Lagging bent colleagues wasn’t good for your nerves, your health or your police career.
DETECTIVE Inspector Graham ‘Chook’ Fowler was filling his car with petrol at a service station when the Royal Commission investigators swooped. But Chook was used to having anti-corruption officers breathing down his neck and kept his hand calmly on the nozzle.
For once, his confidence was misplaced although it would take a while for the bad news to sink in. Until then, somehow he had always survived. None of the seventeen disciplinary charges brought against him by police Internal Affairs while he was head of detectives at Kings Cross had been able to land a punch on the 51-year-old police veteran.
And each escape, narrow or not, added to his belief in his own invincibility and the solidarity of the ‘big blue gang’. Honest police might detest corrupt ones but would rarely expose them, even if they wanted to. Lagging bent colleagues wasn’t good for your nerves, your health or your career.
That’s why he was so sure of himself. That’s why he knocked back the deal the officers offered him to ‘roll over’ and work undercover for the Royal Commission to expose other corrupt police. ‘Thanks but no thanks,’ he said.
From where Chook Fowler stood, it was a pragmatic decision. Why risk changing direction after decades of getting away with standover tactics, intimidation, bribe taking, fraud and offering protection for drug dealing, prostitution and pornography?
But Fowler didn’t know there was a marked card in the hand he was being dealt. The deal he rejected had already been accepted by his friend Detective Sergeant Trevor Haken, who would become the Commission’s star witness – and ultimately send Fowler to jail.
Under Haken’s direction, Fowler would be among the most celebrated, exposed and humiliated individuals in the chequered history of Australian law enforcement. He would emerge as a blustering, antiquated, comical embarrassment: an old-time corrupt copper unable to cope with radical new technology that caught the sins of bent cops and their criminal collaborators on film and tape.
All he could do was watch in bewilderment as irrefutable evidence of his corruption flowed from his own mouth, leaving him no avenue of escape and giving him worldwide exposure as an incompetent, bumbling crook.
‘Car-cam’, as it came to be called, comprised tiny cameras hidden under the dashboard of a specially modified Toyota driven by Haken. The cameras captured perfect video images of anyone sitting in the front seats – and recorded anything they said.
It was impossible to argue with the evidence supplied by the hidden camera because usually the suspect was recorded blithely implicating himself in crime. It was as effective as a full confession. The revolutionary electric surveillance included bugs on phones, cameras in cars, and long-distance recording devices – most of it involving poacher-turned-gamekeeper Trevor Haken. He made 80 secret car-cam videos of corrupt dealings.
Corrupt police watched, at first befuddled, then in mounting horror, as the recorded electronic evidence was played to the Commission. Like cavemen watching a rocket ship, they were dumbstruck as they heard their own voices detailing crimes and corruption that would destroy careers and lives. ‘Rolling over’ immediately became a brutally effective psychological tool. There was nowhere to hide any more, so police jostled to rat on each other in return for leniency and destroyed forever the ‘blue wall’ of solidarity.
They were exposed as just as cowardly and just as disloyal as the criminals they had intimidated into ‘admitting’ to crimes they had not committed. In Fowler’s case, he repeatedly denied questions from counsel assisting the Commission, Gary Crooke, asking if he had ever accepted bribes from Kings Cross night club owners and drug dealers. But the video told a different story.
Haken’s Toyota might have been in perfect running order but it was still a death trap for a police career – as Fowler found out on half a dozen occasions as tape after tape was screened to an enthralled hearing. It was like watching a car crash replayed in slow motion.
Ironically, one videotape included Fowler rejoicing in his security as he accepted a $500 share of a bribe from Haken while laughing at police investigative procedures: ‘They don’t bug cars. They just follow them,’ he scoffed.
Overweight, bombastic, his evidence riddled with four-letter obscenities, and long suspected of being corrupt, Fowler would nonetheless become the Royal Commission’s pin-up boy.
