The home of the Independent Commission Against Corruption is a squarish, concrete and steel bunker in Redfern, bristling with video-cameras and dark tinted glass. ICAC is not, however, a mini FBI, nor is its Commissioner Ian Temby a mini J. Edgar Hoover. If anyone in New South Wales deserves that dubious title, it is Ron Woodham, the prisons boss Temby was assigned to investigate.

The informers inquiry brought one group of investigators up against another, and just how much was achieved had a lot to do with the perceived power relationship between the two. It was to be a real test of ICAC to see how it would deal with allegations of corruption against senior prison and law enforcement officers; but in the end ICAC took the easy way out. The hard issues were sidestepped: Ian Temby preferred bureaucratic reform to pursuit of corruption.

The question of an inquiry into prisoner informers was referred to ICAC in early 1991, after public scandal over the rewards given to prisoners for their evidence. In particular, an emotional debate was raised over the sentence discount given by the Court of Criminal Appeal to convicted rapist turned prosecution witness Fred Many. Some of Many's evidence had been discredited in a separate Court of Criminal Appeal judgement. Ray Denning and the rewards given to him, were also subject to much debate, particularly after my trial. A number of reports about informers appeared throughout 1989-90, culminating in Sharon Davis' ABC documentary on informers and the role of Ron Woodham's Internal Investigation Unit.

In April 1991 Ian Temby announced that ICAC would investigate:

The period looked at would cover January 1985 to April 1991, and Temby added that the inquiry:

The Commission announced that it would deal with the inquiry in about ten "segments", representing prosecutions involving informers. My case involving Ray Denning and several other prisoner informers was to be one of those segments. However if my matter was to be heard publicly, the ICAC Act required that there be no outstanding criminal prosecutions. Earlier in the year I'd started a private prosecution against Denning, on a charge of attempting to pervert the course of justice; I withdrew this charge so that the ICAC inquiry into the use of informers in my case could proceed publicly.

Ian Temby is a former federal Director of Public Prosecutions who came to the informer inquiry with full sympathy for the police and prosecution reliance on informers. He had himself organised indemnities for prosecution witnesses: withdrawing criminal charges in return for their agreeing to incriminate others in court. He is also a politically sensitive lawyer, who deftly deflected Liberal Party expectations that, on its creation and on his appointment in 1988, ICAC would use its new powers to pursue corruption allegations against the Liberals' Labor Party opponents. Temby was too astute to be crudely used in that way.

Nevertheless, he has always been conscious of the wider implications of his decisions. At the time of the controversial prosecution of the late Justice Lionel Murphy, and while many in the mass media and amongst conservative politicians were baying for Murphy's blood, Temby as Director of Public Prosecutions espoused a new prosecutorial theory:

The case against Lionel Murphy was extremely weak, but the decision was made, under considerable political pressure, to prosecute him.

Some years later on, in different circumstances, Temby adopted what could be seen to be an opposite view about prosecuting public office-holders. A case was referred to ICAC involving accusations that several senior police had "loaded up" a suspect, Frank Hakim, with heroin. The evidence included circumstantial evidence and direct evidence of other police, but the distinct feature of this case was that the accused police were all identified with the so-called "White Knights" of the NSW police, those intent on prosecuting police corruption. I should add here that the police anti-corruption drive of the mid-1980s never seems to have included an attack on police who load-up and verbal suspects; that apparently was not considered "corruption". Those accused included several police who had prosecuted other police, including the current NSW Police Commissioner Tony Lauer.

In his 1989 report into the Hakim case Ian Temby devoted a section to the criteria used to assess the evidence against Lauer and the others. He concluded that he had to find facts proven on the "balance of probabilities", but that this phrase may have different meanings in different circumstances:

Quoting a High Court judgement he said the issues which may affect a decision as to whether a matter has been proven to the required standard may include:

No doubt it could be considered a grave circumstance that the reputations of a group of senior police might be affected by serious criminal charges. Temby went on to find that, despite the fact that the evidence of one of the witnesses, a former police Inspector, was "impressive", there was insufficient evidence to justify prosecution of any of the accused police.

Was this decision affected by Temby's concern for the standing of the so-called "White Knights"? An onlooker could be forgiven for thinking that he had lowered the prosecution's high jump bar for Lionel Murphy, but raised it for Tony Lauer.

At the hearings Ian Temby was urbane and accommodating, allowing me to question witnesses, in most cases, without hindrance. As it happened, this also gave him an opportunity to hear of a number of issues that were not raised by other parties.

