There was enough money hidden in the garage to buy a family size house – and the police were going to steal every dollar of it.
BENT cops, crooked lawyers and crims have a saying: ‘It’s only a rort if you’re not in on it.’ This explains why the police that missed out on a ‘whack’ of $200,000 lifted from a cocaine dealer in an operation codenamed Pickup were jealous of those who split up the cash.
The cops with empty pockets called their bent brothers ‘the Christmas Club.’ It had nothing to do with Santa Claus, reindeer or carol-singing, and any goodwill between the bent officers who shared the money would prove short-lived.
The theft – brazen enough to impress career criminals – would bring nothing but trouble to those who pulled it off. Trevor Haken was one of them and it is his inside account that exposed the anatomy of a classic police scam.
‘The name (Christmas Club) was because it all (happened) around Christmas and was a nice little present,’ Haken writes in his biography Sympathy for the Devil.
It happened in 1983. Despite (or because of) the massive amount of money involved – the equivalent of a million dollars in today’s currency – splitting the take sparked much bitterness among corrupt police. Only a dozen or so got a cut. Those actively involved in the sting – plus Haken – got $13,000 each. Others in on the joke got $1000 each. But plenty who knew about it didn’t get any.
Among those who got payouts was a future assistant police commissioner, Ray Donaldson, who would later be forced to resign when faced with evidence of his 20 years of corruption. But he wasn’t alone.
Sharing top billing with Donaldson as the most senior policeman to leave the job in disgrace was the police commissioner’s chief of staff, Bob Lysaught, whose career was wrecked by the tears of a colleague’s distraught teenage daughter.
For Donaldson, Lysaught and the rest, Operation Pickup was the beginning of the end. It all started with the Joint Task Force, known as the JTF. It was supposed to be the most elite crime-fighting force Australia had ever known. But it had a hard core of arrogant opportunists who grew bloated with corruption until the group was disbanded after five years. And of the scams they pulled, Operation Pickup looked the easiest score of all.
It centred on two Sydney drug dealers named Salisbury and Powley, targeted by the task force and under close scrutiny.
Coincidentally, Victorian police contacted the task force to say a man they had under surveillance in Melbourne was coming to Sydney to buy drugs from Salisbury and Powley, (later code-named JTF2 and JTF3 when they appeared at the Royal Commission.)
It seemed a win-win situation for everyone except the two drug dealers. The buyer from Victoria, unknowingly purchasing drugs for the undercover policeman who recruited him, did not suspect that the serial numbers of the cash he was carrying had been recorded by Melbourne police, nor that he was under constant surveillance by the Joint Task Force in Sydney.
He completed his drug deal at Sydney airport and returned to Melbourne, where he was immediately arrested. Back in Sydney, JTF2 and JTF3 were delighted with their quick and profitable transaction – but not for long. They were arrested before they got out of the airport car park.
A search of their car produced two kilos of cocaine and a slab of hash, as well as two bags of cash – one holding $27,000, the other $14,400. It was enough to send the task force officers to look for more money and drugs at a Manly garage that JTF2 and JTF3 were known to use.
When the police got to the garage, according to later testimony, their faces lit up. They had stumbled over Aladdin’s Cave. As the search began, one of the two arrested men knew exactly what would happen. ‘Someone will get a nice new brick veneer tonight,’ he predicted. Meaning, there was enough money hidden in the garage to buy a family size house – and the police were going to steal every dollar of it.
He didn’t have to be Nostradamus. As well as cocaine and the usual drug paraphernalia, police found a briefcase they later said contained around $200,000. JTF2 would tell the Royal Commission it was actually closer to $280,000.
The real figure could be either or neither of the above: it’s hard to pick a winner in any dispute about the relative truthfulness of crooked police and drug dealers. But there is no doubt it was $200,000 or more.
Haken says the cash was brought to the task force headquarters in William Street, Kings Cross, where the marked money from Victorian police was isolated.
