Dirty Man’s business up the Cross
Long before the local newspaper publisher and anti development activist Juanita Nielsen was slain trying to sell an ad to one of Abe Saffron’s nightclubs, Kings Cross cops have looked the other way. From the days of Tilly Devine and Darlinghurst’s Razor Gang through to the Wood Royal Commission’s damning findings into police corruption in the mid 90’s, some would say Sydney’s constabulary has offered the best protection money can buy.
Silence is certainly golden, but the truth is an even rarer gem. When Whistleblower Glen McNamara first joined the Kings Cross police force he just turned 30. A suburban boy from the beaches of Cronulla, he uncovered a drug running ring — managed by his boss, the station’s Detective Sergeant, Larry Churchill, who was eventually incarcerated thanks to McNamara’s tireless police work.
“Dirty Work” (published by New Holland Press) chronicles McNamara’s employment history at the Kings Cross Police Station from the late 1980’s through to the infamous mid 90’s. He was posted at the Kings Cross Station after doing a stint of surveillance for a Federal policing bureaucracy. Trained to conduct intelligence operations into drug operations and corrupt conduct, he raised more than a few eyebrows when he arrived at a Station where staff lunches were an all day affair. Churchill, the Station’s second in command, would shout lunch by shouting: “You don’t have to pay for this shit, do you? We’re doing you a fucking favour being here. While we’re here, you won’t have any crooks or drug dealers in here upsetting your business. You’re safe. We’re the police.”
After arresting one too many dealers in Darlinghurst, McNamara was reprimanded for interfering with the local narcotics trade, thus cutting into his supervisor’s profits. After McNamara ignored several verbal warnings, his supervisor planted cash in his locked drawer to send the eager recruit a none-too subtle message.
Trained in surveillance, McNamara methodically collected enough evidence to prove his boss was a crook. One Saturday morning, while the top command of the Cross cop squad was away on a sex holiday in the Philippines, he entered police headquarters with a pager that linked the Detective Sergeant of the Kings Cross Command to a ring of drug manufacturers and suppliers headed up by Sydney’s most notorious paedophile, Dolly Dunn, who drugged and raped young underage boys while wearing priest’s robes. Dunn painstakingly recorded his rapes on video tape. McNamara was wired by the Internal Affairs Unit and went even further undercover to collect irrefutable evidence against a drug racketeering ring of paedophiles extorted and protected by the police.
It turned out Deputy Sergeant Churchill had established excellent contacts in the Internal Affairs Unit while he worked there. When he returned from Manilla, his mates in the unit alerted him to McNamara’s undercover activities. Predictably, the whistleblower cop was falsely accused of criminal activities by Internal Affairs. After Churchill was arrested, McNamara was forced into hiding. After the police assigned him a “private” number, it was published in the police union newsletter and he and his wife received death threats. After the newlyweds fled to America, their itinerary was leaked to would be assassins.
Glen McNamara’s story, which featured in the Wood Royal Commission into police corruption, is chronicled in his chilling big ball biography, “Dirty Work.” When I spoke with Glen on the phone from an undisclosed location in what he described as a MacMansion somewhere in Sydney’s southwest, I told him that I lived in what he calls “Goldenhurst.” Surely things were worse in the bad old days. I ask him, “Following the findings of the Wood Royal Commission and the damning story in your book, do you think there are better controls in place?” McNamara is not optimistic. He tells me: “It’s no different now. Anytime you have civil servants (and that’s what police basically are) engaged in enforcement of something that is prohibited you have the opportunity to profit. You would have seen it where you live in Darlinghurst. In your neighbourhood there has been no progress at all in relation to the violence meted out to gay men. There is still homophobic violence and people are still being bashed because they are gay or because someone thinks they are gay.” In McNamara’s opinion law enforcement is more interested in narcotics than in anti-gay violence because there is more money to be made in drugs. “There is no money or opportunity to obtain money from victims,” the retired cop told me. A battle weary warrior, Glen McNamara is still willing to fight the good fight.
