BENT

Hancock: I’m not a mean person, but I’ll tell you what: I’ve done things in my life that you never did, and harder things, worse things, and if I’ve got to do them again, well, I’ll do them again.

RM: In the line of duty?

Hancock: That is, yes. What I believe is my line of duty—to get the job done.

Of course, this sort of conversation can be interpreted in a number of ways. Hancock may simply have meant he was prepared to associate with informers and general scum to obtain information, but there are other less favourable ways it can be construed.

When he retired in the late 1990s the hair trigger tempered, often kilt-wearing and Banjo Patterson–reciting Hancock went back to the Kalgoorlie goldfields where he had grown up and opened a hotel in the remote town of Ora Banda as well as working a claim. There, on 1 October 2000, he met with trouble from the local branch of the Gypsy Jokers motorcycle gang. Hancock banned one of its members, William Grierson, from his hotel after he and other bikers swore in front of Hancock’s daughter, Alison. Hancock then shut the bar down for the evening. Later that night the biker was shot dead at a nearby campfire, hit in the shoulder and his spine severed. By the time the police interviewed him, Hancock, known as a fine shot, had showered and changed. He refused to hand over his clothing and he ate an orange, something that would mask gunshot residue. He then returned to Perth, where he took legal advice, declining to assist with police inquiries. Over the next few weeks Hancock’s home was firebombed, as was a store he owned, and the hotel was blown up.

In the spring of 2001 the police heard that some Jokers were mounting surveillance on Hancock’s home and that there was a plot to kill him at a Kalgoorlie race meeting—he had a horse running in the last race on 1 September. They managed to persuade him not to go and instead, along with his friend Lou Lewis, he went to Belmont racetrack in Perth. Probably while they were at the races, a bomb was placed in Lewis’s Holden station wagon. They stayed late at the track because Hancock wanted to listen to the Kalgoorlie race, in which his horse ran third. As Lewis drove them back to Hancock’s home the bomb was remotely detonated, killing both men and blowing a large crater in the road.

On 28 March 2002, 38-year-old Sidney John Reid, a full member of the Jokers, pleaded guilty to the murders. After a long police investigation he had been persuaded to roll over and break the bikers’ code of silence. Reid, who came from a broken home and was estranged from his children, had come to regard the Jokers as his family. He had come under suspicion because he had been at the campsite on the night Grierson was shot. Now he implicated another Joker, Graeme ‘Slim’ Slater, as being with him when the bomb was planted. In return for his cooperation Reid was given fifteen years, a reduction of ten in the sentence he might have expected. He also gave evidence in the successful prosecution of Gary White for the murder of Alan Tapley, who had been killed over a debt and barbecued. He later gave evidence against other bikers who, on 27 August 2004, were all acquitted of the bombing campaign against Hancock. Slater, who had earlier been acquitted of the murders, admitted four charges relating to the earlier bombing campaign and received a three-year sentence, which resulted in his immediate release.

Ironically, it had been thought that Hancock’s death would end any chance the Mickelberg brothers had of clearing their names, but it was then that Tony Lewandowski, now estranged from his wife and son, broke ranks and swore an affidavit admitting that he had lied and had, in fact, taken part in the beating of Peter Mickelberg:

I have had enough. Now that Don Hancock is dead I can’t harm him and I am now telling the truth … a couple of times I wanted to come clean but there was no way I could go against Don.

While he admitted fabricating evidence, Lewandowski said he still believed the brothers to be responsible for the robbery. ‘I do have remorse, of course, but I still believe implicitly that they were guilty of the crime.’ Nevertheless, he asked the DPP for immunity but, while it was being considered, he left the country. He returned to give evidence by video link on 27 September 2002 at a preliminary hearing of a further appeal by the brothers.

On 2 July 2004, by a majority of two to one, the court allowed the appeal, quashed the conviction and indicated that there would be no retrial. It is difficult to see how there could have been. Hancock was dead and so was Lewandowski, who had committed suicide in May that year. The Western Australia Police were unwilling to accept the verdict and Assistant Commissioner Neil Hay said there was an abundance of evidence linking the brothers to the crime. In turn they claimed compensation, which was eventually settled for $1.6 million.

During this period, under Commissioner Bob Falconer, the Western Australia Police lost the respect of the public. There were continual claims of corruption; unsolved murders, including the Claremont serial killings; and sloppy work in briefs handed to the DPP. The consorting squad had been disbanded.

On 4 November 2001 respected West Australian journalist Gary Adshead, in his article ‘Cops on take’, claimed that detectives in the 1990s had been standing over dealers, stealing drugs and cash from them, and giving the green light to favourites. But no witnesses had come forward and if they did, ‘He would say that, wouldn’t he?’ would be the defence. Who would believe a drug dealer’s word against that of a police officer?

In a number of examples presented by Adshead, Dealer 1 said that he sold hydroponically grown cannabis from a house in Lansdale and was raided on average every six weeks. The police would take drugs and cash, and charge him with a ‘pissy’ offence. Once when they had found him with 2500 marijuana sticks or foils and forty-three 50-gram sachets, along with $4900; he was charged with possessing half a gram of cannabis. Once he had been raided while dealing with the son of a senior police officer, who was just kicked out of the house.

