An Investigation Starts

One afternoon in 1986, Roger Cowan was driving back from a meeting of the Registered Clubs Association in Sydney when he received a phone call from the club.

The call was to advise him that about 12 police and officers from the Liquor Administration Board had arrived at the club. They were demanding to see all the club records including minutes of meetings and financial records. There had been no prior notification of the raid. In Cowan’s absence, the task of meeting the officers fell to Glenn Matthews, then a young accountant. Nobody at the club had any idea of the purpose of the visit, or what they were looking for.

Phil Bennett¹, now with his own computer graphics company, was a gaming machine inspector for the LAB at the time and had worked with some of the police officers before. The officer leading the investigation was Detective Sergeant Mick Howe from the NSW Poker Machine Task Force. Howe had requested that Bennett join in the raid.

The group descended on the Club believing that Cowan would be on the premises. It was a logical assumption – he was there most days, from quite early in the morning. When he wasn’t, they jumped to the conclusion that he had seen them coming and left, adding fuel to the notion that he had something to hide.

Cowan, as we know, had not been in the club that day because of the meeting in Sydney. There was no way he could have known of the police visit.

At the time it was seen as a big deal, says Bennett. Mick had brought in a whole lot of people from other units – the Fraud Squad, Corporate Affairs, and the Sydney police unit that did all their accounting investigations.

The NSW police Poker Machine Task Force had been set up to overcome gaming machine crime. Steve Foote² came to Penrith as a police constable soon after the raid on Panthers. He was later to become part of the NSW police’s Licensed Gaming Investigation section. He is no longer in the police force, but he is aware of the raid, and of the task force and its history. The Task Force was, he says, ‘a clandestine operation that had special powers from the commissioner’.

Nothing like this had ever happened at the Club. The LAB investigated complaints from time to time, and made regular routine visits, but this was unprecedented. Before returning to the club, Cowan contacted the club’s solicitor, John Ffrench, to see if he knew anything about it and to ask for advice.

Ffrench’s first reaction was very cautious. He tactfully suggested to Cowan that if he was aware of anything that the police might find in their investigations, he should ‘come clean’.

The idea was, if there were any ‘snakes in the woodpile’, it would be better for John to know in advance rather than be surprised later. He satisfied himself that I had no knowledge of anything that could be of interest to the police, and we talked about what we should do next.

My preference was to simply answer all their inquiries and be quite open with the records. As far as I was concerned there was nothing to hide. But it was obvious that the police thought they had something, just because of the gung-ho way they were approaching the whole thing.

I wondered if I should have a solicitor with me when I was interviewed, but I still didn’t see the need. At first, John Ffrench thought that I should, but we finally agreed that I would go without legal representation and give the police every co-operation. In that way it would all be over quickly, and the club would be cleared of all suspicion.

That strategy backfired badly, but much later and for different reasons.

Ffrench called the officer in charge and set up an interview in my office for the following morning. In fact, that was the last involvement of the club’s solicitor in that chain of events. In hindsight that proved to be a serious mistake.

The officers conducting the interview were Mick Howe and a detective sergeant from the fraud squad. Cowan remembers being impressed by the fraud squad detective. He was highly qualified academically, asked probing questions, seemed to understand situations quickly and was all business and no nonsense. He seemed to assess what was happening quickly and then lose interest.

At that moment though, Cowan was asking himself how had he come to that point? Later, things would slowly fall into place and he would see a strong connection to an innocent event that caused some friction 2 years earlier at the end of Season 1984.³

The connections — between the end of season event and the police raid – began to fall in place for Cowan after the first police interview.

At the outset of the police interview, Cowan was told that the investigation arose from a written complaint to the Assistant Commissioner of Police. It would cover a number of issues, but there were three specific matters of importance. Cowan’s family company, Phyro Holdings Pty Ltd, was one matter. The second was related to the club’s purchase of 100 poker machines from Aristocrat. The third matter was the sale of a property in Station Street, Penrith, the site of the club’s premises before it moved to Mulgoa Road.

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1. Phil Bennett is the principal of Phil Bennett Consulting, established in 1989 to provide gaming consultancy services to clubs, hotels and casinos.
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2. Steve Foote grew up in the Penrith region, attending Penrith High School. After leaving the NSW Police Force, he took various roles in the safety & security sector. He is now retired and focuses on art.
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3. For Cowan there was a connection between this Police raid and an invitation to players & officials for drinks in the Boardroom after the final round game of the 1984 Season. You can read about this in Beyond the Book – The End Of Season Drinks That Weren’t So Cordial ↩︎

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