Underbelly (12 page)

‘There were a lot of matters exposed at the Commission to show what went on at the Cross, but they prosecuted the cops for that bashing. You think, how the fuck did I get into this?' Haken said.

TREVOR HAKEN'S evidence shook the previously ironclad belief of corrupt police that everything would be all right if they stuck together. In nine months of tense undercover work, he collected more than $30,000 from criminals for distribution to crooked police and he caught corrupt police on tape and on camera revealing themselves as thieves who sold their ethics to the highest bidders in the Sydney underworld.

It was a dangerous choice. Potentially fatal, even.

As word swept through Kings Cross that someone had turned informer, criminal bosses with huge fortunes at stake made their intentions clear. One of them was drug czar Billy Bayeh. A curious mix of cunning and stupidity, Bayeh reflected the inability of the underworld to come to grips with modern surveillance technology. Or maybe it was just greed and ego that made him and others like him push their luck.

‘I met with Bill Bayeh on a number of occasions and I received large sums of money from him,' Haken would tell the ABC programme
Australian Story
.

‘He had problems at that stage. He was losing his authority on the streets of Kings Cross and wanted police protection to get back into a better position. At one meeting with Bayeh, he told me that another police associate had told him he must have balls to be meeting with me because the rumours were all over town that I'd rolled.

‘And he said, “If anyone goes against me I'll kill them. I'll kill their wife and I'll kill their children”.'

Haken says the threat jolted him. ‘I did not take it idly. Not then. Not ever,' he says. ‘It was an extremely frightening
time. I got through it by being a walking pill bottle. I was on all sorts of medicals.'

Haken's last meeting with Bayeh was heart attack material. Bayeh had got hold of an electronic alarm that sounded if anyone was wearing a hidden recording wire. The alarm went off when Bayeh approached Haken.

‘I managed to get out of it all right and that was the last time I saw him,' Haken would say.

There were other tense moments. Such as when another criminal told Haken of the rumours he had rolled over and that a lot of crims and some police believed it. Haken, who was wearing a wire at the time, said it was ‘fucking shit'.

The criminal accepted the denial and the incriminating conversation continued. His mistake was to think there is honour among thieves.

TREVOR Haken switched from alcoholic bent cop to non-drinking white knight as easily as if he were an actor swapping roles. He seemed unswayed by friendship or any past associations.

He agreed to be ‘wired up' to trap his colleagues without hesitation. He used the car camera set up by the commission to record and film a detective, Graham ‘Chook' Fowler, talking about bribes and pocketing money he had taken from Haken as a share of a supposed bribe.

The ‘car-cam' footage devastated senior police who had insisted the force was corruption-free. And it shocked tainted police when they realised too late that the electronic surveillance was so sophisticated and the evidence so compelling that there was nowhere to hide.

By the time Haken finished giving evidence, the police force was in tatters. Dozens of senior police had been exposed as drunken, drug-dealing criminals prepared to do anything to get an illegal dollar.

They had stripped vital evidence from prosecution briefs to get guilty drug dealers and killers off; taken money from dealers to protect criminal rackets from police intrusion; and helped wipe out competing drug dealers who were not paying bribes.

There were plenty of dirty deeds – but rarely done dirt cheap. And, for years, Trevor Haken had enjoyed a front row seat.

His apprenticeship in ‘the joke' had begun at North Sydney police station, soliciting $10 bribes from tow truck drivers for access to car crashes and telling undertakers about dead bodies at $20 a time.

‘Over the years I became involved to the extent of being the bag man, picking up money from people who were conducting businesses like prostitution, night clubs, gambling clubs and drug dealers,' he would admit.

‘I was involved in stealing money, verballing people (giving false evidence in court), gutting briefs – which is removing information from briefs to allow people to be exonerated.

‘There was no form of improper behaviour that we were not involved in.'

