by James Morton
Australia’s courts have been littered with examples of the last three types of confession. In theory, the use of the third degree in Victoria came to an end after the suicide of Isabella Newman, who in 1908 claimed to be the female champion pedestrian of Australia. Known as Madame Isabel, she had been sentenced to twelve months’ imprisonment for perjury after denying that she had ever visited a brothel run by a woman called Stella Cross. She had also been investigated over the disappearance of the young child Winifred Oates. When police arrived in December 1913 to arrest her over allegations of baby farming, she took strychnine. The officers then arrested her husband and children and questioned them from 9 p.m. until 11 a.m. the next day without a break, a practice that had apparently been in use in Victoria since the force was founded. As a result the chief commissioner was instructed by the secretary of state that:
The necessary information shall be obtained by the police without resort to all-night interrogations or any proceedings likely to produce physical and mental exhaustion in the person or persons questioned. He will also direct that any person examined shall be fully apprised of his rights and at the same time be afforded every opportunity of having a friend or adviser present to watch and, if necessary, protect his or her interests.
In practice the third degree did not go away, but in the 1930s Victorian chief commissioner Thomas Blamey routinely dismissed any complaints about misconduct in his force. In 1930, 1933 and again in 1936 there were allegations that officers were using the third degree to get confessions.
The first two complaints were brushed aside, but on the third occasion chief justice Sir Frederick Mann commented publicly on police brutality, saying that it was a ‘growing evil’, before he began to sum up in a case in which 69-year-old Benjamin Ries claimed that he had been threatened and beaten into making a confession that he had raped his fifty-year-old housekeeper. Ries had been taken to the police station at 2.30 p.m. and had initially asked to see a solicitor. He claimed, and there was medical evidence to support this, that he had been struck by an officer. Eventually he made a confession between 7.30 p.m. and 9 p.m. Although the chief justice said that he was not referring specifically to Ries’ case, it must have been on the minds of the jurors, who found him not guilty in ten minutes. The next day a jury retired for only eight minutes before finding a grocery manager not guilty of theft. He too claimed that he had been beaten and produced evidence to support his claim.
Blamey was a good man so far as defending his force was concerned. He said that in the ‘past few years’ only one allegation of assault had been proved and that the officer had been immediately discharged. ‘When a prisoner has a weak defence it frequently happens that he falls back on accusations against the police.’
Victoria was not alone in facing this problem. There were allegations in the 1930s that police officers in Queensland had been resorting to force, as well as taking suspects to Roma Street police station, where ‘they would be overwhelmed by the authority of their examiner instead of being examined in their own home’, a practice condemned by Justice Henchman of the Supreme Court. Five years later he called for clarification of what was and was not permissible. In its editorial of 7 October 1935 The Courier-Mail was firmly on the side of the police:
It is within the knowledge of the observant layman that the police secure a considerable number of convictions through the confessions, admissions, or compromising statements of wrongdoers. It may be said with equal certainty that if they were compelled to take a suspect before a justice of the peace or a clerk of petty sessions and allow him to consult a solicitor before they put their questions, they would in many instances be met with a wall of silence. Are they entitled, or are they not, to take advantage of the ignorance or maladroitness of an examinee, his reaction to the uncomfortable atmosphere of a police station, or the unease of his conscience? His Honour Mr. Justice Henchman thinks that question should be settled by definite rulings. If and when they are given it will be in the public interest if they recognise that the police are called upon to match their wits against unscrupulous and dangerous men, and that any circumscription of their powers which does more than protect the innocent may help the guilty to escape.
Fifty years later, the 1984 confession of Barry Mannix to the murder of his father clearly came into the second category of confessions. Forty-year-old Kevin Mannix, a Tweed Heads, Queensland, sex-shop owner with a string of minor convictions for obscene publications, was found with his throat cut in the early hours of 22 June. He had been bound, gagged and blindfolded, and was carried from his Gold Coast unit, for reasons that were not immediately apparent, to the alleyway where his body was discovered. In the course of his abduction, Mannix managed to free one hand and remove part of the adhesive tape covering his mouth. When he called out for help, he was thrown bodily down the flight of stairs leading from the unit, his head striking a concrete pillar.