The drugs and money from JTF2 and JTF3’s car were faithfully recorded as evidence. But the cash stolen from the Manly garage was given to Haken, who acted as paymaster and bundled it into individual packages with the recipient’s name on the front of each.
Police who took part in the raid got $13,000. Others who had the night off got $1000. Haken said that included Detective Ray Donaldson, who would rise to be head of the squad before it was disbanded five years later. Although Haken was not physically involved in the raid, he also took $13,000.
Unbeknown to other police and confirming the adage about not trusting a thief, two officers who drove the two drug dealers’ car from the airport to Manly found $6000 hidden under a seat and decided to split it on the quiet.
Then a new problem emerged. The money designated for return to Victorian police was several thousand dollars short. Somehow, someone had double-dipped in the corruption payments.
Haken says in Sympathy for the Devil that it took a frantic round of phone calls before the missing money was allegedly returned to the task force’s Dennis Pattle by JTF 16, Alan Taciak. Haken took no more chances. He drove to Pattle’s home to collect the cash.
Haken says that as well as taking his $13,000 share, he gave similar amounts to Detective Sergeant Harry Bendt and detectives Taciak, Pattle, Terry Kilpatrick, Michael Tracey, Glenn Matinca, Frank Gillies, Chris Dent, Ian Lloyd and two detectives from other agencies.
There was a nice touch of irony, according to JTF10, a rollover officer. He said the appropriately-named Bendt, the senior officer, tried to persuade three corrupt officers to give him their $13,000 cut for a share in a real estate deal he was organising. All three declined. ‘He would have ripped them off,’ JTF10 said.
Haken says that Donaldson, Detective Inspector Ray Southwell, Detective Inspector Brian Meredith and former Australian Federal Police officer Richard Paynter were among those who took $1000.
Police who thought they were entitled to a share of the money were unhappy with the distribution organised by Haken and they had a supporter in Donaldson, even though he got $1000.
He would call Haken a ‘horrible, lashing (which means ‘ripping off’) little cunt’ when he learned years later of Haken again short changing colleagues with money stolen from a drug dealer.
More than any other evidence of endemic corruption in the police service, the Joint Task Force disgrace made the biggest impact with the public.
‘We were worse than the criminals,’ one corrupt officer would admit – and no one disagreed.
The Joint Task Force combined elite officers of the Australian Federal Police and the New South Wales police in a squad supposed to be the best of the best. It wasn’t. It was the worst. Not all police working in the squad were corrupt but there was a hard core of intractable officers out for what they could steal – from the minor to the massive.
One officer in the ‘Christmas Club’ even staged a fake stab wound in his arm to collect as much as $10,000 of taxpayers’ money as compensation. And Haken organised for a new carpet in the Westfield Towers building (where the task force headquarters was) to be stolen and laid in his own home.
Haken knew instantly he was with birds of a feather when, soon after arriving at the task force, he overheard Southwell telling colleague Richard Paynter about a sweet deal he had engineered: he had accepted $8000 from a drug dealer named David Kelleher to strip his name from a brief. Haken realised it did not matter where you served in the police, there was corruption to be found.
The Royal Commission hearings would shred the JTF’s reputation, with revelations of lying, extortion, fraud, assault, theft, perjury, selling information about police investigations and ‘loading up’ people with drugs before charging them.
In theory, the task force was a timely move to counter the flow of drugs being funnelled through Sydney to the rest of Australia. It supposedly recruited the brightest and best officers into an independent body with generous funding and high expectations.
Instead, many officers simply merged their flair for criminal behaviour into an organised powerhouse of corruption.
Their methods of raising illegal payments from criminals or just generating advantages for themselves were varied and ingenious. At one stage Haken sold Donaldson, the eventual boss of the unit, a stolen outboard motor for $100 after telling him it had been taken during a raid on an eastern suburbs house.
Another time, Southwell damaged the suspension of his own sedan and simply swapped the damaged part with one from the police car driven by the unsuspecting Donaldson, who took the vehicle to a government garage where it was repaired at taxpayers’ expense.
