Underbelly (18 page)

Colourful racing identity George Freeman, 50, marries third wife Georgina, 24. Enough said.
FAIRFAX

Regrets: a heavily-disguised Trevor Haken reflects on the role reversal of the rolled-over cop.
ABC TELEVISION

Braces and belts: a young John Ibrahim and friend practise casting long shadows at the Cross in 1991.
PEOPLE OF THE CROSS

Gangster glamour: John Ibrahim and two new best friends, Tahnya Tozzi and Tallie Nagel, at Bondi Icebergs on New Years Day, 2007.
KRISTJAN PORM: FAIRFAX

Multicultural: Ibrahim and David Freeman on holidays together.
DAVID FREEMAN: MYSPACE

There was enough money hidden in the garage to buy a family size house – and the police were going to steal every dollar of it.

 

BENT cops, crooked lawyers and crims have a saying: ‘It's only a rort if you're not in on it.' This explains why the police that missed out on a ‘whack' of $200,000 lifted from a cocaine dealer in an operation codenamed Pickup were jealous of those who split up the cash.

The cops with empty pockets called their bent brothers ‘the Christmas Club.' It had nothing to do with Santa Claus, reindeer or carol-singing, and any goodwill between the bent officers who shared the money would prove short-lived.

The theft – brazen enough to impress career criminals – would bring nothing but trouble to those who pulled it off. Trevor Haken was one of them and it is his inside account that exposed the anatomy of a classic police scam.

‘The name (Christmas Club) was because it all (happened) around Christmas and was a nice little present,' Haken writes in his biography
Sympathy for the Devil
.

It happened in 1983. Despite (or because of) the massive amount of money involved – the equivalent of a million dollars in today's currency – splitting the take sparked much bitterness among corrupt police. Only a dozen or so got a cut. Those actively involved in the sting – plus Haken – got $13,000 each. Others in on the joke got $1000 each. But plenty who knew about it didn't get any.

Among those who got payouts was a future assistant police commissioner, Ray Donaldson, who would later be forced to resign when faced with evidence of his 20 years of corruption. But he wasn't alone.

Sharing top billing with Donaldson as the most senior policeman to leave the job in disgrace was the police commissioner's chief of staff, Bob Lysaught, whose career was wrecked by the tears of a colleague's distraught teenage daughter.

For Donaldson, Lysaught and the rest, Operation Pickup was the beginning of the end. It all started with the Joint Task Force, known as the JTF. It was supposed to be the most elite crime-fighting force Australia had ever known. But it had a hard core of arrogant opportunists who grew bloated with corruption until the group was disbanded after five years. And of the scams they pulled, Operation Pickup looked the easiest score of all.

It centred on two Sydney drug dealers named Salisbury and Powley, targeted by the task force and under close scrutiny.

Coincidentally, Victorian police contacted the task force to say a man they had under surveillance in Melbourne was coming to Sydney to buy drugs from Salisbury and Powley, (later code-named JTF2 and JTF3 when they appeared at the Royal Commission.)

It seemed a win-win situation for everyone except the two drug dealers. The buyer from Victoria, unknowingly purchasing drugs for the undercover policeman who recruited him, did not suspect that the serial numbers of the cash he was carrying had been recorded by Melbourne police, nor that he was under constant surveillance by the Joint Task Force in Sydney.

He completed his drug deal at Sydney airport and returned to Melbourne, where he was immediately arrested. Back in Sydney, JTF2 and JTF3 were delighted with their quick and profitable transaction – but not for long. They were arrested before they got out of the airport car park.

A search of their car produced two kilos of cocaine and a slab of hash, as well as two bags of cash – one holding $27,000, the other $14,400. It was enough to send the task force officers to look for more money and drugs at a Manly garage that JTF2 and JTF3 were known to use.

When the police got to the garage, according to later testimony, their faces lit up. They had stumbled over Aladdin's Cave. As the search began, one of the two arrested men knew exactly what would happen. ‘Someone will get a nice new brick veneer tonight,' he predicted. Meaning, there was enough money hidden in the garage to buy a
family size house – and the police were going to steal every dollar of it.

He didn't have to be Nostradamus. As well as cocaine and the usual drug paraphernalia, police found a briefcase they later said contained around $200,000. JTF2 would tell the Royal Commission it was actually closer to $280,000.

The real figure could be either or neither of the above: it's hard to pick a winner in any dispute about the relative truthfulness of crooked police and drug dealers. But there is no doubt it was $200,000 or more.

