by Denis Ryan
‘You know that priest we pulled up a couple of weeks back?’ I asked.
‘The Vatican’s finest. Father John Day,’ Tom replied.
‘Tell me, what’s the drill when we lock up a priest?’
‘Dinny, we don’t lock them up. We let them go. Once you’ve been around for a while, you’ll start to learn that the Catholic Church carries a good deal more clout than the local church on the corner. It’s a political organisation. It has wrapped itself around every layer of government. This happens everywhere—all across Australia and probably all over the world, but nowhere does the Catholic Church have more power than it does in the Victoria Police force.’
‘So Day can do whatever he likes and he’ll never get pulled up for it?’
‘Short of a murder blue, he’ll walk away every time,’ Tom replied.
‘This priest is a disgrace. Can’t we make a complaint to the Cathedral?’
‘Dinny, nothing would happen to Day,’ Jenkins answered calmly. ‘But if you wanted to make a complaint to the Cathedral, even if you wanted to front Mannix himself, you’d find yourself as lonely as a bastard on Father’s Day. This goes all the way to the top. It’s not just the police. It’s the judges, the lawyers, the politicians.’
Tom took a sip of his tea. He could see that I was troubled by what he had told me.
‘Between you and me, I don’t agree with it. But there are forces at work here that are stronger than you and me, Dinny. I learnt early on in the job. Don’t pick fights you can’t win.’
The Victoria Police force ran along the old sectarian fault lines. Tom Jenkins was a Catholic like me. Clarrie Bell was a Protestant and a Freemason. The three of us were a microcosm of the Victoria Police force. We got on well and worked well together, but there was an almost imperceptible divide between Catholic and Protestant.
I’d made my allegiances known back at the police academy. I was in one of the three squads of twenty-five trainees. One morning we were all ordered to fall in for parade. A superintendent and two inspectors were present, watching over us.
Our drill instructor was First Constable Allen Coombes. He’d been a lieutenant colonel in the army and had seen action in Crete and Bougainville. He’d been awarded the Military Cross. After Crete he’d helped train the Second AIF in jungle warfare at Atherton in Queensland before they headed off to fight the Japanese in New Guinea. He was a powerfully built and imposing man. All the trainees were quietly terrified of him.
Coombes ordered us at ease and in his gravelly, stern voice ordered us to attend the St Paul’s Anglican Cathedral for the annual police service on the following Sunday.
I wasn’t an Anglican and I wasn’t going to go to an Anglican service. I came to attention. I took one step forward and one to the right and stamped my feet hard on the bitumen of the parade ground.
‘Sir!’ I screamed out.
‘Yes, Ryan. What is your complaint?’ Coombes barked.
‘Sir, I am a Catholic and I am forbidden by my faith to enter another church.’
Coombes, mouth agape for a moment, was stunned by my temerity.
‘Then you are excused on religious grounds,’ Coombes said, his brow furrowed.
With that, another trainee, Tom Atkinson, a young bloke from Warrnambool, stepped forward and meekly announced that he was a Catholic, too.
Coombes excused Tom from attending the Anglican service. He waited to see if there were any more hellions demanding religious freedom but there were none, and the parade was dismissed shortly afterwards.
I didn’t realise what a stir this had caused at the time. My religion was important to me. I may have been young and impulsive but all I thought I was doing was following the directions of the Church. I had no idea that my challenge to Coombes would filter through the police force in a brush fire of whispers and religious espionage that was the main game in the Victoria Police force at the time.
Within the force the Masons had their spies and the Catholics had theirs. I was marked as one of ‘them’ by the Freemasons and as one of ‘us’ by the Catholics. I didn’t have a clue about any of this at the time. I was still a trainee, not yet sworn in as a police officer. But that’s how the system worked. The Freemasons looked after their own and the Catholics looked after theirs.
The story of my audacious interruption of Allen Coombes would precede me wherever I went as a uniformed officer. I don’t know that it advanced my career in any way, nor do I think that it held me back, but from the moment I challenged Coombes on the parade ground, the Catholics within the force saw me as one of them.
