To Serve & Protect: June 07

TO SERVE AND PROTECT
The devastating truth about police corruption in New Zealand
Explosive new allegations of widespread police sexual misconduct reaching as high as current police commissioner Howard Broad have emerged in a major Investigate magazine inquiry into police corruption, along with evidence of a political cover-up by senior Labour politicians including the current Attorney-General Michael Cullen, and CYFS Minister David Benson-Pope. IAN WISHART has this exclusive report

[UPDATE: if you think the story below is an eye-opener, just wait till you read the sequel]

When Investigate magazine broke the story last month of a young court worker allegedly raped by an off duty police officer, many people suspected there was more to our story than met the eye. Although Dunedin police moved swiftly to “investigate” and announce no offence had taken place, they didn’t realise the story wasn’t over – instead, it was the jaws of a trap closing around a police unit whose members have, for at least three decades, been amongst the most corrupt police officers in Australasia.
Last month’s cover story was merely a shot across the bows of Police National Headquarters. Today, Investigate brings you a devastating exposé that’s taken two years to pull together, an exposé linking Dunedin police officers to extortion, bribery, rape, indecent assault, underage sex, drug dealing, bestiality and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. As one former police officer told us, “A large chunk of Dunedin police were effectively the biggest organized crime syndicate in the city – even more powerful than the gangs”.
Some of the Dunedin police officers involved in some of these activities have since graduated to senior positions elsewhere around the country, including Police Commissioner Howard Broad and some of his district commanders.
When Broad apologised “unreservedly and unequivocally” to the women at the centre of the Bazley report on police sexual misconduct last month, he suggested the corruption was confined to “a very few officers who have behaved disgracefully. Their actions were wrong and contrary to their oath of office.”
That’s what Police National Headquarters wanted the public and the news media to believe. It is not, however, the reality.
Howard Broad himself, according to former colleagues, was part of that police culture when he worked in Dunedin in the 1980s.
One colleague approached by Investigate alleges Broad had bestiality videos at his going away party from Dunedin’s CIB in the mid 1980s, a party held at 19 Arawa St, Dunedin.
“There was one particular video being shown, of a naked woman holding a chicken while a man had sex with it. The chicken basically expired, and then the woman immediately performed [a sexual act] on the man. I remember it very clearly, because it’s the only time I’ve ever had the misfortune to witness bestiality.”
Another colleague, former Detective Sergeant Tom Lewis, was Howard Broad’s boss in Dunedin, and recalls incidents of indecent assault.
“He was a bit of a groper…He didn’t take much to get him drunk, and when he got pissed he got a bit of Dutch courage. He was never charged with anything, and I don’t know that he was even investigated properly – it might have just been something that was written off.
“Women had complained about him when he got drunk. But certainly I don’t think they ever initiated any proper investigation into him. He might have had a smack on the hand, but that was about all.”
The future police commissioner’s actions reflect the police culture he tried to distance himself from when he spoke last month at the release of the Bazley report:
“To the women of New Zealand I say: I have been disgusted and sickened, as you will be, by the behaviour put before the Commission of Inquiry in many of the files that covered some 25 years of our recent history.
“To all New Zealanders, I am truly sorry that a very few of our number have undermined the high expectations you rightly have of your police.
“We are encouraging every staff member to have the fortitude to come forward where they perceive things aren’t right. I am personally sponsoring our leadership, management and accountability programme.
“Thankfully, the Commission did not find evidence of any concerted efforts across Police to cover up unacceptable behaviour and I hope the report will provide reassurance that we all take sexual abuse complaints seriously.
“To any victims of sexual abuse who have perhaps been reluctant to make a complaint, please come forward.”
Howard Broad should know. As a member of the Dunedin CIB in the early to mid-eighties he would, or should, have been well aware of the parties that went on inside the CIB offices after hours.
“Let me tell you about Dunedin police in the eighties and nineties,” says one source. “If there is a Royal Commission of Inquiry, it will hear evidence of rookie female police officers being forced to have sex or perform sexual acts on senior officers as part of a ‘rite of passage’ when they joined the force down here.
“Because they were sworn staff, the senior ranks held enormous power over the careers of those girls.”
One Dunedin policewoman was run out of town in the nineties after being sodomised by the police officer son of one of the city’s highest-ranked detectives.
“She was told by National Headquarters staff that making a complaint ‘would not be good’ for her career,” says our source.
Additionally, he says, the CIB had raucous Christmas parties where women were fair game.
“There were a couple of civilian typists on our floor, and I remember at one party seeing both of them naked, legs spread, in two police interview rooms side by side, while a large group of male police officers waited in line to gang-bang these women.”
Former Detective Sergeant Tom Lewis is another who remembers wild behaviour.
“There used to be the early morning shift parties, and they finished at five or seven, they used to allow them the key to the police club. They could help themselves to grog and they worked an honesty system. It was the craziest thing that ever happened. When I was doing internal investigations within the police for [CIB boss Laurie] Dalziel and the CIB, I was attached to him to inquire into police crime and misbehaviour. By God, I reckon at least 60 to 70% evolved from those early morning or party situations. We even had indecent assaults then. In fact even in the book [Cover-ups & Cop-outs] I mention John Kelly [not to be confused with John Kelly from the traffic safety branch of the police] who became a Superintendent in Wellington and would probably have been Commissioner until the book came out. I named him as indecently assaulting policewomen at parties. He didn’t dare sue me because I would be able to name names.
“He actually indecently assaulted the-then police commissioner’s daughter,” exclaims Lewis down the phone from his home in Australia. “Do you know what he got for it? He got put back to uniform branch for seven or eight months. If you were the police commissioner and some jerk had indecently assaulted your daughter, do you think the punishment would fit if you just put him back to uniform branch for six months and transferred him as a detective sergeant to Dunedin?
“From my recollection it was breast grabbing and crotch grabbing. But he had a penchant for indecently assaulting females in social company.”
John Kelly is still attached to Police National Headquarters in a senior role.
But when Police Commissioner Howard Broad said last month there was “no evidence” of any “concerted efforts” to “cover up unacceptable behaviour”, it appears one key incident slipped his mind: an incident that happened while he was based in Dunedin, working under Tom Lewis.
Investigate’s inquiries into this particular incident have uncovered a major political dimension – allegations that senior Labour MPs Michael Cullen (now the Attorney-General) and Minister in charge of CYFS, David Benson-Pope – a schoolteacher at the time – helped police cover-up a major pedophilia, bondage and bestiality ring in the city in the mid-1980s. We’ll have full details of the political angle shortly, but first we’ll take you through the incident itself.
“In June 1984,” writes former Detective Sergeant Tom Lewis in his 1998 book, “I was absent from the office for approximately three weeks. During that time, a number of complaints were received about what appeared to be attempts to recruit young girls for sex shows.
