A few years back I started writing about a Queensland racing identity named Wayne Innes.
Innes was a popular figure at the track, a racehorse owner, sponsor, corporate Brisbane Racing Club (BRC) member, a regular in the exclusive Chairman’s room, and the best friend of his personal racehorse trainer Kelly Schweida.
But there was something I knew about Innes that other’s didn’t.
I used to rite crime, but my real skill was in research, and when researching a Royal Commission (the Wood Commission) into Police Corruption in the NSW Archives I had stumbled upon a list of names of corrupt police officers that had rolled over to the Commission in return for immunity from prosecution, name suppression and the opportunity to resign from the police force and be paid their full accrued entitlements, with future employers never to find out about their corrupt dealings and devilishly low morals and character.
Wayne Innes name was among them.
It sent alarm bells ringing, for only the month before I had been told Innes was a former NSW cop, and the dates fit.
I began inquiries and quickly established that the Queensland racing man Innes was one and the same as this horrid, vile drug money taking and dealer protecting crook and dog whose rollover file I had viewed in the archives, and so with the public image of racing in mind I quietly set about letting people know who this shiny, smiling spiv really was, and why they should never trust him.
Innes soon gelled to what I had been quietly telling people who needed to know, and started making open threats to have me sorted out. “He’s got his coming” Innes told more than one of my circle, referring of course to me.
He did too, believe it or not, and I will hate the prick the rest of his life for it, but I blame myself more for not being awake to what was going on.
I made a couple of mistakes.
The first was to presume that Innes threat was a physical one to harm me.’
That was quickly dispelled when I drove to his house one night, sat in the driveway outside his locked gates, and called him on the phone.
(Note: this is a much sanitised version; I have a restraining order – against me – hearing coming up soon, so can’t go too far into detail; we will save that for the day)
“G’day Wayne” I said. “Archie Butterfly here. We haven’t met, but I hear you’ve been running around the tracks telling people you are gunna (expletive) have me sorted. Is that right is it (expletive)?”
“I don’t like that, and I don’t bow to threats made by gutless (expletive), so I want to talk to you face to face to sort it ya (double expletive) and I want to do it right now”.
“I am not going out anywhere at this time of night to meet with you” he said, after offering up a stuttering denial that he’d made any threats against me, when I knew full well that he had.
“You don’t have to go out anywhere Wayne” I told him. “I’m right here outside your house. Just come down and let me in”.
The curtains opened, a head appeared at the window, it disappeared again, the lights went out, and Innes suddenly started raving that the police knew I was here and they’d be coming to arrest me any second and I was (expletive), and suddenly the penny dropped.
Leopards never change their spots.
Innes was still a police informant.
I took off, knowing that for once in his life Innes wasn’t lying when he said the cops were coming, and not wanting to get tangled up in something that was clearly far bigger than me.
There is a little part of me that refuses to cower to anyone though, so the next day I deliberately went to punt at the pub where Innes punts rather than my own, and fronted him to look him in the eye and shake his hand, just to let him know that he personally didn’t scare or bother me, and that I knew.
He (expletive) himself, and when I knocked back his protestations of it all being a mistake, and his offer of a drink, and jumped up on the little stage the pub has for the live musos, and started pointing at Innes and shouting that he was a dog and taping every word anyone in the joint ever said to him, the (expletive expletive) went so pale I thought for a second he was going to die.
Sadly for Paul Pisasale and co that he slotted, Innes didn’t die.
Instead I started getting arrested.
Arrested over writing racing stories.
Charged with stalking.
The first racing writer in the world to be charged with a serious criminal offence carrying horrible connotations of being some sort of pervert, just for writing true stories about racing.
I was facing a maximum of 7 years per charge, and I had been hit with five.
Me, who’d been happily married for 22 years, was a grandfather, had no criminal record at all – because apart from smoking the occasional joint and sometimes driving too fast, I had never done anything wrong – and worked full time caring 24/7 for dying dad to keep him out of a respite home.
