The prisoners were ordered out of the van one at a time and bashed as they ran the gauntlet between two lines of police.
THE boys were out for a bucks’ night when they learned the hard way not to cross the crooked cops who were the uncrowned kings of the Cross.
The young bucks were aggressive and confident they were tough enough to match any challenge to come their way. They were wrong. In the street brawl that erupted on that winter night in 1992, bouncers from nearby nightclubs joined forces with the off-duty detectives to throw punches and crack heads. It was only going to go one way.
But winning the battle wasn’t enough for the Kings Cross coppers. Like any other street gang members, they wanted to make a point. The more violently the better.
Back-up police arrived swiftly to look after their mates – and ‘fix up’ the would-be troublemakers. They threw them into a paddy wagon, took them to Kings Cross station and systematically beat them with batons.
It still wasn’t enough. To rub salt into their wounds, the bruised and bloodied crew were charged with various offences. Naturally, the police would later collaborate with each other to give false evidence that would ensure convictions – and protect them, they thought, from any possibility of a comeback.
At the time, it was just another violent night in the Cross. But it would prove one of many incidents to come back and haunt the police that took part because one of them was going to tell the truth about it.
Not that he was guilt-stricken or had got religion. It was more cold-blooded and selfish than that. As any cop knows, most crooks will cut a deal to avoid punishment. And that’s exactly what happened when investigators from the Wood Royal Commission came knocking at Trevor Haken’s door.
TREVOR Haken was as bent as a three-dollar note, as crooked as most of the scum he’d ever locked up. He just looked better from the outside.
In nearly three decades of graft and law-breaking he had risen through the ranks to be a detective sergeant at Kings Cross.
He had earned his spurs as a black knight at the Drug Squad at Darlinghurst, called ‘Goldenhurst’ by police in the know because of the easy money they could make from rackets there. He’d been a member of the CIB and of a Joint Task Force of State and Commonwealth officers set up to combat drug trafficking in Chinatown. Finally, he had risen to be in charge of Kings Cross detectives, his dishonesty apparently overlooked (or quietly appreciated) by the many senior police who were already on the take.
In his final year as a corrupt officer, Haken pocketed around $90,000 himself – and acted as the bagman to distribute ‘slings’ to other bent officers. When investigators turned up on his doorstep at Hornsby in north-west Sydney, the ghosts of Trevor Haken’s past came back to haunt him. The investigators had been probing him for weeks and following him everywhere he went. And they had enough evidence to prove what they already knew – he was corrupt.
They gave him a simple choice. He could take responsibility for his crimes and face charges – or he could ‘roll over’ and co-operate with the Wood Royal Commission.
‘Roll over’ was a term that would be heard more and more often as the inquiries and evidence became public and it became increasingly obvious there was nowhere for bent cops to hide.
Haken rolled, choosing to be an informer and turning on crooked police mates to mitigate his own involvement. In return, he and his family would be given new identities and go into witness protection once he’d told the Commission everything he thought he could.
To his former mates, he was a ‘dog’ and a ‘maggot’ for ‘lagging’. But to the Royal Commission, and the majority of the public, he was a one-man force for redemption, the mother lode of information for a sophisticated investigation into police corruption.
Not that it was easy for him – it wasn’t a decision driven by morality or conscience. He would later say he sometimes regretted the decision to roll over because a couple of years in jail might have been better than a life in hiding, constantly fearing recognition by criminals and rogue police he had named in the Commission. By rolling over he had broken a code he’d followed all his working life.
His decision to become a whistleblower underpinned the Wood Royal Commission’s success. Without Haken’s astonishing recall of his own corruption, and the involvement of so many others, the inquiry might have floundered, as others had in the past, when faced with police willing to unite in their lies.
Haken changed that. Using cutting-edge electronic equipment, the Commission’s officers tapped phones and eavesdropped on police doing deals with criminals and talking to other corrupt officers.
A highlight of this remarkable covert investigation was that Haken used his street smarts to fight for good just as skilfully as he had evilly used it to pocket hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years. He wore electronic gear to meetings with corrupt police and criminals so they would incriminate themselves.