One mother of a 14 year old girl went to the Dunedin CIB office to report that not only had her daughter been approached in the street regarding the sex show, she had also been telephoned at home and propositioned.
“The fourteen year old was able to graphically describe the details of the proposed sex show and describe the young woman she had met in the street who tried to recruit her.
“The mother, Cathy, had also spoken to the woman while she was on the phone. This person, who introduced herself as ‘Audrey’, told Cathy that, for $1,000 a performance, her daughter would be required to dress in a sheer nightie and perform in the private suite of one of the upmarket hotels in the city [The Parkside, now known as The Carisbrook].
“The audience would be mixed, with well-to-do people including members of Parliament, lawyers, doctors, ministers of religion, councilors and businessmen present. She told her that it was essential that confidentiality be maintained at all times even if some of the audience were recognised.
“Audrey then said her daughter would be required to lead a naked man, wearing a dog collar, around a small stage. She would be shown how to whip him and later would masturbate him. If she [the fourteen year old] then had sex with him on stage in front of the audience she could earn a bonus. She would also receive a bonus if she had sex with those members of the audience prepared to pay for the privilege.”
As Detective Sergeant Lewis records in his book, Cathy, although shocked, had sufficient presence of mind to play along with the idea in order to get more information and, if possible, a contact phone number from Audrey [Audrey had rung the 14 year old at home].
Cathy was even more stunned, however, when she took the information to the Dunedin CIB only to be met with a “get lost” attitude. Instead, the CIB clerk suggested Cathy conduct her own inquiries if she was bothered by it.
“To instruct a complainant to take on what was a police function was unethical and unprofessional,” wrote Tom Lewis in 1998. “It could also have put Cathy in danger. The CIB clerk was also aware that this was not an isolated complaint as by that time other complaints had been received.”
Non-plussed, Cathy nonetheless pushed ahead under her own steam, and managed to convince Audrey to put her in touch with Audrey’s boss, a man known only as ‘John’.
When Cathy phoned John, the call went to his answering service. When he rang back, Cathy had a tape recorder rolling, as Tom Lewis writes:
“[John] suggested to Cathy that a mother and daughter act would go down well with the type of clientele he catered for at his sex shows. She expressed her interest in his suggestion and asked exactly what he had in mind.
“John told her that for the sort of money he was proposing – $1,500 for each show – they would be required to indulge in sex and masturbation. He explained that the format of the sex show would be Cathy’s daughter leading a naked man around the stage on a dog lead while clad in a see-through nightie. She would be required to verbally abuse him and to whip him before masturbating him.
“Cathy was told that if she ‘measured up’ she would be required to appear on stage naked and to have intercourse with the ‘slave’ while her daughter whipped and verbally abused him.
“In the latter stages, a dog would be introduced to the act and she would be paid a substantial bonus for having sex with the dog. After the main show was over, male members of the audience might request sex with her on stage. The price would be $150, of which she would receive half.
“John reiterated Audrey’s warning about the need for confidentiality as many prominent people attended these sex shows – lawyers, Members of Parliament and the like – and they could be ruined by loose talk.”
By the time Cathy stumped up to the CIB with her taped conversation with John in hand, it was July 1984, and Detective Sergeant Tom Lewis was back on deck in Vice Squad. For the record, it was against the law for anyone under the age of 18 to be employed in a “parlour” – a euphemism for being involved in commercial sex work. Cathy’s daughter, a student at Otago Girls High School, was only 14.
The girl told Lewis that Audrey had been hanging around the school gates waiting for students to come out each afternoon, and approaching attractive 14 and 15 year olds with an offer of several hundred dollars to appear in a “modeling show”. If a girl expressed interest, Audrey took her phone number and arranged to ring later, which is how Cathy became involved.
Lewis immediately went to check what other complaints police had received.
“What I found was disturbing indeed – pieces of paper recording alleged incidents outside Otago Girls High School, in many cases without even the name or phone number of the complainants. Those that I could contact I did, and I found the approaches that had been made were similar to that made to Cathy’s daughter.”
When Lewis raised the slack attitude of CIB staff to taking complaints with his boss, Detective Chief Inspector Laurie Dalziel, Dalziel told him:
“That’s why I have a uniform branch police officer on the front desk, to sort the wheat from the chaff…It was a victimless crime, they [the schoolgirls] hadn’t been hurt, it’s low priority as far as I am concerned.”
Regardless of his boss, Tom Lewis asked a young policewoman, Judy Devlin, whether she would volunteer to go undercover for ‘Operation Audrey”. Devlin agreed, and responded to a newspaper ad that appeared to have been placed by Audrey seeking “models”.
“Audrey…mentioned the show was an adult show which regularly took place in private suites at top hotels in the city,” writes Lewis. “The audience would comprise men and women, many of whom were well known professional people.
“Audrey then proceeded to ask the constable her age, her measurements, in particular the size of her breasts, and then she told her that they had a show organized for Christchurch that weekend. She asked her if she was prepared to travel to Christchurch to perform.”
Constable Devlin declined, expressing a preference for Dunedin. Further conversations followed over the next three weeks, and by the end of it Devlin had been given the same information Cathy had: she would be leading a naked man wearing a dog collar around the stage while whipping and abusing him. She would perform sexual acts on the man and invite women from the audience to participate, and she was then required to have sex with the bondage slave on stage.
“Audrey also told the constable she could double her fee by having sex with as many of the audience as she could manage. The more she serviced, the more she would be paid. She was, like Cathy, told that if she had sexual intercourse with the dog she would receive a large bonus.”
Audrey and Devlin – using the name ‘Jenny’ – agreed to meet at a city coffee bar, and Devlin was given John’s phone number to call the next morning. Detective Sergeant Lewis traced the phone number – it belonged to the Parkside Hotel, now known as “The Carisbrook”, owned and operated by John Lewis, the father of another Dunedin police officer, Murray Lewis.
John Lewis told Devlin that his sex shows were based on the Marquis de Sade’s book, and that people attending the show “were right into bondage and perversion”. He warned her however that confidentiality was extremely important because “prominent people such as members of Parliament” would be present.
John Lewis, however, wanted to inspect his merchandise, and asked ‘Jenny’ – constable Devlin – to meet him at the hotel the following afternoon. Detective Sergeant Tom Lewis (no relation) tried to put a full surveillance team in place but was lumbered with Detective Sergeant John Scott. Scott had been run out of a small South Island town after being found getting rather too close to the young daughter of a local farmer. The farmer and his sons confronted Scott in a barn where he had the girl with him, and the farmer fired up his Poulan chainsaw – threatening to chop off the policeman’s tender portions.
