by James Morton
Ten years after the killing the police could not produce anything like a complete set of papers to the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC). The best the commission could do was to obtain records from a former police officer who had taken the papers with him when he left the force. In New South Wales briefs were often kept in a police officer’s personal possession.
Huckstepp, who came from a Jewish family named Krivoshaw, did not have a long and happy life. She was found strangled and drowned in Busby’s Pond in Centennial Park, Sydney, on 7 February 1986. Privately educated, she married Brian Huckstepp at the age of seventeen and went to Kalgoorlie to work in the tin-shed brothels there. A number of the usual suspects came into the frame for her killing, including Neddy Smith, who sometimes maintained that he had never spoken to her. However, in a conversation with a fellow prisoner, Smith apparently confessed that he had killed her, not because she was a police informer, which she undoubtedly was, but simply because he did not like her lifestyle. He later denied this. After a five-week trial Smith was triumphantly acquitted in less than three hours on 12 November 1999.
In early November 1983 Rogerson recruited Melbourne-based commuting hitman Chris Flannery as another informer. By now, however, his career was slumping. His final fall revolved around the shooting of a New South Wales officer, the honest and talented Michael Patrick Drury, the following year.
In 1983 Drury had been working undercover to set up a drug bust involving Melbourne dealer Alan Williams, and a meeting was arranged at a Sydney hotel car park. Williams did not go through with the deal, but he had been recognised by Drury. To prevent the officer from giving evidence Williams arranged for Rogerson to try to bribe Drury, an offer that was refused in September that year. In May 1984 Williams, who like so many criminals had a pathological fear of prison, then arranged with Flannery to murder Drury for a fee of $100 000, of which Rogerson was alleged to have received half as negotiator.
Shortly after 6 p.m. on 6 June, when Drury was about to wash up after his evening meal at his home in Chatsworth, he was shot through an open window in the stomach and the chest. Fortunately, for once Flannery had an off day and Drury lived. Later Flannery would say that he went to the hospital to which Drury had been taken to make a second attempt but could not get past the police guards. It was believed that Drury would not survive and he made a dying deposition in which he said that Rogerson had approached him with a bribe. In November 1984 Rogerson was charged with trying to bribe Drury, but the following June he was acquitted. However, the damage to his career had been done.
As for Drury, he was treated appallingly by his superiors. The initial inquiry into the shooting was conducted by Angus McDonald, the acting head of the CIB and a friend of Rogerson’s. It was put about, quite falsely, that the shooting had been over Drury’s association with a prostitute. Still recovering from his extensive injuries, he was summoned to Sydney to be questioned as to his whereabouts on the night that Flannery’s house was sprayed with bullets. As Chief Superintendent Doug Kelly later put it: ‘[Drury] had to suffer the indignity of senior police officers not giving him the support he rightly deserved’. Drury resigned from the force in 2000, his career irreparably damaged by officers who could not forgive him for speaking out against Rogerson.
Returned to uniform duties after his acquittal in June 1985, Rogerson was made the subject of anti-corruption surveillance and on 1 July 1985 was photographed when he closed two accounts in false names—not in itself illegal. The sum involved was over $110 000 and a fake contract was drawn up by the drug-dealing Dr Nick Paltos and businessman solicitor Maurie Nowytarger to account for the money. In April 1986 Rogerson went on television denying that he had ever taken a bribe and saying he doubted he had ever had so much as a free lunch. On 28 July that year he was dismissed from the force after seven of nine counts of misconduct were found to be proved against him. He had been suspended for a time during the inquiry, but he had still interceded in a quarrel between drug dealer Louis Bayeh and senior Sydney crime identity Lennie McPherson, going to a meeting at Bayeh’s home to try to help.
In February 1988 Alan Williams was extradited from the Northern Territory and charged with conspiracy to murder. In June he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to fourteen years’ imprisonment. He decided to give evidence against Rogerson on the same charge. At the end of a three-week trial the judge warned the jury that it would be extremely dangerous to convict Rogerson on Williams’ evidence and on 28 November Rogerson was again acquitted. But for the next seven years he was in and out of court.