Another sting was referred to as ‘car-cam’, where a secret camera was hidden in Haken’s car to record irrefutable proof of police taking bribes.
Haken’s allegations dredged up treacheries and acts of dishonesty that those involved might have imagined were long forgotten. The bashing of the Kings Cross bucks’ night revellers described above was just one ‘routine’ offence, and by no means the most serious. Protecting drug dealers was worse – but the bashing was graphic proof that Kings Cross police were out of control and believed they were untouchable.
The combination of a well-placed whistleblower and advanced electronic equipment would supersede all the stillborn attempts at anti-corruption investigation that had gone before it, exposing thuggish police behaviour that had gone unchecked for decades.
As Haken recounts in his own account of his Kings Cross escapades, Sympathy for the Devil, that violent night of 22 July 1990 was one to remember for all the wrong reasons.
The detectives and their wives and girlfriends had just finished dinner at the Gazebo restaurant. They decided to take a stroll around the area to have a look at places of interest.
The group ran into a bucks’ night group of eight to twelve young men from the western suburbs who (as Haken would tell the Royal Commission) had been drinking and were behaving badly. One of the young men brushed shoulders with one of the detectives – a misjudgement that led to a detective throwing one of the revellers against the side of a tow truck in retaliation.
Haken writes: ‘We were set upon by a group of thugs who were later referred to in court as a “group of young men”.
‘But thugs are always a “group of young men” in the eyes of mum and dad. They come along to court in their suits and short hair but on the night they had blood in their eyes and were out of control. They were intent on beating the living daylights out of anyone who got in their way.’
The confrontation quickly became an all-in, bloody brawl.
A constable, Duncan Demol, was kicked in the face and collapsed. He would later need stitches to a cut in his head. Another policeman was kicked and punched. Horrified onlookers scrambled out of the way and as the brawl spilled over the footpath, bouncers from nearby nightclubs rushed to help their police buddies.
With the bouncers in play, who would win the fight was never in doubt. But it took the party boys a little while to work out what they’d let themselves into. Still unaware of the identities of the men they had been fighting, they continued to yell abuse and bang the inside of the police van after the uniformed police arrested them.
It was not until one of them looked out the back door of the van as it pulled into an underground car park beneath Kings Cross police station and saw the men they had been fighting lined up, carrying batons, that the truth dawned on them.
‘Fuck. We’re dead,’ one lout said to his mates. He was almost right. No one died in the resulting bloodbath, but it was a wonder.
The vengeful police started by rocking the van and bashing on the sides and telling the men inside they were ‘dead.’ The prisoners were ordered out of the van one at a time and bashed as they ran the gauntlet between two lines of police to get to the holding cell.
‘It was full on anger and there was plenty of “Get the fuck in there” and “We’ll teach you to fucking belt us” and that sort of thing,’ the Commission heard.
In Sympathy for the Devil, Haken tries to rationalise the attack, saying it squared the ledger for other incidents that had gone unpunished.
‘This type of behaviour used to happen all the time in the Cross,’ he writes. ‘People would come on bucks’ nights and flog someone and get back on their bus and disappear, leaving the damage behind for us to clean up. But this was where we worked, this was home for us and they picked us. They expected to get away with it but they didn’t this time.’
The systematic bashing with batons was not enough. There was simply a change of personnel. While some police got started on paperwork for the arrests, others took over the beating.
Husband and wife police David and Christine Langton, who had been part of the police-and-partners night out, joined in. Langton had a reputation for losing control when dealing with arrested men and would eventually be sacked from the force for breaking the jaw of someone who objected to being searched.
Haken told the Royal Commission that the two ring leaders of the revellers were ‘flogged unmercifully.’
‘Langton was handy with his fists and was a good bloke to have on your side in the Cross but he … was out of control.’
Evidence from one of the revellers supported this. He said Langton shouted, ‘You little fuck!’ at him, punched him hard in the face and then on the head and nose. Yelling at the terrified man to stop crying, Langton had to be stopped from inflicting further punishment.
