Dirty Work. When Police Are Protecting Drug Dealers and Paedophiles, Someone Has to Act. A...

248 Pages·2010·2.47 MB·English

by  Glen McNamara

Dirty
Work

Glen
McNamara
To Cheryl, Jessica and Lucy
In memorium Patrick McNamara
3.2.1933–3.3.2007
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author wishes to acknowledge Sue and Peter Tuck for their unwavering
support and love through the whole of this journey.
Special thanks to Patrick McNamara and Sandra Macauliffe, Greg Bulmer,
Robert Whelan and John Wilcher for their friendship and support through good
times and bad.
For their professional advice, support and friendship thanks to Tim Priest and
Richard Basham.
Thanks to Monica Ross-Marinik, Robert Kirby, Peter Stephens and Phillip
Clay for their legal representation.
A special thanks to Fiona Schultz, Managing Director of New Holland
Publishers, for believing in this book and to Lliane Clarke for working with me
to make this book a reality.
First published in Australia in 2010 by New Holland Publishers (Australia) Pty
Ltd
Sydney • Auckland • London • Cape Town www.newholland.com.au
1/66 Gibbes Street Chatswood NSW 2067 Australia 218 Lake Road Northcote
Auckland New Zealand
86 Edgware Road London W2 2EA United Kingdom
80 McKenzie Street Cape Town 8001 South Africa Copyright © 2010 New
Holland Publishers (Australia) Pty Ltd Copyright © 2010 in text Glen
McNamara Alrights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior
written permission of the publishers and copyright holders.
National Library of Australia Cataloguing in Publication Data
ISBN: 9781741108514 (pbk.)
e-ISBN: 9781921655470
CONTENTS
Introduction
Chapter 1 Welcome to the National Crime Authority
Chapter 2 Between a rock and a hard place
Chapter 3 The Kings of Goldenhurst
Chapter 4 Life in the rat’s nest
Chapter 5 Bait
Chapter 6 Bite
Chapter 7 Dolly—life behind a mask
Chapter 8 Rat eats cat
Chapter 9 Alan gets excited
Chapter 10 Guys and Dolls
Chapter 11 The Doncaster
Chapter 12 The beginning of the end
Chapter 13 Betrayal
Chapter 14 Stripped to the bone
Chapter 15 Sparring with death
Chapter 16 Death in LA
Chapter 17 Falling
Chapter 18 Run Dolly, run
Chapter 19 Word game
Chapter 20 Spin until you die
Chapter 21 The empire strikes back
Chapter 22 The wash up
References
INTRODUCTION
‘Never worry about their size. Give it everything and you’ll be right.’
I have lived around the Cronulla area on the southern beaches of Sydney most of
my life. How it’s changed. How I’ve changed. As kids we lived in a fibro house,
played rugby league and went surfing whenever we got a chance. I loved the
water. Dad had a boat and we spent a great deal of time on the beautiful Port
Hacking River, usually fishing. His present to me for my tenth birthday was a
fishing rod. This wasn’t any old rod, not some flimsy piece of string to just
dangle off the wharf, but a real rod that could hook and hold big fish on the open
ocean, or ‘outside’ as we nicknamed it.
The rod was only part of the deal, though. The real score was going outside
the heads of the river on a big ocean fishing trip with my dad. It was then that I
saw a vastly different side to him. He was no longer the man who was up and
gone to work before
5.00am and home in the dark of night, exhausted. On the ocean he was relaxed
and happy, energised in the company of his son.
When I was ten, I caught a shark with that new rod. I was petrified. It dived
and death rolled on the line as I barely kept control. We couldn’t afford to lose
the line or the rig, so Dad grabbed a gaff and swiftly brought the butt of it down
hard across the shark’s gills. It stunned the animal instantly and Dad twirled the
gaff again, driving its hook straight through the shark’s gills. It was violent, but
quick.
I was awestruck; my father had just killed this shark single-handedly. In his
dry tone, Dad turned to me and said, ‘Never worry about their size. Give it
everything and you’ll be right.’ I learned there and then that a fierce and solid
attack would always give you the advantage.
My family always faced problems head on. Dad’s father served in the RAAF
in WWII. Then, during the Korean War, Dad was in the Army. Although he was
lucky and didn’t have to go to Korea, his best mate lost his legs under heavy
artillery fire there. It’s hard to say how this affected my father because he was a
master at concealing pain, and in fact only mentioned the incident to me in
passing as he lay on his own death bed.
My grandfather was killed two months before I came into the world, ‘king hit’
by a coward in a pub brawl. He’d been working with my father on the
