Steven* catches a glimpse of himself in the vacant shopfront window. He stops for a second, holding up the busy footpath on Ipswich’s Brisbane Road. At first he doesn’t recognise the reflection: that strange man in steel capped black commando boots, navy hard yakka work pants, and Queensland police cap and polo shirt with a double striped Senior Constable epaulet on the shoulder.
Then he realises that man looking back at him, is him. He vomits on the footpath.
When Steven sees himself he sees a fraud. He sees a lie. He sees a uniform he has cultivated a hatred for in those years working as an undercover cop among the heroin dealers and junkies and thieves and standover men of South-East Queensland.
I guess it goes like that, huh, he thinks.
You live a lie for long enough and it becomes the truth. For years he was cop pretending to be a crook. Now, he feels like a crook pretending to be a cop and he hates himself for it, whoever he is.
He thinks back to those early days in the Queensland Police Service Academy and wonders how all this happened. How the hell did he go from being a clean-cut bright-eyed private school boy from a well-to-do suburb in Brisbane’s south to this wreck that he is now?
Marriage ruined, smoking ice and heroin and marijuana to keep that blanket pulled tight over the guilt and confusion that gnaw at him in his nightmares. Breaking into buildings in Brisbane’s CBD at night, BASE jumping from the top storey and running from the cops, from himself. Desperate for the cheap rush that his work now in general duties no longer satiates, the double life he was once hooked on now haunting him.
That double life began the moment he joined the police force as an 18-year-old trainee forensic photographer. At the academy it was all crew-cuts and wrestling and bastard Sergeants drilling safety procedures into your head. Everything so regimented that even the firearms training seemed dull. On the weekends with his two older brothers, it was sky-diving and surfing and BASE jumping. Friday night and all of Saturday and Sunday at the drop zone, pulling bongs and popping pills and jumping out of planes.
The moment he saw the opening for undercover officer advertised in the Police Gazette it screamed his name. This was a means of marrying his two separate lives and getting his fix of adventure and excitement through work. From the moment he started, he was hooked.
“It was really fun. I didn’t have to go to the office. I’d get a wad of money and go and buy something illegal. Initially it was stolen property, then drugs. I got to do a break-and-enter with these guys when I was 23-years-old,” he says.
“I was skydiving and surfing on the weekends and running around, buying drugs during the week. Just leading this really fun lifestyle.”
Steven grew a beard and long hair and pierced his ear. He started smoking weed with the other 15 undercover officers, all of them in their 20s and early 30s. Taking drugs was not condoned by his seniors but it was not discouraged either. They had to mould themselves completely to this role, and any crook would see straight through them if they coughed their guts after ripping a bong while doing a deal in some dingy back room.
The men were like brothers to one another. They had to be because the secretive nature of this work meant they had to distance themselves from their previous lives. Steven withdrew from the friends he had once and surrounded himself entirely with his colleagues. They were the only ones who understood, who could relate to the crazy situations they found themselves in.
“We had a really good tight group. We’d get together and smoke weed and do other drugs and tell stories. We were living this movie scenario, except it wasn’t very Hollywood. It was really bogan. Not very glamorous at all. Very working class, or even below working class, in the least desirable suburbs, housing commissions with little kids running around.”
Steven befriended his targets in order to betray them. He got to know them and their families and their stories and he saw that really, criminal people aren’t always bad. Most of them were victims too. They were victims of the system, of their circumstances, and who was he to judge the hand they had been dealt?
And what was he really doing to make a difference anyway? It didn’t matter how many kilos of smack or how many crooks he took off the street, there was always some other lost and troubled soul waiting to fill their shoes. There always will be, he saw. The system perpetuated an endless cycle, and he was just another cog in that machine.
Steven was forced to face his betrayal at the end of every operation when the arrested target was given the opportunity to confront him. If they accepted, he would enter the interview and expose himself as an undercover cop in the hope they would spill their beans. Most of the time he was abused. He didn’t mind that so much. It made it easier to bear. But one time after arresting an illegal firearms dealer, things played out differently.
“I went in and I go, ‘look, sorry, mate. I’m an undercover cop, and I’m really sorry about this.’ It was honestly what I said because I was feeling terrible. This guy said, ‘no, look, mate, I understand. You’re a good bloke, you’re just doing your job’. That made me feel even worse’,” he says.