Meanwhile, Langton’s wife Christine did her bit, bashing the unresisting mens’ heads on walls and desks. She would tell the commission she was motivated by injuries inflicted on two of her friends in the brawl and because ‘a perfectly lovely night had been upset.’
Newspapers quoted her telling the Royal Commission that she had pushed a fingernail into the throat of an arrested man and said: ‘You didn’t know who you were messing with.’
One prisoner says he was thrown against a wall and repeatedly struck in the face by different officers. Even feigning unconsciousness did not help. Haken says the man was told to ‘get up or get more.’ Langton allegedly told one man to ‘stop bleeding on the floor.’
The prisoners were then forced to run the gauntlet of another line-up of baton-wielding police back to the van to be taken to the Sydney Police Centre. When they got there, the two ringleaders were so obviously injured that police receiving them asked the Kings Cross crew for help to ‘explain’ what had happened in a way that would counter any allegations of police brutality.
Asked about the injuries, those that had inflicted them brazenly denied responsibility saying any wounds must have come from the street brawl before arrests were made.
The police apparently returned to their wives and girlfriends and retired to the Bourbon and Beefsteak nightclub to salvage what was left of the evening. The prisoners, nursing bruises and shredded egos, decided it was prudent not to mention the police thuggery and to plead guilty. All, that is, except one of them.
As Haken says in Sympathy for the Devil, the exception was a security guard who would lose his licence if convicted – so he was determined to tell the truth about the bashing.
But, at the time, this seemed no problem for the police. Haken and his men did what they had done many times before. They had a ‘scrum down’ among themselves, decided on the statements they would make and simply went into court denying the bashing.
‘In those days there were no problems that couldn’t be overcome somehow,’ he writes.
But Haken’s subsequent evidence to the Royal Commission, corroborated by some of the victims, scuppered the cover-up and the guilty police were prosecuted. This was rare: police authorities and the government had always been more interested in ensuring corrupt cops were sacked rather than charged. Not prosecuting crooked police after inquiries was the norm in New South Wales. There were sackings, reprimands and hand-wringing by the government and police authorities. But jail? Hardly ever.
The decision to pursue the bashing case through the courts was no doubt justified but overall it was far less significant, and less deserving of prosecution, than many other matters that Haken’s electronic surveillance and personal involvement had revealed.
‘There were a lot of matters exposed at the Commission to show what went on at the Cross, but they prosecuted the cops for that bashing. You think, how the fuck did I get into this?’ Haken said.
TREVOR HAKEN’S evidence shook the previously ironclad belief of corrupt police that everything would be all right if they stuck together. In nine months of tense undercover work, he collected more than $30,000 from criminals for distribution to crooked police and he caught corrupt police on tape and on camera revealing themselves as thieves who sold their ethics to the highest bidders in the Sydney underworld.
It was a dangerous choice. Potentially fatal, even.
As word swept through Kings Cross that someone had turned informer, criminal bosses with huge fortunes at stake made their intentions clear. One of them was drug czar Billy Bayeh. A curious mix of cunning and stupidity, Bayeh reflected the inability of the underworld to come to grips with modern surveillance technology. Or maybe it was just greed and ego that made him and others like him push their luck.
‘I met with Bill Bayeh on a number of occasions and I received large sums of money from him,’ Haken would tell the ABC programme Australian Story.
‘He had problems at that stage. He was losing his authority on the streets of Kings Cross and wanted police protection to get back into a better position. At one meeting with Bayeh, he told me that another police associate had told him he must have balls to be meeting with me because the rumours were all over town that I’d rolled.
‘And he said, “If anyone goes against me I’ll kill them. I’ll kill their wife and I’ll kill their children”.’
Haken says the threat jolted him. ‘I did not take it idly. Not then. Not ever,’ he says. ‘It was an extremely frightening time. I got through it by being a walking pill bottle. I was on all sorts of medicals.’
Haken’s last meeting with Bayeh was heart attack material. Bayeh had got hold of an electronic alarm that sounded if anyone was wearing a hidden recording wire. The alarm went off when Bayeh approached Haken.
‘I managed to get out of it all right and that was the last time I saw him,’ Haken would say.