Not long after I finished my training and took my oath as a police officer, I was stationed at Russell Street. Every constable coming out of the academy was sent to Russell Street at first. I was doing foot and bicycle patrols in the CBD, patrolling the grounds at Parliament House and occasionally keeping an eye on the corpses down at the morgue.
I was boarding above Russell Street headquarters. The top floors of the building were devoted to accommodation for single policemen. I was on the ninth floor and Bob Saker had his room across the hallway.
Bob and I got on very well. Like me, he loved his cricket. We played together for the Russell Street XI, and I’d roomed with him at the academy. On the day I had stepped forward and told Allen Coombes that I could not enter an Anglican church, Bob was standing alongside me. He had no problem with going to St Paul’s. He was an Anglican.
As young uniform policemen we were both drawn to the ‘Shadowers’—the Observation Squad. Fresh out of the academy, Bob and I played cricket with a lot of them. There were VIPs to guard and protect. Crims to watch over, disguises to be worn, shadows to lurk in. It seemed to Bob and me that it was a very exciting line of police work.
I’d heard on the grapevine that the Shadowers was full of Masons. They were under the charge of Detective Senior Sergeant Gil Brown, who was described to me by my cricket mates as ‘a narrow-minded bigot and a staunch Mason’. I didn’t quite know what to make of it. But if my cricket mates were anything to go by, the Masons ruled the roost in the Shadowers.
I asked Bob if he was a Mason. Maybe he would have a leg up in the Shadowers that way.
‘No, mate,’ Bob told me. ‘I’m not a Mason.’
Bob was about my size and shape. Sometimes he’d come into my room and grab a shirt of mine to wear to spare himself doing his laundry. He didn’t have to ask. We were good mates. He’d help himself.
One night I was in my room, about to go out. I looked for my best shirt and found it was missing. It could only be in Bob’s room so I crossed over the corridor to get it back.
I looked into his cupboard and checked the bottom first because that was where I expected to find it. There it was, along with Bob’s Masonic apron and the rest of the regalia.
When next I saw Bob, I couldn’t let it pass: ‘Bob, I went and got my shirt back out of your room. You are a Mason. I saw your apron in the cupboard.’
He blushed and stammered a bit before acknowledging it. He was clearly embarrassed.
‘You’ve got nothing to be ashamed of,’ I told him. ‘I hear it’s a pretty good organisation. You might even get into the Shadowers before me.’
I didn’t care if my fellow police officers were Hindus or Buddhists or genuflected to goats. It didn’t bother me at all. I had my faith and that was my business, and what Bob or anyone else did was theirs.
I had mates in the police force from all backgrounds and I never prejudged them. Certainly, I did gravitate towards other Catholics in the force, usually over a beer, but not to the exclusion of other police who may have popped on an apron every Wednesday night. That was the way it was. Those who became Masons did so thinking they might get a boost through the force, while the Catholics gravitated towards their Catholic senior officers in the force. It happened almost unconsciously. It was a natural consequence of sectarianism in Australian society at the time.
For a young uniform copper not long out of the academy, the Catholic–Ma
son divide operated almost invisibly. I did not know that dark forces existed within these groups and that they were answering to authorities outside the police force.
But I had my first view of it when the drunken pervert, Father John Day, stumbled out of St Kilda police station without charge. I did not like what I had seen.
2
DITCHING THE UNIFORM
But who shall guard the guardians?
JUVENAL, LATE 1ST CENTURY–EARLY 2ND CENTURY
I didn’t like thugs and crooks. I resented them. I hated thieves especially, and I detested bullies of any stripe. I wanted to be at the sharp end of policing. I wanted to be a detective. Perhaps it was in my genes.
There was nothing wrong with uniform work. I had been in uniform for four years. I’d loved it—even when I was working traffic at St Kilda Junction, where seven of Melbourne’s biggest streets merged into one, with trams, cars and trucks and me as the sole arbiter of who would progress and who’d have to stay put. People hanging their feet out of the tram would inadvertently give me a kick or two as they went past.
