Lawyers, Lies and Money

By Howard Hilton

This is a wry but candid first-person account of the scandal surrounding the corruption of the NSW Minister for Corrective Services Rex Jackson. It is written by the then high-profile criminal defence lawyer who was jailed for his part in it. It winds through an intriguing slice of Sydney’s ‘colourful’ underworld at that time – half-arsed crims; some straight and some very bent coppers; dodgy policing practices; court tactics; informants now named; prison life and the kindness of fellow prisoners.
Behind all this there is an uneasy backdrop of paranoia-tinged menace – suspected conspiracies, reports of betrayals and executions, anonymous death threats. This dark account is nuanced by its unexpected humour and the gently passing story of his Jewish family, their feuds and oddities, and his parents’ brave move from grey post-war England to promised ‘Sunny Australia’. They were bolstered by the success of their eldest son and dismayed by his eventual downfall as a self-described ‘corruptible sod’.
This account is worrying, sad and drily comic.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris AU
• Release date: Jan 7, 2024
• ISBN: 9798369494615

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Copyright © 2024 by Howard Hilton.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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Rev. date: 01/03/2024

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For Kate and Sally

CONTENTS

Foreword

Chapter 1 From Visitor To Inmate

Chapter 2 England

Chapter 3 Leaving England

Chapter 4 Hello Australia

Chapter 5 Where It All Started

Chapter 6 Where It Really Started: Phillip Roach

Chapter 7 Petty Sessions

Chapter 8 The System

Chapter 9 The Riding Instructions

Chapter 10 John Foord QC And Brian Alexander, The Fixer

Chapter 11 Back To The UK

Chapter 12 Meeting Kate

Chapter 13 Meeting Frank Hakim

Chapter 14 99 Redfern

Chapter 15 The Broken Hill Three

Chapter 16 Not An Easy Case

Chapter 17 The BH3 Trial

Chapter 18 Keith Harris

Chapter 19 Fat Maurie

Chapter 20 Phone Tapping

Chapter 21 The Recorded Phone Calls

Chapter 22 BH3 Released

Chapter 23 The Inquiry

Chapter 24 Catastrophic News

Chapter 25 The Trial

Chapter 26 The Vinson Report

Chapter 27 Something From Left Field

Chapter 28 The Verdict

Chapter 29 Her Majesty’s Guests

Chapter 30 In The Belly Of The Beast

Chapter 31 A Funny, Funny World

Chapter 32 And So It Goes

Chapter 33 Settling In

Chapter 34 The Reception Committee

Chapter 35 Alex Tak Tak

Chapter 36 My Other Charge, Courtesy Of Caplan

Chapter 37 My Inside Job

Chapter 38 How It Goes

Chapter 39 A Welcome Visitor

Chapter 40 In Contact With The World Outside

Chapter 41 Daily Life

Chapter 42 First Bail Application

Chapter 43 Second Bail Application

Chapter 44 The Conviction Appeal

Chapter 45 Shimon

Chapter 46 The Note

Chapter 47 After My Release

Chapter 48 Judicial Discretion

When I woke, I found a note on

the floor of my cell -

‘You are dead you dog’

FOREWORD

T HE EVENTS IN this book occurred a long time ago, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Some things I recall well and others not so well. I have also relied on the memories of others and on some notes I made and diaries I fortunately kept in prison. These have been especially hel pful.

My recollection of my state of mind some 40 years ago must inevitably differ from my actual state of mind at those times. I have aged and have somewhat forgiven myself for those events and consequences.

1

From Visitor To Inmate

O THER THAN FOR some dramatic incidents, crimes and misdemeanours in which I was involved, my life has been a commonplace if rackety one and not worth the time spent writing about or reading - lost chances, failed ambitions, general fuck-ups - such as can be the usual run of things for many o f us.

At the heart of this memoir lies the Rex Jackson scandal, my going to prison, how it went and how I behaved. Maybe a bit of ‘how it was then’ will seep through, anyway I hope so.

