BENT

I’m not saying that by way of a threat. I’m not suggesting I want to show it publicly, but you and your solicitor are free to view the entirety of the tape, including the sexual relations depicted, if you wish to do so.

Eade did not. Before the end of the day the man about whom there had been suspicions for the previous ten years and who had survived a number of internal investigations had been dismissed by beleaguered police commissioner Tony Lauer. That half-hour broke the resistance of corrupt officers. Who could tell who was on film and in what position? It was no longer a question of solidarity. In the words of the old gospel hymn, it was a case of ‘Lord, let me in the lifeboat’.

Eade was later sentenced to twenty-two months’ imprisonment for inciting and procuring the supply of prohibited drugs and knowingly giving false evidence to the commission. In 2006 he was ordered to pay in excess of $286 000 to the state, which had settled an action by Michael O’Sullivan, who claimed that Eade had threatened to load him up (plant) with heroin.

There is an old story of a school class allowed an hour to write an essay on the police. One child finished within the first few minutes. When he handed in the composition it consisted of one sentence, ‘All coppers are bastards’. Although whole swathes of the community would, quite wrongly, agree with the sentiments, it was decided that this viewpoint should be changed in one so young. It was arranged that the boy should visit the local police station for a day, after which he would write another essay. The visit passed off well enough. He was shown how fingerprints were taken, went down to the cells, was allowed to pat the police horses, was given a police tea mug to take home and so on, but the revised essay took hardly longer to write. It read, ‘All coppers are cunning bastards’.

As the years pass, for good and bad reasons, large sections of the public have become disaffected with the police, if indeed they were ever affected. Many would now subscribe to the boy’s generalisation or, to use a sociological term, stereotypicalisation, which means just about the same thing but looks and sounds better. As a result, continuing the sociological trend, the police tend to close ranks around themselves and develop a ‘no one loves us, so why should we do anything about our image?’ culture, which sociologists like to call labelling or anomie. This can arise over really petty matters and in turn shows how statistics can be made to lie.

For example, in London after the First World War arrests of women on charges of soliciting for the purposes of prostitution remained at a consistent level. In 1922 there were 2231 convictions, but that figure suddenly dropped the following year, to under 600. However, that did not mean that there had been a drop in soliciting. Rather, a decision at Quarter Sessions had ruled that there was insufficient evidence to show that the man solicited in a particular case had been annoyed—a requirement for the conviction—rather than flattered by the solicitation. The case was dismissed. As a result the police downed tools, staging a go-slow and refusing to arrest the women. A not dissimilar example happened in 1946 in Sydney, when statistics appeared to show that vice in the city was in major decline. All that had happened was that the working girls had shifted their beats from the inner city to the outer suburbs.

What is police corruption? Getting a daily floater in the local cafe—or is that simply a good example of keeping a finger on the pulse of the local community? After all, in the 1930s New South Wales commissioner Bill MacKay was said regularly to eat on the arm at Romano’s, the fashionable Sydney restaurant where he later arrested one of the waiters, Antonio Agostini, for the murder of the man’s wife, Linda. Is it a ticket for the Grand Final? A hotel stay in Honolulu? An expensive bottle of wine? Taking a few dollars from a dead derro? And where in the spectrum do you place officers who in 2012 were paid $100 each to open accounts in their own names so that gambler Steve Fletcher could place bets? What about so-called noble cause corruption: bricking a suspect when you KNOW the man is guilty but there isn’t sufficient evidence to send him down? Is that really corruption? What would most people say about the practice in 1960s Queensland of taking interstate criminals released from Boggo Road Gaol to the New South Wales border and dumping them with firm instructions not to reappear in the state? Don ‘Shady’ Lane, a former member of the consorting squad and special branch as well as a Bjelke-Petersen cabinet minister in Queensland from 1983, thought that this was a good example of the oldest form of community policing.

Sociologists have used up the equivalent of forests in trying to formulate an answer. In 1979 Dr Keith Bottomley, in his Criminology in Focus, devoted the first thirty-eight pages to a discussion of the definition, and many more after him have been similarly puzzled.

However, corruption was neatly defined in the Wood Royal Commission as deliberate unlawful conduct (whether by act or omission) on the part of a member of the police service who is utilising his or her position, whether on or off duty, and the exercise of police powers, in bad faith. The commission went on to say that this included:

[t]he receipt of bribes, green-lighting, franchising and protecting or running interference for organised crime; releasing confidential information and warning of pending police activity; ‘gutting’ or ‘pulling’ prosecutions; providing favours in respect of bail or sentencing; extortion; stealing and recycling drugs, money, property obtained during the course of otherwise legitimate police operations; various forms of direct participation in serious criminal activity the commission of which is facilitated by virtue of the office held; and the deliberate misuse of an office to procure an advantage or disadvantage in matters of promotion, discipline, transfer and the like, through patronage, friendship or personal prejudice.

