by James Morton
You rape ’em
We scrape ’em
No foetus
Can beat us.
Throughout the latter half of 1969, the Scots-born, Melbourne-based abortion-reform advocate Dr Bertram Wainer, described as ‘headstrong, erratic, egotistical and self-serving’, had been making allegations claiming that police officers were standing over abortionists. On 5 December that year a number of Melbourne doctors who practiced as abortionists, including Bertram Wainer and Fenton Bowen, who had been convicted on an abortion charge in September and had been deregistered, handed in affidavits to Truth, which forwarded them to the solicitor-general. They contained allegations that abortionists had to pay some members of the elite homicide squad $150 a week each to avoid raids. Other payments to corrupt officers ranged from $600 to a lump sum of $1200, which would include cover for the ‘possible fatality’ of a patient. The chief commissioner was directed to investigate the complaints, but five out of six officers named refused to see him. As a result, in January 1970 the government appointed an independent, one-man board of inquiry in the form of William Kaye QC ‘to investigate whether members of the Force had demanded or accepted money from persons concerned with abortion in Victoria’. Kaye sat for the next five months.
Unfortunately, when it came to it Bowen, who may well have been in the early stages of dementia, he refused to give evidence before Kaye, so depriving historians of an account of his relationship with Wyatt and his mistress Elva Moran, matriarch of the Moran family later involved in the gangland wars.
Wyatt, however, was a principal witness, standing throughout the five days of his evidence. He told Kaye that ex-CIB officer Harry McMennemin had been for several years the head of ‘Crime Incorporated’ and he had boasted that he had a direct line to Police Commissioner Reg Jackson, with whom he often lunched. Wyatt said that McMennemin had cashed cheques for him on which he had forged his wife’s signature. He also claimed that he had some ‘connections’ but denied paying police through McMennemin. In turn McMennemin denied the allegations Wyatt had made.
Kaye found that there was evidence against Superintendent John Matthews, inspector Jack Ford, detective Martin Jacobson and retired station officer Frederick ‘Bluey’ Adam, known also as ‘Thumper’ for obvious reasons, who was once regarded as the scourge of Melbourne’s criminal fraternity but who by then weighed 140 kilograms and was an alcoholic. Lawyer Frank Galbally thought, ‘He saw little harm in distorting the truth if he thought that the accused deserved to be convicted for one reason or another’. In 1971 all were charged with conspiring to obstruct the course of justice by accepting bribes to protect the illegal activities of abortionists.
Before their trial Margaret ‘Peggy’ Berman, receptionist at an East Melbourne clinic—and godmother to a child of standover man Norman Bradshaw, and the one-time lover of Norval Morris, who founded the criminology department at the University of Melbourne—pleaded guilty to abortion-related offences. Released on bond and given an indemnity against prosecution, she later gave evidence claiming that the officers had stood over the abortion clinic where she worked, demanding payment in return for warning the doctors of potential raids. Unemployed in 1953, she had gone to a doctor for an abortion and had left with a £25-a-week job. The doctor was in the process of selling his practice and Bluey Adam took £50 a week from the purchaser.
The doctors had then been the victim of what Berman called a somersault. They had, she maintained, originally been paying Adam, who had passed them on to Ford, Matthews and Jacobson, who demanded even more money. In particular, for two or three years she had been giving Ford, her former lover and then head of the homicide squad, $600 a month retainer from her employers as well as $200 a month of her own money to pay his gaming debts. Matthews thought the money was compensation for being overworked and underappreciated.
At the trial Ford heaped abuse on his former mistress, claiming that he thought she had tried to kill him. She had, he said, put poison into a bottle of whisky by injecting it through the cork with a hypodermic needle. It did none of them any good. When Matthews gave evidence he admitted that in eight years as homicide chief he had not arrested one abortionist.
Adam may have been an alchoholic, but he retained his sense of humour. Asked by prosecuting counsel if he had a nickname, he replied that he had. The prosecutor then made a foolish—possibly even fatal—error, saying, ‘Perhaps you’d like to share that nickname with the court’. ‘Honest Fred’ was the crushing reply.