There were other tense moments. Such as when another criminal told Haken of the rumours he had rolled over and that a lot of crims and some police believed it. Haken, who was wearing a wire at the time, said it was ‘fucking shit’.
The criminal accepted the denial and the incriminating conversation continued. His mistake was to think there is honour among thieves.
TREVOR Haken switched from alcoholic bent cop to non-drinking white knight as easily as if he were an actor swapping roles. He seemed unswayed by friendship or any past associations.
He agreed to be ‘wired up’ to trap his colleagues without hesitation. He used the car camera set up by the commission to record and film a detective, Graham ‘Chook’ Fowler, talking about bribes and pocketing money he had taken from Haken as a share of a supposed bribe.
The ‘car-cam’ footage devastated senior police who had insisted the force was corruption-free. And it shocked tainted police when they realised too late that the electronic surveillance was so sophisticated and the evidence so compelling that there was nowhere to hide.
By the time Haken finished giving evidence, the police force was in tatters. Dozens of senior police had been exposed as drunken, drug-dealing criminals prepared to do anything to get an illegal dollar.
They had stripped vital evidence from prosecution briefs to get guilty drug dealers and killers off; taken money from dealers to protect criminal rackets from police intrusion; and helped wipe out competing drug dealers who were not paying bribes.
There were plenty of dirty deeds – but rarely done dirt cheap. And, for years, Trevor Haken had enjoyed a front row seat.
His apprenticeship in ‘the joke’ had begun at North Sydney police station, soliciting $10 bribes from tow truck drivers for access to car crashes and telling undertakers about dead bodies at $20 a time.
‘Over the years I became involved to the extent of being the bag man, picking up money from people who were conducting businesses like prostitution, night clubs, gambling clubs and drug dealers,’ he would admit.
‘I was involved in stealing money, verballing people (giving false evidence in court), gutting briefs – which is removing information from briefs to allow people to be exonerated.
‘There was no form of improper behaviour that we were not involved in.’
Haken’s biggest coup was coolly trapping Fowler – one of his mates – by luring him into the car fitted with recording and videotaping equipment. The sting came early in the Royal Commission and had an explosive effect on media coverage. In the past, inquiries had floundered because accused officers would brazenly deny any accusations, but now there was irrefutable proof. Corrupt police were damned by their own words and actions, all caught on tape and film that made headlines for the life of the inquiry – and became its signature ‘grab’ on the electronic media. In isolation, the Fowler ‘sling’ was a small amount but the image it created was immensely damaging.
A fascinated public watched in amazement as a police force repeatedly touted by its bosses and politicians as the best in Australia fell apart under the weight of damning evidence and a blizzard of accusations that were suddenly overwhelmingly plausible.
In one week seven detectives were sacked after Haken regaled the hearing with tales of coppers helping criminals and stealing drugs and cash from criminals.
The blame moved vertically as well. The contract of then assistant commissioner Ray Donaldson was not renewed. The chief of staff to the police commissioner, Bob Lysaught, also went. Police Commissioner Tony Lauer, although not linked to any corruption or criminal behaviour, resigned amid suggestions he was inept.
Haken says his health was damaged by the tension of playing a double agent, of knowing one slip could have got him killed by rogue cops or criminals seeking revenge.
‘I was a wreck, an absolute wreck,’ he would say. ‘Sick in the pit of my stomach, my nerves shot to bits. But what do you do? I had engaged to do a job and I did the job.’
FROM outside, the Hakens looked the suburban family from Central Casting. So much so, in fact, that they were cast as the ideal family by McDonalds, which used a picture of the couple and their children on restaurant placemats and advertisements.
The placemats caused hilarity at Kings Cross, Haken said. ‘They were always all over the place. The junkies used to burn the eyes out of my picture.’
Haken was ruggedly handsome with a persuasive personality and his wife, Jayne, was good-looking enough to do part-time modelling work.
‘To some people we must have looked like a model family,’ he would muse. But there was plenty of trouble below the surface.
Attractive on the outside, dysfunctional behind closed doors, the Haken family was swept into a maelstrom of publicity before going into hiding.