The way the junction sank in the middle, I must have looked like Toulouse Lautrec to all the people passing by. And my work did not go unnoticed. The Melbourne Sun gave me a mention: ‘Congratulations to the young constable working the traffic beat at the St Kilda Junction. It’s a tough job and he does it well but we suggest that he buy himself a butter box to stand on so he can be seen by the passing traffic.’
It was often cold, and when it rained I’d be standing in puddles. Even then I enjoyed it.
But my real desire was to be a detective in the force. I passed the detectives’ exam—came third in the class and ditched the uniform in 1956.
Over the next six months, I was at Russell Street headquarters, attached to the Larceny and General Squad, the Observation Squad, the Larceny from Motor Vehicles Squad and the Breaking Squad. I worked at Frankston CIB for three months, filling in for a detective who’d copped a nasty injury. And when a vacancy came up in Mordialloc, just around the corner from my home, I applied for it and got it.
I had my fair share of rough and tumble experiences, like most detectives. In 1957 I was at Russell Street as a detective senior constable, attached to the Breakers. I was out on patrol with Mick Murphy, who was the same rank—a pair of new detectives in our new suits.
We were driving around East Melbourne, along Gipps Street, in the CIB car, a Twin Spinner Ford. It was just after midnight. We saw a Ford Prefect parked outside a block of flats and the silhouette of a man perched at the steering wheel. Mick knocked on the window and announced us. The driver reluctantly opened the door and got out. He was a big lump of a bloke. A Collingwood six-footer, built like a brick shithouse, in his mid-thirties by my reckoning. He handed over his licence. His name was Harry Clifford Gribbin. He seemed affronted that we had pulled him out of his car. When I asked him what he was doing, he scowled.
‘What’s it got to do with you?’
We searched his car and found a loaded single-shot rifle, with a bullet in the chamber, alongside the base of the front seat. We opened the boot and found it was full to the brim with plastic raincoats. Gribbin couldn’t provide any reasonable explanation for the presence of raincoats in his boot. There was the usual blabber about getting them from a friend he’d met in a pub, a friend he was unable to name.
We arrested him for unlawful possession. Oddly, Gribbin seemed to calm down after we arrested him.
But Mick and I had a logistical problem to deal with— how to get both cars back to Russell Street. Mick explained to Gribbin that we could handcuff him and take him back to Russell Street in the CIB car, then either Mick or I would come back and pick up Gribbin’s car. Or, if Gribbin was going to behave himself, I could sit alongside him while he drove his Ford Prefect to Russell Street and Mick would follow, driving in the Twin Spinner. Suddenly, Gribbin became a shining light of helpfulness and co-operation.
‘I’ve got nothing to worry about. We can sort all of this out back at Russell Street,’ he said, making his way back to his car.
Gribbin took the wheel of the Ford Prefect with me riding shotgun. I felt in control of the situation. I was armed with my .32 Colt service pistol in my shoulder holster and my handcuffs over my belt. I wasn’t expecting any trouble.
That was a mistake.
The sly mongrel took off slowly enough but when he got on to Hoddle Street, he hit the accelerator hard. The little Ford Prefect had a top speed of about eighty kilometres an hour, a good metre or two slower than Mick’s Twin Spinner, but Gribbin started swerving in and out of traffic and quickly left Mick in his wake.
When Gribbin failed to make the right-hand turn and proceeded along on the wrong side of Punt Road, I realised that his co-operation had come to an end.
‘Harry,’ I told him, ‘don’t be bloody silly.’
Gribbin didn’t say a word. He had a look of grim determination on his face as he kept dodging oncoming traffic. I was armed to the teeth, but I couldn’t do a thing about it. I sat there in the passenger seat in a state of grace, too nervous to move and praying Gribbin’s desperate dash would soon come to an end.
He swerved hard into Swan Street, Richmond, then right into a side street. He pushed the little car down the street another 100 metres or so then slammed the brakes on, thrusting the narrow little car to a sharp halt on the kerb.
The car rattled to and fro with the impact and we rattled along with it.