Not that the other parties asked many questions. It was striking to me that there were six to eight barristers in the Commission, for the two weeks I was there, yet almost all questions asked were by Counsel Assisting the Commission and myself. No doubt the other barristers were well paid; but their work seemed to be mainly a "watching brief" for their clients: the police, the police attached to the Internal Investigation Unit, and the Department of Corrective Services. Few other parties seemed interested in or able to participate in the proceedings. If this was an adversarial encounter and Ian Temby was the umpire, then the questions to be resolved would be largely disputes between police and prison officers. At times that's exactly how it seemed. One of the major debates at the end revolved around the less than exciting idea of starting a central register of informants; would it be controlled by the Director of Public Prosecutions or the Department of Corrective Services?

However it was an inquiry, and Temby saw himself as an inquirer, not an umpire. On some occasions, though, he seemed almost embarrassed by the complacency of the regular lawyers, feeling obliged to himself offer an opposite view, perhaps as a reminder to himself of the virtual absence of defendants from the discussions.

It became clear early on that Temby and the Commission's lawyers had decided to use the inquiry as a means of suggesting changes to procedures and perhaps laws, and not as an opportunity to "get scalps". The Commission was to look for "patterns" of conduct, and not to overly pursue particular corrupt acts. While there was some pressing of questions on Woodham and police such as Tees, the Commission's approach was explicitly non-threatening to those who had been publicly accused of corruption, as Temby reassuringly told Tees:

Although Denning was one of the main witnesses in my segment of the inquiry, the Commission chose to ignore the substance of what he was saying and look primarily at the evidence of inducements and rewards. By this approach they understandably hoped to avoid re-litigating the issues in each of the trials. However in my case I was concerned not only with the rewards that had been given to Denning, but the fact that police had conspired with him to help construct his false evidence. This necessarily involved an assessment of the evidence of both Denning and Tees. This raised a conflict in the Commission:

Later on, to Bob Greenhill, barrister for the Police Commissioner, Temby reaffirmed his attitude that issues of such substance, and therefore also of fabrication, would not be delved into:

It would have been no interference to accept the Court of Criminal Appeal's judgement on Denning's story as a benchmark, then proceed to look at the substantial dealings between Tees and Denning. However Temby preferred to remain on safer ground. When looking at the miscalculation of Denning's sentence, which put his date of release three years early, the Commission preferred to view this as an unintentional blunder, and look for general and technical solutions. Temby said:

In the habit of most judges, Temby was deferential to senior police and accepted many police and Corrective Services objections to questions that could be said to go beyond the narrowest interpretation of the inquiry's terms of reference. An exchange about the Commission's aims followed objection to a question I asked of Tees, where NSW police records noted the fabrication of evidence by certain Commonwealth Police in the original Hilton bombing investigation:

This was objected to and the following discussion ensued:

One matter clearly within the terms of reference was the role of the prosecutor at my trial, Mark Tedeschi. However he was never called as a witness. Tedeschi was a public official who had made a number of decisions about the use of informers in my case, in particular the presentation of Denning's evidence to my jury and the choice as to which informers to call at my trial: because there were more candidates than Denning. At least five other prisoners had made statements, between my committal hearings and my trial, also claiming I'd "confessed" to them in prison about ten years earlier. These prisoners were Stephen Robinson, Darryl Cook, Peter Priest, David Stevens and Desmond Applebee. The first four had coordinated their verbal of me around an alleged conflict with Alex Burmistriw, the brother of the police constable killed in the Hilton explosion, and who in the early 1980s was himself serving a prison sentence.

The rash of witnesses with "crises of conscience" in this case was staggering. None would admit they were benefiting at all from their "information"; they were simply public spirited, reformed individuals. Tedeschi had earlier considered calling some of these other prisoner witnesses, in preference to Denning. In April 1990 he wrote:

What had happened between April and August, when my trial began, to determine that Denning would be called but the others would not? ICAC was very interested in this question, and Counsel Assisting the Commission asked the main police in the case, Tees and Godden, how this distinction was made. Tees was asked these questions:

Then Godden was pursued on the same matter:

Godden, who had collected the statements of four of these five prisoners, was trying to avoid his responsibility in the matter, but he was right. The matter having been opened up with the police by ICAC, they should have called Tedeschi. I wrote to the Commission asking that Tedeschi be called over this and several other matters, adding:

However ICAC responded a week later that Tedeschi would not be called, confirming my suspicions of their bias.