His son Barry, who had been working at the sex shop, said he had gone to his father’s unit a little after midnight and found the television and lights on, and his father’s coin collection scattered on the floor. He told police that he presumed his father had gone out. He watched television and then fell asleep. It was next morning that he found his father’s body. On 6 July he was asked to go down to Broadbeach police station and he went voluntarily. During the evening he signed two confessions and was duly charged. He immediately claimed that the confession had been bashed out of him and he had been threatened that, if he did not confess, his whole family would be charged or, in the case of junior members, put in care. Public feeling against him was so great that when he first appeared in the magistrates’ court he had to be protected from the crowd.
He was released in early November that year after a stripper, Jan Hurst, told the police that an Anthony Rau was driving a stolen car. When Rau was arrested he confessed that he, Craig Andrew McConnell, Nigel Andrews and Nicholas Abela had committed the Mannix murder. They were also charged on 26 October with the murder of middle-aged high-class call girl Lovena Cunningham. McConnell had killed her in a botched robbery at her Gold Coast apartment on 26 August. New Zealand–born Cunningham, who had continued working to pay for her son’s career as a motor-racing driver, was found strangled and with her throat cut in the same manner as that of Kevin Mannix. Bleach had been poured over her mouth and genitals. McConnell was sentenced to life imprisonment.
An inquiry by the Police Complaints Commission headed by judge Eric Pratt examined the circumstances in which Barry Mannix confessed. It produced a report that effectively trashed Mannix but not the police. Presumably to show how untrustworthy his evidence might be, the commission found that a band in which Mannix had played had been booed at a Sydney hotel.
Pratt’s finding was:
It is clear that we have discovered a large body of convincing evidence that is available to be led by the Defence in the event that any police officer is charged with an offence arising from these allegations.
There was to be no compensation for Mannix for his ordeal. If anything, he was rather fortunate to come out as unscathed as he did:
The fact is that the system has allowed the incarceration in prison for some four months of a lad innocent of the charge on which he was being held. BARRY MANNIX has been hurt by his incarceration just as the investigating police have been hurt by the subsequent strain of having to undergo our exhaustive investigation.
One positive thing about police perjury, at least from the perjurer’s point of view is, as policeman and journalist CH Rolph pointed out:
Police perjury—unlike some perjuries—carries no risks. Police witnesses are sometimes discredited but rarely prosecuted for perjury in my experience. The profession appears to give immunity from this misfortune.
Perhaps one of the longest-running, most widespread, most flagrant and, for a time, best-kept-secret—from the public at least—examples of noble cause corruption was the illegal tapping of telephones that was eventually exposed by journalist Bob Bottom and bec
ame known as The Age tapes. It broke in a slightly arcane way. Drug dealer Robert ‘Aussie Bob’ Trimbole fled the country in May 1981, shortly before he was due to appear before the Stewart Royal Commission. In winter 1983 the Sydney and Melbourne newspapers began to run stories that he had been tipped off, but it was not clear by whom. Pre-eminent journalists Bob Bottom and John Silvester later told the royal commission that they had seen summarised transcripts of telephone conversations between Trimbole and police officers. In November that year The National Times published extracts of the tapes, and these were followed by further Age reports in February 1984. There followed another helter-skelter effort to destroy incriminating evidence, but some material survived and was passed on to The Age.