Dealer 2, wrote Adshead, claimed that he had been paying $2000 a week to a detective sergeant from 1991 and that he stole a total of twenty-eight cars for another corrupt detective sergeant who was jailed in 1996 for offering a bribe to a third officer to drop an investigation into a smash repairer. A third dealer said that the police had taken well over $100 000 from him over a period of years and that it was not a financial arrangement as in New South Wales but was simply a standover.

The next year Geoffrey Kennedy QC was appointed to head a royal commission ‘Into whether there has been any corrupt or criminal conduct by any Western Australian police officer’. During the commission one former officer told of a twenty-year corrupt career and named forty officers whom he said were also involved in corruption, which he listed as stealing cash from a man shot dead by police, forging signatures, and using and supplying illegal drugs to informants. There was also apparently a videotape of a sergeant trying to steal $1 million. Four years later, in 2006, the final report of the commission concluded that it was ‘an organisation of mediocre achievements’ and:

the full range of corrupt or criminal conduct from stealing to assaults, perjury, drug dealing and the improper disclosure of confidential information have been examined. The Western Australian Police force has been ineffective in monitoring those events and modifying its procedures to deal with that conduct and to prevent its repetition … The fact that there remain in WAPS a number of officers who participated in this conduct, and who not only refused to admit it, but also uniformly denied it with vehemence, is a matter of concern.

One of the high-profile cases the commission had examined was that of the death of Stephen Wardle in the East Perth lock-up in 1988. Allegations of police brutality surrounded the death, and seventeen officers had refused to testify at the coronial inquest. The commission also looked at the Argyle diamonds case, in which one of the defendants alleged he had paid nearly $250 000 to derail an investigation into a series of thefts worth up to $30 million from the Kununurra mine. Overall, however, Commissioner Kennedy found little or no substance in claims of corruption in these cases. In particular, Don Hancock was not on the take, nor had he made money from illegal gold dealings and prostitution, as some had thought and claimed.

The report did not please everybody. One question raised was why the commission had put no time aside for any inquiry into allegations of corrupt relationships with Northbridge identity John Kizon and his offsiders when so much time had been spent finding out so little new about Wardle’s death nearly twenty years earlier and the old Argyle case. Why had Operation Red Emperor, an investigation into organised crime and Northbridge identities, been aborted? There were also complaints from an undercover detective who had worked for three years with Kizon’s associates. ‘West Australia’s recent history with corruption fighters does not inspire a deal of confidence.’

Another case from the previous century spilled over into this mystery. On 11 September 1995 heroin addict Andrew Petrelis had been found dead following a drug overdose in the seaside town of Caloundra, Queensland. Supposedly sent there in a Western Australian witness protection program, he was waiting to give evidence against Kizon, for whom he had worked as a driver. His body, hunched over a CD player on repeat, was discovered after he failed to turn up for a flying lesson.

In 1994 Petrelis had been instructed—by whom it was never wholly clear—to dig up some bags, expected to contain cannabis, in Perth’s Kings Park and take them to a self-storage unit he had rented, padlocking the door behind him. The owners of the unit became suspicious, broke open the door, discovered $150 000 worth of drugs and called the police. When questioned, Petrelis rolled over. Grass cuttings were substituted for the cannabis. Petrelis was used as bait for a trap and John Kizon’s offsider Michael Rippingale picked up the bags on 22 November that year. Following surveillance and phone taps, he and Kizon were arrested. Unfortunately, even before he left Western Australia Petrelis’ cover had been blown. A police constable, apparently looking on the web for information about Elvis Presley’s manager Colonel Parker, had accidentally stumbled on confidential details of Petrelis’ new identity. Worse still, a second officer also came across the details and passed them on to Western Australian criminals. The second officer later resigned. One of the officers who accessed Petrelis’ file was Murray John Shadgett and, at best, his record showed a total laxity of supervision by his superiors. As at June 1994 Shadgett had more disciplinary charges against him than any other Western Australian officer and was on a final written warning. In 1995, seventeen days before the Colonel Parker search, information was received that a man on work release from Albany prison was living with Shadgett. He eventually retired on medical grounds on 6 July 2000, shortly before the completion of an internal affairs unit investigation.

A report tabled in parliament on 9 August 2000 showed that Petrelis’ supposedly secret identity had been accessed seventeen times on the police database. Despite these breaches he was still moved to Caloundra.

In November 1999 Kizon and Rippingale were acquitted of the drug offences. Kizon, who was in hospital at the time of Petrelis’ death, complained bitterly, suggesting that the drugs charge was a slur on his character and that he had only been arrested because of his associates.

In 2006 Queensland coroner Michael Halliday, inquiring into Petrelis’ death, found that ‘there was no evidence which would reasonably suggest that the cause of death was other than self-administration’. There are, however, believable suggestions, backed by evidence—there was no tourniquet, spoon or needle and the injection was in Petrelis’ right arm although he was right-handed—that the overdose was a result of forced feeding.

