Bent Uncensored

by James Morton

  Over the border in South Australia, on 8 October 1981 The Advertiser published claims from its Extra team of journalists, who had been investigating organised crime in other states, that there was a substantial degree of corruption among members of the South Australian police. The allegations followed the usual pattern: green lighting, bricking, lawyers fixing cases with the police, standing over dealers, thefts of drugs and money, and a certainly amount of brutality. The Attorney-General indicated that he would set up an internal inquiry. This announcement did not generally go down well with those who would have preferred a royal commission. In a case that week a jury had disagreed over allegations that police had found seventeen bags of Indian hemp in the possession of Giuseppe Romeo and William Gray at Norwood back in April 1980. The bags had ‘accidentally’ been destroyed by the police and so could not be produced in evidence. Would it be possible for the public to be satisfied with an internal inquiry? The opposition wondered how it was that there had been no look at massage parlours and found it puzzling that some were harassed continually while others near the city centre continued to operate openly and apparently unimpeded. The Attorney-General was sure that the public would be happy. ‘These allegations need capable detective work and if anyone is to test the veracity of these allegations then this team will do just that.’

  Unsurprisingly, the allegations were not well received by the police. The president of the South Australian Police Association, Inspector Barry Morse, was one who was righteously indignant when he spoke up for his members, saying he believed that the allegations were both ‘bland’ and ‘insubstantiated’. He thought that drug dealers were behind the allegations, which were designed to disrupt police investigation into the trade and were ‘an obvious attempt by drug dealers to discredit the police force’.

  Depending upon one’s point of view, the report the following year either cleared the police or was a whitewash. Former Supreme Court judge Sir Charles Bright had been brought in to comment on the investigations and he found that witnesses had either backtracked, refused to cooperate or were untrustworthy. Of the principal witness, who, in fairness, had thirty-one convictions over a 28-year period, including a few for false pretences, Sir Charles wittily wrote:

  What kind of man is Informant ‘A’? Many years ago, in one of his stories of the New York underworld, Damon Runyon introduced a character ‘Joey Perhaps’. Another character summed him up in these memorable words ‘The kindest thing I can consciously say about Joey Perhaps is—you can have him’. I adopt these words as a summary of Informant ‘A’.

  Sir Charles found that in only one case was there real suspicion, but ‘Even in that case there is evidence to suggest a deliberate attempt to concoct a case of corruption’. What he did observe was that:

  Once an allegation of corruption has been made against a policeman it is almost impossible for him to prove his innocence, assuming he is innocent.

  He did, however, go on to advise that officers working in areas such as betting, liquor and drugs where there was a high risk of corruption should stay in the squad for a relatively short period of time.

  Again unsurprisingly, not everyone was pleased with the outcome. The following week, an opposition call for a royal commission was defeated. Adelaide lawyer RC Bleechmore commented:

  Look—this report has not even scraped the surface—what has happened as a result of the April Fool’s Day report is that certain officers are now prepared for any further proper inquiry.

  Another year, another dollar. In the mid-1980s, on one day a year good citizens could ring a toll-free hotline and dob in a druggie or, better still, dob in a dealer. A number took the opportunity to dob in a neighbour whose dog might be annoying and ex-spouses dobbed in their former loved ones for unspecified bad behaviour, but despite these distractions Operation Noah was something of a success, rather defying the general belief that Australians don’t like dobbers. In 1987 there were some 400 calls, which led to fourteen people being charged with offences. The next year, in the first five hours 1300 people called the hotline with nearly 300 ‘valuable pieces of information’. Unfortunately, in 1989 the callers to Noah named thirteen Adelaide officers.

  At the time Barry Moyse, by now chief inspector, was head of the South Australian drug squad, lecturing at schools on the dangers of drugs. He was also a one-time president of the South Australia Police Association and eventually he became Noah’s public face.

  It was at that time that dealer and user George Octopodelis, for a long time another Mr X, was about to be franchised. Octopodelis claimed to have been introduced to the heroin trade by the Indianborn Essie Mooseek, who had started life in Australia as a hawker in Fremantle. Mooseek, alleged to be one of the top ten drug dealers in the southern hemisphere and who ran the Mr Oceanic ring, said to be bigger than the Mr Asia syndicate, absconded on bail in 1985 after he was charged with importing heroin to the value of $25 million.

  Octopodelis had grown up in Adelaide but had started his career selling fake jewellery in Melbourne. After his friends there were named in the Woodward report on drugs he returned to Adelaide, where he built a drug empire. At its height he was controlling five dealers, who each controlled a street network of ten dealers.

  It seems that during a drug bust in August 1986, when Octopodelis was busted over pink rock heroin sent from Sydney, Moyse found an opportunity to take him aside to a bathroom. When they had each satisfied themselves that the other was not wired, Moyse offered to supply Octopodelis with confiscated and recycled drugs. To cover himself he falsified police records that the drugs had been destroyed. In early November that year Moyse arranged a police internal affairs inquiry into allegations against himself. Unsurprisingly, he was cleared. The relationship lasted a bare ten months before Octopodelis turned on his supplier. Moyse should have made sure he was not being taped because Octopodelis was able to hand evidence of the deals to the NCA. Moyse was arrested in September 1987.

  Over the months Moyse had made more than $100 000. He received a 27-year sentence that was reduced on appeal to twenty-one years after he pleaded guilty to seventeen charges of taking part in the supply and sale of heroin. Moyse, described by AFP Commissioner Mick Keelty as ‘A rotten egg cut from the bunch’, was released in 1999 and lived quietly, umpiring local cricket matches. He died aged sixty-five of a kidney-related cancer in September 2010. Perhaps back in 1981 Sir Charles should have paid closer attention to the views of Informant ‘A’.

  After the conviction of Moyse, Octopodelis gave evidence to two NCA commissions claiming that two former New South Wales political figures had key roles in a massive interstate operation being run out of Sydney. He also claimed that Moyse’s co-defendant Rocco Sergei had Mafia connections. Despite his addiction to the drug, Octopodelis had luxury apartments in both Adelaide and Sydney, as well as a string of expensive cars. On 4 June 1989 the 32-year-old was found dead in his Porsche in Craigend Street, Darlinghurst. Earlier in the evening he and his girlfriend had injected themselves and when she woke she found him dead. He had left the witness-protection scheme the previous October. At the time eleven people were awaiting trial based on transcripts of taped conversations between him and Moyse. Octopodelis himself was awaiting trial on charges of assaulting the police and fraud. Two Kings Cross officers were alleged to have taken $3000 from him, but no charges were brought and suggestions that he had been given a hot shot went unproved.

  The belief was that, while Moyse was the only officer to take the fall, he had not been acting alone. Investigative journalist Chris Masters told The Advertiser before a Four Corners program on the events went out:

  We have interviewed prostitutes, dealers, users, who all say police are supplying them drugs. The drug and brothel trades are franchised by police who, instead of policing properly, limit and regulate by doing deals with these people.

  Meanwhile the Moyse case had a serious spin-off. There were questions about how one of the witnesses, drug dealer and brothel keeper Gianni Malvaso, had been g
iven a suspended sentence of three years. Could it be that Attorney-General Chris J Sumner had been blackmailed into it? The story that circulated in Hindley Street and the surrounding area was that Sumner was a regular brothel visitor and he liked being whipped and ridden as a horse by one or more of the girls. Both allegations were something he denied at the first opportunity, but nevertheless it drove him to a minor breakdown. The allegations were repeated by Chris Masters on Four Corners in 1988. His argument was that the police had franchised SP bookmaking in the 1960s and prostitution in the 1970s. Now, in the 1980s, they were franchising drugs. Masters claimed that since he had been in Adelaide investigating the program:

  Ranks have closed in the police, people know we’re down here and we’re getting letters under the door etc.

