BENT

It’s amazing how many coppers are in this business. They’ve got it by the balls … It’s guaranteed you know … Everything’s protected from way high up.

Another on the bandwagon was former butcher and truck driver Maxwell Gudgeon, who joined the New South Wales Police in October 1963. From there his career was an upwardly mobile one until he joined the CIB in 1977. Then two years later came a defining moment. In May 1979 a colleague of Gudgeon’s made a series of arrests in Double Bay over a quantity of cannabis. Gudgeon interrogated one of the suspects at Flemington police station before the man was charged with supplying, a charge which carried a maximum of fifteen years. Early in 1980 Gudgeon was promoted to detective sergeant, a fortnight before the Double Bay suspect was committed for trial. The next year Gudgeon and a businessman were alleged to have purchased Knightvale, a property near Byrock, 60 kilometres south of Bourke in New South Wales. Whether due to the strain of becoming a property owner or some other reason, Gudgeon was placed under the care of a psychiatrist for a nervous disorder in the winter of that year. The medicinal properties in Indian hemp for relieving stress are well known and perhaps this was the reason he was alleged to have conspired with others to cultivate the drug at Knightvale from October that year. As for the Double Bay matter, in January 1981 a report from Gudgeon’s psychiatrist stating that he and the arresting officer in the case were both suffering from nervous disorders and that neither was well enough to attend court was sent to the Crown prosecutor’s office. The psychiatrist was unable to say when the pair might be well enough to give evidence and the Attorney-General entered a no bill in November 1982.

Gudgeon resigned from the police in August that year. He later approached a Detective Keenan to ask him to leave the police and become the manager of Knightvale, telling him what the property was to be used for and that the product would have a ‘quality better than that at Hay’—a reference to a police raid on a marijuana plantation there. Keenan blew the whistle and in November 1982, after a police raid on Knightvale, Gudgeon, senior constable Andrew Swan and three others were arrested. On the property were two lots, each of up to 6000 marijuana plants, valued at up to $6 million. It was clear that there had been an earlier harvest. In 1986 all were sentenced to ten years in prison, and in Gudgeon’s case there was no set pre-parole period.

Judge Anthony Collins told Gudgeon that he regarded him as the lynchpin and that the law made the gamble worth taking for many criminals, adding that, ‘Ten years is not ten years. Ten years for a first offender who behaves himself is a little over six years. Given a few Royal tours and a few warders’ strikes … five’. He called for ‘urgent legislative action’ to correct a situation that was resulting in some drug users receiving heavier penalties than the dealers themselves. A merciful Court of Appeal reduced Gudgeon’s sentence and he was released on parole in 1991.

Prison rarely has redemptive qualities. The month after his release Gudgeon set up a conspiracy in Queensland to import cannabis from Thailand. This time when he was caught he received fifteen years.

By then, however, bent officers such as had entered into the spirit of things, teaming up with career criminal Neddy Smith in the 1980s Sydney drug wars. During this period of free-for-all it was difficult to tell the difference between the criminals and some of the police.

Down south, drugs were relative latecomers to the vice industry in Victoria. In 1957 the officer in charge of the drug bureau reported that he had yet to find a marijuana smoker, although a few Chinese had been charged with possessing and smoking opium. Cannabis was criminalised in 1963 and, by 1973, 3601 offenders accused of ‘non-medicinal use of drugs’ had been detected across the state. The following year the number of offenders had doubled. As drug busts were made there were increased allegations against police of ‘misdeeds including brutality and corruption’. Drug squad Chief Inspector Roy Kyte-Powell believed that most allegations could not be substantiated but were time consuming and morale sapping.

It soon became clear, however, that at least some allegations against police had substance. In January 1981, after months of intelligence gathering, Operation Leo resulted in simultaneous raids on fifty properties near Swan Hill, where marijuana was thought to be growing in between grape vines. Nothing was found—a tip-off had prompted an early harvest. The source of the leak was never identified, but it was believed that it could only have come from within the force.