“I felt I was just screwing these guys over. It’s like, ‘oh, God, I’m pretending to be one of their friends and I’m just f..king them over’. I got no satisfaction out of it at all. I didn’t think like, oh, we got three ounces of heroin off the street. I just felt like a snake.”
He masked that guilt by smoking more marijuana. The more he smoked the murkier the boundary between who he was pretending to be and who he really was.
His bosses knew of his struggle. They had known of it for a long time; you were only allowed to serve two years in the undercover squad because of all the guys who had gone off-the-rails, and the trouble reassimilating them into general duties. Steven lived with the paranoia that his superiors would find out what he was doing. He almost prayed for it to happen so he could put a stop to this, but him and the other officers continued on unchecked.
“I was living on the edge. Every time the boss called I thought, ‘here we go’. They’re gunna call me in and want to take a sample of my piss, or make me see a psychiatrist or a psychologist. It never happened.
“I think they were too scared about the can of worms it might open up. It was just easier to brush it under the carpet and hope that eventually that person leaves the police and just disappears.”
Steven and his teammates had to cultivate a hatred for the police to blend into the criminal world, and that hatred became real. Those bosses didn’t care about the situations they were pushing them into and the impact it was having on their wellbeing. All they cared about were the arrests, the numbers. Drugs off the street, bad guys in jail. The undercovers pushed the limits, seeing how much they could take the piss before the bosses realised the impact this was having on them.
“We’d all go to the pub and have lunch with the bosses, but before we’d go we’d go around to one of the guys places and just get so stoned. We’d go to the meeting with all of our eyes just glowing. It was kind of like a f..k you,” he says.
“Once we went to the police club on a Friday afternoon and there were 40 coppers all in uniform, standing around drinking beers. Me and three other undercover guys just stepped out onto this tiny little veranda and blew a spliff, right in front of them. Not giving a f..k, you know.”
They felt invincible. They lived life on the edge and nothing and nobody could touch them. The thrill of their work was intoxicating and like all junkies, adrenaline or otherwise, it was never enough. They needed something more, and it wasn’t much of a step up from marijuana to heroin. They were around it all the time, hanging out with dealers who flaunted huge bricks of it, driving around junkie informants who shot up in the back of their cars. On one Ipswich job, a girl who hadn’t injected before asked Steven if she could do him up.
“And so here I am, in the back of this car, whacking heroin up her arm. It just became normal.”
Some of the bosses also encouraged them to buy syringes from the chemist and give themselves a few jabs in the crook of their arm, bruise it up a bit, make themselves appear more credible.
“You start sticking needles in your arm, and then it’s not that much further to go to put some heroin in the needle and plunge it in. Next thing you know, that’s what you’re doing. You’ve crossed that line.”
Steven injected heroin a few times but he didn’t like the feeling that it gave him. He didn’t mind the euphoria that came straight away but he hated the nausea and the itchiness and the nodding off that came afterwards. It was just too intense. He preferred smoking it. It took his mind off all the bullshit, as did smoking weed, and he justified his drug use by telling himself that it was all part of playing this role. This is who he was now. This is the person he had to be.
Steven’s long-term partner fell pregnant with their child around the same time as he began working a major Thai heroin import bust. He was sworn in as a federal police officer and given a fake passport, and an informant introduced him to the target. It was a dodgy job right from the beginning.
“The informant was a professional informant, a really dodgy guy. After he introduces me to the target he starts doing deals with him, buying and selling drugs, and then rips him off $500. Later, he gets arrested in Nimbin with a stolen gun. In jail, he has his eye ripped out. And you can guess who organised that, can’t you? These are the calibre of the people we’re dealing with.”
Still, with the informant out of the way Steven could just get on with the job. He loitered often at the target’s house, buying marijuana and smoking it there, trying to build a bit of rapport. But the target was edgy. All those years in prison had trained him to sniff out a rat, and he wasn’t so sure about this long-haired character. He just didn’t know enough about him. One sticky summer afternoon, he took him to the bedroom at the back of his housing commission home to find out just who Steven really was.
“He pulled out some foil and started chasing the dragon. And he goes, ‘I want you to pick up that phone there and ring one of your mates. I’m going to be listening on the other phone, and I want you to say halfway through the conversation, ‘you know what I do for a living, don’t you?’.”
