Chapter 1

Denis Tanner

The principles of natural justice are based on three core rules. The hearing rule provides the right to a fair hearing. When conducting an investigation, it is important that the person being complained against is advised of the allegations in as much detail as possible and given the opportunity to reply to them before any decision is made. The bias rule requires that no-one be judge in his or her own case and that investigators and decision-makers act without bias or perception of bias in all procedures; where a person has preconceived opinions, a vested interest or personal or family involvement, they should not investigate the matter. And the evidence rule provides that decisions must be based on logical proof and evidence, not on mere speculation.

When I set out to look at the cases involving Denis Tanner, I discovered that these principles of natural justice had all been ignored.

Denis Tanner’s only trial has been by media, which has turned public opinion against him without allowing him the opportunity to put his side of the story. The events that caused him to be targeted so aggressively were part of a long-running campaign against him, beginning in the late 1980s, when he stood up to high-ranking superiors and won. The Adele Bailey and Jennifer Tanner cases were just the most effective among many attempts to destroy him.

•••

Denis Tanner was born at Mansfield, the youngest of five children. His parents, Fred and June, raised their children on Springfield, the family farm at Bonnie Doon. When Denis left school, he initially became an apprentice motor mechanic in Mansfield, but he’d always wanted to be a policeman, so he entered the police academy in October 1973 at nineteen years of age.

Denis is a tall man with meat on his bones and is very powerful physically, a product of his penchant for hard work. He’s always on the go. He doesn’t sit down and read a book, go fishing or go to the beach. If he isn’t working at his job, he’s building something at home, helping a friend fix a fence or earning a few bob doing a part-timer. He’s an amazing provider for his family.

I was surprised by his unheralded benevolence. When he transferred to Benalla, he’d travel to Mansfield every weekend to mow the lawn and do house maintenance for his parents. In Benalla itself, he did the same for elderly folk without family, putting the bins out, weeding the garden, clearing the spouting and giving something a coat of paint. He was also an energetic member of his church board, but he didn’t make a fuss about it; he just quietly went about doing things for others. He didn’t tell me this – church elders did.

In police uniform or plain clothes, he was always impeccably groomed, clean-shaven with close-cropped dark hair. He looks tough, but is quietly spoken for such a big man. He has a crushing handshake and looks you in the eye, but can be shy in new company. He doesn’t push himself on people; he listens and plays his cards close to his chest. He’s passionate about politics, where he leans right of Right, and is prone to outbursts of bad language and black humour. He can also be judgmental about others who don’t share his moral standards. Many policemen are womanisers; Denis Tanner isn’t one of them, and he’s critical of those who are.

As a rookie, he served at the records section, then at South Melbourne and briefly at Shepparton before moving to St Kilda in October 1977. He became a detective in March 1979, initially working in the Russell Street car squad. He is one of only a handful of Victorian policemen who made it to detective while he was still a constable; he is the only one I know of from his era. To progress so rapidly inside five years of service, he must have impressed the selection panel with his performance and dedication to duty. His commendation for bravery would certainly have helped. Interestingly, he earned this award on 4 May 1978, ten days before he arrested Adele Bailey. The citation reads:

 

Commended for dedication to duty, courage and persistence displayed, with scant regard for his own personal safety, in the apprehension and subsequent conviction of a desperate criminal who exercised every violent means at his disposal endeavouring to effect escape.

 

As a detective constable and later senior constable, he was in the car squad, consorting squad and major crime squad at CIB headquarters, and at divisions in the inner suburbs of Prahran and Footscray.

In 1980 he met his future wife Lynne McKenzie, also a police officer, while he was temporarily stationed at Prahran CIB. They married on 12 March 1982 and had their first child on 30 September 1984, a few weeks before Jenny Tanner died. Denis was then based at Footscray and was due for promotion to sergeant. He’d applied for a number of vacancies, including one at Mansfield, where his parents now lived. He’d claimed compassionate grounds for wanting to live closer to his elderly parents, but he knew he was unlikely to succeed because he didn’t have the necessary seniority.

He didn’t get the Mansfield job, but by the end of November he’d been promoted to sergeant at the city and traffic patrol in Melbourne, and a year later he was back in CIB headquarters as a detective sergeant. On 7 December 1988 he transferred to be in charge of Benalla CIB, the position from which I’d retired. His record sheet shows that over the years all except one of his commanding officers have assessed him as well-conducted, competent, reliable and hard-working; they still support him today.