The cops raided my house 3 times and took all my phones, computers and files. Six of them came carrying guns and tasers the first time. They detained my dad, my wife, her sister, my kids, my grandkids and me. We were all just there to help look after Dad. He’d an ASIO clearance for most of his life, and had worked with police officers for 40 years. He couldn’t believe what was happening. None of us could, but he was terminally ill, and this whole thing almost killed him early.
I won’t bore you with the details, other than to say I landed in jail on three occasions during all this, once for 4 days, all without ever getting to trial. It cost me $180 000 in legal fees which at first I didn’t have, and was only able to pay through the kindness of strangers (and a huge thank you to you all; I wouldn’t be here still writing if it wasn’t for you), a world pull of stress and pain, and – most important of all – it cost me precious time that I should have, and wanted to, have been spending with my Dad.
For a long time I blamed the QRIC Commissioner Ross Barnett for my travails.
I was wrong, in the main part anyway.
Barnett knew about it – most senior coppers did – but he wasn’t behind it.
The CCC were.
It was all about protecting Innes, to protect him as a source.
Everything me and my innocent family went through was to protect a crooked ex-cop and crim who’d been to jail before (after getting names suppression in the Wood Commission, Innes had gone on to con his way into the role of Building Manager for the Eagle Boys pizza chain, and robbed them for millions).
To protect him so that he could roll over on another crooked ex-con Pisasale (yeah, ex con; they’ve expunged his juvenile record – you should ask about it, it’s red hot, literally).
What a wonderful world hey?
The charges against me were dropped before trial, after the Magistrate told the cops two years after my arrest that if they didn’t tell me the precise details of what I had supposedly done to deserve getting arrested, they couldn’t proceed with the charges.
Of course they couldn’t tell me, because there was nothing to tell, so the charges were dropped.
Two years, three spells of being locked behind bars, and $180 000 later, all for being silly enough to start writing stories about racing that I didn’t know were cutting across a CCC investigation involving a crook I was writing about.
It’s not over yet either, for next month I face a hearing in the Magistrates Court on five restraining order applications that the cops have brought using an obscure piece of legislation that stems from the dropped stalking charges.
This little known provision was designed for, and is meant to stop, psychos who have got off a charge of stalking their ex on a technicality, and harassing them all over again by cross-examining them violently during a subsequent restraining order hearing, and continuing to make the poor former partner’s life a misery.
In my case I have never even met more than 2 of the 5 people I’m alleged to have stalked, and the two I did meet once I met on cordial and polite terms, on occasion solely related to our mutual work.
It’s just further harassment, because I refused to lie down and shut up.
Well I never will. Not again. That’s why I got sexually abused as a child, and why my abuser was able to go on and abuse other innocent kids before the cowardly maggot killed himself within 24 hours of me speaking out.
I don’t roll over and shut up anymore when I know I am right, and I never will, especially not to self-interested people who think its okay to corrupt the system to get at those they deem corrupt.
Well its fucking not.
If the guards can’t protect us by playing it straight, then who is going to protect us from the guards when they go rogue?
Not long after Wayne Innes evidence helped put Paul Pisasale away for the first time, the arresting officer in my case – a CIB detective, who while drugs were washing across our neighbourhoods, and women were getting raped, and little kids were getting killed, had been working full-time on shutting this little racing writer up and down – was promoted to a senior role within the CCC.
She has been running my prosecution from the shadows and in the light even since her promotion, which is curious to say the very least, bizarre to say a bit more, and highly disturbing to say further.
I won’t tell you her name, because you will hear it after I put her on the stand and cross-examine her about her role in the whole saga at the upcoming restraining order hearing next month, and what you hear won’t be pretty. I have already used my contacts in the non-Murdoch media to arrange to ensure that it will be reported on, so watch this space.
This has all happened because of one little maggot named Wayne Innes, and another little maggot mate of his who was the Mayor of Ipswich, and a board member of the Turf Club.
What a fucked up world.
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This is from this morning’s Courier Mail
A crooked landfill contractor’s alleged fraudulent dealings with a racing official led corruption investigators to bust open the Fitzgerald-era level corruption scandal in Queensland’s councils.