Underbelly (15 page)

Debbie later heard that she had been given ‘a speedball that would have killed a horse' but that her tolerance to
drugs was so high the killers had to hold her under water to kill her. The consensus is that it was all to silence her over her willingness to speak out over what she called a police conspiracy to cover up the details of the death of her boyfriend Warren Lanfranchi, shot dead by Rogerson four years earlier.

Huckstepp had blown the whistle by going to media, insisting Lanfranchi had been deliberately murdered by corrupt police. In the end, all it got her was the early grave she'd enlisted for by turning her back on her middle-class life in favour of drugs and prostitution. Her looks and her intelligence meant that her story gained traction where others wouldn't. Her monument is a fine book written by an admirer, John Dale. He called it
Huckstepp: A dangerous life
.

BE careful what you wish for, goes the saying. Deborah Locke wanted to be a detective.

It was the appeal of working in plain clothes that led her to the Gaming Squad. It wasn't much of a reason, looking back on it, but she was young and still relatively innocent about the secret ways of the New South Wales police. Besides, she had worked with the son of the Gamers' commanding officer at the Cross, and he put in a good word for her.

During the interview for the job, a senior officer suggested she try the Highway Patrol on the grounds that, ‘They're starting to let women in there.' It might have been good advice from someone with her best interests at heart, but how could she know that? She was only 21 and she wanted to be a detective.

The senior officer urged her to think about the
environment she would be going into with the Gaming Squad, and suggested it was no place for a woman. She would recall and record, with uncanny precision, his exact words: ‘You would be the odd female in a squad of hardworking, hard-playing blokes. The language around here gets pretty rough.'

But if she wanted to follow her ambition, that's the way it was. Already, she had tried to do something about the treatment women received in the force. Inspired by a talk by the head of the Equal Employment Opportunities branch towards the end of her stint at North Sydney, she had spoken up. She approached the officer to complain about sexual harassment and discrimination but was ‘basically told to shut up and that was just the way it was and that I should consider myself lucky to be there.'

Despite her growing disenchantment, she was still keen for the excitement of detective work that had led to doing the undercover work at Kings Cross.

‘There's the police force and then there's the rest of society. Being a cop is exciting. The other day I saw a car go past doing a high-speed chase with lights and sirens and I was so envious,' she would tell Maree Curtis, long after leaving the force.

‘It's the adrenaline rush. I was a detective. It's like a secret club that you had to be invited into and I had broken through the glass ceiling.'

The Gaming Squad branch of ‘the club' had 60 members. Locke was the only woman, as the one before her had left days before after receiving a hard time. She was an Italian girl called Claudia, and Deborah heard she was ‘too much of a nice girl' to handle the brutally sexist behaviour.
‘The guys made disgusting comments about her being Italian and what they would like to do with her. No wonder she ran. I began to wonder what I had walked into.'

The sexual harassment started as soon as she walked in the door. That did not surprise her – but she would soon become uncomfortable about the more secretive goings on.

‘Very little police work was done,' she would say later. ‘There would be days when some officers wouldn't turn up at all and other days when we might only work for two hours. It was not very productive.'

It was at the Gamers that she would win two Commissioner's Commendations for police work. But it came at a cost. The job inevitably involved drinking in bars and clubs and it took its toll. On race days, Wednesdays and Saturday, detectives would visit pubs and drink, supposedly looking for SP bookies. Her social drinking would turn into a drinking problem in the two years she was there.

‘It was a great job if you were an alcoholic,' she writes. They were given tax-free cash from a slush fund to pay for drinks and then do the round of the pubs, driving unmarked cars. Race days were better than a day off for the drinkers in the crew. The funny thing was, she notes, not many SP bookies were being arrested as a result of the supposed surveillance. And although the ‘gamers' constantly drank and drove, it was never an issue. They were above the law but didn't enforce much of it.

She gradually realised that each ethnic community that ran illicit gaming had a police ‘protector' in the squad. Her crew looked after Chinatown, another seemed to have an understanding with the Lebanese and another with the Greeks. One day a sergeant angrily remonstrated with her
boss, saying he was sick of approaching Chinese involved in illegal gaming and having them yell, ‘You can't touch us!' But after her sergeant took the other one away and talked to him he calmed down. It didn't stop the regular meals in Chinatown – almost always at restaurants that ran big games upstairs. And it was nothing but the best – usually the biggest live lobster in the tank was sacrificed to keep the detectives well fed.

