James Morton - Bent. Australias Crooked Cops

BENT

AUSTRALIAS CROOKED COPS

JAMES MORTON & SUSANNA LOBEZ

MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS
An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited
1115 Argyle Place South, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia
mup-info@unimelb.edu.au
www.mup.com.au

First published 2014
Text James Morton and Susanna Lobez, 2014
Design and typography Melbourne University Publishing Limited, 2014

This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers.

Every attempt has been made to locate the copyright holders for material quoted in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked or misattributed may contact the publisher.

Cover design by Nada Backovic
Typeset by J&M Typesetting
Printed in Australia by McPhersons Printing Group

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Morton, James, 1938 author.

Bent: police corruption in Australia/James Morton and Susanna Lobez.

9780522862256 (paperback)
9780522866506 (ebook)

Police corruptionAustralia.
Police misconductAustralia.
Judicial corruptionAustralia
Organized crimeAustralia.
CrimeAustralia.
Lobez, Susanna, author.

364.1323

But that was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.
Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta, Act IV, i.

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This is another of our books which could not have been completed without the endless hours of research, advice and encouragement of Dock Bateson. To misquote, This poor thing is not ours alone but hers as well.

Our thanks are due to many people. They include in strictly alphabetical order: Gary Adsworth, Sunil Badami, JP Bean, Bob Bottom, Keith Bottomley, the late Clive Coleman, Sean Cowan, Nicholas Cowdery QC, Professor David Dixon, Michael Drury, Walter Easey, Dr Richard Evans, Tim Girling-Butcher, Sally Heath, Simon Illingworth, Barbara Levy, Damian Marrett, Bernie Matthews, Brian Murphy, Christine Nixon, Sybil Nolan, Leonard Nipper Read, John Rigbey, Russell Robinson, the late CH Rolph, Geoff Schuberg, Adam Shand, Clive Small and Joe Swickard, as well as many others who have asked not to be named.

Our thanks are also due to the staff at the National Library of Australia, the state libraries and archives of New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Victoria and Western Australia, as well as the National Archives in London, the British Library and the Newspaper Library formerly at Colindale.

FROM BENT FOR THE JOB TO DOWNRIGHT CRIMINAL: THE FIVE STAGES OF CORRUPTION

Over the years and around the world there have been many examples of brilliant cross-examinations. They include the destructive opening question of prosecutor Norman Birkett, What is the co-efficient of the expansion of brass?, put to a self-proclaimed engineering expert in the 1928 Rouse murder trial in England. He was unable to answer and the defence case was destroyed. But there can be few which have matched the brilliance of that of Virginia Bell, assistant counsel to the 1995 Royal Commission into the New South Wales Police Service chaired by Justice James Wood.

On 11 December 1995 Wayne Eade, the former head of the Gosford drug squad, was in the witness box and doing nicely. Yes, he thought he was an officer of impeccable integrity. No, he certainly did not have an interest in child-porn videos. Nor had he tried to buy ecstasy for colleagues; of course he knew that it was an illegal drug. He had certainly never visited a witness codenamed GDU7, a former prostitute and drug dealer, while on duty.

It was a classic piece of cross-examination and one that should go down in any textbook. Eade was then invited to look at a film taken when he was on duty at 10.40 p.m. on 27 August that year. Up on the rooms television screens appeared a film of GDU7 (who had been given anonymity) pouring a line of cocaine on the officers penis and proceeding to lick it off. She then started to talk about a shipment of cocaine before they moved to a couch, where he began masturbating and talking about buying ecstasy and a porn video of children. The screen went blank as GDU7 was about to provide more oral sex.

Wood asked Eade if he wished to see more of the film, adding:

Im not saying that by way of a threat. Im not suggesting I want to show it publicly, but you and your solicitor are free to view the entirety of the tape, including the sexual relations depicted, if you wish to do so.

Eade did not. Before the end of the day the man about whom there had been suspicions for the previous ten years and who had survived a number of internal investigations had been dismissed by beleaguered police commissioner Tony Lauer. That half-hour broke the resistance of corrupt officers. Who could tell who was on film and in what position? It was no longer a question of solidarity. In the words of the old gospel hymn, it was a case of Lord, let me in the lifeboat.

Eade was later sentenced to twenty-two months imprisonment for inciting and procuring the supply of prohibited drugs and knowingly giving false evidence to the commission. to the state, which had settled an action by Michael OSullivan, who claimed that Eade had threatened to load him up (plant) with heroin.

There is an old story of a school class allowed an hour to write an essay on the police. One child finished within the first few minutes. When he handed in the composition it consisted of one sentence, All coppers are bastards. Although whole swathes of the community would, quite wrongly, agree with the sentiments, it was decided that this viewpoint should be changed in one so young. It was arranged that the boy should visit the local police station for a day, after which he would write another essay. The visit passed off well enough. He was shown how fingerprints were taken, went down to the cells, was allowed to pat the police horses, was given a police tea mug to take home and so on, but the revised essay took hardly longer to write. It read, All coppers are cunning bastards.

As the years pass, for good and bad reasons, large sections of the public have become disaffected with the police, if indeed they were ever affected. Many would now subscribe to the boys generalisation or, to use a sociological term, stereotypicalisation, which means just about the same thing but looks and sounds better. As a result, continuing the sociological trend, the police tend to close ranks around themselves and develop a no one loves us, so why should we do anything about our image? culture, which sociologists like to call labelling or anomie. This can arise over really petty matters and in turn shows how statistics can be made to lie.

For example, in London after the First World War arrests of women on charges of soliciting for the purposes of prostitution remained at a consistent level. In 1922 there were 2231 convictions, but that figure suddenly dropped the following year, to under 600. However, that did not mean that there had been a drop in soliciting. Rather, a decision at Quarter Sessions had ruled that there was insufficient evidence to show that the man solicited in a particular case had been annoyeda requirement for the convictionrather than flattered by the solicitation. The case was dismissed. All that had happened was that the working girls had shifted their beats from the inner city to the outer suburbs.