In other words, the Arantz story is not about whether the figures were to emerge but when they would – and maybe even who would get the credit for this.
At first Allan refused to allow the early statewide figures to go to all detectives. Arantz found this deeply disappointing – he had spent months persuading them to provide total crime figures because in return they would receive useful statewide data, and now they were being denied this. And so, finding the idea of a twelve-month wait unacceptable, he decided to put the real figures before the public. He seems, from the account provided in his memoir, to have been driven by a genuine concern for the truth and how it might benefit the police and the fight against crime, but also by his alienation from colleagues and an intense antipathy towards Allan, whom he had hardly ever met. (Arantz says Allan did not deal with mere sergeants – maybe this was part of Arantz’s problem with him.) He had reached that comforting place where the revelation of the truth becomes an absolute value, trumping all others.
By now Arantz was frequently and officially dealing with journalists’ questions about the new computer system. He approached ABC TV’s Four Corners program and suggested they might find it an interesting subject. The ABC asked Allan if they could do a program and he agreed, which is interesting. So too was the fact the ABC was not shown a copy of an early statewide report – although it was told that the new crime figures would be much higher than the old ones – and Allan apparently lied about the Paddy’s book system, denying its existence.
The Four Corners program was broadcast in late May and attracted some media follow up. The coverage gave publicity to the fact there was a bright new computer system, and acknowledged that as a result the crime figures would go up, although the reasons for this were somewhat vague. For Allan, seeking to prepare the public for the new figures next year, it was not a bad outcome.
Arantz must have been upset by this modest result, and he had other concerns. The Commissioner ordered that the newly established and independent Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research not be given access to the new crime statistics yet. Jack Kendrigan told Arantz he was so dispirited by the Commissioner’s attitude that he’d decided to return to the Public Service Board. Arantz, feeling isolated and frustrated, increasingly ran his own race. When senior detectives asked for the statewide total crime figures, he provided them despite the Commissioner’s directive. In August, he approached the ABC again and suggested they do a program on a pilot in the eastern suburbs, which was using the new crime figures in an attempt to improve policing methods. When the ABC asked the Commissioner’s permission to do the program, it was told there was no such pilot.
In October 1971, the 1970 Police Department Annual Report was tabled in parliament. It showed a crime figure of 81 319, which was 30 per cent higher than for 1969, and a clear-up rate of 45 per cent, down from 52 per cent the previous year. Allan was moving in the direction of honesty, even if it had not yet been reached.
Arantz later recalled in his memoir that he was on leave at the time and, ‘I purchased newspapers that evening and the following morning and could find nothing in the reports to convince me that the Commissioner had made any attempt to qualify the crime figures quoted or to suggest that there were going to be dramatic increases in volume of crime and decreasing clear-up figures in future reports. I was absolutely dismayed at this. This convinced me finally and totally that the Commissioner had no intention of disclosing the true situation and that the general improvements so desperately needed in the police force would therefore not occur.’
So he decided to leak the computer figures to the Sydney Morning Herald.
In fact, Allan had said in the annual report that a pilot study had ‘emphasised the need to extend the scope of reporting (including of crime )’ and the new computer system would ‘provide more effective and detailed information than has hitherto been possible’.19 Arantz appears not to have read the annual report, either before leaking the information or before writing his memoir many years later.
By this time, Arantz’s relationships with some of his colleagues had broken down. He writes that he had started to think of himself as a lone crusader. He believed that he was obliged, by virtue of the oath he’d taken when he became a policeman, and his unique knowledge of the true crime figures, to go public. To do otherwise would be to breach the principle established at the Nuremberg trials, that no one is obliged to follow an unlawful order. The Police Rules book said confidential information might be released if ‘in the interests of the Service’, and to his mind it was in the interests of the police force for the truth to be revealed. The fact that the Commissioner was moving in the direction of full disclosure – and in mid-November Allan permitted the distribution of statewide total reporting figures to detectives – is almost completely ignored in the memoir.