Scott was subsequently transferred to Dunedin, where his nickname around the office was “Poulan”.
“Even [current police commissioner] Howard Broad used to get in on the act,” one former officer told Investigate. “He would stand outside Scott’s office pretending to pull a chainsaw and making the appropriate noises.”
Scott organised only three detectives for the surveillance, not the required six, so when undercover agent Judy Devlin entered the Parkside to meet sex show boss ‘John’, Detective Sergeant Tom Lewis was not a happy man.
Over the concealed microphone embedded in the policewoman’s bra, they could hear John talking about the bondage and sado-masochism of his sex shows, which included “group and kinky sex”. An alsation dog was a regular peformer at the sex shows, he told the woman, and she would be extremely well paid if she allowed the dog to have sex with her on the stage.
“You look young and pretty good to me,” John could be heard saying lecherously, “but I like to inspect my merchandise more closely…let me see you naked. I want to look over you closely. Take off your clothes.”
Constable Devlin made an excuse that she needed to use the bathroom first – a pre-arranged signal to the surveillance team that she needed back-up.
When police burst in, they found John clutching a bottle of baby oil and whip, while on the bed nearby lay a copy of the Marquis de Sade’s book as well as a dog collar and leash. A videotape was found of one of the previous Dunedin sex shows, and included the type of sexual acts John and Audrey had described to Cathy and Constable Devlin. One local man on the videotape was instantly recognisable to police.
“This film was later placed in the custody of [Detective Sergeant] John Scott,” wrote Detective Sergeant Tom Lewis. “It subsequently disappeared without trace.”
The suspect, John, was panicking meanwhile. As the father of Murray Lewis – now Tauranga’s Area Police Commander – he recognised Tom as a colleague of his son’s. He initially tried to suggest that the policewoman was simply a prostitute he had picked up, but slumped in his chair when Tom Lewis informed him they knew he had been attempting to recruit 14 year old schoolgirls for the sex shows through Audrey.
“Yeah, it’s true she did recruit them for me but it was just for me to screw,” he told the police officer. His hands were shaking and he was described as “sweating profusely”.
“I paid Audrey to get young girls for me as I enjoy sex with young girls. It’s just one of those things, a lot of men do.”
Detective Sergeant Lewis asked him how many young girls Audrey had arranged.
“I can’t remember. Not many. I only remember the name of one, Bonnie. I think she was over sixteen but you can’t be sure these days. I admit I’ve had sex with a few but I honestly can’t remember their names Tom.”
John initially denied knowing that Cathy’s daughter was only 14, but folded when the police officer confronted him with the existence of his taped phone call to Cathy. In it, he had told the mother that the fact her daughter was only 14 “did not bother” him when it came to letting her take part in the sex shows.
“I’ve had nightmares about this,” John confessed. “Yes, I did say that.”
Tom Lewis’ book, based on his copy of the police files, reveals John admitted he was hiring the children to have sex with “people in high places”. He would not, however, reveal specifically who. He did, however, provide contact details for ‘Audrey’ – real name Lynley Deaker.
Tom Lewis immediately instructed Detective Sergeant John “Poulan” Scott to action a search warrant at Audrey’s home and bring her in for questioning. The events that followed are the first evidence of a massive police cover-up operation beginning.
John Scott had instead gone to Dunedin’s police chief, District Commander Ross McLennan, and informed him that they’d just picked up Detective Murray Lewis’ father in the pedophile sex ring investigation.
McLennan wanted the father released into the custody of his son, and immediately bailed. Detective Sergeant Lewis wasn’t happy with that idea, especially as Audrey had not yet been brought in. The bailed suspect could easily alert other key suspects and evidence could be destroyed. The police officer also knew that some of his colleagues had a very close relationship with John and his hotel.
“I was aware that John Lewis was the ‘host with the most’ among the hierarchy of the Dunedin Police. I had been to his hotel on more than one occasion, with the head of the Dunedin CIB, and partaken of his hospitality as he curried favour with his son’s bosses. I also knew that Scott was a regular visitor to the hotel and I suspected this was the start of a campaign to minimise the seriousness of the charges against Lewis.”
Despite Tom Lewis’ protestations, Scott was adamant that releasing John was the District Commander’s explicit instruction. Although Audrey was subsequently located, John Scott’s team “forgot” to obtain a search warrant, so no evidence was seized and she was now at the police station refusing to answer questions and demanding to be either released or charged.
John Scott had also decided to send undercover agent Judy Devlin home, so nobody was available to run an identification line-up. If they had, Audrey could have been pinged and locked up for attempting to procure schoolgirls for sex. Instead, with events collapsing around him, and Devlin unable to be located, Tom Lewis was forced to release Audrey as well.
The following day, August 9, 1984, an unbowed Tom Lewis organised his own search warrant of Audrey’s house, and arranged for Constable Devlin to accompany him so she could identify Audrey as part of the process. Just as they were about to head out the door, John ‘Poulan’ Scott pulled Lewis aside and told him CIB chief Laurie Dalziel had ordered “the sex inquiry is to be stopped until he gets back tomorrow”.
The wheels of a police cover-up were well and truly spinning by now.
When Dalziel returned, he came to Lewis’ office and allegedly urged him to drop the case.
“He wanted me to report the John Lewis offences along favourable lines,” says Tom Lewis in his book, “even to the extent of changing my report to say there was insufficient evidence to charge him.”
“Don’t you understand?” urged Dalziel, “It’s a victimless crime!”
In a nutshell, that summed up the attitude of Dunedin Police – a sex ring where 14 year old girls were offered huge sums of money to have sex with old men in bondage gear and an alsation dog, was a “victimless crime” – a statement the parents of Dunedin schoolchildren would have been less than happy to hear.
The investigation, however, was quashed.
Tom Lewis responded by trying to file an official complaint about Detective Chief Inspector Dalziel attempting to pervert the course of justice by preventing an active investigation of a pedophile/BDSM/bestiality ring involving prominent Labour government MPs and Dunedin business leaders.
“I went upstairs and reported it to the District Commander that the head of CIB had tried to pervert the course of justice by stopping me with my inquiry. And of course for 9 months they wouldn’t take my complaint, so I can sort of see how these women went when they tried to complain about being raped. Here was I, a detective sergeant, with 20 years experience and I couldn’t get a complaint laid, so you can see the problems they must have had,” Lewis told Investigate.
Audrey had named a high-ranking Labour cabinet minister as one of those attending the shows, but Lewis wasn’t allowed to question him either.
A phony war broke out, with Dalziel trying to convince Lewis to withdraw his complaint and drop charges against the publican, John.
“Eventually I decided to force the issue,” Tom Lewis records in his book. “I obtained a search warrant from the District Court for Audrey’s address. I took Constable Devlin and another police officer and we raided her address in mid-September 1984.