The brazen $200,000 Christmas Club sting was crude but it reflected the red-hot opportunism of corrupt officers inside the task force who would stoop to anything from extortion to perjury and straight-out theft to make money. Worst of all, they would sell out police investigations.
The corruption network came crashing down after selected officers were confronted with evidence of their corruption, gathered through electronic surveillance and telephone taps. Their choice was to become undercover double agents for the commission to avoid charges themselves. A case of setting a thief to catch a thief.
And no matter where the Commission headed in its inquiry into the JTF, the signposts of corruption invariably seemed to point at Donaldson and Lysaught, who were close friends and had followed tandem career paths.
Donaldson, called the ‘Smiling Assassin’ by his troops, proved a man of hugely contrasting opinions. He privately attacked the Royal Commission while publicly endorsing it, then went running to the Supreme Court on a failed mission to suppress his name and the allegations against him.
He denied all knowledge of any officers being corrupt then resigned (before he was pushed), claiming his reputation had been butchered beyond belief.
Arrogant and derisive about the Commission when it was first announced, Donaldson showed his true colours in a conversation with a colleague who had ‘rolled over’ and was wearing a recording device.
‘The whole fucking thing’s frog shit,’ Donaldson ranted. ‘This is a hundred million (dollars to run). It’s the WOFTAM Commission (Waste of fucking time and money). Any team of fucking galoots could have gone up to the Cross. It’s been going on for 100 years.’
To the delight of the public gallery at the Royal Commission, Donaldson’s WOFTAM tirade came immediately after he had been in the witness box under oath.
He was asked: ‘And there’s never been an occasion when you’ve done anything that a fellow policeman would take as a want of support for the Royal Commission by way of word or deed. Is that correct?’
Donaldson: ‘Correct.’
Counsel for the Commission: ‘Would you listen to this tape?’
Donaldson could blink and swallow but he couldn’t run and he couldn’t hide. But he lied. A diehard believer in the quaint idea of the ‘big blue gang’ being invulnerable to any investigation if police remained staunchly united, he repeatedly denied everything. But it was too late.
The gallows for Donaldson and Lysaught, the police commissioner’s chief of staff, was built on the plea of former officer Paul Deaves, who rolled over to become JTF7.
Deaves broke down in the witness box as he shamefacedly detailed his corrupt behaviour, including a massive $100,000 scam on a drug dealer. He wasn’t alone in reaching for the tissues.
By the time he had finished detailing the widespread corruption in the task force, the sixteen colleagues he’d implicated were in tears as well as they saw their careers crash and burn.
Deaves became a weapon of mass destruction for the Commission, unhesitatingly naming fellow officers that he said acted corruptly, including Donaldson and Lysaught.
He came into the hearing through the ‘roll-over’ door reserved for officers who had changed sides and his testimony burned holes in his previous dodgy evidence.
He admitted he was corrupt, had accepted bribes in the past and had direct evidence linking other police with bribes from criminals. And he was willing to tell all.
Deaves said his teenage daughter had begged him to tell the truth in the witness box, whatever the consequences.
‘You’re a policeman, dad,’ she had said. ‘You’ve sworn to tell the truth.’ So he did. His colleagues, facing the sack over charges ranging from theft to intimidating witnesses to perjury and drug dealing, thought he should have stuck to the adage that children should be seen but not heard.
Deaves’ testimony was poignant, partly because it had to be so personally treacherous. He was a long-time personal friend of Donaldson and Lysaught, who was godfather to Deaves’ son. JTF6, another officer who rolled over, was also a close friend of all three men.
That intimacy turned to ashes as the pair saved their own hides by switching sides and working undercover for the Commission. Deaves recalled the past and JTF6 captured the present on a recording device he wore into Lysaught’s office to tape conversations.
Deaves revealed his and Lysaught’s involvement in a scam that extracted $100,000 from a slow-thinking cocaine dealer and a midnight rendezvous on a winter’s night to distribute the spoils.
