Bent Uncensored

by James Morton

  In the ensuing Hong Kong investigation around forty Chinese officers left the colony. During the week granted him to explain his assets of HK$4.3 million, Deputy District Commissioner Peter Fitzroy Godber managed to get out of the territory, using his police airport pass to bypass immigration and passport checks. His escape, however, brought on a public outcry, with students at a mass rally in Victoria Park protesting against the government’s failure to deal with corruption, and Godber was extradited from England in April 1974. Found guilty, he served a four-year sentence. He was thought to have accumulated some US$600 000 through bribes. The upshot was the establishment of the Hong Kong Independent Commission Against Corruption that year.

  McCoy thought that over the years Australian police in general, and officers in the New South Wales, Victorian and Queensland forces in particular, had consistently operated at levels three and four. However, as the Fitzgerald inquiry in Queensland showed, they had also operated at level five in the 1970s and 1980s, and it may well be that there was a similar situation in New South Wales in the 1940s, 1950s and 1990s, and in Victoria in the late 1990s. Any police force worldwide will try to explain that any corruption (which anyway is not admitted) is a thing of the past.

  In this book we have mostly concentrated on fourth and fifth level corruption, where other officers must have known what was happening but turned a blind eye or became passive participants.

  Sometimes is it clear that colleagues did not know what was happening. If it seems inconceivable that an officer could go off and rob a bank in his lunch hour, then attention should be paid to South African police captain Andre Charles Stander. The handsome son of retired police officer Major General Frans Stander, he had been Pretoria police college’s dux of 1964 and, as captain at the CID branch of Kempton Park police station, he was destined for a career that might have led all the way to the top. But then he took to robbing banks after, he claimed, he was sickened when he shot up to twenty-two unarmed demonstrators in the Tembisa township uprising of 1976. Others say he had never been at Tembisa and that, forced into the police by his father, he had resented the discipline required when he joined the drugs squad.

  The first robbery seems to have been after he gave out the morning assignments to his staff. He then drove to Jan Smuts airport to catch a plane to Durban, where he hired a car. He put on a wig and a false beard, then drove to a bank. South African banks in the late 1970s were open plan with little security. Stander approached a cashier, sat down and quietly pulled a gun on her, asking her to fill a bag with money. Terrified, she did. Stander took the money, left the bank before anyone realised what had happened, got in his car and drove back to Louis Botha airport, peeling off his disguise on the way. Then he flew back to Johannesburg in time for an afternoon’s work. Buoyed by his success, very often he would carry out a robbery in his lunch break and return later in the day as the investigating officer.

  When police officers go off the rails it is often in a spectacular fashion. None illustrates this better than South Australian fraud-squad detective Colin Creed, also the dux of his intake class. Perhaps his superiors should have paid closer attention because, a connoisseur of wine and ‘always flash with cash’ when in the squad, Creed would spend $60 – a substantial sum in the 1970s – on a bottle of Riesling.

  In April 1974 a young woman was raped at knifepoint in her own home. When she went to Hindmarsh police station the next day she identified Creed, whom she saw in the station, as her attacker. He had been at her house some months previously when he investigated a minor burglary. He was found not guilty, but after that his first marriage broke up. A year later he married a policewoman. On 10 April 1980 security cameras picked out a man in a Torrensville bank robbery and, to the shock of officers, it appeared to be Creed. He was questioned, brazened things out and, when he was not identified in a parade, was allowed to go home. That night he vanished. Two rapes followed immediately, both at knifepoint, and he carried out a bank robbery at Glenelg the following month. While on the run he wrote a letter of resignation from the force. After that he went interstate and was said to have teamed up with New South Wales robber and escaper Russell ‘Mad Dog’ Cox.

  His career on the run was marked by near misses. First there were suggestions he had been standing over women in Victorian massage parlours and that the underworld had put out a $15 000 contract on him. If the latter was correct, he survived. Then he was seen by police sitting in a car in Coburg for what appeared to be an inordinately long time. When questioned he again toughed it out, saying that he was waiting for an assignation with a married woman.

  He certainly should have been caught in Queensland on 4 January 1982, when police were alerted by a hotel manager who had seen green dye on Creed’s hands and suspected that he had touched banknotes marked by the authorities. Creed was also in possession of a large sum of money but, after three hours of police questioning, he was released.

  He also survived the police raid following a shootout at Mad Dog Cox’s safe house on the Mornington Peninsula in which painter and docker turned bank robber Ian Revell Carroll was killed. By the time police searched the house, finding an arsenal of weapons and Creed’s fingerprints, he was long gone.

  By the spring of 1983 the hunt for him stepped up, with women’s magazines being asked to refer specifically to the rape, and medical magazines to the fact that Creed was suffering from a bowel disorder which, his family thought, might kill him unless he had long-term treatment. Restaurants were canvassed in case a waiter remembered a man buying expensive wine.

