Confessions of a crooked cop
June 13 2003
By John Silvester
Steve Paton says he was standing in the small evidence room of the drug squad when a senior colleague said, "There's something for you in the top drawer", and walked out. Paton opened the metal filing cabinet and saw a green drop file. Inside was $5000.
The 21-year veteran detective pocketed the money. Now, years later, he wonders why.
"I didn't need the money," he says. He had just received about $30,000 from the sale of land, and was not burdened with debt.
"I can't really explain why I did it. I am not looking for sympathy. I was a big, grown-up boy. I was a willing player, and I expect to go to jail for what I have done. I have been in a position of trust, and I have breached that trust."
Paton was a drug squad senior detective investigating some of Victoria's most notorious amphetamine, ecstasy and cocaine dealers. He was also corrupt.
Today he is in jail waiting to be sentenced by County Court Judge Michael McInerney on two counts of drug trafficking. Over the past year Paton has been interviewed several times by The Age on the condition his story would not be published until he appeared in court. "I don't want anyone thinking I'm trying to put pressure on the judge," he says.
He still struggles to explain how he turned from a detective with a reputation as an elite investigator to an opportunist who creamed off money with little hesitation.
There was no particular day he turned bad. He says he slowly drifted, rather than consciously stepped over the ethical line of policing. For years he saw and ignored police breaking laws, and eventually lost any perspective of what was right and wrong.
He says he went along with some illegal schemes because he wanted to be known as "staunch" - the police term for unquestioned loyalty to the Brotherhood.
"I just wanted to be accepted. If you weren't accepted you wouldn't get the good jobs and work on the good crooks. You would be one of the clock-watchers who walked out at 4.30 every afternoon and achieved nothing . . . did nothing.
"You had to be in with the right people to get on. Then you got the interstate junkets and the work cars. Your jobs were given a higher priority, and life was easier when you had someone with influence to look after you. The money was only part of it. It was secondary, really. It's just like when you're a kid, you want to be part of the cool gang."
Paton says that a few weeks after he took the $5000 in December 1999 he was given an envelope containing $2500 by a colleague who said: "This is how you make money around here." Again he accepted the cash with little thought of the consequences.
Over 12 months he admits to receiving between $20,000 and $30,000, often in payments as small as $400. The only lasting benefit was the battered 15-year-old sedan he bought with a few thousand of the profits. "Where did the rest go? I really don't know. I've certainly got nothing to show for it."
Stephen Andrew Paton, 41, is one of seven serving and former police now charged with criminal offences related to drug squad activities. Some detectives are accused of having acquired more than $800,000 in unexplained assets.
A taskforce, codenamed Ceja, is investigating a series of allegations of corruption against members of the former drug squad, including drug trafficking, blackmail and perverting the course of justice. More arrests are expected.
Steve Paton says he was no boy scout before he accepted money. He had seen police in their attempts to convict suspects break laws they had sworn to uphold, but always he stayed silent - in his eyes he was being staunch.
He says he knows of two cases where evidence was planted on suspects in 1997 and 1998 as part of drug squad investigations. But he told no one.
"You would see someone get a belting or see something snipped (stolen) and you wouldn't say anything. If I said, 'No, that's not right', I wouldn't have been accepted."
In 1999 he was investigating high-profile solicitor Andrew Fraser, who was planning to import cocaine. It was a dream job. Fraser, out of control because of his own drug use, was talking freely about his plans to assist in the importation of cocaine valued at $2.7 million. Telephone and listening device transcripts would provide solid evidence for his eventual successful prosecution.
But before Fraser's September 1999 arrest, Paton says he was approached by a senior member of the drug squad and told to plant cocaine in the suspect's home "as insurance".
"I was told to load up Fraser. I was no white knight, but I was livid: we had him cold, there was no reason to do it. We had enough on him."
He says he refused to plant the evidence and it was one of the reasons he first tried to resign, planning to join the Queensland police.
