Bent Uncensored

by James Morton

  Allan was another who, despite the efforts of the press to alert him, declined to target SP bookies or gaming in general. In 1981 Fred ‘The Cat’ Silvester, father of journo John and then the head of the Australian Bureau of Criminal Intelligence, told how he had warned Allan that there were SP links between Sydney and Melbourne, which had a combined turnover of $2800 million, but no action was taken. As for the baccarat clubs, in June 1967 Allan announced that ‘Police action is taken at all times and in all cases where evidence of any unlawful gaming and/or wagering is forthcoming’. The announcement was met with derision. The Sydney Sun, which could hear the ‘screech of the cockatoos down the Cross’, began, ‘Come off it Norm! … surely you don’t expect us to cop that memorable quote of yours when you’re quizzed about baccarat’. The Sydney Telegraph more sedately thought, ‘Mr Allan seems to be in a state of continual wide-eyed surprise over allegations of illegal gambling’.

  As the years went by the corruption of Allan’s senior officers became an open scandal, as did the ‘cold store’ he kept in the Sydney Market, where traders would deliver tributes. The store had been seen as a perk for previous commissioners, but now it became a public outrage.

  Allan’s career came to an end with the disclosure that the crime figures were being massaged to show a higher clear-up rate than was the case. It had been going on for close to forty years and worked on the principle of one book for the tax inspector and one for the business. In this case it was one book for the public and one, known as Paddy’s Book, for the force. Certain crime, regarded as difficult to clear up, appeared only in Paddy’s Book. Almost every detective in the force must have been complicit in the cover-up over the years. Allan could have survived, but he chose to ignore the concerns of police computer expert Phillip Arantz who, when he could get no positive response from the commissioner, went instead to The Sydney Morning Herald. Also on Allan’s debit side were the numerous inquiries he conducted for Askin that took the heat off sensitive issues but the findings for which were never released.

  Allan’s most disastrous act, however, was to ensure the promotion of Fred Hanson to commissioner in November 1972. Under Frederick John ‘Slippery’ Hanson, the New South Wales Police became known as ‘the best police force money could buy’. Hanson began his working life as a railway porter, joining the force in 1936. Two years earlier he had been rejected as undersized and had gone on a bodybuilding course. After the war he was a founding member of 21 Division, set up to deal with the young bashers who were causing general mayhem in the Sydney suburbs. His nickname was a play on words. Not only was he devious but also he had an unfortunate knack of losing his footing.

  But one good turn deserves another. As commissioner, Hanson—who, curiously, disliked his nickname—declined to go after the casino owners, such as highly popular gambler and identity Perce Galea, said to be pushing $5000 a week all the way to the top ranks of police and politicians. Unbelievably, Hanson claimed that the police did not have the authority to go into the clubs. His appointment coincided with the growth of organised crime in New South Wales and, if there is not clear evidence against him, there is the deepest suspicion that he protected identities such as his duck-shooting friend Robert ‘Aussie Bob’ Trimbole, part of the Mr Asia drug syndicate, who gave him an expensive shotgun. He allowed officers named by prostitute Shirley Brifman as corrupt to retire ‘hurt on duty’ and so avoid questioning and possible charges. He also cocked a snook at the Moffitt Royal Commission by promoting Sergeant Jack McNeill to inspector when the commission found that he and his colleagues were involved in a ‘deliberate or corrupt’ cover-up of details relevant to their investigation into organised crime in clubs.

  By 1974 Hanson was slacking off, working only 47 per cent of his official hours. In February 1976 he brought and settled an action that implied he had an interest in an illegal casino at West Gosford, but, with that, his days were numbered. He agreed to retire early if he could appoint his successor, and he sat on the three-man committee to select his nominee Mervyn Wood, overlooking Brian ‘The Cardinal’ Doyle, who would have been a far more suitable appointment and who might just have stemmed corruption in the force. One perhaps fanciful suggestion is that as a Catholic, Doyle disapproved of the decision five years earlier in the Heatherbrae case, which legalised abortion in New South Wales, and he might have used his influence as commissioner to challenge it.