  He was finally caught in an ABC bookshop in Hay Street, Perth, on 6 September that year, when he was recognised by Ian Goldsmith, a South Australian police officer on holiday, who said, ‘It’s been a long time, Colin, hasn’t it?’ Creed was charged with possession of implements of disguise—a wig and a balaclava—along with possession of a .32 Smith & Wesson at the north-eastern Perth suburb of Bayswater. Creed pleaded guilty to charges relating to two armed hold-ups on 10 April 1980 at Underdale.

  The authorities were singularly reluctant to pay the reward money to the holidaying police officer who had caught him, arguing that it was only part of the officer’s duty. Eventually, with the help of his union, an ex-gratia payment was negotiated. Perhaps this sort of attitude does not encourage honest officers.

  In November 1984 Creed’s South Australian sentence of twenty-one years for the rapes and bank robberies, with a pre-parole term of twelve years, was increased on appeal by the Crown to a minimum of seventeen. A psychological report suggested that at the time he went off the rails he was ‘in a state of depression and anxiety and that contributed to his offences’. In early June 1986 the Victorian Supreme Court sentenced Creed to forty-five years in jail on charges relating to six robberies, three of them armed, to be served concurrently.

  Throughout his sentence Creed’s behaviour was exemplary, but—like all former police officers—he was at risk of attack from other prisoners. In February 1988 his cell was firebombed, destroying his computer equipment. Two months later, with his security rating downgraded, he was transferred to Mobilong Prison. In 1995, now deemed a model prisoner and with no objections from the police, he was granted parole. When he spoke of his time on the run he said, ‘You may as well be in prison. It’s a pretty terrible lifestyle.’ Multiple jail escapees such as Brenden Abbott might disagree.

  Police who turn corrupt are, like fallen angels, often fascinating, and Australia has provided rather more than its fair share of them. This book is an informal, to an extent selective, and certainly condensed, account of corruption by police, politicians and lawyers from the arrival of the First Fleet to the present, with an added glimpse of the future. It is not a reflection on the hundreds of thousands of honest and decent officers who have struggled to maintain the integrity of their forces. Indeed it is an account of how they have been betrayed by their colleagues, superior officers and management.

  The naming of an individual in this book should not in any wa
y be taken to imply that he or she is guilty of an offence or improper behaviour; in many cases it is quite the reverse.

  2

  DOOMED TO BE BAD

  It was never likely that the police in Australia would get off to a good start. Initially, the police force comprised the marines sent out with the First Fleet. Conditions in Sydney town were terrible: food was at a premium and theft was rife. Damper was all there was to mark the celebrations for the birthday of the Prince of Wales after it was discovered that some of the sheep scheduled for roasting had already been stolen and eaten. Within three weeks of the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788, Governor Arthur Phillip appointed James Smith, said to be the first recorded police officer in Australia, as constable. Smith did not last long. In 1789 he was forced to resign amid allegations that he had pilfered the government stores at Rose Hill. Shortly afterwards, Private Hunt of the marines was caught looting. It was something he and six colleagues—all of whom, as marines, were supposed to be enforcing the law, not breaking it—had been doing for a period of eight months. He saved himself from the gallows by turning King’s evidence, but five of his fellow looters were hanged.

  The New South Wales Corps, known as the Rum Corps, was formed in England in 1789 for the purpose of travelling to Australia to relieve the marines of their police duties. Commanded by officers on half pay, and composed of a ragtag collection of soldiers released from military prisons and rapscallions who were happy to look for new hunting grounds, the corps arrived at Sydney Cove in 1790 with the Second Fleet. Their commander, Major Francis Grose, arrived two years later. A fourth company was raised from marines who wished to remain in New South Wales.

  The night watch and the rowboat guard were appointed in 1789 from ‘the ranks of the best behaved of the convicts’. In 1790 the night watch was replaced by the Sydney Foot Police, which continued as one of the organised forces until the amalgamation of New South Wales colonial police forces in 1862. Strangely, it was often not the ‘best’ of convicts who turned gamekeeper but the worst. For example, Thomas Chalkley had only been in the police a month before he was ‘disarmed’ by bushrangers. The suspicion, however, was that he had cooperated with them, for they were his associates.

  It wasn’t until 1 June 1811 that Governor Lachlan Macquarie established the first rudimentary police force in Sydney. Fifty constables appointed under a superintendent were empowered to punish all prisoners, freemen rogues and vagabonds. There were five district watch houses and the men were equipped with cutlasses and wooden rattles. In October of that year Macquarie felt able to write to the Earl of Liverpool back in England to tell him that ‘… thefts, burglaries and depredations’ were largely a thing of the past:

  Happily these are now almost totally suppressed, and when such an occasional plunder does take place such is the vigilance of the police that justice speedily overtakes the delinquent.

  Certainly, in the short term this new arrangement improved matters, but since the police were expected to combine the functions of judge, jury and executioner with power to whip miscreants, they were never popular and were frequently heavy-handed.