He was the first one to appear on car-cam and generated massive public interest when video of him talking about his corruption was played. It dominated headlines around Australia next day and was replayed endlessly on TV news shows and overseas services.
It stunned the public. More importantly, it frightened the dozen or so other high-ranking police who suddenly realised their futures were in jeopardy because of their suicidally frank talks about corrupt activities during the previous nine months with roll-over cop Haken – either in his car or when he was ‘wired for sound’.
But no victim was as staggeringly obtuse as Fowler. He even admitted he had heard rumours Haken had rolled over but chose not to believe them – or take precautions. He took bribes and was linked to a $10,000 offer to an alleged murderer to ‘fix his case.’
Another car-cam tape showed Haken receiving a $2000 bribe from Kings Cross sleaze merchant Steve Hardas, also being monitored by Commission investigators. As soon as Hardas left the car, investigators counted the money and confirmed with Haken that $1000 of the bribe was to be passed on to Fowler.
With so much evidence at its fingertips, the Commission calmly ignored Fowler’s witness-box bluster, revealing for the first time its pattern of attack.
Crooke, the counsel assisting, ran Fowler through the usual inquiries about whether he was corrupt and got the expected denials. In fact, 25 times Fowler denied being corrupt. In the past, such verbal denials had been enough to get corrupt police off the hook. But not with car-cam.
A stiff exchange between Crooke and Fowler in the witness box disguised the dynamite about to detonate.
Crooke: Mr Fowler, it has been your position, hasn’t it, that you’ve never been in receipt of corrupt monies?
Fowler: That’s correct.
Crooke: And so it is today?
Fowler: That’s correct.
Crooke: And by that you mean to say that you haven’t been involved directly or indirectly in the receipt of corrupt funds?
Fowler: That’s correct.
Crooke: It’s just a blanket answer as far as you are concerned. Corruption and you are strangers, in other words.
Fowler: That’s correct.
Then came the big bang.
Crooke: Would you look at the tape, please?
And there, in black and white on half a dozen video screens around the room, Fowler was seen stuffing the bribe Haken had given him into his pocket while bitching about the size of the payment. The audio made misunderstanding impossible.
Haken: ‘Hardas gave us a grand, right. That was just a fucking drink to keep going as far as I understand it anyway. Are you happy with that?’
Fowler: ‘Yeah. Fucking yeah… the fucking duds.’
Haken: ‘That ought to pay for this morning’s shopping so what are you fucking blueing about.’
The tape ran for 22 minutes. To Fowler it must have seemed an eternity. He watched the early frames with a puzzled look then, as reality hit him, he went white and started fidgeting as if a wasps’ nest had fallen down his pants.
The end of tape one brought no relief. The Commission had more films than Hollywood. Another one showed Fowler talking about a future accident he planned to have: it involved slipping on a spilt milkshake in the foyer of the City of Sydney police station to get a hurt-on-duty discharge and a hefty accompanying payout.
The conversation included what were known to be Fowler’s short term plans to handle what seemed to be increasingly dire straits and financial pressures.
As a result of the milkshake ‘accident’ Fowler was on indefinite sick leave and used it as a reason to delay his appearance before the Royal Commission for more than six months. It finally took a threat from Commissioner Wood to jail him if he did not appear, to force him to front in December 1994 and answer some more tough questions.
Although he had beaten charges from Internal Affairs while working at Kings Cross, he was becoming increasingly tainted. In fact, he was a carcass swinging in the breeze, stinking to high heaven.
During his time at the Cross, one of Fowler’s colleagues, former sergeant Larry Churchill, had been jailed on a variety of charges including protecting drug dealers and involvement with a $4 million importation of amphetamines. Another officer was sacked.
This time Fowler had run out of protectors. His loud denials started to unravel as the evidence mounted. He claimed that a lump sum of $30,000 he used to help pay for a house on the Central Coast – plus the monthly mortgage payment of $1300 – came from punting on horses.