  After Hanson retired it is alleged that he flew drugs down from Cairns in partnership with an Oxford Street, Sydney, brothel owner. He died of carbon-monoxide poisoning in his car in October 1980, a death many believe was suicide. The coroner dispensed with an inquest. It was thought that Hanson’s death came shortly after he learned that he was to be the subject of a newspaper exposé.

  Overall, the attitude of his successor, Merv Wood, appointed in 1976, was at best one of live and let live—unless and until he was forced to do otherwise. Many, however, thought that this laissez-faire attitude concealed a rather darker side. Son of a police sergeant, Wood—another noted oarsman who was the baby of the Australian Olympic squad in Berlin—later won a gold, a silver and two bronze at successive Olympic Games. There must have been some sort of delayed reaction to the German water, because three of the squad who joined the police went off the rails in a serious way. In 1950 Wood won the double sculls at the Auckland Empire Games with the later even more disgraced Mervyn Riley. Wood took the position of commissioner amid a general round of applause, but he did not last long. On his appointment he said that he hoped the vexed question of gambling would soon be cleared up and, while he had heard of Mr Big and Mr Sin—George Freeman and Abe Saffron—they had been built up by the press to be bigger than they actually were. You could find their equivalents in any major city, he said.

  It was during Wood’s time as commissioner that Superintendent Merv Beck was invited by Assistant Commissioner Jim Lees to take action against the gaming clubs, which were running unhindered in Sydney and elsewhere in New South Wales. As a result Beck and his family endured years of threats, death threats and harassment. Beck taught his wife how to use a shotgun, and by the end of his stint cleaning up Darlinghurst police station and 21 Division she had taken to sleeping with the shotgun in her bed. During the course of his tours of duty he ran up against the so-called Barbecue Set, a group of politicians, criminals and corrupt police who met on a Sunday afternoon. Doubt has been cast on the existence of the Barbecue Set, but veteran journo Bob Bottom recalls:

  Johnny James organised the meat for the Barbecue Set. Dick Cox, head of the Vice Squad, controlled prostitutes and when his cortege turned up at the cemetery there were 100 girls and madams and a band played ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’.

  Beck found Darlinghurst police station in 1977 to be in complete disarray; a drinks bar operated from one of the cells, property went unreturned after cases were finished, and an honour system was in place so that items could be borrowed and returned at will. He began to install some sense of discipline and to tighten security, but it was clear that not everyone approved of his purge. Soon he was offered $500 not to take action against the gambling joints and prostitutes. Instead he began Operation Eagle against the clubs, including Thommo’s, which far from being the paragon of two-up establishments, lent money at 300 per cent and had bouncers who broke the kneecaps of defaulters. Beck had Lees’ full approval to raid the clubs, but Lees warned him to lay off the girls because politicians would not like it. Then Wood removed Beck without notice and he was sent to Central police station. Abe Saffron had upset things.

  Two years later, when Wood had gone and Lees was commissioner, Beck was again asked to clean things up—this time in 21 Division. Unfortunately, his new immediate boss was Chief Superintendent Bill Allen, who told him which casinos were to be left untouched. Instead Beck, whose team was known as ‘Beck’s Raiders’, went after both them and SP bookmakers, who were paying $100 000 a week to the police to be left alone. It was now that offers were made to him; when he refused them, th
ey were followed by threats. After he had been in charge for ten months, Allen called him and said that he had done his work. Beck was transferred to the Central Coast. Simply by staying away from Chinatown, ‘I could have made a million’, he told The Sun-Herald on 30 May 1982.