Coleen Thomas, one witness due to appear at the inquest, simply disappeared, saying she did not wish to have a ‘fucking pair of concrete boots’. The inquest was followed by a 2007 Corruption and Crime Commission of Western Australia report, which confirmed the suicide verdict. When it was suggested that Tony Lewandowski should be given police protection after confessing to his part in verballing the Mickelsons, Avon Lovell had commented, ‘Put him in the Petrelis memorial protection program? No.’

Sometimes, even in these more sophisticated days, police can be lured into traps by unlikely bedfellows, often with disastrous consequences. In Western Australia one such culprit was police groupie Pasquale Minniti, who came to prominence in 2006 when the Corruption and Crime Commission investigated allegations he was able to have speeding tickets cancelled for his friends.

Throughout the early noughties Minniti, a panel beater known as ‘Inspector Minniti’, had assiduously cultivated police contacts and obtained confidential information via the police computer, including some for a prisoner on remand. He was taken along by officers on patrol and had errands run for him and his friends. The police would target and harass people who had offended him, and he was given police hats and ties to wear.

In 2009 Minniti was found guilty of corruption, making a false statutory declaration and attempting to induce a witness to give false evidence to the Crime and Corruption Commission. He was jailed for eighteen months, while former police officer Arduino Silvestri, who provided a false statutory declaration for Minniti, was jailed for twelve. Another sergeant received a twelve-month suspended sentence and a $6000 fine for witnessing a forged document. He also received a ten-month suspended sentence and a $5000 fine when he pleaded guilty to unlawfully using a restricted-access computer.

Minniti’s downfall was also that of one-time police minister John D’Orazio, whom he assisted in trying to get his traffic fines quashed. Caught on tape, D’Orazio later appeared before the Crime and Corruption Commission to try to explain his relationship with Minniti. Far more serious was the Queensland case of Lee Owen Henderson, who had raped Tracey Dovey on 21 November 1988 in her Burleigh Heads home and then killed her by injecting her with a hot shot of heroin. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and after killing a fellow prisoner received a second life sentence. From his cell, and using elaborately headed notepaper, somehow Henderson scammed the Rockhampton police into thinking he could help with their crime clear-up rate. In June 2002 he became a registered confidential police informant and as result a Sergeant Dalton, who acted as his handler, was alleged to have set up a joint phone-betting account, with Henderson accepting almost $8000 from him—but never asking where the money came from. Henderson was also given his own locker in the police station and was allowed to go out on unsupervised visits for lunch. Under magistrates’ orders obtained by police, Henderson was allowed out of prison nine times over three years and once was taken to Brett’s Wharf restaurant on the Brisbane River to meet a female associate. He was photographed wearing an armed robbery unit tie. On 28 July 2004 it was arranged for Henderson to have a day’s release from prison and attend the Villa Mar Colina Motel at Yeppoon so that he could have face-to-face contact with targets suspected of being involved in the importation of a large quantity of cannabis from Papua New Guinea. Unfortunately, Henderson took a dominant role in the conversations that took place and actually attempted to procure the commission of the offence of importation and/or supply of dangerous drugs.

One officer also arranged for Henderson to be given a $5000 reward for providing information on a crime, but $1000 of it ended up in a police officer’s own bank account. A telephone-diversion arrangement was put in place at Cleveland police station, which allowed Henderson to make nearly 1250 redirected, unmonitored phone calls from jail between 2003 and 2006. In yet another damaging revelation, the 2009 Crime and Misconduct Commission report Dangerous Liaisons said that Henderson orchestrated the theft of more than $250 000 in drug money during a police raid on a property.

It was not as though the police had not been warned. When Henderson was first used the far northern regional crime coordinator had told them that Henderson, who took the nickname ‘The General’, was ‘not a person to be trusted’. Well before that warning, in 1993 career criminal turned journalist Bernie Matthews had already written an article, ‘Superliar’, in The Gold Coast Bulletin about the dangers of employing informants in general and Henderson in particular.

Operation Capri followed and its report was not well received. Police unions are right to be protective of their members, but sometimes, as with the Beach inquiry in Victoria, they are protective even in indefensible circumstances. Now the Queensland Police Union of Employees was not pleased. On 22 July 2009, the day of the tabling of the Capri report, the union issued a media release:

This is nothing more than a media stunt by the CMC … If there was substance to all of the allegations in this report there would be 20 or 30 police facing the courts not just three.

The timing of the report today has much more to do with a conference hosted by the CMC next week where Russell Pearce … is scheduled to do a presentation regarding Operation Capri.

Police Union president Ian Leavers said that everyone had the right to innocence until proven guilty, especially when the report comprised ‘wild’ allegations relying on the word of convicted criminals.

It is for the courts to decide someone’s guilt or innocence, not the CMC, not the media and not the police commissioner. I believe the only reason the CMC was in such a hurry to publish the allegations is so they could grandstand at an anti-corruption conference next week.

Dangerous Liaisons warned of the dangers of the improper dealings between law-enforcement officers and Henderson. Two officers faced criminal charges of perjury and falsifying evidence and were acquitted when the judge stopped the case. One retired and the other was reinstated but due to his ‘procedural breaches’ lost some pay for his time off work. Eleven others who faced disciplinary action resigned. Leavers was extremely upset about the Crime and Misconduct Commission’s handling of the case. ‘The CMC should hang their heads in shame’, he said.

