by James Morton
When he learned that police were receiving kickbacks, Konrad went to his superiors; ignored, he went to the ombudsman. For his trouble, he was hounded out of the force. Later he told Sally Neighbour on ABC TV’s Four Corners:
I went out in the morning and my car was completely vandalised you know, the windscreen was smashed, there were rocks thrown over the top of it, yet no other police, you know, no other private car in the compound was touched. None of them were brave enough to ever say anything to my face, but it was, you know, I got called a dog and a lagger over the PA system throughout the whole building. Matter of fact, one of the sergeants at Moorabbin said to me you know, if I was in the police force 10 years ago I would’ve found myself unconscious in the car park. I had another friend at another station who said, you know, they were openly discussing doing a black balaclava job on me.
For those not personally involved, whistleblower watching is a popular sport:
partly because of the spectacle of a person being publicly disloyal to the organisation to which he or she belongs and partly too because whistleblowers have often focused public attention on a hidden membrane of popular culture.
Added to this is the voyeurism of watching if and how the whistleblower will be destroyed, rather like the Romans watching to see if a Christian could occasionally evade the lions and at least live to fight another day. Whistleblowers rarely survive within their own organisations and the culture shock and ostracism leave them with deep scars. A very few, such as New York officer Frank Serpico—who was immortalised in the film bearing his name—end up heroes, but it should be remembered that the three other whistleblowers who joined him suffered the usual fate.
The authority challenged has a range of defences and counterattacks at its disposal. As with Arantz, there can be accusations that the whistleblower is emotionally unstable and mentally ill, is an alcoholic, has behaved offensively, or is acting out of malice brought on by a real or perceived slight, perhaps lack of promotion. Whistleblower Simon Illingworth thought:
Whistleblowers are always accused of being mentally ill. When the leadership of an organisation have been caught out lying, deceiving, thieving and/or incompetent they will inevitably ‘go for the man rather than the ball’. The reason for this is because the facts speak for themselves. If the facts point towards incompetence or worse they’ll divert attention from them and go for a personal smear of the witness. This is a disgusting trait of Australian people in power that have been caught out being unethical.
Sociologists believe that many whistleblowers come from religious or moral backgrounds and that others may have been isolated as children and grown up ‘outside the pack’—and the latter is not an ideal qualification for joining the police. The whole experience may be strengthening to whistleblowers in general.
Geoff Schuberg explained one reason why so many officers remained silent:
It was well known in those days, if you rocked the boat you’d be transferred to the bush. You’d be just put out of the way. And that’s what happened to police. So, there were areas of policing that people didn’t want to get involved with otherwise they were going to get themselves in trouble.
In the early years of the twenty-first century, widespread corruption in the Victoria Police drug squad was starting to unravel. Within months, dozens of police were investigated by the Ceja Task Force for trafficking in drugs: pseudoephedrine, heroin, cocaine, cannabis. The amounts were substantial—4.5 kilograms of heroin, 2 kilograms of pseudoephedrine. Convictions and jail terms followed.
Illingworth had already given evidence against his corrupt former partner. He had also been bashed and threatened by another officer. At this stage he was working in the professional practices unit. Under the umbrella of the ethical standards department and headed by Superintendent Neil O’Sullivan, the unit fought corruption from the inside. It was O’Sullivan’s detectives who located a cache of illegal substances and weapons in the ceiling cavity of the St Kilda CIB complex. But, despite this and other achievements, O’Sullivan’s unit was disbanded. It was then that Illingworth came to believe:
Untangling corruption almost always leads to the disclosure of secrets and the erosion of underground loyalty. To save their own skins, corrupt police and criminals often turn on each other after they’ve been arrested.