  Wood’s first clash with Premier Neville Wran came in December 1977. At last, after years of tolerance, illegal casinos were to be closed, but Wood stated publicly, and to a great deal of ridicule, that he did not intend to close them before Christmas because of the hardship it would cause the 300-odd employees who would lose their jobs. The next and more serious blue came in March the next year, when Wood did not pass on to Wran a report linking George Freeman and Lennie McPherson to the upper echelons of the United States’ Mafia, saying rather disingenuously that he did not think it was important. The third came at the beginning of May, when Wran appointed Bill Allen to the post of chief superintendent ahead of recommendations by Wood and without informing him.

  That winter was not a good one for Wood. In the face of mounting criticism of the police and leaked allegations—which he denied—he resigned in early June. The allegations included an association with casino owner George Ziziros Walker, later charged with conspiracy to murder, although the charges were dropped and Walker was discharged. Wood was also said to be associating with George Freeman and Abe Saffron and, more specifically, it was alleged that one of his senior officers had been at the Wentworth Hotel on 7 November 1977 with a casino operator. Two of the casino’s female croupiers were killed by Walter Coman, a nightclub bouncer, two days later.

  Coman lived in a flat at beachside Bronte with his wife of two months, the former Joanna de Marco, and his common-law wife, Erica Scott. Mrs Coman and Miss Scott were lovers. The three engaged in group sex and the prosecution’s case was that, in the early afternoon of Wednesday 9 November, the women taunted Coman with their lesbian relationship and, when he produced a .45 pistol, said he would not have the guts to pull the trigger. If they did say that, it was imprudent: he shot them both dead. Coman, in prison for life, later offered a different motive: that they had been killed not by him but because they had seen a bribe being passed. There were also allegations, never proved, that Wood was linked to a drug conspiracy case with one-time chief stipendiary magistrate Murray Farquhar, dishonest Sydney solicitor Morgan Ryan and convicted drug trafficker Roy Cessna. It was to this period that Sydney solicitor Chris Murphy referred when he said, ‘Lennie McPherson and George Freeman may have been the Mr Bigs of Sydney crime but in truth the real Princes of the City were the police. When they came back after the Second World War the uniform seemed attractive. By the 1960s they had started networking criminals and they got lazy. In the end, by the late 1980s they were using criminals to kill people’.

  The Cessna case itself was heard in May 1979, when Farquhar dealt with Cessna most leniently, giving him an eighteen-month good-behaviour bond for importing over 100 000 Buddha sticks. Originally Cessna had been charged with the importation of cannabis valued at $1.5 million. In court the value was more amorphously given as ‘some value’. The allegations were that Morgan Ryan had pressed his old friend Wood for help. Wood maintained that the magistrate dealt with the case as he did because the drug content in the police haul was very low.

  On 6 June that year Wood resigned, giving five hours’ notice, days before Harvey Bates, head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (Australia), also resigned amid allegations of corruption in the FBN, which was later subsumed into the Australian Federal Police. Bates later withdrew his resignation. Wood did not. The catalyst for his premature retirement was not only the Cessna affair but also the document prepared by senior officers and sent to Askin the previous month detailing extensive allegations against the police, politicians, lawyers and brewery interests.

  On 12 May 1994 Wood told The Herald:

  It’s a sad state of affairs pervading Sydney at the moment.

  I wonder what is wrong with the city.

  The old hard-nosed copper is finished. You have management experts now—it has been going on for years—and the good, hardened, knockabout policeman has disappeared.

  Police are not getting the information. They are not allowed to fraternise with their informants. That’s how you get your information. After all, you don’t get your information at Sunday School.

  Without the right information, you are on a desert island. You are lost and you are in trouble. But if you do talk to someone outside a particular area there are all these snide remarks.

  In 1996 the not-always-reliable drug dealer and Kings Cross identity Louis Bayeh told the royal commission on the police that Mervyn Wood had been a regular at dinners given by drug dealer and fixer Frank Hakim—known as the Lebanese Godfather, and a man who had corrupted many officers over the years—at his flat near Centennial Park, both before and after Wood became police commissioner.