Operation Mint

Four months after he moved to Benalla, Denis Tanner became the subject of a flawed internal affairs investigation. During 1988 Detective Sergeant Ron Iddles of the drug squad had been overseeing an undercover drug operation in Melbourne named Operation Mint. The job was compromised when someone tipped off one of his surveillance targets, and Iddles reported to internal affairs that he’d been told Denis Tanner was one of those responsible for selling the operation out.

Detective Superintendent Neil Comrie and Inspector Tony Warren from internal affairs were tasked to investigate. After almost a year, they hadn’t spoken to Tanner, so he forced the issue by going to Comrie’s office and asking to be interviewed. Warren interviewed Tanner in Comrie’s presence on 24 October 1989. Tanner protested his innocence and denied knowing about Operation Mint or selling the operation out. He also disputed Iddles’ version of a conversation they’d had at police headquarters, in which Iddles claimed Tanner had implicitly admitted being involved.

Comrie wasn’t satisfied that Tanner had proved why he’d been wrongly accused, and in November 1989 the investigators submitted a report recommending that Tanner be compulsorily transferred and two other officers charged with discipline offences. (Neither was convicted.) As a result, the Deputy Chief Commissioner transferred Tanner to the Force Reserve in January 1990.

Tanner appealed to the Police Service Board, an independent appeal body chaired by a judge, which conducted an exhaustive twenty-day hearing and unanimously found that the Chief Commissioner had been misled by a flawed investigation. The Board’s finding said:

 

Comrie’s evidence was…that the appellant [Tanner] had ample opportunity, when the allegations were put to him, to make an explanation or to offer some reason why he had been wrongly accused.

 

The Board described the investigators’ approach as ‘untenable’:

 

Tanner, when confronted by allegations which have now been demonstrated to be without a probative evidentiary basis, was required to discharge an onus to prove conclusively his non involvement. It would be virtually impossible for a member who had no involvement in a corrupt practice of this nature to refute a ‘very strong suspicion’, which had been generated on a basis which now appears to be without foundation.

 

The Board also expressed concerns about the handling of evidence. Ron Iddles hadn’t told Comrie and Warren that his surveillance operatives had actually seen the man who had tipped off their target, and he wasn’t Denis Tanner. The Board had heard a tape recording of comments that were exculpatory to Tanner, but these comments had been left out of the transcript tendered to the Board. The investigators also hadn’t spoken to the person who named Tanner as one of those who sold out Operation Mint because they’d been told he was hostile to officers; but the Board said a ‘robust’ investigation required them to speak to him directly.

The Board’s conclusions were uncompromising:

 

The Board is…satisfied that the Chief Commissioner was misinformed as to the facts upon which his decision was based and was not informed of facts and circumstances which bore materially on the exercise of his discretion. The Board has accordingly reached a unanimous conclusion that the discretion of the Chief Commissioner has miscarried in this case and must be set aside.

 

The Board also issued a general caution against police relying on ‘rumour and speculation’, which in time could assume the appearance of ‘established fact’.

Had Neil Comrie stayed in the Victoria Police, the Board’s criticism would have been a setback to his career. If he had applied for promotion, others competing for the same positions would have used this adverse finding against him, but he moved to the police service in Queensland. Ron Iddles resigned and went truck driving. Neil Comrie and Ron Iddles were well-intentioned, highly respected, decent and industrious police, but the Board’s criticism of them in this case was of their own making.

Victoria Police appealed the Board finding and lost. Tanner believes their mistakes cost the department about half a million dollars.

Tanner was reinstated in his position at Benalla in August 1990 and did well there. He had no favourites and was a hard taskmaster to his subordinates. But in standing up to the department, he’d made lifelong enemies.

Operation Sauterne

While Comrie and Warren were investigating the Operation Mint complaint, others in internal affairs turned Tanner’s legitimate attempts to do his job into adverse entries on his file.

In September 1989, the Benalla flying club had temporarily lost the use of the local airfield while the Australian Defence Force conducted a major training exercise there. The aerodrome was swarming with military aircraft, helicopters, tanks, troop carriers and thousands of soldiers in a tent city.

Bob Slusarczyk, a Benalla light aircraft pilot, decided to have a bit of fun. He made up a harmless but very noisy bomb and detonated it on the tarmac near the main hangars. All hell broke loose, and the police were called. Slusarczyk was soon fingered, and on 15 September 1989 he was interviewed by Sergeant Russell Anderson and detectives Denis Tanner and Gary Wilson. The police found the bomb evidence and a .45 pistol.