In the 1990s the force’s drug squad, rather than being enlarged as was probably necessary to try to stem the tide of heroin flooding the markets, was divided into three units. The first was to investigate the Asian heroin syndicates, the second was primarily responsible for investigating manufacturers and traffickers of amphetamines, and the third investigated heroin traffickers as well as cocaine and marijuana crops.

There were internal problems as well. Drug squad headquarters were still at Russell Street when, in October 1991, 1.3 kilograms of methamphetamine went missing, allegedly stolen from a locked and alarmed storeroom. Poor management and procedural deficiencies were blamed and several officers faced disciplinary measures.

Relatively easy to produce, amphetamines were being cooked in small laboratories. The profits were many and the dangers were few. A conviction for a major trafficking in heroin could earn twenty years and upwards; for a similar amphetamine conviction the penalty was a quarter or a third of that. By 1990 Melbourne had become the amphetamine capital of Australia. Two years later producers, as opposed to distributors, were to be the main police target.

The rise of gang violence in Melbourne in the 1990s stemmed, at least in part, from the high-risk police policy of arranging the manufacture of their own amphetamines in an attempt to break into the city’s network of dealers. By the middle of the decade a system had been devised whereby the police would buy precursor chemicals from wholesalers and, using controlled deliveries, they or trustworthy informers—if that is not an oxymoron—would sell on to the producers, which would provide evidence for prosecutions. The drug squad regularly set up buy-bust arrangements using informers and undercover police. The undercovers also occasionally sold, hence the need for supplies around the office. Damian Marrett, a drug squad undercover of the time, explained:

At that time we were doling out samples of our wares to interested parties … Victoria Police figured that if their covert operatives were out in the community, prepared to sell as well as buy, the targets would be more inclined to take us seriously. That was the thinking then … Granted the perception didn’t look good. A case could be made that we were dealing the stuff ourselves.

Unit 2 of the drug squad, now at the St Kilda Road police complex, operated what was later quaintly called ‘the chemical diversion desk’. The drugs and precurser chemicals were purchased from chemical companies by drug squad officers and, prior to use in buy-bust operations, were carefully recorded and kept at the out-of-town Attwood storage facility near Tullamarine airport. Unluckily, in 1992 a substantial amount was stolen and cheaper powders substituted. This awkward fact only emerged during the trial of two drug offenders, who insisted that drug exhibits be retested. Again the culprit was ‘management procedures’, found to be non-existent. Keys were left in unlocked drawers, the facility was never inspected and there was no audit trail or responsibility.

Attwood was ordered to lift its game. Detective Senior Constable Kevin Hicks—a fully fledged graduate of the major crime squad, disbanded for improper dealings with suspects and corrupt activities in the early 1990s—was put in charge to guard and take responsibility for the drugs and chemicals stored there.

Unfortunately, Hicks soon made friends with a drug-trafficking syndicate. When in August 1996 further thefts of chemicals from Attwood were suspected, the ethical standards department sent in Task Force Guardsman. Hicks was found to have supplied the syndicate with drugs, and a fake drug raid was even staged so that it could get its hands on precursor drugs to manufacture speed. He subsequently pleaded guilty to burglary, bribery and drug trafficking, and received a modest six years with a minimum of 4½ years.

In the mid-1990s documents crucial to Operation Phalanx, a massive investigation into amphetamine manufacturers, were stolen from Level 12 of the St Kilda Road complex. Gone was the brief on the decade-long involvement of the Black Uhlan motorcycle gang and their speed kingpin, John William Samuel Higgs. Gone also were documents identifying informers, only known as numbers, along with those identifying undercover drug cops. Those responsible were never discovered.