  In 1989 Wood was charged with two counts of acting with intent to pervert the course of justice over the Cessna case, but Justice John Sinclair stayed the proceedings because of the delay in bringing the charges and also because Wood was apparently losing his memory. Wood died aged eighty-nine in 2006. He had been suffering from cancer.

  Jim Lees, a devout Christian, was the next to be appointed commissioner, with Brian Doyle once again overlooked. Doyle lasted only three months as Lees’ special adviser before he resigned with his head held high, maintaining that there had been ‘no row, no blue, no blow-up’, but even with, and particularly without, Doyle, Lees was always struggling. In June 1979, after the turbulent term of Merv Wood, the government had made Lees acting commissioner and then in October it confirmed him in the position. Lees simply could not cope and lasted only two years. During his time, however, he had to deal with the corrupt Bill Allen, still clawing his way to the top.

  Lees had joined the force in 1936. He headed the internal affairs branch for twelve years and had enjoyed the ‘Untouchables’ tag given to him and his men. Starting in 1958 with a staff of one, he built up the section under—perhaps despite is a better word—commissioners Norman Allan and Fred Hanson. During that time, 412 policemen were sacked and 402 criminal charges were laid against officers. Lees said that he was putting officers before the courts at an average of one every ten days. He restructured 21 Division, responsible for the policing of gaming, and expanded the crime intelligence unit.

  After his fortunate appointment as assistant commissioner ahead of sixteen more senior and, as it transpired, far better candidates, Bill Allen had a second piece of good luck. This time Police Minister William Crabtree ignored the advice of Lees and promoted Allen to deputy commissioner. Lees resigned, to be replaced by Cecil Abbott. In October 1981 Crabtree was sacked; on the face of it this was the result of a Cabinet reshuffle, but in reality Crabtree had proved inadequate in dealing with corruption in the force. In turn, in June 1982 he was cleared of corruption charges by an investigation conducted by Detective Inspector Joe Parrington. The investigation had arisen after an allegation in parliament that a senior Labor MP had been interviewed by Premier Wran over allegations that he had received thousands of dollars in bribes. Crabtree admitted that he was the MP referred to but denied any wrongdoing.

  In 1986 the government was forced to invite Justice Jack Nagle to conduct a special inquiry into police handling of the highly controversial disappearance of anti-drugs campaigner Donald Mackay from outside a Griffith hotel in 1977. The original investigation, also conducted by Parrington, had failed to solve the mystery.

  Justice Nagle found no corruption but said in his scathing report that Parrington had withdrawn evidence from the Mackay inquest, allegedly suppressed evidence and misrepresented people involved in the investigation. Nagle found that there was sufficient evidence to prosecute Parrington for attempting to pervert the course of justice in the Mackay case, but no criminal charges were brought against Parrington, with whom the new commissioner, John Avery, said he worshipped as a Christian. Instead he was charged departmentally with neglect o
f duty and fined a total of $1000 on two charges in 1987. As former Victorian police officer Simon Illingworth commented generally, ‘People survived because of being an embarrassment to the force if prosecuted, so they were promoted’.

  After Lees came Cecil Abbott, who in his turn shut down various inquiries, including one into Police Minister Rex Jackson. He was helped by officers such as Parrington, who had investigated, usually without success, a number of other matters, including the death of 24-year-old drug dealer and socialite Maria Hission in 1975, and the corrupt Norman Allan, against whom he found no evidence of wrongdoing.

  It was in November 1981 that the lid blew off. As was often the case, the problem arose over gambling; the trigger here related to plans for a casino at a time when Bill Allen was assistant commissioner for licensing. There was a separate allegation that on five occasions that year Allen had given Warren Molloy, then chief of the special licensing squad, $500 cash in an envelope. There was also the problem of the regular visits of Abe Saffron to Allen’s office.