The squad was named ‘The Incorruptibles’, and for good reason.
THE uniformed sergeant standing at the Wangaratta railway station could not hide his disappointment. He stood and watched as strapping young men, the sort who would make ideal police recruits, walked past on their way to seasonal farm work.
When the train pulled out only one man was left on the platform – a skinny young bloke in a tweed jacket holding a cane fishing rod. This was Wangaratta’s newest constable – a former London ‘bobby’ who knew nothing about country Australia.
The sergeant shook his head in disbelief and told the young man there would be no concessions for the overseas import and he would have to learn on the job.
He did.
The former bobby was Frederick Albert Silvester. He would become one of Australia’s best-known – and most feared – policemen.
He was posted to Wangaratta in January 1952. He had joined the Victoria Police in 1949 after two years in the London Metropolitan Police.
A wrong number was to change his life – and many others. It happened on a quiet Saturday when young Constable Silvester was left to polish the station floors.
He did as he was told, but not without his own not-too-silent protest. He made sure he banged the electric polisher against the skirting boards to annoy the senior officer trying to sleep upstairs. Then the telephone rang. It was a woman trying to place an illegal starting-price (SP) bet for 10 shillings. ‘Is this Wangaratta 61?’ she asked, puzzled by the silence of the supposed ‘bookie’ on the line.
‘No, it’s 16,’ Silvester replied. She apologised and hung up.
The local telephone directory was only a few pages long. In a few minutes the young constable had the address to match the number. As was to be a habit of a lifetime, he told no one until he was ready to move. The next Saturday he went around and nabbed the local illegal bookie.
A few years later, the senior officer who had been trying to sleep upstairs that day had moved back to Melbourne. He called Silvester and confided to him that a secret unit was being formed to investigate organised SP bookmaking networks. ‘You should enjoy it,’ he said.
The gaming (special duties) branch was a group of seven police headed by young senior constable Sinclair Imrie Miller, known as ‘Mick’. He would later become Victoria’s best chief commissioner and Australia’s most respected police officer.
The group launched a series of raids on the bookies, many of whom had been protected by corrupt police and government officials for years. The system had become so entrenched that sergeants from stations all over Melbourne routinely went out on Saturday to collect bribe money. The squad was nicknamed The Incorruptibles’, and for good reason. It couldn’t be got at, and it always got its man.
During one raid, Silvester lay in black dust in a ceiling for 13 hours before dropping down to arrest occupants of one of Melbourne’s thriving gambling dens. In another, he scaled a drainpipe to climb into the top-storey fortified room of another SP headquarters. He became known as ‘The Cat’ and one of Melbourne best-known gamblers offered a bet of £500 that no one could lock him out. The bet was never collected.
Ten bookmakers offered him £10,000 a year for life if he would go easy on them. It was a fortune for the 20-quid-a-week copper with a young wife and two kids in a Housing Commission house in working-class Preston. The bribe was refused and one by one the bookmakers were driven out of business.
So impressed was the then Chief Commissioner, Major-General Selwyn Porter – another outsider – that he gave the special duties ‘Secret Seven’ a security brief to attend all the events of the 1956 Melbourne Olympics.
As a result of the team’s work, the State Government held a royal commission on illegal off-course betting in 1958. It resulted in the formation of the TAB.
Silvester once gathered nearly 500 telephone numbers of SP bookmakers operating in New South Wales. He went to Sydney to tell the NSW Commissioner, Norman Allan, who promised immediate action. Allan was as good as his word – there was action, but not the type expected. The following Saturday the Sydney illegal bookies closed for the day – they had been tipped off. For the next 25 years Silvester maintained that organised crime had corrupted the core of the NSW police force. A series of royal commissions would prove him right. Throughout his career, Silvester was seen as the most dangerous of all police: one who spoke his mind and refused backroom deals.
He liked a drink and a bet himself, but believed in upholding the law. He raided VFL clubs when they ran unofficially sanctioned illegal raffles and once swooped on the press box at Caulfield racecourse when he found SP networks were using reporters’ phones.
He refused to compromise when he believed he was right. And no one can ever remember him believing he was wrong. His boss and lifelong friend, Mick Miller, said, ‘The most infuriating thing about Fred was that he made the most outrageous statements and they would invariably turn out to be right.’
It was a trait not all would see as an asset. One senior officer wanted him to transfer to a less sensitive position because he had upset some of Melbourne most influential establishment figures. Silvester refused to budge.
His police officers’ college report stated: ‘Silvester has an easy, confident manner, a sharp sense of humour and ready wit. He possesses drive, vitality and initiative. He is impervious to pressure.’ But his instructors remained concerned at his ‘reluctance to conform’.
Miller recalled receiving a phone call from the then Chief Secretary (police minister) asking that Silvester be told to tone down his public comments that were embarrassing the government. Miller just laughed at the thought that anyone could change ‘The Cat’. It was an apt nickname because cats cannot be trained. ‘Fred’s Fred,’ Miller told the minister. That was the end of the conversation.
Miller wrote a touching obituary for Silvester in the Herald Sun newspaper after his death in late 2002. It said in part: ‘During his 34-year career, Fred was awarded a Chief Commissioner’s Certificate and earned 10 commendations for outstanding service. He proved himself to be utterly incorruptible. He was a lateral thinker who could always be expected to do the unexpected. He was relentless in his pursuit of the corrupt and corruptors. He responded to challenges. He had his detractors, but they were people who feared him or didn’t know him. Colleagues respected him. He was slow to make friends but when he did, those friendships endured, throughout the force, across Australia and overseas.