Haken says the cash was brought to the task force headquarters in William Street, Kings Cross, where the marked money from Victorian police was isolated.

The drugs and money from JTF2 and JTF3's car were faithfully recorded as evidence. But the cash stolen from the Manly garage was given to Haken, who acted as paymaster and bundled it into individual packages with the recipient's name on the front of each.

Police who took part in the raid got $13,000. Others who had the night off got $1000. Haken said that included Detective Ray Donaldson, who would rise to be head of the squad before it was disbanded five years later. Although Haken was not physically involved in the raid, he also took $13,000.

Unbeknown to other police and confirming the adage about not trusting a thief, two officers who drove the two drug dealers' car from the airport to Manly found $6000 hidden under a seat and decided to split it on the quiet.

Then a new problem emerged. The money designated for return to Victorian police was several thousand dollars
short. Somehow, someone had double-dipped in the corruption payments.

Haken says in
Sympathy for the Devil
that it took a frantic round of phone calls before the missing money was allegedly returned to the task force's Dennis Pattle by JTF 16, Alan Taciak. Haken took no more chances. He drove to Pattle's home to collect the cash.

Haken says that as well as taking his $13,000 share, he gave similar amounts to Detective Sergeant Harry Bendt and detectives Taciak, Pattle, Terry Kilpatrick, Michael Tracey, Glenn Matinca, Frank Gillies, Chris Dent, Ian Lloyd and two detectives from other agencies.

There was a nice touch of irony, according to JTF10, a rollover officer. He said the appropriately-named Bendt, the senior officer, tried to persuade three corrupt officers to give him their $13,000 cut for a share in a real estate deal he was organising. All three declined. ‘He would have ripped them off,' JTF10 said.

Haken says that Donaldson, Detective Inspector Ray Southwell, Detective Inspector Brian Meredith and former Australian Federal Police officer Richard Paynter were among those who took $1000.

Police who thought they were entitled to a share of the money were unhappy with the distribution organised by Haken and they had a supporter in Donaldson, even though he got $1000.

He would call Haken a ‘horrible, lashing (which means ‘ripping off') little cunt' when he learned years later of Haken again short changing colleagues with money stolen from a drug dealer.

More than any other evidence of endemic corruption in the police service, the Joint Task Force disgrace made the biggest impact with the public.

‘We were worse than the criminals,' one corrupt officer would admit – and no one disagreed.

The Joint Task Force combined elite officers of the Australian Federal Police and the New South Wales police in a squad supposed to be the best of the best. It wasn't. It was the worst. Not all police working in the squad were corrupt but there was a hard core of intractable officers out for what they could steal – from the minor to the massive.

One officer in the ‘Christmas Club' even staged a fake stab wound in his arm to collect as much as $10,000 of taxpayers' money as compensation. And Haken organised for a new carpet in the Westfield Towers building (where the task force headquarters was) to be stolen and laid in his own home.

Haken knew instantly he was with birds of a feather when, soon after arriving at the task force, he overheard Southwell telling colleague Richard Paynter about a sweet deal he had engineered: he had accepted $8000 from a drug dealer named David Kelleher to strip his name from a brief. Haken realised it did not matter where you served in the police, there was corruption to be found.

The Royal Commission hearings would shred the JTF's reputation, with revelations of lying, extortion, fraud, assault, theft, perjury, selling information about police investigations and ‘loading up' people with drugs before charging them.

In theory, the task force was a timely move to counter the flow of drugs being funnelled through Sydney to the
rest of Australia. It supposedly recruited the brightest and best officers into an independent body with generous funding and high expectations.

Instead, many officers simply merged their flair for criminal behaviour into an organised powerhouse of corruption.

Their methods of raising illegal payments from criminals or just generating advantages for themselves were varied and ingenious. At one stage Haken sold Donaldson, the eventual boss of the unit, a stolen outboard motor for $100 after telling him it had been taken during a raid on an eastern suburbs house.

Another time, Southwell damaged the suspension of his own sedan and simply swapped the damaged part with one from the police car driven by the unsuspecting Donaldson, who took the vehicle to a government garage where it was repaired at taxpayers' expense.

The brazen $200,000 Christmas Club sting was crude but it reflected the red-hot opportunism of corrupt officers inside the task force who would stoop to anything from extortion to perjury and straight-out theft to make money. Worst of all, they would sell out police investigations.