Underbelly (7 page)

The public did not hear of Kim Hollingsworth until two years later but the events that led to her hitting the headlines happened in mid-1995. In July that year, Hollingsworth's short career as a trainee police officer ended abruptly after a gruelling interview with her superiors in a suburban Sydney police station, Daceyville. When she went into the room she noticed a document headed ‘Termination of SPO Hollingsworth'. It was obvious the dice was already loaded against her: they were just going through the motions. Next day, little more than two months after joining the force, she was sacked.

Her offence, officially, was that she had failed to disclose her previous career as a prostitute and stripper on the application form to join the force earlier that year. In legal terms, this threw doubt on ‘her veracity'. In fact, the application form was the perfect Catch 22 booby trap, able to be used against her at the whim of anyone in authority.

It was reasonable to assume that if she had volunteered every detail of her employment history on the form – as most shrewd people would not – it would have jeopardised her chances of entry into the force despite her physical fitness, engaging personality and higher than average intelligence.

Like a lot of police recruits her age, Hollingsworth had plenty of jobs on her resume – she had worked in shops, as a model, a flower seller, waitress and pharmacy assistant and on horse properties and in stables. In fact, she would later tell the authors of this book, her main motive in signing on was to join the mounted police. This was slightly at odds with her claim to journalist Ben Hills in 1997 that she wanted to work with dogs, but that doesn't matter. Either way, it reflected her professed love of animals.

One of her friends was a mounted policeman. The friendship didn't bring him luck. He would later commit suicide after being questioned about writing her a reference on police letterhead. But Kim Hollingsworth was made of sterner stuff. When she was faced with the prospect of being humiliated and rejected, she didn't kill herself – she did something braver. She killed any chance of safe anonymity – of quietly reinventing herself away from the sex industry – by airing her grievance on the most public of stages.

The irony was this: the real reason for her sacking was not for her supposed dishonesty in airbrushing her past on the application form – but her honesty in blowing the whistle on a fellow police recruit with bad intentions and shady connections.

It happened like this. When she applied to join the police force in early 1995, she was routinely vetted by a sergeant assigned to that mostly tedious task. The sergeant would later claim to have checked police records, spoken to her neighbours and her landlord, as well as interviewing the would-be recruit herself.

The sergeant could find ‘nothing of an adverse nature' and reported the applicant was ‘of good character' and ‘a suitable person for police employment'. For her part, Hollingsworth left out colourful details of periods of ‘self employment' over several years. She would later say there was no space to do so on the form, the sort of answer any serving police officer would be pleased to make under cross examination by a pesky lawyer. If she was not specifically asked details of her self-employment, why volunteer them? No copper in their right mind would. As the daughter of a detective, and street smart from time spent working variously as a stripper, as an escort and as a $400-an-hour pro in expensive brothels such as Sydney's famous Touch of Class, she knew when to shut up. Although not enough, as it turned out, to bury her past.

She had been inducted into the police academy at Goulburn in May, 1995. For a few weeks, all was well. Fit, friendly and good-looking, with a breezy line of chat, Recruit Hollingsworth seemed to fit in. Had she gone to Perth or Darwin to join up, she might have been a police officer to this day, perhaps a good one. But to imagine she would go unrecognised – or that it wouldn't matter if she were – was optimistic, if not naïve or even a touch arrogant. Sydney
was too close for comfort. It was inevitable that the past would point a grubby finger at her.

It happened when a young detective who had seen her working at police strip nights recognised her. It wasn't as if he were shocked – or motivated by altruism to identify Hollingsworth's past to his superiors. He was (name deleted) later identified by the Commission as MK2, and a man with an eye for an opportunity. Hollingsworth said he asked her to act as a madam in a brothel he said he was planning to open in Sydney's western suburbs, a fact that would imply he was probably associated with the Lebanese gangsters who were expanding from their western suburbs strongholds into the more profitable fleshpots of Kings Cross.