Once the car finally came to rest, Gribbin jumped out. I took off after him and brought him down with a tackle that would have put Dally Messenger to shame. But rather than sliding along on the hallowed turf of the SCG, I found myself crashing onto the bluestones of Richmond and coming up covered with the detritus of the inner city gutter all over my suit.
Gribbin and I punched on in the gutter, the city slime caking us both. I felt obliged to resort to foul play. I pulled my handcuffs off my belt and gave Gribbin a couple of hard smacks to the head, swinging the cuffs and chain like a mace. It didn’t deter him much. We continued to sprawl about in the gutter until I heard what I took to be the voice of the Archangel Gabriel booming: ‘What’s going on here?’
I looked up at a large uniform police officer on foot patrol.
‘I’m a police officer!’ I yelled out, eager to prevent him laying into me, too. My large, blue-shirted new friend came to my assistance and commenced the process of disentangling me from Gribbin.
Finally, Mick arrived in the CIB car. I was out of the shit. Harry Gribbin, however, was in plenty.
Gribbin was charged with a string of offences, including larceny of the goods we’d found in the boot of his car, resisting arrest, assaulting police and firearms offences. The judge took a dim view of his activities and sentenced him to a long stretch.
About the only thing he wasn’t charged with was kidnapping. That didn’t stop my fellow police officers back at Russell Street bestowing on me the title of the ‘Last copper kidnapped since Ned Kelly was about’. Laughter all round.
All I cared about was that the dry-cleaners gave my new— now soiled and shit-stained—suit their very best attention.
That was what it was like being a detective. Each day was different to the last, and any time you signed on for a shift, there was no way of knowing what surprises were in store.
Sooner or later, a police detective in Victoria would be offered a bribe. It was a natural action for crims to offer a police officer a quid to look the other way.
I got a serious offer one day in 1960. Detective Sergeant Jack Meehan and I were investigating thefts from building sites around Melbourne. About £15,000 (equivalent to almost $400,000 today) worth of gear—stoves, hot-water systems, window frames, sinks, baths, even the toilets had been stolen from a block of ten Glen Iris flats that were a day or two away from being finished and sold off.
Jack was a World War II veteran who had seen active duty in New Guinea. He had played a few games for St Kilda and sported the number two
guernsey for the club. He was a tough man and as honest as the day is long.
Jack and I received some information that a breaker, James Kelly, was responsible for the building site thefts. Kelly had a criminal record longer than my arm and his put together. When Jack and I paid Kelly a visit, he had a heap of stolen property at his house. He eventually coughed to the break, enter and steals.
He was more than forthcoming because he felt that he’d been cheated by ‘Fishy’ Taylor, a known fence who operated out of a junkyard in Richmond. Out of the £15,000 worth of gear Kelly had lifted, Fishy had flicked him only £3000. Kelly told us we could expect to find most of the gear still on Fishy’s premises.
And so it transpired. Sinks, baths, stoves and a whole lot of other stolen gear were stored in Fishy’s lock-up. There was so much stolen gear that the police van had to make five trips back and forth to the police academy, where it was stored as evidence.
When we walked into Fishy’s cluttered little office, he knew we had him cold. He seemed resigned to his fate. He got up and opened the safe behind them. There were thousands of pounds in nice, neat tidy piles.
‘That’s yours,’ Fishy said, motioning at Jack and me.
‘Stick it up your arse, Fishy,’ Jack replied. ‘Dinny and I aren’t interested.’
Fishy shrugged. ‘If you don’t take it, someone else will.’
We took him back to St Kilda police station and charged him with receiving stolen property.
The next time I saw Fishy we were both in court. He was in the dock and I was giving evidence against him. Jack Meehan was the police prosecutor. We had a big team there. We expected that the magistrate would view proceedings as a committal and refer the matter for judgment in a higher court.
Fishy put his hand up and pleaded guilty, and the magistrate determined that the matter would go no further. He looked solemnly at Fishy and handed down his sentence. Jack and I expected him to get five years. The magistrate thought otherwise and gave Fishy a twelve-month good behaviour bond.