by James Morton
It was there that Higgins met Lamb, who had two luxury homes in Hawthorn and Kew, as well as a Lamborghini and extremely expensive personal habits. His lavish informal parties involved recreational use of drugs as well as women. When Lamb came to the conclusion in 1977 that he could use a little police protection from his competitors and the vice squad, he contacted someone he knew in the New South Wales Police who, for a fee of $10 000, put him in contact with Higgins. He and other police officers were invited into Lamb’s circle, and girls were on the house, a facility of which Higgins and other officers regularly availed themselves.
Lamb would carry up to $10 000 in cash, which came in handy because he was soon paying thousands of dollars to police each month as protection money. In exchange his sex empire flourished, as the police on his payroll would warn him about any raids planned for his various parlours on the city fringes. Money, variously said to be $3000 a week or month, was handed over on the first of the month in the back room in Higgins’ squad’s office. In return Higgins and others agreed to stop investigations in their tracks, fabricate evidence if necessary and lean on the working girls if they were thought to be taking it too easy.
Higgins would instruct junior officers in his squad to make false entries on running sheets when Lamb was visited. On one occasion an officer was taken by Higgins to one of Lamb’s establishments at Rathdowne Street, Carlton, and sent in to pick up a gun from Lamb. Higgins then allegedly told him to record that the .32 revolver had been received from a Drummond Street dobber. Lamb claimed he had been told by Higgins that he was to say he was an informant if questioned by police internal investigators.
At the beginning of August 1978, painter and docker turned brothel owner Joey Hamilton complained that police had planted a bomb at his home. It was the third attack and the second bomb in twelve months. When he was asked by reporters when the violence would stop, he replied, ‘When people like you stop getting edited and start exposing organised crime—the police’.
Days after Hamilton’s home was bombed, Higgins and another detective, acting on behalf of Lamb, helpfully planted a number of bombs in rival concerns, including the Collingwood home of brothel owner James Robert Slater. Hours later police raids ‘uncovered’ gelignite and a tin of detonators in a child’s toy box. Higgins did not even attempt to make an appearance of conducting a proper investigation. People who had access to the areas where the explosives were found were not interviewed. Charged with possession of explosives, Slater’s watertight alibi was not checked. This time it was a case of the biter bit. At his trial he was able to prove, through a traffic-infringement ticket, that he had been staying in Mildura.
In March 1979 Higgins was brought before the Police Discipline Board, charged with being absent from duty and three lesser charges. There he was supported by senior officers, who gave evidence of his value to the CIB. No penalties were imposed, but he was transferred to uniform duties at Russell Street. In no time he was receiving glowing references and was quickly seconded to the car crime squad.
While there, a younger officer reported that Higgins had been helped by an informer to ‘set up’ drug dealers. Higgins would arrest the dealer, and the drugs seized would be cut by the informer with another substance. Higgins would save some for use as court exhibits, and the remainder would be sold and the profits shared. The young constable also said that Higgins had ordered him to doctor the official records. He also mentioned a gun Higgins provided to the informer for his own protection.
It was the usual fallout for the whistleblower. The constable was vilified and ostracised by his colleagues, and was transferred to a post where no one knew him. Even though he had the personal support of the chief commissioner, his life and career were seriously damaged.
The constable’s allegations were not corroborated, so ultimately police management backed off, leaving Higgins to enjoy a free rein. When Higgins applied for a promotion to Russell Street CIB in 1982 he was knocked back, but he then appealed to the Police Service Board. Again the evidence of the young constable was pitted against Higgins’ version of events. Again Higgins seemed to be the Teflon man. Although the board felt that he had perhaps been a little too close to his informers and needed to address this flaw, it was conceded that:
it needs to be recognised that apparently he had throughout his service been somewhat encouraged to behave in this way by the results which he has achieved and the commendations and approval which the achievement of those results have brought him.
