Neil Mercer
IT WAS August, 2000. A massive covert investigation into NSW Police corruption, called Operation Mascot, was in full swing.
Run by three bodies - NSW police from within the Special Crime and Internal Affairs unit, the NSW Crime Commission and the Police Integrity Commission - it had been going since February the previous year. It depended heavily on a corrupt NSW police officer, codenamed M5, who was working undercover, recording his colleagues.
But secret Crime Commission documents obtained by The Sun-Herald reveal that at least two of those agencies knew on August 23, 2000, that they had a serious problem.
The problem was this: M5, who was working for SCIA and the Crime Commission, had privately admitted to his superiors that in order to obtain search warrants he had told lies in court.
They also reveal that another SCIA officer, the then Detective Inspector Cath Burn, compiled an "information report" about the matter on September 5 that year.
The Sun-Herald has been unable to establish whether the magistrate was ever informed that M5 had admitted lying in court.
The document says: ''[M5] informed Dolan/Standen that he swore information in support of an application for a search warrant [integrity test] knowing that information to be false.
"[He] said that he was very sorry for his actions and is aware of the problem it presents.''
The Sun-Herald does not suggest Ms Burn is corrupt.
On Friday morning, The Sun-Herald sent a series of questions to Ms Burn, now a NSW Police Deputy Commissioner. Through her lawyers Commissioner Burn issued a statement saying she was ''under an obligation not to disclose information or to make comment … as any disclosure would constitute a criminal offence due to the secrecy provisions of the NSW Crime Commission''.
Mr Dolan is no longer in the police and could not be contacted. Mark Standen, once the crime commission's top investigator, was not available for comment. He is serving a 22-year jail term for an unrelated matter - planning a 300-kilogram drug importation.
The latest leak to The Sun-Herald follows revelations reported in recent weeks about unethical, improper or illegal activities by some officers within SCIA.
The state government has so far rejected calls for an independent judicial inquiry, saying the matters are under investigation by the Inspector of the Police Integrity Commission, the former Supreme Court judge David Levine.
But Mr Levine himself has said he is simply assessing whether the recommendations of Strike Force Emblems, or its report, can be publicly released.
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