By early 2004 the Ceja Task Force had charged thirteen detectives. Aside from those, Illingworth had given evidence against five of his colleagues. There had been plenty of arrests but ultimately more acquittals than convictions. ‘It was the equivalent of a gold miner shoveling through 20 tonnes of shale for one small nugget of pure gold’, says Illingworth. Other corruption investigators were also under threat. Two hollow-point bullets were delivered to one of Illingworth’s colleagues, with the names of the man and his partner etched on them. Diagnosed with post-traumatic stress and at the end of his tether, Illingworth went to the media. His account appeared on ABC Television’s Australian Story on 24 May 2004.
After he went public, his vilification increased. The media, however, had latched onto the story of links between criminals and the police and ran with it. A CCTV photograph of ‘crim and the cop’ showed an accused gangland figure with a suspended detective who was facing criminal charges (of which he was later acquitted). They were filmed together in a pub Illingworth frequented. Another underworld figure with access to Illingworth’s address was found in possession of eight guns, night-vision goggles and a silencer. Illingworth, on temporary leave at the time, negotiated to leave Victoria Police. He turned down a payout of $250 000 because the package was coupled with a confidentiality clause. In turn, he told the media about the gagging. The Herald Sun ran a front-page story, ‘You can’t gag me’, and later published Illingworth’s letter to the police commissioner explaining his decision to refuse the payment. Finally he was offered the payout without restriction. On his retirement he wrote a bestseller about his experiences and became an anti-corruption consultant.
Dr Jean Lennane, consultant psychiatrist and founder of Whistleblowers Australia, defines the act as principled organisational dissent. In a research paper, ‘Whistleblowing and the Protected Disclosures Act’, delivered to a conference in Sydney in late 2013, she outlined the dangers of dissenting from the accepted culture, internal principles and practises of an organisation.
Her position was based on an early study of Australian whistleblowers in 1998 which showed that 90 per cent lost their jobs or were demoted, 20 per cent got into difficulties with alcohol, 20 per cent had a long-term relationship break up, 20 per cent were threatened with a defamation action, 6 per cent attempted suicide and 9 per cent went bankrupt. Not a good strike rate, as The Sydney Morning Herald put it.
Today states and territories have stand-alone acts that provide for the establishment of whistleblowing systems and some form of legal protection against reprisals. It began in South Australia with the Whistleblowers Protection Act 1993 and was followed by Queensland and New South Wales the next year, Victoria in 2001 and Tasmania the year after. The Northern Territory rather lagged behind, not producing legislation until 2008. Only the Commonwealth remains without protective legislation.
Of course, there is a great deal of difference between theory and practice, as a whistle-blowing Brisbane officer found out when his colleagues handed him a tin of dog food as a secret Santa Christmas present at the office party.
8
VICTORIA FROM THE 1960s: FROM ABORTIONISTS AND BULLY BOYS TO ZEBRA AND ZULU
For twenty years from the 1960s Victorian police were under constant fire from their critics. One of the criticisms, which dated back to the Blamey era of the 1920s and 1930s, related to their method of taking statements from suspects. Alleged by the police to be voluntary, these statements were often challenged as having been extorted from the accused. Police interviews still took place without the presence of independent witnesses, without any attempt to take down proper shorthand or produce a taped record, and without the presence of any person to
represent or assist the suspect.
It was not only in Victoria that the problem arose. In Queensland barrister MP Col Bennett, who for decades had his sights on corrupt members of the CIB, thought:
It is rather amazing that at the CI Branch very few, if any, voluntary confessions are obtained from people who are allegedly invited to enter the CI Branch while in the company of friends … But not long after they are separated from their companions, out pops a confession, freely and voluntarily admitting every element of the offence in such a fashion that one might believe that the accused was a lawyer who understood how to make admissions acknowledging the truth of every aspect of the charge.