There has long been a defence mechanism among police management that a corrupt officer is a rotten apple and there are no such things as rotten barrels or, even worse, rotten orchards. One study (quoting former New York police commissioner Patrick Murphy) surmises that most of the major inquiries into police corruption reject the ‘bad-apple’ theory:

The rotten-apple theory won’t work any longer. Corrupt police officers are not natural-born criminals, nor morally wicked men, constitutionally different from their honest colleagues. The task of corruption control is to examine the barrel, not just the apples, the organisation, not just the individual in it, because corrupt police are made, not born.

The ‘bad apple’ theory of corruption has been all but fully discredited. Successive major commissions of inquiry have catalogued the ways in which corruption is frequently highly organised and systematic.

The rotten-apple theory of police corruption, that it is one of individual moral failure, was discredited at least back in the 1990s and probably a century before that. Any attempt by government or the police hierarchy to defend the rotten-apple theory can only be seen as a face-saving, papering-over-the-cracks exercise doomed to failure.

The question of free food raised its head from the plate, or at least the wrapper, yet again in January 2013 when McDonald’s and Krispy Kreme, along with a number of other fast-food outlets, acknowledged that they gave free or heavily discounted food to police and emergency-services staff.

Former McDonald’s employees, including managers, told online news publication Crikey that a key motivation was to entice police to visit more frequently, to provide high-visibility and free security at taxpayer expense. It is in no way different from the London casinos of the 1960s, which used to hire well-known hard men to keep out potential predators. One look at men such as ‘Mad’ Frank Fraser sitting on a stool was sufficient to deter all but the most committed robber or cardsharp.

Professor Leslie Holmes of the University of Melbourne’s School of Social and Political Sciences, who is researching international attitudes to police corruption, says the fast-food perks pose a ‘potential problem’ and the practice isn’t allowed in countries like Singapore due to the potential for corruption.

‘They should not be allowed to accept anything, they’re not paid that badly’, Holmes told Crikey. ‘It would be much clearer if there were rules saying, “we don’t accept it”.’ It is not a problem confined to McDonald’s. On the Gold Coast officers were receiving free drinks and skipping queues at nightclubs and discos until the practice was barred in 2012.

Holmes cites the work of pioneering US researcher Lawrence Sherman, who wrote in the 1970s on the ‘slippery slope’ of public officials accepting free gifts, however small. Holmes posed a hypothetical example in a small town: if a cop receives free food, then pulls over the store manager for speeding, will he issue a fine or wave the manager through due to their cosy relationship? Perhaps more significantly, what would be the attitude of a police officer who eats on the arm regularly and is then called to the outlet to deal with a dispute with a customer?

Holmes’ research on public attitudes to police corruption in Germany and Bulgaria found that just under 60 per cent of respondents thought it was unacceptable for officers to receive minor perks. He hoped the survey could be replicated in Australia.

Olivia Monaghan, a PhD candidate studying with Holmes who is looking at police corruption in Australia, raises other concerns about officers providing free security for McDonald’s: it may not be fair to competing businesses and could detract from the police officers official capacities. If McDonald’s wants security officers it should hire them, she argues.

At its most simple, police corruption can be divided into two categories. First, there is ‘bent for self’ and, second, there is ‘bent for the job’—so-called noble cause corruption. Unfortunately, ‘bent for the job’ is not as altruistic as it first seems. A high conviction rate leads to promotion, and better pay and status. There is also the possibility of a share in the now considerable reward money that is often on offer but not necessarily available to the rank and file. At the end of a career in the police force a higher rank will result in better retirement pay and the chance of a better job in security, far higher up the food chain than what is available to the routine jobsworthy. Officers can sometimes be bent for both self and job: adopt noble cause corruption and also behave in a corrupt way for their own financial advantage. Into this category would certainly fall Ray Kelly, the great New South Wales thief taker of the war and postwar years, and a generation later, the same force’s talented but wholly corrupt .