Haken's biggest coup was coolly trapping Fowler – one of his mates – by luring him into the car fitted with recording and videotaping equipment. The sting came early in the Royal Commission and had an explosive effect on media coverage. In the past, inquiries had floundered because
accused officers would brazenly deny any accusations, but now there was irrefutable proof. Corrupt police were damned by their own words and actions, all caught on tape and film that made headlines for the life of the inquiry – and became its signature ‘grab' on the electronic media. In isolation, the Fowler ‘sling' was a small amount but the image it created was immensely damaging.

A fascinated public watched in amazement as a police force repeatedly touted by its bosses and politicians as the best in Australia fell apart under the weight of damning evidence and a blizzard of accusations that were suddenly overwhelmingly plausible.

In one week seven detectives were sacked after Haken regaled the hearing with tales of coppers helping criminals and stealing drugs and cash from criminals.

The blame moved vertically as well. The contract of then assistant commissioner Ray Donaldson was not renewed. The chief of staff to the police commissioner, Bob Lysaught, also went. Police Commissioner Tony Lauer, although not linked to any corruption or criminal behaviour, resigned amid suggestions he was inept.

Haken says his health was damaged by the tension of playing a double agent, of knowing one slip could have got him killed by rogue cops or criminals seeking revenge.

‘I was a wreck, an absolute wreck,' he would say. ‘Sick in the pit of my stomach, my nerves shot to bits. But what do you do? I had engaged to do a job and I did the job.'

FROM outside, the Hakens looked the suburban family from Central Casting. So much so, in fact, that they were cast as the ideal family by McDonalds, which used a picture
of the couple and their children on restaurant placemats and advertisements.

The placemats caused hilarity at Kings Cross, Haken said. ‘They were always all over the place. The junkies used to burn the eyes out of my picture.'

Haken was ruggedly handsome with a persuasive personality and his wife, Jayne, was good-looking enough to do part-time modelling work.

‘To some people we must have looked like a model family,' he would muse. But there was plenty of trouble below the surface.

Attractive on the outside, dysfunctional behind closed doors, the Haken family was swept into a maelstrom of publicity before going into hiding.

Their troubles had started years before the Royal Commission, Jayne Haken would say, when her husband embraced the heavy drinking culture adopted by so many police at the time. They had met when she was a waitress at the Double Bay Steak House – in Lane Cove national park – where Haken and his mates at nearby Chatswood police station would often have their evening meal.

‘They were easy going but they never left a tip,' she told
Australian Story
, in a telling aside about the selfishness, greed and suspicion of corrupt cops.

They married when Jayne was 20. Haken's taste for alcohol, police camaraderie and scoring easy money from criminals seemed as important to him as his growing family.

‘His hours would get longer and longer and there were times when he didn't come home at all,' Jayne Haken said.

‘I would sit in the backyard and cry because I was newly
married with two young ones. I guess they were drinking if they were not working. Trevor always had a drink.'

She realised how warped her husband's priorities were when she was almost due to have their second child.

‘I was eight months pregnant … and he didn't even come home on New Year's Eve. When work finished at 10 pm they decided to go and party.'

Another night an intoxicated Haken came home with two equally drunken police colleagues and continued drinking.

‘They were both drunk as skunks and I had a new baby. I was suddenly awoken by a shotgun noise,' Jayne would tell
60 Minutes
.

‘They had fired at the rooster down the back (of the yard).'

The couple had marriage counselling once but it was useless because, Jayne says, ‘We would discuss it over dinner – and then he had to go and have a drink with the boys.'

But Haken's regard for ‘the brotherhood' soured suddenly when he caught his wife in an intimate embrace with a colleague who had brought him home drunk and thought he had passed out on a couch.

‘What really shattered me was when another detective I was working with made a move on her (Jayne),' Haken would reveal in a gruelling interview.

‘That really broke my belief in the brotherhood. The relationship between another detective and my wife made me realise that I'd taken my eye off the ball completely by excessive drinking. I gave it up.'