‘I win at least $200 a week on the horses,’ he said. ‘I’m more successful at picking winners (than losers).’
Fowler would admit he had anything up to $30,000 (in lots of $5000) hidden around his house at any one time, including in the pockets of suits. And his recorded conversations with Haken made it clear he had an intimate knowledge of who paid bribes at Kings Cross and how entrenched various police were in the corruption.
In the weeks leading up to the Royal Commission, Fowler’s exasperated bosses had moved to limit his activities. They decided to at least move him as far away as they could from opportunities for corrupt payments. He could go to Chatswood station on uniform duty. Or he could go to a country station.
Chatswood or the bush was no choice at all for Fowler. It would mean an end to his established lines of graft and corruption and slash his revenue by hundreds of dollars a week. That’s why he devised the third option: he would stage an accident and be discharged with a payout.
He spoke to Haken about suffering a ‘career-ending’ accident in a staged car smash but then switched to the idea of slipping on a milk-shake at the City of Sydney station when he walked out of a lift, injuring his back on the marble floor.
‘I’ve got to have an accident tomorrow at work,’ he told Haken in a taped conversation which was played to the Royal Commission only minutes after Fowler had denied any such conversation had ever taken place.
‘I’ll have to set it up.’ It would have to be a ‘fucking nasty accident – nothing else would suffice,’ he said. ‘I need a payout. Stress isn’t enough.’
The payout would go towards the down payment on a caravan he was planning to buy to travel around Australia. Right on cue next day, as Fowler had foretold, he slipped on a pre-arranged spilt milkshake near a lift well and was carried out of the building on a stretcher.
In his book Sympathy for the Devil, Haken says Fowler survived only a few days in hospital before being sent home, ‘following a number of incidents involving alcohol.’
Fowler’s ability to predict his accident and his inescapable collusion caused Commissioner Wood to be almost light-hearted at one stage in his questioning.
Wood: You say you genuinely fell on a milkshake?
Fowler: Yes.
Wood: Is it a co-incidence that you happened to talk about slipping before it happened?
More damning was Fowler’s taped conversation with Haken in planning the accident.
Fowler: Stress is not enough. I have to go for a payout.
Haken: HOD (hurt on duty) are you?
Fowler: Yeah HOD and fucking injury, long term.
Haken: At work.
Fowler: Yeah, don’t fucking mention that to any cunt. Doctor said all I have to do is make it happen. I’ll do everything, everything is organised.
Stunned by the secret tapings, Fowler tried to fall back on his dismal record as a policeman – and even tried to call the Commission corrupt. It was the raving of a desperate and ruined man.
‘This Commission is as corrupt as anyone it is investigating,’ he almost shouted from the witness box. He emphasised he had been exonerated on all seventeen charges he’d faced at Kings Cross but said he remained tainted by what he called ‘rumour and innuendo.’
‘After 32 years in the police trying to uphold the laws of this state I have always believed a person is innocent until proven guilty,’ he stormed. ‘We’ve come back to the French Revolution. Where’s justice?’
Watching Fowler stumble into the Commission’s well-laid traps made compelling watching. He typified the stupidity of corrupt police who believed in their own invincibility long after it had crumbled.
Despite overwhelming evidence, Fowler blocked out reality. He became a pathetic figure as he continued to maintain his innocence, saying at one stage that the money Haken was handing over was to repay a loan. He also came up with a novel alternative defence: that the man on the video taking bribes was not him. It was, he said, an actor hired by the Commission to impersonate him.
‘Do you think we’d hire someone to play Graham Fowler?’ asked an amused Crooke.
‘Funny things happen here,’ said Fowler, clearly rattled.
The revelation that Haken had sold him out shattered Fowler’s self-proclaimed integrity and blind loyalty to police unity. The blue line was no more. It was now a race to the lifeboats, every man for himself.
It was well-known that certain senior police were out for all they could get from bribes or dodging work. Haken said that after a certain hour each night Fowler could be more easily found in the Sir John Young Hotel than on duty. He was one of several officers-in-charge whose nocturnal activities were not textbook policing.
