BENT

It is rather amazing that at the CI Branch very few, if any, voluntary confessions are obtained from people who are allegedly invited to enter the CI Branch while in the company of friends … But not long after they are separated from their companions, out pops a confession, freely and voluntarily admitting every element of the offence in such a fashion that one might believe that the accused was a lawyer who understood how to make admissions acknowledging the truth of every aspect of the charge.

In 1963 at a United Nations seminar in Canberra, during a session discussing human rights being breached by police interview techniques, the judges present were unanimous that the extent to which admissions and confessions seemed to be obtained by intimidation was an ‘agonising problem’. They said that tape recording interviews would help solve the problem. But police chiefs attending the seminar argued that ‘much police evidence was gleaned during a car trip or while walking down a corridor’, policemen ‘only hit back spontaneously when provoked by suspects’ and ‘if police were put in a straitjacket’ and denied the ‘flexibility’ they needed in interrogation, then ‘the real job they had to perform would get out of control’. One delegate suggested that the police attitude was ‘perturbing’. Too much time was being spent by police chiefs defending existing national practices, and too little on ways to improve them, said Professor Julius Stone, Chalis Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Sydney.

The next year, during the investigation and questioning of three Italian men for the murder of market gardener Antonio Monaco, two of the men were held for eighteen hours and were, they claimed, kicked, punched and pistol-whipped by police. Dr Macera, an assistant police commissioner from Reggio in Italy, had been flown in to help with the investigation and had advocated ‘toughness in handling Italians of this class’. During the trial of two of the suspects, Mr Justice Sholl of the Victorian Supreme Court disallowed the confessions, finding that ‘it is impossible to be satisfied that these injuries were not inflicted by the police’. He found that the detectives’ contemporaneous notes prompted ‘an uneasy suspicion that [they] … may have been written after the interviews had been completed’.

On 4 June 1965 an exasperated Sholl was quoted in The Age as saying, ‘After sixteen years on the bench, I have lost confidence in methods used by police in interrogations. The more so since suggestions from the bench to modernise what is done is entirely disregarded’. His comments should have taken no one by surprise: he had been making them since 1961. The acting chief secretary of the day, ER Meagher, was reported as saying that he would discuss the judge’s comments with senior police, but no real change resulted from any discussions. It was as though the police and government would simply not take the hint.

Then in September 1965 opposition leader Clive Stoneham announced in parliament that he had obtained and listened to some nine hours’ worth of tape recordings containing allegations of misconduct and corruption against a number of police. The man involved, known as Mr X, was a police informer and a convicted criminal. His wife also had allegations to make. Mr X claimed that he had only made the allegations after his wife had been threatened and his police handlers had turned on him. He went directly to a judge who had previously sentenced him and the complaint was referred to the Attorney-General.

From then on discussion of these corruption allegations was front-page news in The Age. Would the officers be named? Who would hear the case? Why was the government taking so long to investigate? Stoneham was persistent, saying in parliament that the government had known of the existence of corruption in the ranks since at least June 1962. As morsels were drip fed to the media, it appeared that the corrupt behaviour related to instances of ‘framing’ suspects, evidence being ‘planted’, cooking up false confessions or admissions, rorts with informants, improperly withdrawing charges and good old-fashioned lying.

By the end of 1965 seven policemen were to face disciplinary charges, including one of ‘disgraceful and improper conduct’ against a senior constable. To an extent there was supporting evidence for Mr X’s claims from ex-boxer Robert George Flannery, who alleged that the police had planted a pistol on him. Stipendiary magistrate WN Thompson chaired the Police Disciplinary Board that began on 2 December, and first he determined that the crucial witness, Mr X, could not be named as he and his wife could be in danger from criminal elements. However, Mr X was soon to be outed as housebreaker Brian Donald Latch. Counsel for the policemen was Ray Dunn.

It is not difficult, particularly for a man of Dunn’s skills, to cross-examine a man like Latch—prior convictions, especially after pleas of not guilty, can be lovingly put, and motives such as malice and revenge can be examined in detail. Time and again Latch was made to pay for his treachery in turning on his former police friends. He was forced to admit numerous priors, including buying stolen radios up to forty a time from ‘dozens of men’, as well as two spells in mental hospitals. Finally, he turned to the magistrate, saying, ‘I’ve admitted being an informer against criminals. Now they want me to inform on my own family’. Dunn had already accused him of dobbing in his own solicitor over a procedural matter. Latch’s unfortunate wife was forced to admit that the dress she was wearing at the hearing had been stolen.