  The program is a big message for all Australia. Things are going on which the people of Adelaide should know about. I want them to get angry, just like Queensland did.

  But they did not. While NCA inquiry Operation Hydra was opened, the outcome was again inconclusive. Prostitutes and dealers might have been prepared to talk with Masters and his researchers, but they were less forthcoming when interviewed by the police.

  In Hydra’s report of February 1991 the witnesses were coyly identified as figures in Greek mythology, but there was no Pandora’s box. There were few brothels and many escort agencies in the city. Many of the brothel owners had recording equipment on the premises, but none had used it to tape any clients, let alone Mr Sumner. One girl had made the mistake of mixing up Mr Sumner with a client who looked like him and was also called Chris. There was no evidence whatsoever that he had ever been in a brothel or been blackmailed. But what did emerge was that a Patti Walkuski had run an illegal brothel in the city for fourteen years and a Geoffrey Williams had been involved with seventy brothels from 1972. One brothel in the city, the Holdfast Health Clinic, had run unhindered for an astounding twenty-six years.

  In 1991 a former senior constable received three years and another a suspended sentence after agreeing to give evidence. They had been part of a gang of up to ten uniformed officers who had been moonlighting as shop and office breakers for several years. It appears the first inkling came from another officer who, said Commissioner David Hunt, had ‘discovered something was wrong or amiss’. Although he denied that corruption was ‘institutionalised’, it was thought that at the time at least five NCA investigations were targeting the Adelaide police.

  In Western Australia one of the scandals of the late 1990s was that of the Kalgoorlie Six: police officers who were alleged to have been flying ecstasy into and out of the town, and to be in cahoots with members of the Gypsy Jokers motorcycle gang. In 1992 a sting was planned and Christos Trifon was given $18 000 to buy morphine from the detectives. Unfortunately, instead of playing his part, he absconded with the money, for which he was given an eighteen-month suspended sentence. Two of the officers were sacked and two resigned. An inquiry into the Six became part of the, again inconclusive, Kennedy Royal Commission of 2002.

  Meanwhile, across the continent, Queensland had more than a fair share of problems of its own.

  12

  SIR TERENCE AND CO: THE LONG AND WINDING ROAD TO FITZGERALD

  In 1934 Mr Justice Macrossan, sitting in Brisbane, was suitably prescient when dealing with the talented, although often convicted, safe breaker Harry Terry. Then aged forty-nine, Terry pleaded guilty to yet another charge of warehouse breaking after tobacco and gelignite were found in a room in Union Street, Spring Hill. His story was that he had been asked by three detectives in 1929 to burgle the home of Judge Henchman, who had, they said, unfairly criticised them. They would fence the proceeds for him and he would get all the money. Unsurprisingly, the detectives denied this and Macrossan called his story a pack of lies, adding, ‘if it is accepted for one minute [this] would mean that the police force in Queensland needs a good sorting out’. Terry received five years and was declared a habitual criminal. He was carried fighting from the dock. His appeal against the declaration was dismissed.

  Fast forward nearly four decades and the newspaper headline for 25 April 1970 ran, ‘Graft paid to police said to run into millions’. It actually referred to the New York City police and appeared in The New York Times, but it could just as easily have appeared in Brisbane’s Courier-Mail a decade later. Similarly, if Alfred McCoy had written his 1980 book Drug Traffic, setting out the five stages of corruption, ten years later he would probably have changed his opinion that no level-five corruption existed among the police in Australia to rank with the behaviour of Hong Kong police in the 1970s. Justice Macrossan’s disregard for Harry Terry’s claims was an early milepost along the road to the 1987–89 Fitzgerald Royal Commission, which exposed systemic corruption in Queensland from the premier down. Long and winding, the road trailed through the factional divisions of the 1950s, when Masons and Roman Catholics vied for senior police positions. It was, says Professor David Dixon, dean of law at the University of New South Wales, a time when:

  Queensland police were part of a political machine. Brisbane was the equivalent of an old time American city and the police were simply the arm of corrupt state government. New South Wales was never as bad as Queensland.