It was up to Justice Stewart to determine whether it was possible to identify who was conducting the conversations on the tapes, whether they provided evidence of criminality and whether the tapes helped in the Mr Asia drug case, in which heroin in massive quantities was imported into New Zealand, Australia and the United Kingdom in the 1970s, and in which participants thought to be disloyal were ruthlessly killed. Stewart reported that the material had to be authenticated and that could only be done with evidence from those who had done the taping, which, since it was not court approved, had been illegal. To do this, indemnities against prosecution had to be given to the tapers, and some 350 indemnities were granted to members of the New South Wales force and the Australian Federal Police. It also became clear that members of the later disbanded Commonwealth and New South Wales Joint Task Force, set up after the Williams and Woodward royal commissions, had been bugging illegally. What Stewart found particularly cynical was that commencing the phone taps could have been done legally, with a warrant, probably granted by a judge.
Frustrated by the failure of conventional criminal investigations, the upper echelons of the police had readjusted the balance of power. Illegal bugging was first authorised by Norman ‘The Foreman’ Allan in around 1967 and had been carried on by the New South Wales force with the approval of ‘Slippery’ Fred Hanson, Mervyn Wood, the squeaky-clean Jim Lees and Cec Abbott. When it became clear that Abbott would succeed Jim Lees as New South Wales police commissioner, Bill Jenkings, the Sydney Daily Mirror’s chief crime reporter for thirty-five years—who would not hear a word spoken against either Ray Kelly or his cohort Fred Krahe—wrote on 26 November:
The 1274 detectives in the New South Wales police force would welcome, probably to a man, the appointment of Senior Assistant Commissioner Cec Abbott as their new Commissioner.
And if they still had to wear hats they’d throw them into the air and cheer, according to a survey this week … Mr Abbott admired and learned from those who have been hailed as the ‘greats’ of the CIB—people like the legendary Detective-Inspector Ray Kelly.
Three years after Abbott’s appointment, the publication of the tapes forced the New South Wales Government to pass the Listening Devices Act 1984. A 2007 report by the Victorian Office of Police Integrity asserted:
Noble cause corruption is the nursery of entrenched and systemic corruption. If a police service wants to rid itself of corruption, it must attack noble cause corruption.
In his book Getting Justice Wrong, former New South Wales DPP Nicholas Cowdery argues that periodic exposures of police misbehaviour show if there are not strong controls in place over bodies like police forces, there will be improper conduct and corruption. Unprofessional police will always be quick to exploit any loophole in procedures to achieve what they regard as the ‘right’ result.
For a police force under pressure for results and immune from genuine scrutiny, Machiavellian cynicism must be a constant temptation. Provided that the victims of injustice are unpopular and without means—dingoes—the rewards for solving cases are great and the risks small.
In his essay Miscarriages of Justice in Serious Cases in Australia, writer Paul Wilson identifies several factors that contribute to miscarriages of justice. They include over-zealousness by police, police taking ‘short cuts’ to secure convictions against a ‘guilty’ person, evidence from experts who are in reality acting as ‘propagandists for the prosecution’, and confessions that have been either fabricated or extracted through pressure. Often, he argues, there is no conscious decision to convict the innocent; the police simply adopt tunnel vision and will not look at evidence that might exculpate the suspect. Any illegal means is justified by the end result of obtaining a conviction. And once charges are laid prosecutors will collaborate with the police to do everything possible to make those charges stick.
Given this longstanding scenario of noble cause corruption, a change of attitude may be a long time coming.
11
DRUGS: AN IRRESISTIBLE TEMPTATION
Drugs in different forms have always floated around Australia—notably, there were cocaine wars in Sydney in the 1920s—but it was not until the Vietnam war, when Sydney was home to US servicemen on R and R, that the heroin trade really took off. Between 1967 and 1971 over 280 000 Americans visited Sydney. As late as 1966, with only a handful of known addicts in Australia, let alone New South Wales, drug possession and importation was a very low priority for the force. Ironically, a police officer was amongst the first to take advantage of the vacuum.
