Chapter 11

Lang Hancock

AS PREVIOUSLY RELATED in my first tome, The Fifth Estate, there was a Coronial Inquiry in May of 2001 into the death of the much respected Mr Lang Hancock, the pioneer of the worldwide boom in iron ore. It is a real shame that this Icon of Industry, after his death, had his name cemented in legal history along with the motley crew associated with Colin Burns Pace. There was also a plethora of lawyers all billing away at top speed but even they were left behind in a cloud of dust as the PI’s smelled the cash and jump started. Pace had originally been hired by the daughter and sole heir to the great man to assist in determining whether he had died by natural causes or otherwise. Gina Rinehart had concerns that the latter day wife of Mr Hancock, Rose (now remarried to upper echelon realtor, Willy Porteus) may have been in some way complicit in her former husband’s death. Pace was to work under the eminent QC, Peter Hayes.

The process of having a Coroner’s Inquiry called was a long and arduous journey not to mention expensive and heart breaking for all concerned.

With permission finally granted for the inquiry to take place, even the public breathed an audible sigh of relief. The man would finally be put to rest and matters such as a suitable monument to his life’s great passage erected suitable to his legendary achievements.

But alas, the grubby fingerprints of Pace and his raggedy lot were about to affect this visionary man’s life and reputation. Thankfully, in my view, time will wipe the stain of their intrusion from memory.

The best forgotten private investigation firm consisting of two former WA police officers, Pace and Henley, was retained by Mrs Gina Rinehart to assist in clearing the air and solving the mystery surrounding her father’s death. By a sad quirk of fate Gina had sought and taken the advice of a close and respected employee, Mrs Wick. This simple and understandable decision was to turn both the inquiry and many personal lives inside out for some years. Not to mention the cost and reputations of many. She was the wife of one Tony Wick, security el supremo at the swank Observation Hotel on the sands of Scarborough which formerly netted a mention in dispatches for shenanigans at Port Hedland when the ho’s were on the go under the benign eye of the then resident Port Hedland copper, Pace and Perth comptroller, the self-same Mr Wick. I have related elsewhere the hasty exit from the police force of Wick upon internal inquiries being commenced and the transfer and stubborn resistance to honesty by Pace, hanging on to become head of the fraud squad. It was in that vaunted position that various jobs failed to find resolution including a few baubles worth about $100m that went astray from Argyle Diamonds’ mine up North and offices in Perth. This failure to find the fabulous pink diamonds led to the former Assistant Commissioner of Police, Les Ayton, to observe publicly after his resignation that “Pace was crooked as a dog’s hind leg.” Not shy with his verbal tirade, Mr Ayton continued with his fervent description: “Pace is an ex-Chief Inspector who was corrupt to the core. He’s a person who we bundled out of the job because the Commissioner decided we shouldn’t charge him. But I had recommended that we charge him with two criminal counts and six disciplinary counts.” Just in case the public failed to perceive his descriptive pathway, Mr Ayton again repeated, “He’s corrupt to the core.”

Thus recommended at a personal level and clearly without knowledge of the public views of Les Ayton as to the ethical vacuum in which Pace thrived, Circles joined the A-Team. He was rubbing elbows and wallets with nearly every Silk and Solicitor in town. Some became involved in differing degrees on one side or another. Hopping camps as information and money changed hands. Often. Yes, as Clancy was wont to say, all the “guns had gathered to the fray.” The shoot-out was not played out in the OK Corral but in a court of law.

It is not my intention to plough through the thousands of pages of claptrap of the many weeks of transcript dialogue. However, it is probably useful to remind you of what we will call the Martin incident. This is sufficient to showcase the lowlife scumbags who played a part. It is very simple yet disgusting behaviour. Towards the end of the inquiry, Mr William Porteous, the current husband of the former Mrs Rose Hancock, was approached as he left the court one lunch break by a male person. This person introduced himself as Martin. He made Mr Porteous an offer. He would supply the Rose Porteous side with the full results of all the inquiries on behalf of the opposing party, Gina Rinehart, by Pace and Henley and a bevy of sundry solicitors. Furthermore, Martin would do so at a hefty discount to actual cost.

