Underbelly (13 page)

The veiled threats brazenly broadcast on the police radio confirmed what she already knew – that the bent cops played rough. And they kept bad company. A few days earlier, she had realised how difficult it would be not to be compromised. Her senior ‘partner', given the alias ‘Ron Marowitz' in the book, had gone to a long lunch at the Park Royal pub in Parramatta, leaving her in the detectives' office. After a few hours he called and asked her to come down.

She found Ron with two of Sydney's most notorious figures. One was Louie Bayeh, reputedly mixed up in
prostitution, gaming and drugs. The other was ‘Mr Big' himself, Lennie McPherson, whose interests intersected with Bayeh's but also extended to murder, robbery and large-scale theft. She smiled uneasily at the men, wondering what Ron wanted her for. When she found out, she was horrified.

Ron took her outside and produced a folded piece of paper. It was an application for a gun licence in the name of one of McPherson's close relatives. Locke didn't know what to say. Was it a trap? ‘I fell back on my usual response and just laughed,' she would later write. When Ron pressed her she said, ‘You have got to be joking'. When she refused again, he pulled out a wad of cash and offered her $150 – a lot for a five-minute job in 1988 – but no amount would have tempted her. Later, she claims, she kicked herself that she didn't take the gun licence application ‘for evidence'. But she didn't. She handed it back to her bent partner with her fingerprints all over it. She had no doubt they were trying the routine ruse of implicating a newcomer in dodgy dealings, compromising her so she could not act against them.

‘I just wanted to be a cop and do my job properly,' She would later tell journalist Maree Curtis. By attempting to compromise me, the bastards weren't letting me do that.'

She had to make a decision. She wasn't going to go over to the dark side, which left her with a tough choice. Should she ‘rat'? Or do what hundreds of other anxious cops had done: pretend it wasn't happening and sit it out until she could escape with a pension, superannuation or extended sick leave.

‘I honestly couldn't believe what was going on,' she
would tell Curtis. ‘I was a young girl and I was shocked at what I saw. We were supposed to be the good guys. It was surreal. Everyone had a racket going and most of them had a sheila on the side – that was a status symbol.'

Apart from the casual and constant sexual harassment, abuse and discrimination, she was shocked at how willing her brother officers were to consort with crooks, milking them for favours while tipping them off about police operations. She wanted no part of it.

For a while she toyed with calling Detective Sergeant Kimbal Cook for advice. Cook had been her boss, briefly, at the Gaming Squad, and he was the only honest cop she felt sure of. She knew first hand what he had done – and how he had suffered for it.

Cook had worked in Internal Affairs and had been switched to Gaming to clean up its surveillance unit, where Locke worked. He seemed the sort of cop she had always wanted to work for. At one of his first morning briefings, she recalled, he had told the plain clothes members words to the effect, ‘If you make a mistake I will go all out to help you. But if anyone … does anything dishonest, corrupt, I will go out of my way to crucify you.'

Around the same time, the unit took on Frank Deak, another sergeant who had worked in Internal Affairs with Cook, and Gene Zubrecky. To Locke, they seemed excellent undercover officers. For a while. Then she noticed they had secretive conversations that stopped when she came within earshot. But Zubrecky's wife worked on the intelligence desk at the squad and seemed nice. ‘They seemed like the perfect police couple'.

But although they were working under a boss that was
straight, ‘It was uncanny that as hard as we tried, every time we attempted surveillance on a gaming establishment, the bastards knew we were there,' she would write. Once, when Gene Zubrecky had taken a ‘sickie' at short notice, Cook had himself posed as a taxi driver to gain entry to an illegal gaming venue in a shed behind the Lane Cove National Park. When he got there, driving a borrowed cab, the organisers walked straight up and dragged him out of the car and started to beat him up. They knew he was a cop.