There was insufficient evidence to even put to a jury. The two police officers involved … have been through hell over many years, this has destroyed careers and destroyed families.

In 2009 the CMC began Operation Tesco, an inquiry into allegations that three officers on the Gold Coast were involved in inappropriate associations with criminals, drug use, misuse of confidential police information and accepting gratuities. It soon emerged that there were long-term problems in an environment where there was drug and alcohol abuse by some police officers and a marked reluctance to report suspected police misconduct. Whistleblowers could expect to be punished by their fellow officers. One was sent bullets at his family’s home.

The eighteen-month investigation found that free drink cards were given out to police in nightclubs frequented by members of outlaw motorcycle gangs, and police were leaking information to them. One officer had given a reference to an ex-stripper, and yet another had lied as a cadet about her medical history of depression and shock treatment for mental-health problems. But in the end only one serving and one former officer faced criminal charges, and six others were disciplined. There was, said John Allen, counsel assisting the commission, no evidence of endemic corruption.

However, in 2010–11 thirty Gold Coast officers were subject to internal discipline. One was dismissed for theft from a social club and eight others resigned. They had been charged with a variety of offences including fraud, perjury, supplying drugs, sexual misconduct with a witness and forgery.

Criminal lawyer Michael McMillan said that following the CMC investigation the police had lost a lot of their power and were no longer feared by the underworld.

They’re not nabbing the crooks as swiftly as they used to and many are getting away with all their crimes. The courtrooms are empty, we used to go until 5 p.m. every day, now it’s a busy day if we are there until midday. Temporary helicopters and taskforces won’t fix this, permanent resources and more power will.

The Police Union complained that so much money had been spent and so many officers harassed to so little effect. Why, if there was so much corruption, were there no arrests and prosecutions? One answer is that evidence obtained from a suspect in a CMC investigation cannot necessarily be used in a prosecution.

One outcome was the Queensland Police Service gifts and benefits policy, which came into effect on 1 January 2012 and which prohibited free or discounted entry into licensed premises and free or discounted alcohol. Officers were also required to report on the acquisition and disposal of gifts and benefits.

In the year 2012–13 the CMC conducted forty-three inquiries into 192 allegations of misconduct. The most common types of allegations investigated related to official conduct (duty failures), the unlawful possession (use) and supply of dangerous drugs by police officers, the unauthorised release of information from the Queensland Police Service database, and assaults by police officers on members of the public. In other words, a good deal of what Operation Tesco had looked at in 2009.

By September 2013 there were, however, fears that an increase in crime and the escalation of outlaw motorcycle gangs on the Gold Coast were due, at least in part, to the clearing out of experienced officers.

The noughties were damaging for Victoria Police as well. The Melbourne gang wars were at their height. On 13 December 2001 newly appointed Chief Commissioner Christine Nixon announced the immediate disbanding of the drug squad. In its place would be established a new, clean, accountable body, the major drug investigation division. As one former officer remarked, ‘Nothing like a cleansing and refreshing name change’.

Unfortunately, members of the disbanded, discredited drug squad were invited to apply to join the new division. While at Harvard, Nixon had studied techniques to create a police force with the capacity to resist corruption. Her hero Patrick V Murphy had been charged with the task of cleaning out the New York police after the 1971 Knapp Commission, and the first thing he did was replace 90 per cent of its senior ranks. Nixon may have regretted not following her hero more closely.

One of the most egregious examples of collective noble cause corruption is that of Victoria’s armed offenders squad. In 1979 the Beach inquiry found that the armed robbery squad had committed ‘abuses … so grave as to warrant the most prompt institution of safeguarding reforms’. However, it was not until 1999 that the squad was amalgamated with the special response and prison squads to form the armed offenders squad, with a brief to investigate non-fatal violent crime. The new squad lasted seven years. By then it had, so its critics said, become an uncontrolled law unto itself. Its thirty-five detectives, including the one female member, wore a uniform based on that of the jewel thieves in the film Reservoir Dogs: black suit, white shirt and a tie with a logo of crossed revolvers. The logo was superimposed on top of the Victoria Police badge symbol and used on official documents. There were allegations of beatings, bashings and brickings. Supervision was lacking, and in 2003 when a newly appointed inspector drew up detailed proposals to improve the day-to-day working of the squad, these were ignored until he was transferred out and the proposals were shelved. An Office of Police Integrity (OPI) report found that:

Informal squad culture … gained such strength and impenetrability that the chain of command was effectively reversed, to the point where some squad members considered themselves immune from managerial accountability or authority.

The lessons from the Wood Royal Commission in New South Wales had, again, drowned in the Murray. Despite the fact that the squad was warned television cameras were being installed in its headquarters at St Kilda in September 2006, one officer was caught on tape punching a suspect and threatening him that his ear would ‘come off’ by the end of the interview and, when another suspect asked to be allowed to make a telephone call, a second detective beat him with the telephone saying, ‘Here it is; here’s your fucking phone call … piece of shit’.

On 13 September Chief Commissioner Christine Nixon told the squad it was being disbanded. She was taped, and the tape was leaked to The Herald Sun. A little poem was written that summed up the squad’s attitude:

So long as there’s bad crooks, they’ll need us around, If they’re rid of us then crime will abound.