During the search, Denis Tanner noticed some boxes containing glass vessels of the kind used for cooking amphetamines. He suspected that Slusarczyk was manufacturing drugs, but Slusarczyk was a hard nut who’d done serious jail time, unlikely to admit to anything. So, without making a fuss, the police charged him over the bomb incident, then Tanner notified the drug squad and Bureau of Criminal Intelligence (BCI) of his suspicions that Slusarczyk was a drug cook. In normal circumstances, this was excellent police work. Detective Sergeant Jim Venn, his BCI team and their surveillance ‘Dogs’ took up the task.

In the course of this investigation, the BCI discovered that Slusarczyk had an associate who was a police officer; they informed internal affairs of the connection. The case came to the attention of Lindsay Cummins, a senior sergeant there, who knew he had colleagues investigating Denis Tanner over Operation Mint. Now there was a drug investigation occurring in Benalla, some in internal affairs decided there must be a connection. Internal affairs then launched Operation Sauterne, an investigation into Denis Tanner, suggesting that he was involved with Slusarczyk in manufacturing drugs.

This was poor judgment, because Tanner was the one who had initiated the operation against Slusarczyk. Naturally, nothing came out of Operation Sauterne, but internal affairs recorded an unjustified black mark on Tanner’s internal file.

The Barjarg crop

During 1991, Denis Tanner got wind that a drug crop was growing in bushland at Barjarg, a large station between Benalla and Mansfield. The property belonged to the elder brother of a man who’d been Denis Tanner’s friend since childhood, but Tanner was unfazed. He put in a report and requisitioned the police helicopter so that he could locate the crop. He was told detectives from Alexandra also wanted the chopper for a search in their district, so he agreed to let them use it first.

Lindsay Cummins, the former internal affairs senior sergeant, was now at Wangaratta in charge of the District Support Group (DSG), which covered Benalla and Alexandra. He also rang for the helicopter and was told that it was already in his district at Alexandra, so he met it there and used it for his own job. Along the way, the pilot told him that the chopper had come to the district at Denis Tanner’s request to find a drug crop at Barjarg. With Cummins on board, the chopper flew over Barjarg, circling both the crop and the homestead. After the chopper left, the farmer panicked and pulled the crop out. When police arrived next day, the crop had gone, but fortunately the farmer confessed.

Cummins appears to have decided that Tanner couldn’t be trusted to do his job. Internal affairs files claimed that Denis Tanner would have had a role in the Barjarg drug crop ‘because he had known the family all of his life’. After this incident, Tanner refused to have any further dealings with Cummins.

The integrity test

On 17 June 1992, Denis Tanner received a call from a man I’ll call Chris, a petty criminal from Euroa. Chris asked Tanner to meet him at Seven Creeks Run, a tourist venue, and said he had information to offer about drug dealing in the town. Tanner went along and took one of his detectives with him.

When they met, Chris said he could give Tanner information in exchange for drugs and money. Tanner rejected the notion, but he did say that if Chris provided accurate information, he might be able to arrange some informer cash officially through his superiors. This would have come from an informer slush fund administered at headquarters.

As Tanner and the other detective were leaving, they decided to check out a car parked in an area where a new section of freeway was under construction. They discovered two men loading photographic and audio equipment into the car. When Tanner confronted them, they produced police identification and said they were internal affairs officers. They’d been monitoring Tanner’s meeting with Chris.

The two accompanied Tanner to the Euroa police station, where he confirmed their story. There was nothing he could do about it; internal affairs often use these methods to test the integrity of police. In this case, Tanner had passed an integrity test with flying colours.

Ten years later Tanner lodged FOI applications to access this file, but the police department claimed that there was no record of the incident. There certainly is in the Benalla detectives’ diaries, and as a black mark on Tanner's internal personnel file.

Comrie’s return

Before the Victorian election of 1993, the Labor government had announced that Deputy Commissioner John Frame would succeed retiring Chief Commissioner Kel Glare. In police and media circles, John Frame was the obvious and outstanding candidate. Neil Comrie, now working in Queensland, didn’t apply.

Then the Liberal Party under Jeff Kennett won the election and readvertised the chief commissioner’s job. It was later reported that a senior policeman who was married to a Liberal Party staffer was despatched to Queensland to ask Neil Comrie to apply; he did, and got the position. After Comrie’s return, Ron Iddles rejoined the police and was appointed to the homicide squad.

As a condition of his appointment, Comrie insisted that the Police Service Board be disbanded and that he be given absolute power to dismiss officers in whom he had no confidence, with no right to independent appeal. This power was every policeman’s nightmare. In Tanner’s case, he could have been sacked without charge for allegedly compromising Operation Mint although, as the Police Service Board had proved, he wasn’t guilty of anything.