Matthews and Ford were jailed for five years. They were all smiles after the jury verdict and kept up the front for the media at their appeals, but, before Matthews was sent back to Pentridge after one appearance, he was heard to snarl at reporters ‘get back to your brothels, you bastards’.
Both were released after serving rather under half their time. Jacobson served thirteen months. Matthews was later given a job writing on consumer affairs at Truth, the newspaper whose campaign had in part led to his destruction. He was assigned the chair of Evan Whitton, the journalist who had exposed him, but he took these humiliations in good part—perhaps he had no alternative. Adam was acquitted and died of stomach cancer on 14 April 1973.
Peggy Berman thought that the only lasting effect of the Kaye inquiry and the case was that the price of abortions leapt to $400. After being told in the 1960s that she had cancer and only had eighteen months to live, Peggy unexpectedly survived until she died, aged seventy-nine after a heart attack in December 2002.
An Age editorial reflected on the case:
It would have been naive to suppose that responsible ministers and officials, and successive police chiefs, had no inkling of what was going on.
It could not be expected that the case would go without reprisals and in 1971 Bowen, Wyatt and Elva Moran were all charged with abortion offences. During Bowen’s trial doctors rallied round their colleague, one saying that after Bowen had suffered a stroke on Christmas Day 1967 he had advised him to give up practice. A psychiatrist said that to the layman Bowen was in a ‘second childhood’ and he would ‘take advice from people he would not normally have taken it from’. Bowen was acquitted on fourteen counts on 7 December. Interviewed after the acquittal, he told reporters that he had applied for re-registration that very day.
During the trial Wyatt alleged that not only had inspector Jack Matthews framed men for murder but that when the police raided Fenton Bowen and seized his card records, six of them related to policewomen. ‘There are many policemen who would like to see me out of circulation, because of my peculiar knowledge of their activities. Police feeling against me is running very high at the moment because I know a great deal about them,’ he told the jury in an unsworn statement from the dock. He said he had twenty-one tapes of officers discussing not only the abortion racket but also robberies and payroll robberies. It did him no good. Wyatt and Moran, described by one witness as a ‘marvellous woman’, were convicted on a total of twenty-five charges. Wyatt received 4 ½ years, and Elva Moran, who said she had never held an instrument, merely the hands of the distressed women, went down for twelve months.
Later Wyatt would be portrayed by some as a loveable rogue, but he was also regarded by the cognoscenti as a ‘dangerous, incorrigible and self-serving criminal’. Peggy Berman was horrified to hear that he had become an abortionist. When Wyatt heard about her horror, he happily said that he would have her killed.
If the Victorian police thought that after the successful prosecution of Matthews and the others Bertram Wainer would let up they were wrong. He was not nearly finished with them and in 1974 he presented sufficient evidence to the government for it to undertake a preliminary inquiry into his new allegations.
The result was that the very experienced Barry Beach QC was appointed to sit as another one-man board of inquiry to report on whether there was ‘any credible evidence raising a strong and probable presumption that any, and if so which, members of the Victoria Police Force’ were guilty of criminal offences, breaches of sta
nding orders or ‘harassment or intimidation of any member of the public’.
Beach began by advertising in the newspapers for members of the public to come forward. The result was not a trickle or even a flow of complaints but something approaching a deluge. The total number of complaints was 131, but Beach decided to examine only twenty-one. The inquiry lasted fifteen months, during which time 290 witnesses were called.
There were, of course, the usual criminal stalwarts giving evidence of brutality, including bank robbers Peter George Gibb, Joseph Power, John Palmer and Barry Quinn. The brother of another bank robber, ‘Jockey’ James Smith, also gave evidence and so did a man who was bundled through a window after the police raided a room while chasing the Melbourne heavy Laurie Prendergast.