On 19 September 2006 three detectives were shown videotapes of themselves beating a suspect. All claimed not to recognise themselves on the video but were suspended the same day. The disbanding of the squad was followed by a reprise of the protests about the Beach report. This time around 300 police and former members of the squad, including the suspended detectives, rallied in the appropriately named Batman Park. Motions calling for the reinstatement of the squad and the resignation of Christine Nixon were passed. Police Association secretary Paul Mullett told the meeting that the result of disbanding the squad would be ‘what’s currently occurring in New South Wales: drive-by shootings, ethnic gangs, race gangs, youth gangs, street gangs, gang rapes by the day’.

After negotiations Victoria Police agreed that those officers not charged would be guaranteed positions on the newly formed armed crime task force set up to replace the squad. In the wash-up, two of the three officers received community service orders of ten weeks and the third five weeks. Charges against a detective inspector, of counselling and procuring the assault, were dropped.

As the decade went on, public focus was shifting from rooting out crooked, drug-dealing cops, to the top brass and the institutions there were intended to be anti-corruption watchdogs. It was a case of cleaning up the cleaner-uppers.

Much of the trouble for the senior hierarchy arose from the death of Shane Chartres-Abbott, a 28-year-old bisexual prostitute who specialised in rough sex. He was shot in Howard Street, Reservoir, in July 2003 on his way to court to stand trial for the rape of a thirty-year-old Thai woman in a St Kilda motel. Her tongue had been bitten in half and Chartres-Abbott, who claimed to be a 200-year-old vampire, was running the defence that he had been lured into a snuff movie in which he himself would be killed. As he left his home with his pregnant girlfriend and her father, he was shot in the neck in what was believed to be a contract killing in revenge for the woman’s death or possibly to prevent Chartres-Abbott from naming his other clients in court. Operation Briars was later set up to establish whether police officers were connected with the killing. It was suggested that one had given Chartres-Abbott’s address to the hitman. On 27 March a career criminal identified only as ‘JP’ and known by the pseudonym ‘Jack Price’ agreed to give evidence against senior officers allegedly linked to the case.

In 2009 there was another twist to this story when former police media director Stephen Linnell was sentenced to eight months’ imprisonment, wholly suspended, and fined $5000 on perjury charges. He had agreed to testify against Deputy Police Commissioner Noel Ashby, admitting that he leaked to him information on Operation Briars.

In February 2010 charges of perjury against Ashby were dropped. He had been accused of lying when questioned at an OPI hearing, saying that he had not received information about a serving detective who was being investigated for murder. Justice Robert Osborn ruled that the charges could not be sustained because the hearing at which he was alleged to have lied was not conducted within the law: the OPI deputy commissioner who heard the case had not been formally authorised to do so. As a result DPP Jeremy Rapke withdrew the charges.

In June 2010 Linnell’s convictions were quashed. The OPI alleged that Ashby had passed on the information to former Police Association boss Paul Mullett and that, as a result, the suspected detective was tipped off. Charges against Mullett were dismissed by committal magistrate Peter Couzens, who described the evidence against him as ‘more chaff than wheat’. Linnell later wrote a book entitled Don’t Tell the Chief: The Untold Story of Police, Politics and Power.

In November 2010 the OPI admitted that it was incapable of dealing with an allegedly corrupt officer, and also to have been the victim of a robbery while guarding $4 million worth of cigarettes in the 1990s. It appeared that files on had vanished.

In the late summer of 2009 Christine Nixon, the first woman to become a chief commissioner and who had already been considering retirement, announced that she was standing down not long after a story broke that she had been part of a freebie package that involved travelling to the United States with her husband. And so the baton passed to Purina Task Force head honcho Simon Overland, a former Federal Police officer with ‘an impressive resume’. Deputy to Christine Nixon from mid-2006, he replaced her as the new Victorian chief commissioner on 2 March 2009. Four months later the United Kingdom’s Sir Ken Jones, with an equally impressive police pedigree, became one of Overland’s deputy commissioners.

Within a year there were apparent rifts in the relationship between the chief and his deputies. Sir Ken was not afraid to speak his mind, even when he was out of step with his colleagues and his boss. In 2010 suspicions were raised by a whistleblower that, before the state election, Overland had allowed inaccurate and misleading crime statistics to be published. The stats, which showed a 27.5-percent reduction in CBD assaults, were thought likely to bolster Labor in the elections, and to some it appeared that Overland’s relationship with the Brumby government was a little too close. An ombudsman investigation ensued.

Next, Overland drew negative media attention when the police computer system had a cost blow-out of $100 million. Even worse, Sir Ken sent Overland an email regarding a sensitive report he was about to turn in on murders committed by parolees. The report stated that up to four murders could have been prevented had police databases kept better track of parolees, because officers dealing with criminals had not been alerted to their status.

Suspicion for the unfavourable leaks against Overland fell on Sir Ken Jones, who had resigned from his post three months earlier than he had intended on 6 May 2011 amid suggestions that Overland had precipitated his departure. Another investigation was ordered, this time to be run by the OPI.