One would come to work with his fishing gear. Wearing a jumper to cover his police uniform, he would spend the night sitting on the sandstone wall around the Opera House, fishing. Another would bring a kayak to work and row in Centennial Park lakes to keep fit. Fowler’s antics were more mercenary than sporting. His only known exercise was counting the cash he got in ‘slings’.
Although his decision not to roll over to the Royal Commission would ultimately send him to jail, Fowler’s decision to take his chances was backed by the sound logic of the past. Previous inquiries in New South Wales had inflicted few casualties on police united in lies and denials and he must have thought the line would hold. One reason for his confidence was that two senior police had told him (so he told Haken in a bugged conversation) that his ‘loyalty’ to the bent brotherhood would be rewarded.
The senior men made it clear that protecting the force was top priority. Those who stayed silent would be given a choice of jobs when the Commission was finished. Or they would be given a pension.
This was backed up by Haken. When warned by a lawyer that if he had not rolled over, his assets would have been seized and he would have been imprisoned, he had retorted: ‘… if I hadn’t (helped the Commission) I might also have become a superintendent in the CIB.’ It was a fair point.
Eventually, even Fowler’s loud and repeated denials of corruption started to unravel as evidence mounted. The Royal Commission asked him to explain how he could be such a successful punter when his TAB account, which they subpoenaed, indicated that in three and a half years he had lost a large part of the $9000 he had wagered.
Despite his profitable working relationship with Fowler and the friendship between them, Haken had no compunction about trapping him. It was, he said, just a continuation of his role as an undercover agent for the Commission. Survival of the fittest – and the quickest thinkers.
‘Detective Inspector Graham Fowler had been a colleague of mine for a number of years,’ he said on 60 Minutes, appearing in heavy disguise. ‘The video that I recorded in my car was typical of many previous transactions where money had been picked up from a criminal and was being divided among the police involved.’
He told the ABC’s Australian Story: ‘I was a close associate if you like, if not a friend. They were hard times but that was the job I undertook. That was the way it went.’
Asked what was going through his mind as he betrayed Fowler, he answered: ‘That I was doing a job… Purely and simply a job.’
He said he blocked out the fact that somebody he had known and presumably liked was being set up. But after a couple of rambling sentences that said nothing, he came out with the truth: ‘There is no nice way of putting it – yes, I was destroying him.’
But in his book he made a cooler and less-emotive assessment of Fowler. ‘He was nice enough when you were on a par with him but he was a standover man both to his staff and to people in the street,’ he wrote. ‘He was called GOC (Grumpy Old Cunt) or GOP (Grumpy Old Prick).
‘I didn’t mind the guy but he was an horrendous “dudder” – that is, he would rip you off. If there was a quid around he would take 75 cents in the dollar. I didn’t worry because there was plenty around in the Cross … Perhaps that is why I survived so well, I played the odds.’
As for Fowler, as people all around him rolled over he blindly clung to his belief that somehow his faith in the brotherhood would rescue him at the eleventh hour. It didn’t. Allegations mounted, including one that he and Haken had taken thousands of dollars from Hardas to help him beat charges of having bribed a police sergeant in Sydney’s west.
He claimed that his bugged conversations with Haken had been tampered with to provide the wrong interpretation.
Counsel assisting, Gary Crooke: ‘Are you suggesting that the Commission might have got actors or cobbled these videos together? Is that going through your mind?’
Fowler: That’s a possibility. You could have dubbed the tape, yes.
Crooke: Has somebody taken the part of Graham Fowler and taken the money?
Fowler: Funny things happen, don’t they.
Wood: Are you suggesting we’ve doctored all those tapes. Last time you suggested we provided an actor to play your part. Do you still suggest that is the case?
Fowler: I don’t know what to believe, sir. I wouldn’t believe you’re part of it, sir, but I wouldn’t put it past some of the people.