But there is no such thing as a free lunch. Her sergeant, a big sporting man almost old enough to be her father, took her under his wing. One night after another Chinatown dinner he drove her to his home on the pretext of picking up something he needed. In the driveway, she would write later, was a silver Mercedes with deep circular scratches on the bonnet and roof. He said the vandalism had been caused by ‘a woman scorned'.

Inside, he offered her a gin and tonic. She liked a drink and accepted, despite the fact she did not feel comfortable looking at family photographs – including adult children older than she was herself. He told her his children had left home and he had no one to share the house with. As she looked politely through a picture album, he sat beside her.

She jumped up, making excuses for not being interested in his advances. She told him about having to look after her alcoholic parents. She hoped that would be the end of it, but she would find out it wouldn't be quite so easy to fight off unwanted attention.

About a week later, she got to work to find two strange detectives waiting for her. They were from Internal Affairs – as opposed to the sort the sergeant had tried to embark on. This pair was investigating everyone in the office who'd
helped raid a Greek card game at Marrickville a few days earlier. She had to go with them and answer a few questions.

A complaint had been laid that police had stolen money, gold rings, and a bracelet from the Greek card players. The investigators were not interested in her version of events. One typed her statement while the other dictated it. It said she had seen nothing untoward while searching the premises and that no one had complained to her there, and that she had mostly been out in the car. This was basically true, but she was unhappy about being told what to say and what to sign. It was, of course, the same feeling that countless offenders had complained of after being interviewed.

Meanwhile, it was back to the hard-living, hard-drinking life of the squad. One night, described in
Watching the Detectives
, her amorous sergeant got drunk, produced a bundle of fireworks from his locker and got Deborah to drive to each of the venues where they knew there were card games in progress. At each one, he would light a big bunger and toss it through the door, where terrified patrons would hit the floor when it exploded.

But ‘Sarge' had more than fireworks in mind. He made another pitch for her to live with him, arguing that the age difference wouldn't matter and that he had plenty of money to keep her ‘happy'. When she resisted, she writes, ‘He pushed me up against the wall of an elevator, trying to kiss me as we were coming up from the basement to the office.'

Fighting him off, she bolted from the lift to the women's room. Inside was a policewoman she names as Mandy Price, from the Surveillance Unit, who asked what was wrong.

Deborah would recall replying she was ‘sick of fighting these bastards off'. To which Mandy Price had answered: ‘They're all dumb pricks' and offered to talk to a senior officer about moving to the Surveillance Unit. ‘I had to go there because the same shit was happening to me.' She said the gaming squad office was a ‘zoo … full of animals'.

Within a week, she was doing surveillance.

FOR someone who was starting to feel persecuted, Locke was going pretty well for a while. The surveillance gig meant wearing casual street clothes, driving a new sports car supplied by the office, and being issued with slush fund cash to splash around to help develop a cover – which was pretty well all the time. Surveillance detectives worked from home, to avoid being seen coming out of police buildings. They would meet at a coffee shop or McDonalds that was close to that day's target, then split up. Overtime was virtually unlimited. One of her new colleagues regularly filled his car from the police bowser, and found enough spare time to run his DJ business after hours.

There were funny jobs. Sometimes, female undercovers would go to male strip shows to ensure that no pubic hair was revealed. On another job, Deborah's friend Mandy was sent to a brothel to apply for work. During the interview, Mandy agreed to a request to strip and pose for some erotic photographs. After she revealed this at the debriefing later, the boss ordered the crew to raid the brothel to recover the photographs in case they ended up in court – or in the newspapers.

For a while, it seemed better than working for a living. But, as usual, there was a catch.

In late 1986, Mandy and Deborah moved into a motel room at Bondi as cover to infiltrate an illegal gaming house at Kings Cross. They chatted up an ‘old guy' called Ernie who ran the front counter of the gaming house, called the Barclay Club. He gave them the job of minding the security system designed to keep police out while illegal games were on. It was putting the foxes in charge of the henhouse.

