the brilliance of that of Virginia Bell, assistant counsel to the 1995 Royal Commission into the New South Wales Police Service chaired by Justice James Wood.

  On 11 December 1995 Wayne Eade, the former head of the Gosford drug squad, was in the witness box and doing nicely. Yes, he thought he was an officer ‘of impeccable integrity’. No, he certainly did not have an interest in child-porn videos. Nor had he tried to buy ecstasy for colleagues; of course he knew that it was an illegal drug. He had certainly never visited a witness codenamed GDU7, a former prostitute and drug dealer, while on duty.

  It was a classic piece of cross-examination and one that should go down in any textbook. Eade was then invited to look at a film taken when he was on duty at 10.40 p.m. on 27 August that year. Up on the room’s television screens appeared a film of GDU7 (who had been given anonymity) pouring a line of cocaine on the officer’s penis and proceeding to lick it off. She then started to talk about a shipment of cocaine before they moved to a couch, where he began masturbating and talking about buying ecstasy and a porn video of children. The screen went blank as GDU7 was about to provide more oral sex.

  Wood asked Eade if he wished to see more of the film, adding:

  I’m not saying that by way of a threat. I’m not suggesting I want to show it publicly, but you and your solicitor are free to view the entirety of the tape, including the sexual relations depicted, if you wish to do so.

  Eade did not. Before the end of the day the man about whom there had been suspicions for the previous ten years and who had survived a number of internal investigations had been dismissed by beleaguered police commissioner Tony Lauer. That half-hour broke the resistance of corrupt officers. Who could tell who was on film and in what position? It was no longer a question of solidarity. In the words of the old gospel hymn, it was a case of ‘Lord, let me in the lifeboat’.

  Eade was later sentenced to twenty-two months’ imprisonment for inciting and procuring the supply of prohibited drugs and knowingly giving false evidence to the commission. In 2006 he was ordered to pay in excess of $286 000 to the state, which had settled an action by Michael O’Sullivan, who claimed that Eade had threatened to load him up (plant) with heroin.

  There is an old story of a school class allowed an hour to write an essay on the police. One child finished within the first few minutes. When he handed in the composition it consisted of one sentence, ‘All coppers are bastards’. Although whole swathes of the community would, quite wrongly, agree with the sentiments, it was decided that this viewpoint should be changed in one so young. It was arranged that the boy should visit the local police station for a day, after which he would write another essay. The visit passed off well enough. He was shown how fingerprints were taken, went down to the cells, was allowed to pat the police horses, was given a police tea mug to take home and so on, but the revised essay took hardly longer to write. It read, ‘All coppers are cunning bastards’.

  As the years pass, for good and bad reasons, large sections of the public have become disaffected with the police, if indeed they were ever affected. Many would now subscribe to the boy’s generalisation or, to use a sociological term, stereotypicalisation, which means just about the same thing but looks and sounds be
tter. As a result, continuing the sociological trend, the police tend to close ranks around themselves and develop a ‘no one loves us, so why should we do anything about our image?’ culture, which sociologists like to call labelling or anomie. This can arise over really petty matters and in turn shows how statistics can be made to lie.

  For example, in London after the First World War arrests of women on charges of soliciting for the purposes of prostitution remained at a consistent level. In 1922 there were 2231 convictions, but that figure suddenly dropped the following year, to under 600. However, that did not mean that there had been a drop in soliciting. Rather, a decision at Quarter Sessions had ruled that there was insufficient evidence to show that the man solicited in a particular case had been annoyed—a requirement for the conviction—rather than flattered by the solicitation. The case was dismissed. As a result the police downed tools, staging a go-slow and refusing to arrest the women. A not dissimilar example happened in 1946 in Sydney, when statistics appeared to show that vice in the city was in major decline. All that had happened was that the working girls had shifted their beats from the inner city to the outer suburbs.