There was also the question of whether police or the prosecution knew of Denning's involvement in a major heroin importation conspiracy in 1986, which I detail below. Denning's role was described in both Federal Police and Federal DPP documents. Tees was questioned closely about this and denied having any knowledge of the incident. But despite no prosecuting lawyer having been called, Counsel Assisting in their final submission concluded that Tedeschi was misled on the issue:

Yet Tedeschi had not even been called to be asked if he'd heard of this information. Clearly there were to be no problems for lawyers in this inquiry.

It was an irony, then, that Temby could later rhetorically ask a seminar on 'truth in business and the professions', "why does the law do so little to punish liars?", noting in particular that standards of honesty were not enforced as severely on lawyers as on professional and business people.

Despite the limited approach of ICAC to its terms of reference, a great deal of information about police dealings with Denning and the other prisoner informers did emerge. This included information about applications for the Hilton bomb reward, which had been denied under an earlier Freedom of Information request I'd made, and some information about Denning's indemnities from prosecution, which had been suppressed when called for on subpoena, at my trial.

In the earlier chapter "Denning Goes on the Dog" I referred to some material that first emerged in the ICAC hearings: the role of Magistrate Kevin Waller in advising Tees, confirmation of the police view that Denning was of great use as a propaganda tool against the Prisoners Action Group, and details of how Denning's indemnities in Queensland were obtained. Other evidence about Denning that emerged at ICAC related to the way in which two judges sentencing him in 1989 and 1991 were misled, his involvement in the 1986 Hong Kong heroin import conspiracy, his alleged rehabilitation, and his nearly-successful attempt to secure the quarter million dollar Hilton bomb reward.

Not that much of this was reported in the mass media, which preferred the personal clash between myself and Denning. Headlines such as "Denning challenges Anderson to a lie test" indicated stories which said little about the information that emerged in the hearings. And when Tees responded to one of my questions by accusing me of helping an escapee leave the country, the headline "Anderson helped escapee, ICAC told", once again said little about what emerged in the day's proceedings. Only when two issues came to a sensational head did the media coverage change. Within twenty-four hours Denning's planned release was put back three years and he and his closest friend Dot Bach, also a police informer, were exposed for their 1986 plan to import heroin from Hong Kong.

Throughout the ICAC hearings both Denning and Tees denied resolutely that Denning had received any benefits for his informing. Evidence emerged, however, to show that there were at least seven substantial benefits. First Denning was transferred rapidly to New South Wales from Victoria, and thus escaped the effect of his sentence there. Then he was given highly favourable treatment, based on misleading information, at his sentencing for a 1988 escape. Third and importantly, he secured indemnities from prosecution for two armed robberies in Queensland. He was then paid around $800 by police for his expenses whilst in prison, and also gained a unanimous recommendation from the police rewards committee that he be paid the full quarter of a million dollars Hilton bomb reward. Sixth he was given special access to the media to put his case (for the reward, amongst other things) after my trial. And finally, when he was re-sentenced over his 1976 "life" sentence in 1991, the judge there, Justice James Wood, was given highly misleading information about his existing sentences and his alleged rehabilitation.

Two gross errors were made in the calculation of the effect of Denning's multiple sentences, and these errors appeared in information provided to two court hearings in July 1989 and April 1991 where Denning was sentenced and resentenced. Denning's illegal and premature release was averted at the last moment only by members of the public, the media and the parliament bringing the errors to the notice of the Department and the Minister.

Firstly Denning's sentence for his 1988 escape was made cumulative to a ten year sentence imposed in 1983, rather than to his total aggregate sentence of 21.5 years, which dated back to 1973. This led to an incorrect and ineffectual sentencing for his 1988 escape by Judge Shillington in July 1989. The error was corrected by the Judge after a November 1991 motion of notice by the Director of Public Prosecutions, based on an affidavit by Neil Guy of Corrective Service's Prisoner Index. This motion, however, was only made after strong public pressure in the week before Denning's planned release and as the ICAC hearings were proceeding.

Secondly, Denning was awarded a range of remissions up to July 1988 to which he was not entitled, as he had escaped and by Section 67 of the Prisons Act had lost all remissions up to the time of his escape. This erroneous information was passed on to Justice Wood in April 1991, leading him into error in resentencing Denning on the life term imposed in 1976. Wood set a parole date for Denning's life sentence which was well before the effective parole date for his fixed term sentences.