Now heading Unit 2 and so responsible for the chemical diversion program was Detective Inspector Reid. Unfortunately for him, a Beretta 9 mm pistol disappeared from his safe. Its theft was a mystery but did not reflect well on Reid’s leadership and responsibility. Reid was later charged and convicted of disciplinary offences before locating the missing pistol a few months later. Nonetheless he resigned. Even more unfortunately for the force, he was replaced by Detective Sergeant Wayne Strawhorn, described by a former colleague as ‘a true professional cop … set goals and absolutely determined to get the job done … whatever it took’. He had recently returned from overseas study and was brim full of drug crime-busting ideas. Other Unit 2 chemical diversion members were Detective Senior Constable Steve Paton and Detective Senior Sergeant Malcolm Rosenes.

Among prime targets for the drug squad were the Reading brothers, Lenny, Joe and Jeff, sometimes called the ‘Three Stooges’, who had been relatively unhindered by police raids for some years. ‘If they didn’t have a green light to deal drugs in Victoria, they were flat-out revving the car on amber!’, recalled Marrett.

In a classic example of the ability of the police to load members of families whom they consider to be criminals, when Malcolm Rosenes joined the drug squad under Wayne Strawhorn, one of his first missions was to head out to the western suburbs to raid Lenny Reading’s house. Strawhorn suggested to Rosenes that, as Lenny was apparently cooking with an exciting new recipe, Rosenes was likely to find three different precursor chemicals. Rosenes and his team scoured the house and found nothing. He phoned Strawhorn and was told to search in the backyard. Again Rosenes reported back in the negative. No worries: Strawhorn now directed him to hunt under a pile of rocks close to the back fence. And there Rosenes uncovered purple chemicals in a plastic bag. Now Strawhorn, directing things by remote control to keep a distance, told Rosenes to try between the shed and the fence. Again, Rosenes struck lucky. Two chemicals down and one to go. Finally Strawhorn suggested, off the top of his head, another hiding spot and there Rosenes found the third chemical stash. It was then that Rosenes, according to his biographer, the former lawyer and drug dealer Andrew Fraser, started to smell a rat in the upper ranks. ‘He had been used as the bunny to load Lenny.’

Rosenes wasn’t alone. Strawhorn sent another young recruit out to search Lenny’s house for a drug recipe book, known as ‘Uncle Fester’s Cookbook’. Inside was a one-page typed recipe for speed utilising precisely the three ingredients Rosenes had found in the backyard.

Reading protested his innocence and claimed that the gear had been planted. When Reading was tried for the three chemicals plus the recipe bust, the judge effectively directed the jury to acquit. The jury disagreed, but the judge had the final say and Reading received an entirely suspended sentence.

In the three years from 1998 nearly sixty clandestine laboratories were discovered. In 1999 a man regarded as Australia’s biggest amphetamines manufacturer was arrested, and a Melbourne identity was charged with conspiracy involving a shipping container of chemicals. But then the wheels began to fall off. There were allegations that chemicals were being stockpiled by the police. A secret bank account was opened by them and sometimes chemicals went missing. In December 2001 the drug squad was disbanded and replaced with the major drug investigation division. But the damage had already been done.

Meanwhile, across at Unit 1, the heroin trafficking unit, Detectives Glenn Sadler, Stephen Cox and Ian Ferguson were taking multicultural relations too far. They had as one of their informants Kenneth Lai, whom they supplied with heroin at a bargain price. He then sold it on, and in exchange the officers were to receive 30–40 per cent of his profits. The arrangement also provided for Lai to help them arrest other drug dealers, and the sweetener was that he would be given a portion of the heroin seized in any bust he facilitated. So it was a merry-go-round of heroin: the police could obtain free heroin from busts, they could sell it cheap to trafficker-informers, and the traffickers could on-sell it to dealers and kick back a share of the cash profits to the police. The police, informed by the traffickers, could then bust the dealers and reclaim the heroin. If the new set of dealers could then be persuaded to work with the police and dob in other dealers, it became a beautiful circular enterprise.