  Hannibal Hawkins Macarthur, well-connected and successful nephew of the better-known soldier, entrepreneur and pastoralist Captain John Macarthur, wrote to his brother-in-law PP King in England in the 1820s that the police magistrate of Parramatta was said to be ‘at the head in this unfortunate village, keeping up a most detestable system of Police, such as would never be imagined to exist in any English Town … every stranger coming to the inns, however respectable, being questioned as to their name etc by the Convict Constables of this detestable fellow’.

  A horse patrol, set up to deal with Aboriginal and settler disputes and to combat bushrangers, was established in 1825, but as the recruits were frequently drunk and disorderly, the patrol soon started recruiting its men from the British police, a move that succeeded in alienating it from the general population.

  The irony was that the British recruits were no more honest than those recruited in New South Wales. Between 1825 and 1826, at a time when the average strength of the force was fifty, fifty officers were dismissed for misconduct and another twenty-five resigned.

  In the 1840s three consecutive chiefs of police in Sydney were dismissed in fairly quick succession for a variety of indiscretions. The first was Henry Croasdaile Wilson, appointed in 1834 with a brief to devote his time to the supervision of recruitment and training. The plan foundered because of the increasing number of cases being brought before the bench, of which Wilson was also first magistrate. On the credit side of his tenure was his introduction of the beat system and his reorganisation of the force, which made the Sydney police something resembling London’s Metropolitan Police: one of service, rather than a paramilitary force like the Irish Constabulary. On the debit side was his temper: governor Sir George Gipps was obliged to inquire into physical quarrels between Wilson and other officials. In 1838 Wilson survived allegations of a relationship with a female convict, but he did not survive complaints lodged the following year that he had used policemen to build his home and as liveried domestic servants. (His claims that the officers were necessary for his personal protection and that the liveries were a disguise were not accepted.) On 7 November 1839 Wilson was suspended from duty, and he was formally removed from office in July the next year. In 1841, after he had been defeated in an election for secretary-treasurer of the Australian Club by Major William Christie, he wrote a series of anonymous articles suggesting that Christie’s wife was morally unsound. When Wilson’s authorship was revealed, Christie horsewhipped him. In a later Supreme Court action Wilson was awarded £150 in damages for assault.

  William Augustus Miles, who took over conduct of the police force in 1841, was reputedly the illegitimate son of William IV. He was no greater success than Wilson. Unfortunately, Miles was also a man of eccentric habits and, worse, a poor judge of character. When in October 1846 he employed George Hood as one of his ‘runners’ or de facto detectives, Sydney newspaper Bell’s Life commented:

  about one of the most thorough knaves—one of the most convicted scoundrels in New South Wales. He has been in almost every iron gang in the Colony: and has been a leader in some of the greatest burglaries that were perpetrated in Sydney. When Joe Jennings and Watkins the publican were robbed, Hood (Miles’s Police Runner) was the man who bailed them up. It would be absurd to suppose for a moment that Mr Miles could have been ignorant of the police history of this Hood. With the knowledge therefore that he must have had that the fellow was a knave of the deepest dye, why employ him? Why allow such a character to join the force? Why bring such a contaminated ruffian into connexion (sic) with a body of men, deserving and respectable? He (Hood not Miles) has been flogged for absconding—and it is actually proved now that he is at present a runaway from the Goulburn district. It is both an injustice to the public, and an insult to the force, to promote a criminal to such an appointment.

  A select committee on police was formed in 1847 under the chairmanship of Charles Cowper. Miles appeared as a witness on 16 June 1847, answering a range of questions on his role and the manner in which his duties were carried out, the duties of his subordinates, alternative models for the organisation of the police force, the conflict with the Corporation of the City of Sydney and some specific questions relating to crime and order in Sydney. He testified that there were too few police officers and that too much of their time was occupied by ‘casual duties’. He generally defended his men against charges of neglect of duty and corruption, although he admitted that there was difficulty in hiring and retaining an appropriate quality of man because of uncompetitive salaries and better opportunities in other callings.

  The next year Miles’ accounts were found to be out of order. He was dobbed in by what must be the first whistleblower, police sergeant James Robinson, who reported to the governor that Miles was appropriating police funds for his own use. Robinson was not believed and was sacked from the force.

  I
n May 1848 a select committee was set up to inquire into the state of policing. The unfortunate Robinson’s allegations had resurfaced when other constables also complained. Miles was now accused of inappropriate use of the police fund—made up of the fines of constables and the payment of half of the first week’s pay of each constable, which was supposed to go toward their uniforms. Miles had used the fund to pay informers, for his own carriage hire and for other personal expenses. He had also taken money from the treasury that was intended to pay constables an extra stipend for night service in the bush. To compound this, he had wrongly dismissed an acting chief constable and he had been drunk on duty. In the Legislative Council, Robert Lowe accused Miles of being ‘guilty of gross peculation and abominable tyranny’. Miles had become an embarrassment, and in a time-honoured move was shifted sideways and allowed to remain a police magistrate. Bell’s Life thought him ‘about as queer and as funny an old gentleman as this portion of the world contains’. He died three years later. On his tombstone in Newtown cemetery appears the epitaph: