The Stories That Changed Australia: 50 Years of Four Corners

by Sally Neighbour

  What journalism can do at a time like this is form the narrative so the public can be informed to a point where they care. The truth should not be confined to mavericks and victims unlucky enough to be bashed in a cell or die from a heroin overdose sold by a police-franchised trader.

  The report that for me best told this layered story was ‘The Moonlight State’, made again with Peter Manning and other Four Corners treasures, Shaun Hoyt and Deb Whitmont.

  The investigation began in 1986 with a tip-off from a Canberra police intelligence contact. He told me of a Queensland colleague in a jam because he had been bribed by a superior to suppress the passing of intelligence on organised crime to national policing agencies.

  When we poked our noses in further, the reek of systemic corruption intensified. A system common enough in pre-war Australia was still intact — of underworld bagmen collecting for the bosses who secured a fringe benefit by protecting more benign crimes, such as illegal gambling and prostitution.

  Queensland Police Commissioner Sir Terence Lewis had followed the lead of his predecessor, ensuring he retained a cut in the same way he had by standing over working girls in his early days on the beat. He and Lady Lewis would receive their brown paper parcels of cash funnelled via a former colleague, Jack Herbert, as they sat down to tea at one of the better Brisbane hotels.

  Lewis had powerful protectors such as Premier Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, who continued to defend him as law enforcement in Queensland began to spin out of control. Subordinates were furious about either being beaten to promotion by a slippery colleague or missing out on their cut.

  The old rationale for copping a quid for turning a blind eye to ‘victimless’ crime, for accepting a dividend for society’s dirty work, was also becoming harder to justify as a burgeoning post-war drug trade encroached on old territory. Senior cops who said they would never take a sling from a drug dealer were doing just that. Once they licensed the crime bosses they could not then arrest them without endangering themselves.

  In the early months of 1987 our small team, armed with no power to compel testimony or tap telephones, put in some unmerciful hours. By May 1987 we had gathered enough facts to make a case of entrenched and systemic police corruption as well as accompanying political blindness. ‘The Moonlight State’ triggered another judicial inquiry as well as long overdue reforms to policing and governance that would spread beyond Queensland. Following the Fitzgerald inquiry, Sir Terence Lewis was jailed and the long reign of the notorious Bjelke-Petersen government ended.

  For Four Corners and myself, however, the experience of making the program was then eclipsed by a death by a thousand courts. It was not until the turn of the century before the last searing tentacles of litigation fell away.

  The trial of defending the program turned out to be greater than the trial of making the program. And making it had been difficult. I was away from home for over three months. The underworld and their corrupt cohorts became nasty when they saw us getting close to the truth. Cameraman Chris Doig and sound recordist Guntis Sics were roughed up and our camera smashed by hoods in Fortitude Valley. In investigative journalism you don’t expect a painless path to the truth.

  While the path to resolution proved more tortured, it was also eased by the ABC Legal Department. If a program so demonstrably in the public interest had been found wanting, it would have been a blow not only to the ABC but all media. So an effective defence was called for and thanks to the likes of lawyers Bob Mulholland QC, Michael Sexton, Judith Walker and many more, the battles were finally won.

  The program had made a difference. Queensland and Brisbane, released from other clawing tentacles, raced to the new century. The sophistry of Bjelke-Petersen’s ‘can do’ regime became more apparent. Corruption has more than moral consequence. Cronyism bestows favour on the unworthy. In ‘The Moonlight State’ gaudy property developers were preferred to credible rivals. Ethical police officers lost ground to amoral colleagues. Talent shrank from the tertiary sector. Joh’s ‘can do’ system was a political estate built on mud and mangrove. Time and tide found it out. An inevitable swelling of grievance from all those failed yet worthy competitors had for us fortuitously coincided with the May 1987 broadcast.

  Within Four Corners the program also had ongoing influence. The ‘big dig’, as we call it, became more defined than random. It is unusual in journalism to apply so much time and resource to a single subject. Investigative journalism had always been a feature of the program. But it was never all we did. Four Corners is a healthy melange of storytelling forms, encompassing interview-based profiles, lyrical films, long-form essays, history documentaries and so on.

  Now we were applying more resources to the prospective ‘big dig’, with a focus on corruption, and most particularly police corruption. It was clear the Queensland system, termed ‘the joke’ by insiders, was operating elsewhere, if in varying forms.

  In 1991 Neil Mercer made ‘Police Story’, an early Underbelly-style profile of one of the kings of Kings Cross, Louis Bayeh. It was a clever character portrait and economic profile of how the business of organised crime works in New South Wales. Kings Cross has always had its Mr Bigs. Over time the system was being finessed to a point where they were becoming untouchable. By being seen to be powerful you can, like a feudal lord, informally tax your subjects without getting your hands dirty.

  As it turned out, Big Louis’s finessing proved deficient. In 1996 before the Wood Royal Commission he admitted to bribing 41 police. In 1997 Bayeh received four years’ jail for perverting the course of justice. In 2000 he faced a different court — of peers — falling wounded before a hail of bullets outside the El-Bardownie restaurant at Narwee. In 2001 he copped another three years for supplying drugs and demanding money with menaces from brothel proprietors. By then the Kings Cross throne was vacated and swiftly re-occupied. Indeed the newest King of the Cross, John Ibrahim, later celebrated in the tabloid press, had featured briefly in ‘Police Story’.

  My later program, ‘Academy of Crime’, broadcast in June 1995, had connections to both Neil Mercer’s report and ‘The Moonlight State’. It focused once more on Kings Cross, relying substantially on work generated by the Wood Royal Commission and a team that had learned some valuable tricks in Queensland.

  Gary Crooke QC, who had been counsel assisting Tony Fitzgerald, now took on a similar role with Justice James Wood. By now commission personnel such as Crooke had learned to avoid recruiting from the ranks they were investigating. They had also seen the value of roll-over witnesses. In 1994, a team largely from the Federal Police, derided by NSW colleagues as ‘plastics’, began covert observation at the broad and gaudy intersection of Kings Cross detectives and crime landlords.

  Hundreds of meetings were videotaped and recorded. In one I recall the NSW detectives who saw themselves as the toughest in the land pledging loyalty to the brotherhood. ‘We’ll never roll over like all those little cowboys in Queensland,’ declared the ruler of the roost, Inspector Graham ‘Chook’ Fowler.

  Chook did not know his good mate Sergeant Trevor Haken had done just that. The public would be entertained with images of Chook’s hairy legs and pungent prose as he pocketed wads of cash. A tiny camera and microphone had been secreted forward of the passenger seat in Haken’s Toyota. ‘Crotch cam’ joined its sporting equivalents ‘stump cam’ and ‘helmet cam’ in the lexicon, as the public eavesdropped on the detectives’ ingenious orchestration of the F word into every sentence. ‘That’s out the fuckin’ window, mate … fuck me dead I’m fuckin’ bleeding … I’m not even fuckin’ going near him.’

  The listening devices revealed the local villains adopting the same codes used in England. Haken and Fowler called $500 a ‘monkey’ and $1000 a ‘gorilla’. In New South Wales the Queensland ‘joke’ became ‘the laugh’. Taking a bribe was known as ‘a drink’, which was close to the truth; a huge amount of the monkeys and gorillas were supporting prodigious consumption.

  Chook further delighted the pub
lic with his brazen denials of wrongdoing. He sought to avoid the court by taking the ‘psychiatric express’, claiming a hurt-on-duty exemption from giving evidence. Chook pretended to slip on a spilled milkshake. The B-grade subterfuge was caught on tape.

  The program, made with Sue Spencer, my favourite producer, reached beyond the entertainment value that the underworld can use to disguise their core business of exploitation, ugliness and pain. Sue brought hard work, measure, good sense and a big heart to the slippery slopes of the Cross.

  With strong material from the Wood inquiry to build on, we further sought context and meaning. It is easy to think these stories are about their key elements: prostitution, police, politics and so forth. But most of all they are about people.

  In all journalism there is nothing like getting out of the office and going to the evidence. Sue and I trawled Kings Cross, stepping tentatively beyond the glitter. We joined our film crew for midnight excursions with the NSW Ambulance Service. The ambos’ routine following an overdose case was to inject Narcan at $85 a shot, more money than the fit of heroin that had reduced their patient. There had been 1201 overdoses in the area in the preceding year, and 28 deaths by overdose. We witnessed an angry user railing at us as ‘hyenas’ while the ambos laboured over his inert girlfriend. We watched the ambos later carry from a shabby boarding house a corpse of one they could not save.

  We spoke to demoralised business owners as the last menswear store in the area closed its doors. Most memorable was a conversation with a teenage prostitute who spoke of heartache and helplessness. Her story was that overwhelmed by the pressure of finals exams she had taken the train to the city, where she met a man who introduced her to heroin and a new, old profession. She said she missed her family but it was too late to go back. She was the age of my daughter. We tried to stay in touch but soon lost contact. I often wonder about her.

  Like so many of these reports, ‘Academy of Crime’ exposed an unnatural order. The job of the Kings Cross detectives should have been to protect that young girl rather than facilitate her destruction. Kings Cross had long been a breeding ground of mischief with police officers such as Trevor Haken learning the tricks of the wrong trade and becoming more like a crook than a cop.

  I later got to know Haken, who came to regret not only his corruption but rolling over to the Royal Commission. He remained proud of and continued to identify with the brethren he betrayed. Like Jack Herbert, the Queensland bagman, who also rolled, he had done us all a service, and as with Jack there was no way of turning back. Trevor missed the long lunches and the camaraderie. He continued to believe that despite the abject corruption, his ex-mates were law enforcement’s A-graders, the true hard men. I wondered how they could have got anything done after 2pm, by which time they were generally swimming in alcohol as well as self-delusion.

  The reform process is not easy. The Fitzgerald and Wood commissions were confronting generations of neglect. Too much had been for too long in the too-hard basket. Overdue reform is hurtful and there was inevitable and regrettable bruising of the undeserving, alongside a purging of the impious.

  While the news cycle demands instant change, reality works at a different pace. Unless police acquire the skills necessary to do their work ethically, the point of their work becomes meaningless. A generational change was through these decades becoming more visible. Police Services started taking greater advantage of science and technology. They improved self-education. More often the cops went home to wives or to the gym rather than sliding into pubs. And to the grand frustration of many a boozing predecessor, they also began to demonstrate greater effectiveness.

  The fact that this time Four Corners had worked somewhat ‘inside the tent’ was itself telling. The program would not have been made without the cooperation of the Wood Royal Commission investigators, who I presume saw value in public education. This arrangement would not have been possible a decade earlier, when working ‘outside the tent’ was the only viable option.

  By the 1990s anti-corruption agencies were entrenched in most states, with Victoria a notable exception. Gangland wars blighting Melbourne soon advanced pressure for another Royal Commission. The Victorian government stubbornly resisted, giving rise to a presumption they were fearful how far the investigators might reach. Their Police Minister denied the existence of endemic corruption, rejecting the Royal Commission option as ‘an expensive wigfest’.

  By the turn of the century I began to wonder whether the political community was no longer seeing credit in reform; the pain and ugliness being such, the more that was revealed, the more they got the blame.

  In 2004, as Victoria’s gangland death toll climbed to 22 after six years, my old boss, Jonathan Holmes, began working on ‘Speed Trap’ with the help of a young gun reporter, Nick McKenzie, and producer Sarah Curnow.

  Drug law enforcement remains the most volatile frontier in policing. The cops can make little impact on demand. A bulk of the clientele are otherwise respectable citizens, many of them our own sons and daughters. Removing one drug dealer creates space for another. Profits beat other forms of criminal enterprise hands down. A young detective on a raid can pocket the deposit on a house for simply looking the other way, with little likelihood of protest from the victim.