In March 1966 Thompson dismissed charges against one officer relating to the improper withdrawal of charges against Flannery. Further allegations by Latch dropped by the wayside and a few paltry charges hovered around. In the end only a couple of minor charges stuck. Thompson found that no attack on a sergeant’s honesty or integrity had been substantiated: ‘We think the error he made was one of judgment’. The penalties were nugatory.

By August that year Latch was living under an assumed name in Rockingham, Western Australia, with his wife and family. He was complaining that he had been recognised by a Victorian criminal and was in fear for his life. Some years later, back in Victoria, Latch wrote his self-serving memoir, Mr X—Police Informer.

During the year of Mr X, police morale was said to be at an all-time low. Resignations were flooding in, and so were complaints about ‘police brutality’ and provocation during demonstrations at the time of US President Lyndon Johnson’s visit.

The Police Association was outraged. At a meeting attended by 400 members, police complained that Mr X, who had initially tele- phoned a judge with his story, had hoodwinked the solicitor- general, had brought the police into disgrace and, perhaps worst of all, had jumped the Housing Commission’s waiting list. There were also complaints about the way the press had behaved. Significantly, members wanted the association to provide financial aid for legal advice on the possibility of civil action against the solicitor-general, the chief commissioner of police, any of the assistant commissioners or members of the force involved in launching these prosecutions. If the legal advice was favourable, members said that further financial aid should be given to prosecute the matter in the civil court. It was a response that should have demonstrated to the government the strength of the Police Association. It turned out to be a rehearsal for the destruction of the Beach report, which called for extensive police-procedural reform ten years later.

One general problem in any force is that the misdemeanours of an outstanding officer who is also corrupt—Ray Kelly, Fred Krahe and in New South Wales, and later Paul Higgins in Victoria immediately spring to mind—are overlooked because of his arrest and conviction record. And this was the case in Victoria of one-time head of the homicide squad Jack Matthews. He was one of the first to recognise the unchecked and unmonitored rise of organised crime, particularly organised ethnic crime, and he was adroit in solving the murders relating to the Victoria fruit market in which Italian factions fought each other for control. It was Matthews who had persuaded Chief Secretary Arthur Rylah that foreign expertise, including the likes of Dr Macera, was necessary to crack Italian crime circles. That was the plus side of his career. On the debit side were the abortion rackets he ran with other officers.

Medical abortionists had thrived in Melbourne for at least fifty years. One, William Fenton Bowen, had survived a prosecution back in the 1940s. Bowen’s offsider Stanley Charles Wyatt, a former homicide chief inspector, had as a detective first constable been ordered out of the CIB by Chief Commissioner Alexander Duncan. He had later been a member of the gaming squad but had resigned from the police in 1948 and set himself up as an SP bookmaker.

Wyatt had two useful friends, solicitor Roy McMennemin and his father, Harry ‘Mac’ McMennemin, a former CIB officer who had served in the police for forty years and now ran an off-course gambling club above a television-repair shop in Geelong. He also maintained links with unsavoury local abortionist Mario Marchesani, who was known to have roused patients from the anaesthetic to let them know that the fee would be doubled as they were a bit further along than first thought. Marchesani’s son-in-law was in charge of the Geelong CIB, having earlier been attached to the sheep- stealing squad. When Wyatt was arrested in 1962 by Ronald Jackson of the gaming squad, the pair got him off on a technicality. Wyatt later became an informer for Jackson.

In 1959 Wyatt went to live in Ascot Vale with Elva Isabella Moran, also known as Bella Lewis, who was then the licensee of the Red Lion in Carlton, from where Wyatt ran his business. As a result she lost her licence. In May that year he was sentenced to 3½ months’ imprisonment for an assault on her and related charges. Around 1966 he became an abortionist, later working with Fenton Bowen, who had rooms opposite the law courts and who was called over if a defendant was taken ill. The alcoholic Fenton Bowen was unable to perform the abortions because of the shakes, but he saw the patients and then sent them into the back room, where ‘Charlie did the business’, recalls one lawyer. A ditty was written about the abilities of the pair:

You rape ’em

We scrape ’em

No foetus

Can beat us.

Throughout the latter half of 1969, the Scots-born, Melbourne-based abortion-reform advocate Dr Bertram Wainer, described as ‘headstrong, erratic, egotistical and self-serving’, had been making allegations claiming that police officers were standing over abortionists. On 5 December that year a number of Melbourne doctors who practiced as abortionists, including Bertram Wainer and Fenton Bowen, who had been convicted on an abortion charge in September and had been deregistered, handed in affidavits to Truth, which forwarded them to the solicitor-general. They contained allegations that abortionists had to pay some members of the elite homicide squad $150 a week each to avoid raids. Other payments to corrupt officers ranged from $600 to a lump sum of $1200, which would include cover for the ‘possible fatality’ of a patient. The chief commissioner was directed to investigate the complaints, but five out of six officers named refused to see him. As a result, in January 1970 the government appointed an independent, one-man board of inquiry in the form of William Kaye QC ‘to investigate whether members of the Force had demanded or accepted money from persons concerned with abortion in Victoria’. Kaye sat for the next five months.