  What is police corruption? Getting a daily floater in the local cafe—or is that simply a good example of keeping a finger on the pulse of the local community? After all, in the 1930s New South Wales commissioner Bill MacKay was said regularly to eat on the arm at Romano’s, the fashionable Sydney restaurant where he later arrested one of the waiters, Antonio Agostini, for the murder of the man’s wife, Linda. Is it a ticket for the Grand Final? A hotel stay in Honolulu? An expensive bottle of wine? Taking a few dollars from a dead derro? And where in the spectrum do you place officers who in 2012 were paid $100 each to open accounts in their own names so that gambler Steve Fletcher could place bets? What about so-called noble cause corruption: bricking a suspect when you KNOW the man is guilty but there isn’t sufficient evidence to send him down? Is that really corruption? What would most people say about the practice in 1960s Queensland of taking interstate criminals released from Boggo Road Gaol to the New South Wales border and dumping them with firm instructions not to reappear in the state? Don ‘Shady’ Lane, a former member of the consorting squad and special branch as well as a Bjelke-Petersen cabinet minister in Queensland from 1983, thought that this was a good example of the oldest form of community policing.

  Sociologists have used up the equivalent of forests in trying to formulate an answer. In 1979 Dr Keith Bottomley, in his Criminology in Focus, devoted the first thirty-eight pages to a discussion of the definition, and many more after him have been similarly puzzled.

  However, corruption was neatly defined in the Wood Royal Commission as deliberate unlawful conduct (whether by act or omission) on the part of a member of the police service who is utilising his or her position, whether on or off duty, and the exercise of police powers, in bad faith. The commission went on to say that this included:

  [t]he receipt of bribes, green-lighting, franchising and protecting or running interference for organised crime; releasing confidential information and warning of pending police activity; ‘gutting’ or ‘pulling’ prosecutions; providing favours in respect of bail or sentencing; extortion; stealing and recycling drugs, money, property obtained during the course of otherwise legitimate police operations; various forms of direct participation in serious criminal activity the commission of which is facilitated by virtue of the office held; and the deliberate misuse of an office to procure an advantage or disadvantage in matters of promotion, discipline, transfer and the like, through patronage, friendship or personal prejudice.

  There has long been a defence mechanism among police management that a corrupt officer is a rotten apple and there are no such things as rotten barrels or, even worse, rotten orchards. One study (quoting former New York police commissioner Patrick Murphy) surmises that most of the major inquiries into police corruption reject the ‘bad-apple’ theory:

  The rotten-apple theory won’t work any longer. Corrupt police officers are not natural-born criminals, nor morally wicked men, constitutionally different from their honest colleagues. The task of corruption control is to examine the barrel, not just the apples, the organisation, not just the individual in it, because corrupt police are made, not born.

  The ‘bad apple’ theory of corruption has been all but fully discredited. Successive major commissions of inquiry have catalogued the ways in which corruption is frequently highly organised and systematic.

  The rotten-apple theory of police corruption, that it is one of individual moral failure, was discredited at least back in the 1990s and probably a century before that. Any attempt by government or the police hierarchy to defend the rotten-apple theory can only be seen as a face-saving, papering-over-the-cracks exercise doomed to failure.

  The question of free food raised its head from the plate, or at least the wrapper, yet again in January 2013 when McDonald’s and Krispy Kreme, along with a number of other fast-food outlets, acknowledged that they gave free or heavily discounted food to police and emergency-services staff.

  Former McDonald’s employees, including managers, told online news publication Crikey that a key motivation was to entice police to visit more frequently, to provide high-visibility and free security at taxpayer expense. It is in no way different from the London casinos of the 1960s, which used to hire well-known hard men to keep out potential predators. One look at men such as ‘Mad’ Frank Fraser sitting on a stool was sufficient to deter all but the most committed robber or cardsharp.

  Professor Leslie Holmes of the University of Melbourne’s School of Social and Political Sciences, who is researching international attitudes to police corruption, says the fast-food perks pose a ‘potential problem’ and the practice isn’t allowed in countries like Singapore due to the potential for corruption.

  ‘They should not be allowed to accept anything, they’re not paid that badly’, Holmes told Crikey. ‘It would be much clearer if there were rules saying, “we don’t accept it”.’ It is not a problem confined to McDonald’s. On the Gold Coast officers were receiving free drinks and skipping queues at nightclubs and discos until the practice was barred in 2012.