I went to prison in November 1986. I had been convicted and jailed for conspiring with others to bribe the New South Wales Minister for Corrective Services, Rex Jackson. The essence of the charge was that I, as their solicitor, had arranged to have three of my clients - ‘The Broken Hill Three’ as they came to be known - released early from prison.

The Broken Hill Three were in fact released but not earlier than they were scheduled to have been and, despite an intensive investigation, were never put back in prison or charged with any offence relating to their release.

When I went to prison I was aged 43 and had been one of Sydney’s busiest criminal lawyer: a man much in demand, on top of his game and a significant player in that underworld milieu in which my clients existed. At that time, everyone wanted to know me and were happy to pay the appropriate price for my advice and assistance.

I enjoyed the money, the prestige and the satisfaction of being in the know as to ‘what really was going on in the city’. A successful jackass, a smart-arse. I look back at myself and wince at my arrogance and self-satisfaction.

The Jackson matter, even though it involved a Minister of the Crown, was low-grade knockabout stuff, but perfect entertainment for the proles. It provided a way for the government of the day to show that it was getting tough on crime without inconveniencing any of the real crooks.

Crime is a given in every society and has always been a problem. Our rulers have always used crime and criminals to distract the public, and to stop them noticing the bigger villainies that they and their mates commit.

At the time of my jailing, NSW was as good an example as you could find of unpunished and largely unexamined high-level corruption. I believe it still is. The public is cheered to see on the nightly news that our fine police have caught various baddies; they, the viewers, can thus relax at home. Comix in real time.

Career criminals commit offences because they need to make a comfortable living without the drudgery of work, and the dole is of course grossly inadequate to keep their lifestyle going. Crime is fun, until they are caught and dealt with. Too much crime, though, gives the impression that things are getting out of hand and the crooks are on top. That cannot be tolerated.

In the 1970s catching and convicting crooks was generally not a problem; there were plenty of crooks about and the evidence, if not available, was easily manufactured as required. This was done by the police and was just part of the culture of their job. No one really cared - the streets were being swept and the cats were catching the rats.

But the prisons were static assets that could not meet the need for more space to take in our rising population of prisoners. They were expensive to build, and it was not easy to find places to put them. The overcrowding, which had previously been inconvenient, now became intolerable and created problems in prison management. The living conditions for the prisoners, many of whom were not bad or violent people, were unacceptably degraded. When I was inside, two prisoners per cell was the norm and they were not large spaces.

Overcrowding had become so bad that Neville Wran’s Labor government passed some sensible laws to address this problem. Essentially the law said that, if you behaved yourself in prison, were of excellent behaviour and took steps to improve yourself, then your actual jail time could be reduced by 33%. This was obviously welcomed in prison, but it was also seen more broadly as a sensible way to encourage convicted people to behave and to change themselves.

When a person is sent to prison there are two periods of time specified: the head sentence and the non-parole period. The head sentence is simply the maximum time you must serve if there are no ameliorating circumstances. The Non Parole (NP) period is the minimum time, with ameliorating circumstances, you must serve before you can apply for and obtain release on parole.

The NP is the important one for the prisoner. If, for example, you were sentenced to nine years maximum with a non-parole of six years, as I was initially, you had to serve those six years before you might be released on parole. With the new law in place, I could have 33% of my six-year NP period remitted so that I would serve only four years. Still a bloody long time.

Your behaviour in prison is the main determinant when parole is being considered. If you don’t get into fights and you try and get some education, you will probably get parole at the new reduced rate.

It was this harmless and beneficial piece of legislation that led to my downfall. At the time the law was passed, it barely registered with me. I was focused on the justice system before the fact of imprisonment, not on the possibility of obtaining parole after the fact of prison.

I knew prison well, but only as a visitor. I was engaged in keeping my clients out of it, or in it for the shortest time possible. After each case, win or lose, the clients largely dropped out of my mind as there were soon others waiting to be processed.

In November 1986, the visitor became the inmate.

