Gotcha!

Most of the police and government officers involved in the police raids on Panthers had walked away satisfied that Cowan, and the club, had nothing to answer on any of those original allegations. Mick Howe didn’t give up.

Four months later, newspaper headlines and TV bulletins revealed that Cowan had been charged with four counts of fraud. Howe had finally hit his mark. But the charges had nothing to do with the original investigation or the letter of complaint.

A chance remark to a staff member about a questionable tax deduction, and the discovery of some discrepancies in the accounts of the Panthers’ travel agency¹ eventually rewarded the persistence of Detective Sergeant Mick Howe.

Early in 1986, before the investigation started, Cowan had taken a holiday in Thailand, which he booked through the Panthers travel agency. When booking the trip, he advised the manager of the agency that he was not going on club business, and that she should bill the travel expenses to his personal account. Part of the conversation touched on the tax deductibility of his trip.

It was suggested that if the trip was to Brisbane instead of Thailand, he might be able to claim the trip as a tax deduction. But it really was just a holiday, and Cowan did not claim any of the expense on tax. Unfortunately, though, on one of the travel agency records it was entered as a Brisbane trip.

In July 1986, Cowan was in his office when Mick Howe arrived.

He sounded casual and very friendly. “We’re almost finished”, he said. “I just need to look at some of the club’s trust companies. I understand there’s a travel trust? Maybe I could look at that first.

I told him “Not a problem”, with absolutely no inkling of what was happening. I picked up the phone and spoke to Irene Southern, the new travel agency manager. “Mick needs to have a look at the travel agency books. Can you give him whatever help he needs?”

When criminal barrister, Jack Birney, was called in later, his response was vigorous. “You must be crazy! You allowed a simple investigation to turn into a fishing expedition. This person has been doing everything he can to put handcuffs on you for months, and here you are doing your absolute best to help him!”’

A few days after Howe left the office, Cowan received a phone call from the Howe’s secretary.

Mick has asked me to call you to make an appointment. He would like you to come to the station. He needs a final discussion with you to clear up a few issues about minutes.’

Cowan replied, ‘Sure, when does he want me to come?’

She answered, ‘Next Tuesday and Wednesday’.

As I put the phone down, the penny dropped! All this time I had thought the best way to deal with Howe and his investigations was complete co-operation, and all I was doing was just getting myself deeper into some problem I didn’t understand. Eight months after Mick Howe first walked through Panthers’ door, I finally decided it was time to get legal advice.

Cowan’s first port of call was Steve Bowers, who was a solicitor and a personal friend. Bowers agreed urgent advice was needed before Howe’s ‘final interview’. He phoned barrister Jack Birney.² Birney was tied up in a court case at Parramatta but agreed to see them during the court lunch break.

Cowan explained what had been happening, including the request for a two-day ‘interview’ with the detective.

‘There is no way you will be attending that interview’, Birney said, at the same time suggesting that Cowan had been holding out his wrists to allow the handcuffs to be slipped on.

Awaiting Cowan’s arrival on Tuesday morning, Mick Howe was instead surprised to be confronted by a solicitor and a leading criminal barrister.

Steve Bowers says it was a very long conversation.

Howe just kept asking questions about Roger. How many holidays he took, the renovations on his house, and so many obscure things. While he was pumping us, Birney was pumping him, to try to find exactly where he was coming from.

The discussion centred around the documents which Howe had obtained from the travel agency. At the end of the meeting, the detective told the lawyers that he intended to lay charges against Cowan. The basis of Howe’s case was that Cowan had tried to defraud the Commonwealth by claiming a tax deduction to which he was not entitled. The charges rested solely on Cowan’s trip to Thailand, and the manner in which it had been recorded by the agency.

‘The conversation went on for two and a half hours‘, says Bowers. ‘Howe eventually got sick of it, and stood up and said, ‘that’s it, get Cowan down here now, or we’re sending the paddy wagon and we’ll bring him back here in handcuffs.’‘

As the three men left the detective’s office, Bowers remembers Howe ‘ranting and raving’ as they moved towards the foyer. As they passed a conference room, a high-ranking senior policeman in a light blue dress uniform noticed Jack Birney. He greeted the barrister, and the two got into a chat about the old days at the criminal court in Sydney, as Howe hovered in the background.

Bowers says as the conversation between the two old mates was winding up, the policeman said, ‘Jack, you remember — if there’s ever anything I can do for you …’.  The barrister jumped in immediately, ‘Well as a matter of fact, there is one thing. If Detective Sergeant Howe were to issue a summons for Roger Cowan rather than coming down to the club to drag him away in handcuffs, I would be most appreciative?’

The senior police officer looked at Howe and said, ‘I think that can be arranged, can’t it, detective sergeant?’

Bowers says Howe could only growl, ‘Yes, sir!’

That evening, the lead story on the television news was that Cowan had been charged on four counts of fraud.

The likelihood that Mick Howe accidentally came across this evidence as he waded through thousands of travel agency documents is minimal. There was no money missing anywhere, and the travel agency had been paid in full by Cowan. Finding details of a particular journey, then discovering that it had been recorded incorrectly somewhere else would be an amazing stroke of luck. It would have been like finding a gold nugget in a haystack when you were actually looking for a needle.

Irene Southern remembers Howe’s visit clearly. ‘In actual fact, he had ‘waded through’ very few documents.’ She told Cowan later, ‘He spent a short time in the office, made a couple of casual requests, then went straight to your file and pulled out some documents. He knew exactly what he was looking for, and where to find it.’

Looking back, Roger Cowan supposes that a complainant from within the Club became aware of the discrepancy in the travel agency records, and tipped off Detective Sergeant Howe. It might have been mere coincidence that the old travel agency manager had been terminated a matter of days before Howe’s visit.

Jack Birney appeared for Cowan at the court hearing. Cowan’s main witness was the accountant who had prepared his tax returns for the previous year. He produced documents proving that Cowan had made no attempt to claim the Thailand trip as a tax deduction. Howe had not taken the simple and obvious step of obtaining a copy of the tax return, which would instantly have shown him there was no case to answer.

Cowan was found not guilty on all four charges.

During the hearing, Jack Birney was cross-examining Mick Howe. ‘Sergeant Howe, you have alleged that Mr Cowan committed fraud. Would you tell the court who he defrauded or attempted to defraud?’.

Howe’s answer: ‘I don’t have to say who it was.’

Former police gaming machine investigator, Steve Foote, tells what he knew of the history of the Poker Machine Task Force.

Howe, and the detectives he worked with, took a proposal to the Police Commissioner to set up the task force, probably around the late seventies or early eighties. They were asking for special resources to combat crime in clubs and were virtually a group of untouchables. The original brief was specifically to catch poker machine cheats, but the technology was progressing so fast in the early eighties, the opportunity for poker machine fraud all but vanished.

Foote says that when the task force’s main reason to exist all but disappeared, they had to find another focus to justify keeping the squad in operation, and they began to investigate club managers.

Says Foote: ‘Those guys in the task force always had a ‘holier than thou’ attitude, they were a pretty self-righteous group.’

Mick Howe resigned from the police force in 2005 at the level of Detective Inspector. He was contacted for his comments during the writing of this book but did not respond.

---

---

1. Panthers ran its own travel agency for may years. It operated under a separate trust company.
   ↩︎
2. Jack Birney had been the Federal Member for Phillip from 1975 he was defeated by Jeanette McHugh in the 1983 election. Before his political career he’d been a barrister. ↩︎

---

Commentary and Contributions