“When I spoke to Audrey at the door, she said, ‘What’s going on? I was told this had all been squared off and all charges dropped. I better not be taking the rap on my own. Are you doing a warrant on John again? If I’ve been set up to take the rap for this then I’ll take him and his mates with me’.”
Constable Devlin made a positive ID, although Audrey denied meeting her, and inside the unit police found an alsation dog, BDSM bondage gear, and handwriting samples that matched copy supplied to the Otago Daily Times newspaper seeking girls for sex shows.
In other words, they had Audrey dead to rights.
It was during one of these conversations that Tom Lewis says Audrey coughed to the identity of the high-ranking Labour cabinet minister visiting the sex shows when he had the chance to get into Dunedin. Investigate has the minister’s name – for the record they are no longer in parliament.
Audrey’s boss, John, had however already talked of Labour MPs in the plural sense, not the singular.
Despite now having enough evidence to charge both Audrey and John, Tom Lewis was still running up against a corruption wall inside the police when it came to getting action on the file.
“A week later, I learned that the Dunedin children’s sex file had been hastily sent to the police legal section in Wellington without the additional evidence. Still later, I learned that the file that was sent had been interfered with and much of the documentary evidence against Lewis removed before being sent.”
Dunedin police perverting the course of justice? Again, dead to rights.
The trail, and the chance to bring a pedophile ring to justice, was going cold.
Simultaneously, Lewis’ colleagues slipped him photocopied pages from Detective Sergeant John ‘Poulan’ Scott’s diary, revealing Scott had apparently been stalking Tom Lewis’ wife and teenage daughter, even though neither had anything to do with the case.
Tom Lewis engaged a lawyer, Bruce Robertson, later to become a Court of Appeal judge, who suggested a complaint was laid directly with Labour’s Police Minister, Ann Hercus. But Labour refused to act. Lewis believes police bosses may have been blackmailing the Labour Government:
“They had a file in CIS [Criminal Intelligence Section] on her [Hercus] which I was aware of because I was in CIS at the time. They had a couple of things on her so she was under quite a bit of pressure, so the Labour government were very keen to cover this up.”
Instead, amid mounting public pressure and increasing media speculation, the government appointed what it called an “independent examiner” to review the allegations. Except the “examiner” wasn’t independent, but instead was closely allied to police bosses.
His report, issued in 1985, whitewashed the claims, stating there was insufficient evidence to lay charges in the sex ring case. Tom Lewis choked on his cornflakes. The only reason there was insufficient evidence, he knew, was because senior police – backed up by the Labour government – had shut down the investigation. Furthermore, when you added back the hard evidence stripped from the file sent to headquarters, there was indeed sufficient evidence. The whole case reeked.
But it was what happened next that adds a political dimension to this case. Local Labour MP Michael Cullen – now the Attorney-General – and one of his enthusiastic party workers, a schoolteacher by the name of David Benson-Pope, helped quash public concern about a cover-up by circulating copies of the “independent” examiner’s whitewash report to service clubs and high schools, along with a covering letter expressing the hope that it would “dispel unrest in your community”.
Their line: “there’s nothing in it, the claims are unsubstantiated, move on”.
Who were they protecting, and why?
It was not as if Labour was unaware of the central allegations: that the father of a police officer had procured underage schoolgirls for a bondage and discipline sex show that also included bestiality. Why would Michael Cullen, now the Attorney-General and Deputy Prime Minister, want to pour cold water on such a devastating allegation?
Why would David Benson-Pope, a schoolteacher, want to reassure teachers and parents that there was no truth to the allegations?
Lewis firmly believes the whole affair – with the implication that a senior Labour politician was involved in bondage and discipline, underage sex and bestiality – was ultimately shut down for political reasons, not just the fact that the man organising it was the father of a police officer.
It is significant that while Prime Minister Helen Clark was fully prepared to set up a Commission of Inquiry into historic police rape allegations from the Bay of Plenty, equally serious allegations with a political overtone have been strangely ignored – even though two politicians involved in damage-control at the time are now senior figures in Helen Clark’s cabinet.
It is significant that former Detective Sergeant Tom Lewis, now resident in Australia, was unaware that David Benson-Pope had even become an MP himself.
“Did you come across any junior Labour people like David Benson-Pope?” Investigate asked Lewis.
“Yes I did. Now he was a schoolteacher wasn’t he?”
“Yes,” we confirmed, adding that he was now an MP.
“At Bayfield High,” continued Lewis. “That’s right. Now he was one of the ones who would have helped get it into schools. I know that he was very close to Cullen in that St Kilda electorate. Now is he an MP himself now?”
“Yes, he is. Dunedin South.”
“Well that’s where Cullen was, but I think it was called St Kilda. Yes, Benson-Pope was active, his name did come up. That name was definitely prominent around that time. He’s a bald-headed guy isn’t he?”
“He is.”
“Yeah. And he was a teacher, something to do with Bayfield High. I think at that stage he might have even been involved in Cullen’s campaign. His name certainly came up in relation to those schools and I think he was the man who distributed them at Bayfield High.
“The examiner’s report was very widely spread,” Lewis told Investigate. “These MPs took them to those service groups and asked them to distribute them. Detective Murray Gallagher was the head of the Lions in Dunedin, and he came to me pretty disgusted.
“I suppose they worked on the basis that if they got all the service groups, the movers and shakers of Dunedin, and into the headmasters when concerned parents tried to talk about the cover-up, that they could dampen the fires a bit.
“They defended their actions, they said there was so much innuendo going on about the inquiry, and they were sorry the guy they appointed as an independent examiner wasn’t independent at all – he’d been a member of the police tribunal – but they didn’t think that influenced his report…Nobody wore that, and that was the thing that was going on then with regard to that inquiry.
“It was Cullen, the whole lot, carte blanche across the board, all the Dunedin MPs. Cullen I think was the MP for St Kilda. There was another guy, a younger guy, Clive Matthewson as well.”
It is here that the story takes a much more sinister turn. Had Dunedin’s rogue police team been brought under control by the Labour government in 1986 – when Tom Lewis finally gave up the fight and left the country – much of what followed might not have happened.
If, instead of running damage control, the current Attorney-General Michael Cullen had pushed for an open and honest police investigation, and prosecution of any officer found perverting the course of justice, history might have changed. Cullen, even then, had influence in the Labour government in his position as senior government whip.
It didn’t happen, and instead the corruption in Dunedin worsened, setting the scene for even grislier offending, as you’re about to read.
One of the unspoken themes in the 1984 investigation outlined above was the possibility that the audience in the sex shows may have included Dunedin police officers, as well as the aforementioned Labour cabinet minister. Investigate has now been able to document instances of senior police officers visiting the city’s brothels and demanding free sex in return for not busting the joints.