2

England

I WAS BORN IN North London in 1943 during the Second World War. Frank, my father, was sent by the Army to India. I was brought up in a Jewish household by Debbie, my mother, and my grandmother Jana, who lived with us, although Gran needed more looking after than I did. Then, single-parent families were the norm and mothers made do with little help from the State, which had other things to cons ider.

We were migrants and the children and grandchildren of migrants. Dad’s father came from Germany towards the end of the 19th Century bearing the family name ‘Herman’, which was swiftly and sensibly changed to Hilton in 1914 when the First World War started - no one, especially the kids, wanted to be known as ‘Herman the German’.

They lived in the East End of London which was pretty much a Jewish enclave and full of poor immigrants. Grandpa Hilton, a barber, was a mean-spirited man who insisted that both his elder son Robert and my father Frank leave school in their early teens and help him in the shop. Perhaps not so unreasonable given the circumstances and times.

So, at age 14 Dad started by sweeping up the hair on the floor and learned the barber’s trade from watching in the shop. But he always hated being a barber and disliked his father, whom he saw as a selfish and uncaring man for making him take up that trade.

Bobby, his elder brother, was a bright spark and managed to slip away to become a successful if eccentric property developer. But Dad stayed a barber and resented Bobby, who always seemed to intimidate and belittle him.

My mother’s people had the family name Bernstein and had come from Lithuania to escape the pogroms and forced military service there in the early part of the 20th Century. In London they ran a fish and chip shop. Both of my parents’ families were lucky to escape Europe when they did.

Our family lived in Edgeware, about 24 kilometres outside the centre of London on the Northern line. We were tenants in a large and comfortable detached double-storey house with a slate roof and bay windows. As a small child, I was entranced when in winter the air filled with whirling snowflakes that settled gently on the neighbouring roofs and gardens, smoothing out their angularities and making a strange silent world.

There was a rhododendron thicket at the front of the house, in which I used to stalk and be stalked by wild animals, and a side garden where hedgehogs would come out at night and drink milk from the cat’s saucer, and where we lit our bonfire and let off our fireworks on Guy Fawkes night. At the back, the land fell away steeply to a sunken garden where a brook, a tributary of the River Brent, flowed. In spring it became a torrent, inundating the back garden when the accumulated snow melted. In summer it was a couple of feet wide and a foot deep and there I used to liberate my goldfish.

I started at the local primary school and can recall its principal Mr Bird intoning morning prayers in the school hall. Once a week the undernourished children each had a large spoonful of malt from a big tin, all lining up to use the same spoon. I used to envy these ‘special kids’ their treat.

I once went with my mother on an outing to a café where, after much consideration, I ordered ‘sand wiches’ from the menu. I vividly recall the acute disappointment I felt when what arrived was just ordinary bread and spread. I had not previously seen the word and it had seemed exotic and to promise so much: ‘Sand Witches’. It was my first hint of the dichotomy between the word and the thing.

I was a voracious reader from a very early age. I would ask friends home from school and then sit reading while Mum had to entertain them. I have been a lifelong reader and a collector of books. When I walk into my library room and see the packed floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, I am transformed. Music also carries me effortlessly along.

The ‘11+’ examination loomed at the end of primary school, the most important test that a British schoolchild had to face. If you passed you went to a grammar school and were prepared for university and the professions. If you failed, as I did, you were sent to a secondary modern school and prepared for a trade or the dole. My being marked for failure from age 11 was a factor that induced my parents to leave England. I don’t remember the test itself, but I do recall how important it was and how anxious my parents and I were.

Like so many wartime children, I had no father for my important early years. But I was lucky - mine did make it back. Dad returned home in 1946 when I was three years old. My daughter Sally also had no father for three years, between five and eight, while I was in prison.

My first memory of him is that of a strange man coming into our garden, picking me up and swinging me on to his shoulder and my crying and being terrified because he looked so big and loomed over me. It was Dad, my unknown father, home from the war.