In 1963 at a United Nations seminar in Canberra, during a session discussing human rights being breached by police interview techniques, the judges present were unanimous that the extent to which admissions and confessions seemed to be obtained by intimidation was an ‘agonising problem’. They said that tape recording interviews would help solve the problem. But police chiefs attending the seminar argued that ‘much police evidence was gleaned during a car trip or while walking down a corridor’, policemen ‘only hit back spontaneously when provoked by suspects’ and ‘if police were put in a straitjacket’ and denied the ‘flexibility’ they needed in interrogation, then ‘the real job they had to perform would get out of control’. One delegate suggested that the police attitude was ‘perturbing’. Too much time was being spent by police chiefs defending existing national practices, and too little on ways to improve them, said Professor Julius Stone, Chalis Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Sydney.
The next year, during the investigation and questioning of three Italian men for the murder of market gardener Antonio Monaco, two of the men were held for eighteen hours and were, they claimed, kicked, punched and pistol-whipped by police. Dr Macera, an assistant police commissioner from Reggio in Italy, had been flown in to help with the investigation and had advocated ‘toughness in handling Italians of this class’. During the trial of two of the suspects, Mr Justice Sholl of the Victorian Supreme Court disallowed the confessions, finding that ‘it is impossible to be satisfied that these injuries were not inflicted by the police’. He found that the detectives’ contemporaneous notes prompted ‘an uneasy suspicion that [they] … may have been written after the interviews had been completed’.
On 4 June 1965 an exasperated Sholl was quoted in The Age as saying, ‘After sixteen years on the bench, I have lost confidence in methods used by police in interrogations. The more so since suggestions from the bench to modernise what is done is entirely disregarded’. His comments should have taken no one by surprise: he had been making them since 1961. The acting chief secretary of the day, ER Meagher, was reported as saying that he would discuss the judge’s comments with senior police, but no real change resulted from any discussions. It was as though the police and government would simply not take the hint.
Then in September 1965 opposition leader Clive Stoneham announced in parliament that he had obtained and listened to some nine hours’ worth of tape recordings containing allegations of misconduct and corruption against a number of police. The man involved, known as Mr X, was a police informer and a convicted criminal. His wife also had allegations to make. Mr X claimed that he had only made the allegations after his wife had been threatened and his police handlers had turned on him. He went directly to a judge who had previously sentenced him and the complaint was referred to the Attorney-General.
From then on discussion of these corruption allegations was front-page news in The Age. Would the officers be named? Who would hear the case? Why was the government taking so long to investigate? Stoneham was persistent, saying in parliament that the government had known of the existence of corruption in the ranks since at least June 1962. As morsels were drip fed to the media, it appeared that the corrupt behaviour related to instances of ‘framing’ suspects, evidence being ‘planted’, cooking up false confessions or admissions, rorts with informants, improperly withdrawing charges and good old-fashioned lying.
By the end of 1965 seven policemen were to face disciplinary charges, including one of ‘disgraceful and improper conduct’ against a senior constable. To an extent there was supporting evidence for Mr X’s claims from ex-boxer Robert George Flannery, who alleged that the police had planted a pistol on him. Stipendiary magistrate WN Thompson chaired the Police Disciplinary Board that began on 2 December, and first he determined that the crucial witness, Mr X, could not be named as he and his wife could be in danger from criminal elements. However, Mr X was soon to be outed as housebreaker Brian Donald Latch. Counsel for the policemen was Ray Dunn.
It is not difficult, particularly for a man of Dunn’s skills, to crossexamine a man like Latch—prior convictions, especially after pleas of not guilty, can be lovingly put, and motives such as malice and revenge can be examined in detail. Time and again Latch was made to pay for his treachery in turning on his former police friends. He was forced to admit numerous priors, including buying stolen radios up to forty a time from ‘dozens of men’, as well as two spells in mental hospitals. Finally, he turned to the magistrate, saying, ‘I’ve admitted being an informer against criminals. Now they want me to inform on my own family’. Dunn had already accused him of dobbing in his own solicitor over a procedural matter. Latch’s unfortunate wife was forced to admit that the dress she was wearing at the hearing had been stolen.