Meanwhile the press, in particular The Herald Sun, ran what some unkindly termed a ‘get Baldy’ campaign, in reference to Overland’s shaved head. In 2011 almost 2980 police members, a quarter of the force, voted in a Police Association online poll, which found that 92 per cent did not have confidence in Overland continuing as their boss.

On 16 June 2011 ombudsman George Brouwer’s annual report found that, while Overland had been inadequately briefed by senior police as to the validity of the crime statistics, he had allowed them to be rushed through to the media, despite warnings that the data was not ‘settled’. Overland, with dignity intact and denying any improper conduct, resigned the same day.

But the slate was not yet clean. Now Ashby and Mullett complained that Overland, his Assistant Commissioner Luke Cornelius and former Deputy Commissioner Graham Ashton had breached federal communications laws when they accessed OPI phone-tap information. Ashby and Mullett also claimed that Overland had conducted a vendetta against them, instigating a joint OPI and Victoria Police investigation during which they had been humiliated in public hearings.

Even the OPI itself was firmly in the firing line. Critics, including a retired judge, had already accused it of being incompetent in dealing with a police force riddled with corruption. It was thought to be heavy handed, using secret internal investigations, phone tapping and other star-chamber tactics. Not unexpectedly, the OPI was disbanded and replaced in early 2013 by the Independent Broad-Based Anti-Corruption Commission (IBAC). The name and constitution may have changed, but sadly the complaints were carried over.

In November 2013 the new watchdog announced that it was not empowered to investigate anything short of ‘serious corruption’. As Graham Ashton had not intended to breach the federal telecommunications law when he provided OPI telephone tapes to Overland and Cornelius, his behaviour had fallen short of corruption and so was outside IBAC jurisdiction. IBAC also cleared Overland and Cornelius of any wrongdoing and found that Mullett and Ashby’s allegations were either not made out on the evidence or were outside IBAC jurisdiction. It resolved to hand the Simon Overland–Sir Ken Jones stoush to an outsider: retired judge Murray Kellam. There was immediate press criticism of the watchdog, saying that it needed wider powers and the ‘serious corruption’ threshold was too restrictive.

It is difficult not to draw the conclusion that the only anti- corruption investigations that worked at least in part were ones where, instead of confining the ambit of the investigator, the boundaries were stretched beyond what was initially thought appropriate. By accepting or putting itself in a strait jacket, IBAC risks being thought to be simply pussy footing.

Kellam’s report, tabled in the Victorian Parliament on Wednesday 19 February 2014, cleared Sir Ken of serious misconduct. Kellam found that there was no evidence Jones leaked sensitive information directly to the media and, while he may have divulged confidential information to others, he had no intention that the information be passed on to the media. While there certainly were leaks of material confidential to Victoria Police, the OPI and the Victorian ombudsman between 2009 and early 2013, the sources of the leaks were not identified. However, Kellam found that the facts demonstrated there was a ‘serious level of dysfunction’ in the relationship between Overland and Jones. He was highly critical of the OPI investigation and found sympathy for Sir Ken’s argument that the report demonstrated a ‘methodology adopted by the OPI of pre-judging Jones’ guilt and then conducting an investigation to support that conclusion’. Which is, of course, how many believe the police regularly conduct their investigations.

But the biggest disaster for Australian police was in relation to Mark Standen, former assistant director of investigations for the New South Wales Crime Commission. The highest-ranking officer to fall in recent years, Standen was another in the Kelly, Krahe and mould:

Like the Roman god, a mythological gatekeeper, Standen had two personas: one was the competitive, effective and highly decorated investigator; the other was the shadowy alter-ego of an addicted gambler, who managed to evade paying the debts for his sometimes questionable professional methods and friends.

His questionable friends included Sydney identity John David Anderson and his son Michael, who were convicted in 2008 of the attempted importation of 27 kilograms of cocaine in watertight containers strapped to the hull of the Tampa and another vessel. The haul, worth around $11 million, was discovered by New Zealand officers and substituted. The Tampa was then tracked and Michael Anderson was seen diving in to try to retrieve the drugs. John Anderson received eighteen years and his son, who was said to have acted out of misguided loyalty, received ten.

Curiously, in Standen’s case none of the lessons of earlier decades appear to have been learned. He had been under suspicion for a great deal of his career but, despite this, continued his inexorable rise, lasting a full thirty-three years in law enforcement. Along the way he had been adversely named in royal commissions, faced accusations of destroying evidence and, as Paul Higgins had done in Melbourne years earlier, managed to overturn adverse rulings—in Standen’s case over his entry into the Australian Federal Police (AFP).

In 1982 the Stewart Royal Commission into drug trafficking heard that Standen had worked for the Federal Narcotics Bureau, then an arm of customs that later amalgamated with the AFP. In May 1979 Standen and two other narcotics agents had raided the Bondi house of a man called Udy, where they found eighteen silver foils of hashish. Standen later told Stewart that he and his colleagues had, weeks later, flushed the hash down a toilet, falsified entries into the bureau’s log book to show that nothing was found in the raid and then destroyed a signed statement from Udy confessing to his ownership of the drugs, thus effectively removing any trace of the bust.