Dad had been a senior sergeant, a Warrant Officer First Class. He had refused a commission as he preferred the company of the other NCOs and men to that of the officers. As a WO First Class, he was at the top of his heap whereas, as a junior officer, he would have been at the bottom of a different heap where, as a passionate socialist, he would not have felt comfortable. In the officers’ mess, he would have felt himself to be a class traitor.

He was more than lucky not to have been sent to Burma, where 60,000 Allied prisoners of war, many of whom died, were subjected to labour during construction of the notorious Burma railway. He had been put on the Burma draft three times and each time one of his mates, a fellow sergeant who looked after the transfers, had taken his name off the list. Sergeants ran the army.

He seemed to have had a ‘good war’ - no medals but little danger. Dad liked India and Indians. As a committed socialist and a decent human (rarely the same thing), he thought that they were being exploited by the British in the same way that the British class system exploited the working class in England. The class system was especially odious to him. It set all against all.

I think it was Henry Kissinger who said, ‘academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small’. I felt that this exactly described the British class system. The upper-middle, middle-middle and the lower-middle classes all fought for their tiny piece of social turf - distinctions without differences and where the upper classes won all.

After he came back from India, Dad became more and more dissatisfied with England and his place in that society. After being a very senior NCO, with a staff and large responsibilities, he came back to subservient menial work, cutting the hair of the ‘great unwashed’. He must have hated himself and them.

Years later, when he retired in his mid-sixties, he and Mum took a long holiday in India. It was Mum’s first visit and a nostalgic return for Dad. It was their last holiday together before he became too ill to travel.

Neither of my parents had any religious belief, but they knew well that they belonged to a small and besieged tribe and were fiercely and unshakeably loyal to it. Most of their friendships were with Jews and their working lives were similarly circumscribed.

This Judeo-centric view was not open to any sort of sensible discussion; such discussions in our house never remained sensible for long. Fear of the Holocaust for those surviving it, even if at a distance, was indelibly imprinted on their psyche. Who could blame them for being clannish, insular and cautious?

My mother later told me of her fears during the war, not only for Dad but for herself and me. By then the fate of the European Jews was widely known and she had decided that, if the Germans invaded, she would kill me and then herself rather than have us sent to a camp and be gassed. She retained a visceral hatred of Germans and things German all her life, and had a substantial distrust of non-Jews of all sorts. It seems fair enough to me, all things considered.

Later, when, in the first flush of lawyerly success, I bought a Mercedes Benz, she considered this to be a personal betrayal just a little less serious than marrying a non-Jewish woman, a shiksa, which I later also did. My marriage, after 43 years, is still robust, but I should have bought a British-made Jaguar and put up with the repair bills.

After the war, my parents produced my two younger brothers, Paul and Jon, both of whom, sadly, are now dead - from smoking and lung cancer. After three boys, my mother, having hoped for a girl at each confinement, gave that game away. She told me that she wouldn’t risk having another son. This lack of a daughter was happily made up to her in part in 1981 by the birth of my daughter Sally.

We were a talking and shouting sort of family. Dad and I loudly ‘discussing’ politics or world affairs must have been risible. His strong socialism, plus his life experiences, went head-to-head with my adolescent certainties based on utter ignorance and a bit of partly understood reading. It always ended in yelling and slammed doors. I don’t think Mum found it at all amusing.

When I was more grown-up and wanted to know more about these things, Dad was lost in the fog of dementia and I had my own problems. It is now in my old age that these and other regrets come back to concern me in my 4:00 am wake-ups.

Toward the end of his life, I asked Dad’s brother Bobby why, despite his wealth, he had not assisted Dad. He mumbled in an embarrassed fashion something about his not having the ‘ready cash’. I suppose that was so - he would have kept most of it in Switzerland.