The pay-off came when two police cars driven by officers with no known interest in nature study pulled into Koala Park, a deserted tourist attraction at Castle Hill in outer Sydney. With only gum trees as witnesses, a white cloth bag containing $44,000 in bundles of $50, $20 and $10 notes was tossed from one car to Deaves in the other with the message: ‘Here’s your Christmas present.’
It was actually mid-1987, not Christmas time, but the police calendar is elastic about such things.
Deaves’ first reaction to the windfall was to phone Lysaught from a public phone and say: ‘Everything is sweet.’
The police in Koala Park and the dozen or so others in on the rort were the dark side of Santa Claus. They were splitting $100,000 in cash they had conned out of a drug importer called John Murphy.
Murphy, big in cocaine, thought he was buying his way out of being charged over millions of dollars worth of drug importations. He was a little optimistic. As Deaves would later reveal in the witness box, the task force had no brief on Murphy and could do nothing to help him – but the temptation to relieve him of $100,000 was too much to ignore.
Murphy’s $100,000 offer was relayed to New South Wales drug officers Peter George and Chris Hannay who in turn, the Commission was told, passed it along to Lysaught and other senior police. Lysaught was named as the mastermind of the extortion scheme and a corruption conduit to his friend Donaldson. They even set up ‘think tanks’ to find a way to make it work.
‘During the course of discussions with Mr Lysaught it was decided that, as we didn’t have a brief on Murphy anyway, we were not in a position to charge him,’ Deaves said. ‘There was a discussion about basically distancing ourselves from the money and Murphy. I have a recollection Mr Lysaught and myself also spoke to Dick Paynter and Brian Meredith.’
Paynter and Meredith allegedly drove the police car that arrived at the Koala Park and threw the money to Deaves – a charge they denied, along with other allegations of corrupt behaviour.
Lysaught was the bagman. He took $17,000 of Murphy’s bribe for himself and another $5000 he said was for Donaldson. A total of $44,000 went to four officers with the remaining $56,000 divided between other police in the rort.
With the ghosts of his past threatening him, Lysaught decided attack was the best defence at his first appearance before the Commission. It didn’t last. He had come into the hearing like a brass band. He went out like a tin whistle.
He castigated the media for pursuing him and protested his innocence until counsel assisting, John Agius, dropped the stunning news that Lysaught’s office had been infiltrated and recording devices planted in it.
‘Mr Lysaught, I tell you now so that you may know and think about this,’ Agius said. ‘For quite some long time now (JTF6) has been assisting the Royal Commission by having meetings with people, including yourself, at a time when he was wearing a listening device.
‘The Royal Commission has those holdings and there are a large number of them and your voice features prominently. The Commission would like you to think about your position between now and the time you return to the witness box.’
The realisation hit Lysaught like a bucket of iced water. He had been sold out by a man he trusted implicitly.
Agius demanded an answer. Did Lysaught understand the situation?
It was a bitter moment for Lysaught as he whispered, ‘Yes’. Having headed down a dead end by initially denying ever seeing or hearing of any corruption during their time in the force and sticking to their story, Lysaught and Donaldson had to sit like condemned men waiting for the trapdoor to drop as a black cloud of allegations burst over them.
Surveillance and bugging, modern policing’s best tools, were being used to rid the modern force of some of its dinosaurs. Other tapes recorded secretly in Lysaught’s office and played for Justice Wood revealed officers pledging to hold their ranks at the Royal Commission.
Deaves also said Lysaught had shared a $10,000 bribe with other corrupt police for not opposing a bail application by a Central Coast heroin seller.
‘Rollover’ officers told of Lysaught instigating an aggressive twelve- hour interrogation of a woman at Sydney airport and bullying her into signing a partly false statement he had compiled about her conspiring to import drugs even though none had been found on her person or in her luggage.
Deaves said other officers involved in the case had met to go over the details to ensure ‘their statements dovetailed to make it look like it had actually happened.’ The woman was subsequently jailed.
