McNamara Glen - Dirty Work

To Cheryl, Jessica and Lucy

In memorium Patrick McNamara
3.2.19333.3.2007

The author wishes to acknowledge Sue and Peter Tuck for their unwavering support and love through the whole of this journey.

Special thanks to Patrick McNamara and Sandra Macauliffe, Greg Bulmer, Robert Whelan and John Wilcher for their friendship and support through good times and bad.

For their professional advice, support and friendship thanks to Tim Priest and Richard Basham.

Thanks to Monica Ross-Marinik, Robert Kirby, Peter Stephens and Phillip Clay for their legal representation.

A special thanks to Fiona Schultz, Managing Director of New Holland Publishers, for believing in this book and to Lliane Clarke for working with me to make this book a reality.

First published in Australia in 2010 by

New Holland Publishers (Australia) Pty Ltd
Sydney Auckland London Cape Town

www.newholland.com.au

1/66 Gibbes Street Chatswood NSW 2067 Australia

218 Lake Road Northcote Auckland New Zealand
86 Edgware Road London W2 2EA United Kingdom
80 McKenzie Street Cape Town 8001 South Africa

Copyright 2010 New Holland Publishers (Australia) Pty Ltd

Copyright 2010 in text Glen McNamara

Alrights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers and copyright holders.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing in Publication Data

ISBN: 9781741108514 (pbk.)
e-ISBN: 9781921655470

I have lived around the Cronulla area on the southern beaches of Sydney most of my life. How its changed. How Ive changed. As kids we lived in a fibro house, played rugby league and went surfing whenever we got a chance. I loved the water. Dad had a boat and we spent a great deal of time on the beautiful Port Hacking River, usually fishing. His present to me for my tenth birthday was a fishing rod. This wasnt any old rod, not some flimsy piece of string to just dangle off the wharf, but a real rod that could hook and hold big fish on the open ocean, or outside as we nicknamed it.

The rod was only part of the deal, though. The real score was going outside the heads of the river on a big ocean fishing trip with my dad. It was then that I saw a vastly different side to him. He was no longer the man who was up and gone to work before
5.00am and home in the dark of night, exhausted. On the ocean he was relaxed and happy, energised in the company of his son.

When I was ten, I caught a shark with that new rod. I was petrified. It dived and death rolled on the line as I barely kept control. We couldnt afford to lose the line or the rig, so Dad grabbed a gaff and swiftly brought the butt of it down hard across the sharks gills. It stunned the animal instantly and Dad twirled the gaff again, driving its hook straight through the sharks gills. It was violent, but quick.

I was awestruck; my father had just killed this shark single-handedly. In his dry tone, Dad turned to me and said, Never worry about their size. Give it everything and youll be right. I learned there and then that a fierce and solid attack would always give you the advantage.

My family always faced problems head on. Dads father served in the RAAF in WWII. Then, during the Korean War, Dad was in the Army. Although he was lucky and didnt have to go to Korea, his best mate lost his legs under heavy artillery fire there. Its hard to say how this affected my father because he was a master at concealing pain, and in fact only mentioned the incident to me in passing as he lay on his own death bed.

My grandfather was killed two months before I came into the world, king hit by a coward in a pub brawl. Hed been working with my father on the construction of the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Scheme at the time. As tough a slog as it was, Dad had done it to make enough money to build a house for his young family, but lost his own father in the process.

I was raised to stand up for myself and deal with problems as they arose, all the while moving forward. I learnt to be strong in who I was and not to look back.

I left school in 1976 and joined the cops. The notion that a kid from a working-class family could go into the cops and have the opportunity of a well-meaning career was very attractive to me. I guess I was like a lot of kids of my age who wanted to leave school and get straight into the workforce.

The Police Force became a logical step for me. At the time it seemed the police had a lot of miliary features about it. My dad and my grandfather had been in the military so I thought it might work for me. I was just 17 years old when I joined the New South Wales Police Force. I spent about 18 months as a Cadet before I was sworn in as a Constable on my nineteenth birthday. That led into three long years as a uniformed cop in the St George area and the Sutherland Shire, in the south of Sydney. After that Id just about had a gutful of domestic violence calls and scraping dead people out of crashed cars. When my fists started to find the chins of some of these wife-bashing heroes with increasing frequency I knew it would only be a matter of time before I did someone serious physical damage. I needed a job change.

Not long after my twenty-second birthday I got what Id been waiting forthe call up to be a plain-clothes Detective. I loved the work but hated the drinking culture that most Detectives were hooked on, in and out of work hours. Too many times I witnessed drunken police attempting to exert their alcohol-induced power over others, only to see the whole situation fall apart because they werent following the procedures. I struggled with it, sometimes to the point where I considered throwing in the towel.

The fact I never signed a resignation letter at that point was due greatly to a man known as Schuey. I was partnered with Detective Sergeant Geoff Schuberg early on in my career. He was the perfect mentor, thoroughly grounded. Schuey possessed one of the most perceptive intellects Ive ever encountered. A Vietnam veteran, he had an abundance of courage, probably too much courage for one man. He was a fearless operator.

My father and Schuey influenced me in a hugely positive way. They provided me with the values and reasons why I had to make the judgements that I did when I came face to face with corrupt cops and paedophile rings, drug rings and police protection on the streets of Sydneys Kings Cross and Darlinghurst.

They also provided me with the reasons why I needed to write this book, so that what they stood for wouldnt be lost and forgotten. I did what I had to do in honour of the values that they taught me. For doing what I had to, for hunting down drug dealers and paedophiles, I make no apologies.

In the early 1980s in Sydney, drug dealing was bigit still is. In 1981, the infamous drug dealer and armed robber, Warren Lanfranchi, was wanted nationally for the attempted murder of a traffic cop in Sydney. When Lanfranchi aimed the shot, the firing pin jammed in the hammer of his revolver, which saved the life of the traffic cop that day. Lanfranchi became a prime target of the New South Wales Police Force.

My partner Schuey and I had information that Lanfranchi sold heroin on behalf of the notorious drug kingpin Neddy Smith to Aborigines who hung out at the Everleigh Hotel. The Everleigh was in the area called The Block in inner-city Redfern.