He was later persuaded to withdraw his resignation with the promise he would be able to work on high-priority targets. The Fraser case had given him the start of a media profile and he liked the attention. "They (his superiors) appealed to my ego. I decided to stay."
But his attempt to leave was noted. "My resignation letter was pinned up at the squad with a spelling mistake circled."
THE son of an international pilot, Steve Paton was brought up in Melbourne's east, and planned to be an auto electrician until he saw a police recruiting ad in the Football Record. The money was better than an apprentice's wage, so he joined as a cadet.
It was 1979, and he was 17. In April 1980 he graduated from the police academy.
He worked city traffic and the City West station but went to the Bureau of Criminal Intelligence as a junior while recovering from a motorcycle accident. He worked on a taskforce investigating the underworld murder of Ian Revell Carroll, shot dead in Mount Martha in January 1983.
The suspect in the case was Australia's most wanted criminal, escaper Russell "Mad Dog" Cox. During the operation Paton helped raid the homes of some of Victoria's most notorious gangsters.
He worked in the crime cars, Russell Street CIB, and the gaming and vice squads. In 1996 he worked at a northern suburban CIB and became involved in an amphetamine investigation. When the drug squad took over the job in December 1996 he was seconded there for a month. He was invited back in March.
No one will say anything about Paton on the record. Many who worked with him feel betrayed now they know he was crooked. But one officer remembers him in the pre-drug squad days as a good detective, keen to make arrests. "I can't tell you why he went off the rails."
Another former policeman says he was "absolutely stunned" when he heard of Paton's arrest. "He was the most charismatic bloke I ever worked with."
Once in the drug squad, Paton saw a chance to build his own little empire. He realised that occupational safety had been ignored, and began to study the problems of raiding amphetamine labs where unstable chemicals were stored.
After some raids police couldn't sleep for days - they had been unwittingly inhaling amphetamine fumes, and were high on speed. When one lab was found at Sunbury, police had to evacuate the area for three days. But in 1999 he was told to "forget that crap" and put back into frontline investigations. His targets included members of the Moran family, including Mark, murdered in June 2000.
During the investigation into Mark Moran, police became aware of another man seemingly on the periphery of the drug industry. He would appear in the background of surveillance photographs, but no one knew his connections.
He was a businessman with a TV celebrity girlfriend, who thought nothing of spending $5000 on one night out. Police profiled him and found he had spent $80,000 in 12 months on hire cars, and $150,000 on air fares. He had 30 aliases, and was one of the biggest drug movers in Melbourne. He was arrested with two kilograms of cocaine in August 2000, and Paton turned him into an informer, questioning him in a motel room for a month. He later confessed to his girlfriend he had a problem with drugs. She thought he was battling addiction, and promised to stand by him during rehabilitation, unaware he was a major dealer.
Moran became a drug squad target but, for reasons that have never been explained, police removed surveillance only hours before he was murdered.
The cultivation of the informer was considered a coup, but he eventually became a source for internal investigators and helped set up one drug squad detective who is now facing serious drug charges.
PATON was a member of unit two of the drug squad, the group assigned to investigate amphetamine syndicates. While the rest of the squad struggled to deal with heroin rings, unit two managed to arrest many of its top targets.
Their secret to success was a tactic known as controlled chemical deliveries. In short, the unit bought chemicals that could be used to make amphetamines then, using a network of informers, sold them to suspects to try to follow the trail to the labs and manufacturers.
The drug squad bought so much of the anti-cold medication Sudafed, a drug that can be used in amphetamine production, it became the manufacturer's biggest national client, and was eligible for discounts.
In his interim report into allegations of corruption in the drug squad tabled in State Parliament last week, Ombudsman Barry Perry found the tactic to be fatally flawed.
"The practice of supplying informers with chemicals without any significant controls may have resulted in the drug squad creating an elite group of manufacturers and suppliers who may not have been so involved had it not been for the opportunity provided by police."