The allegations against Donaldson mounted until they were a noose around his neck. Being fingered for receiving money from the drug raid was just the start of his problems. Eye witnesses said he had also assaulted a man involved in heroin trafficking and then colluded with other officers to lie about the case in court.
By this stage the supposedly rock-solid task force that Donaldson was relying on for support was fracturing fast. Realising their past sins were surfacing and confronted by Haken’s forensic memory and recorded evidence, guilty officers rushed to ‘roll over’ and tell their stories to the Commission to reduce the looming penalties.
At one stage former squad members JTF1, JTF6, JTF7, JTF8 and JTF 9 were lining up behind Haken to give evidence. Then came J10 and J11. In poker it was a straight.
It was JTF8 who revealed that Donaldson had assaulted an Asian cocaine dealer during a raid on a house in Kirrawee in Sydney’s south. It happened after police tracked imported heroin (packed into a car axle) to the house.
JTF8 said the raid was more violent than he’d expected despite the fact the suspects found living at the house had shown little resistance.
‘It was a hard entry. The Asians living there were secured violently and pushed and thrown to the ground,’ JTF8 said. He admitted grabbing a man named Truang and slapping him before dragging him into the yard, where other police converged on him.
‘I recall the man (Truang) being hit across the face two or three times by another police officer,’ JTF8 said. ‘Hardhanded slaps to the side of the face. The man (a Vietnamese) was screaming and wailing as he was being bashed in the backyard.’
Asked which officer had hit the man JTF8 replied: ‘Detective Sergeant Ray Donaldson.’
The assault had also been witnessed by people next door. Unluckily for the cops, one of the witnesses was a retired fireman and lay preacher with an irresistible urge to tell the truth. ‘We didn’t know he was watching what went on,’ JTF8 said feelingly.
The people in the Kirrawee house were charged with conspiracy to supply heroin. But the neighbour willingly gave evidence of having seen Truang assaulted. To overcome the problem the police involved had a ‘scrum down’ and decided to deny the allegations en masse.
‘Under oath I denied these allegations as did the other police involved,’ JTF8 admitted.
Royal Commissioner: What other police denied those allegations?
JTF8: Mr Donaldson was among them.
RC: Did you speak to your police colleagues about what evidence you would give about the matter in court?
JTF8: Yes. We decided that the assault would be denied.
JTF8 said Donaldson agreed with the decision to lie to the court. Other former colleagues also rushed to kick Donaldson’s battered reputation to death.
Evidence was given that he had once helped dispose of a police car severely damaged when Lysaught hit a parked vehicle while trying to change lanes after a drinking session in inner Sydney. Lysaught had called Donaldson, who told him to hide the vehicle until morning. Donaldson would later decide the car was so damaged it should be dumped so JTF6 reported it stolen.
As the allegations mounted, an increasingly jittery Donaldson verged on a state of shock. He knew there was plenty more where that came from. For instance, the Commission heard that Donaldson had illegally intervened in a case being heard by Royal Commissioner James Wood when he was a trial judge.
It revolved around a raid on a Five Dock home in Sydney’s inner-west and the arrest of two heroin dealers whose names were suppressed. The raid, Operation Bing, was so farcically handled it could have been a script for a comic book.
Even though cocaine was genuinely found on the premises, the raid was ‘chaotic’, according to Deaves. He said the male heroin dealer had been assaulted and police were swearing and screaming at the top of their voices and using language like ‘sit down, you fucking moll’ to the man’s partner. Unfortunately for them, the house was being bugged – and the tapes hadn’t been turned off. The rogue cops realised too late that all their swearing, bullying and violence was on tape.
Deaves said he had taken this problem to Detective Sergeant Rob Milner, the JFT deputy leader, but Milner refused to help and wanted the tapes played in their entirety in court. In other words, he seemed to be the only character in the pantomime with any idea of what proper policing was about.
Donaldson was next on Deaves’ list to ask for help. ‘He told me we would have to get rid of the tape because it could not be played,’ Deaves recalled.