Were these errors mistakes or additional and illegal rewards? The Corrective Services explanation was that there had been a series of coincidental errors. The initial calculation had been done by Neil Guy in early 1989, and as Denning, although recaptured, had not yet been convicted of the 1988 escape, the inclusion of the 1983-88 remissions was at this stage "theoretically" correct. No proper explanation was given as to why the 20 July 1989 calculation of an aggregate sentence by a Mr Ellich of Prisoner Classification, noting Denning's disentitlement to remissions and giving a release date in 1994 prior to the 1988 escape sentence, was not on Denning's file and was ignored at the resentencing before Justice Wood.

The explanation for the second error was that Corrective Services clerk Karen Beresford had to prepare the advice at a few hours notice. The suggestion was that her hastily prepared document was all that Corrective Services, their boards and the Director of Public Prosecutions had available to check Denning's existing determinate sentences. No-one from the DPP was called on this matter, even though there was the separate July 1989 sentence advice, addressed to the Solicitor for Public Prosecutions.

The Commission appeared unwilling to investigate this matter, and appeared to accept the department's tortuous explanation. On the evidence, though, there were a number of reasons why this explanation can't be accepted.

Firstly, the evidence of Karen Beresford suggests that Neil Guy had taken a more recent look at Denning's calculations, as she found the paperwork on his desk in April 1991. Guy claims not to have touched the calculations since 1989. Secondly, Neil Guy was at that time working directly under Ron Woodham, and he knew that Woodham had been a character witness for Denning. Not only that, Denning had attracted a lot of publicity in the past, so there was every reason for special care in this case. Thirdly, and even more significantly, Neil Guy, while working under Ron Woodham, was asked on three occasions in 1991 to check Denning's sentence calculations. He was asked by the Serious Offenders Review Board secretary Graham Egan in mid-1991, he was again asked by the secretary of the Offenders Review Board (the new parole board, which has a role once "life" sentence prisoners are given a parole period) Janice Hutchinson, and also by Robert Brook of CEFTA in November. On each occasion he reported that the calculations were correct. Neil Guy replied to Robert Brook in a letter of 14 November 1991, just days before Denning was due to be released:

Only after the Minister for Corrective Services requested a review were the errors admitted.

Neil Guy presented a list of five other prisoners who had been wrongly released over the past ten years, to suggest that mistakes do occur, but despite looking he could find no cases of prisoners who had been released through extra remissions.

Ironically the only other similar error brought to the Commission's notice was one of the errors made in the sentencing of Denning himself, back in 1983. Judge Alf Goran apparently made the same error as Judge Shillington, in not making his escape sentence cumulative to his existing sentences.

The consequence of Denning's plea bargains in 1983 and 1989, then, was astonishing. He did not have one day added to his sentence for any of his 1980-81 and 1988 robberies and attempted robberies, his misprision of a felony, his firearms offences and his two escapes. Only the last minute adjustment of his 1988 escape sentence, in November 1991, broke that remarkable record.

The issue that attracted most attention to and embarrassment for Denning's friends Dot and John Bach at the Commission was exposure of their statements to Joint Drug Task Force police in 1986, in which they admitted that they'd gone to Hong Kong at Denning's instigation to import a substantial quantity of heroin.

Dot, John and one of their sons, when arrested in Hong Kong in early July 1986, signed statements admitting their own involvement and implicating Denning and several others. It was a great irony that Denning, who lost all his friends as a result of informing on or verballing them, discovered that his one friend left in the world, Dot, had five years earlier informed on him. It seems that Denning didn't know this before the ICAC hearings.

It is clear from the statements and other police documents at ICAC that the Bachs were subsequently set up as witnesses against Denning over the heroin conspiracy. Although their statements concerned their own trip to Hong Kong, they also implicated several NSW prisoners and people in Hong Kong; but their evidence would have been most damaging to Denning. They said Denning had given them written instructions over the contacts they had to make and the heroin they had to bring back. They were in financial trouble at the time and, according to their son's statement, they planned to either get a large sum of money for the importation or some of the heroin to sell themselves.

At ICAC, Dot and John were forced to admit signing the statements, but claimed they were the result of threats and intimidation whilst they were in Hong Kong. This didn't explain why they both signed similar "induced" statements two months later, back in Sydney. Not only was Ms Bach not under pressure back in Sydney, she spoke highly of one of the Federal Police officers she dealt with, Lawrie Gray, saying he was "a very nice fellow".

