.’IN AND OUT OF THE WOOD
What Queensland did in 1979 New South Wales did in 1995, its royal commission not reaching quite so high but perhaps wider than the Fitzgerald inquiry. Throughout the 1980s independent MP John Hatton had been a thorn in the flesh for a series of governments with his repeated allegations of corruption and his calls for a royal commission into the New South Wales Police. In the early 1990s he began to assemble evidence that he hoped would be sufficient to force the government to launch an inquiry. There was never a hope in the years during which there was a Labor majority, but in 1994 the John Fahey Liberal government was in a minority and Hatton saw a window of both opportunity and hope. Working with him were two police officers, Kimbal Cook and Debbie Locke, her detective husband Greg, Cook’s sister Jackie Payne, adviser Alan King (who had been kidnapped and locked in the boot of a car during an inner-city anti-development campaign) and journalist Morgan Ogg.
On 11 May 1994, shortly after Hatton began his historic speech calling for a royal commission, which lasted nearly an hour and a half, into the public gallery of the Legislative Assembly marched a phalanx of senior police officers, resplendent in full dress uniform, who formed row upon row of what was described as ‘intimidating lines of blue’. Ranking from deputy commissioner, to assistant commissioner, to inspector, the officers were intent on staring down Hatton and his supporters. Nigel Hadgkiss, later appointed chief investigator of the royal commission, thought ‘Hatton’s performance during that marathon debate was a brave one. After all, he was no spring chicken at the time’.
By a vote of forty-six to forty-five his motion forced the Fahey government to establish a royal commission. And—unlike the one in Adelaide, which many thought to have been a whitewash—a right Pandora’s box this turned out to be, with reverberations that continued for the next twenty years. Chaired by Justice James Wood, the commission sat for more than 450 days, heard from 902 public witnesses and cost an estimated $64 million. Even its critics agreed that it was the most thorough and far-reaching of all Australian inquiries into the police. The fascinated public learned a new language—that of corrupt police officers—where a ‘giggle’ or a ‘joke’ was a bribe and a ‘laugh’ a large bribe, a ‘whippy’ was money stolen by police during a raid, and a ‘green light’ was given to privileged criminals to carry out crime.
The commission’s broad terms of reference were to inquire into the existence of corruption and misconduct within the service and into the efficacy, or otherwise, of its internal affairs branch. In 1993 Police Commissioner Tony Lauer, who had done a great deal to clear up corruption in the time when his predecessor, the much-respected John Avery, was the commissioner, had gone on the record saying, ‘In New South Wales we are at the cutting edge of policing as far as our ability to act on corruption among officers’. The next year there was another statement that would come to haunt him: ‘It ought to be my responsibility that this service never again has working among it .’
At the beginning of the Wood Commission in December 1994 Lauer again held himself hostage to fortune when he said that ‘in today’s Police Service institutionalised corruption does not exist’. Asked by counsel Gary Crookes QC how he could be so confident that the police culture in New South Wales had changed for the better, he replied that he walked ‘among my troops’, adding ‘I do that extensively and I expose myself to the Police Service Officers’, which may have been an unfortunate way of putting things.
The commission’s star witness was corrupt former detective Trevor Haken, who had worked in Darlinghurst and for a while had been a member of the Commonwealth/State Joint Task Force into Drug Trafficking. At an early stage in the inquiry he had been selected as a man likely to roll over and, provided with a mini-camera, he was persuaded to tape and film his dealings with his corrupt colleagues. On 12 September 1995 he gave evidence about his dealings, including the 1983 New Year’s Eve divvying up of $200 000 taken by officers from drug dealers. One of those receiving officers, he said, was then Assistant Commissioner Ray Donaldson.
Called the next day, unsurprisingly Donaldson denied Haken’s allegations, claiming that the junior officer was a drunk and an extortionist. He, Donaldson, had never witnessed and certainly not taken part in any corruption. And it was something he continued to deny, although a number of former officers came forward to give evidence that supported Haken’s allegations.