After waiting until Milner went on holidays, Deaves and JTF 20 stole the tape and edited out the troublesome words. JTF 20 burnt the original. But in court the two dealers complained about being assaulted and queried the authenticity of the modified tape played in the trial.
Justice Wood, then the trial judge, ordered that the tapes be tested by experts for authenticity and that Legal Aid provide enough money for ten hours of examination.
Deaves, embarrassed at giving evidence to a Royal Commissioner about the way he had been duped as judge, admitted they had thwarted Woods’ plan by putting the doctored tape at the bottom of the pile to be tested.
They then diverted the expert’s attention by continually talking about his electronic equipment until the Legal Aid funds were exhausted. ‘He only got through about seven tapes before the cash ran out,’ Deaves said.
Commissioner Wood said from the bench that the evidence against the couple had been very powerful.
‘Roll over’ witness and former officer JTF16 proved full of malice and without any morality. A search of his home by Royal Commission officers found pipes stuffed with money buried in his back yard, along with a .38 Smith & Wesson service revolver issued to another officer.
The two men had argued so JTF16 stole the other officer’s pistol because he knew that losing your weapon was a serious breach for a police officer. JTF 16 was eventually sacked from the force and was last known to be selling cars for a living.
Another example of the task force members’ insatiable appetite for corruption also came in Operation Bing, again involving drugs.
Deaves, seconded to the task force from the Australian Federal Police, was part of a surveillance team watching the Five Dock house, where suspected heroin importers Pat and Elizabeth Curry were living.
The couple were being watched when they went to Bangkok. Pat Curry owned a Sydney taxi school and was eventually convicted after heroin was found hidden in the panelling of one of his cabs.
He was interviewed by Haken and Deaves and while he was in custody, all his furniture was stolen, including a refrigerator. ‘We received a note from Curry’s solicitor saying there was no furniture in the house,’ Deaves told the Commission. ‘Everything had been taken from the house. Just about everything that wasn’t nailed down was gone.’
Deaves said Donaldson, by then the commanding officer in the JTF, had been angry about the theft, insisting the stolen furniture be returned.
‘He (Donaldson) basically said: “I don’t care who took it. I want it put back straight away”.’ Deaves denied that he or Haken were behind the theft and blamed an officer called John Cushion.
Police also raided the home of an associate of the Currys in the mistaken belief they would find drugs and money. ‘Mr Donaldson blued about nothing being found,’ Deaves said.
The task force got its own back for missing out on finding any easy money. When Curry’s associate was later arrested on an unrelated matter, JTF6 and Deaves ‘verballed’ him.
THE officer codenamed JTF14 was one of the many police – those who appeared before the Commission and those who did not – who had regarded the police brotherhood as invincible. Sticking together in adversity was their mantra – but it didn’t last when the rats started to rat on each other.
Corrupt police were uncovered in all sorts of places, and JTF14 was one of them. He was recalled from working on assignment in Great Britain for the Australian Federal Police. He arrived back in Australia to admit he had framed a suspected drug dealer out of misguided loyalty to other corrupt police.
It was a long way to come to be sacked from a cushy overseas posting. At that stage JTF14, a detective superintendent in the Australian Federal Police, was the most senior officer to appear before the inquiry.
He said Ray Donaldson had driven him to a house in inner-city Alexandria to plant a knife near where a drug dealer had earlier been arrested. It was part of a subterfuge to provide a corrupt financial windfall for another officer, Detective Sergeant Richard Paynter, who retired from the force in 1986 medically unfit.
Paynter had cut his arm climbing a corrugated fence during a raid on the Erskineville Hotel to capture a man named Eric John Honeysett in1983 but he wanted to turn the injury into something more lucrative. So he claimed he had been stabbed by a knife supposedly wielded by Honeysett during a scuffle.
There was no scuffle and no knife. An unarmed Honeysett ran out of the hotel into a lane and despite ‘almost everyone from the task force being there’ he managed to climb a fence and get onto a roof while being shot at by police, who luckily all missed him. They could steal a barn door but they couldn’t hit one.
