By Peter Anderson
SYDNEY — The CEFTAA magazine Framed has raised a number of very pertinent questions about the activities of the supposed "good cop", Inspector John William Burke, who has appeared before the ICAC inquiry into police corruption.
Burke told ICAC he had worked with former detective Roger Rogerson for six or seven years but had been devastated when he heard Rogerson was corrupt. The commission has heard that Burke provided information linking Rogerson to one of the matters currently under investigation, but also that Burke is a distinguished detective, with bravery awards and commendations.
Burke was admired by his peers for some of the same reasons as Rogerson: he was a proficient verballer with a smooth court-room manner, which contrasted with his "shotgun blast through the front windscreen" mode of arresting a suspect.
In 1978 and 1979, along with Rogerson and Dennis Gilligan, Burke led the team of detectives that verballed and framed Ananda Marga members Tim Anderson, Ross Dunn and Paul Alister in the Yagoona Case. When the three were pardoned and compensated in the mid-1980s, Burke still kept a bravery award given him for his part in the case.
The Yagoona case not only led to a "bravery" award for Burke, he also secured a Churchill fellowship to study terrorism overseas. By 1989 he was head of SWOS when they killed innocent Aboriginal David Gundy in his Marrickville home.
In the mid-1980s, when Rogerson was being abandoned by the force after it was thought he'd tried to kill undercover detective Michael Drury, a range of drug-related accusations surfaced against Burke.
In April 1983, along with several detectives including Dennis Gilligan and John Openshaw, Burke arrested drug suspect David Kelleher, claiming he had half a kilo of heroin in the boot of his car. A jury took less than two hours to accept the word of Kelleher, a man with a serious criminal record, against that of Burke, Gilligan and other detectives. Kelleher's brother-in-law had taped the whole police operation, using a radio scanner.
In April 1984 Federal Police informant Stephen Bazley publicly named Burke, along with seven other police, as being involved in drug trafficking. No charges followed. Bazley's wife Louise was also acquitted in the Sydney District Court on a charge in which she accused Burke of a "load up".
In a December 1984 court case Burke was again linked to drugs. Robbery suspect Mark Treloar was taken from the Eastwood Police Station to Ryde Hospital suffering from a heroin overdose, after an interrogation session which involved detectives Burke, Lemmie, Moran, Canellis, McNamara, Edmunds, Freeman, Pettiford and Abel. Treloar later pleaded guilty to the robbery, so the accusations that heroin was given to him not make it to trial.