by James Morton
In May 1981 Allen, his wife and his 23-year-old daughter were in Macau, guests of the Sociedade de Turismo e Diversoes de Macao, run by the Yip family of the Macau Trotting Club. Then came the second freebie in as many months. On 6 June 1981 the three flew first class to Hawaii, where they met another of Allen’s daughters and her husband. There they stayed at the home of Lori Yip, the daughter of the chief of the Macau Trotting Club. On 11 June they went on to San Francisco, staying again free of charge at the Holiday Inn in Union Square, courtesy of ‘representations’ by Sydney bookmaker Bill Waterhouse. Then it was on to Las Vegas, where once again they were in luck because the tab was picked up by Mafia-linked Jack Rooklyn, head of Bally poker machines in Australia, and a man who had come under heavy fire from Justice Moffitt. Not only had the Allens been shouted the trip but also lucky Bill won $1000 on the machines. He was a man who liked cash. He told the subsequent inquiry into his conduct that he was a regular winner at the races. He bought his house for cash, paid off his American Express card in cash and, he said, kept $10 000 in cash at home. In turn the inquiry told him that by accepting hospitality and associating with the likes of Abe Saffron and Rooklyn, he had acted in a manner likely to discredit the police. By offering money to Warren Molloy he had tried to compromise him. Allen resigned.
With men like these at the top, was there any doubt that corruption would pervade the lower ranks?
7
WHISTLEBLOWING V THE BROTHERHOOD: AND THE WINNER IS …
Whistleblowing on one’s colleagues is not a sport encouraged by rank-and-file police, and the line of officers who have fallen foul of their fellows when they have tried to point out defects in people or the system is a long one. ‘If a senior detective complains about his fellows he is finished when it comes to working with detectives thereafter’, New South Wales Deputy Commissioner John Perrin was quoted as saying in the December 1989 Report on an Investigation Relating to the Raid on Frank Hakim’s Office. But if whistleblowing on your offsiders is dangerous, it is a wholly different game from ratting on your superiors.
One of the perennial problems for senior officers in a police force is the question of crime clear up rates. And, over the years, it has led to allegations by junior officers that these have been massaged. Currently there are minor scandals in both Britain and France that crime statistics are being manipulated on a regular basis. But things are never that simple. For a start how are crime statistics recorded? Is the clear up rate to be decided on arrests, convictions or even the unproveable belief of an investigating officer?
Assuming there has been a series of thefts from, say, twelve different premises in an office block on the same day, is it reasonable to suspect that this is the work of the same person or gang, and so should this be recorded as one incident or twelve? If a person is arrested and admits to these burglaries, should they be recorded as one matter cleared up or twelve? Various forces take different attitudes, but over the years the swing in attitude to these questions has been considerable.
In December 1971 computer expert Philip Neville Arantz, a 42-year-old New South Wales detective working on a computerisation program in the police research branch, found that the New South Wales Police Service had been systematically under-reporting crime statistics by up to 70 per cent for years. He drew the inference that police were trying to conceal both corruption, which allegedly extended up to Norman Allan, the police commissioner at the time, and also widespread police involvement in organised crime. Published crime statistics gave a completely false figure of the existence of crime and its clear-up rate.
Arantz was not the first officer to draw attention to the practice—back in the 1950s Sergeant R Blissett had been transferred back into uniform when he raised questions about the integrity of crime figures—but he was the most vociferous. He took his findings to senior officers, but they were dismissed out of hand, as was an approach to Allan. Eventually Arantz realised that Allan and commissioners for the previous decade, if not directly involved in it, were at least aware of the scheme, and the commissioners wanted to suppress his findings. The frustrated Arantz approached journalist Basil Sweeney, who had both sets of figures published in The Sydney Morning Herald.