Honeysett jumped into a backyard and was captured only because he tried to run through the house and stumbled over two large Greek men sleeping in the hall trying to catch a breeze on a hot day. The Greeks fell on top of him as he shouted, ‘You fat bastards.’
Then Honeysett’s day rapidly got worse. He was fitted up with a charge of attempted murder of Paynter with police falsely claiming he was carrying a knife. Honeysett being ‘armed’ was necessary, of course, because it justified police shooting at him. The fact that it would mean a man would serve a huge jail sentence for something he hadn’t done didn’t matter to them.
Haken’s account was: ‘There was no knife so we had to put a knife into the scenario somewhere. So the Fed (JTF14) took a knife and threw it back over the fence.
‘Of course, when the scientific guy was photographing the scene the next day he found the knife.’ Naturally. Planting a ‘throwaway’ for honest colleagues to find is one of the oldest tricks in the bent cop rulebook because the innocent dupe gives flawlessly sincere evidence.
JTF14 corroborated Haken’s evidence, saying Paynter told him he was going to claim he was stabbed by Honeysett and asked him to go back to the scene in a car driven by Donaldson and plant a knife.
Two more protected witnesses, JTF 15 and JTF16, said their statements – used to support the case against Honeysett – were false and had been compiled only after police rehearsed their story.
Honeysett, trapped in a web of lies, had done the best deal he could. Finally accepting that the odds of him beating the manufactured evidence and a conspiracy were astronomical, he pleaded guilty to both a drug charge and using an offensive weapon. ‘It was me against the task force,’ he told the Commission in explanation of his guilty plea.
The whole charade was a disgraceful example of how far bent police would go to fit someone up with a false charge to suit their own selfish purposes. Morality was discarded as casually as a ‘throwaway’ knife.
Even a doctor, who initially said the gash on Paynter’s arm did not look as if it was caused by a knife, was pushed towards a conveniently vague conclusion. Police had commented that her ‘failure’ to recognise the injury as a knife cut was a ‘pity’ because it was crucial evidence against a criminal who had 63 convictions for rape and assault on women.
She said: ‘Where do I sign?’
The fit-up was an almost sadistic act by the police involved. Honeysett faced a possible twenty years in jail for attempted murder of a policeman had he not pleaded guilty to the manufactured charge.
Paynter, who had retired from the force on medical grounds, denied the allegations. But the combined evidence of the guilty Federal policeman, Haken and Honeysett, who emphatically denied he had ever attempted to stab anyone, finally carried the day.
JTF14 paid a high price, despite regaining some integrity by telling the truth about the Paynter sham.
‘It was misguided loyalty,’ he said of his involvement, adding his name to the list of police who felt compelled to be corrupt to stay in line with senior officers who had control over their future. ‘(What I did) was utterly inexcusable and impermissible.’
But apparent remorse wasn’t enough to atone for his sins. Commissioner Wood killed JTF14’s future as a policeman.
‘Do you think you could stay a day longer in the Federal Police?’ Wood asked. It was a rhetorical question. The only anwer was ‘No’.
While JTF14’s support strengthened Haken’s version of what happened, his recall from overseas to testify was puzzling because no incentives seemed to be on offer except being sacked instead of being prosecuted. There was no prosecution of anyone else involved in the scam.
‘I don’t know quite what happened,’ Haken would write. ‘Someone must have convinced him (JTF14) to say “Well, this happened” and then he’d be okay to go back to England and live happily ever after.
‘You’ve got a Federal Police superintendent coming back from England saying: “Yeah. Righto. That’s what we did.”
‘And there’s all these other people saying that’s what happened but no prosecutions.
‘I believe Paynter received a $2500 payment as a result of a criminal compensation payment for the (cut arm).
‘If you look at his history, he’s claimed for injuries in motor vehicles and other things. Mate, he’s the most injured man in history. He shouldn’t be able to walk. He should be like Raymond Burr (from the TV crime series Ironside) ripping around in a wheelchair.