Following a phone conversation with Denning, who was the first witness questioned about this business in ICAC, the Bachs supported his phony story which claimed the plot was to import "gold" and not heroin. Dot Bach admitted that Denning had told her over the phone to say the business was about "gold", although she claims this was the truth and that Denning added "tell the truth". She suggested that if the word "heroin" were replaced with "gold" in their statements, the statements could be close to the truth; but she also claimed she didn't read her statements before she signed them.

The "gold" story didn't fit the detail of their statements at all. The three Bachs spoke of codes to meet their secretive heroin suppliers, and John told of practising with "icing sugar" and a body stocking, for the importation. John told police:

John also said Denning had spoken to another prisoner and then told the Bachs: "if you bring back an additional pound he would take it off us for $100,000" - more than ten times the value of gold but close to the wholesale value of heroin. In her statement of 24 September 1986, back in Sydney, Dot said the following:

Dot Bach then had the following exchange with Counsel for ICAC, Stephen Rushton:

Rushton correctly assessed that Dot Bach's lies were designed to cover her acute embarrassment in exposure of the matter, and of her informing on Denning. She was in no danger of being charged, and she would have known this. A formal advice from a Federal DPP officer, from early 1988, discloses that serious consideration was given to using the Bachs as indemnified witnesses against Denning and another man in Hong Kong, but that this idea was rejected. It was considered that the Bachs would have been uncorroborated accomplices, that their credibility was suspect and that as their involvement was no less than Denning's, it was against policy to grant them indemnities.

What is not so clear is why the Bachs themselves were not prosecuted in 1986. The reason given in 1988 was basically that they had been strung along as if they would be witnesses against Denning and, as they had not been prosecuted earlier, they would have had a "reasonable expectation" this would not occur. There was thus a fair chance the prosecution might be "stayed" by the courts. None of this explains the decision not to prosecute back in 1986, and we can only assume that the Federal Police valued the Bachs more as informants than as defendants. This apparently saved them.

The same DPP advice that recommended against import charges also recommended John Bach be charged over 34 marijuana plants found at the Bachs property at Wilton, while they were in custody in Hong Kong. This would have been a NSW police matter. However, no charges were ever laid, no explanation was given for this, and we can only assume that, once again, the Bachs' status as informers saved them. It was certainly a leniency not displayed to other growers of marijuana. When John Bach came to give evidence at ICAC he was with the NSW Police as a civilian employee.

Denning's "rehabilitation"

Denning's claims to have changed from being "100% against authority" to "100% for authority", as simplistic and improbable as they appear, seem to have been very effective with those in a position to help. Dot Bach and her husband John, in a letter of May 1984 to the Release on License Board attributed their relationship to Denning as the:

And there may well have been some truth in this.

Retired Judge Torrington, of the Serious Offenders Review Board, in a report to Justice Wood also pointed to Denning's turning away from the campaign against "police verbals" and from his association with "persons antagonistic to law enforcement". Torrington wrote:

Repeating Denning's own self-serving claim, it was his disillusionment with the alleged attitudes of fellow escapee Russell Cox that "put Denning on his own road to Damascus", Torrington naively reported.

Justice Wood adopted the argument put forward by Tees, which was that Denning had been on the slow boat to rehabilitation since his guilty plea in 1983. Wood spoke of:

and while he warned that any re-offending could lead Denning "to spend the remainder of his years in the prison system", as he set a "life" parole period, Wood gave great credence to the notion of rehabilitation through assistance to the authorities, and mentioned Denning's bizarre suggestion of making videos to be an example of 'reform' to young people:

In light of what has emerged since, these videos might have the capacity to be truly Shakespearian in proportions: an example of someone who betrays every friend he ever had, including by perjury against a former friend, leaving only one friend, whom he later discovers betrayed him several years earlier, just as his best-planned escape is collapsing.

What was the reality? Denning had become a drug taker in the 1980s, had grown a bit older and had lost his previous will to be a rebel. There was nothing inherently evil in being a rebel or prison activist, just as there was nothing inherently good in being a friend of Dot Bach and enormously pro-authority. A very respectable argument can be made to the opposite effect. But if "rehabilitation" was the question, it was his criminal and other selfish behaviour that should have been at issue, not his political view or allegiances. By this measure, a very different picture can be painted, from 1983 onwards.

