Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
ix
many police are isolationist, and this is often true. The nature of the
Job means police see and experience things that normal people do not.
Undercovers experience things that other police do not. This is not
meant as bravado, but as fact.
I have mentioned the Fitzgerald Inquiry in some places in this
book. For perspective, it is beneficial to provide an overview of that
inquiry.
In May 1987, after a media report of possible police corrup-
tion involving prostitution and illegal gambling, Acting Queensland
Premier Bill Gunn ordered a commission of inquiry. Tony Fitzgerald
QC was appointed to lead the ‘Commission of Inquiry into Possible
Illegal Activities and Associated Police Misconduct’, known as the
Fitzgerald Inquiry.
The Inquiry was expected to last about six weeks, but instead
spent almost two years conducting a comprehensive investigation of
police and political corruption in Queensland. It changed the face
of policing and the political landscape in Queensland forever. I am not
going to comment on the prosecutions arising from the Inquiry, but
there were many unintended consequences for honest and dedicated
police.
After the Inquiry, new recruits at the Academy were told that anyone
above the rank of Senior Constable could not be trusted as they were
either corrupt or accepted a culture of corruption. Some police who had
little operational experience were promoted to positions they were not
equipped for. Some honest police were adversely named by offenders
they had arrested as a payback. Even when these allegations were proven
not to be correct, once they had been named, their careers were ruined.
During their service, many active and operational police were
subject of complaints against them by offenders, a common tactic
to delay court proceedings. In the brave new world of policing after
Fitzgerald, this meant that police who had complaints on their records
were often overlooked for promotion.
xiii
Ten years earlier he’d never had a drink in his life. In 1982 he’d been
a constable in the Queensland Police Force, working deep undercover
operations targeting drug rings.
In Cairns, Harry was forced to use heroin to maintain his cover.
No doubt someone was suspicious of him, and maybe he thought he
could just take heroin once. Lots of people do.
We were all damaged then, but none of us knew it. Our police work
affected us like sediment building up, an accumulation: dead bodies,
car smashes, rape victims, the sound of people dying and the sound of
people trying not to die. When the heroin hit his brain it made all those
things seem very far away.
After Cairns, Harry did a couple more operations and then
returned to uniform. I guess he was the only uniformed police officer
in Queensland with a heroin addiction, although he hid it well, and he
held out until 1992 before the drugs and their effects became too much
to handle. The Job unofficially recognised its culpability and paid him
out, medically unfit. No therapy, no rehabilitation, no responsibility.
The money soon disappeared and all Harry had left was his bike and
his habit.
Harry got it the worst, but nobody came out unscathed. We started
off as kids and became hardened undercover operators. Some of us
became tactical response specialists, some of us became detectives.
We’d kicked in doors, been shot at, infiltrated heroin importation rings
and mafia circles. The Job taught us how to be effective narcs, but not
what to do afterwards. It didn’t know what to do, and neither did we.
We could buy drugs, fool dealers, and we could drink enough to wash
it all away. So that’s what we did.
It would be decades before anyone saw Harry again.
This book’s about corruption, but it’s not. It’s about people whose
suffering has been obscured—and instigated—by the intrigue and
scandal of the years we chanced into being police officers. It’s about
kids who joined the force to fight crime only to find themselves in a
world that endorsed it. It’s that the only people who know these stories
are the people they belong to.
It’s been over thirty years now and I still haven’t let it go.
I was happy for the first six years of my life, when I lived with my mother
and grandparents in the tiny farming town of Tambo, on the banks of
the Barcoo River. If nothing had changed I might be living in Brisbane
now, working as a lawyer or in social services. I would go to work in the
morning, come home at night, and I never would have killed anyone.
My parents divorced before I was old enough to talk, and my
mother and I moved from New South Wales back to her hometown to
be with her family. She didn’t have many choices. There was no family
law court in the 1960s, no assistance for a mother whose husband
had left.
I have a few memories from that time: fishing with my grandfather
and his sons, all drovers, tough but kind men who showed me how to
treat people well, and how to work hard. I remember my grandmother
preparing meals on a wood stove and seeing her wash clothes in an
old copper kettle. I spent the lazy days playing with other kids in the
paddocks and the patch of dry grass we called a schoolyard.
When I was six years old, my mother introduced a man to the
family who she had fallen in love with. He seemed friendly and pre-
sented himself well. It’s hard to say how long it was, but some months
later the three of us packed up and left Tambo. I had no idea how much
of an influence this man would have on my life.
Mum could see what was happening but couldn’t stop it. She was
powerless. My stepfather, on the other hand, didn’t see me as a victim
but as an encumbrance on his life, a financial drain when money was
already tight. Worse than anything, though, I was a constant reminder
that there had been another man in his partner’s life.