  What we have seen from Brisbane to Baltimore is a kind of ‘green-lighting’, with selected dealers allowed to operate in exchange for information that keeps competition down and statistics up. Some in the Victoria Police Drug Squad were now further refining the system in keeping with an advancing underworld business model. The old drugs of choice started giving way to synthetic competitors. Methamphetamine in varying forms and names — ‘ice’, ‘ecstasy’, ‘speed’ — were cheaper to purchase and easier to produce. Indeed it took little skill and enterprise to buy the chemicals and equipment, such as a pill press, and then subcontract the cooking. Otherwise ordinary street-corner hoods from the Williams and Moran clans began disporting themselves as crime barons. Throw in some otherwise ordinary cops eager to strengthen their pension plans and you had a crime wave.

  ‘Combined chemical delivery’ was the trick. The cops bought the precursor chemicals with government money from legitimate suppliers, handed it on to the underworld and waited for the cut. Their moral justification: ‘You don’t catch grubs without getting your hands dirty.’

  Jonathan, Sarah and Nick, in profiling the business model, brought to light the glaringly obvious — that not too many grubs were getting caught. Jonathan even managed to interview one of them. Carl Williams, who had taken a bullet in the stomach fired by a rival from close range, did something of a Chook Fowler in professing mystification about the identity of his assailant.

  The crooked cops in Victoria were demonstrating a keener sense of entrepreneurialism than many colleagues in other states. And while it might be true there was a touch more sophistication to their dirty work, they were also confronting improved anti-corruption forces.

  I had seen the proposition that you need to be dirty before you make clean disproved by tough and honest cops such as Bob Inkster in New South Wales, who arrested the multimillionaire murderer Andrew Kalajzich. In Victoria there were others: Ron Iddles, Peter de Santo and a remarkably impressive detective, Gavan Ryan, who ran the Purana Task Force, then investigating the gangland killings.

  I am pleased to say I much later interviewed Gavan, as did my colleague Liz Jackson. But at this stage, when telephoned by a reporter, he would hang up. Strange as this may seem, I could not help being impressed. Unlike the faux Sopranos gangsters, Gavan was not attracted by limelight.

  A year after Jonathan’s report aired, Four Corners returned to the subject, although work had actually commenced at the end of 2004. What most separates investigative journalism from daily journalism is time. You need time not merely to uncover facts but build trust. I had by now learned to try to position the ‘big dig’ at the end of the year, as we had done with ‘The Moonlight State’, to allow additional research time over the summer
months while the program is off air.

  Another distinguishing feature of investigative journalism is a lesser reliance on long-term contacts. A problem with building stories on the word of well-placed sources is a narrowing of the information horizon, and an increased danger of being used.

  The same team to work with Jonathan now joined me. Nick McKenzie and Sarah Curnow had good Melbourne connections to the usual secret assembly of police and underworld contacts. But of course we needed to go further.

  It tends to work better if you can put the story ahead of the issue, and the story that captured us, which gave rise to the issue, was the May 2004 murder of Terence and Christine Hodson. Terry Hodson was a registered police informant who in 2003 had been arrested with a cop while attempting to rob a drugs safe house. Hodson then turned on his associates, giving evidence against Detective Senior Constable David Miechel, and an alleged conspirator, Detective Sergeant Paul Dale.

  Eight months later the Hodsons became victims 27 and 28 in the Melbourne underworld ‘war’, clinically executed in their own home at Kew while under witness protection. The case synthesised the morbid entanglement of organised crime and police corruption as well as underscoring the seriousness of Victoria’s law enforcement crisis. While the Victorian government might reasonably argue corruption was not systemic, in a sense it was worse. There was not just franchised drug trafficking but, it seemed, orchestrated murder on their watch.

  On 23 November I called the victims’ son Andrew and asked to meet and talk. He was good enough to agree, but at this stage, much as anticipated, was reluctant to further cooperate. Daily journalism regularly crashes at this barrier. You need time to build cooperation. Four Corners had not much to offer but a keenness to tell the story with as much depth and insight as we could muster.