Unfortunately, when it came to it Bowen, who may well have been in the early stages of dementia, he refused to give evidence before Kaye, so depriving historians of an account of his relationship with Wyatt and his mistress Elva Moran, matriarch of the Moran family later involved in the gangland wars.

Wyatt, however, was a principal witness, standing throughout the five days of his evidence. He told Kaye that ex-CIB officer Harry McMennemin had been for several years the head of ‘Crime Incorporated’ and he had boasted that he had a direct line to Police Commissioner Reg Jackson, with whom he often lunched. Wyatt said that McMennemin had cashed cheques for him on which he had forged his wife’s signature. He also claimed that he had some ‘connections’ but denied paying police through McMennemin. In turn McMennemin denied the allegations Wyatt had made.

Kaye found that there was evidence against Superintendent John Matthews, inspector Jack Ford, detective Martin Jacobson and retired station officer Frederick ‘Bluey’ Adam, known also as ‘Thumper’ for obvious reasons, who was once regarded as the scourge of Melbourne’s criminal fraternity but who by then weighed 140 kilograms and was an alcoholic. Lawyer Frank Galbally thought, ‘He saw little harm in distorting the truth if he thought that the accused deserved to be convicted for one reason or another’. In 1971 all were charged with conspiring to obstruct the course of justice by accepting bribes to protect the illegal activities of abortionists.

Before their trial Margaret ‘Peggy’ Berman, receptionist at an East Melbourne clinic—and godmother to a child of standover man Norman Bradshaw, and the one-time lover of Norval Morris, who founded the criminology department at the University of Melbourne—pleaded guilty to abortion-related offences. Released on bond and given an indemnity against prosecution, she later gave evidence claiming that the officers had stood over the abortion clinic where she worked, demanding payment in return for warning the doctors of potential raids. Unemployed in 1953, she had gone to a doctor for an abortion and had left with a £25-a-week job. The doctor was in the process of selling his practice and Bluey Adam took £50 a week from the purchaser.

The doctors had then been the victim of what Berman called a somersault. They had, she maintained, originally been paying Adam, who had passed them on to Ford, Matthews and Jacobson, who demanded even more money. In particular, for two or three years she had been giving Ford, her former lover and then head of the homicide squad, $600 a month retainer from her employers as well as $200 a month of her own money to pay his gaming debts. Matthews thought the money was compensation for being overworked and underappreciated.

At the trial Ford heaped abuse on his former mistress, claiming that he thought she had tried to kill him. She had, he said, put poison into a bottle of whisky by injecting it through the cork with a hypodermic needle. It did none of them any good. When Matthews gave evidence he admitted that in eight years as homicide chief he had not arrested one abortionist.

Adam may have been an alchoholic, but he retained his sense of humour. Asked by prosecuting counsel if he had a nickname, he replied that he had. The prosecutor then made a foolish—possibly even fatal—error, saying, ‘Perhaps you’d like to share that nickname with the court’. ‘Honest Fred’ was the crushing reply.

Matthews and Ford were jailed for five years. They were all smiles after the jury verdict and kept up the front for the media at their appeals, but, before Matthews was sent back to Pentridge after one appearance, he was heard to snarl at reporters ‘get back to your brothels, you bastards’.

Both were released after serving rather under half their time. Jacobson served thirteen months. Matthews was later given a job writing on consumer affairs at Truth, the newspaper whose campaign had in part led to his destruction. He was assigned the chair of Evan Whitton, the journalist who had exposed him, but he took these humiliations in good part—perhaps he had no alternative. Adam was acquitted and died of stomach cancer on 14 April 1973.

Peggy Berman thought that the only lasting effect of the Kaye inquiry and the case was that the price of abortions leapt to $400. After being told in the 1960s that she had cancer and only had eighteen months to live, Peggy unexpectedly survived until she died, aged seventy-nine after a heart attack in December 2002.

An Age editorial reflected on the case:

It would have been naive to suppose that responsible ministers and officials, and successive police chiefs, had no inkling of what was going on.