At home I learnt to avoid eye contact and do exactly as I was told.
Even so, one of the few constants in my life was being hit with my step-
father’s belt or across the head.
They’d been married for a couple of years when my mother
decided I needed stability in my schooling. By that time they’d had
a daughter, which only increased the tension among us. I know it
broke my mother’s heart, but she decided to drive me back to Tambo
to live with my grandparents again. My stepfather was happy to be
rid of me.
For the first time since he had arrived, I was happy again. Returning
to Tambo ended the moving around, the beltings I received at new
schools and at home. It was like going back to my old life, where I was
meant to be all along. I missed my mother, but my grandparents had
been there since I was born, so they were like parents to me. They
understood what I was going through, and expressed this understand-
ing through their efforts to provide good role models, the first I’d had
since leaving Tambo in the first place. I was able to forge friendships
with other children and see that the world was bigger than the inside of
a caravan, and that there were better ways to treat people.
My grandparents owned a shop next to the house, and in those
days the local shop was a central fixture in any country town’s social
life. My cousins lived right across the road, and my uncles stayed with
us when they weren’t out on the stations. I was surrounded by people
who loved and cared for me. One uncle showed me how to play chess,
and another taught me a love of books. Evenings engaged in these
pursuits fulfilled and enriched me, and were as far as I could get from
life in the caravan where books were treated with suspicion.
I don’t know what would have happened if I hadn’t had those two
years away. The abuse wouldn’t have become any better, and I don’t like
to think about how it might have changed me. Many of the criminals
I met later in life had similar upbringings to my own. Perhaps they’d
been like me, but without any family to guide them.
It was around this time that I became interested in being a police
officer. I was drawn to the idea of standing up for people who couldn’t
help themselves. Through snippets of overheard conversation, though,
I came to understand that Tambo’s police officer wasn’t much of a service
to the community. He spent most of his time at the pub, demand-
ing cheap or free drinks and threatening to arrest patrons for public
drunkenness, although he was the drunkest in the bar. Later, I learnt
that rural police postings were often punishments, doled out to officers
who failed to perform in the city, or irritated the wrong inspector,
or were caught for the wrong misdemeanour. Not that all rural police
were inept, but the unfortunate consequence of this system was a trend
of poor policing in the country, and even upstanding country people
like my grandparents came to distrust the police. They only ever saw
the worst of them, and the worst could be pretty bad.
I’m not going to linger on it, because as hard and unfair as it was, it was
the same wherever we went. When you’re a kid, time takes forever to
move on. It feels like you’ll never grow up, that you’ll be a child forever.
At least that’s what it felt like to me. This was my life and it would
never change.
Of course, it did, and when I was eleven years old, my stepfather
bought a taxi licence and we settled in Cairns. Being in one place
meant I could piece together a normal childhood. For the first time
I was able to make friends with kids my age, knowing that I wasn’t
going to disappear. I joined the Scouts, and in Year 8 the Army Cadets,
where I found the guidance of good men who believed in supporting
kids. Looking back, I was drawn to structured, disciplined environ-
ments with reliable authority figures.
It doesn’t take a psychologist to work that one out.
We moved to Cairns when I was in Year 6, but left again about
halfway through Year 9 to live in Charters Towers, near Townsville. To
say I hated it there was an understatement. After having lived in Cairns,
I resented the small-minded attitudes I saw around me, the racism and
homophobia, the lack of ambition. I always knew I had to get out, to go
somewhere else and be somebody else, and living in Charters Towers
brought this into stark focus.
I took up judo when I was fifteen. I didn’t think about it like this then,
but I needed a way to feel confident, and to develop myself as a person.
I was a shy, withdrawn teenager who’d never spoken to a girl unless I
had to, and only had a couple of friends. My stepfather was hostile
about my decision to train in martial arts. I don’t know if it was because
he saw it as a response to his behaviour, or because he was antagonistic
towards people trying to improve themselves.
A few months after I’d started training, we had a bad night at home.
He was pissed, and he hit Mum across the face. Instead of hiding, this
time I told him to stop.
He spun to face me, then grabbed a chair from the table and
wielded it like an axe. ‘If you don’t shut the fuck up,’ he roared, ‘I’ll
break this across your head.’
I don’t know what happened, but suddenly I had a chair in my
own hands and was yelling back at him. We were nearly eye-to-eye.
Until that moment, I hadn’t realised that I was almost as tall as him.
He’d always been this dominating presence in the house, and it wasn’t
until I confronted him that I understood he wouldn’t be bigger than
me forever.
He glared at me, but didn’t strike. Instead he threw the chair down.
I was still holding mine when he staggered off, muttering something
about ungratefulness.
The next morning he acted like nothing had happened, but he
didn’t hit either of us again.