In March 1966 Thompson dismissed charges against one officer relating to the improper withdrawal of charges against Flannery. Further allegations by Latch dropped by the wayside and a few paltry charges hovered around. In the end only a couple of minor charges stuck. Thompson found that no attack on a sergeant’s honesty or integrity had been substantiated: ‘We think the error he made was one of judgment’. The penalties were nugatory.
By August that year Latch was living under an assumed name in Rockingham, Western Australia, with his wife and family. He was complaining that he had been recognised by a Victorian criminal and was in fear for his life. Some years later, back in Victoria, Latch wrote his self-serving memoir, Mr X—Police Informer.
During the year of Mr X, police morale was said to be at an all-time low. Resignations were flooding in, and so were complaints about ‘police brutality’ and provocation during demonstrations at the time of US President Lyndon Johnson’s visit.
The Police Association was outraged. At a meeting attended by 400 members, police complained that Mr X, who had initially telephoned a judge with his story, had hoodwinked the solicitor-general, had brought the police into disgrace and, perhaps worst of all, had jumped the Housing Commission’s waiting list. There were also complaints about the way the press had behaved. Significantly, members wanted the association to provide financial aid for legal advice on the possibility of civil action against the solicitor-general, the chief commissioner of police, any of the assistant commissioners or members of the force involved in launching these prosecutions. If the legal advice was favourable, members said that further financial aid should be given to prosecute the matter in the civil court. It was a response that should have demonstrated to the government the strength of the Police Association. It turned out to be a rehearsal for the destruction of the Beach report, which called for extensive police-procedural reform ten years later.
One general problem in any force is that the misdemeanours of an outstanding officer who is also corrupt—Ray Kelly, Fred Krahe and Roger Rogerson in New South Wales, and later Paul Higgins in Victoria immediately spring to mind—are overlooked because of his arrest and conviction record. And this was the case in Victoria of one-time head of the homicide squad Jack Matthews. He was one of the first to recognise the unchecked and unmonitored rise of organised crime, particularly organised ethnic crime, and he was adroit in solving the murders relating to the Victoria fruit market in which Italian factions fought each other for control. It was Matthews who had persuaded Chief Secretary Arthur Rylah that foreign expertise, including the likes o
f Dr Macera, was necessary to crack Italian crime circles. That was the plus side of his career. On the debit side were the abortion rackets he ran with other officers.
Medical abortionists had thrived in Melbourne for at least fifty years. One, William Fenton Bowen, had survived a prosecution back in the 1940s. Bowen’s offsider Stanley Charles Wyatt, a former homicide chief inspector, had as a detective first constable been ordered out of the CIB by Chief Commissioner Alexander Duncan. He had later been a member of the gaming squad but had resigned from the police in 1948 and set himself up as an SP bookmaker.
Wyatt had two useful friends, solicitor Roy McMennemin and his father, Harry ‘Mac’ McMennemin, a former CIB officer who had served in the police for forty years and now ran an off-course gambling club above a television-repair shop in Geelong. He also maintained links with unsavoury local abortionist Mario Marchesani, who was known to have roused patients from the anaesthetic to let them know that the fee would be doubled as they were a bit further along than first thought. Marchesani’s son-in-law was in charge of the Geelong CIB, having earlier been attached to the sheepstealing squad. When Wyatt was arrested in 1962 by Ronald Jackson of the gaming squad, the pair got him off on a technicality. Wyatt later became an informer for Jackson.
In 1959 Wyatt went to live in Ascot Vale with Elva Isabella Moran, also known as Bella Lewis, who was then the licensee of the Red Lion in Carlton, from where Wyatt ran his business. As a result she lost her licence. In May that year he was sentenced to 3 ½ months’ imprisonment for an assault on her and related charges. Around 1966 he became an abortionist, later working with Fenton Bowen, who had rooms opposite the law courts and who was called over if a defendant was taken ill. The alcoholic Fenton Bowen was unable to perform the abortions because of the shakes, but he saw the patients and then sent them into the back room, where ‘Charlie did the business’, recalls one lawyer. A ditty was written about the abilities of the pair: