Underbelly

by John Silvester

  Watching Fowler stumble into the Commission’s well-laid traps made compelling watching. He typified the stupidity of corrupt police who believed in their own invincibility long after it had crumbled.

  Despite overwhelming evidence, Fowler blocked out reality. He became a pathetic figure as he continued to maintain his innocence, saying at one stage that the money Haken was handing over was to repay a loan. He also came up with a novel alternative defence: that the man on the video taking bribes was not him. It was, he said, an actor hired by the Commission to impersonate him.

  ‘Do you think we’d hire someone to play Graham Fowler?’ asked an amused Crooke.

  ‘Funny things happen here,’ said Fowler, clearly rattled.

  The revelation that Haken had sold him out shattered Fowler’s self-proclaimed integrity and blind loyalty to police unity. The blue line was no more. It was now a race to the lifeboats, every man for himself.

  It was well-known that certain senior police were out for all they could get from bribes or dodging work. Haken said that after a certain hour each night Fowler could be more easily found in the Sir John Young Hotel than on duty. He was one of several officers-in-charge whose nocturnal activities were not textbook policing.

  One would come to work with his fishing gear. Wearing a jumper to cover his police uniform, he would spend the night sitting on the sandstone wall around the Opera House, fishing. Another would bring a kayak to work and row in Centennial Park lakes to keep fit. Fowler’s antics were more mercenary than sporting. His only known exercise was counting the cash he got in ‘slings’.

  Although his decision not to roll over to the Royal Commission would ultimately send him to jail, Fowler’s decision to take his chances was backed by the sound logic of the past. Previous inquiries in New South Wales had inflicted few casualties on police united in lies and denials and he must have thought the line would hold. One reason for his confidence was that two senior police had told him (so he told Haken in a bugged conversation) that his ‘loyalty’ to the bent brotherhood would be rewarded.

  The senior men made it clear that protecting the force was top priority. Those who stayed silent would be given a choice of jobs when the Commission was finished. Or they would be given a pension.

  This was backed up by Haken. When warned by a lawyer that if he had not rolled over, his assets would have been seized and he would have been imprisoned, he had retorted: ‘… if I hadn’t (helped the Commission) I might also have become a superintendent in the CIB.’ It was a fair point.

  Eventually, even Fowler’s loud and repeated denials of corruption started to unravel as evidence mounted. The Royal Commission asked him to explain how he could be such a successful punter when his TAB account, which they subpoenaed, indicated that in three and a half years he had lost a large part of the $9000 he had wagered.

  Despite his profitable working relationship with Fowler and the friendship between them, Haken had no compunction about trapping him. It was, he said, just a continuation of his role as an undercover agent for the Commission. Survival of the fittest – and the quickest thinkers.

  ‘Detective Inspector Graham Fowler had been a colleague of mine for a number of years,’ he said on 60 Minutes, appearing in heavy disguise. ‘The video that I recorded in my car was typical of many previous transactions where money had been picked up from a criminal and was being divided among the police involved.’

  He told the ABC’s Australian Story: ‘I was a close associate if you like, if not a friend. They were hard times but that was the job I undertook. That was the way it went.’

  Asked what was going through his mind as he betrayed Fowler, he answered: ‘That I was doing a job… Purely and simply a job.’

  He said he blocked out the fact that somebody he had known and presumably liked was being set up. But after a couple of rambling sentences that said nothing, he came out with the truth: ‘There is no nice way of putting it – yes, I was destroying him.’

  But in his book he made a cooler and less-emotive assessment of Fowler. ‘He was nice enough when you were on a par with him but he was a standover man both to his staff and to people in the street,’ he wrote. ‘He was called GOC (Grumpy Old Cunt) or GOP (Grumpy Old Prick).

  ‘I didn’t mind the guy but he was an horrendous “dudder” – that is, he would rip you off. If there was a quid around he would take 75 cents in the dollar. I didn’t worry because there was plenty around in the Cross … Perhaps that is why I survived so well, I played the odds.’

  As for Fowler, as people all around him rolled over he blindly clung to his belief that somehow his faith in the brotherhood would rescue him at the eleventh hour. It didn’t. Allegations mounted, including one that he and Haken had taken thousands of dollars from Hardas to help him beat charges of having bribed a police sergeant in Sydney’s west.

  He claimed that his bugged conversations with Haken had been tampered with to provide the wrong interpretation.

  Counsel assisting, Gary Crooke: ‘Are you suggesting that the Commission might have got actors or cobbled these videos together? Is that going through your mind?’