At first she thought it was a joke, she would claim. Then she realised she was being forced to make a choice. Faced with the unspoken but explicit threat of her past being revealed, she decided to fight. She had wanted a clean break from the sex industry but now, dragged back to face her past, she decided to tell the truth. She blew the whistle on the dodgy detective. This, she would tell the Wood Royal Commission (and the New South Wales Industrial Commission), was the real reason for her sacking. Her sin was that she wouldn't play the game by joining ‘the joke' to become a bent cop moonlighting as a brothel madam, an outrageous dual role to which the force might well have turned a blind eye at the time.

‘One day I was told I was a human being by senior staff at the police academy but after blowing the whistle it was a very different story,' she would say later. ‘It was the end of
my career. The police knew that I had a wealth of knowledge about corrupt police officers, having been involved in the sex industry.'

The Commission had no choice. It had to be seen to act. Its investigators came up with a faintly farcical scheme to set up Hollingsworth's flat with a hidden video camera to mount a sting on the bent detective. It took a month, and the cast included a tow-truck driver pretending to be a crooked police inspector and Strip-O-Gram operator, a mechanic with ambitions to open a brothel above his garage, and a maintenance man from a Sydney escort agency. Eventually they filmed the detective accepting $100. He was dismissed from the force but denied being charged with taking a bribe or anything else. Nor were any of the other twenty police that Hollingsworth had named as having links with the sex industry.

Supposedly, her background as a stripper was not officially ‘discovered' by the police hierarchy until half way through the sting operation. She was kept on until the sting was done, then sacked at short notice after the interview at Daceyville.

It was a cruel lesson about being a Crown witness – especially against police. The investigators had promised protection, support and a new identity, but now that they'd used her and the fun was over, it seemed they didn't love her in the morning. In fact, they treated her as if she were just a hooker with a big mouth; she had done her trick for the boys and was now an embarrassment to be bundled down the back stairs and out of sight. Literally out of sight, in this case: they gave her a one-way ticket to Adelaide and
(she would later testify) encouraged her to go back to work in a brothel to repay money she had borrowed from the Commission.

Realising her life could be in danger, she spent a couple of months ‘crying myself to sleep' before sneaking back to the bright lights of Sin City, angry and determined. That's when she decided it was payback time.

She engaged a lawyer and, ignoring threats, demanded that the authorities make her case public. Having run foul of bent police, it might have seemed that the safest place to stand was right in the spotlight – or maybe it was just that part of her craves publicity. Either way, she got it: an army of journalists turned up at the hearings of the New South Wales Industrial Relations Commission to catch the jilted stripper's tale. She didn't disappoint.

Among the onlookers was veteran investigative reporter and author Ben Hills, who was bemused but not quite convinced by the stripper's spirited performance. To him, the young woman suing the Police Department seemed more happy hooker than bitter whistleblower. There was a pattern to the coverage. Another hardbitten reporter, Ray Chesterton, wrote at the time that she worked the crowd, flashing ‘a smile that would empty your wallet at twenty paces.'

Hollingsworth could be alarmingly frank. Once, sitting outside the court room, she told Hills that her breast implants enabled her to move her breasts independently – and offered ‘to demonstrate this phenomenon to me', he noted later. (He politely ducked the demonstration, but accepted a short-lived invitation to write a book. The negotiations didn't end well.)

Anatomical entertainment was in the court room as well as outside it. Hollingsworth's artificially enhanced breasts weren't the only ones before the bench. In what one reporter called ‘theatre of the absurd', the police service engaged a transsexual attorney to represent it.

The barrister, formerly known as Terry Anderson, had swapped regulation dark suit and tie for a dress, handbag and frizzy ginger hair and asked to be called ‘Teresa Anderson'. If briefing Anderson were an attempt by the police brains trust to prove its broad-minded equal employment credentials, it didn't work that well. When not alarming natural-born women by using the female toilets at the court, the new Ms Anderson scored a few points along the way. She said Hollingsworth had admitted ‘lying' on her application form and scoffed at her portrayal as a whistleblower motivated by conscience. Instead, she painted Hollingsworth as a cunning and manipulative liar who would ‘say anything at any time to achieve what she wants.'