The episode might well have been an underlying motive
for Haken to turn on his crooked mates. But, once he had betrayed them, like many protected witnesses he became disillusioned. He felt discarded and used by the authorities.

Haken's biography makes it clear he felt cheated by the system. In it, his analyst is quoted describing poor accommodation in a cheap motel, bad meals and problems created by his mother-in-law and wife.

The federal agents assigned to protect Haken were ‘more interested in racking up all of the overtime and meal allowances they could,' the analyst said. ‘They fed him crap. He couldn't go out to get his own food so they would cook cheap and nasty food and Trevor would have to eat it.'

But the analyst did not altogether paint Jayne Haken as a victim. ‘His wife is quite beautiful. She would spend a lot of the money that he would make illegally on things like cosmetics and clothes. And she had a ball on all of this money but she claimed she never knew anything about what he was doing.

‘She slept with a colleague of Trevor's and he caught them at it. He went a bit crazy about this and then gave up the drink.'

Haken's mother-in-law also caused problems for the family and the Royal Commission, the analyst said. ‘She would often threaten to go to the Press, which threatened the security of the whole thing.'

In one terrifying episode, Haken felt as if he were being encouraged to commit suicide by those being paid to protect him – two officers from the witness security unit, known as WITSEC.

‘Imagine if you can, driving in a car with two WITSEC officers, when for no reason they turn off onto a dirt road in a country area,' he writes.

He claims that one of the officers took out his police-issue handgun and said: ‘What information did you give to the Royal Commission about (a Federal officer)? He's a mate of mine.' The officer allegedly handed the gun to Haken, who claims he promptly handed it back, believing it was an invitation to take his own life.

In the end, the Wood Royal Commission's success rested on Haken's decision to become a whistleblower – and on his remarkable recall of specific events.

Without Haken's detailed description of his own corruption and the involvement of so many others, counsels assisting like John Agius, Virginia Bell, James Black and Paddy Bergin would not have had the ammunition to destroy the wall of lies that had hidden bent police for decades. And Justice Wood would not have been able to pursue an inquiry that cast a long shadow over Australian police for many years. But as subsequent events in Sydney would prove, Wood's probe did not uproot police corruption altogether: it simply pruned it so that it flourished again when conditions suited.

–
WITH RAY CHESTERTON

Deborah realised that most of them were wearing chunky gold rings … suspiciously similar. It dawned on her they were probably stolen: taken as a job lot orchestrated by bent cops.

 

THE moment of truth hit Deborah Locke late at night sitting in an undercover police car in a lane behind a brothel in Sydney's west. Among the crackle and chatter of the routine police messages was a strange series of calls for a particular cop, stating that his wife had been ‘abducted'.

She wondered why the older detective with her ignored what sounded like an horrific crime: one that should have enraged every serving police officer. Then he explained. The calls were bogus – a warning to a ‘troublesome' cop to make him fear what could happen if he ‘put them in' – meaning, if he reported his colleagues' corrupt activities
to the authorities. The detective explaining this to Locke didn't realise that a far bigger threat to his crooked career was sitting right next to him.

‘I felt like I was going to vomit,' Locke later told journalists while promoting her book,
Watching The Detectives
, ostensibly ‘fictionalised' to head off defamation suits but clearly a version of her experiences in the New South Wales force. The fact was, she was poised to ‘rat out' her colleagues at Parramatta Detectives by reporting corruption, discrimination and harassment.

At 24, she was wiser – and sadder – than the wide-eyed recruit who had joined up four years before. Long before she became Deborah Locke the hated whistleblower, the rookie Debbie Webb had twigged it was safer to go along with the bent cops than to cross them. When she first hit the streets of Kings Cross soon after the police academy, she'd sensed the danger of coming across as too honest. So far, she had been savvy enough to keep her hands clean and her eyes averted – but the time had come when she had to make a choice.