Mr Porteous naturally was on a high. However, the sage gentleman by this time had become learned, yes, very erudite in the antics of the likes of Pace and his miscellaneous mob. Why them you ask and rightly so? Willy did not at this time know who Martin was or whom he represented. The various Queens Counsel and other members of the tribe representing the Rose Porteous camp were duly and properly informed of events by Willy. In exchange for documents and details of years of inquiry paid for in good faith by Gina Reinhart she was to be betrayed and shafted for the miserly sum of $30,000. I would estimate that the treachery cost the daughter of Lang Hancock, pioneer of this state and prime source of today’s booming economy, millions of dollars from his hard earned estate.

Give me a break! Who did Martin represent? Well, who had access to all the information? It was simple, very simple. Only Pace and his assorted assistants, either acting as a group or as an individual member of the crew! You take your own pick, although I lean towards going for the group grope, the crew as a whole. Methinks it might be a bit dangerous to double cross your own mob. All were ex-cops and most had been thrown out for corruption of a giddying variety. All were gun-smart. All were connected to serious crime and criminals over a long time. All were re-badged as Private Investigators. They followed the well worn Yellow Brick Road for the seriously bent.

Through no fault of her own and by pure blind trust Mrs Rinehart had walked into the grasping hands of the Port Hedland social and recreational services providers, Pace and Wick supported by an equally legendary cluster of crime fighters and can-do’ers. Dennis Henley was, of course, the other bit of the Pace Henley business and himself a former cop and now re-badged Private Investigator. Henley is also of Mickleberg fame: yes, one of the original witnesses against them about whom the Court of Criminal Appeal when quashing the convictions of the brothers in 2004 made numerous disparaging remarks as to his truthfulness!

Henley was a hotelier during the Americas Cup ‘boom’ times, who had suffered a bit of bad luck himself. He had bought into a south end hotel in Fremantle during the Money Awash days of the Big Cup when one and all wanted to buy many a drink and enjoy the great Alan Bond testimonial. However, the South End did not enjoy very much of the traffic flow. It was probably more the old blue suit or cardigan over the white shirt. Ex-footballers and cricketers make popular publicans, but ex-coppers never fail to arouse negative vibes, especially amongst the back alleys and riffraff of a busy international port. To add to his cash flow woes, call it simply bad luck, the joint was gutted by fire. Bad karma or Jewish Stocktake as they were once known before political correctness ripped our colourful language into timid cliché; it did allow him a dignified departure from the pub game.

Barbeque Jack was a highly respected member of what I now think of as the Motley Mob and of course gets an honorary guernsey as an associate of the eminent Queens Counsel, Mr Peter Hayes. In an entirely unpolitically correct but totally accurate phrase, Mr Hayes ‘went down’ in history as probably the first QC to die of a cocktail of drugs whilst frolicking in a South Australian hotel room with a couple of ladies of the night. It is not known if they were the same ladies both Pace and Wick were associated with in the leisure industry in Port Hedland some couple of decades prior. Which raises the interesting question, where do Fallen Angels go when they must implement their exit strategy? A scribbling friend who provides copy to the local rag suggests they either run their own business, become a homebody Mum, join a political party, run for office or become lawyers. He opts for the last two as he reckons the ladies have enlarged by diligent professional exercise the exact organ essential to qualify for Parliament or the Law.

If nothing else this tale does prove that bent ex-cops, after re-badging, do stick together, especially when the smell of a loose quid or two is wafting about.

Imagine to what heady heights their excitement is aroused when that loose quid or two is raised to millions of loose quids. Especially when they have an insider with the training, background and morals of Tony Wick.

In June 2001 the Rinehart / Hancock inquiry was still being played out in the Perth Coroner’s Court. I refuse to even record the Coroner’s name in this summary of events as he, in my humble opinion, may as well have stayed at home. He had no idea as to what was really being played out in his court. But he did look impressive on the bench.