Their troubles had started years before the Royal Commission, Jayne Haken would say, when her husband embraced the heavy drinking culture adopted by so many police at the time. They had met when she was a waitress at the Double Bay Steak House – in Lane Cove national park – where Haken and his mates at nearby Chatswood police station would often have their evening meal.
‘They were easy going but they never left a tip,’ she told Australian Story, in a telling aside about the selfishness, greed and suspicion of corrupt cops.
They married when Jayne was 20. Haken’s taste for alcohol, police camaraderie and scoring easy money from criminals seemed as important to him as his growing family.
‘His hours would get longer and longer and there were times when he didn’t come home at all,’ Jayne Haken said.
‘I would sit in the backyard and cry because I was newly married with two young ones. I guess they were drinking if they were not working. Trevor always had a drink.’
She realised how warped her husband’s priorities were when she was almost due to have their second child.
‘I was eight months pregnant … and he didn’t even come home on New Year’s Eve. When work finished at 10 pm they decided to go and party.’
Another night an intoxicated Haken came home with two equally drunken police colleagues and continued drinking.
‘They were both drunk as skunks and I had a new baby. I was suddenly awoken by a shotgun noise,’ Jayne would tell 60 Minutes.
‘They had fired at the rooster down the back (of the yard).’
The couple had marriage counselling once but it was useless because, Jayne says, ‘We would discuss it over dinner – and then he had to go and have a drink with the boys.’
But Haken’s regard for ‘the brotherhood’ soured suddenly when he caught his wife in an intimate embrace with a colleague who had brought him home drunk and thought he had passed out on a couch.
‘What really shattered me was when another detective I was working with made a move on her (Jayne),’ Haken would reveal in a gruelling interview.
‘That really broke my belief in the brotherhood. The relationship between another detective and my wife made me realise that I’d taken my eye off the ball completely by excessive drinking. I gave it up.’
The episode might well have been an underlying motive for Haken to turn on his crooked mates. But, once he had betrayed them, like many protected witnesses he became disillusioned. He felt discarded and used by the authorities.
Haken’s biography makes it clear he felt cheated by the system. In it, his analyst is quoted describing poor accommodation in a cheap motel, bad meals and problems created by his mother-in-law and wife.
The federal agents assigned to protect Haken were ‘more interested in racking up all of the overtime and meal allowances they could,’ the analyst said. ‘They fed him crap. He couldn’t go out to get his own food so they would cook cheap and nasty food and Trevor would have to eat it.’
But the analyst did not altogether paint Jayne Haken as a victim. ‘His wife is quite beautiful. She would spend a lot of the money that he would make illegally on things like cosmetics and clothes. And she had a ball on all of this money but she claimed she never knew anything about what he was doing.
‘She slept with a colleague of Trevor’s and he caught them at it. He went a bit crazy about this and then gave up the drink.’
Haken’s mother-in-law also caused problems for the family and the Royal Commission, the analyst said. ‘She would often threaten to go to the Press, which threatened the security of the whole thing.’
In one terrifying episode, Haken felt as if he were being encouraged to commit suicide by those being paid to protect him – two officers from the witness security unit, known as WITSEC.
‘Imagine if you can, driving in a car with two WITSEC officers, when for no reason they turn off onto a dirt road in a country area,’ he writes.
He claims that one of the officers took out his police-issue handgun and said: ‘What information did you give to the Royal Commission about (a Federal officer)? He’s a mate of mine.’ The officer allegedly handed the gun to Haken, who claims he promptly handed it back, believing it was an invitation to take his own life.
In the end, the Wood Royal Commission’s success rested on Haken’s decision to become a whistleblower – and on his remarkable recall of specific events.
Without Haken’s detailed description of his own corruption and the involvement of so many others, counsels assisting like John Agius, Virginia Bell, James Black and Paddy Bergin would not have had the ammunition to destroy the wall of lies that had hidden bent police for decades. And Justice Wood would not have been able to pursue an inquiry that cast a long shadow over Australian police for many years. But as subsequent events in Sydney would prove, Wood’s probe did not uproot police corruption altogether: it simply pruned it so that it flourished again when conditions suited.
– WITH RAY CHESTERTON