‘The DPP (Department of Public Prosecutions) hasn’t prosecuted the majority of people who ought to have been prosecuted out of the Royal Commission. People haven’t asked why. The DPP should be asked to explain this.’
The failure of the DPP to pursue obvious – and in many cases admitted – guilt was disappointing, especially after the stern warning about penalties facing corrupt police issued by the Royal Commissioner at the start of the hearings.
He said police and criminals who were later shown to have lied to the Commission ‘must expect significant penal sentences – that is, significant periods in jail. It was wishful thinking.
LYSAUGHT and Donaldson were linked by a mutually beneficial friendship. So strong was the link that counsel assisting the Royal Commission, John Agius, accused them of being the most prominent links in a chain of corruption stretching from working police almost to the doorstep of Police Commissioner Tony Lauer.
While there was no suggestion of impropriety about Lauer, he emerged from the imbroglio as an administrator of stunning naivety.
Writing in the Weekend Australian, ABC commentator Quentin Dempster nailed Lauer’s inability to survive the overwhelming evidence of his ineptitude.
‘A revolver in the library appears to be the only honourable course open to Tony Lauer: pre-emptive resignation,’ he wrote.
‘He could jump before he is pushed, admit failure and declare his wish to allow the rebuilding of public confidence in the police force through Wood’s pursuit of the truth.
‘At the moment, Lauer’s tactics are to maintain a low profile. The silence is deafening.’
Former Independent Member of Parliament, John Hatton, a long time campaigner for the Royal Commission to be set up, called for Lauer to be sacked. ‘The failure of his administration warrants his sacking now,’ Hatton said.
In the end, Lauer did resign, perhaps avoiding a more dramatic end to his career. A huge hurdle for him was his support for Donaldson’s integrity despite rapidly mounting suspicion to the contrary.
Lauer said he had no doubt about Donaldson’s ability to continue in his role in the force. ‘Assistant Commissioner Donaldson has sought and should be granted the opportunity to respond as soon as possible to these allegations,’ Lauer said. ‘These allegations stem from some years back when Mr Donaldson was not assistant commissioner.
‘I hope eventually the Royal Commission will start to deal with more contemporary policing rather than these incidents of some time ago.’
Allegations about the $100,000 bribe extracted from Murphy and the role of Lysaught and Donaldson in the corruption had surfaced previously and led to a 1990 Crime Commission inquiry by a judge.
But the police involved put their heads together, as usual, and told concurrent lies, claiming it had never happened. Lysaught and Donaldson were both exonerated.
Without the incriminating eavesdropping from other corrupt officers wearing recording devices, the Royal Commission’s inquiry a decade later and subsequent exposure of the corruption might have gone the same way.
This time Lysaught was unceremoniously sacked. Donaldson was told his contract would not be renewed and resigned immediately. But he didn’t go quietly.
‘I don’t think I will ever recover,’ he whined, saying the media scrutiny of his 35-year police career had ‘destroyed my character and reputation.’ He said one true thing: that his entire career had ‘been in vain’. No one argued with that.
And in a bizarre reminder that no power in Sydney is mighty enough to change the thinking of established police about supporting a colleague, no matter how circumstances may taint him, Lysaught got a new job.
A newspaper reported that Lysaught became manager of a block of units in Queensland – the sort of job that usually commands a good salary because it requires supervising the renting of units to holiday-makers. When Lysaught’s dodgy background was raised, who came to his rescue? Senior New South Wales police, of course.
The Sun-Herald commented: ‘They like a certain kind of policeman up there in the deep north.
‘Disgraced former New South Wales chief superintendent Bob Lysaught’s foray into management at Broadbeach’s new Capricornia high-rise unit block per the use of laudatory references from senior police, who should have known better, has been given the thumbs up.
‘Capricornia’s Body Corporate has approved Lysaught continuing in the new role.’
Those who had suffered because of the actions of bent police did not end up with such a comfortable life.
– WITH RAY CHESTERTON