The prosecutor was a Mr Lloyd Rayney from the office of the DPP. Now where have we heard that name before? Mr Rayney is now probably best known, rightly or wrongly, as the only person of interest in the murder of his wife, Corryn. Mr Rayney was so described by the Officer in Charge of the Police inquiry into the murder, one Detective Sergeant Jack Lee. Strangely enough, as matters often are in Perth investigative circles, the said officer then promptly took up a posting to a country Police Station to further his chances of promotion in the future. Good for him, of course, but not so good for Mr Rayney who is still left with Jack Lee’s tag but as yet uncharged. One is instantly thinks of that infamous Assistant Commissioner of Police, Caporn, who had control of the inquiries into the Claremont serial killings only to tag and eventually name a public servant as the main suspect for over a decade only to be wrong again. This act caused untold harm to the reputation of the public servant and wreaked havoc on his and his family’s life. Then again, Mr Caporn did go on to redeem himself by getting an unfortunate indigent, Mr Andrew Mallard, sent down for the murder of a shopkeeper for 12 years hard before the real murderer was outed by someone else. It was whilst resting on his wonderful success in the Mallard conviction that Caporn led a decade long inquiry into the murder of numerous young women in the suburb of Claremont, once again unsolved as investigations concentrated on one suspect seemingly to the exclusion of others, as in Mallard, Button, Mickelberg, etcetera and so on.

In any event, Lloyd Rayney was up against two teams of Queens Councils, the creme de la crème of Australian Legal Brains, which the above mentioned scribbler suggested to me was a contradiction in terms. For Gina Rinehart, in the front row, stood Mr Ronald John Davies, the famous ex-Crown prosecutor and Mr Mark Trowell, both top silks in their own right. For Rose Hancock there was an array of the usual suspects, highly paid blow-ins from the East Coast over here for a Top Earn and a bit of a rest.

At one point in the proceedings, on 7 June 2001, Mr Rayney put to Pace: “Can I come straight to the matter which brings you to this court. At some stage in after 1992 were you approached by lawyers acting for Mrs Rinehart to undertake some work?” Pace replied that the year was 1996.

“Who employed you?”

“I’m not sure but I think it was a man called Tony Wick.”

Such a hesitant identification about his old running partner and good mate!

These various legal teams had no chance from the start. They did not know or determine during the proceedings the history of the players that they were being churned by the most infamous bent cop in West Australian police history. Yes folks, El Bento, Colin Circles Pace, “crooked as a dog’s hind leg...” Which description my mate at the West Australian suggests is defamatory of dogs.

I had wandered into the court to watch the antics of old Circles, 61 years of age at the time, as he led the Silks on a merry foxtrot around the truth, as I knew he would. During a short recess Circles had preceded me into the gentlemen’s rest rooms to refresh himself before returning to the witness box for a further round of perjury.

I innocently wandered in simultaneously, only to be confronted by an enraged man blabbering something about his son Bradley Pace, a self taught expert in re-badging as explained in my first book The Fifth Estate. Yes, as his father had done before him, young Brad had left the Fraud Squad as a Detective Sergeant only to be also re-badged as a Private Investigator and was then re-badged once again as a Federal Police Officer. In any event his departure from the West Australian State Police was “all my fault” according to Circles in the privacy of the privy so to speak.

Circles took one almighty swing at my head, obviously intending to remove it from my shoulders.

He missed.

I didn’t.

Circles returned briefly to the witness box but successfully obtained a recess upon the stated grounds that he was feeling poorly.

The astonishing lengths to which Pace and his lot would go in providing the twists of ‘evidence’ was appallingly illustrated at page 3663 of the transcript when Pace was cross examined by Mr Heliotis on 16 June 2001. Pace is being taken through paragraphs of statements he had put to prospective witnesses which Mr Heliotis was teasing from Pace that he was in effect suggesting answers which he wanted.

Mr Heliotis: [Paragraph] 30?

Pace: The main thrust was the death of Mr Hancock.

Mr Heliotis: 32? “Rose has stated that she had an affair with [Barrister “X”] in 91/92.” [Did you] put that to the witness?

Pace: Yeah.

Mr Heliotis: Having put that to the witness you go on to 33, do you: “What are all of the holds Rose has on [Barrister X], and any details of each of these.” And then there are some specific matters?

Pace: Mm hm.

Mr Heliotis: Including: “[Barrister X’s] likely knowledge and involvement with the Coroner’s office.” I mean, do you not see that that’s suggesting the answer to the witness, if you put it in that form?

Pace: Yes, certainly.

At this point the Coroner suppressed the evidence as Mr Heliotis put to Pace that he was in effect creating evidence of alleged orgies involving key parties and Barrister X and that Pace did not know the source of the allegation. The same held for a sequence of unsupported allegations as Mr Heliotis continued to cross examine the ducking and weaving PI.