Another dealer, Duy Le, a friend of Lai’s, was arrested in August 1998 for aggravated burglary, and again in April 1999, this time for trafficking heroin. He pleaded guilty to the burglary and received a suspended sentence. He was then persuaded by Lai to get back into the heroin-trafficking game and began buying from the detectives. By mid-2000 Duy Le was buying a block of heroin from Ferguson every few days. The detectives also kept him informed of the efforts of the Asian squad to arrest him. In turn, he gave the drug squad information about dealers. Cox had by then retired from the force with a substantial gratuity.

It all came undone when Le was finally arrested in New South Wales in 2002 on the 1999 drug charges. He was induced to cooperate with the Ceja Task Force and became a key witness against the detectives on conspiracy charges. Evidence of the hundreds of thousands of dollars they had managed to accumulate was also compiled as corroboration.

Ferguson was additionally convicted of money laundering and in April 2006 received a twelve-year sentence with a minimum of eight to serve. Sadler and Cox were tried jointly, and in November 2006 Sadler was given ten with a six-year minimum, and Cox received seven with a four-year minimum. All appealed in 2009 without success.

The full disaster of the 1990s Victoria Police drugs policy became brutally clear on 18 October 2006. After three years on remand, high-flying Detective Senior Sergeant Wayne Strawhorn—dobbed in by drug-dealing lawyer Andrew Fraser—was convicted of trafficking 2 kilograms of pseudoephedrine to the late gangland leader Mark Moran and sentenced to a maximum seven years’ imprisonment. He was acquitted on three of four other charges, including trafficking the chemical to members of the Bandidos motorcycle gang. Strawhorn appealed against conviction and sentence, but in June 2008 these were dismissed. Another officer, Stephen Paton, had entered a guilty plea in June 2003 and was sentenced to six years with a three-year minimum. Rosenes had followed suit in October 2003 and received six with a 3½-year minimum.

Pending the trial and appeal of Strawhorn, the names of Rosenes and Paton were suppressed and a number of other cases were kept on hold. Once Rosenes and Paton entered guilty pleas, appellants came out of the woodwork, claiming that the detectives’ pleas constituted fresh evidence that might have led to the acquittal of those who had been convicted and there was the risk of a miscarriage of justice. Their hopes generally went unrewarded.

After this spate of cases Detective Sergeant Bill Patten, an original member of the Ceja Task Force, claimed that up to two dozen officers had escaped corruption charges and the only proper investigation would have been a royal commission. Other officers in difficulty at the time included Matthew Bunning, a former member of the drug squad, who was sentenced to a minimum of three years for providing information about intercepts, and former Victorian officer James McCabe, on secondment to the National Crime Authority (NCA), who failed to appear in Sydney to answer charges of robbery and drug dealing. He fled to Cambodia, from where he was expelled. On his return to Australia in 2008 he pleaded guilty to stealing 1 kilogram of drugs and served just over a year. On his release he returned to Cambodia and set up a unit to help abused children. Another officer who fell by the wayside was one-time Detective Senior Constable Paul Hatzakortzian, who was jailed for a year after pleading guilty to dealing in drugs. He had been working at Sexpo while on leave from the sexual offence and child abuse unit.

In February 2007 the Office of Police Integrity (ORI) had told Victorian Police Commissioner Christine Nixon that it had evidence against dozens of officers who had been involved in drug dealing, theft and associating with criminals. However, the OPI maintained that another royal commission was not necessary and the office was the best placed to deal with corruption.

Terence Hodson was by no means the first or last Western Australian villain who came to grief in Victoria, and he brought many people down with him. Born in Great Britain in 1947, he started his criminal career by stealing unattended purses at dances before moving to Western Australia in November 1974. On the face of things he was an old-style polite, even charming, crook, but deeper down he was a dobber who came to be regarded as a man who would give up anyone to save himself. In the early 1990s Hodson moved to Melbourne, where his Kew home was well guarded with an array of floodlights, heavy-duty wire grilles, security cameras and a pair of German shepherds.