In 1966 New South Wales special branch detective John Wesley Egan masterminded a high-grade heroin-smuggling ring. He had begun his criminal career while still a serving officer. A fine swimmer and a man commended for his lifesaving, he was a member of the police diving squad that was asked by customs to try to recover some gold ingots thrown overboard by Chinese seamen to pre-empt a search. He duly located them but taped a number to a pylon for later personal recovery. After that he began smuggling watches, transistors and cameras, which Egan later claimed were mainly sold to police officers. An unfortunate sale to a customs official blew the lid off that particular scheme and five officers resigned. It was then that Egan was introduced to the possibilities of heroin smuggling by a man connected to the painters and dockers, and he determined to make a million dollars inside three months and retire.
He learned of a potential customer, an ex-CIA agent in New York, borrowed money for ‘home improvements’, obtained compassionate leave to attend the ‘funeral of an aunt’ in California and booked a flight to New York on Qantas with a kilo of almost pure heroin. He made $6000 from the run and had a taste of future possibilities. Four months later he resigned from the special branch and began a fulltime career organising drug smuggling.
On his first run to his ‘aunt’s funeral’ Egan had a special vest made for himself, and all his couriers—mostly officers on leave from the New South Wales Police who were paid $2000 a run—were similarly kitted out, giving the group the name the Corset Gang. Six months later, with twenty couriers operating, he was netting $80 000 a week. The couriers were sent to Hong Kong to collect the drugs, which were flown to the United States via London, Tokyo and New Delhi. Egan’s downfall came after a tip-off that there was to be a raid. He flew to Hong Kong to tell New Zealander Glenn Reid, in charge of buying from Chinese suppliers, to suspend operations. Unfortunately, Reid kept 2 kilograms, and when he was arrested in Honolulu he shelved Egan and arranged to set him up. Egan was arrested and given bail, which he skipped. He went first to England and was arrested in Paris three years later. Extradited to the United States, he served just under four years of an eight-year sentence. Back in Australia, Egan retired to the Gold Coast, where in 1978 he was fined $1500 for illegal gambling.
It was estimated that over a six-month period from 1966 to 1967, Egan and his gang smuggled $22 million worth of heroin into the United States. As American sociologist and author Alfred McCoy points out, the exercise revealed the capacity for corruption within the New South Wales Police. Its tolerance for that corruption paved the way for a level of drug trafficking that would have astounded Egan, who had already expressed the view that ‘Organised crime and highly placed policemen are often the same people’.
For
a time Egan’s good work and philosophy were carried on by New South Wales constables Michael Woodhouse and Philip Briddick, who in 1978 received fifteen years between them for dealing in cocaine and Indian hemp. Their undoing was a wire tap, in which Briddick was recorded as saying:
It’s amazing how many coppers are in this business. They’ve got it by the balls … It’s guaranteed you know … Everything’s protected from way high up.
Another on the bandwagon was former butcher and truck driver Maxwell Gudgeon, who joined the New South Wales Police in October 1963. From there his career was an upwardly mobile one until he joined the CIB in 1977. Then two years later came a defining moment. In May 1979 a colleague of Gudgeon’s made a series of arrests in Double Bay over a quantity of cannabis. Gudgeon interrogated one of the suspects at Flemington police station before the man was charged with supplying, a charge which carried a maximum of fifteen years. Early in 1980 Gudgeon was promoted to detective sergeant, a fortnight before the Double Bay suspect was committed for trial. The next year Gudgeon and a businessman were alleged to have purchased Knightvale, a property near Byrock, 60 kilometres south of Bourke in New South Wales. Whether due to the strain of becoming a property owner or some other reason, Gudgeon was placed under the care of a psychiatrist for a nervous disorder in the winter of that year. The medicinal properties in Indian hemp for relieving stress are well known and perhaps this was the reason he was alleged to have conspired with others to cultivate the drug at Knightvale from October that year. As for the Double Bay matter, in January 1981 a report from Gudgeon’s psychiatrist stating that he and the arresting officer in the case were both suffering from nervous disorders and that neither was well enough to attend court was sent to the Crown prosecutor’s office. The psychiatrist was unable to say when the pair might be well enough to give evidence and the Attorney-General entered a no bill in November 1982.