Leviathan (56 page)

But Askin's government was not the only administration that played fast and loose. In September 1978 the
National Times
reported that a prominent council official had been engaged as a ‘consultant' by the American company, Citibank, with the promise of a $75 000 bonus if he was able to secure a rezoning the bank desperately needed. In 1983 Senator Don Chipp, then leader of the Australian Democrats, expressed his astonishment in federal parliament that Neville Wran's State Labor government had chosen, upon discovering a Public Transport Authority building had been illegally sublet to Sydney's ‘Mr Sin', Abe Saffron, and now contained a sex shop, a brothel and a gambling club, to pay out the lease to the tune of $2.6 million and had further declined to prosecute any of the enterprises involved.

The ruthlessness of people like Allan and Askin, and the way they protected criminal activity, was laid bare by the Arantz affair. Phillip Arantz was a detective-sergeant who had been appointed to head the police department's computer bureau in 1969. The department wanted to computerise its records but there was a problem. For many years the police had been running a two-track crime reporting system designed to maximise the official clear-up rate. This was the ‘paddy book' scheme. Crimes which had little chance of being solved were kept out of official police statistics, being entered instead into the secret paddy book. Arantz had never been comfortable with the arrangement. At one point in his career at Ryde station only fifty crimes had been officially recorded while a thousand choked the paddy book. With computers the system would become unworkable. He demanded Commissioner Norm Allan release the real crime statistics for 1971, and when Allan didn't, Arantz released them himself. The reaction was swift and brutal. The Commissioner had Arantz proclaimed insane by a police medico and frog-marched to a psychiatric institution. When the doctors there refused to play along, Allan retaliated with instant termination of the detective-sergeant's employment. He and Askin then joined forces to intimidate the nascent computer industry into denying Arantz employment anywhere in the field. Given such a tightly contained and brutally maintained system, you could be forgiven for despairing that it would ever unravel. But it did, decisively, twenty-three years later with the coming of James Wood.

 

Any royal commission is likely to disrupt or even ruin the lives of those it investigates. Such inquiries are often a last line of defence when all the other safeguards of the State have failed. Their investigations and findings, unrestrained by the rules of evidence prevailing in a normal courtroom, are usually to be feared by someone. And the fearful nature of Wood's inquisition, the violence of the shock it delivered to the city, can be reckoned from the number of lives it took. It's possible that up to twelve men killed themselves after becoming enmeshed in Wood's deliberations. Nine certainly did. Among their number was Robert Tait, an acting patrol commander in Narrabri who blew his brains out after facing accusations of covering up the indiscretions of two other police officers; Clinton Moller, a former constable at Bondi station, who hung himself in a prison cell; Detective Senior Constable Wayne Johnson who shot his estranged wife then ate a bullet himself after he was named for cheating on his travel allowances; former Wollongong councillor Brian Tobin who gassed himself to death in a car after being approached by Wood's investigators; Peter Foretic who went the same way on the day he was scheduled to give evidence against a former mayor of Wollongong; and Ray Jenkins, a dog trainer, who came over all stiff and uncommunicative after earlier providing the commission with information about police corruption around Campbelltown. Many of these men passed quietly, unnoticed. The entire nation, however, was stunned by the suicide of former Supreme Court judge David Yeldham in November 1996 after he had been named in the upper house of the New South Wales Parliament by Labor member Franca Arena as someone who was being protected by the Wood Commission's pedophilia inquiry. Arena did not accuse Yeldham of being a pedophile, but he took it that way, as did many others. Some time on the afternoon of Monday 4 November, he connected the exhaust of his red Toyota Lexcen to a length of flexible piping, fed the hose through a window, climbed into the driver's seat and put himself beyond the reach of Arena's parliamentary privilege.

No evidence emerged of Yeldham's ever being involved in child abuse. At most he seems to have been a man whose unacknowledged homosexuality or bisexuality led him to furtive encounters with like-minded men in the city's train stations and public toilets. An unexpected casualty of Arena's speech was the police Special Branch which was found to have protected Yeldham from exposure, thus leading to the possibility of blackmail. When Wood sent his finders into the branch, it quickly gave up the information that for years it had been keeping files on parliamentarians, civil liberties activists and lawyers. The Police Commissioner disbanded the unit within hours. The shockwaves continued spreading though, with government departments such as education and community services exposed as being virtually complicit in child sexual abuse, so pathetically inadequate was their response to the quite amazing number of pedophiles revealed within their employ. And then the cancer spread beyond them into what could be thought of as the moral core of society, with revelations that the churches had protected child molesters within their ranks for decades.

The Wood Commission ran for so long that the endless revelations eventually had something of a numbing effect. It is probably only now, some time after the event, that a dry recitation of its findings carries some emotional potency. Leaving aside the results of his pedophilia inquiry and concentrating only on the police, Wood detailed ‘a state of systemic and entrenched corruption' within the service which encompassed bribery, fraud, illegal violence and the abuse of police powers, subversion of prosecutions, theft and extortion, protection of the drug trade as well as active drug trafficking, protection of illegal clubs and brothels, protection of illegal gambling operations and interference with internal investigations.

A form of ‘noble cause' corruption, also known as process corruption, involved breaking the law to enforce it, with officers engaging in perjury; the planting of evidence such as drugs and weapons; tampering with evidence; inventing fictitious confessions; denial of basic rights such as a caution; assaults, including baton whippings and macing to induce confessions; posing as lawyers to advise suspects to cooperate with police; and ripping off criminals seen to be beyond the law.