On 27 September 2003 Hodson, on bail and lined up to give evidence in drugs trials, together with his handler, Detective Senior Constable David Miechel, were caught in flagrante stealing drugs from another dealer’s house in East Oakleigh. They had hoped to find $700 000 cash but were seen throwing bags over the back fence. In his flight Miechel was badly bitten by a police dog with whom he had a run-in and was bashed by the dog’s handler. Within hours of the burglary Hodson’s file, showing that he was a long-term informer, was stolen from a police station and released in the underworld. Miechel eventually went down for a minimum of fifteen years, reduced on appeal to twelve, after convictions for burglary, theft and trafficking a commercial quantity of drugs.

Hodson, as was his game, was preparing to give evidence against Miechel and Detective Sergeant Paul ‘Killer’ Dale—whom he claimed had masterminded the burglary—when, on 16 May 2004 he and his wife, Christine, were found shot dead at their home. There was no sign of a break-in and it is thought that they therefore must have known their killer. After their deaths, charges were dropped against Dale. Dale, who has always maintained his innocence of any wrongdoing whatsoever, was later charged with conspiracy over the death of Hodson, but when, in turn, Melbourne gang leader Carl Williams was killed on 19 April 2010 in the supposedly secure unit in Barwon Prison, that charge was also dropped. In 2013, after he was cleared of lying to the Australian Crime Commission, Dale called for a reinvestigation of the Hodson killings.

In September 2012 a suppression order was lifted and the Victorian public was at last allowed to know who killed the Hodsons—something they could have worked out for themselves with a little time on the internet. The answer was contract killer Rodney Collins, known as ‘The Duke’, already serving thirty-two years for the 1987 murder of another pair of drug dealers, Raymon and Dorothy Abbey; he will be ninety-eight before he becomes eligible for parole. That, of course, still leaves the all-important question of who took out the contract.

Over the border in South Australia, on 8 October 1981 The Advertiser published claims from its Extra team of journalists, who had been investigating organised crime in other states, that there was a substantial degree of corruption among members of the South Australian police. The allegations followed the usual pattern: green lighting, bricking, lawyers fixing cases with the police, standing over dealers, thefts of drugs and money, and a certainly amount of brutality. The Attorney-General indicated that he would set up an internal inquiry. This announcement did not generally go down well with those who would have preferred a royal commission. In a case that week a jury had disagreed over allegations that police had found seventeen bags of Indian hemp in the possession of Giuseppe Romeo and William Gray at Norwood back in April 1980. The bags had ‘accidentally’ been destroyed by the police and so could not be produced in evidence. Would it be possible for the public to be satisfied with an internal inquiry? The opposition wondered how it was that there had been no look at massage parlours and found it puzzling that some were harassed continually while others near the city centre continued to operate openly and apparently unimpeded. The Attorney-General was sure that the public would be happy. ‘These allegations need capable detective work and if anyone is to test the veracity of these allegations then this team will do just that.’

Unsurprisingly, the allegations were not well received by the police. The president of the South Australian Police Association, Inspector Barry Morse, was one who was righteously indignant when he spoke up for his members, saying he believed that the allegations were both ‘bland’ and ‘insubstantiated’. He thought that drug dealers were behind the allegations, which were designed to disrupt police investigation into the trade and were ‘an obvious attempt by drug dealers to discredit the police force’.

Depending upon one’s point of view, the report the following year either cleared the police or was a whitewash. Former Supreme Court judge Sir Charles Bright had been brought in to comment on the investigations and he found that witnesses had either backtracked, refused to cooperate or were untrustworthy. Of the principal witness, who, in fairness, had thirty-one convictions over a 28-year period, including a few for false pretences, Sir Charles wittily wrote:

What kind of man is Informant ‘A’? Many years ago, in one of his stories of the New York underworld, Damon Runyon introduced a character ‘Joey Perhaps’. Another character summed him up in these memorable words ‘The kindest thing I can consciously say about Joey Perhaps is—you can have him’. I adopt these words as a summary of Informant ‘A’.