  One pre-condition of corruption is an illegal market, such as in alcohol, gambling, prostitution and drugs, which is widely popular. By the 1970s there was a seam of corruption running through the police, not merely at ground level but to the very top. The cause was the rakeoff from permitting prostitution and illegal gambling. The rewards were high, and politicians—some of whom were beneficiaries—were unwilling to do anything about it.

  Queensland had always had something of a laissez-faire attitude to prostitution, but when the talented, if corrupt, detective Frank Erich Bischof—another who set up a police pipe and drum band—was appointed commissioner of Queensland police in 1958, he shut down the brothels in the Brisbane inner city by the simple, expedient of padlocking the doors. The now closed houses included the best known, the Killarney, which was not far from South Brisbane railway station and had been operating since at least the Second World War and possibly for up to fifty years. From time to time it had housed Shirley Brifman, usually known as ‘Marge’, who had a side line as a police informant. Like so many in the trade, Brifman divided her working life between Queensland and New South Wales. Very quickly an arrangement was made with hotel managers to allow girls to solicit in the lounges, and one who did so was the quick-witted and garrulous Brifman.

  From 1957 to 1965 Bischof, who had also set up a juvenile bureau with his protégé Terence Lewis in charge, had been collecting graft from bookmakers on a massive scale. The police minister interviewed him and he was allowed to continue in his position on an undertaking to stop the racket. He never did. Bets by him went into a book under the initial ‘B’. When he won the rest of his name was added and when he lost it was entered as a fictitious name beginning with ‘B’.

  On 29 October 1963 the Labor member for South Brisbane, Colin Bennett, speaking in parliament, told members, ‘many of the (police) force are disillusioned, frustrated and discouraged’. He went on to maintain:

  the Police Commissioner and his colleagues who frequent the National Hotel, encouraging and condoning the call girl service that operates there, would be better occupied in preventing such activities rather than tolerating them.

  His allegations were quickly denounced as the product of ‘infantile imagination’.

  On 3 November 1963 The Sunday Truth, a committed supporter of Bischof’s, attacked Bennett for having exposed the commissioner.

  Its front page leader read:

  The campaign Mr Colin Bennett MLA is waging against the Police Commissioner Mr Bischof is now completely out of control and in the public interest the State Government can move in only one way. It must order an immediate Royal Commission.

  The facts are that the honour and integrity of the Queensland Police Commissioner have been attacked …

  His name h
as got to be cleared.

  Bennett persisted in his attacks and some months later a royal commission was set up under Harry Gibbs QC and witnesses were asked to come forward. The response was limited. At that time Brisbane was still a large country town where anyone who was anyone knew everyone else. The locals could hardly be expected to speak up and damage their standing in the community, so it was left to outsiders. One who did so, to his cost, was David Young, a one-time barman at the National Hotel who also acted as a sort of night manager. Young would tell the commission that he had seen Bischof and other officers drinking in the hotel after hours. He also claimed that he had served the malign detective Tony Murphy and other officers with liquor after hours, and had seen prostitutes such as Brifman, Val Weidinger and Lilly Ryan soliciting at the hotel. He also told Gibbs that shortly before he was due to give evidence he had received a threatening telephone call warning him not to do so.

  Much of the inquiry was given over to ‘kick Young time’, a game played with great enthusiasm and no little skill by the participating barristers and also to a lesser extent by Gibbs. Young’s past—the number of jobs he had held and had left in short order—was thoroughly raked over. Contradictions in his evidence were seized on with delight and he was also accused of running the girls himself. John Geza Komlosy, another witness who had also worked in the hotel as a porter, said that some of the girls actually lived in the place. Unfortunately, years earlier he had been convicted over a bounced cheque and his evidence was similarly trashed. There was some evidence that women were regularly sitting into the middle of the night drinking in the hotel. Quite what Gibbs thought they were actually doing there went unrecorded.