Underbelly

by John Silvester

  ‘The wife and kids never really spoke to you unless they had to,’ the officer recalls. ‘It was as if they had been instructed by the father not to talk to people. No “nice day today” or anything like that. If he brought them into the station to collect his mail or anything, the kids would never talk to you. I don’t think many people would go to the house. He was a bit of a mystery man.’

  THE only paying customers who get to see Kim Hollingsworth these days aren’t buying sex. They are riders who pay by the hour to do trail rides at the Scenic Hills Riding Ranch near Campbelltown. It’s easy to find, she says: the name is spelled out in big, white letters, Hollywood style, on a hill near the M5 freeway south-west of Sydney.

  She’s a casual riding instructor – saddling horses to ride out with the public who turn up at the ‘ranch’ on weekends and holidays. It is the latest in a line of jobs she has had with horses since quitting prostitution and being forced to abandon the police service after a determined effort to embarrass the authorities for snubbing her. She has worked at racing stables – riding work for various Sydney trainers. She is light but strong for her weight – testament to a vegetarian diet, exercise and the fact, she says, that she has never done drugs. At 42, she looks years younger in photographs, with few of the tell-tale signs of surviving the sex industry.

  She refuses to deny or be demeaned by her past. Luke Slattery wrote of her in 1997: ‘She carries herself with a confident air, all the while striving to lay claim to a fresh self.’ She still does.

  When the authors spoke to her in 2009, she was living at a small property at Appin, between Picton and Wollongong, and working part-time at the riding school, half an hour’s drive away. She was as bright and engaging as any sales person – or well-schooled escort. She tells her stories with apparent frankness, but there is a sense that they are well-honed anecdotes of the sort that performers roll out on chat shows. Cute on cue.

  She tells, for instance, how a little girl at the riding school asked her innocently one day, ‘Were you a policeman?’ and when asked why she’d asked, said it was because of the way Kim sits up straight, shoulders squared, hands neat and low. There is a discipline and precision in the way she does things that is at odds with the sex and drugs and dirty money of life in the Cross.

  In the end, of course, the big question is: Why? What made her take up the sex industry?

  The story she has told everyone for years hasn’t changed.

  ‘I was a late starter,’ she confides, beginning her routine as if it’s for the very first time. It isn’t. ‘I didn’t do anything in Albury-Wodonga. But then I had a bad boyfriend. I thought everyone was out of a Jane Austen book but I walked in on him with two prostitutes. I was all sad and crying and they looked after me and ended up offering me a job. When I asked, ‘How much?’ they said I could make at least a grand and more likely two grand a week. My wage at the time was $160 as a waitress.’

  But the motive wasn’t the money, she says. At first she was just trying to get back at the bad boyfriend. But once she tasted the money it was hard to go back to low pay.

  She says when she started stripping, she and her sister and another woman (‘two blondes and one brunette’) took their skimpy stripper costumes and tape player into the grounds of a kindergarten next door to their apartment and practised on the hopscotch court. Once they got their moves down pat, they were in business.

  She doesn’t avoid talking about her years in the sex industry but is happier talking about her love of animals. She claims to have declared herself against eating meat when she was a tiny child, to her parents’ astonishment, and to have stood by those principles all her life. It hasn’t been easy, she says.

  Her ill-fated mounted policeman friend was called Roy De Coque. Because she wanted to get into a Bachelor of Applied Science course in equine studies she needed a reference stating that she was an experienced horse handler. De Coque obligingly wrote one for her – on police letterhead. When he was summoned to the Wood Royal Commission to answer questions about this he panicked and shot himself. But the story does not quite end with that senseless tragedy.

  The postscript Hollingsworth adds is that the fatal reference got her into the course but she couldn’t stand it. Why? The college had a pig production unit that upset her. And her lecturers put down a pregnant mare so the students could study the foetus. She ditched the course. So De Coque’s fatal favour didn’t do anyone much good.

  IN mid-June 2009, in the news room of the Albury newspaper, the Border Mail, the chief of staff fielded a telephone call. On the line was Kim Hollingsworth, calling from Campbelltown. She said she wanted to announce that she – meaning a character based on her – was going to be in the next Underbelly television series, to be screened in 2010.

  The chief of staff, Anthony Bunn, was mildly surprised at the naked self-promotion but happy to play along. Hollingsworth, an old hand at the publicity game, was only too pleased to pose with her clothes on in front of the Campbelltown police station so that her local Camden newspaper could photograph her. The same picture (and story) could be used in both that paper and the Border Mail. She told Bunn the Campbelltown police weren’t happy at her using their station as a backdrop – but not to worry, she’d do it anyway. And that’s exactly what she did.

  Kim Hollingsworth pleases herself. There was a time when that meant she provided happy endings for the police, but not any more. She’s a big girl now.

  5

  COOKING CHOOK

  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.’

&nbs
p; 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?’