  Holmes cites the work of pioneering US researcher Lawrence Sherman, who wrote in the 1970s on the ‘slippery slope’ of public officials accepting free gifts, however small. Holmes posed a hypothetical example in a small town: if a cop receives free food, then pulls over the store manager for speeding, will he issue a fine or wave the manager through due to their cosy relationship? Perhaps more significantly, what would be the attitude of a police officer who eats on the arm regularly and is then called to the outlet to deal with a dispute with a customer?

  Holmes’ research on public attitudes to police corruption in Germany and Bulgaria found that just under 60 per cent of respondents thought it was unacceptable for officers to receive minor perks. He hoped the survey could be replicated in Australia.

  Olivia Monaghan, a PhD candidate studying with Holmes who is looking at police corruption in Australia, raises other concerns about officers providing free security for McDonald’s: it may not be fair to competing businesses and could detract from the police officers official capacities. If McDonald’s wants security officers it should hire them, she argues.

  At its most simple, police corruption can be divided into two categories. First, there is ‘bent for self’ and, second, there is ‘bent for the job’—so-called noble cause corruption. Unfortunately, ‘bent for the job’ is not as altruistic as it first seems. A high conviction rate leads to promotion, and better pay and status. There is also the possibility of a share in the now considerable reward money that is often on offer but not necessarily available to the rank and file. At the end of a career in the police force a higher rank will result in better retirement pay and the chance of a better job in security, far higher up the food chain than what is available to the routine jobsworthy. Officers can sometimes be bent for both self and job: adopt noble cause corruption and
also behave in a corrupt way for their own financial advantage. Into this category would certainly fall Ray Kelly, the great New South Wales thief taker of the war and postwar years, and a generation later, the same force’s talented but wholly corrupt Roger Rogerson.

  After looking at patterns of police corruption in New York, Marseille, Hong Kong, Bangkok and Sydney, 1970s sociologist Alfred McCoy propounded a five-stage model for the scale and quality of police corruption. However, academic critics such as Dr Richard Evans have suggested that this may be too basic:

  I think his model is a bit simplistic—corruption is much more a matter of networks, and there is a continual process of jostling for position and influence. Extensive corrupt networks can and do co-exist with comparatively effective and honest policing—indeed really effective corruption thrives best behind a good ‘shopfront’ of policing.

  American sociologist ER Stoddard has suggested that there may be as many as ten stages of corruption, but McCoy’s five-point plan seems to provide an eminently workable and relatively uncomplicated structure and, at the risk of offending our betters, we consider this as good a basis as any upon which to begin.

  McCoy suggests that the first stage is what he calls honest graft, such as accepting fees from accident tow-truck drivers in return for sending work in their direction. Getting an informal bonus for doing their job of keeping the streets clear: what harm is there in that? Probably not a great deal, except that it can be turned into a business, as Victorian police did in similar circumstances in the 1980s. This leads to step two, which is taking an actual bribe not to report a speeding or similar minor offence. Unfortunately, at a higher level this may lead to sharing the proceeds with an armed robber or splitting the drugs with a dealer, either to be resold for the officer’s profit or to be given to their informers.

  McCoy’s third step is obtaining a regular fee from club and brothel owners, abortionists and illegal gamblers to allow them to continue unmolested or to warn them of impending raids. The fourth is a giant leap. Now officers at a senior level become criminal entrepreneurs, licensing certain criminals to commit serious offences. The fifth stage is the one reached in the Royal Hong Kong Police in the late 1960s, when corruption was rife throughout the country. Hospital patients had to pay so-called ‘tea money’ to be brought a bedpan or have their sheets changed. Ambulance staff required money to collect a patient. Bribes were required when applying for housing and schooling. Police officers had to pay for promotion to vice or drug squads, where protection was on offer for payment. So far as the police were concerned, drug dealers, brothel keepers and gambling-palace owners paid a fixed share of their income to senior officers, which was then divided among themselves and junior officers.