Underbelly (10 page)

The conversation included what were known to be Fowler's short term plans to handle what seemed to be increasingly dire straits and financial pressures.

As a result of the milkshake ‘accident' Fowler was on indefinite sick leave and used it as a reason to delay his appearance before the Royal Commission for more than six months. It finally took a threat from Commissioner Wood to jail him if he did not appear, to force him to front in December 1994 and answer some more tough questions.

Although he had beaten charges from Internal Affairs while working at Kings Cross, he was becoming increasingly tainted. In fact, he was a carcass swinging in the breeze, stinking to high heaven.

During his time at the Cross, one of Fowler's colleagues, former sergeant Larry Churchill, had been jailed on a variety of charges including protecting drug dealers and involvement with a $4 million importation of amphetamines. Another officer was sacked.

This time Fowler had run out of protectors. His loud denials started to unravel as the evidence mounted. He claimed that a lump sum of $30,000 he used to help pay for a house on the Central Coast – plus the monthly mortgage payment of $1300 – came from punting on horses.

‘I win at least $200 a week on the horses,' he said. ‘I'm more successful at picking winners (than losers).'

Fowler would admit he had anything up to $30,000 (in lots of $5000) hidden around his house at any one time, including in the pockets of suits. And his recorded conversations with Haken made it clear he had an intimate knowledge of who paid bribes at Kings Cross and how entrenched various police were in the corruption.

In the weeks leading up to the Royal Commission, Fowler's exasperated bosses had moved to limit his activities. They decided to at least move him as far away as they could from opportunities for corrupt payments. He could go to Chatswood station on uniform duty. Or he could go to a country station.

Chatswood or the bush was no choice at all for Fowler. It would mean an end to his established lines of graft and
corruption and slash his revenue by hundreds of dollars a week. That's why he devised the third option: he would stage an accident and be discharged with a payout.

He spoke to Haken about suffering a ‘career-ending' accident in a staged car smash but then switched to the idea of slipping on a milk-shake at the City of Sydney station when he walked out of a lift, injuring his back on the marble floor.

‘I've got to have an accident tomorrow at work,' he told Haken in a taped conversation which was played to the Royal Commission only minutes after Fowler had denied any such conversation had ever taken place.

‘I'll have to set it up.' It would have to be a ‘fucking nasty accident – nothing else would suffice,' he said. ‘I need a payout. Stress isn't enough.'

The payout would go towards the down payment on a caravan he was planning to buy to travel around Australia. Right on cue next day, as Fowler had foretold, he slipped on a pre-arranged spilt milkshake near a lift well and was carried out of the building on a stretcher.

In his book
Sympathy for the Devil
, Haken says Fowler survived only a few days in hospital before being sent home, ‘following a number of incidents involving alcohol.'

Fowler's ability to predict his accident and his inescapable collusion caused Commissioner Wood to be almost light-hearted at one stage in his questioning.

Wood:
You say you genuinely fell on a milkshake?

Fowler:
Yes.

Wood:
Is it a co-incidence that you happened to talk about slipping before it happened?

More damning was Fowler's taped conversation with Haken in planning the accident.

Fowler:
Stress is not enough. I have to go for a payout.

Haken:
HOD (hurt on duty) are you?

Fowler:
Yeah HOD and fucking injury, long term.

Haken:
At work.

Fowler:
Yeah, don't fucking mention that to any cunt. Doctor said all I have to do is make it happen. I'll do everything, everything is organised.

Stunned by the secret tapings, Fowler tried to fall back on his dismal record as a policeman – and even tried to call the Commission corrupt. It was the raving of a desperate and ruined man.

‘This Commission is as corrupt as anyone it is investigating,' he almost shouted from the witness box. He emphasised he had been exonerated on all seventeen charges he'd faced at Kings Cross but said he remained tainted by what he called ‘rumour and innuendo.'

‘After 32 years in the police trying to uphold the laws of this state I have always believed a person is innocent until proven guilty,' he stormed. ‘We've come back to the French Revolution. Where's justice?'

Watching Fowler stumble into the Commission's well-laid traps made compelling watching. He typified the stupidity of corrupt police who believed in their own invincibility long after it had crumbled.

Despite overwhelming evidence, Fowler blocked out reality. He became a pathetic figure as he continued to maintain his innocence, saying at one stage that the money Haken was handing over was to repay a loan. He also came
up with a novel alternative defence: that the man on the video taking bribes was not him. It was, he said, an actor hired by the Commission to impersonate him.

‘Do you think we'd hire someone to play Graham Fowler?' asked an amused Crooke.

‘Funny things happen here,' said Fowler, clearly rattled.

The revelation that Haken had sold him out shattered Fowler's self-proclaimed integrity and blind loyalty to police unity. The blue line was no more. It was now a race to the lifeboats, every man for himself.

It was well-known that certain senior police were out for all they could get from bribes or dodging work. Haken said that after a certain hour each night Fowler could be more easily found in the Sir John Young Hotel than on duty. He was one of several officers-in-charge whose nocturnal activities were not textbook policing.

One would come to work with his fishing gear. Wearing a jumper to cover his police uniform, he would spend the night sitting on the sandstone wall around the Opera House, fishing. Another would bring a kayak to work and row in Centennial Park lakes to keep fit. Fowler's antics were more mercenary than sporting. His only known exercise was counting the cash he got in ‘slings'.

Although his decision not to roll over to the Royal Commission would ultimately send him to jail, Fowler's decision to take his chances was backed by the sound logic of the past. Previous inquiries in New South Wales had inflicted few casualties on police united in lies and denials and he must have thought the line would hold. One reason for his confidence was that two senior police had told him (so he
told Haken in a bugged conversation) that his ‘loyalty' to the bent brotherhood would be rewarded.