Steven started sweating. He sweated so profusely he got a heat rash and melted away the adhesive that kept the tape recorder stuck to his body. He could feel it just hanging beneath his t-shirt. He pictured it falling out on the floor, pictured the bullet flying straight between his eyes. He looked out of the flyscreen window and saw his car parked on the street. He prepared himself to kick the screen in, dive out the window and run for his life. But that was a last resort. First, he had to try and play ball.
His wife was at work and there was no one home, so he rang his home number. No answer. He rang three times, and when there was still no answer he placated the target and made an excuse to leave. Outside in his car he took off his soaked t-shirt and wrung it out. He towelling off the sweat still dripping from him. He started his car, and drove home.
“That was when it stopped being fun. I started to realise that I could get killed or something. Things were getting serious,” he says.
“After that I started having nightmares. It was really starting to play on my mind.”
The nightmares continued even after Steven’s stint in the undercover squad finished. They continued for the next ten years in the surveillance team, and six after that as a forensic officer. The nightmares ruined his marriage, ruined his life. He tried blocking them out by smoking more marijuana, more ice, more heroin. The drugs masked the pain but they masked everything too. He switched off completely, a zombie in his own life, haunted and in denial and afraid to seek support from the police.
“I didn’t trust them. I didn’t want to show my hand like that. I was scared of what the consequences could be. If I told them what I was doing it could be more detrimental to my career rather than beneficial to me as a person. And I was in complete denial that I was messed up.”
Steven looks at himself in the mirror on the wardrobe of his bedroom in the Currumbin Clinic Drug and Alcohol Rehab. He looks at that reflection looking back at him and he is f..king terrified. He is scared of the things he might find inside that man if he allows himself to look, of telling his withdrawing heroin addict roommate he is a cop and freaking him out. Of not telling him he has been an undercover and continued to live this lie.
Steven is here not because he wants to be but because he has to be. It’s all part of this process of suing the police for neglecting their duty of care to him. He has to prove he’s done everything possible to treat this psychological injury. He just wants an end to all this. A settlement. No more nightmares. No more lies.
He wonders what he should tell his roommate. The psychologist thinks he should just make up a story so as not to alarm him, but aren’t all the stories he’s made up inside his head the very reason he is here? No. F..k that, he says. He packs his bag. He takes one last look at himself in the mirror, and he slips out the side gate and onto the street.
“I thought, I’m just undercover again. These guys are supposed to be helping me, but it’s actually making me worse. I just got out from there and left. It was making me worse. I started going in just for day treatment, and going to group therapy sessions which I really didn’t want to do, but I found eventually that it was helping me. It was good, to just be honest with myself and go, ok, this is who I am. And just tell my story.
“The psychological work was something I should have done a long time ago. But it’s f..king terrifying. It was something I did not ever want to do. I hated it. It was one of the most confronting things you could ever do. But being there with all the other crazy people made me realise that I’m crazy too. I felt like I didn’t belong, but I bloody did. I needed to be in there.”
Steven looks in the rearview mirror of his motorbike. He is lean and tanned and smiling and there is jungle and a glistening blue surf break behind him. For the past six years, ever since receiving his compensation payout from the Queensland Police, he has been here, exploring the Indonesian archipelago, surfing. First in a 40-foot twin-hull catamaran and now on his 155 N-Max scooter, all loaded with two surfboards and a backpack and little foam roller for his back.
The doctors wanted him to go on medication. They wanted to put him on anti-depressants to try and treat his PTSD. But Steven knew the real fix. He needed an adventure, to get away from all the bullshit and challenge himself; learning how to sail and navigate storms and rebuild a diesel motor, all those smiling, friendly people who gave him a hand along the way helping to restore the faith in humanity he had lost.
“I didn’t like seeing doctors, I didn’t like taking the medications. I needed to do my own thing sort myself out, go on adventures, make things happen,” he says.
“I feel I’ve cured myself through travel and surfing. I feel amazing. I feel really privileged to be able to do this, and now I like my own company. I don’t have any demons I’m battling. It’s just so liberating. And then seeing people who don’t have much and they’re just so welcoming and so happy and so friendly.
“It did for me what the psychologist and the psychiatrists and rehab and stuff couldn’t. That was my rehab, I guess.”
Steven looks again in the rearview mirror of his motorbike. He sees that face looking back, all lean and tanned and healthy. He looks again, just to make sure it really is him. It is. And he smiles.