You’ve already seen us quoting one police officer about the fact that rookie policewomen were forced to have sex with higher ranked officers, now we can reveal how police were pulling a similar stunt in at least one major establishment, Reflections, owned and run by Jack Ingersoll and his business partner Winnie.
‘Megan’, a former escort interviewed by Investigate in Dunedin says police had an “arrangement” for free sex in the brothels.
“I worked at a parlour at one stage and there were police that came in there. They never paid. They thought they had every right to come in there and have the services. It was all quite shocking to me and I didn’t know what the procedure was, I was a bit naive about it all and I wasn’t very impressed. But obviously if a person can do that with me, and I had more clues than some of them, then yes, girls could be taken advantage of.
“Definitely it went on, without a doubt, that police took advantage of the girls…This was about 1991, 92, when I worked there.”
There was, she says, a mixture of uniform branch and plainclothes detectives. She also recalls one police officer who had sex with her then tried to get her to smoke a cannabis joint with him.
“He had a big bag of this dope, a huge bag. When he went to the toilet I reached across for an ordinary cigarette and accidentally knocked some of his papers on the side table, and I saw he had an invitation to the police ball.”
In return for enjoying free sex with prostitutes, police officers turned a blind eye to offences such as using underage schoolgirls in the parlours.
Which brings us to yet another twist in this increasingly serious story: in late 1993, perhaps early 1994, Bayfield High School dropout Laniet Bain began working part time at the Reflections massage parlour. She would have been aged just 17. It is extremely likely that part of her “initiation” involved being forced to have sex with Dunedin police officers. And one of those officers was quite likely Detective Sergeant Milton Weir – the man who later controversially spearheaded the Bain family murder investigation and allegedly planted evidence to implicate David Bain.
In a statement dictated to Colin Withnall QC in his presence but left unsigned amid fears for her life, Dunedin woman Susan Sutton recounts a conversation where one of her friends told her about Milton Weir’s behaviour.
“Joyce has also told me about what Milton used to do when he was in the squad that was in charge of the Dunedin massage parlours. She said he would insist on having sex with the new young girls at the parlours as a perk of the job, and that Jack and Winnie Ingersoll would arrange it for him.
“Also, some of the girls who were under age or had a drug conviction and accordingly weren’t allowed to work in the parlour would be allowed to work in parlours provided that they gave Weir free sex, not only for him but for his mates.”
Let that sink in for a moment. Susan Sutton’s statement confirms what Investigate had already heard from Megan. But there’s even more corroboration – Megan doesn’t know either Sutton or her friend Joyce Conwell (aka Joyce Blondell); she’d already quit the parlours to work as a private escort before their time there.
Were senior Dunedin police officers sexual clients of underage prostitute Laniet Bain? Did that have a bearing on how the police conducted their investigation into the Bain homicides of June 20, 1994?
One man who knows something is Dean Cottle, who told police he’d met Laniet in a bar in Dunedin in August 1993.
Cottle’s statement was taken by Detective Malcolm Inglis, who later worked on the David Benson-Pope tennis balls investigation. The statement is intriguing for both its explosive content, and the apparent lack of interest of police in what Cottle was telling them.
For example, he reveals:
“About the family, she told me that her father Robin had been having sex with her and this had been happening for year [sic]. That he was still doing this as I believed it…she didn’t want it coming out what had happened to her, I wasn’t to tell anyone.”
The Bain family had lived in Papua New Guinea for years, in a region where incest and group sex were cultural traditions. One book on the Bain murders alleges the family fell victim to sexual misconduct there and that the practice took hold. Cottle’s statement seems to back that up to an extent:
“The night she told me about what her father had done to her, she also told me before this that something had happened to her in Papua New Guinea. She didn’t say what, but I presumed she meant something sexual. After that she started crying and told me about what her father did to her…She also told me that her sister Arawa had been involved in some prostitution.”
It is well documented that Laniet’s mother, Margaret Bain, was becoming increasingly deranged and obsessed with New Age rituals. It has also been alleged that Margaret Bain had a sexual relationship with her sons. It is no exaggeration to say that the Bain family was seriously dysfunctional.
While author Joe Karam has speculated that Laniet sparked the murders by threatening to reveal how her father had been having sex with her, it seems likely that such a revelation would not be news inside a family with wide incest issues resulting from their Papuan lifestyle. Indeed, Karam asserts that Laniet may have given birth at age 11 to a child resulting from her father’s incest, which was adopted out in Papua New Guinea. Hello! If Laniet was truly pregnant at 11 to her father, how was a revelation of further incest going to add anything to the debate within the house?
A more likely explanation is that Laniet was planning to reveal her involvement in prostitution at the brothel used by Dunedin’s police force, and Cottle’s statement again appears to back this up. He says he saw Laniet just before she was murdered:
“I stopped and spoke to her on the footpath for about 5-10 minutes. She told me that she was going to make a new start of everything, that her parents had been questioning her about what she was doing. She said she was going to tell them everything and make a clean start of things…She had always been very scared of her parents finding out what she was doing. I thought by saying this she was going to tell her parents about prostitution.”
You’d think with dynamite like this in Dean Cottle’s statement that police would be all over him with questions. Apparently not. There appears to have been no major effort to follow up Cottle’s leads, and Laniet’s diary containing her list of clients’ names and phone numbers mysteriously disappeared.
The officer in charge of the scene examination at the Bain murders was Milton Weir.
Susan Sutton and Joyce Blondell were both working in the sex industry in the mid 1990s.
“I first met Milton Weir in 1995,” Sutton told Colin Withnall QC in her statement, “when Joyce Blondell asked me to perform a foursome with her and [Detective Sergeant Jim] Doyle and Weir and myself at the Golden Fleece Hotel, Waikouaiti.
“The main thing I want to talk about is his unstable nature…he had a very short fuse and would fly off the handle over virtually nothing at all, would rant and rave. He would have to take pills to get himself back under control.
“Some particular occasions that I recall was one night he took me to a barbecue at a house in Waverley, the address of which I have not yet been able [to] locate but I remember it because there [are] two ornamental lions at the entrance to the drive.
“There were about 20 people present at this barbecue and in the bathroom in the house was a supply of cocaine there for people to use. During the night we were out by the barbecue and there was a cat which started rubbing up against Milton Weir’s leg – Weir reacting by grabbing a barbecue tool and chopping the cat to death in an absolute frenzy. I was just horrified but other people there just laughed.”
Significantly, a Dunedin lawyer has independently confirmed he was told the Milton Weir Cat-killing story by another police officer who attended the same barbecue. That lawyer has never seen the statements of Susan Sutton or Joyce Blondell and is unaware they even exist. Needless to say, no police officer has ever seen the statements either until now.