That picture is this. He was involved in a 1986 conspiracy with the Bachs to import heroin from Hong Kong; Ron Woodham knew of this, but claims he said nothing to Aarne Tees, who pleaded ignorance. Then Denning breached the trust of minimum security in 1988, escaped, got hold of illegal weapons, committed a bank robbery and planned more. He escaped prosecution for his 1988 robbery and an earlier 1981 robbery in Queensland, and blamed his co-accused (a man ten years younger than him) for planning the escape, for taking most of the money and for having them recaptured in Melbourne. He then told on all the people who had even slightly helped him as an escapee and, with the help of Tees, beefed up his stories against some of them in successive interviews, to allow possible 'aiding escapee' charges. Although he says the young woman who helped him in his 1988 escape had nothing to do with the Queensland robbery, he refused to give evidence to help her and she was subsequently convicted and jailed for the armed robbery he committed. He then gave perjured evidence against me, a former friend, in the Hilton case, in an attempt to secure his own early release and gain a quarter million dollar reward. His credibility as a witness was judged by the Court of Criminal Appeal as worthless.

Was this the example of rehabilitation Justice Wood wanted for young people? Apparently all the robberies, escapes, drug importations and perjuries in the world count for nothing if one is "pro-authority" and so "on the road to Damascus".

Both Denning and Tees were defensive about the discussions they'd had regarding reward money. Denning said a $100,000 reward for the a Melbourne murder was discussed in Victoria "from the beginning"; but that while he was aware of the Hilton reward, he didn't discuss this one with Tees "from the beginning". However he said that Tees did tell him at an early stage:

This early signal from Tees may be significant as an inducement for him to fabricate evidence, especially as Denning didn't reveal his Hilton bomb story for another two months. Denning at first denied but later agreed that in giving information he was motivated by reward money.

Tees told the Commission he didn't speak to Denning or his solicitors before making what he agreed was a "very very strong recommendation" for Denning to receive the full $250,000 reward. He claims not to remember when he first discussed the Hilton reward with Denning, but believes it was first mentioned:

Somehow, though, Tees was apparently able to judge Denning's early motivation regarding the reward. He wrote in his seven page, 15 January 1991 report to Commander Brian Harding, which was endorsed and forwarded to the Reward Evaluation Committee:

Tees also stressed the importance of Denning's information and evidence in this way:

After my trial the chronology of reward events seems to have proceeded as follows. Denning saw a television crew in the Special Purposes Prison immediately after my conviction in late October 1990 and told them he intended to apply for the reward. His solicitors then lodged a 28 November 1990 application with the Reward Evaluation Committee and a strongly argued recommendation by Tees dated 15 January 1991 followed shortly after. Apparently a rival claim for the reward from Richard Seary, the Special Branch informer in the 1978 Yagoona case, was also considered and rejected, by both Tees and the Reward Committee.

A request by NSW Police Commissioner Tony Lauer on 6 May 1991 for further information on the benefits received by Denning, and on the quantum of the reward, was responded to by Tees in a further strongly argued 4 page report of 12 May. In this report Tees lashed out at an alleged "misinformation campaign" and "the propaganda of Anderson's supporters, many of whom are convicted criminals". Tees used this report to suggest that I was guilty of the Yagoona matter, for which I had been pardoned, that Denning had served longer than most other prisoners for his life sentence and that the $250,000 reward was entirely appropriate. He suggested that an apparently unhelpful attitude by the DPP at Denning's resentencing the previous month:

He also claimed that Justice Wood:

This however was contrary to Justice Wood's judgement, which did indeed incorporate such a reward:

Commissioner Lauer refused an offer by Tees to consult with him and requested details of the witness protection to be provided to Denning. Lauer then wrote to Federal Police Commissioner Peter McAulay on 16 May, labelling as "inappropriate" the committee's recommendation - that the full $250,000 be awarded - and noting the committee's further recommendation that no payments should be made until Anderson had "exhausted all avenues of appeal".

From a final report by Lauer of 22 June it appears that McAulay agreed the committee's recommendation was inappropriate, but in any case, noting the Court of Criminal Appeal's 6 June judgement, Lauer concluded that "the question of payment of a reward does not now arise".

Denning did not want to reveal the fact at first, but eventually agreed that he'd planned to share the reward with Dot Bach; Dot Bach said she knew of this. In the end, though, the plan was no more successful than their Hong Kong "gold" venture. However had the Court of Criminal Appeal not overturned my conviction and written off Denning's evidence, it seems likely that with Tees' assistance he may well have earned a reduced reward payment, perhaps of $100,000.