Comrie kept a low public profile during the later investigation of Denis Tanner, but no expense was spared. Author Robin Bowles has described Comrie as having ‘pretty much given [the investigators] an open chequebook to try and nail Denis Tanner’.

The Euroa drug house

The Euroa drug house episode had the hallmarks of an attempt to entrap Denis Tanner by linking him with a hydroponic drug crop being grown in a house at Euroa. The incident occurred before the appointment of the Kale Taskforce but after Adele Bailey’s remains had been found.

Tanner was doing a job at Euroa on 1 December 1995 when he encountered the man I’ve previously mentioned as a police associate of Benalla pilot Bob Slusarczyk. The man’s name is subject to a suppression order, so I’ll refer to him as DE. He’d now left the police and become involved with some notorious crime figures in Melbourne, including the Moran family. Tanner had always regarded DE as a namedropper and big-noter, but he tolerated him because he occasionally supplied fruitful information about local crime.

DE hinted that he was thinking of buying a house in Euroa to grow marijuana and said an old Greek bloke connected with a Melbourne drug family would tend the crop. He suggested that he’d appreciate it if Tanner let him know when any warrants were issued for the property. Tanner dismissed this claim as bravado.

Unbeknown to Tanner, on the previous day DE and Slusarczyk had spoken to the local Euroa sergeant, Russell Anderson, and told him the homicide squad was investigating Tanner for the murder of his sister-in-law. Anderson brooded over this, but didn’t tell Tanner. The obvious question is how these two knew about a secret homicide investigation six months before it became public knowledge.

DE again spoke to Tanner in late January 1996, this time nominating an actual house at 16 Railway Street, Euroa. Tanner now thought the boast might have legs. On 1 February he took Euroa Senior Constable Mark Arians into his confidence and later that day informed Sergeant Craig Dooley of the Wangaratta District Support Group (dsg), because drug crops were the DSG’s responsibility. Tanner told Dooley he didn’t want to jeopardise an informant’s trust by engaging in the operation directly, but he said he’d update Dooley with whatever came to hand.

Dooley reported his conversation with Tanner to Senior Sergeant Lindsay Cummins, who immediately notified Inspector Peter Keogh and Sergeant Ken Ball of internal affairs, saying he suspected that Denis Tanner was corruptly involved in the Euroa drug house. In Mark Arians’ first call to the DSG, their analyst told him that the DSG was treating Tanner’s information as a ‘blind’. This puzzled Arians, but dutifully he didn’t tell Tanner.

Cummins later claimed he’d been approached by someone else, who told him they ‘needed him on side because everybody else was covered’ on the Euroa drug house; he interpreted this as implying that Tanner and others were corrupt. This was just one of several similar claims made by Slusarczyk and DE. At different stages DE told Denis Tanner that Russell Anderson was ‘tainted’ and Slusarczyk told Anderson the same about Tanner. The two compared notes and cleared the air while working on another drug crop above Strathbogie on 12 March 1996. Tanner told Anderson about DE’s approach to him and said that Arians had been checking the drug house and reporting activity to the DSG.

Anderson also confronted Tanner about Jenny Tanner’s death. Knowing nothing of the new investigation that was covertly targeting him, Tanner assured Anderson that the matter was old news and had been cleared up at the inquest in 1985.

From that point Anderson joined Tanner and Arians in recording activity at the drug house – car numbers, when the lights were on, the windows taped over. Arians had already told Dooley and Tanner that cars used by DE and an East Doncaster Greek family were regularly parked at or near 16 Railway Street. Anderson even spoke to DE in the front yard of the house one day and noted that he seemed evasive and nervous. The local police passed their observations to Dooley at the DSG.

But Tanner, Anderson and Arians became concerned that the DSG was doing absolutely nothing, and they started complaining. Eventually Dooley gained entry to the Euroa house and observed a hydroponics crop growing under lights. He came back with a warrant a week later on 1 August 1996, but the lights were turned off and the crop was dead.

A few days later Tanner discovered from a local estate agent that a Melbourne detective who was DE’s lifelong mate had bought the Euroa house in February. He also noted that DE’s brother was working in the agent’s office. Ethical Standards Division (ESD) reports show that the brother immediately rang the Melbourne detective. The detective then spoke to police in Euroa and rang Cummins at Wangaratta, complaining that the house had been damaged during the raid. The DSG did nothing further. No prosecutions, no interview of DE or his detective mate, and no statements taken from the Euroa police or Denis Tanner.

•••

The most alarming thing I learnt from my research into this drug house episode was how badly it was mishandled in the police and government anti-corruption processes. It’s significant because of the unfair treatment afforded Denis Tanner in his efforts to have the matter properly investigated.