In other words, his misconduct had been condoned, even encouraged, by the force. Higgins began at Russell Street CIB on 30 June 1982. In 1983 Operation Achilles was started, supposedly in secret. However, information was leaked to the media, prompting an article that claimed police corruption existed in the massage-parlour and prostitution industry. It was alleged that payments were being made to a group of detectives to ensure protection from both competitors and prosecution. Senior police were said to be investigating these claims. The inquiry bore little fruit, despite fourteen months of diligent police probing. The force made no official comment.
On 25 April 1984 Higgins moved over to the armed robbery squad, known as ‘The Robbers’, but by 1986 was back at Russell Street as a senior sergeant. He had not been a shoo-in for this promotion. Some superior officers at the Police Service Board regarded him unfavourably, but his immediate supervisors had sung his praises. The decision tipped his way and he was posted to Prahran station.
However, the newly formed Internal Investigations Department (IID) was on the path of police corruption. The IID set up Operation Cobra to inquire into the activities of Higgins and others. During Cobra, investigators interviewed over 800 people and travelled all over Australia. The witness list was narrowed down to 170 people who had been involved in the Melbourne vice industry during the 1970s and 1980s. The list included Lamb’s first lieutenant, Sandy MacRae, a serial killer thought to have been involved in up to twenty deaths and whose track record was certainly open to scrutiny. Cobra also accessed new information uncovered by an unrelated drug squad inquiry.
Higgins and Lamb finally fell out over a pre-1984 affair the detective had with Lamb’s de facto wife, Lorraine Goyne, who later died following a drug overdose. From this point on Lamb’s empire began to crumble. He fell for a gorgeous model turned prostitute who had taken up heroin. He tried to help her break her addiction but instead ended up using himself. Once, in one of the kinder acts of an untidy life, MacRae chained him to a bungalow wall on his Mildura property in an effort to wean him off the drug.
When key witnesses such as Lamb rolled over and made statements implicating Higgins and other officers, prosecutors felt confident they had Higgins, and two others from his old days at The Consorters, in the firing line. On 13 April 1987 Higgins was charged with, among other things, conspiracy to pervert the course of justice and suspended from duty.
The criminal proceedings were an unmitigated forensic disaster. It was, and probably still is, the second-longest case in Victorian legal history. The committal hearing began in October 1987 and lasted ten months. Geoffrey Lamb was in the witness box for seventy days, meekly telling the court he had blown $20 000 a week on heroin and had used up all his brothel profits. Eventually, with little progress being made, the Crown withdrew charges in August 1988, on the grounds that if the case had been allowed to continue, it would have been an ‘abuse of court process’.
But then in 1990 one of Higgins’ consorting squad associates admitted that a group of police in the squad had accepted bribes from Lamb in exchange for keeping his brothel empire free from prosecution. Later that year Higgins and the others went on trial in the County Court. After 135 days of legal argument, a jury of fifteen—three more than the usual number—was empanelled, in anticipation of some jurors withdrawing from what promised to be an unusually long trial.
And unusually long it was. To Higgins’ chagrin and annoyance, much of the supporting evidence of Lamb came from MacRae. MacRae, who owned a massa
ge parlour in Mildura, north-western Victoria, had persuaded an Albert O’Hara that he could make a profit from buying and selling marijuana. Instead, on 21 December 1984 he killed him, shooting him in the head and then cutting up his car so it could be dropped into the Merbein tip.
The list of MacRae’s other victims included standover man Michael Ebert, killed outside a Carlton brothel in April 1980. Apparently Ebert had beaten MacRae badly the previous fortnight, and this slight, balding man was out for permanent revenge. In July 1980 police found the remains of a woman buried in the backyard of a home owned by an underworld figure’s mother. The dead woman was thought to be a South Australian prostitute, also killed by MacRae. In August 1981 his girlfriend Deborah Joy Faher was found dead in a St Kilda motel. She had absorbed a ‘hot shot’ of almost pure heroin. Then came a prostitute known as Little Lisa. At MacRae’s trial for the murder of O’Hara he claimed that it was his former de facto Judith Ip, whom he portrayed as the mastermind, who had killed O’Hara. The jury did not believe it and he was sentenced to life imprisonment. MacRae’s appeal was dismissed.