Then came Rogerson’s trial over the bank accounts. It was the Crown’s case that the money in his account was from illegal sources, and part of the evidence against him—strongly challenged—came from a woman who claimed that she had taken a bundle of money to Sydney airport on behalf of Melbourne drug dealer Dennis ‘Mr Death’ Allen. There she had given it to Rogerson in exchange for plastic bags of heroin. He maintained that the money came from the sale of a vintage Bentley and successful gambling.
In March 1990 Rogerson, Paltos and Nowytarger were convicted of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. Rogerson was sentenced to eight years, Nowytarger received a minimum of four and Paltos, who was serving a drug sentence, received another thirty months. On 11 December the Court of Appeal quashed Rogerson’s conviction and, in turn, then DPP Reg Blanch successfully appealed that decision. Rogerson finally served three years and was released from Berrima gaol in New South Wales’ Southern Highlands on 15 December 1995. He was just in time to attend an inquest into Flannery’s death and appear before the Wood Royal Commission on the New South Wales Police, which had begun the previous December and was by now in full swing as, week by week, ever more amazing revelations were made. Rogerson was not cooperative, saying, ‘I don’t care about this inquest and I don’t care if you find out anything about Flannery at all’.
Since then Rogerson’s career has been one of short prison sentences interspersed with writing books, appearing with celebrity criminal the late Mark ‘Chopper’ Read and a former footy player in highly lucrative talks on the club circuit, and auctioning signed photographs of himself standing by Lanfranchi’s body. But Rogerson did not give up his pastoral work entirely. In 2010 he could be found giving solace and support to Kings Cross nightclub owner John Ibrahim, whose family was under siege by the police. By 2013 his rehabilitation in the public eye was such that he was invited to comment in The Telegraph on the merits or otherwise of the popular television series Underbelly.
By 2014 the former detective Glen McNamara, who had been stationed at Darlinghurst, and had written books on his fight against police corruption, now had a private detective agency in which Rogerson was something of an adviser.
And then it all went Underbelly up and, to mix metaphors, the sky fell in on both former officers. And what a fall it was.
10
NOBLE CAUSE CORRUPTION AND THE ART OF EXTRACTING A CONFESSION
Without a noble cause to begin with there can be no noble cause corruption. In their study of police ethics, US writers Michael A Caldero and John P Crank thought:
We believe that the noble cause is something of which the police can be proud. The noble cause enables police to celebrate their special craft, to find meaning in the day-to-day activity of their work. Without the noble cause police work would lose its meaning and police officers would lose their sense of humanity, their concern for the innocent, and their dislike of bad people.
And noble cause corruption?
It is corruption committed in the name of good ends, corruption that happens when police officers care too much about their work. It is corruption committed to get the bad guys off the streets, to protect the innocent and the children from the predators that inflict harm and suffering on them. It is the corruption of police power, when officers do bad things because they believe that the outcomes will be good.
But is it that simple? Les Ayton, Western Australian deputy police commissioner from
1994 to 1996, believed, ‘There is no way you can effectively catch criminals by sticking strictly to the letter of the law. Good detectives have to take the law to the knife’s edge’.
Cases that end in convictions lead to peer-group praise, to press and public acclaim, to advancement in the force. Advancement in the force leads to a higher salary, and a higher salary leads to an enhanced pension and a better position on retirement: head of security instead of merely driving a security van or carrying boxes from the van to a bank vault. Who ever heard of a mere constable being appointed head of security to a major enterprise?
Suspects are rarely caught in flagrante, and so other evidence—identification, forensics, being found in possession of the stolen property or the weapon used, a confession by a co-accused, or if all else fails, the evidence of a fellow prisoner who will say that the defendant has unburdened himself in the exercise yard is required. Sometimes, as in the case of Victorian super criminal Squizzy Taylor, accused of the Haines murder in 1914, someone such as a police matron can be recruited to supply the crucial—and, in this case, ambiguous—words. When Taylor was placed in a cell with his fellow accused John Williamson, he was said to have remarked, ‘They cannot very well pot us if they do not identify us’. Perhaps unusually, the judge told the jury that the remark might equally be made by a wholly innocent man.