Arantz’s punishment was swift and harsh. He was promptly certified mentally ill and sectioned in a mental hospital for three days. The advice to section him had been supplied by former senior police medical officer Dr Morrie Vane, who told the 7.30 Report in 1988 that, in retrospect, he believed he had been duped and used in the affair by Allan, and ‘[I] deeply regret the role I played’ in declaring that Arantz was mentally ill.
On 20 January 1972 Arantz was dismissed without pension for misconduct—namely, supplying police secrets to Sydney newspapers. An employment appeal tribunal unanimously upheld the dismissal. Worse was to follow. Premier Askin also indicated that any firm in the computer industry employing Arantz would be looked on with extreme disfavour. It was only after an outcry when, a decade later, disgraced deputy commissioner Bill Allen was granted a detective sergeant’s pension, that Arantz was given $250 000 compensation by the Wran government, which, after championing him when in opposition, had effectively abandoned him when in office. His name was eventually cleared by special legislation. He died on 4 March 1998.
Four years before his death Arantz told The Sydney Morning Herald that he had not been alone in causing embarrassment, but that:
I was the odd one but there were so many others (20 years ago) who were in a lot of trouble and, rather than be proceeded with departmentally, it suited them to go out medically unfit and have their pensions for the rest of their lives. And it suited Norman Allan when he was commissioner because he had no further problems and it didn’t look bad for his administration … They would be ‘boarded out’ (retired through illness).
In November 2009 former Assistant Commissioner Geoff Schuberg, who had resigned after a disagreement with Commissioner Peter Ryan, interviewed by Tim Girling-Butcher for the Sydney exhibition Sin City, recalled:
Well it was a massive cover up. Like I felt sorry for the guy [Arantz]. I’ve had contact with many, many whistleblowers in my time but I would always speak to them and say ‘you sure you want to do this? Because your life will be ruined. Your career will be finished’ and a lot of them refused to believe it. They think they’re doing the right thing by coming forward and exposing what they know. But they do it at a cost. And the cost is to them and their family.
If corroboration is needed, here is a ‘working girl’ speaking of her life in the 1970s and 1980s:
There was no way you could work if you didn’t ‘weigh-in’. There’s a lot of cops’ wives whom I’ve helped to put fur coats on their backs and a lot of cops’ kids whom I’ve helped to educate until the law changed [in 1979] and all of a sudden I had surplus money, heaps of work and I didn’t have to close the door for an hour to entertain cops.
Greg Wheadon, son of a chief inspector, was another who fell from brotherly grace when in 1987 he approached New South Wales Internal Affairs alleging corruption by a senior officer at Ballina police station. Over the next ten years he was persecuted by his former colleagues—at one time, a contract was taken out on his life. He was eventually sent to police a one-man station. In 2001 he was awarded $660 000 as compensation for his treatment and the failure of the police service to protect him.
Two other notable whistleblowers who suffered for their sins in New South Wales were officers Kimbal Cook and Deborah Locke. On 13 June 1988 bookmaker Allan Tripp was arrested and detective sergeant Ferrenc Deak and senior constable Eugene Zubrecky wanted to sell him back his gaming ledger. They approached Kimbal Cook for help. Cook not only refused but also dobbed them in. Their cases took five years to come to court, and they received short sentences. During this time Cook was subjected to harassment and was left unsupported by his superiors.
The reaction of the gaming squad, according to ICAC evidence, repeated at the 1995 Wood Royal Commission, was to ostracise him. The harassment
, including a break-in at Cook’s home, drove him from the service. He did not receive much sympathy from Police Commissioner Tony Lauer, who thought he was trying ‘to exit the police service on the highest possible pension’. His application for a discharge was deferred and he was told to supply further independent evidence.
On the other hand, Col Cole, a former New South Wales assistant commissioner who had been criticised by Cook, first took extended sick leave and then supplied medical certificates to ICAC, the police board and the parliamentary committee, excusing himself from giving evidence on the grounds of stress. On 26 October 1993 questions were raised in parliament about Cole’s suspension and apparent failure to discharge his duty to inform his commissioner of the full facts about the Frenchs Forest incident. The House was told that he was in fact on sick leave, having reported a stress-related illness on 2 March, and the police board had lifted his suspension as assistant commissioner on 7 October. Cole then applied for a medical discharge and his application was promptly granted.