Including the 135 days of preliminary legal argument, the trial lasted a total of 420 days. The prosecutor’s final address took from 16 December 1990 to 26 January 1991. That of the defence ran from 27 January to 17 February 1991 and the judge’s summing up to the jury from 18 February to 15 March 1991. The transcript of the aborted committal proceedings ran to over 7000 pages and that of the trial itself 32 000 pages. Legal Aid cost $700 000. The Police Association spent an estimated $1.8 million on legal fees, which nearly bankrupted it. The Crown case cost about $6 million, so the estimated total cost of Operation Cobra, which included court, legal and police expenses, ran to between $30 and $33 million, all taxpayers’ money. How could a jury believe the word of brothel magnate Lamb and of a criminal like MacRae over that of a respected police officer? But they did.
Higgins was found guilty by the long-suffering jury, and on 6 April 1993 Judge Strong sentenced him to seven years’ imprisonment with a minimum of five. He appealed unsuccessfully against his conviction and served his time at Ararat prison. Unsurprisingly, police officers normally have a hard time in prison, but it is said that when Higgins first arrived he ‘beat the shit out of a fellow inmate’ as a show of strength. In 1993 his consorting squad associates pleaded guilty to one count each of receiving a secret commission. Both received suspended sentences.
The authorities saw the Cobra inquiry as a ‘powerful and symbolic attack on corruption within the Force’. At its heart was a struggle for control between senior management and an entrenched power group who thought they were untouchable. It was also a battle for supremacy between the Police Association and force command that management believed it had to win, no matter what the cost. It also proved divisive among the association ranks. With the association haemorraging money, ultimately pragmatism prevailed and after a series of votes it was decided that it was inappropriate to fund a case where an officer was charged with offences that occurred well outside the course of his duty. The association’s accounts show that, in the period from 1988 to 1992, $6 948 682 was spent on legal fees.
Lamb died aged sixty-one sitting in an armchair in what was then his modest West Heidelberg home. Higgins, said to be still upset about what he considers his unfair treatment, has applied for a private investigator’s licence.
Higgins’ case is interesting in three respects. First is the way he managed to keep his nefarious activities hidden from his immediate superiors, who all appear to have thought him to be an outstanding officer. Second is the apparently open secret that over a lengthy period members of the vice squad were available to be bribed. And third are the complexities involved in dismissing a serving officer or denying him the promotion he seeks.
Meanwhile, Higgins’ contemporary in the New South Wales Police had his own troubles. By the middle 1980s, on any account, certain police officers were not only out of control but were, as was said of Lord Byron, ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’. And one of them was detective Roger Caleb Rogerson. Once a shooting star with, said his admirers, a chance of reaching the very top, Rogerson instead chose a different path. He aligned himself with career criminal Arthur Stanley ‘Neddy’ Smith and took an active part in the drug war that was running in Sydney at the time. It was during these wars of the 1980s that bent New South Wales police really appear to have come into their own.
Undoubtedly talented but corrupt, Rogerson, whose association with a number of colourful identities would cause immeasurable grief to the New South Wales Police, was born in January 1941. He joined the force in 1958 and the criminal investigation branch four years later, and so served in the era of Ray Kelly and Fred Krahe. He became a member of the armed holdup squad in May 1974 and was among the officers when bank robber and murderer Philip Western was shot and killed in June 1976. The next year Rogerson shot and killed a man trying to hold up a courier taking money to a bank. He was an arresting officer in the high-profile Ananda Marga bombing case in June 1978 and in August 1979 he was present when Gordon Thomas, another bank robber, was shot and killed at Rose Bay. In 1980 he received the Peter Mitchell Award for the most outstanding performance in any phase of police duty.