So Arantz talked off the record to Basil Sweeney and Gavin Souter of the Sydney Morning Herald, and provided the computer’s figures for the first ten months of the year. The first of the articles appeared on the front page on 26 November, and it and the accompa-nying editorial are by later journalistic standards surprisingly mod-erate and respectful of authority. The situation regarding the Paddy’s book system was clearly explained, with the interesting comment related to R&R from one anonymous detective that, ‘Anyone (who is a victim) with an American accent goes in the Paddy’s book even if he’s got skin and flesh hanging off him (rather than the assault being officially reported). Even if we found an offender, we’re not likely to have a complainant (that is, the victim would be back in Vietnam and unable to give evidence in court to obtain a conviction).’ The article explained that the transition from the Paddy’s book system had been happening for ten years, as officers became more accurate in their reports, and described the computer figures as the ‘final stage’ of this.
In fact, Allan came out of the story pretty well, so much so that Arantz thought he might actually take credit for the leak. According to Sweeney and Souter, ‘Mr Allan was the first Australian Police Commissioner to dare seek the truth, and he may not like what he has found.’ According to the editorial that accompanied the story, ‘It is to Mr Allan’s credit that he has been prepared to face the truth, unpalatable though it is.’
On the morning the article appeared, Harold Fulton asked Arantz if he was the source, and he said he was. He says in his memoir he admitted this partly through concern that one of those other detectives might be ‘blamed’ for the leak. That possibility seems unlikely – by that point many other detectives had access to the statewide statistics. It is more likely Arantz feared that some other officer, even Allan himself, would be praised for the leak. Arantz wanted that credit for himself.
But by the end of that day, his motives no longer mattered to most people. What happened in the next few hours would turn him from a conflicted individual, who released some important figures that would have come out soon anyway, into a tragic hero.
The Herald had treated Allan with respect, and a wiser or more humble man would have kept quiet. But Allan responded furiously, to the point where he decided to brand Arantz as insane.
He’d tried this before, with Wally Mellish. There was also a model provided by Allan’s mentor and predecessor Bill McKay. When the Harbour Bridge opened in 1932 and Francis de Groot had interfered and cut the ribbon as a political protest, acting Police Commissioner McKay had bundled him off to the Lunatic Reception House in Darlinghurst. Unfortunately, de Groot, like Mellish later on, had been declared sane by the experts.
Now Allan told Harold Fulton to take Arantz to be examined by one of the police medical officers, Dr Amoury Vane, and then to the Prince Henry Hospital, where there was a ward for police. At the hospital Arantz would be seen by a psychiatrist. Allan also instructed Fulton to offer Arantz a pension, should he choose to retire due to his supposed mental condition. Presumably the Commissioner hoped that by the time Arantz reached the hospital, this would seem like an offer too good to refuse.
Fulton did not t
hink Arantz was insane, but he did what he was told. Dr Vane thought it odd that he, with only a year’s experience, had been chosen for this important job rather than the senior police doctor. But he was told the Commissioner thought Arantz was mentally ill, and after his examination decided he agreed.
Fulton and the doctor went to see the Commissioner. On their return, Fulton instructed Arantz to hand over his gun and Vane said he was referring him to Prince Henry Hospital for examination by a psychiatrist. Apparently the Commissioner had already called the hospital and arranged this. Arantz was allowed to call his wife and was then driven directly to the hospital.
It was a Friday and Arantz spent the weekend at the hospital, under observation and being interviewed by consultant psychiatrist Leslie Guile. Accounts vary as to whether Arantz was forced or agreed to stay over the weekend. If he agreed, it raises questions about motivation. Before Harold Fulton went home on Friday evening, he put the Commissioner’s offer to Arantz – a pension if he retired medically unfit – and it was rejected.
On Saturday the Sydney Morning Herald published a second article, about the pilot in the Eastern Suburbs, which was using the new crime figures in an attempt to improve policing methods. The article was generally positive about the new system and its potential to reduce crime.