‘Fred was a non-conformist who had a habit of achieving results by going against the flow. He was a colourful character and no stranger to controversy. He often made provocative statements just to see the effect they had on people. Never the diplomat, Fred always believed in the head-on, “in your face” approach which didn’t endear him to everyone.’
His individual style was a trait he developed as a child. Born in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, he spent four years in the 1930s living in what is now Pakistan, on the north-west frontier near the Afghanistan border, where his father served with the Royal Air Force.
It was a hostile country for a young boy and he was told never to leave the base without an escort. But when his soccer ball rolled down a hill to a nearby village, despite his father’s warnings, he went off to retrieve it.
This was not well received by the locals, who did not appear to be fans of the world game, and they gave chase. Silvester took off (after grabbing his ball) but as he was higher up the hill he took advantage of his position and threw a large rock at his pursuers.
One fell to the ground, unconscious. This inflamed the posse even more. The boy with the soccer ball made it back to camp and soldiers with bayonets fixed had to put down the uprising. It was the first international incident he would create, though not the last. And it was a lesson he remembered for the rest of his life: always try for the high ground and always be able to back up what you start.
On returning to England, the young Silvester joined the Royal Navy in 1943 and became a petty officer. It was the beginning of a lifelong love affair with the sea.
After the war he returned to village life and, like many, was not in a hurry to find a career. So much so that locals voted him the lad least likely to succeed in life. His father persuaded him to look for a job and, seeing an advertisement for former servicemen to join the Metropolitan Police, he applied. He reasoned that he would not get the job but it would at least appease his father because he was trying. To his amazement, he was accepted.
In his two years as a bobby he learned that not all police could be trusted. Having caught a group of factory burglars stripping a lead roof in a bombed-out site, he was temporarily moved to the detectives’ division. He was told to answer the telephones and not to conduct independent investigations.
The phone rang. It was from the London docks, where a group of thieves had been grabbed. With no detectives available, Silvester went down to make the routine arrests but the local inspector was unimpressed – criticising the junior constable and returning him to the beat. Later, he found out the detectives were paid a secret ‘bonus’ from businesses for each arrest and he had stopped them getting their illegal payment.
It was then he began to think of leaving England, considering Palestine a possible destination. In the end, he and a colleague tossed a coin – heads Australia, tails Canada. It came down heads. His mate backed out but Silvester made the move.
On board the ship Cheshire on the way to Australia he met a young English nurse, Jean Burt. After a shipboard romance that he expected to end when they docked in Melbourne, they met again by chance at a city cinema. They married soon after. She died in 1968, leaving him to raise two young children.
As a career policeman he saw many problems, and often the solutions, long before they became public issues. He saw an urgent need for police departments to recruit from ethnic minorities, argued for an Australian Crime Commission nearly 20 years before it was established, and warned that Asian gangs would gain control of the heroin market. He targeted bikie gangs and corrupt unions and was one of the first police in Australia to use sophisticated undercover techniques and electronic bugging to gather evidence.
He once advocated that police establish their own electrical repair business in St Kilda as part of a sting operation on burglars. Undercover police would pass the message through the drug world that the business would buy stolen goods. As burglars came in to sell stolen items the transactions would be filmed and police would close the net, grabbing teams of thieves in one sweep. Despite the promise of ‘sensational results’ the plan was dropped because of the estimated $40,000 cost.
Decades later, police started an intelligence-led project to try to develop proactive programs to curb the rate of house burglaries.
Some thought his methods were a waste of time. His Bureau of Criminal Intelligence was known inside the force as ‘Freddie and the Dreamers’, an allusion to the British band of the 1960s. But his dreams, as Miller said, tended to come true.
In the early 1970s Silvester called for breweries to produce light beer to help cut the road toll and lower domestic violence. The response from the government at the time was less than enthusiastic. The then Chief Secretary, John, later Sir John Frederick Rossiter, KBE, said, ‘My friends would draw and quarter me if I suggested they should cut down the alcohol content. I would not like beer in Australia to change in any manner, shape or form.’
A brewery boss suggested the outspoken policeman should stick to catching thieves and observed there was no market for light beer.
Silvester was seen as the nation’s best investigator of complex crime and was appointed the first director of the Australian Bureau of Criminal Intelligence in 1981. He argued there was a need for a national attack on organised crime and corruption. Those who opposed him included Queensland Commissioner Terry Lewis (later jailed for corruption) and senior NSW police, some who were later exposed as having accepted bribes from many of the ABCI’s main targets.
He retired in 1983 to Loch Sport on Victoria’s Gippsland Lakes to fish, garden and argue with anyone who had the energy for a debate. His wife, June, died in July 2002. He died three months later, on October 18. On the last day of his life doctors disconnected all life support systems but he continued to battle on for more than 12 hours. As always, he fought to the end. As Mick Miller said, ‘There will never be another like him.’
FRED Silvester was an assistant commissioner, Victoria Police; founding director, Australian Bureau of Criminal Intelligence; life member, Victoria Police Association; and was awarded the Queen’s Police Medal. He was a former patron of the Hawthorn Football Club, past president of the Loch Sport RSL and a former Petty Officer in the Royal Navy.
3-2-1926 – 18-10-2002