However, some cleanskins also came forward. Among them was a man who was viciously assaulted and his wife abused by officers as she waited to collect him after a dinner he was attending, as well as a solicitor’s clerk. These were not the sort of people whom the police could be expected to treat as dingoes.
Beach was unimpressed with much of the police evidence, some from very senior men. He found that certain high-ranking officers ‘will lie on oath if occasion suits them and no proper investigation will be made’. Of one senior sergeant, he commented:
One of the most unimpressive of the police officers who gave evidence before the Board. He is clearly a man who will give false evidence whenever the occasion suits him.
Overall, Beach found that police used high-handed, violent and illegal tactics against both known criminals and members of the public in order to achieve their ends, and that police would conspire and commit perjury as necessary, either in court hearings or when appearing before him. His report also identified instances of inappropriate use of informers and the existence of a ‘brotherhood syndrome’, whereby police at all levels would do whatever was required to protect workmates. What also came across from the report, which the Rupert Hamer government of the time originally did not want to release, is the sheer helplessness experienced by men and women who find themselves in a police station.
In the final outcome Beach made extensive recommendations for police procedural reform in areas such as the investigation of complaints and the interrogation of people under arrest. He was scathing about the complaint processes and the standard of investigations existing at that time, saying ‘the Board’s inquiry into [specific incidents] established beyond doubt the undesirability of police investigating complaints against police’. Beach wanted fifty-five officers to be charged with a variety of offences, including perjury, assault, corruptly receiving money and conspiracy. Among them was Paul Higgins, whom Beach thought should be charged with assault, conspiracy and malicious damage. Had he been, hundreds of thousands of dollars might have been saved.
Instead what followed was a triumph for naked aggression by the Police Association. The protests over the Mr X case had indeed merely been a very useful dry run. This time more than 4000 men and women from a force of 6400 met at Festival Hall on 18 October 1976 to formulate a plan of resistance. They had not seen the Beach report; they did not know what his recommendations were, and they did not know which officers he had named and why, but they gathered in what the president of the Police Association, LJ Blogg, described as ‘the greatest demonstration of unity in the history of the Association’.
The meeting instituted a ‘work to rule’ campaign, but there were hints also of a strike threat. In the face of such massive industrial opposition, Premier Hamer backed down and accepted a series of demands from the rank and file. Among these was one specifying that:
Any change in police procedures was to be the result of a conference involving the police department, the Police Association and the government and not made on any recommendations made by Beach.
Instead of the Beach report being effectively a committal hearing, as had been the case with Kaye, now seventeen officers faced actual committal proceedings—fifteen were found to have no case to answer. No bills were entered against the remaining two. As for Beach’s recommendations for change, again the government backed down and set up a new inquiry, this time chaired by J Norris QC and implicitly tasked with watering down the Beach report.
In 1977 Mick Miller became chief commissioner and almost immediately clashed with the association, whose policy, ‘My Association right or wrong’ did not include the nineteenth-century US senator Carl Schurz’s addendum, ‘and if wrong, to be set right’. There was no question of members being in the wrong. The Office of Police Integrity’s board’s report Past Patterns gives an example of the tortuous road to be followed if an officer was to be disciplined:
Once he [Miller] had attended the Dawson Street police complex in Brunswick. By chance, he found a member putting petrol into the tank of his private motorbike from the police bowser. In due course, the member was charged and appeared at court where he was convicted by the Magistrate. The member’s barrister told the Magistrate the conviction could result in his dismissal from the Force and the Magistrate placed him on a good behaviour bond. He was then arraigned before the Police Discipline Board that also found against him, and dismissed him from the Force. The offender appealed to the Police Service Board, which reinstated him. On his return to the Force, he was posted to the Missing Persons Bureau, where he became a malcontent. He took sick leave and, in due course, was boarded out, medically unfit on the grounds of ‘management-induced stress’.
Like Tony Lauer in New South Wales, Miller would not accept that there was entrenched corruption in the force. However, in 1981 it became apparent that all was not well with the licensing, gaming and vice squad, with suggestions that the entire unit had been compromised by longstanding and systemic corruption—in other words, from the top down.