Officers who have for whatever reason been under a cloud, have regularly found that the ‘stress express’, as it is known, ensures their generous pensions continue. One former officer says that getting out on stress leave before heads roll is referred to as ‘beating the posse’.
Even when there was no corruption, high-ranking officers behaved indiscreetly. In December 1992 Cole, then New South Wales assistant commissioner, lunched with two reported criminals, Tom Domican and Louis Bayeh, along with Tony Day, president of the Police Association, who had arranged the meeting at Domican’s request. Later the commissioner was told by an informant that Domican had been boasting he had Assistant Commissioner Cole in his pocket.
Deborah Locke’s story, Watching the Detectives, is a litany of low-level corruption: taking money from prostitutes and warning of gaming-squad raids. Once when officers broke down the door of a suspected club in Surry Hills there was a table of food, a welcome banner, the solicitor Chris Murphy and a man with a video camera to record the search. There was also sexual harassment and drunkenness, and derelicts moved into another jurisdiction.
Geoff Schuberg found the situation to be similar:
When I went to 21 Division they would never let me work on illegal gambling there because I had a reputation of being straight. And for that reason I wasn’t trusted.
He found that even low-level prostitution was organised:
Prostitutes were told where they could work, when they could work. If they didn’t, well then they’d be arrested and they’d be charged … Prostitutes when they were charged, they even paid station staff so they could be bailed out quickly so they could get back on the street.
Deborah Locke soon realised:
If you didn’t agree with something you were expected to look the other way. Kim (Cook) had broken the code that said loyalty to the brotherhood was the most important thing.
In fact Locke and Cook may have escaped relatively lightly. Perhaps the worst thing for a whistleblower was to discover that their information had been quickly leaked and they would hardly be back at the station before it was known that he or she had turned dog. Deborah Locke soon found this out, but perhaps the most egregious example was claimed by Glen McNamara when he was dealing with a seriously difficult Darlinghurst officer, Larry Churchill. A protégé of the corrupt Chook Fowler, Churchill was then protecting paedophiles in Darlinghurst. After McNamara went to the Internal Police Security Unit (IPSU) an inside leak warned Churchill of the allegations. When IPSU arranged for them to get a silent phone number, it was published in Police News. In his book Dirty Work, McNamara claimed to have learnt that Churchill, now in jail, was planning to have him murdered, but the police refused to pay for him to relocate and took away his firearm.
He and his wife Cheryl, who was pregnant with their first child, went to Los Angeles and gave IPSU a copy of their itinerary. Apparently a few days later a group of cops in the North Cronulla Hotel were heard discussing a detailed plan to have McNamara murdered in the United States. IPSU called the McNamaras in their Los Angeles hotel to warn them and Glen went into the bathroom to vomit. When he came out, Cheryl was having a miscarriage. Churchill eventually went to prison for twelve years but was released after four.
Today, still not all superior officers are sympathetic to whistleblowers. Tony Lauer, who had experienced his own period of exile to the bush, summed up official government and police attitudes as, ‘Nobody in Australia much likes whistleblowers, particularly in an organisation like the police or the government’.
In 1988, the year New South Wales Chief Commissioner John Avery publicly stated that whistleblowers would not be the subject of discrimination, 22-year-old recruit Simon Illingworth took the Victoria Police pledge:
to serve the community without favour or affection, malice or ill-will … and to discharge … all the duties legally imposed upon me, faithfully and according to the law.
He was then taken by his superior on duty and he watched, dumb-struck, as the officer walked into the back room of a cafe. There the card tables bore all the signs of illegal gaming. But, rather than make an arrest, Illingworth’s senior officer merely helped himself to the cash in the register behind the counter, stuffing it in his pockets, before scraping more cash off the table. The cafe owner apparently took the theft quite calmly.
Illingworth did nothing at the time, later claiming that there were two conflicting trains of thought running through his head. Certainly, the cafe owner was running illegal gaming and everyone seemed to be in on it. Illingworth had already seen evidence of police careers fasttracked for ‘mates secretly looking after each other’. The other train of thought came from the shock of realising how many on both sides of the law simply accepted police corruption as normal. He learned that meticulous record keeping was not only to assist prosecutions. Corrupt police kept notes of other members’ minor breaches or rule breaking, so that the pot was less likely to call the kettle black. Later Illingworth would learn that one difficulty in getting honest police to come forward against corrupt police was the fear of being targeted for breaking minor rules, put on hellish rosters or given finetooth-comb supervision. He wrote in Filthy Rat: ‘No police officer can claim that he or she has always followed the strict Victoria Police code of ethics and conduct to the letter, seasoned cops call the manuals “150 years of fuck ups” because every time someone fucked up a new rule would be made.’
In fact over the years and in various states officers have spied on each other, not always for the good of the force. In New South Wales when Deputy Police Commissioner Bill Allen was under siege over his relationship with organised-crime figures such as Abe Saffron, he produced a tape recording he had made of an interview with Commissioner Jim Lees. In itself the tape produced nothing remarkable—simply Lees saying that it was not he who had investigated Allen—but it raised a number of questions. First: how could Lees be so naïve as to think that Allen would not do something like tape him? Second, and of far greater concern: if Allen had taped Lees, just who else was on tape and in what more sinister circumstances?
Inter-police spying and taping was not that uncommon. In the early 1980s Victorian detectives ran an illegal operation in Sydney to gather evidence on police and political corruption. It ended when New South Wales detectives stole their surveillance gear. In Western Australia in 1985, The Daily News revealed that Police Commissioner Bill Bull had spied on his assistant commissioner, Spears, for three months using what was called the ‘dog squad’. Unfortunately for Bull and the public image of the force generally, Spears had discovered this and with the help of The West Australian had the squad filmed in flagrante.
‘They have a touch of the martyr’, said another senior officer, referring to whistleblowers. He and others believe that an anonymous call to the authorities is better than coming out in the newspapers and so often achieving martyrdom amongst their colleagues. Others see them simply as troublemakers and publicity seekers. It has been suggested that a new recru
it, fresh from the academy, will within only a matter of weeks be acclimatised to the corruption or have decided, somehow, to take a stand. Illingworth, called a ‘maggot’ and a ‘filthy rat’ for his failure to jump on board, puts it this way: ‘Some people get on the corruption bus, some run alongside it, very few have the guts to stand in front of it’.
In the early 1990s in Victoria it was probationary constable Karl Konrad’s turn to pay the price. His crime was to dob in fellow officers who were part of a gigantic kickback operation in which window-repair companies were alerted that a breakage had occurred and a repair or temporary shutter was required. The result was Operation Bart, and 1548 police from eighty-nine stations were investigated. In 1995 alone, payments of $144 000 had been made to police. The investigation revealed that it took less than six weeks for a member new to a particular station to embrace the corruption, put aside ethical considerations and grab a share of the cash. There were also unproved suggestions that it was police themselves who were breaking the windows. In the wash-up, the Director of Public Prosecutions was not confident of securing convictions, as even officers not on the take balked at dobbing in colleagues who were. Ultimately, one senior constable was convicted and fined, along with a shutter company. The remaining 550 were dealt with on disciplinary charges. Nine officers were dismissed, seven resigned before their hearings and eighteen resigned during or after their hearings. Five were demoted and transferred, eighteen were merely transferred and 188 were fined. A further 139 faced in-house disciplinary penalties. In total $239 000 in fines was paid. A decade after the shutters hit the fan, George Brouwer, director of the Office of Police Integrity, would say that Operation Bart had demonstrated that ‘one in three police was corruptible’.