A queue of verballers

After Denning gave his evidence at my committal hearings, a number of others wanted to join in. In early 1990 I was served with the statements of five other prisoner verballers, and it seems there may have been one or two others ready to join in, too. On the other hand, a number of prisoners, some of them informers themselves, also approached me or my lawyers to offer information. I had no direct dealings with them, as a protection against setting myself up for further verbals. I referred any person who came to me to my solicitor.

When the ICAC hearings began, then, there were statements from several prisoners concerning the prisoners who'd made statements against me. Yet although the prisoners who'd made statements for the prosecution were called, ICAC didn't call any of those who'd made statements for me. The "reserve" prosecution witnesses were simply paraded before ICAC, asked if they'd received any rewards, and then sent back. Their stories were not properly investigated, but then, by this time even the police had disowned them. Two of them, Darryl Cook and Stepehen Robinson, had been giving evidence in murder cases for years, saying prisoners had "confessed" to them, even when they were known as informers. Darryl Cook had even sent out a tape from Goulburn Gaol in 1989 in which he confessed to being a "recruited" perjurer; he later disowned this and claimed he was "forced" to make it.

Four of the five told a story which had me, in effect, apologising to Alex Burmistriw, the jailed brother of one of the bombing victims. Peter Priest, Stephen Robinson, Darryl Cook and David Stevens made statements saying they were approached by me at Parramatta Gaol and that I said:

There was then a ridiculous story that I'd tried to pay Alex some money to placate him, after he'd attacked me. Although the story was in some respects well organised, in that four informers were attempting to confirm each other's story, it had problems from the beginning. Priest, who made the first statement, said this occurred in July-August 1979; but I was never at Parramatta Gaol in 1979. I first arrived there in November 1980. Robinson, whose statement came two weeks later and was the first witnessed by Bob Godden (who knew of my gaol movements through the Denning investigation), made it sometime in 1980. The others then made the date 1980 or 1981.

The next problem was that their entire story depended on the involvement of another person who was not an informer, or even at that stage a prisoner: Alex Burmistriw. Not that police hadn't been to see him. At ICAC Godden suggested that Burmistriw had simply not cooperated with police, not that he'd had anything contrary to say. To my lawyer he was also not very cooperative, but managed to say this much:

These informers were people who had been criticised for perjury in previous cases. Darryl Cook had admitted lying on oath in the prosecution of two prisoners over the murder of prisoner Noel Holden. In a prosecution on drug charges against prison officers at Cessnock, the magistrate had said of Cook:

In the middle of the Holden trial, Cook, Robinson and another informer named Walsh had escaped from the Sydney Police Centre, causing the trial to be aborted. In a later retrial where they again gave evidence, the two men charged were acquitted.

There has been then, a history of calling such witnesses even after they've been utterly discredited. But perhaps the fatal blow, so far as their use in my case was concerned, was a 12 May report from the Special Purposes Prison. This report revealed that Cook and Robinson had been sending coded messages between themselves and that this code had been discovered by prison officers. The messages were mainly about drugs, but one of them from Robinson to Cook read:

Tees told the Commission that, in any case, he didn't believe Cook and Robinson. Prosecutor Tedeschi was not called to explain why he changed his mind about these four.

The fifth prisoner-verballer was a man called Desmond Applebee, who had a separate story. He simply made a statement saying "he (Anderson) said he did not want to kill the people that were killed." Applebee had been an informer in other cases and was facing serious charges at the time he made his statement. He also got his dates wrong, placing his story in the Remand Centre in December 1978. At that time I was in the prison hospital, on a hunger strike. I can't recall ever having seen Applebee before in my life.

One final witness called was long time informer Ernie Wade. He'd made a statement to my solicitor, saying that Tees and Woodham had attempted to recruit him to verbal me, but he'd resisted the offer. My lawyers had him sign an affidavit which was filed in the Court of Criminal Appeal, but we didn't call him, because we didn't trust him. We knew he'd lied before, in other cases. By the time the ICAC hearings started Wade had changed his story, and was saying that there was a conspiracy of prisoners placing pressure on him to make such statements. These were prisoners, though thankfully not including me, who had no contact with him but who threatened his homosexual lover in another jail. As absurd as this sounds, a major police task force named "Dallas" was launched into Wade's accusations. Ron Woodham said he had helped initiate the task force, which was to investigate:

