Underbelly (11 page)

‘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

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.

‘Fuck. We're dead,' one lout said to his mates. He was almost right. No one died in the resulting bloodbath, but it was a wonder.

The vengeful police started by rocking the van and bashing on the sides and telling the men inside they were ‘dead.' The prisoners were ordered out of the van one at a time and bashed as they ran the gauntlet between two lines of police to get to the holding cell.

‘It was full on anger and there was plenty of “Get the fuck in there” and “We'll teach you to fucking belt us” and that sort of thing,' the Commission heard.

In
Sympathy for the Devil
, Haken tries to rationalise the attack, saying it squared the ledger for other incidents that had gone unpunished.

‘This type of behaviour used to happen all the time in the Cross,' he writes. ‘People would come on bucks' nights and flog someone and get back on their bus and disappear, leaving the damage behind for us to clean up. But this was where we worked, this was home for us and they picked us. They expected to get away with it but they didn't this time.'

The systematic bashing with batons was not enough. There was simply a change of personnel. While some police got started on paperwork for the arrests, others took over the beating.

Husband and wife police David and Christine Langton, who had been part of the police-and-partners night out, joined in. Langton had a reputation for losing control when dealing with arrested men and would eventually be sacked from the force for breaking the jaw of someone who objected to being searched.

Haken told the Royal Commission that the two ring leaders of the revellers were ‘flogged unmercifully.'

‘Langton was handy with his fists and was a good bloke to have on your side in the Cross but he … was out of control.'

Evidence from one of the revellers supported this. He said Langton shouted, ‘You little fuck!' at him, punched him hard in the face and then on the head and nose. Yelling at the terrified man to stop crying, Langton had to be stopped from inflicting further punishment.

Meanwhile, Langton's wife Christine did her bit, bashing the unresisting mens' heads on walls and desks. She would tell the commission she was motivated by injuries inflicted on two of her friends in the brawl and because ‘a perfectly lovely night had been upset.'

Newspapers quoted her telling the Royal Commission that she had pushed a fingernail into the throat of an arrested man and said: ‘You didn't know who you were messing with.'

One prisoner says he was thrown against a wall and repeatedly struck in the face by different officers. Even feigning unconsciousness did not help. Haken says the man was told to ‘get up or get more.' Langton allegedly told one man to ‘stop bleeding on the floor.'

The prisoners were then forced to run the gauntlet of another line-up of baton-wielding police back to the van to be taken to the Sydney Police Centre. When they got there, the two ringleaders were so obviously injured that police receiving them asked the Kings Cross crew for help to ‘explain' what had happened in a way that would counter any allegations of police brutality.

Asked about the injuries, those that had inflicted them brazenly denied responsibility saying any wounds must have come from the street brawl before arrests were made.

The police apparently returned to their wives and girlfriends and retired to the Bourbon and Beefsteak nightclub to salvage what was left of the evening. The prisoners, nursing bruises and shredded egos, decided it was prudent not to mention the police thuggery and to plead guilty. All, that is, except one of them.

As Haken says in
Sympathy for the Devil
, the exception was a security guard who would lose his licence if convicted – so he was determined to tell the truth about the bashing.

But, at the time, this seemed no problem for the police. Haken and his men did what they had done many times before. They had a ‘scrum down' among themselves, decided on the statements they would make and simply went into court denying the bashing.

‘In those days there were no problems that couldn't be overcome somehow,' he writes.

But Haken's subsequent evidence to the Royal Commission, corroborated by some of the victims, scuppered the cover-up and the guilty police were prosecuted. This was rare: police authorities and the government had always been more interested in ensuring corrupt cops were sacked rather than charged. Not prosecuting crooked police after inquiries was the norm in New South Wales. There were sackings, reprimands and hand-wringing by the government and police authorities. But jail? Hardly ever.

The decision to pursue the bashing case through the courts was no doubt justified but overall it was far less significant, and less deserving of prosecution, than many other matters that Haken's electronic surveillance and personal involvement had revealed.