Traditional forms of corruption included bribes from illegal clubs and gambling dens, taken in the form of money, free booze and meals at the clubs or free sex in brothels. Such bribes were sometimes extracted through direct extortion, but more often they simply formed the basis of unhealthy friendships with criminals. The limitless supply of free grog and drugs inevitably led to problems of substance abuse with Wood exposing serious levels of alcoholism within the service and the use of speed, dope, steroids and coke among younger officers. Drinking on duty frequently resulted in car crashes and violent assaults on both suspects and members of the public. In an illustrative case one officer working around Penrith, St Marys and Fairfield admitted

The connections formed between police and criminals during long lunches and visits to brothels and illegal casinos often perverted the justice system when officers interfered with the prosecution of such figures, through ‘watering down' their criminality by reducing the amount of drugs or money involved in any case against them, by selecting lesser charges or supporting bail applications by withholding relevant details, by losing track of evidence or witnesses and creating loopholes in records of interviews or court testimonies. Some favoured informants were virtually given a ticket to ride through the system; for instance, one group of detectives sat on electronic surveillance of one of their informants pulling off an armed robbery.

Not everyone got off so lightly of course. Wood also wrote that theft and extortion of criminals had become ‘regular features of policing' by the late 1980s. In its simplest form this consisted of shaking down street level drug dealers, a practice which evolved into something of an art form at Kings Cross. Relieving unimportant crooks of their drugs and cash ‘generated vast amounts of money for those police who engaged in it', some of them developing such rapacious appetites that they unwittingly helped suppress the drug trade by simply walking out the front door of the station. When they were on the streets, said one officer, ‘word quickly spread amongst the runners who suspended operations until they had left the area'. Major drug dealers, in contrast, were not all that concerned about shake-downs and rip-offs because the money was very easily replaced and every dollar extorted or stolen by the cops during a raid was a dollar which couldn't be used against them as evidence in court.

Some stings took place at the highest levels of the drug industry, with correspondingly greater problems should the sting turn bad. In December 1983, for example, an operation run by both the Victorian police and a joint task force of the New South Wales and federal police targeted two suspects who were followed from Sydney airport to the northern beaches after a drug sale. A search of their car uncovered plastic bottles full of cocaine and two bags stuffed with over forty grand in cash, all of which was formally booked up as evidence. Missing from the evidence list, however, was $6000 two NSW detectives found in the dealers' car, another stash of cocaine and somewhere between $150 000 and $285 000 discovered in the garage. This windfall was parcelled out between eight NSW cops but, like the paranoid goldminers in
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
, they knew for a stone fact they could not trust each other and bad blood soon developed over the carve-up. An even greater problem arose when it emerged that the dopey but honest Victorian cops had logged some of the money their Sydney colleagues had trousered. An almost Seinfeldian episode ensued, with ‘strenuous efforts' being made to recover the money. Unfortunately ‘this was made difficult by the fact that the bundle of notes originally booked up had already been photographed by the Police Scientific Section'. Detective Trevor Haken, who later turned informant for the commission, ‘had to return the stolen notes to that bundle and organise to have it rephotographed'.

More disturbing than mere opportunistic freelance banditry was overwhelming evidence of alliances between police and drug lords, with officers taking bribes to ignore the trade, or rendering active assistance to dealers in the form of tip-offs about raids, undermining their trials and even driving out the competitors of favoured dealers; a win-win situation, as the protected criminals thrived and the cops looked like they were doing their job. Police, wrote Wood, were actively involved in the supply of cocaine, heroin and cannabis, mostly through recycling drugs seized in various operations but not booked up as evidence. So cosy were the links with some traffickers that they actually supplied money for the service to use in buy-bust ops against their competitors. On one such occasion a bungled operation resulted in the loss of $12 000 which had been lent to the police by a dealer. The detectives compensated by cutting the drugs and giving some to the dealer to make good his loss. In another case four and a half kilograms of cannabis were stolen in a job set up by police informants, and resold by them, the proceeds being shared between the crims and their controlling officers. One detective even bought a consignment of heroin from one criminal associate for resale to another because the latter was having trouble obtaining the stocks he needed at a competitive price from his usual supplier.

Another dealer turned snitch for the police in order to close down a rival, on the basis that he would take a half share of any heroin the cops might find.

There was no honour, it seems, amongst thieves or bent cops. The real victims in all this of course were the likes of that fourteen-year-old girl who sat next to me on the steps outside of Woolworths in Kings Cross, or the emaciated Aboriginal boy who needed us to stick the syringe into his arms, or the sad, stiffening transsexual on the slab at the Glebe Morgue.

How far back would you have cast your gaze to understand why things went so wrong? In 1900, the editor of the
Truth
and member of parliament, John Norton, called for a Royal Commission into the police force, some of whom, he alleged, were in the pay of brothel keepers and ‘in league with some of the worst scoundrels ever let loose on society'. Al McCoy argues that Sydney compared very poorly with Melbourne. The southern capital had its fair share of scandals, and the sort of thriving vice trade you would expect to find in any large port city. But unlike Sydney it never succumbed to rule of criminal syndicates. Once established, he writes, syndicates cannot survive without an understanding with police and political power. ‘It is at this point that a city's fundamental character comes into play.' Sydney's organised criminals of the 1960s and 1970s courted premiers, distributed heroin across the country and entered into joint ventures with the American mafia. Melbourne's were confined to the docks and corralled within the waterfront unions. For McCoy, it was a case of Melbourne having much stronger commercial and industrial sectors than Sydney. There the establishment held firmly onto ‘the reins of social control' and strove to block any rise of the nouveau, ‘criminal or otherwise'. Sydney by contrast did not have such resources. The pastoral-commercial elite who had seen it as nothing more than a transit point for their shipments to European markets ‘created an opportunity for Sydney's syndicate lieutenants to gain political influence'.