Another officer, Graham ‘Chook’ Fowler, whom Haken had recorded on film stuffing a $1000 bribe from club owner Steve Hardas down the front of his trousers, at least had an ingenious defence, telling the commission, ‘It must have been an actor’. (This was more or less the same defence used by officers from the Victorian armed offenders squad when they were filmed bashing a suspect some ten years later.) The commission found that Fowler had given false evidence about a sham accident, in which he had supposedly slipped on a spilt milkshake, in an effort both to claim compensation and avoid giving evidence. He was also found to have made a series of false entries in his official police notebook, recording his presence on duty in Sydney at a time when he had, in fact, been in the Philippines with another corrupt detective, Larry Churchill.
As the weeks went on it was apparent that, when sufficiently armed, Wood was quite prepared to be ruthless with police officers who initially followed the golden rule that they would be all right provided they all stuck together. They were swiftly disabused of this theory.
It was the cross-examination on 11 December 1995 of Wayne Eade by Virginia Bell, counsel for the commission, that broke their collective resistance. First Eade denied any involvement in criminal or even improper behaviour and then he was shown a film in which he behaved and spoke in quite the reverse manner. After the shock of seeing her husband’s secret life exposed, Eade’s wife appealed for the incriminating videos to be banned from prime-time television.
Detective Constable Duncan Demol was another who changed his mind over a weekend. On a Friday afternoon he had been staunch, saying that anything he had done had been in the interests of the police. Haken he considered to be a good, decent man. The gallery hooted. On the following Monday Demol told of his first day on the squad in 1986, when other officers took him to a Darlinghurst brothel and told him, ‘You’re not a cop until you can work pissed’. And things had never looked up from there. He told the commission that officers considered the law to be a joke and that ‘scrumdowns’, in which police officers fabricate the scenario of an arrest, were common—‘you had to do it to get a conviction’. Another officer said that the arrest rate rather the conviction rate was what mattered.
Historically, few investigations had gone further than requiring officers to take long- or short-term sick leave, asking them to resign and, if they did not, dismissing them. The commission was no exception. At the end of 1995 an amnesty was offered to corrupt officers if they agreed to tell all and provide evidence against their colleagues. This was, said Wood, a once-and-for-all amnesty. Those who did not take advantage of it would not get a second chance. They had until 9 February 1996 to come out of the locker room. Resignation would be required, but they would be allowed to keep their superannuation, pension and any ill-gotten gains.
Specialist officers from the Fraud Enforcement Agency, northwest regional crime squad and drug squad were implicated in particularly serious abuses and criminality. A large number of uniform officers also left the service due to the disclosure of misconduct. In the final report a total of 284 police officers were adversely named, 46 briefs of evidence were sent to the DPP and by 2001 nine officers had pleaded guilty to corruption offences. Seven police officers received jail sentences, including Eade and Fowler, who received a two-year minimum sentence in February 2000. Wood found:
A state of systemic and entrenched corruption which extended throughout certain squads, across whole areas, and reached very senior officers.
The contract of Assistant Commissioner Ray Donaldson, who had gone head to head with Haken, was not renewed and that of Bob Lysaught, the police commissioner’s chief of staff, was simply torn up. Charges against fourteen officers were dismissed because of irregularities in search warrants and their execution. There were other casualties, however, and in 2010 Steven Reeves, a 29-year honest police veteran, who had his future ambitions stymied by evidence given at the commission by his corrupt boss, Bob Lysaught, was awarded $2 million for his lost career prospects and his 10-year ordeal at the hands of the force.
By 2007 twelve people involved in the commission had committed suicide. The highest profile of them all had been retired judge David Yeldham, due to face the commission after admitting that he had been questioned by police over alleged indecent behaviour at a railway station some six years earlier. Others had died, their illnesses exacerbated, so their families believed, by their involvement.