On Monday 29 November, Arantz was discharged from hospital. A certificate provided by Dr Guile noted, ‘I could find no evidence of psychosis. He is an intelligent man with some obsessional traits, but they are not out of control and in the interview he was at all times alert, rational and showed appropriate affect … I think he is a statistically abnormal personality and he holds his views most tenaciously but I can see no reason for keeping him in hospital.’
Commissioner Allan’s treatment of Arantz was heartless and stupid, if not quite so stupid as it seems in retrospect – men in Allan’s position had been used to treating subordinates poorly for a very long time. Allan went on radio and said, ‘in all my years … I have never known anybody to have done what he did and to set up the explanation that it was in the public interest’.
In the days that followed, Arantz decided not to answer formal questions from superior officers about what he had done, knowing this refusal would probably lead to his dismissal and confident this would be reversed if he then appealed to the Crown Employees Appeal Board. He seemed determined to provoke the Commissioner and make his action more public, and again one wonders at his motives. But this was overshadowed by Allan’s extraordinary reaction to the leak, which was supported by the Premier.
Askin told parliament that Arantz ‘had been certified as being mentally sick by the police medical officer’. On 7 December Arantz refused to answer questions from a superior officer and was sus-pended without pay, and a media storm began, with Arantz and his wife appearing on television. The next day the Sydney Morning Herald called for Allan’s early retirement and the opposition demanded a parliamentary select committee to inquire into police administration.
Askin declined and told parliament that Dr Vane (a general prac-titioner) had extensive experience in the diagnosis of mental illness, and had diagnosed Arantz with ‘paranoia psychosis’. He said the examination of Arantz for mental illness ‘was not a harsh check, or a bullying one, but a kindly one’. It was true the specialist at Prince Henry Hospital had reached a different conclusion, but, ‘I think it is proper to point out that medical opinions frequently differ’, and while the hospital doctor had found no evidence of psychosis, ‘the patient had some obsessional traits’.
If Arantz wasn’t crazy, he was bad. Askin told Channel 10: ‘Any man in the position of trust … who is well, mentally well … who goes behind the back of his superior officer and betrays that trust, warrants nothing but contempt.’
But privately Askin continued to push the madness theme. In his memoir, Arantz records a conversation his sister Edna had with the Premier at the Rosehill races. Edna and her husband were members of the racing world, but Askin was unaware of her relationship with Arantz.
‘Tell me, Mr Askin,’ she said, ‘what is going to happen to that poor unfortunate sergeant who is in all the trouble?’
‘Don’t you worry yourself about him,’ Askin replied. ‘He did the wrong thing and he’ll get what’s coming to him. He’s mad anyway, you know. Comes from a mad family.’
SHIRLEY SPILLS THE BEANS
The Magician’s appearance at her refuge in Victoria Street helped Brifman decide to get out of Sydney. Sometime in the next few days, she moved up to Brisbane with Sonny and their three youngest children. There, on 24 June she took an overdose of sedatives but had recovered sufficiently by 2 July to have a meeting with Queensland Deputy Commissioner of Police Abe Duncan, in the offices of her lawyer Colin Bennett.
Brifman obtained some kind of protection from the Queensland Police, who found her accommodation. But any sense that she had found a safe haven was shattered one day in mid-July when the Magician re-materialised on her doorstep. John Regan had been poking around Brifman’s old home ground in Far North Queensland. He ‘came in a little red sports car with a NSW number plate,’ she told investigators a few weeks later. He ‘came to the door and said to me, “I have just come back from up north, Mareeba and Herberton and in the mining area. Have you got the lease of the mine they talk about in the paper?” ‘Yes but I haven’t got it here,’ she replied.
It was straight out of Intimidation 101: the part where they say, ‘We know all about you’.