Crooke: Where’s it going to get you, Mr Fowler? Why don’t you be a man and confess?
Fowler, who was suspended without pay straight after the car-cam screenings, was eventually tried and convicted on charges of defrauding an insurance company over his milk-shake ‘accident’ but served only a couple of years in jail.
He was never charged with any corruption offences arising from his taped conversations and video evidence.
IF Trevor Haken and Fowler were the established face of perennial police corruption, Detective Senior Constable Duncan Demol represented the next generation of officers being swept up in ‘the joke’, often against their will.
To succumb to temptation was to spurn the vows of public service and integrity they made as police officers. But to knock back a share of the spoils was to risk being ostracised – and could even cripple careers.
Demol was tortured by the dilemma from his first days on the job, when his minder and work partner Senior Constable Stephen Worsley had taken him to a brothel called the Barrel, where they sat drinking with naked women. Free women, food and drink: you don’t see those job opportunities on police recruitment posters.
Demol picked up the idea of warped police work pretty quickly. During his first week he signed a false affidavit about a crash involving a police car. Demol’s first bribe was $50 from Haken, who took it from two shoplifters. The next time he had a search warrant he stole $5000 from a cupboard in a raid on a drug dealer’s house and split it with Haken.
Demol rolled over to the Commission after being confronted by video evidence, taken in Haken’s car, of him lying. Although they by then worked in different areas, Demol idolised Haken, staying close even though rumours were pinpointing the older man as a turncoat collecting evidence for the Commission.
So when Demol read a confidential memo from a New South Wales Crime Commission mentioning Haken he rushed to tell him, not knowing he had rolled over. In return, Haken deliberately lured him into the car-cam vehicle so his confessions could be recorded and handed over.
A disillusioned Demol, overweight and bald, then rolled over himself. He told of police fitting ‘someone up with the trifecta’ – cop slang for charging someone with offensive language, assaulting police and resisting police, whether they had committed offences or not.
Kings Cross police were served free beer in teapots in restaurants so no one could see them drinking. It was protocol that money stolen during drug raids would be shared among other police. So warped were the values that the only notion of ‘dishonesty’ was failing to split a drug dealer’s dirty money with others cops on the shift.
Demol volunteered two police maxims drummed into him as a probationary officer: ‘You’re not a copper until you can work pissed,’ and, ‘Everything you did was to cover your arse.’
Police drank on duty and held parties at the back of the station while someone watched the front desk. Any member of the public who came in with a problem was processed as quickly as possible.
He told of police getting together in ‘scrum downs’ to fabricate evidence. Perjury was rife because police considered the odds were against them making a case on the facts alone. He admitted he would fake evidence against someone who was guilty if the case needed strengthening. And theft and corruption payments for protection were widespread.
‘It is a common belief that you have got to do what you can to get a conviction because nobody believes you,’ Demol said. ‘Juries won’t believe you, judges won’t believe you.’
Demol, who was with the Drug Enforcement Agency, said street police hated all investigative organisations like the Royal Commission and the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC).
Demol was among eight police, including Haken, dismissed from the force after either giving self-incriminating evidence or being confronted by indisputable evidence on video.
The others included Fowler, Detective Senior Sergeant Denis Kimble Thompson, Detective Sergeant Neville John Scullion, Detective Sergeant Wayne James Eade, and Detective Sergeant John Gordon Swan.
Eade, head of the Police Drug Unit on the New South Wales Central Coast, was caught on video taking drugs, having sex with a prostitute and asking her if she had access to child pornographic films.
The eighth ‘scalp’ was one of the highest-ranked officers to be caught up in the corruption investigation, Detective Chief Superintendent Bob Lysaught, who allegedly arranged bribes from drug dealers. Betrayed by a close associate and long-time friend of the family, he crashed and burned and the flames singed everyone who had ever been close to him.
The bigger they are, the harder they fall.
– WITH RAY CHESTERTON