But after a nine-day hearing, Industrial Relations Commissioner Peter Connor decided that most of the lies and manipulation had not come from Hollingsworth's side. He found that she had been denied natural justice and ordered that she either be reinstated as a trainee police officer – or paid compensation. The compensation figure was later set at $35,000 – but Hollingsworth wasn't going to be brushed off with that. She wanted to be back in uniform as a police recruit.

‘I do hope I get the job back in future,' she told reporters. ‘That's been my ambition since I was a six-year-old and corrupt police will not be spoiling that for me. I have no ill-feeling towards the police service. I don't think I ever will
have. It's something that happened in the past and all I can do now is try and get reinstated.

‘Of course there are going to be some police officers who won't be happy,' she conceded.

She was right about that. And the officers unhappy with the ruling included senior people running the force, according to anonymous sources who briefed reporters.

If the commission ordered she be reinstated, it would be unlikely she would successfully complete recruit training.

‘She'd be better off taking a compensation package,' one source told a reporter.

Meanwhile, before the media caravan moved on, there was a chance to make a little extra cash. The Nine network's
Sixty Minutes
reportedly paid her $19,000 to appear, and it was well-known that a division of Penguin had offered a hefty advance for a tell-all book.

Ben Hills was approached to write the book but says he pulled out when a lawyer advising Hollingsworth demanded the lion's share of the advance for her. Hills, famously frank, told the lawyer where to go and no book was written. The approaches from film and television producers also came to nothing for many years. It was only when the makers of the
Underbelly
drama series revived contact with Hollingsworth years later because of her colourful Kings Cross connection that it looked as if a version of her story would reach the small screen.

By mid-1997, Hollingsworth was locked in a Mexican stand-off with the police force. She insisted she still wanted to join it – and the force insisted she wasn't wanted. One tactic was to refine the charge against her. According to a barrister acting for the police at a new hearing before the
full bench of the New South Wales Industrial Relations Commission in October that year, Hollingsworth's time as a prostitute would have exposed her to ‘the criminal milieu'. The barrister said the police service wanted to draw a ‘very, very distinct, clear line' in the case. The trouble was that the line was not clear because prostitution is not a crime in New South Wales. The case polarised – and titillated – public opinion as old morality collided with new political correctness. If there was no law against being a prostitute, then how could the fact of being one in the past legally be used against a job applicant for the police service or anywhere else?

The mix of sex scandal, corruption and political correctness was irresistible to the media and the public. Among the reporters who swarmed to the case when it was resumed in late 1997 was Luke Slattery of
The Australian
. Like Hills, he was not quite convinced by Hollingsworth's portrayal of herself as a simple country girl-turned-fearless whistleblower confronting a corrupt and hypocritical system that denied her the chance to turn over a new leaf.

The astute Slattery wrote of ‘the rather theatrical form' of Hollingsworth's dual personalities as the police woman/prostitute: what he called ‘Good Kim. Bad Kim.'

‘Kim Hollingsworth's eyes are a deep, lapis lazuli blue,' he wrote. ‘Her skin is pale, sun shy. Her nose has been so finely shaped by a surgeon's scalpel that it resembles more closely a piece of ornamental filigree than a breathing apparatus.

‘She is beautiful yet severe – all angles and planes. Too pointy, you'd think, to melt hearts. If she sashayed into a Sean Connery-era James Bond thriller as a wily seductress,
you would wonder, as she and Connery slide between the sheets: KGB or CIA?'

But he made the point that the severity is softened by an open ‘at time naïve, country manner, a mouth that curls readily into a schoolgirlish grin, and a repertoire of broad Aussie dipthongs: “yes” is a husky “yieah” …'.