Mr Heliotis: Para 34: “What are the alleged holds Rose has on Dr Barry Hopkins?” You must see that that assumes that there are holds that Rose has - ?

Pace: Mm hm.

Mr Heliotis: … on Barry Hopkins?

Pace: That’s right.

Mr Heliotis: An affair with Dr Barry Hopkins; holds over Reg Browne, and moneys paid to him. Did you put all that to each of these witnesses?

Pace: Mm hm.

Mr Heliotis: Para 36: “What are the holds Rose has on Dr Hutchinson?”

And so it went on page after page of character assassination and witness manipulation making a mockery of the entire process. The shooting match went pear shaped. One significant reason for the sad shambles in my opinion was that no one paid attention to the fact that a strategic player, Mr Tony Wick, was the husband of Gina Rinehart’s personal secretary. Of what significance is that, you will be thinking? Well, if one refers ones attention to my second book, If the Hat Fits Wear It, the chapters on Near Misses and the stories on the Port Hedland detectives running prostitutes in collusion with a couple of Perth detectives, you’ll remember that one of the Perth detectives was indeed Mr Tony Wick. He was re-badged as a private detective after being forced to or allowed to resign with a clean sheet for his efforts with Pace in the Port Hedland scandal. Pace recorded yet another ‘Near Miss’ at that time. Of course he was publicly outed later on in his career, thence being re-badged as a Private Investigator.

These two crime fighters kept in touch, as the breed does, joining forces taking advantage of Mrs Wick’s position as a respected employee of Mrs Rhinehart, churning both Mrs Rinehart and Rose Hancock for very tidy sums of cash and cheques. They also used the services of their long term confidant, Mr McPherson (although his real name was Clarkson), the international, roving Private Investigator that no one knew, no one had ever met and no one knew how to find, Yet he lived just across the Swan River, had worked the Terminus Hotel in Fremantle when Pace was officer in charge of Liquor and Gaming, worked in gaming houses in Fremantle, worked the Fremantle Wheelhouse Nightclub when leased by the Blum family of boxing fame and owned by Steve Cicerello, all the period when Pace was still in charge of liquor and gaming. McPherson nee Clarkson also worked money lending books with Pace for a couple of decades after Pace had been shown the door by WAPOL.

Funnily enough, Inspector Glen Feeney, appointed by the Commissioner of Police to oversee the Coroner’s Court proceeding, who knew all the players herein mentioned, had also completely forgotten all the above. I know the full extent of his knowledge of the game players as he was on my Police Academy course some 30 odd years prior.

The reason for me narrating the above is very simple. In a previous conversation with the Right Honourable Mr Jim McGinty as to his pet project, the Royal Commission into allegations of police corruption, he had asked me the question, “How far back should we go?” My answer was, “As far back as you have to.”

You see, as long as Bent Cops are not dealt with they will keep offending. Allowing them to resign with no record and re-badging them as Private Investigators creates little cabals of criminals who run together thus creating powerful syndicates of miscreants who with their still serving bent copper mates have access to all sorts of information from the Police computer including paid police intervention in court cases, assistance in tracking down all sorts of people and far more dangerous information. Dangerous to the public at large that is, though better described as extremely valuable to the Bad Cop Cabals.

McGinty knows better but has allowed the practices to continue. Now we have the established innocence of the Micklebergs, Mallard, Beamish and Button. All admitted. On the other side we have Kucera and his cohorts in the Mickleberg affair, Shervill, Caporn, Carter and others in the Mallard affair. I have a superb suggestion for Mr McGinty. He should return to his office in Justice, sit behind the big desk, and get out his pen and paper and begin sketching out some new legislation. Perhaps it might be called “The Integrity Act”. In essence it would require that the position of Attorney General in future would be filled by a qualified professional and would forever ban politicians from polluting the post. He would basically ban himself from office and all of his ilk. Integrity, indeed.

For Gina Rinehart, at the end of the day, the coroner basically found nothing and the whole shebang faded away.

Not so our pasty faced PI.

We know where Fallen Angels go. But what of Circles?

Pace, an everlasting icon in crime at 68 years of age, is still running free.

The photograph below is of Bar-B-Que Jack, the missing link. Fit and well and living in Mill Point Road, South Perth W.A as he was during the Coronial Inquiry as Pace and many, many others well knew.

In the old days lying under oath from the witness box was known as ‘perjury’ and was worth about 7 years!

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