‘I said, “How did you find out where I live?” He said, “I have got ways and means.” He did not threaten me but I was shocked to see him.’20
She was brave, but she had taken on an entire corrupt establishment and was losing support. In mid-July she was dropped by Kevin Murray, the Sydney lawyer recommended to her by Krahe, who had defended her against the prostitution charges. ‘He told me he would not defend me because I went on television and hit at the police,’ she said.21
It was against this background of threat and abandonment that between 28 July and 9 November 1971, Brifman gave a series of interviews about her dealings with corrupt police during her eight years in Sydney. Abe Duncan was present at some of these. The NSW Police were represented by Detective Inspector Williams and Detective Sergeant Paull, and later by Detective Sergeant Brian ‘The Cardinal’ Doyle, so despised by Ray Kelly for his honesty. This was an extraordinary step for Brifman to take, unprecedented in the annals of Sydney Noir. In an era before the word whistleblower was known, you wonder if Darcy Dugan, Philip Arantz and she were reacting to something in the air. The degree of detail she revealed would be unmatched until the revelations in the Wood and Fitzgerald Royal Commissions in later decades, although in the intervening period, in 1986, another Sydney prostitute abused and exploited by NSW Police – Sallie-Anne Huckstepp – would also die for trying to blow the lid on corruption. Brifman’s revelations form the substance of the material on her in this book, the first time her Sydney material has been covered so extensively.
But it had little impact in 1971. Her allegations against police were dismissed as the malicious rantings of a criminal and prostitute, bent on defaming honest cops.22 Most citizens were still reluctant to let go of the consoling myth of an honest constabulary.
Eventually Brifman would be vindicated. One former senior Sydney policeman with deep knowledge of the era told us her allegations are ‘99 per cent’ correct. He chooses not to be identified because some of the cops Brifman accused, and their close colleagues, are still alive. Others who have vouched for her credibility include prominent Brisbane figures like barrister and politician Colin Bennett, and former Police Assistant Commissioner Norman Gulbransen.23
The transcripts of these interviews, largely ignored by the NSW Police, would be tabled in the South Australian Parliament in March 1978 by the Attorney-General in the Dunstan Labor Government, Peter Duncan. At the time, Abe Saffron was trying to expand his property portfolio in South Australia; because of his criminal reputation, the Governm
ent wanted to keep him out. In support of their position, Duncan tabled a parcel of documents to demonstrate the contagious corruption of Sydney Noir, over which Saffron presided as ‘Mr Sin’.
The Brifman transcripts are not easy reading. There are mis-spellings and unexplained references. The text is disjointed, because often the police would go back to a question to seek clarification: the narrative jumps around from year to year; sometimes an account of a particular episode might be broken up into two parts separated by twenty hard-to-decipher pages.
But this can’t kill the fascination of what she says. Brifman’s slang is the voice of a criminal world with its roots in 18th century London, transplanted to Australia by convicts, and used by CJ Dennis in his 1915 classic of inner-city low life, The Sentimental Bloke. Words like ‘to plant’, meaning to bury, to hide stolen goods, and ‘to go square’, meaning to give up the criminal life, or turn to honesty. This is another reminder that during the Golden Years, the old ways were only slowly giving way to the new.
The last four months of 1971 saw a steady decline in Brifman’s fortunes. Regan repeated his threat against her life, and there were also threats to her children.24 Her cries for help got louder: on 3 September she took another overdose, then rang up Assistant Commissioner Duncan who came around and took her to hospital.25
Suicide stalked Brifman’s Noir world. One Sydney criminal, an alcoholic, had threatened to commit suicide ‘a million times’ after she rejected him.26 Others in her circle of acquaintance had died of overdoses – like Anne Borg. Now, just a few days after Commissioner Duncan rescued her, her friend and patron, Brisbane stockbroker Robin Corrie, took an overdose of methaqualone and phenobarbitone. Corrie was depressed about his failing business and he made sure that no one was going to rescue him.27
Sydney Noir Page 24