  Fowler: That’s a possibility. You could have dubbed the tape, yes.

  Crooke: Has somebody taken the part of Graham Fowler and taken the money?

  Fowler: Funny things happen, don’t they.

  Wood: Are you suggesting we’ve doctored all those tapes. Last time you suggested we provided an actor to play your part. Do you still suggest that is the case?

  Fowler: I don’t know what to believe, sir. I wouldn’t believe you’re part of it, sir, but I wouldn’t put it past some of the people.

  Crooke: Where’s it going to get you, Mr Fowler? Why don’t you be a man and confess?

  Fowler, who was suspended without pay straight after the car-cam screenings, was eventually tried and convicted on charges of defrauding an insurance company over his milk-shake ‘accident’ but served only a couple of years in jail.

  He was never charged with any corruption offences arising from his taped conversations and video evidence.

  IF Trevor Haken and Fowler were the established face of perennial police corruption, Detective Senior Constable Duncan Demol represented the next generation of officers being swept up in ‘the joke’, often against their will.

  To succumb to temptation was to spurn the vows of public service and integrity they made as police officers. But to knock back a share of the spoils was to risk being ostracised – and could even cripple careers.

  Demol was tortured by the dilemma from his first days on the job, when his minder and work partner Senior Constable Stephen Worsley had taken him to a brothel called the Barrel, where they sat drinking with naked women. Free women, food and drink: you don’t see those job opportunities on police recruitment posters.

  Demol picked up the idea of warped police work pretty quickly. During his first week he signed a false affidavit about a crash involving a police car. Demol’s first bribe was $50 from Haken, who took it from two shoplifters. The next time he had a search warrant he stole $5000 from a cupboard in a raid on a drug dealer’s house and split it with Haken.

  Demol rolled over to the Commission after being confronted by video evidence, taken in Haken’s car, of him lying. Although they by then worked in different areas, Demol idolised Haken, staying close even though rumours were pinpointing the older man as a turncoat collecting evidence for the Commission.

  So when Demol read a confidential memo from a New South Wales Crime Commission mentioning Haken he rushed to tell him, not knowing he had rolled over. In return, Haken deliberately lured him into the car-cam vehicle so his confessions could be recorded and handed over.

  A disillusioned Demol, overweight and bald, then rolled over himself. He told of police fitting ‘someone up with the trifecta’ – cop slang for charging someone with offensive language, assaulting police and resisting police, whether they had committed offences or not.

  Kings Cross police were served free beer i
n teapots in restaurants so no one could see them drinking. It was protocol that money stolen during drug raids would be shared among other police. So warped were the values that the only notion of ‘dishonesty’ was failing to split a drug dealer’s dirty money with others cops on the shift.

  Demol volunteered two police maxims drummed into him as a probationary officer: ‘You’re not a copper until you can work pissed,’ and, ‘Everything you did was to cover your arse.’

  Police drank on duty and held parties at the back of the station while someone watched the front desk. Any member of the public who came in with a problem was processed as quickly as possible.

  He told of police getting together in ‘scrum downs’ to fabricate evidence. Perjury was rife because police considered the odds were against them making a case on the facts alone. He admitted he would fake evidence against someone who was guilty if the case needed strengthening. And theft and corruption payments for protection were widespread.

  ‘It is a common belief that you have got to do what you can to get a conviction because nobody believes you,’ Demol said. ‘Juries won’t believe you, judges won’t believe you.’

  Demol, who was with the Drug Enforcement Agency, said street police hated all investigative organisations like the Royal Commission and the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC).

  Demol was among eight police, including Haken, dismissed from the force after either giving self-incriminating evidence or being confronted by indisputable evidence on video.

  The others included Fowler, Detective Senior Sergeant Denis Kimble Thompson, Detective Sergeant Neville John Scullion, Detective Sergeant Wayne James Eade, and Detective Sergeant John Gordon Swan.

  Eade, head of the Police Drug Unit on the New South Wales Central Coast, was caught on video taking drugs, having sex with a prostitute and asking her if she had access to child pornographic films.

  The eighth ‘scalp’ was one of the highest-ranked officers to be caught up in the corruption investigation, Detective Chief Superintendent Bob Lysaught, who allegedly arranged bribes from drug dealers. Betrayed by a close associate and long-time friend of the family, he crashed and burned and the flames singed everyone who had ever been close to him.

  The bigger they are, the harder they fall.

  – WITH RAY CHESTERTON

  6

  NO SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL

  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.