With the commission winding down, in mid-January 1996 Lauer, forced to accept that corruption was endemic in certain branches of the force, resigned as police commissioner and a search for a new appointment began. Untouched by the scandal were a number of perfectly good home-grown candidates, including Christine Nixon, who went on to become the police commissioner of Victoria, Clive Small and Jeff Jarrett, who along with around seventy others, all applied. But it was decided that a global search should begin for what Nixon described as ‘a new commissioner-cum-saviour’ to show that the government was serious about changing police culture.
The position was hawked around senior officers in Great Britain before, in June 1996, Peter Ryan—a lecturer at Bramshill Police College in England—was called in at a salary of rather more than that of the premier to drink from the poisoned chalice. Although he had been chief constable of rural Norfolk, Ryan had never commanded a city force. In interviews shortly after his appointment he was keen to dismiss suggestions that he did not have the depth of experience to deal with city detectives bent on hiding their misdeeds. ‘People have overlooked the fact that there is a determination to clean up the act. It rests not only with me but with a widespread group of people.’ There was now in place a Police Integrity Commission, established in January 1997, to root out corruption.
Although Ryan brought Jo Hampson, a close colleague from England, with him to act as his chief of staff, from the start he was isolated, fed contradictory advice and information, and by no means au fait with the situation on the ground. When at his first press conference on 11 June he asked, ‘Who is Roger Rogerson?’ the conference came to a hurried end. The only person he felt he could unreservedly trust was Assistant Commissioner Bev Lawson, but sadly she died from a massive stroke in January 1998. One senior officer remembers him:
My view is that he had good ideas but he was appalling at implementation. He had outward confidence but internally was insecure. Every time you went to see him there was ten minutes of him telling you he was a more experienced officer than you no matter what department you worked in.
Some 200 officers were known to have criminal records when Ryan took over. It was proposed that he should have power of dismissal without appeal. Unsurprisingly, it was an unpopular move and on 20 November there were demonstrations with calls to ‘send the Pommie back’. Seventy per cent of officers sacked for having criminal convictions won reinstatement at industrial tribunals.
On 7 February 1997 Ryan launched a new code of conduct, including the banning of free gifts and drinking on duty, and the threat of dismissal for any criminal offence, including drink driving. It did not go down well, particularly when it was immediately disclosed that he had earlier accepted a ticket for the Grand Final and another for the opening night of Crazy for You. Professor David Dixon of the University of New South Wales thinks:
The Wood Royal Commission actually made recommendations for a much deeper change but Ryan effectively said ‘Forget about all that’. Police corruption has to be seen as very closely connected with wider political corruption. Here in the 1980s political corruption was very close to the surface and police corruption was a tool of it. England is a more complex society with more layers of influence to go through in a less transparent way.
On 28 June 1997 disturbed drug dealer Ron Levi was shot by officers Rodney Podesta and Anthony Dilorenzo on Bondi beach. Levi had been seen wading fully clothed in the surf brandishing a knife. In March 1998 the coroner decided that the officers had a case to answer over his death, but no charges were ever laid. Two years later Podesta admitted that he had dealt in cocaine. His father, who ran a coffee shop in Kings Cross, had been named in two royal commissions.
By December officers were still behaving as though Wood had never existed; money was being taken for information about potential drug raids and there was access to police computers. Even some officers in Task Force Bax, set up to eliminate crime networks in Kings Cross, had gone bent. Working with the Police Integrity Commission, with whom he later rather fell out over the scale of his operations, over the past year Ryan had put together a covert operation and with Mal Brammer and set up Operation Gymea. In a series of raids two amphetamine laboratories were closed down and twenty people arrested.
Another problem came when police cadet Kim Hollingsworth, a one-time stripper and $400-an-hour prostitute, and also the daughter of a former officer, was dismissed after eight weeks at the police academy. Some of her stripping performances had been for police smokos. About a month after commencing her studies, Hollingsworth was recognised as a former prostitute by a police officer studying on a detective course at the academy. He approached her to work in a brothel that he was opening in western Sydney, an offer she declined. When her earlier career became known Ryan was quite unwilling to let her stay, but he was overruled. Reinstated, she later dropped out of the course.