Granny Bernstein came to live with us after she was widowed and none of her other children - my eight aunts and uncles - would take her in. She was a handful for Mum because she was a wanderer and had to be watched. She had become lost in time and place, and all she really knew was that she wanted ‘to gae hame’. She would wander off, stop people in the street and ask in her little English the way to go home, or else where she could find the ‘Jewish Market’. Home for her was either the house in Whitechapel, to which she had emigrated as a young girl or, more likely, her village in Lithuania that was long gone and the Jews with it.

Sometimes she would be off up the road and along the High Street in her nightie to the railway station, where she would try to buy a ticket to ‘gae hame’. She was known to the station staff; either one of the local policemen or Mum, much embarrassed, would go and get her.

The constant sadness of her senility and the routine drudgery of looking after a demented 76-year-old wore my parents out. It did not help that Dad earned little money. Many years later, when my father also succumbed to that implacable disease, Mum had to look after him.

When we once went for a seaside holiday to Jaywick, my mother’s sister Lilly was induced with great difficulty to ‘take’ Gran for the two weeks. When Mum came to collect her, she noticed all her mother’s rings and jewellery were missing. Lilly said, ‘She insisted that I take them, and I did not want to hurt her feelings by refusing’.

3

Leaving England

I N THE EARLY 1950s it had become clear to my parents that leaving England and emigrating was the only way forward for them and their three boys. They chose Australia over Canada because Mum had her brother Eddie and other family in Sydney. Grandma died in 1951 and we left for Australia in late 1955.

‘Welcome to your new life in Sunny Australia!’ beamed Australia House in the Strand in the 1950s. Mum was hesitant to leave England, her friends and familiar places, and they needed to save some money for their leap into the unknown.

In an old photo, there we all are at Victoria Station, just about to catch the boat train. Mum and Dad are looking young and resolute and smiling and serious at the same time; me, Paul and Jon (cuddling his bear) are arranged by height.

We left in early September 1955 as ‘ten-pound Poms’ - a colloquial name given to British people who emigrated to Australia under a subsidised government scheme. One thousand pounds was all they could scrape up before setting off on their long cruise to Australia. That trip was Mum and Dad’s first proper holiday since before the war or, perhaps ever.

Uncle Bobby and Aunt Kate came to see us off at the boat train. Partly out of family affection and guilt; but largely, I think, to make sure that we were really going. Seeing us off was as much as Uncle Bobby ever did for my parents.

That voyage on the Orsova was the longest and best holiday I had ever had. It was Mum’s first look at anywhere outside England, because in those days people of her class did not even consider going to France or Europe. She had a smashing time being waited on - no cooking or cleaning, and just reading in a deck chair in the sun. Pure Heaven. I am sure that she hoped that the rest of her life in Australia would be just like that.

4

Hello Australia

A USTRALIA WAS NOT entirely terra incognita to us. Waiting for us on the wharf in Sydney was Uncle Eddie, my mother’s older and favourite brother. He had been here for some five or six years and owned a business ‘The Carrington Laundry,’ a car and a house. His was the real success story that stirred my parents’ imaginings of doing even half as well.

We piled into Eddie’s car, a Renault Dauphine. It must have been a tight squeeze for Eddie with the five of us and our luggage. He was always a maniacally fast driver and took us at high speed to his house in Waverton, just over the Sydney Harbour Bridge. There Aunt Debbie and my two cousins, Brian and Barry, were waiting for us. After the meet and greet over a cup of tea, Eddie drove us to a furnished flat in Manly that he had found for us, just off The Corso, between the harbour and the ocean beach.

Having barely seen the sea in England, nor much blue sky, I found Manly a revelation. ‘Seven miles from Sydney and 1,000 miles from care’ was its enticing call, seen on every bus and billboard, and it was spot on.

I settled in without thought or hesitation. There was so much to see and do, so many new sights and smells and places to go. The ocean, a 200m walk from our flat, was strange and exciting. It was my first spring in a warm climate, and I was intensely aware of that wonderful hard-edged, clear bright light.

I discovered fishing by watching the kids and the old men fish from Manly wharf. I spent happy hours and days there myself, fishing from the wharf for garfish and