It could not be expected that the case would go without reprisals and in 1971 Bowen, Wyatt and Elva Moran were all charged with abortion offences. During Bowen’s trial doctors rallied round their colleague, one saying that after Bowen had suffered a stroke on Christmas Day 1967 he had advised him to give up practice. A psychiatrist said that to the layman Bowen was in a ‘second childhood’ and he would ‘take advice from people he would not normally have taken it from’. Bowen was acquitted on fourteen counts on 7 December. Interviewed after the acquittal, he told reporters that he had applied for re-registration that very day.

During the trial Wyatt alleged that not only had inspector Jack Matthews framed men for murder but that when the police raided Fenton Bowen and seized his card records, six of them related to policewomen. ‘There are many policemen who would like to see me out of circulation, because of my peculiar knowledge of their activities. Police feeling against me is running very high at the moment because I know a great deal about them,’ he told the jury in an unsworn statement from the dock. He said he had twenty-one tapes of officers discussing not only the abortion racket but also robberies and payroll robberies. It did him no good. Wyatt and Moran, described by one witness as a ‘marvellous woman’, were convicted on a total of twenty-five charges. Wyatt received 4½ years, and Elva Moran, who said she had never held an instrument, merely the hands of the distressed women, went down for twelve months.

Later Wyatt would be portrayed by some as a loveable rogue, but he was also regarded by the cognoscenti as a ‘dangerous, incorrigible and self-serving criminal’. Peggy Berman was horrified to hear that he had become an abortionist. When Wyatt heard about her horror, he happily said that he would have her killed.

If the Victorian police thought that after the successful prosecution of Matthews and the others Bertram Wainer would let up they were wrong. He was not nearly finished with them and in 1974 he presented sufficient evidence to the government for it to undertake a preliminary inquiry into his new allegations.

The result was that the very experienced Barry Beach QC was appointed to sit as another one-man board of inquiry to report on whether there was ‘any credible evidence raising a strong and probable presumption that any, and if so which, members of the Victoria Police Force’ were guilty of criminal offences, breaches of standing orders or ‘harassment or intimidation of any member of the public’.

Beach began by advertising in the newspapers for members of the public to come forward. The result was not a trickle or even a flow of complaints but something approaching a deluge. The total number of complaints was 131, but Beach decided to examine only twenty-one. The inquiry lasted fifteen months, during which time 290 witnesses were called.

There were, of course, the usual criminal stalwarts giving evidence of brutality, including bank robbers Peter George Gibb, Joseph Power, John Palmer and Barry Quinn. The brother of another bank robber, ‘Jockey’ James Smith, also gave evidence and so did a man who was bundled through a window after the police raided a room while chasing the Melbourne heavy Laurie Prendergast.

However, some cleanskins also came forward. Among them was a man who was viciously assaulted and his wife abused by officers as she waited to collect him after a dinner he was attending, as well as a solicitor’s clerk. These were not the sort of people whom the police could be expected to treat as dingoes.

Beach was unimpressed with much of the police evidence, some from very senior men. He found that certain high-ranking officers ‘will lie on oath if occasion suits them and no proper investigation will be made’. Of one senior sergeant, he commented:

One of the most unimpressive of the police officers who gave evidence before the Board. He is clearly a man who will give false evidence whenever the occasion suits him.

Overall, Beach found that police used high-handed, violent and illegal tactics against both known criminals and members of the public in order to achieve their ends, and that police would conspire and commit perjury as necessary, either in court hearings or when appearing before him. His report also identified instances of inappropriate use of informers and the existence of a ‘brotherhood syndrome’, whereby police at all levels would do whatever was required to protect workmates. What also came across from the report, which the Rupert Hamer government of the time originally did not want to release, is the sheer helplessness experienced by men and women who find themselves in a police station.

In the final outcome Beach made extensive recommendations for police procedural reform in areas such as the investigation of complaints and the interrogation of people under arrest. He was scathing about the complaint processes and the standard of investigations existing at that time, saying ‘the Board’s inquiry into [specific incidents] established beyond doubt the undesirability of police investigating complaints against police’. Beach wanted fifty-five officers to be charged with a variety of offences, including perjury, assault, corruptly receiving money and conspiracy. Among them was Paul Higgins, whom Beach thought should be charged with assault, conspiracy and malicious damage. Had he been, hundreds of thousands of dollars might have been saved.

Instead what followed was a triumph for naked aggression by the Police Association. The protests over the Mr X case had indeed merely been a very useful dry run. This time more than 4000 men and women from a force of 6400 met at Festival Hall on 18 October 1976 to formulate a plan of resistance. They had not seen the Beach report; they did not know what his recommendations were, and they did not know which officers he had named and why, but they gathered in what the president of the Police Association, LJ Blogg, described as ‘the greatest demonstration of unity in the history of the Association’.