Elsewhere in Sutton’s statement there are equally chilling nuggets:
“Weir has told me about an incident at the Police Club one night when a police officer put a bag over the head of a girl (I think another police officer) and then raped her in the Police Station. Weir told me this because he thought it was very funny. I wasn’t told the names of the people involved.
“Joyce also told me that she had some video tapes of Dunedin Police involved in various sexual acts. I told her that I didn’t believe her and challenged her to show me the tapes. She did show me some of the tapes although some of them I wouldn’t look at because they were just too disgusting. However, the ones I did see included a film of Detective Sergeant Doyle having sex with a dog. In another one, a ginger haired girl was tied down while four people had sex with her. She was crying and definitely not looking as if this was willing. I recognised Milton Weir as one of them and also [name withheld].”
According to Sue Sutton, this was standard M/O for Milton Weir when it came to aggressive sexual advances.
“On one occasion he rang me at work and wanted me to go out with him. When I told him that I couldn’t, he got very angry, came up to where I worked and again insisted I go with him…grabbed me by the throat and dragged me out to the car and took me to Allanton.
“On another occasion…he came around [to her work] and brought some blue cord and grabbed my wrists and tied them up, and said I was going with him and I could either get in the front of the car or he would put me in the boot.
“I have been asked by Mr Withnall why I didn’t go to the Police about Weir’s behaviour. My answer is that Milton Weir was the Police, and I was scared of him – I am still scared of him – and I didn’t think that going to the Police would help. My father is a retired policeman and believes that the Police can do no wrong, and I didn’t think anyone would believe me.”
Sutton wrote that Weir knew she’d been talking to the David Bain defence team for several months, “and over that period I have been receiving dead budgies in my letterbox wrapped up in newspaper. I believe Weir is sending me these.”
When she confronted Weir, he claimed to know the bird-breeding habits of the Bain defence team and claimed one in particular had an aviary. He didn’t.
But the police were prepared to fight even dirtier. A file note by Colin Withnall QC reveals:
“On Thursday June 1 I was told by a person who is closely associated with and influential in the Black Power movement in Dunedin that police have been spreading the word to gangs and to ‘lifers’ in prison that [a Bain defence associate] ‘was kicked out of the police for sodomising his son’.”
The clear intent of the police, records Withnall, was to make the associate a marked man in the criminal world where “kiddy-fiddlers” are not tolerated. The man, of course, had done no such thing and the official records show he resigned from Dunedin Police in 1992 honourably. But in the context of dead budgies in the letterbox, rape threats, violence and intimidation, this criminal slander by members of the Dunedin Police was par for the course.
Joyce Blondell’s statement records similar intimidation and slander:
“Milton Weir and other police have gone out of their way to try and stop me from talking to [the Bain defence team] and others…more importantly the threats and violence we have suffered at the hands of certain police to stuff us up and stop us from talking to [them].
“Last year, 1999, Milton Weir visited me at my Mum’s after he had finished in the police and threatened me not to talk to [the Bain team]…or there would be serious repercussions.”
Are you starting to see the pattern? These are police officers, sworn to uphold the law, knowingly lying in order to intimidate witnesses who could testify about police rape, drug use and corruption.
In another report obtained by Investigate, it is alleged that the corruption extends far higher than Milton Weir, and much further than Dunedin:
“It has come to our attention that Weir has been afforded a level of protection from a very high rank within the Police,” says the report, before naming the individual and his position in another major city police force.
The report tracks Weir’s activities at other locations where he has been stationed, including this from Christchurch:
“Whilst in Christchurch we managed to ascertain that Milton Weir was a regular visitor to certain parlours as a client. Information gleaned was that he looked after at least three of the parlours, meaning they were left alone and allowed to break the law openly in the following areas:
1. Running an unlicensed bar
2. Live sex shows which included audience participation
3. Drug dealing
4. Underage sex
“Weir left these places alone on a professional basis on the condition that he and his mates could visit them at any time free of charge and obtain free sexual pleasures for turning a blind eye to any breaches of the law. The establishments where Weir was indulging are the following:
1. Atami Bath House
2. Felicity’s 140
3. Penthouse
4. The Boutique Lounge
“Weir regularly arranged private shows for him and his friends away from the Atami in places such as the Ferrymead Tavern and the Christchurch Police Club. At the Ferrymead Tavern it became public that a uniformed police officer actively took part in indecencies on stage. This was covered up by Weir who conducted the inquiry.
“There was an incident on one occasion at the Police Club which involved hookers and Weir bundled one of them into the boot of an unmarked police car after striking her.
“From all the information gleaned whilst in Christchurch the picture which was painted for us was one of police corruption on a large scale. A lot of other information [about] offending by police was obtained but not relevant to your matter or the person you are interested in. For example, we have the names of several police officers who are dealing in illicit substances (drugs) and using.”
The report also reveals that TVNZ’s Holmes show conducted an on-camera interview with a prostitute detailing “very compelling complaints about Milton Weir criminally offending”, but didn’t run the story because other sex workers were too scared to go on tape.
While investigators were talking to the woman concerned, a CIB car pulled up and, as the report notes, “she was visited by members of the local CIB who intimidated her. Colin Withnall QC was contacted immediately – he proceeded to the property where he ordered them to leave. This is documented on a television news broadcast.
“As a result of this ‘lady’ not only talking to [TV reporter] Mike Valintine, but also to Colin Withnall QC and Stephen O’Driscoll, solicitor [now a judge], [it] led to Withnall having a private meeting with the Commissioner of Police and tabling a formal complaint of police corruption. The Commissioner of Police then appointed a police member from outside the district to conduct an inquiry…unfortunately, when this officer interviewed the said lady she then started to recant…the matter then fell over. It could be said the Police obtained the statement they desired.”
It was, of course, simply a matter of police protecting their own by intimidating the witnesses. And the sheer scale of that intimidation is incredible. According to Joyce Blondell, she confessed to two crimes she did not commit – one of them murder – because of Milton Weir’s threats if she didn’t take the rap.
Blondell is now serving a life sentence at Christchurch Women’s Prison for murder. Her first inkling of trouble was when police reopened a case originally determined as death by natural causes.
Nursing home resident Doreen Middlemiss was found dead in June 1998, as elderly rest home patients often are. An autopsy was performed, no foul play was found: death by natural causes was the verdict.
It so happened that Joyce Blondell worked at the rest home, but this was purely coincidental – the rest home had other staff as well. But Milton Weir knew Joyce worked there.
And when he found out later in 1998 that Blondell had been talking to the Bain defence team, he hit the roof, as you’ve already seen. Blondell alleges the pressure hit boiling point in late 1999.