construction of the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Scheme at the time. As
tough a slog as it was, Dad had done it to make enough money to build a house
for his young family, but lost his own father in the process.
I was raised to stand up for myself and deal with problems as they arose, all
the while moving forward. I learnt to be strong in who I was and not to look
back.
I left school in 1976 and joined the cops. The notion that a kid from a
working-class family could go into the cops and have the opportunity of a well-
meaning career was very attractive to me. I guess I was like a lot of kids of my
age who wanted to leave school and get straight into the workforce.
The Police Force became a logical step for me. At the time it seemed the
police had a lot of miliary features about it. My dad and my grandfather had
been in the military so I thought it might work for me. I was just 17 years old
when I joined the New South Wales Police Force. I spent about 18 months as a
Cadet before I was sworn in as a Constable on my nineteenth birthday. That led
into three long years as a uniformed cop in the St George area and the Sutherland
Shire, in the south of Sydney. After that I’d just about had a gutful of domestic
violence calls and scraping dead people out of crashed cars. When my fists
started to find the chins of some of these wife-bashing ‘heroes’ with increasing
frequency I knew it would only be a matter of time before I did someone serious
physical damage. I needed a job change.
Not long after my twenty-second birthday I got what I’d been waiting for—
the call up to be a plain-clothes Detective. I loved the work but hated the
drinking culture that most Detectives were hooked on, in and out of work hours.
Too many times I witnessed drunken police attempting to exert their alcohol-
induced power over others, only to see the whole situation fall apart because
they weren’t following the procedures. I struggled with it, sometimes to the point
where I considered throwing in the towel.
The fact I never signed a resignation letter at that point was due greatly to a
man known as ‘Schuey’. I was partnered with Detective Sergeant Geoff
Schuberg early on in my career. He was the perfect mentor, thoroughly
grounded. Schuey possessed one of the most perceptive intellects I’ve ever
encountered. A Vietnam veteran, he had an abundance of courage, probably too
much courage for one man. He was a fearless operator.
My father and Schuey influenced me in a hugely positive way. They provided
me with the values and reasons why I had to make the judgements that I did
when I came face to face with corrupt cops and paedophile rings, drug rings and
police protection on the streets of Sydney’s Kings Cross and Darlinghurst.
They also provided me with the reasons why I needed to write this book, so that
what they stood for wouldn’t be lost and forgotten. I did what I had to do in
honour of the values that they taught me. For doing what I had to, for hunting
down drug dealers and paedophiles, I make no apologies.
CHAPTER 1
WELCOME TO THE NATIONAL CRIME AUTHORITY
Maybe it was who you knew, not what you knew, that would help you
get ahead in the Force.
In the early 1980s in Sydney, drug dealing was big—it still is. In 1981, the
infamous drug dealer and armed robber, Warren Lanfranchi, was wanted
nationally for the attempted murder of a traffic cop in Sydney. When Lanfranchi
aimed the shot, the firing pin jammed in the hammer of his revolver, which
saved the life of the traffic cop that day. Lanfranchi became a prime target of the
New South Wales Police Force.
My partner Schuey and I had information that Lanfranchi sold heroin on
behalf of the notorious drug kingpin Neddy Smith to Aborigines who hung out at
the Everleigh Hotel. The Everleigh was in the area called The Block in inner-city
Redfern.
Warren Lanfranchi was a creature of habit. If he wasn’t at The Block
tormenting drug addicted Aborigines, he wouldn’t be too far away. It was a
matter of hitting the place a couple of times to catch him. So, dressed in jeans
and T-shirts, Schuey and I bowled through the Everleigh Hotel searching for
him. We were the only two white guys in the dump.
The locals did not welcome our arrival. In fact, they were hostile, shouting
and mouthing threats under their breath, until the loudest loudmouth in the place
accidentally fell from his barstool and landed on his arse. After that it was dead
quiet.
Schuey and I searched the pub high and low for Lanfranchi. We didn’t find
him. Schuey’s courage in going into the Everleigh Hotel, and physically
controlling its violence-prone Aboriginal patronage, was very unusual for a