The meeting instituted a ‘work to rule’ campaign, but there were hints also of a strike threat. In the face of such massive industrial opposition, Premier Hamer backed down and accepted a series of demands from the rank and file. Among these was one specifying that:

Any change in police procedures was to be the result of a conference involving the police department, the Police Association and the government and not made on any recommendations made by Beach.

Instead of the Beach report being effectively a committal hearing, as had been the case with Kaye, now seventeen officers faced actual committal proceedings—fifteen were found to have no case to answer. No bills were entered against the remaining two. As for Beach’s recommendations for change, again the government backed down and set up a new inquiry, this time chaired by J Norris QC and implicitly tasked with watering down the Beach report.

In 1977 Mick Miller became chief commissioner and almost immediately clashed with the association, whose policy, ‘My Association right or wrong’ did not include the nineteenth-century US senator Carl Schurz’s addendum, ‘and if wrong, to be set right’. There was no question of members being in the wrong. The Office of Police Integrity’s board’s report Past Patterns gives an example of the tortuous road to be followed if an officer was to be disciplined:

Once he [Miller] had attended the Dawson Street police complex in Brunswick. By chance, he found a member putting petrol into the tank of his private motorbike from the police bowser. In due course, the member was charged and appeared at court where he was convicted by the Magistrate. The member’s barrister told the Magistrate the conviction could result in his dismissal from the Force and the Magistrate placed him on a good behaviour bond. He was then arraigned before the Police Discipline Board that also found against him, and dismissed him from the Force. The offender appealed to the Police Service Board, which reinstated him. On his return to the Force, he was posted to the Missing Persons Bureau, where he became a malcontent. He took sick leave and, in due course, was boarded out, medically unfit on the grounds of ‘management-induced stress’.

Like Tony Lauer in New South Wales, Miller would not accept that there was entrenched corruption in the force. However, in 1981 it became apparent that all was not well with the licensing, gaming and vice squad, with suggestions that the entire unit had been compromised by longstanding and systemic corruption—in other words, from the top down.

Operation Zebra was set up, and the story of the investigation followed the usual lines, with considerable ingenuity being displayed by suspected officers to avoid questioning—perhaps more than that displayed by the investigators, who were hampered by both lack of expertise and today’s technical equipment. Although he had never previously been known to suffer from epilepsy, one man had a ‘fit’ when interviewed. He then took sick leave, before successfully retiring on a pension, claiming that his early retirement was due to stress brought on by the actions of management. Another, when required to answer a report explaining his actions, fired a number of shots through the document with his service revolver. He then went to a nearby hotel and never returned to the force. In the wash-up there was sufficient evidence to prosecute just one man. However, eighteen members retired, resigned or went on long-term sick leave. Operation Zebra may not have produced convictions, but some 560 offenders were fined nearly a quarter of a million dollars, and it was believed that SP bookmaking was temporarily wiped out in the state and the operators of Chinese card games who were linked to Triads were exposed.

Out of Zebra was born Zulu, when it was alleged that a senior police officer was in a corrupt relationship with former lawyer Mario Condello. Born in 1952 and educated at Fitzroy High before going on to study law at the University of Melbourne, Condello, the son of a painter and decorator from Calabria, was a thoroughly undesirable man with whom any officer, let alone a senior one, should never have become entangled. Almost from the start of his legal career he was involved in laundering and extortion. In December 1982 he was sentenced to six years’ imprisonment after a marijuana crop was found on land he leased near Ararat. A fortnight earlier he had been struck off the rolls by the Supreme Court.

After his release from prison he became the owner of a restaurant in Bourke Street and, said one of his former lawyers, ‘he also had an interest in the cemetery business’. The next year he was found guilty of two counts of arson. On 5 March 1985 he stood trial for the attempted murder of Richard Jones, a businessman who had upset another. Condello had been called in to deal with the recalcitrant Jones, who was shot in the stomach through a doona as he lay in bed. Amazingly, Jones survived because feathers plugged the wound. Condello was found not guilty after a confession he had made was ruled to be not under caution. In 1986 he received four years for conspiracy to defraud an insurance company. His business bought 120 000 prints for $2.40 each and arranged a sham sale in Italy, which valued them at $1.4 million. The prints were said to have burned in Naples during an earthquake riot.

The senior police officer was exonerated and after 2½ years Operation Zulu was wound up. Condello lived another two decades before he became one of the last men killed in the long-running Melbourne gang war.

As always, where products or services are illegal but wanted or desperately needed by the public, there is the temptation for police officers to look the other way, in exchange for some consideration. Graft will find a way.