“I went into the Dunedin Police station late last year and made a statement admitting hiding in Doreen Middlemiss’ wardrobe and then attacking her and leaving her for dead,” says Blondell in her statement.
Before we continue, how often do you see people – especially former sex workers – turn themselves in voluntarily on an attempted murder when the death had already been ruled natural 18 months earlier? The correct answer, of course, is that you are more likely to see a herd of pigs fly past in RNZAF colours.
Sure enough, Joyce Blondell alleges it was a forced confession.
“I didn’t kill Doreen Middlemiss, I did not hide in her wardrobe, I did not attack or assault her. I made the statement and pleaded guilty because of threats made to me last year [1999] by Milton Weir, a former detective with the Dunedin CIB.
“Late last year I was walking down the street in Dunedin when Milton Weir came up behind me and said to me to keep walking and not to turn around. He told me that I had to plead guilty and confess to murdering Doreen Middlemiss. Weir further told me what I was to say in my confession and that if I did not, then serious injury or worse, someone I care about a lot could be killed.
“I dwelled on it for a couple of days and then went into the police station and saw Detective Senior Sergeant Kallum Croudis. When I was interviewed regarding Doreen Middlemiss late last year (1999) it was a video interview. I had to do a second video interview because what I had stated to Kallum Croudis in the first one was not what they wanted to hear – it was not what I was told to say.
“Croudis, in my opinion, knew what I was supposed to say because when I said anything he, Croudis, was not happy with my first statement and made me make a second one stating what I had been told to say.
“I have known Milton Weir over a period of four years. Over this period I have been subject to much harrassment, threats and violence by Milton Weir and other police. I live in fear of Milton Weir and some of his friends in the police, even to this day. Milton Weir used to visit me at my address regularly. He would just arrive unannounced. If I was in bed he would hop into bed with me and force me to have sex with him.
“He raped me on a number of occasions and told me that if I did not do what he wanted he would rape [name deleted] who boarded with me. [Name deleted] is the daughter of my friend Sue Sutton.
“I at no stage consented to his advances but I feared for [name deleted’s] safety and believed and still believe to this day that Weir would have abused her had I not allowed him to have sex with me. By allowed, I don’t mean willingly. Intercourse took place on a number of occasions and I can say that he hurt me when this occurred. On these occasions he would also help himself to money after having demanded money from me.
“Over four years, Milton Weir has pinched a number of wallets out of my bag…I would estimate between two to three, maybe four thousand dollars.”
As well as rape, extortion and theft, Blondell alleges Weir enticed one of Blondell’s co-workers at the rest home, Murray Childs, to attack her when he found out Blondell was talking to outsiders.
“When I was beaten up with a baseball bat in 1999…it was Murray Childs who beat me up with the baseball bat which resulted in my having to stay in hospital for a period. As Murray Childs was assaulting me he made the comment to me that I was getting the beating because I had upset Milton Weir.
“The words used were ‘You didn’t listen to Milton – this is from Milton’.”
Blondell also alleges that on one occasion when she couldn’t pay the head scene detective on the Bain murders $500 in extortion monies, he rang her to say she’d be sorry and there “would be repercussions”. The following day her car was stolen – witnesses reported seeing a CIB car parked nearby at the time – and left in the raging surf at St Clair beach, with the word “murderer” graffitied on the side.
So Blondell’s “confession” to the attempted murder of Doreen Middlemiss, resulting in a four year jail sentence, was the culmination of police bullying and attempts to pervert the course of justice.
Murray Childs, who’d already shown himself as one of Milton Weir’s enforcers, then shot dead Blondell’s former partner Alec Rogers, who Blondell had hired to help protect her. Childs then implicated Blondell, who was jailed as a co-conspirator in the murder and sentenced to life. Another crime she says she didn’t commit.
Blondell’s statement confirms that videotapes of Milton Weir and other police gang raping a woman do exist, and Blondell concludes her statement:
“I was forced into confessing to the murder of Doreen Middlemiss by Milton Weir. I fear for my safety even though I am in prison as Milton Weir and Kallum Croudis and other police can arrange things to happen. I genuinely fear for my safety when they find out I have made this statement to you. I fear for my life and that of Sue Sutton and her daughter.
“You need to be talking to Murray Childs. If you can get him to talk you will get most of your answers and evidence against the police who have been criminally offending, but if Childs speaks he will be killed. That is why I don’t think he will talk to you.
“I have more to tell you but I have had enough for one day. I am exhausted.”
Now here’s the next political twist in this explosive police corruption scandal: Labour MP Tim Barnett was sitting with Joyce Blondell the whole time she was giving her statement. Barnett had been asked as an MP to help facilitate the urgent meeting with the prisoner, and listened to every word.
Labour cabinet minister Pete Hodgson, likewise, was briefed on the explosive nature of the revelations. Police Minister George Hawkins is recorded as telling Hodgson that the allegations are “groundless” and “old news”. For the Minister to make such a statement, he first had to obtain advice, and Hawkins’ advice would have come direct from Police National Headquarters – the same Police National Headquarters now claiming misconduct was limited to “a very few officers” and was nothing for the public to be concerned about.
Hodgson, meanwhile, appears to have been unconvinced. He wrote to Corrections Minister Matt Robson expressing concern about the safety of Joyce Blondell in prison, particularly because:
“Joyce Blondell has information that would be damaging to a number of Dunedin officers. The information has been described to me. If it exists, it is serious indeed.”
In reply to Pete Hodgson’s concerns, Corrections Minister Matt Robson sent in the elephants:
“My private secretary contacted the manager of Christchurch Women’s Prison last week…Prison management interviewed Ms [Blondell] who stated she is not concerned at all for her safety.”
No, she was probably freaking out that suddenly prison bosses knew she’d spoken up.
Robson did acknowledge a key point:
“This inmate has alleged she has knowledge of a videotape which demonstrates serious misconduct by members of Dunedin Police. You may wish to follow up this matter with the Minister of Police directly.”
Indeed. So where was the government-ordered inquiry into police corruption back in 2000? It didn’t happen. Labour has known about these allegations for seven years, but nothing has been done. A woman continues to languish in jail for crimes she probably did not commit, whilst allegations of police corruption far exceeding the Louise Nicholas case go uninvestigated.
Perhaps a clue as to how corrupt the New Zealand Police are can be found in our interview with former Detective Sergeant Tom Lewis.
“Just as an aside to show you how the police work, when I was going around NZ doing the book tour [in 1998], I ended up in Christchurch in a little bar in Merivale, and [Superintendent Paul] Fitzharris who was then the head of the South Island police district asked me to join him at his table. I said no thanks, so then he came over to me and said, ‘Look, I’ll just give you a bit of information. You are not going to have your book reprinted, you will not get any more publicity after this week on your book. It’s virtually sold out now and that’s going to be the end of it. And there will not be a reprint, even though it has sold. You can believe me or not believe me, but that’s what’s going to happen.’