In mid-September 1996, it became apparent to Anderson, Arians and Tanner that the DSG wasn’t going to pursue DE and the detective owner over the drug house. After the botched raid, Russell Anderson reported that ‘the word is in the town, the coppers have been growing hooch’. He described the relationship between the DSG and local police as being ‘in tatters’ and wanted to make sure that the Euroa police weren’t made to wear all the blame.

Incensed at the lack of action, Anderson, Arians and Tanner complained to their local superiors and then went to internal affairs. Statements were taken from them, but they were also threatened with discipline charges. They went to the Police Association lawyers for advice, then all three lodged grievance reports. More than fifteen years later, their grievances have never been answered.

The internal affairs file shows that Detective Sergeant Ken Ball submitted his finalisation report for the Euroa drug house case on 20 May 1997. The report made it clear that the mud from the past was sticking to Tanner:

 

Tanner himself has been the subject of or involved in a number of internal investigations where his integrity has been in question and corruption was alleged. These allegations have not been substantiated.

Cummins had no trust at all in Tanner and believed him to possibly be involved in the cultivation of the crop. Tanner wouldn’t speak to Cummins because he’d been the subject of an investigation (Operation Sauterne) by Cummins when he was attached to the ISU [Internal Security Unit]. Tanner was giving information to Dooley and communicating consistently with Anderson and Arians of Euroa police, which caused friction between the Euroa Police and the DSG.

 

To his credit, Inspector Paul Newman, who was now at the drug squad, wasn’t happy to have the file written off. On 23 July 1997 he submitted his own report to internal affairs requesting that the case be reopened. His report coupled the Euroa drug house with another incident connected to DE and the detective involving an armed theft of cigarettes valued at $4 million. He claimed this was also a botched investigation; of the Euroa drug house case, he said: ‘I do not believe that this investigation was allowed to come to a proper conclusion.’ Again internal affairs didn’t interview either DE or the detective about either crime. In 2002, Denis Tanner lodged a complaint with the Ombudsman about the handling of the drug house matter.

When I found out about the drug house incident, I wondered why DE would so blatantly approach Tanner and ask him to cop a quid, so I approached him on 7 October 2002 and asked him this over a cup of coffee. He admitted to growing the dope, but claimed it was a plan he’d hatched with his detective mate. He thought Tanner was going along with him until the DSG raid. He said police had never interviewed him; if they had, he said, ‘I would have put my hand up. A few plants – so what?’ He called at my restaurant a few days later and repeated this claim. Tanner and I reported these conversations to the Ombudsman on 21 October 2002.

Later I discovered the true story. DE had tried to set Denis Tanner up as part of a deal with unnamed police to avoid being charged with a serious offence. He admitted this on 25 October 2002 in a taped conversation with the Ceja Taskforce, an internal affairs investigation into drug squad corruption. Iddles would later give evidence in Ceja trials that DE was his registered informer and that he’d introduced him to the Ceja Taskforce on 9 October 2002; this was two days after my meeting with him.

When the taskforce asked DE about the information I’d just supplied to the Ombudsman, he explained:

 

They’ve come to me and they said, ‘You know we’ve got you on toast, but we’re going to let this one go through to the keeper and we want you to do something on Tanner.’ Well, they got me to do it up and then set Tanner up. And he doesn’t do [anything?]…whatever. Fuck, it was just a, it was just a shemozzle.

 

Had Tanner taken the bait, he’d have been an immediate easy pinch, but he was untouchable because he’d handled the approach honestly.

In March 2003, the Ombudsman advised Tanner as follows:

 

I confirm that the [Euroa Drug House] investigation was not an ESD integrity test. I believe further enquiries are warranted in relation to aspects of the investigation. However I have decided that I should defer any further investigation into this case pending advancement of the CEJA taskforce investigation.

 

We now know that he meant the trials in which DE gave evidence for the Crown against members of the drug squad. Tanner heard nothing more from the Ombudsman.

According to documents, the original Ethical Standards Department file on the Euroa drug house seems to have been shredded on 4 March 2003. FOI action by Denis Tanner revealed that internal affairs had created new files with the detective house owner and Tanner as the subject. This meant that if anyone sought disclosure information about Crown witness DE, there was no file on him.

Tanner later went to the newly formed Office of Police Integrity to complain about the drug house investigation. They refused to accept his complaint. I tried myself, with the same result.

The media image of big bad Denis Tanner has left him nowhere to go within the police, the political system or the anti-corruption agencies. In truth, in this case he was a policeman simply doing his job.