Underbelly (16 page)

Locke was terrified, with good reason. Her life could have been in danger. She called the senior officer at internal security. He made soothing noises but when she said she'd been told ‘they' had an informer in the security unit, he went quiet. Then he offered her a transfer to the Commissioner's Policy Unit at police headquarters – starting 36 hours later.

When she started the new job, a superintendent told her that ‘we' should not bother the Commissioner, John Avery, with her problem. Instead of seeing Avery, who was soon to retire, she would talk to the assistant commissioner in line for the top job, Tony Lauer. It was the first Locke knew that Avery was going and Lauer was taking over. Suddenly, she was at a high altitude – but not enjoying the view.

She waited for what seemed like a long time for the interview with Lauer. When it came, she blurted out her whole story of corrupt activities with names, places and dates. His reaction, she would later write, was mainly what to do with her. After she again attempted to tell him how bad things were, he told her that police ‘don't like whistle-blowers', which was true.

It was the first time she'd heard the term ‘whistleblower'. It would soon become part of her everyday vocabulary.
By the end of the interview she was quietly convinced that Lauer thought she was – if not exactly at fault – then certainly taking a risk by dobbing in other cops.

‘I felt like a silly little girl who had done something that everyone else knew not to do,' she would write of the scene in the office high in the sky. Finally, Lauer told her she would be put with Michael Drury, the other ‘outcast' who had been shot in 1984, apparently for his refusal to bend to bent police. Together, they ran Task Force Wave, a faintly bizarre scheme to trap car thieves by setting up cars fitted with sophisticated thief-catching gear. The electronic gear was worth a huge amount of money but the ‘bait' cars were old bombs no self-respecting thief would want to pinch from a supermarket or railway car park. It was a miserable time for Locke. Because Drury had his office in another building and was preoccupied writing a book,
In the Line of Fire
, with Darren Goodsir, she spent much of it working alone from a desk in an old hat factory in Surry Hills. At home, meanwhile, she started to drink with her parents. She was only 25, and felt as if her life was over.

It wasn't. After swinging a transfer to the comparative normality of the Fraud Squad, she met the man who would change her life – and her surname – Greg Locke. She took notice when a detective warned her not to trust him because ‘if there's money to be found, he won't take any.' A backhanded compliment that first aroused her interest, then her feelings. She started a relationship with him a month later but was still a long way from being saved from the dark hole in which the police force – and her alcoholic parents' dependence on her – had left her. First she attended meetings of Alanon, a group for relatives of alcoholics.
It was good, but it wasn't enough. That didn't happen until a little old lady at one meeting told her she had to give up drinking completely or she would end up a hopeless alcoholic like the rest of her family.

She gave up drinking, one day at a time. And she married Greg and had her first baby.

She had tried to clean up her troubled life. But there was still the small matter of cleaning up the police force.

SIX years is a long time. World War II lasted for six years. That is how long it took from when Deb Locke first went to the Internal Security police in 1988 to when the Independent MP John Hatton aired her damning evidence in State Parliament in 1994. The New South Wales Premier of the day, John Fahey, apologised for the treatment she'd suffered at the hands of other police.

It was this, more than anything else, that forced the Wood Royal Commission, which exposed entrenched police corruption as well as organised paedophile activity. It was in its way a great victory against overwhelming odds. But nothing could repay her for what she had sacrificed. As Maree Curtis would write much later, Locke's career was in tatters: ‘She had endured 10 years of emotional and verbal abuse and sexual harassment; had suffered a miscarriage; been treated for depression; was a recovering alcoholic; and she was struggling to hold on to her physical and mental health.'

There was good reason for the fears playing on her mind: speaking up had put her life at risk. Once, while at
the Fraud Squad, she was called to an interview with the Independent Commission Against Corruption when a disturbing thing happened.

‘As I was putting things in my handbag ready to leave, one of my colleagues strolled up and said “Have you got your gun with you?” When I asked him why, he said, “You better take it with you or someone here might use it on you”.'

Was it a veiled threat – or a genuine warning from a colleague who sensed that something evil was in the wind? The fact is that if she had been found shot dead with her own gun, it would easily have been dismissed as a ‘clear cut' case of suicide to fellow police investigating the death of someone easily painted as an alcoholic, prone to depression and obviously under great strain. In fact, a senior New South Wales police officer had been found in just such circumstances some years earlier. Officially, he shot himself – but the rumour is that bent police lent him a hand.

By the time Locke wrote
Watching the Detectives
, published in 2003, she was 39, had left the force well behind and had two more children. She and her husband were surviving on police pensions after taking medical discharges from the job that had turned them into pariahs. Despite everything, she told Curtis, she had no regrets about what she had done.

‘If you decide to take a stand, you can't stop,' she said. ‘You just have to keep going and see it through.' Of her book, since republished to catch the wave of publicity surrounding the
Underbelly
drama series, she said: ‘In a way, it's closure. Those bastards did a lot of bad things to me.

‘If I found myself in the same situation, I would do it all again. It has taken a huge toll – on my life and on my health and on my family – but at least I feel as if I've done my bit.'

The Wood Royal Commission started on 24 November 1994, and sat for 365 days. It adversely named 200 police officers, among others. At least ten people committed suicide, including police members, school principals and paedophiles. Three people were arrested for failing to answer questions. The Commissioner's main recommendations were the setting up of a Police Integrity Commission, random drug and integrity testing and the abolition of the New South Wales Police Board. The Police Commissioner was given increased powers to hire and fire.

Beach boys: ‘Teflon John' Ibrahim (right), Adam Freeman and a young friend.
DAVID FREEMAN: MYSPACE

Tough love: John Ibrahim clowns with David Freeman and a mate.
DAVID FREEMAN: MYSPACE

Tough tummy: Fadi Ibrahim, who survived being shot five times.

Tough head: ‘Sam' Ibrahim, a bouncer, biker and big brother.

Posers: Adam Sonny Freeman, Paris Hilton and David George Freeman, doing what they do best.
DAVID FREEMAN: MYSPACE

Happy days: John Ibrahim (left), David Freeman and Todd O'Connor, who died in 2008.
DAVID FREEMAN: MYSPACE