But best of all is a confession by the suspect:
The work of any investigator … is made much easier if a suspect can be induced to confess. It saves a lot of legwork. And it can be considered as the most conclusive sort of evidence if the person with the greatest vested interest in opposing the prosecution actually supports it.
The widely read American manual Criminal Interrogation and Confessions outlines no fewer than twenty-six specific techniques to be used in obtaining a confession. Commenting on these, Welsh S White, visiting professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania, thought:
Most of these techniques will inevitably involve some sort of deception because they require an officer to make statements that he knows are untrue or play a role that is inconsistent with his actual feelings.
According to psychologists Gisli Gudjonsson and James MacKeith there are three kinds of confession, the first and best of which is the voluntary confession, in which no pressure of any kind is required. However, this must come with a caveat: these are not necessarily true confessions. In any high-profile murder case the investigating officers have to cope with, and eliminate, a number of spurious confessions. In the celebrated 1947 Black Dahlia killing of Elizabeth Short in Los Angeles, more than sixty people were reported to have confessed, simply for Warhol’s ‘fifteen minutes of fame’.
In turn, these false confessions can be broken down into two further categories. The first is the voluntary false confession, perhaps made to divert attention from the actual person who committed the crime. For instance, a man might confess to save his wife, parent or child from gaol. The second is the coerced false confession, made to escape a stressful situation such as so-called third-degree questioning, to avoid the possibility of a beating, or to gain a promised or implied reward, such as a lesser sentence, a respite from the questioning or perhaps simply a cup of coffee.
The term ‘third degree’ seems to have been coined in the 1880s by corrupt New York police officer Thomas Byrne, who was once described by journalist Lincoln Steffens as ‘simple, no complications at all—a man who would buy you or beat you, as you might choose, but get you he would’. He sounds very like New South Wales’ Fred Krahe a century later.
The third degree could take many forms and over the centuries the procedure for extracting confessions from prisoners has had many variations. In India the suspect often had their hands tied behind them before being hoisted by their wrists to a roof beam. There was also the practice of walking the prisoner about. Police changed every couple of hours, but the prisoner was kept on their feet until they confessed. In Madras in the 1870s a favourite method of obtaining a confession was beating the suspects’ ankles and other joints with a soft mallet.
In Germany it was standard practice in the days when women wore long skirts to introduce rats into the cells of female suspects. In post–Second World War France a prisoner could expect the so-called passage à tabac (a bad beating) or being made to kneel in the crucifix position on the rim of a bicycle wheel. But there a confession might also be rewarded with a bottle of wine and dinner in a local cafe or even a visit to a prostitute. The latter seems to have winged its way across the world. Queensland’s Crime and Misconduct Commission found that between 2001 and 2005 officers had prisoners removed from jail for conjugal visits as inducements to confess to unsolved crimes.
From the 1860s onwards in the United States there was the practice of sweating. The prisoner was kept in a small and increasingly hot cell until they confessed. They would also be given little sleep and meals would always be late. In December 1881 Mike McGloin, from the New York Whyos’ street gang, suspected of the murder of tavern owner Louis Hanier, was positioned so that he could not avoid seeing the bloodstained clothing of his victim, and all the people who could connect him to the murder coming into and out of the prison. Another murderer was made to sleep in the bed of his victim and yet another was forced into the coffin in which his victim was to be buried. In 1892, when an Argentinian called Velasquez refused to admit to police that he had killed his girlfriend’s children, he was given a thorough beating, bound and laid beside the children’s corpses for the night. Fortunately, after another week of beatings during which he still refused to cooperate, fingerprints showed that he was not the killer.