Rogerson was well on his way to what many thought would be a dazzling career, with words such as ‘future commissioner’ bandied about. But he was far too close to Smith, who was rather more his partner than his informer, for that to happen. The interesting question is why did he go off the rails? One suggestion is that he came under the malign influence of, and was corrupted by, older officers such as Noel Morey, another man with a very successful record as a crime buster and who later headed the CIB at a time when there were complaints about its use of power. Certainly, Rogerson worked closely with Morey. Others say that it was Rogerson who turned; having made good arrests, he was given far too loose a rein.
Crime writer Evan Whitton says that when in July 1969 antiabortion campaigner Bertram Wainer needled New South Wales Police Commissioner Norm Allan about abortion rackets in Sydney, Don Fergusson, sergeant Noel Morey and constable Roger Rogerson interviewed him in the Radio 2GB boardroom. The subject was close to Fergusson’s heart—he being bagman in an abortion racket at the time—and he was, naturally enough, quite agitated. For his part, Dr Wainer rightly judged that it might be imprudent to be alone in a room with Sydney police, and he insisted on the presence of witnesses—if not to see fair play, at least to save him from a beating. Evan Whitton was one of these witnesses and he recounts one of the more memorable exchanges:
Wainer: This is like Kafka.
Fergusson: I don’t know Kafka.
Wainer: No matter, you could have written it.
The next year Morey and Rogerson worked together on the Mayne Nickless robbery, in which nearly $600 000 was stolen from a security van that was parked while its members had lunch in Guildford. It remains unclear quite why Morey and Rogerson were seconded to the Brisbane CIB to assist in the inquiry into the Whiskey Au Go Go fire, in which fifteen people died after the nightclub was bombed on 8 March 1973. They and four Queensland officers witnessed the unsigned confession of James Richard Finch, later convicted of the bombing. Some years after the conviction three officers, all disguised, came forward to admit that Finch had been verballed. According to one unnamed officer, Finch was given a bad beating in an effort to make him confess. Syd Atkinson, then a detective sergeant but later deputy commissioner until he retired in 1987 after being adversely named in the Fitzgerald Royal Commission, gave Finch a ‘terrible hiding’. It was a worldwide tried-and-tested way to obtain a confession, ‘Some blokes you kick them in the balls and straight away they start squealing and they’ll tell you everything’. By the end the unnamed police officer had some grudging respect for him. ‘Finch was handcuffed to a chair and we knocked the shit out of him … He didn’t even whimper.’ Later Finch would say that, while he had been verballed by the police, in their position he would have done the same.
Rogerson
’s career began to spiral downwards with the shooting on 27 June 1981 of drug dealer Warren Lanfranchi, who was then living with the prostitute Sallie-Anne Huckstepp. The police wanted to interview Lanfranchi, and Neddy Smith, acting as honest broker, indicated to Rogerson that the dealer was prepared to pay up to $50 000 to avoid this unhappy event. Later Rogerson said that he had been offered $80 000.
According to Huckstepp’s version of events, Lanfranchi left their home, unarmed and carrying $10 000, to meet Rogerson alone in Dangar Place, Chippendale. In fact Rogerson had discussed the meeting with his superiors and some eighteen officers were in the area, with Rogerson and three others in the lane at 2.45 that afternoon. Smith drove Lanfranchi to the meeting where, according to Rogerson, he pulled out a gun that had been manufactured around the 1900s and later turned out to be defective. Rogerson shot Lanfranchi twice, once in the neck and once in the heart. The police said that Lanfranchi had no money on him. At the inquest the four-man coroner’s jury found that Rogerson had shot Lanfranchi while endeavouring to make an arrest but specifically declined to say that it was in self-defence. An internal inquiry headed by Superintendent Ronald Ralph, known as ‘Click’ because he said that when he saw a criminal something ‘clicked’ in his mind, cleared the police of any misconduct. In 1988 Ralph, along with drug dealer Morres George, was convicted of conspiracy to receive money, on the evidence of a superdobber. They each received fourteen years, but the convictions were quashed by the Court of Appeal, which held that the evidence of the informant was wholly unreliable.