Another night, Cook led his team into a lane behind a suspect address in Surry Hills where, he had been told, an illegal game was being run. They broke open the back door with a sledgehammer – but inside, instead of illegal gamblers caught red-handed, was an unworried group of people that included a well-known and popular criminal lawyer. They were next to a long table covered with food under a large painted ‘welcome' banner. It was clearly another tip-off, but at least this time no one was hurt. Standing next to the smiling lawyer was a man with a video camera, obviously hired to record the police's entry. The search produced nothing, of course. ‘Our video guy videoed their guy videoing him. It was all a bit embarrassing,' notes Locke drily.

Later, the unit built a case against a big-time SP bookmaker who operated near the Victorian border and went on to make multi-millions in Vanuatu. After the bookie's arrest, Gene Zubrecky and Frank Deak asked their boss, Kimbal Cook, if he were interested in splitting the $10,000 bribe the bookie had offered them. He was interested – but not in taking the bribe. He was interested in nailing his crooked men. Next time they met, he secretly taped
them, and arranged for their arrest after they picked up the bribe money from the bookie at a McDonalds car park in Goulburn.

Deborah was sitting an exam while this happened. When she went back to the office she found Gene Zubrecky's wife in tears. ‘Between sobs she told me what had happened. “Kim set them up,” she growled. “The bastard”. I thought, Well, they have been warned. They knew the rules of the game. Frank must have thought he could trust Kim, as they had worked together at Internal Affairs years earlier.'

She asked Cook about it when he got back from Goulburn and got an answer that summed up the dilemma of the honest cop surrounded by the dishonest and the apathetic in an organisation that breeds paranoia. ‘Well, what could I do?' he asked. ‘How did I know it wasn't a setup? I have a wife and kids, a mortgage. What were they thinking? What choice did I have?'

The two cops were sent to jail. And Kimbal Cook's working life was never the same again. Nailing the two officers made him the natural enemy of almost every member of the Gaming Squad, not to mention most of the force. Once, as Deborah walked into the office, she overheard a group of angry cops muttering threats against their boss, Cook, hatred in their faces. Many of them had crossed the line themselves, she knew, and had it been slightly different, they might have ended up behind bars with Zubrecky and Deak.

The way she tells the story, the mutinous cops were discussing ‘loading up' Cook with drugs or money – or bashing or even killing him ‘to make an example' of him. This was how warped it had got. Up to and including the early
1990s, Sydney police ran ‘red hot'. Bent cops ran the force, honest ones were ostracised and the ones in the middle mostly turned a blind eye because it was safer that way. For a long time, Deb Locke was one of those in the middle. ‘Just supporting Kim was a social death sentence,' she wrote.

Later, she would do something about it. In the meantime, she just wanted to get away from the scary people in the Gaming Squad. Six weeks later she scored a transfer to Parramatta Detectives. Which was where she was teamed up with the senior detective she would call Ron Marowitz. It was a case of out of the frying pan, into the fire.

Marowitz was, she would write, ‘a slimy, pock-faced little weasel' but he took a shine to her because she had been in the Gaming Squad and, luckily, the grapevine hadn't yet poisoned her reputation by painting her as a closet sympathiser of honest police who ‘dogged' on ‘good blokes' for ‘copping a quid'. Ron's brother, Jim, had been in the Gamers and so he had assumed Debbie was staunch because, ‘The Gamers was a tough squad to get into; you had to be invited to join the club, so the blokes at Parramatta thought I was cool.' She didn't bother correcting the impression that she jumped ship because of the arrest and jailing of her former colleagues, when in fact she just wasn't interested in getting bribes from crooks. The truth was she was worried about being put into a situation where she had to reject a bribe offered by a fellow cop.

All of which meant she had to put up with Ron duchessing her around the streets of Parramatta as a sort of trophy: the young, blonde detective who acted like one of the blokes. A dangerous role, and yet the only option seemed almost unthinkable at the time. It made such an impression
that she opens her book by describing a lunch that made her guts churn. Not because of the food but the company.

‘Ron was as flash as a rat with a gold tooth,' she wrote. ‘It was a morning late in 1988. I came into the office to find Ron jumping out of his skin with excitement. “It's the big time today,” he said, smiling. “I'll show you what it's all about, being a detective. We have a big lunch on today, and if you're a good little girl I'll let you come”.'