Ernie liked the girls. They must have seemed more trustworthy than most he met. Unwisely, as it turned out, he showed them his collection of stolen jewellery in a small chest under his bed. He had been a ‘fence' for years, and had picked over the best gear stolen from luxury houses around Double Bay. To Deborah's untrained eye, a lot of the jewellery seemed old enough and valuable enough to be family heirlooms, which could never be replaced. ‘My family's home had been broken into and I knew what it felt like to lose irreplaceable family things,' she would write. ‘I was more interested in getting this stuff back to its owners than in a bunch of Lebs playing cards.'

A few nights later, she was working the counter when who should walk through the door but ‘Grimy Graham', a heroin addict and one of her street contacts when she had worked at Kings Cross the previous year. He laughed to see a cop working security for the gaming house. She was terrified he would sell her out, as he always needed money for heroin. She called her boss to say she had been ‘burnt' and didn't feel safe. He said too much money had been spent on the operation to abort it, and to finish the shift and to call him next day. She was scared that if the crooks were tipped off, she would be dragged out the back door and made to disappear. But ‘Grimy Graham' must have remembered
how she had treated him kindly, and kept his information to himself.

Next night Deborah called in sick and Mandy took over the spot. When the police raided, she opened the door for them and then ran off, making it look as if she were frightened and had left the door open accidentally.

The raid was a success. The club was closed down. The detectives searched Ernie's room for the jewellery Deborah told them about. But when they came back they said that the chest was empty. She never knew whether to believe it or not.

It was back to the Gaming Squad. That's when she met the honest boss she would always admire, Kimbal Cook. The man who knocked back a bribe and then nailed his bent colleagues for taking it. And had to live with the fallout. She believed in him and his code but she knew he was hopelessly outnumbered. She did not want to work in a squad so dominated by corruption and went to Parramatta and found out that corruption was everywhere. By that night in April 1988, listening to veiled threats to an honest cop being broadcast on the police radio, she was screwing up her courage to break ranks and tell the truth.

THE longest journey starts with one short step, the saying goes. For Deborah Locke that step was a telephone call to the home of her former Gaming Squad boss, honest Kim Cook. There were good reasons to think twice about making this move. An officer called Phil Arantz had been thrown in a mental institution after speaking out about falsified police statistics. And, more notoriously, a detective called Michael Drury had been shot as he stood washing
dishes in his kitchen in front of his wife and two small children. Although no one has ever been charged with Drury's shooting, the consensus is that former Melbourne hit man Christopher Dale Flannery pulled the trigger on the orders of corrupt police – not long before Flannery himself disappeared because of his potential to turn on his Sydney ‘patron' George Freeman.

As Locke would tell reporters, she called Cook at home and asked to meet him. She poured out her story to him in an Oxford Street coffee shop. He told her she had no choice but to go to the Internal Police Security Unit and offered to make the arrangements and accompany her. Days later she found herself, heart pounding and palms sweaty, in a small office with two senior officers from the internal security unit. To her surprise, after introducing her to the officers, Kim Cook left. She was on her own.

Again she told her story. None of it surprised them. They seemed to know every character she mentioned but they seemed uninterested. One of the stories she told them was about being tricked by ‘Ron' the dodgy detective into filing a report for a supposed break and enter at the house of a man who turned out to be Ron's brother. The report, almost certainly the basis of a bogus insurance claim, was filed in triplicate. Yet the internal security officers wanted her to retrieve a copy of it from the busy Parramatta Detectives' office, where she risked falling immediately under suspicion. It was downright dangerous – but that didn't worry the men from headquarters. A whistleblower's lot is not an easy one. Which is exactly what she found out when she returned to Parramatta and waited for a chance to raid the records to get a copy of the dodgy report. One of the
detectives saw her and asked her, point blank, if she were waiting around to ‘get a copy of your report'. They knew. She couldn't believe it. Later in the shift two detectives told her they had a source at the Internal Security Unit … and the source had leaked about her interview there. It had taken less than a week. The boss of the office warned everyone that the phones were tapped and glared at her as he said it. And another detective told her she was ‘a silly little girl'.