Sir Charles found that in only one case was there real suspicion, but ‘Even in that case there is evidence to suggest a deliberate attempt to concoct a case of corruption’. What he did observe was that:

Once an allegation of corruption has been made against a policeman it is almost impossible for him to prove his innocence, assuming he is innocent.

He did, however, go on to advise that officers working in areas such as betting, liquor and drugs where there was a high risk of corruption should stay in the squad for a relatively short period of time.

Again unsurprisingly, not everyone was pleased with the outcome. The following week, an opposition call for a royal commission was defeated. Adelaide lawyer RC Bleechmore commented:

Look—this report has not even scraped the surface—what has happened as a result of the April Fool’s Day report is that certain officers are now prepared for any further proper inquiry.

Another year, another dollar. In the mid-1980s, on one day a year good citizens could ring a toll-free hotline and dob in a druggie or, better still, dob in a dealer. A number took the opportunity to dob in a neighbour whose dog might be annoying and ex-spouses dobbed in their former loved ones for unspecified bad behaviour, but despite these distractions Operation Noah was something of a success, rather defying the general belief that Australians don’t like dobbers. In 1987 there were some 400 calls, which led to fourteen people being charged with offences. The next year, in the first five hours 1300 people called the hotline with nearly 300 ‘valuable pieces of information’. Unfortunately, in 1989 the callers to Noah named thirteen Adelaide officers.

At the time Barry Moyse, by now chief inspector, was head of the South Australian drug squad, lecturing at schools on the dangers of drugs. He was also a one-time president of the South Australia Police Association and eventually he became Noah’s public face.

It was at that time that dealer and user George Octopodelis, for a long time another Mr X, was about to be franchised. Octopodelis claimed to have been introduced to the heroin trade by the Indian-born Essie Mooseek, who had started life in Australia as a hawker in Fremantle. Mooseek, alleged to be one of the top ten drug dealers in the southern hemisphere and who ran the Mr Oceanic ring, said to be bigger than the Mr Asia syndicate, absconded on bail in 1985 after he was charged with importing heroin to the value of $25 million.

Octopodelis had grown up in Adelaide but had started his career selling fake jewellery in Melbourne. After his friends there were named in the Woodward report on drugs he returned to Adelaide, where he built a drug empire. At its height he was controlling five dealers, who each controlled a street network of ten dealers.

It seems that during a drug bust in August 1986, when Octopodelis was busted over pink rock heroin sent from Sydney, Moyse found an opportunity to take him aside to a bathroom. When they had each satisfied themselves that the other was not wired, Moyse offered to supply Octopodelis with confiscated and recycled drugs. To cover himself he falsified police records that the drugs had been destroyed. In early November that year Moyse arranged a police internal affairs inquiry into allegations against himself. Unsurprisingly, he was cleared. The relationship lasted a bare ten months before Octopodelis turned on his supplier. Moyse should have made sure he was not being taped because Octopodelis was able to hand evidence of the deals to the NCA. Moyse was arrested in September 1987.

Over the months Moyse had made more than $100 000. He received a 27-year sentence that was reduced on appeal to twenty-one years after he pleaded guilty to seventeen charges of taking part in the supply and sale of heroin. Moyse, described by AFP Commissioner Mick Keelty as ‘A rotten egg cut from the bunch’, was released in 1999 and lived quietly, umpiring local cricket matches. He died aged sixty-five of a kidney-related cancer in September 2010. Perhaps back in 1981 Sir Charles should have paid closer attention to the views of Informant ‘A’.