‘I do not actually specifically remember the incident—I feel fairly certain I would have destroyed it by shredding’, Standen told the commission about this confession. Asked by Stewart if the men were ‘really trying to obliterate all traces of this incident’, Standen responded, ‘That is correct’. The reason they destroyed the hashish and paperwork was that the amount of drugs was less than 500 grams and so charges could not be brought under federal laws.

But AFP Chief Superintendent John Reilly, who investigated the matter after a complaint was made by New South Wales Police, offered a different version of how the agents had explained their actions. According to Reilly, the agents claimed that there had been problems with charging Udy because of lack of cooperation by local police and they then became embarrassed about having held onto the hashish for more than two weeks. Stewart said that Standen’s answers during the investigation ‘reflected on either his honesty or his quality as an investigator’.

Standen was charged under the Public Service Act and recommendations were made that he and another agent be barred from joining the AFP when the Narcotics Bureau merged into the new Commonwealth force later that year. The charge and the AFP ban were dropped because of ‘indecision by members of the Department of Administrative Services and what was then Business and Consumer Affairs’. So Standen moved into the AFP, along with Allan Gregory McLean, later convicted for importing heroin into Australia.

Two of Standen’s colleagues in the Udy bust, Stephen Innsley and Frank Ramaccia, came to notice again later. Ramaccia joined the New South Wales Police and was investigated by the Police Integrity Commission, though no charges were brought. Innsley was jailed for four charges of perjury at the 1982 Stewart Royal Commission.

In 1979 Standen went to work in the AFP’s Sydney office, where by all accounts his gambling escalated. Federal agents who were his workmates said it was widely known that he had a problem and he was a regular punter on the horses, racking up a debt of about $70 000 at his favourite hotel near AFP headquarters.

During those years the AFP was riddled with corruption. In 1990 AFP drug-registry officer Michael Anthony Wallace was convicted of stealing $20 million worth of drugs, some of which he had hidden at his parents’ home, and cash and exhibits. He was jailed for twelve years. After his release he was convicted of the manslaughter of Zoe Zou, with whom he said he was in a relationship. He had dumped her body in the Blue Mountains. In 2007 an appeal against his sentence of fourteen years was dismissed. AFP officer Allan Gregory McLean was sentenced to sixteen years’ jail for helping to import millions of dollars worth of heroin from India hidden inside a consignment of soccer balls in 1988. In 2001 Cliff Foster, Standen’s former boss at the Sydney drugs unit, committed suicide while under investigation for supplying heroin and possible links to a crime syndicate importing hashish from New Zealand.

In 1995 Standen’s colleague Alan Taciak rolled over in the New South Wales Wood Royal Commission and alleged that seventy-eight AFP officers—15 per cent of the force—were corrupt. Taciak’s allegations prompted a 1996 inquiry headed by Ian Harrison, who later became a Supreme Court judge.

Harrison’s final report, which is understood to have found widespread corruption in the AFP, was never released. However, in April 1997 the Attorney-General gave parliament limited details of the inquiry, which had investigated eighty-nine allegations in respect of fifty-four current members of the AFP. His statement contained the exculpatory sentence, ‘It is worth noting that the AFP currently comprises approximately 2700 persons’.

According to the statement, Harrison had found that many of Taciak’s allegations related to times long ago and were to some extent based on gossip and rumour for which no supporting evidence was found. Those matters that Taciak witnessed or in which he was directly involved, where his allegations might be more soundly based, were thoroughly investigated by the inquiry and recommenda- tions were made where appropriate. Every serving AFP officer invited to attend or otherwise cooperate with the inquiry did so, without exception. However, the statement did not add that many agents escaped investigation simply by quitting the AFP.

Harrison made no adverse findings in respect of forty-six of the fifty-four officers. In each instance he found that there was no reliable basis on which to recommend any further steps be taken. He also examined twenty allegations involving seven of the remaining eight officers. While he found that many could not be substantiated, he did recommend that some allegations against seven officers be referred to the AFP commissioner in order to determine, in light of the material available, whether the commissioner retained confidence in those officers. In respect of the eighth officer, Harrison recommended that one issue, going back some fifteen years, be referred to the DPP for consideration as to whether any charges should be laid. Many thought the whole thing was a whitewash.

Standen met Diane James in the AFP drug-targeting unit in 1995. She later married Bakhos ‘Bill’ Jalalaty, left the AFP and went to work with him in their smallgoods company. Standen and Diane Jalalaty kept in touch, but he became closer to her husband than to her.

That year, 1995, was also the year Standen took voluntary redundancy from the AFP and joined the New South Wales Crime Commission. There he was in charge of what was known as the Gymea Team, which had responsibility for investigating organised crime, drug importation and the manufacture and distribution of drugs.

In 2005 Michael Nicholas Hurley, variously described as a criminal ‘head honcho’ of a new east-coast milieu or the Coogee Mob, was arrested following a five-month investigation known as Operation Mocha. This related to the alleged cooperation of baggage handlers in smuggling drugs through Sydney airport. The October 2004 haul that ended Hurley’s career had been the last thing loaded onto an Aerolíneas Argentinas flight from Chile. As a result it would be unloaded first, so that it could be removed before it reached the baggage hall in Sydney and put into a designated bin for subsequent collection. Hurley died before his trial could take place.