The senior men made it clear that protecting the force was top priority. Those who stayed silent would be given a choice of jobs when the Commission was finished. Or they would be given a pension.

This was backed up by Haken. When warned by a lawyer that if he had not rolled over, his assets would have been seized and he would have been imprisoned, he had retorted: ‘… if I hadn't (helped the Commission) I might also have become a superintendent in the CIB.' It was a fair point.

Eventually, even Fowler's loud and repeated denials of corruption started to unravel as evidence mounted. The Royal Commission asked him to explain how he could be such a successful punter when his TAB account, which they subpoenaed, indicated that in three and a half years he had lost a large part of the $9000 he had wagered.

Despite his profitable working relationship with Fowler and the friendship between them, Haken had no compunction about trapping him. It was, he said, just a continuation of his role as an undercover agent for the Commission. Survival of the fittest – and the quickest thinkers.

‘Detective Inspector Graham Fowler had been a colleague of mine for a number of years,' he said on
60 Minutes
, appearing in heavy disguise. ‘The video that I recorded in my car was typical of many previous transactions where money had been picked up from a criminal and was being divided among the police involved.'

He told the ABC's
Australian Story
: ‘I was a close associate if you like, if not a friend. They were hard times but that was the job I undertook. That was the way it went.'

Asked what was going through his mind as he betrayed Fowler, he answered: ‘That I was doing a job… Purely and simply a job.'

He said he blocked out the fact that somebody he had known and presumably liked was being set up. But after a couple of rambling sentences that said nothing, he came out with the truth: ‘There is no nice way of putting it – yes, I was destroying him.'

But in his book he made a cooler and less-emotive assessment of Fowler. ‘He was nice enough when you were on a par with him but he was a standover man both to his staff and to people in the street,' he wrote. ‘He was called GOC (Grumpy Old Cunt) or GOP (Grumpy Old Prick).

‘I didn't mind the guy but he was an horrendous “dudder” – that is, he would rip you off. If there was a quid around he would take 75 cents in the dollar. I didn't worry because there was plenty around in the Cross … Perhaps that is why I survived so well, I played the odds.'

As for Fowler, as people all around him rolled over he blindly clung to his belief that somehow his faith in the brotherhood would rescue him at the eleventh hour. It didn't. Allegations mounted, including one that he and Haken had taken thousands of dollars from Hardas to help him beat charges of having bribed a police sergeant in Sydney's west.

He claimed that his bugged conversations with Haken had been tampered with to provide the wrong interpretation.

Counsel assisting, Gary Crooke: ‘Are you suggesting that the Commission might have got actors or cobbled these videos together? Is that going through your mind?'

Fowler:
That's a possibility. You could have dubbed the tape, yes.

Crooke:
Has somebody taken the part of Graham Fowler and taken the money?

Fowler:
Funny things happen, don't they.

Wood:
Are you suggesting we've doctored all those tapes. Last time you suggested we provided an actor to play your part. Do you still suggest that is the case?

Fowler:
I don't know what to believe, sir. I wouldn't believe you're part of it, sir, but I wouldn't put it past some of the people.

Crooke:
Where's it going to get you, Mr Fowler? Why don't you be a man and confess?

Fowler, who was suspended without pay straight after the car-cam screenings, was eventually tried and convicted on charges of defrauding an insurance company over his milk-shake ‘accident' but served only a couple of years in jail.

He was never charged with any corruption offences arising from his taped conversations and video evidence.

IF Trevor Haken and Fowler were the established face of perennial police corruption, Detective Senior Constable Duncan Demol represented the next generation of officers being swept up in ‘the joke', often against their will.

To succumb to temptation was to spurn the vows of public service and integrity they made as police officers. But to knock back a share of the spoils was to risk being ostracised – and could even cripple careers.

Demol was tortured by the dilemma from his first days on the job, when his minder and work partner Senior Constable Stephen Worsley had taken him to a brothel called the Barrel, where they sat drinking with naked women. Free women, food and drink: you don't see those job opportunities on police recruitment posters.

Demol picked up the idea of warped police work pretty quickly. During his first week he signed a false affidavit about a crash involving a police car. Demol's first bribe was $50 from Haken, who took it from two shoplifters. The next time he had a search warrant he stole $5000 from a cupboard in a raid on a drug dealer's house and split it with Haken.

Demol rolled over to the Commission after being confronted by video evidence, taken in Haken's car, of him lying. Although they by then worked in different areas, Demol idolised Haken, staying close even though rumours were pinpointing the older man as a turncoat collecting evidence for the Commission.

So when Demol read a confidential memo from a New South Wales Crime Commission mentioning Haken he rushed to tell him, not knowing he had rolled over. In return, Haken deliberately lured him into the car-cam vehicle so his confessions could be recorded and handed over.

A disillusioned Demol, overweight and bald, then rolled over himself. He told of police fitting ‘someone up with the trifecta' – cop slang for charging someone with offensive language, assaulting police and resisting police, whether they had committed offences or not.

Kings Cross police were served free beer in teapots in restaurants so no one could see them drinking. It was protocol that money stolen during drug raids would be shared among other police. So warped were the values that the only notion of ‘dishonesty' was failing to split a drug dealer's dirty money with others cops on the shift.

Demol volunteered two police maxims drummed into him as a probationary officer: ‘You're not a copper until you can work pissed,' and, ‘Everything you did was to cover your arse.'

Police drank on duty and held parties at the back of the station while someone watched the front desk. Any member of the public who came in with a problem was processed as quickly as possible.

He told of police getting together in ‘scrum downs' to fabricate evidence. Perjury was rife because police considered the odds were against them making a case on the facts alone. He admitted he would fake evidence against someone who was guilty if the case needed strengthening. And theft and corruption payments for protection were widespread.