After the conviction of Moyse, Octopodelis gave evidence to two NCA commissions claiming that two former New South Wales political figures had key roles in a massive interstate operation being run out of Sydney. He also claimed that Moyse’s co-defendant Rocco Sergei had Mafia connections. Despite his addiction to the drug, Octopodelis had luxury apartments in both Adelaide and Sydney, as well as a string of expensive cars. On 4 June 1989 the 32-year-old was found dead in his Porsche in Craigend Street, Darlinghurst. Earlier in the evening he and his girlfriend had injected themselves and when she woke she found him dead. He had left the witness-protection scheme the previous October. At the time eleven people were awaiting trial based on transcripts of taped conversations between him and Moyse. Octopodelis himself was awaiting trial on charges of assaulting the police and fraud. Two Kings Cross officers were alleged to have taken $3000 from him, but no charges were brought and suggestions that he had been given a hot shot went unproved.

The belief was that, while Moyse was the only officer to take the fall, he had not been acting alone. Investigative journalist Chris Masters told The Advertiser before a Four Corners program on the events went out:

We have interviewed prostitutes, dealers, users, who all say police are supplying them drugs. The drug and brothel trades are franchised by police who, instead of policing properly, limit and regulate by doing deals with these people.

Meanwhile the Moyse case had a serious spin-off. There were questions about how one of the witnesses, drug dealer and brothel keeper Gianni Malvaso, had been given a suspended sentence of three years. Could it be that Attorney-General Chris J Sumner had been blackmailed into it? The story that circulated in Hindley Street and the surrounding area was that Sumner was a regular brothel visitor and he liked being whipped and ridden as a horse by one or more of the girls. Both allegations were something he denied at the first opportunity, but nevertheless it drove him to a minor breakdown. The allegations were repeated by Chris Masters on Four Corners in 1988. His argument was that the police had franchised SP bookmaking in the 1960s and prostitution in the 1970s. Now, in the 1980s, they were franchising drugs. Masters claimed that since he had been in Adelaide investigating the program:

Ranks have closed in the police, people know we’re down here and we’re getting letters under the door etc.

The program is a big message for all Australia. Things are going on which the people of Adelaide should know about. I want them to get angry, just like Queensland did.

But they did not. While NCA inquiry Operation Hydra was opened, the outcome was again inconclusive. Prostitutes and dealers might have been prepared to talk with Masters and his researchers, but they were less forthcoming when interviewed by the police.

In Hydra’s report of February 1991 the witnesses were coyly identified as figures in Greek mythology, but there was no Pandora’s box. There were few brothels and many escort agencies in the city. Many of the brothel owners had recording equipment on the premises, but none had used it to tape any clients, let alone Mr Sumner. One girl had made the mistake of mixing up Mr Sumner with a client who looked like him and was also called Chris. There was no evidence whatsoever that he had ever been in a brothel or been blackmailed. But what did emerge was that a Patti Walkuski had run an illegal brothel in the city for fourteen years and a Geoffrey Williams had been involved with seventy brothels from 1972. One brothel in the city, the Holdfast Health Clinic, had run unhindered for an astounding twenty-six years.

In 1991 a former senior constable received three years and another a suspended sentence after agreeing to give evidence. They had been part of a gang of up to ten uniformed officers who had been moonlighting as shop and office breakers for several years. It appears the first inkling came from another officer who, said Commissioner David Hunt, had ‘discovered something was wrong or amiss’. Although he denied that corruption was ‘institutionalised’, it was thought that at the time at least five NCA investigations were targeting the Adelaide police.

In Western Australia one of the scandals of the late 1990s was that of the Kalgoorlie Six: police officers who were alleged to have been flying ecstasy into and out of the town, and to be in cahoots with members of the Gypsy Jokers motorcycle gang. In 1992 a sting was planned and Christos Trifon was given $18 000 to buy morphine from the detectives. Unfortunately, instead of playing his part, he absconded with the money, for which he was given an eighteen-month suspended sentence. Two of the officers were sacked and two resigned. An inquiry into the Six became part of the, again inconclusive, Kennedy Royal Commission of 2002.

Meanwhile, across the continent, Queensland had more than a fair share of problems of its own.