Operation Zebra was set up, and the story of the investigation followed the usual lines, with considerable ingenuity being displayed by suspected officers to avoid questioning—perhaps more than that displayed by the investigators, who were hampered by both lack of expertise and today’s technical equipment. Although he had never previously been known to suffer from epilepsy, one man had a ‘fit’ when interviewed. He then took sick leave, before successfully retiring on a pension, claiming that his early retirement was due to stress brought on by the actions of management. Another, when required to answer a report explaining his actions, fired a number of shots through the document with his service revolver. He then went to a nearby hotel and never returned to the force. In the wash-up there was sufficient evidence to prosecute just one man. However, eighteen members retired, resigned or went on long-term sick leave. Operation Zebra may not have produced convictions, but some 560 offenders were fined nearly a quarter of a million dollars, and it was believed that SP bookmaking was temporarily wiped out in the state and the operators of Chinese card games who were linked to Triads were exposed.
Out of Zebra was born Zulu, when it was alleged that a senior police officer was in a corrupt relationship with former lawyer Mario Condello. Born in 1952 and educated at Fitzroy High before going on to study law at the University of Melbourne, Condello, the son of a painter and decorator from Calabria, was a thoroughly undesirable man with whom any officer, let alone a senior one, should never have become entangled. Almost from the start of his legal career he was involved in laundering and extortion. In December 1982 he was sentenced to six years’ imprisonment after a marijuana crop was found on land he leased near Ararat. A fortnight earlier he had been struck off the rolls by the Supreme Court.
After his release from prison he became the owner of a restaurant in Bourke Street and, said one of his former lawyers, ‘he also had an interest in the cemetery business’. The next year he was found guilty of two counts of arson. On 5 March 1985 he stood trial for the attempted murder of Richard Jones, a businessman who had upset another. Condello had been called in to deal with the recalcitrant Jones, who was shot in the stomach through a doona as he lay in bed. Amazingly, Jones survived because feathers plugged
the wound. Condello was found not guilty after a confession he had made was ruled to be not under caution. In 1986 he received four years for conspiracy to defraud an insurance company. His business bought 120 000 prints for $2.40 each and arranged a sham sale in Italy, which valued them at $1.4 million. The prints were said to have burned in Naples during an earthquake riot.
The senior police officer was exonerated and after 2 ½ years Operation Zulu was wound up. Condello lived another two decades before he became one of the last men killed in the long-running Melbourne gang war.
As always, where products or services are illegal but wanted or desperately needed by the public, there is the temptation for police officers to look the other way, in exchange for some consideration. Graft will find a way.
9
TWO COPPERS, TWO STATES: PAUL HIGGINS AND ROGER ROGERSON
Eight years after the Beach Royal Commission came yet another scandal, this time an extremely expensive one, both emotionally and financially, for the administration and the police union.
Following an internal investigation known as Operation Cobra, the prosecution alleged that Paul William Higgins, a former wrestler and twenty-year veteran of the Victoria Police, had led a ring of corrupt officers from 1978 to 1982. They had been working for the wealthy Geoffrey Lamb, Melbourne’s then brothel king, whose empire included an estimated twenty-five illegal massage parlours. Higgins was another upwardly mobile officer with a good list of arrests who had been rewarded by rapid promotion. His record included the encomium, ‘keen, tireless, efficient and reliable, energetic, knowledgeable, capable and well conducted’. One former officer recalled him as being ‘not tall but very fit, he could be intimidating even hanging upside down from gravity boots at the gym’. He was one of the men who were seconded to the armed robbery squad shortly after it was formed and from there he moved into the CIB in 1972. Four years later he was promoted directly to the rank of detective sergeant, something that reflected the opinion of his superiors. Unusually, instead of being returned to uniform he was moved to the consorting squad. Dubbed ‘The Consorters’, members were part of another squad that was regarded in some quarters as a law unto themselves.