Dr Perry said: "The scale and complexity of many of the transactions uncovered is beyond belief. The practice is one that has been examined in depth, and largely rejected as an absolute last resort by the majority of law enforcement agencies both in Australia and internationally."
Chief Commissioner Christine Nixon has now banned police from using controlled chemical deliveries and replaced the drug squad with the major drug investigation division.
According to Paton the system was out of control. "It was not used as the last resort. It was used as the first and only resort." Dr Perry estimated the amount of chemicals lost at 40 per cent to 80 per cent. Paton says it was more like 90 per cent.
"We would try and follow a plastic bag containing tablets or small bottles of liquid. It was ridiculous." He says many of the sales were done with no intention of arresting the suspects, and were simply fishing expeditions.
"They were non-evidentiary sales, or intelligence-gathering exercises. It was a joke. We just kept losing the shit."
Paton says 1000 boxes of Sudafed disappeared from inside the drug squad office in St Kilda Road. In October 1999, he says, he sold one kilogram of pseudoephedrine to an informer for $10,000, then left the cash in a padlocked kitbag inside a squad locker.
When he returned from leave weeks later, he says, the two padlocks were cut and the money missing. It was never reported.
Under the controlled chemical delivery scheme police were supposed to fill out paperwork and have their requests authorised by senior police before any drugs could be purchased. But Paton says the drug squad stockpiled chemicals for use on authorised and unauthorised jobs.
He also says that informers were rewarded with free chemicals. But the real profiteers were the police department. Buying at wholesale and selling at blackmarket prices meant the drug squad made money on nearly every deal. According to Dr Perry, the drug squad chemical purchase account stood at $267,137 in August 2001.
According to Paton, some of the profits from the scheme had already been spent.
"It was diverted for heroin buys because money for undercover jobs had been cut." Senior police say that some of the undercover budget had been used by the crime department to buy computers.
"They actively encouraged the chemical diversion policy because it helped fund other areas in the drug squad," according to Paton.
According to a confidential interim Ceja report corruption claims against the former drug squad are worse than first thought.
Detectives from the taskforce are looking at allegations that some police have helped themselves to suspects' property in their own version of asset seizure, grabbing pornographic material, wines, mobile phones, casino chips and cash.
Taskforce investigators have also been told that a disturbing number of young police are abusing drugs. A police source told The Age that in one case a group of suburban detectives drinking in an upmarket hotel rang a constable at the local station who was a dealer. "He dropped some ecstasy around to the pub that night."
In December 2000 a former detective working at the Sigma chemical company raised concerns about the amount of chemicals bought by the drug squad. Paton says he was already set to resign - "I decided that enough was enough." In July 2001 he was arrested and charged with drug trafficking.
Before being granted bail he spent 10 days in jail. It opened a window to his bleak future. Three days into his stint in maximum security, inmates began to yell out his wife's name and his unlisted home number. He knows he will have to be protected from mainstream prisoners when sentenced next week.
Last year he made a statement to the Ceja taskforce admitting he had accepted money and was corrupt.
It was a huge step. He is now hated by inmates and many of his former colleagues. Ceja investigators have already given evidence that Paton was threatened, including having bullets sent to his home.
With his guilty plea Paton will receive a discount on his sentence. But he still has his doubts.
"Sometimes I think it would have been better to shut up and just do the time. At least I wouldn't have to look over my shoulder for the rest of my life and worry about my wife and kids."
Surprisingly, Paton would still like to work for the police force he betrayed.
"I want to talk to young police after they have been in the job for a year. I want to tell them of the consequences.
"I have had to remortgage my home to pay legal bills. I have put my wife and children at risk. I have lost my job, my future and my respect. It nearly cost me my marriage. I couldn't see what I was doing was wrong.
"We were locking up crooks. You just forget where the line is."
Full article quoted from:
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/06/12/1055220704159.html