New South Wales police officer in the postwar period and later judge and royal commissioner Don Stewart recalled his days as a young constable on the court staff:
I can remember witnessing people in the CIB getting full, free and voluntary confessions out of people by hanging them by the ankles over the balcony of the CIB. And saying ‘If you don’t confess we’ll drop you’. And the Station Sergeant would run out of the charge room and I’d run out and say, ‘Don’t, don’t, don’t drop him, don’t drop him’. ‘Get out, get out, it’s none of your business!’
The third category, known as internalised false confessions, are those in which, as a result of highly suggestive interrogation techniques, the person has come to genuinely believe that he or she has committed the crime.
To these three may be added the confession invented by police, known as verballing or bricking. This relates to a verbal admission in full, or a partial confession hedged with ambiguous replies, and made without a lawyer or disinterested witness present. The suspect then refuses to sign a written statement. Former police ‘bagman’ (bribe collector) Jack Herbert turned whistleblower in exchange for indemnity and admitted to the Fitzgerald inquiry in 1988 that verballing had been endemic in the Queensland police force. This resulted in the immediate release of Walter John Anderson, who had served twenty-two years for the ‘chicken-coop murder’ at Funnel Creek in 1966 (so called because the bodies of the two murdered men had been wrapped in chicken wire). Herbert admitted to the inquiry that Anderson had been ‘verballed’ in 1966.
Early in its public hearings the Wood Royal Commission of 1995 to 1997 came to hear of ‘scrumdowns’, in which police would meet to ‘refresh’ each other’s memories and ensure that ‘there were no pitfalls’ in the prosecution, even if this involved giving evidence that was wholly fabricated.
Former detective sergeant Neville Scullion explained that, on the first occasion he was required to give evidence, another officer prepared a statement for him that contained matters of which he had no knowledge. Yet, as requested, he gave evidence of them. He acknowledged that this was something he learned on the job from others, in the same way that ‘an apprentice learns a trade’. Sometimes it was for expediency—for example, to remove the need to call a civilian witness—and sometimes it arose out of frustration with the difficulty of securing a conviction. He also said that inducements were re
gularly given to a suspect before the interview and denied later, and that any officer who gave a suspect a caution was considered ‘a fool’. The interviewing officer and the corroborating officer were expected to be consistent in their evidence if questioned on these matters.
Although he denied direct involvement in any scrumdowns during his service with the armed holdup squad, former detective sergeant John Swan confirmed that the unit had a substantial reputation for this practice, and that he had an ‘understanding’ junior officers were informed by senior officers of the version of events that would be given in their statements, with the expectation this would be reflected in their evidence.
If it is accepted that noble cause corruption leads to more general corruption, then judges and magistrates, with some honourable exceptions, must take their share of the blame. At trials and inquiries some have almost wilfully refused to contemplate the disagreeable fact that police might be lying, and in this lawyers for the inquiry or commission have often colluded.
In New South Wales, Chief Justice Laurence Street set the tone when in 1978 he spoke of defence challenges to the admissibility of evidence as wasting the court’s time in ‘tedious and pointless fishing exercises’. Pointless in the sense that he was never going to accept the defence submissions, that is. The officers in that case included the legendarily corrupt Roger Rogerson. On the other hand, some Victorian and Queensland judges from the 1920s onwards did speak out against bashing and bricking, but they might just as well have been speaking in an empty room.
It was not until the 1991 case McKinney v R that the High Court made up its mind about the necessity of warning a jury that unsigned confessions might actually have been fabricated. Before that there had been conflicting judgements about what was required, but now the court noted developments in technology that could be used to record interviews and took, by a majority decision, a firm line. Forces were moving on. Audiovisual recording of interviews would soon commence in New South Wales and it was anticipated that every police station in that state would be appropriately equipped within two years. Section 464H amended the Crimes Act 1958 (Vic) to make a confession inadmissible in Victoria unless it was recorded. In Tasmania it seems that interviews are routinely recorded, unless they occur in a remote part of the state where equipment is not available. Nowadays, where equipment is available any unrecorded confession should be subject to close scrutiny.