It seemed like the usual patronising crap she copped from the men, who hustled free meals every other day on their ‘patch'. She didn't realise it was a special day. At midday sharp, Ron grabbed the unmarked car keys and said they were going. The destination: a local Chinese restaurant that had been an illegal gaming den. There were already other unmarked cop cars in the restaurant car park, and more to come.

Inside, another detective already seated at a big table at the back of the room scowled when he saw Deborah. ‘What did you bring her for?' he hissed at Ron, who assured him with words to the effect of: ‘You can trust her. She'll be all right. I'm training her.'

As the other guests rolled in, she began to feel uneasy. There were two wealthy used-car dealers in expensive suits, four city detectives from one of the squads, casually dressed. Then came the heavy division: Louie Bayeh, one of Sydney's biggest ‘colourful identities' – and a celebrity in Parramatta. And the cherry on top was Roger Rogerson, the most notorious detective sergeant in Australia.

‘I started to feel as if I was well and truly in the wrong place. I had thought the cops were just pretending to be mates with these guys to get a brief on them … It was
beginning to dawn on me that the relationship here between cops and crims was different.'

She was caught. Every instinct told her to get out but she didn't want to draw attention to herself by leaving before Ron. And he was in no hurry: happy as a pig in shit.

Thoughts raced through her mind. She was the only woman present, and young and attractive. Would they all get violently drunk and hand her over to someone as a sexual offering? Or because of her Gaming Squad background, would they assume they could recruit her to be in on the giggle, as the saying went. She knew that being with drunken coppers was not safe, either way. If nothing else, if Internal Affairs were filming the lunch, her career could be ruined.

Despite her nerves, and the free gins she drank to calm them, she noticed that ‘Louie' and ‘Roger' were the ones holding court, regularly moving to a table to talk quietly with whichever of the guests wanted an audience.

Rogerson's reputation preceded him. The boy from Bankstown who had once looked like commissioner material was by 1988 probably the sharpest black knight in The Job. And he wasn't happy to see a ‘front bum' or a ‘dickless Tracy', as older cops called policewomen. His instincts were high. He glared at her.

Rogerson, Bayeh and the car dealers stayed cool and relatively sober. For them, business was business. But by the time genuine paying customers started coming in for dinner, the rest of the crew had drunk themselves stupid. Deborah realised that most of them were wearing chunky gold rings with rows of diamonds, suspiciously similar. It dawned on her that the rings were probably stolen: taken as
a job lot in one heist orchestrated by the bent cops. Those wearing them should have been arrested for bad taste let alone anything else. But that wasn't all. Late in the afternoon, one of the detectives fell off his chair and went to sleep under the table. Then they smelt him. He had fouled himself. Worse, he was wearing white jeans.

Deborah Locke had grown up with alcoholic parents and gave the bottle a nudge herself. But this was a club she did not want to be in. Problem was: how was she going to extricate herself?

When the bill came around those still standing looked at each other and shuffled their feet. Paying was the one thing they feared. But it was all right … Bayeh picked up the bill. And Locke drove all the way home to her parents' sorry farmhouse at Glenorie, northwest of Sydney. After what she'd seen that day, drink-driving was the least of her worries. Besides, detectives didn't often have to blow in the bag in those days. And if they did, it would be ‘accidentally' dropped on the ground and go nowhere.

She was caught at a crossroads – with headlights coming at her from both directions. She would later write what it felt like.

‘I had entered dangerous territory. Here I was with a bunch of crooks … Just by being there I was afraid I might be implicated in their activities. I was also frightened that if they found out I had supported the arrest of two cops at the Gaming Squad they might kill me because I might have too much information about them. I was being drawn into the dark circle of police connections with Sydney's underworld …'

DEBORAH Webb had joined the New South Wales Police in February 1984, the month that another feisty female destined to cause trouble, Kim Hollingsworth, was starting her final year of school at Wodonga. When Deborah walked into the old Redfern Police Academy, she was twenty years old, size ten, with long blonde hair. She was one of the token women in Class 201, second last to go through at Redfern before the new academy opened at Goulburn.