After looking at patterns of police corruption in New York, Marseille, Hong Kong, Bangkok and Sydney, 1970s sociologist Alfred McCoy propounded a five-stage model for the scale and quality of police corruption. However, academic critics such as Dr Richard Evans have suggested that this may be too basic:

I think his model is a bit simplistic—corruption is much more a matter of networks, and there is a continual process of jostling for position and influence. Extensive corrupt networks can and do co-exist with comparatively effective and honest policing—indeed really effective corruption thrives best behind a good ‘shopfront’ of policing.

American sociologist ER Stoddard has suggested that there may be as many as ten stages of corruption, but McCoy’s five-point plan seems to provide an eminently workable and relatively uncomplicated structure and, at the risk of offending our betters, we consider this as good a basis as any upon which to begin.

McCoy suggests that the first stage is what he calls honest graft, such as accepting fees from accident tow-truck drivers in return for sending work in their direction. Getting an informal bonus for doing their job of keeping the streets clear: what harm is there in that? Probably not a great deal, except that it can be turned into a business, as Victorian police did in similar circumstances in the 1980s. This leads to step two, which is taking an actual bribe not to report a speeding or similar minor offence. Unfortunately, at a higher level this may lead to sharing the proceeds with an armed robber or splitting the drugs with a dealer, either to be resold for the officer’s profit or to be given to their informers.

McCoy’s third step is obtaining a regular fee from club and brothel owners, abortionists and illegal gamblers to allow them to continue unmolested or to warn them of impending raids. The fourth is a giant leap. Now officers at a senior level become criminal entrepreneurs, licensing certain criminals to commit serious offences. The fifth stage is the one reached in the Royal Hong Kong Police in the late 1960s, when corruption was rife throughout the country. Hospital patients had to pay so-called ‘tea money’ to be brought a bedpan or have their sheets changed. Ambulance staff required money to collect a patient. Bribes were required when applying for housing and schooling. Police officers had to pay for promotion to vice or drug squads, where protection was on offer for payment. So far as the police were concerned, drug dealers, brothel keepers and gambling-palace owners paid a fixed share of their income to senior officers, which was then divided among themselves and junior officers.

In the ensuing Hong Kong investigation around forty Chinese officers left the colony. During the week granted him to explain his assets of HK$4.3 million, Deputy District Commissioner Peter Fitzroy Godber managed to get out of the territory, using his police airport pass to bypass immigration and passport checks. His escape, however, brought on a public outcry, with students at a mass rally in Victoria Park protesting against the government’s failure to deal with corruption, and Godber was extradited from England in April 1974. Found guilty, he served a four-year sentence. He was thought to have accumulated some US$600 000 through bribes. The upshot was the establishment of the Hong Kong Independent Commission Against Corruption that year.

McCoy thought that over the years Australian police in general, and officers in the New South Wales, Victorian and Queensland forces in particular, had consistently operated at levels three and four. However, as the Fitzgerald inquiry in Queensland showed, they had also operated at level five in the 1970s and 1980s, and it may well be that there was a similar situation in New South Wales in the 1940s, 1950s and 1990s, and in Victoria in the late 1990s. Any police force worldwide will try to explain that any corruption (which anyway is not admitted) is a thing of the past.

In this book we have mostly concentrated on fourth and fifth level corruption, where other officers must have known what was happening but turned a blind eye or became passive participants.

Sometimes is it clear that colleagues did not know what was happening. If it seems inconceivable that an officer could go off and rob a bank in his lunch hour, then attention should be paid to South African police captain Andre Charles Stander. The handsome son of retired police officer Major General Frans Stander, he had been Pretoria police college’s dux of 1964 and, as captain at the CID branch of Kempton Park police station, he was destined for a career that might have led all the way to the top. But then he took to robbing banks after, he claimed, he was sickened when he shot up to twenty-two unarmed demonstrators in the Tembisa township uprising of 1976. Others say he had never been at Tembisa and that, forced into the police by his father, he had resented the discipline required when he joined the drugs squad.

The first robbery seems to have been after he gave out the morning assignments to his staff. He then drove to Jan Smuts airport to catch a plane to Durban, where he hired a car. He put on a wig and a false beard, then drove to a bank. South African banks in the late 1970s were open plan with little security. Stander approached a cashier, sat down and quietly pulled a gun on her, asking her to fill a bag with money. Terrified, she did. Stander took the money, left the bank before anyone realised what had happened, got in his car and drove back to Louis Botha airport, peeling off his disguise on the way. Then he flew back to Johannesburg in time for an afternoon’s work. Buoyed by his success, very often he would carry out a robbery in his lunch break and return later in the day as the investigating officer.