This task force ran in parallel to the ICAC hearings. It attempted to get copies of statements Wade had given to my solicitor and, when we refused, served a search warrant on the Legal Aid Commission, which held the statements. It was the first time solicitors there could remember being served with a search warrant, as their dealings with clients and witnesses are usually protected by legal professional privilege. However in the case of evidence of a serious crime, there is an exception to that privilege, and this is what the police hoped to exploit. We challenged the search warrant in court and "Dallas" lost, the matter being decided mainly on Wade's credibility. Justice Allen's comments in this case, though, could apply to many other prisoner verballers, and had echoes of the earlier claims made about Denning:

All the above statements except the first, by Peter Priest, had been taken by Robert Godden, the detective from the Yagoona case. I pointed out to Godden that, after Priest had got his dates wrong, the other dates had all "improved". He said he'd not noticed this before, but admitted that he had access to details of my prison whereabouts, through his involvement in the investigation of Denning's story. Perhaps to avoid the worse inference that he'd fed his witnesses information, he admitted that he was negligent in not checking the dates of their accounts. However this claim to be careless does not sit easily with his highly motivated involvement in my prosecution. He was the one detective centrally involved in both the Yagoona and the Hilton cases. He admitted that he resented the 1985 pardons over the Yagoona case issued to Paul Alister, Ross Dunn and myself, and that he also resented the efforts made by me to have his "bravery award" for the Yagoona arrests withdrawn. I wonder if some of his witnesses might have been called, had a junior prison officer not caught them confessing their lies?

As it had become pretty clear that the use of prisoner informers had become a substitute for police verbal, I also asked Godden for his response to the admissions of his old armed hold-up squad partner, Roger Rogerson, that verbals were regular practice. Tees had tried to distance himself from Rogerson, but Godden had worked with him in many cases. Once again there was an objection to my line of questioning, this time from Commissioner Temby, who seemed to be uncomfortable with this line of inquiry:

I read out to Godden Rogerson's comments, including the following:

I asked Godden what he thought of this and the following exchange occurred:

To complete the matter I asked the following:

Godden was the senior officer who took these prisoners'' statements, but he says he never noticed the discrepancy between the date of the first statement (the only one he didn't take) and the others, which fell into line, date-wise. It was after this that he admitted he may have been negligent.

I prepared a lengthy written submission for ICAC, but didn't attend the final hearings. The main proposals, in the final days, seemed to revolve around the establishing of a central register of informants which, it was supposed, would provide some efficiency for the prosecution and some disclosure for the defence. Something for everyone. A debate centred around whether this register would be controlled by the Police or by Corrective Services. There was also discussion of whether there should be recommendations about the admissibility of evidence by prisoner informers.

An anomaly had opened up in the law since McKinney's case in 1991, which established a rule of practice that a warning should be given to a jury in the cas of uncorroborated police evidence of "confessions". This was the strongest High Court recognition to date of the danger of police verbal. However there was no rule as to verbal by prisoner informers. No doubt the High Court will have to address this anomaly soon. In my opinion, though, it is meaningless to keep giving juries a series of "warnings" about categories of evidence. Categorically tainted evidence, such as that of prison "confessions" given by prisoners for the prosecution, should simply be inadmissible. All such stories are tainted by the inducements and hoped for rewards. Prisoners are not free agents in such matters.

In ICAC there was some discussion about what recommendations to make in this regard. In any event, while Commissioner Temby was writing his report some Labor Members of Parliament were, preparing a draft amendment to the Crimes Act, which would place controls over this category of evidence. Even some months prior to the ICAC hearings, Shadow Attorney General Paul Whelan had announced a policy of implementing controls. Whelan criticised the evidence for reward system and commented:

What did the ICAC inquiry achieve? A greater recognition of the problem, no doubt. Prior to the inquiry, Attorney General John Dowd had defended the reward system, saying that it was often the only way to get information and that "the crown can't be too fussy about who their witnesses are". It seems unlikely that this head-in-the-sand attitude will retain any credibility. However ICAC having avoided the hard issues and having opted for the path of bureaucratic reform, real controls over the use of prisoner informers will have to come through parliament.

In the middle of the ICAC hearings Ian Temby made the remarkable comment that New South Wales could now be said to be "the moral leader" in Australia, due to its Freedom of Information legislation, better parliamentary accountability procedures and of course the good work of his organisation, ICAC. He commented:

Apparently he didn't regard the inquiry he was sitting on as involving any substantial scandal. This was a pretty tactless and tasteless thing for him to say, at that time. It would be far more realistic to conclude, like Mark Twain, that reports of the death of corruption in New South Wales have been greatly exaggerated.