In 2001 Ryan announced that his reform mission was now complete. In his earlier years he accepted that he had faced a good deal of sniping on a professional and personal level, but believed he had weathered the storm. In his first months he had dismissed twenty officers and 150 had been suspended. ‘When it was seen I was dismissing officers, there was a rush to hand in resignations.’ The force was now clean, he said, echoing Tony Lauer.
Unfortunately, at hearings of the Police Integrity Commission that same year, Operation Florida—a three-year sting mounted by the force’s internal anti-corruption unit—made it clear that the force was not at all clean. Microphones and cameras had been planted in lavatories in Manly and the police were filmed as they met and dealt with drug dealers. One detective, Senior Constable David Patison, was another filmed pushing banknotes down his trousers. He had found the money while searching the home of a cannabis dealer. Another clip showed three officers taking $40 000 and laughing, saying ‘happy days’. Much of the evidence came from a former officer known as M5, who had been trapped and persuaded to roll over. For six months he recorded what he did on a daily basis.
Vince Caccamo, a senior heroin dealer of the North Shore area, claimed that he had paid $92 000 in bribes, including a weekly $1000 to Patison and Senior Constable Matthew Jasper in 2000. He was recorded complaining to an associate, Anthony Markarian, that he was being badly squeezed. ‘Every cent I make goes to them.’ Rather unsympathetically, Markarian thought it was like having a shop and paying rent. In another traditional police rort, Jasper had arranged for a convicted burglar to rob the home of a man known not to be security conscious in return for a percentage of the proceeds.
Patison, one of six officers convicted of offences, received a seven-year sentence with a minimum of five to be served, as did Jasper. Caccamo received the same minimum sentence. Forty former officers and three serving officers were said by the commission to have been guilty of a variety of offences, but because of lack of corroboration they were never prosecuted. One Sydney solicitor was acquitted of bribery and acting with intent to pervert the course of justice; nevertheless, the law society cancelled his practicing certificate. It was reissued in 2009.
Ryan, who had just negotiated a new $400 000-a-year contract, was said to be very angry, as well he might be. Putting on a brave face, he told his force to ‘Wear your uniform with pride’, saying that Operation Florida showed his reforms were working. But drivers stopped for speeding were asking the police, ‘How much?’ In fairness to Ryan, a good deal of the evidence heard had pre-dated his appointment.
Ryan sometimes also showed appalling lack of judgement. When complaints were made about the head of Special Crime and Internal Affairs Mal Brammer, by Detective Sergeant John Ellund and New South Wales independent MP John Hatton, Ryan sought advice on how to deal with it. This was understandable. Because of his background Ryan did not know the players involved. What was not understandable was that he consulted Brammer on how the complaints should be answered. It is amazing that he was unable to see the conflict of interest this demonstrated. Brammer sensibly wrote:
Given the history of Mr Hatton’s resolute pursuit of myself … it is my submission that any further inquiry is an absolute waste of time and effort.
Ryan canned the investigation.
It was a long, uphill struggle in which, after the death of his trusted assistant Bev Lawson, Ryan eventually became totally isolated—Jo Hampson had returned to England after eighteen months. The lengths to which his enemies would go are demonstrated by perhaps the most audacious piece of intra-police espionage ever seen. Two undercover officers were stationed in Sydney’s upmarket Marriott Hotel, where Ryan and his wife went for drinks, in the hope that the Ryans might make some indiscreet remarks that could later be used in the fight to unhorse him. The fact that the undercover cops were posing as a bodybuilding biker and his girlfriend made the surveillance seem even more ludicrous. Surveillance was also ordered by Assistant Commissioner Mal Brammer on a number of other senior officers, none to any effect. Brammer retired before Ryan could move him.
Ryan resigned on 3 April 2002 amid scenes of mutual recrimination and exited to a lone piper playing a lament. He became the security expert of the International Olympic Committee. The experience makes it unlikely that the experiment of importing a commissioner from abroad will ever be repeated.