When police officers go off the rails it is often in a spectacular fashion. None illustrates this better than South Australian fraud-squad detective Colin Creed, also the dux of his intake class. Perhaps his superiors should have paid closer attention because, a connoisseur of wine and ‘always flash with cash’ when in the squad, Creed would spend $60 – a substantial sum in the 1970s – on a bottle of Riesling.

In April 1974 a young woman was raped at knifepoint in her own home. When she went to Hindmarsh police station the next day she identified Creed, whom she saw in the station, as her attacker. He had been at her house some months previously when he investigated a minor burglary. He was found not guilty, but after that his first marriage broke up. A year later he married a policewoman. On 10 April 1980 security cameras picked out a man in a Torrensville bank robbery and, to the shock of officers, it appeared to be Creed. He was questioned, brazened things out and, when he was not identified in a parade, was allowed to go home. That night he vanished. Two rapes followed immediately, both at knifepoint, and he carried out a bank robbery at Glenelg the following month. While on the run he wrote a letter of resignation from the force. After that he went interstate and was said to have teamed up with New South Wales robber and escaper Russell ‘Mad Dog’ Cox.

His career on the run was marked by near misses. First there were suggestions he had been standing over women in Victorian massage parlours and that the underworld had put out a $15 000 contract on him. If the latter was correct, he survived. Then he was seen by police sitting in a car in Coburg for what appeared to be an inordinately long time. When questioned he again toughed it out, saying that he was waiting for an assignation with a married woman.

He certainly should have been caught in Queensland on 4 January 1982, when police were alerted by a hotel manager who had seen green dye on Creed’s hands and suspected that he had touched banknotes marked by the authorities. Creed was also in possession of a large sum of money but, after three hours of police questioning, he was released.

He also survived the police raid following a shootout at Mad Dog Cox’s safe house on the Mornington Peninsula in which painter and docker turned bank robber Ian Revell Carroll was killed. By the time police searched the house, finding an arsenal of weapons and Creed’s fingerprints, he was long gone.

By the spring of 1983 the hunt for him stepped up, with women’s magazines being asked to refer specifically to the rape, and medical magazines to the fact that Creed was suffering from a bowel disorder which, his family thought, might kill him unless he had long-term treatment. Restaurants were canvassed in case a waiter remembered a man buying expensive wine.

He was finally caught in an ABC bookshop in Hay Street, Perth, on 6 September that year, when he was recognised by Ian Goldsmith, a South Australian police officer on holiday, who said, ‘It’s been a long time, Colin, hasn’t it?’ Creed was charged with possession of implements of disguise—a wig and a balaclava—along with possession of a .32 Smith & Wesson at the north-eastern Perth suburb of Bayswater. Creed pleaded guilty to charges relating to two armed hold-ups on 10 April 1980 at Underdale.

The authorities were singularly reluctant to pay the reward money to the holidaying police officer who had caught him, arguing that it was only part of the officer’s duty. Eventually, with the help of his union, an ex-gratia payment was negotiated. Perhaps this sort of attitude does not encourage honest officers.

In November 1984 Creed’s South Australian sentence of twenty-one years for the rapes and bank robberies, with a pre-parole term of twelve years, was increased on appeal by the Crown to a minimum of seventeen. A psychological report suggested that at the time he went off the rails he was ‘in a state of depression and anxiety and that contributed to his offences’. In early June 1986 the Victorian Supreme Court sentenced Creed to forty-five years in jail on charges relating to six robberies, three of them armed, to be served concurrently.

Throughout his sentence Creed’s behaviour was exemplary, but—like all former police officers—he was at risk of attack from other prisoners. In February 1988 his cell was firebombed, destroying his computer equipment. Two months later, with his security rating downgraded, he was transferred to Mobilong Prison. In 1995, now deemed a model prisoner and with no objections from the police, he was granted parole. When he spoke of his time on the run he said, ‘You may as well be in prison. It’s a pretty terrible lifestyle.’ Multiple jail escapees such as Brenden Abbott might disagree.

Police who turn corrupt are, like fallen angels, often fascinating, and Australia has provided rather more than its fair share of them. This book is an informal, to an extent selective, and certainly condensed, account of corruption by police, politicians and lawyers from the arrival of the First Fleet to the present, with an added glimpse of the future. It is not a reflection on the hundreds of thousands of honest and decent officers who have struggled to maintain the integrity of their forces. Indeed it is an account of how they have been betrayed by their colleagues, superior officers and management.

The naming of an individual in this book should not in any way be taken to imply that he or she is guilty of an offence or improper behaviour; in many cases it is quite the reverse.