“And that’s exactly what did happen. My book editor at the publishing company resigned in disgust over it. And the funny thing is many of the copies of my book were actually bought by the police department!”
For a book that sold a bestselling 10,000 copies, there are remarkably few copies of Cover-ups & Cop-outs in public circulation. It was never reprinted.
IN SUMMARY:
Investigate has been shown the names and specific allegations about a large number of current and former police officers alleged to have been involved in multiple rapes, drug deals, extortion, perversion of the course of justice, sexual misconduct, abuse of power, bringing the police into disrepute, abduction and kidnapping, fraud and a range of other crimes. Multiple police districts and National Headquarters are involved. There is far, far more than we have published in this major investigation.
Investigate understands that the people who compiled the list will only provide it if a fully independent Royal Commission of Inquiry is established into the performance of the New Zealand Police, with wide terms of reference and full powers to subpoena, compel and take evidence on oath. Our contacts do not believe the police have sufficient integrity to investigate these allegations against senior officers, and no other independent law enforcement agency exists capable of investigating the police.
If the matters had been solely historic in nature, we would have chosen not to publish. But we have obtained extensive evidence, not published as part of this report, of alleged serious criminal offending by Dunedin police officers right up to the present moment.
Additionally, some of the people involved historically remain highly placed in the police.
One final point, in court testimony a former police inspector has confirmed that the police bond is “a brotherhood” that transcends the end of the job and continues “your whole life”. Police officers who testify against their mates are said to have broken “the brotherhood”. Therefore, investigators trying to break through this “brotherhood” will be up against officers who may be prepared to lie on oath to support those accused. Investigate has been told that it is common practice amongst “bent officers” to keep a notebook listing any indiscretions of their colleagues they may become aware of, so that if the need ever arises the colleague can be blackmailed into toeing the line. Investigate understands those blackmail lists may include the names of judges and other prominent people who have visited prostitutes – it has been suggested compromised judges deliver the verdicts that their blackmailers require.
Any Royal Commission of Inquiry will need to be able to invite submissions from former police or the public, and should be able to provide immunity from prosecution to those officers willing to testify where it can be shown their own role in criminality or breach of procedure has been minor. This would prevent the criminal element within the police from exercising their blackmail “card”.
Submissions should also be invited from the criminal fraternity and prisoners – especially as the police have had no qualms about using prisoners as secret witnesses in high profile trials for years.
Because of the allegations that the Labour government has been implicated in covering-up the real extent of police corruption, decisions on immunity should not be made by the Attorney-General but by a panel of retired High Court judges untarnished by political links. Any attempt to skew either the Royal Commission or the judges panel with compromised appointees will be uncovered by Investigate magazine, if it happens.
This is not the first time a media organisation has called for a full Royal Commission – back on October 2, 1985, the national Catholic newspaper The Tablet called for just such a Commission in the wake of the Dunedin sex scandal. The Labour government refused.
Investigate has absolutely no doubt that the corruption uncovered here is of a scale similar to that afflicting the New South Wales and Queensland police forces in times past, and that New Zealanders cannot regain confidence in law enforcement until the rot has been cleared out.
For obvious legal reasons, and also because lives have been threatened already, Investigate has chosen not to seek advance comment from any of those police officers named in this article. The magazine has, however, corroborated allegations and assembled similar fact evidence that we have not published.
Finally, some may ask why Investigate has chosen to release the names of the women making the statements about Milton Weir, given the extreme fear they have for their lives.
The answer is very simple: in our experience of extortion and death threats, sunlight is the best disinfectant. For more than a decade, some of these people have lived in fear of retribution if they ever spoke up. Now that they have been named publicly, the entire country is aware of their plight.
Additionally, with the Beehive instituting clumsy inquiries about the women through both Police National Headquarters and the Corrections Department at a political level, their safety was compromised seven years ago. Investigate is, if anything, giving their evidence some much-needed context and ensuring that fresh questions are asked about Joyce Blondell’s convictions in the first instance.
Police National Headquarters, Dunedin police and other police regions need to know that a number of people now have copies of crucial documentation, and if anything happens to a witness – particularly one that documentation exists for but who we haven’t named – there will be, to use Milton Weir’s turn of phrase, “repercussions”.
To briefly recap the main points of this special report, the magazine alleges:
1. That current Police Commissioner Howard Broad had, and was watching, bestiality videos at his going away party from the Dunedin CIB at 19 Arawa St
2. That current Police Commissioner Howard Broad fondled junior staff whilst stationed at the Dunedin CIB
3. That Howard Broad, when he stated that only a “few” officers were involved in sexual misconduct, either knew or should have known of the extensive sexual misconduct in the Dunedin CIB
4. That Police National Headquarters, Dunedin Police and the Labour Government helped quash an investigation into a child sex, bondage and bestiality ring operating in Dunedin in 1984 run by the father of a police officer and attended by at least one Labour cabinet minister
5. That current Attorney-General Michael Cullen and the current Minister responsible for CYFS, David Benson-Pope, helped run damage control over the child sex, bondage and bestiality case in 1985
6. That current Labour coalition MPs Pete Hodgson, Tim Barnett, George Hawkins and Matt Robson were aware of major allegations of police misconduct from 2000 onwards, including the existence of videotapes of police rapes and bestiality involving police officers
7. That by failing to rein in police corruption brought to their attention in the eighties and again in 2000, the Labour government has permitted the culture of corruption to widen in that time, wrecking more lives
8. That former Wellington District Commander and current Police National Headquarters officer, Superintendent John Kelly indecently assaulted a number of women, including the daughter of a previous police commissioner
9. That Dunedin and Christchurch Police had arrangements to turn a blind eye to organised crime – including underage sex and drug dealing – in return for sexual favours from brothels
10. That police have maintained files on key politicians and public figures capable of being used to blackmail the government, judges, lobby groups and even police association members into supporting the status quo
11. That Dunedin police officers, former and current, have been involved in multiple rapes of junior female police staff, prostitutes and civilians, drug deals, and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, including falsifying charges
12. That several of the top officers in the David Bain case, including Milton Weir, were allegedly corrupt police officers
13. That the officer involved in the alleged rape of a court worker, detailed in our last issue and cleared by Police National Headquarters last month, is also a corrupt officer
14. That the culture of police corruption, far from being localised to the Bay of Plenty or historic, extends to a large number of jurisdictions because of staff movements, and continues to the present day
15. That the only way to weed the bad cops out of the force is a Royal Commission, because the Old Boys Network within the police is currently looking after its own interests and bringing discredit to the many hardworking honest police who do not have the institutional power to bring change