In 2004 Standen was involved in the authorised sale of 7 kilograms of cocaine seized from the Hurley syndicate to an authorised informant codenamed ‘Tom’, on the curious grounds that it could not seriously endanger anyone’s health. A single kilogram was later retrieved, but Tom had either sold the remainder or buried it in bushland near Wahroonga. In any event, 6 kilograms was never recovered.

In late 2004 the Crime Commission received information from an informer that Englishman James Kinch, who was overseas, was a ‘big mover’ of drugs. In early 2006 Australian police were tipped off by their Dutch counterparts to the plan, which was allegedly being masterminded by Kinch and involving Bakhos Jalalaty, who now had a food-importing and -distribution business in Blacktown.

On 19 December 2005, $47 192 was transferred by Kinch into a bank account belonging to Jalalaty’s company. Payments totalling $47 000 were made from the bank account to Standen in December 2005, and in January and February 2006. These transactions amounted to a gift from Kinch to Standen. The gift was not made directly, because Standen did not want the Crime Commission to know that he was receiving money from the Englishman, who was later giving evidence at his trial, or that Kinch had offered to send him as a Christmas present—as one does—the amount of money required for an operation on his eyes. However, the cost of the operation would have been only $5000 or at most $10 000. From May 2006, police and investigators, including Standen’s colleagues, intercepted thousands of conversations between Standen, Kinch and Jalalaty. Standen’s role in the massive importation plan would be to advise on the movements of customs officers and so pinpoint a time when it would be safe to import drugs.

On 15 September 2007 Jalalaty and Standen met at a Sydney cafe, where they discussed the incongruity of rice being sent by a company named Elegant Hosiery and whether such a name would attract the authorities’ attention. Standen gave advice to Jalalaty about how he should answer in the event of his being arrested, and also spoke about customs procedures for inspecting imported containers and the profit that could be made from the venture. He said, ‘They will probably make from 100 to 120 a kilo’. Jalalaty then said, ‘So if they bring in 100 kilos it makes 12 million profit and he goes half with … the biggest mule and we go thirds’.

Unaware of the around-the-clock surveillance, Standen and Jalalaty pressed on. In their communications the three of them adopted pseudonyms, including female names. Jalalaty was usually referred to as ‘Myrtle’. Kinch was referred to by a variety of female names, including ‘Jo-Jo’. Standen was usually referred to as ‘Maurice’.

In May 2010 Jalalaty pleaded guilty to conspiring to import a commercial quantity of pseudoephedrine. He received ten years with a minimum of six to be served. Standen fought to the end. On 11 August 2011, after a five-month trial, a jury found him guilty of conspiring to import and supply 300 kilograms of pseudoephedrine, which could be used to produce $60 million worth of ‘ice’ or crystal meth. He was also found guilty of perverting the course of justice and sentenced to twenty-two years in jail with a minimum of sixteen to be served. In sentencing Standen the judge said he found ‘that by his acceptance of this [initial] substantial sum of money Mr Standen was irretrievably corruptly compromised, so far as Kinch was concerned’. Many might think he had compromised himself years earlier.

In 2011 former New South Wales Police Integrity Commissioner and Australian Crime Commissioner John Pritchard resigned from his $417 000-a-year job and began working as a salesman at a Ray’s Outdoors store in Caringbah. Since the report on his conduct was embargoed not everything is crystal clear, but it appears that Pritchard had leaked confidential information to the media in an effort to make the Police Integrity Commission (PIC) look better. He had left the PIC for a top job with the Australian Crime Commission in January the previous year, nine months before his five-year term was due to expire. Six months into his new job he was obliged to offer his resignation.

One increasing worry for all states has been the potential infiltration of its officers by a new breed of outlaw motorcycle gang members, in particular those of the Comancheros and Bandidos. In March 2013 there were allegations that Victorian and other states’ officers were taking drugs supplied by bikers, using biker-owned tattoo parlours and getting free entry into strip clubs run by gang members. As far back as 2004 a potential AFP raid on multimillionaire drug dealer Amad ‘Jay’ Malkoun, then president of the Comancheros, had been compromised by leaked information. In February 2011 the multi-agency trafficking investigation Operation Corsair was aborted when Malkoun received a tip-off that he was on its list and being targeted by police. Investigations by the now disbanded OPI and other agencies identified several Victoria Police officers associating with Malkoun or members of his criminal syndicate over several years.

In April 2013 Victorian Police Commissioner Kenneth Lay admitted that the force was investigating breaches of its LEAP computer system dating back three years, with sensitive files allegedly having been sold to motorcycle-gang members. Task Force Eagle was established to tackle the problem. ‘It is not just about compromising Victoria Police now; it is about compromising the organisation in five, 10 or 15 years’ time’, said Lay.

Recent reports of police officers hobnobbing with bikie-gang members in rural Victoria and at high-end city functions suggest that the lines between the gang in blue and those they pursue may be blurring. Just as organised crime has put moles in place in both business and government, it will be interesting to see when, rather than if, the first motorcycle-gang mole planted in a force is unearthed.