Fitzgerald Inquiry figure exposes Gold Coast police abuse in new book

A KEY Fitzgerald Inquiry figure tells in a new book how Coast detective abused him during a raid on a Surfers Paradise penthouse.

News BCM 11.5.07 Nigel Powell talks about the Fitzgerald inquiry. Pic Annette Dew Story Anna Reynolds

A KEY Fitzgerald Inquiry figure, former licensing branch officer Nigel Powell, tells in a new book how a Gold Coast detective abused him in an expletive-ridden tirade during a raid on a Surfers Paradise penthouse suspected of being used for prostitution.

In May 1983, Powell had been hitting a brick wall in much of his work with the licensing branch, with many of the reports he had been submitting to his boss, disgraced assistant commissioner Graeme Parker, being ignored.

But one day he was told to don a suit and drive to the Gold Coast to inspect a penthouse suite that had been turned into a bar and strip club.

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In journalist/author Matthew Condon’s new book All Fall Down, which will be launched tonight at the State Library, Powell tells how he and other officers entered the unit “standing out like dogs’ balls’’.

“They observed a ‘bit of gaming, bit of porn, a sex show, but no evidence of prostitution’,’’ Condon writes.

But Powell believed he had enough to lay some charges and left to obtain warrants.

He returned with licensing and local CIB officers and it was during the raid that he copped abuse from a fellow officer for trying to do his duty.

Condon writes that Powell later told the Fitzgerald Inquiry: “While the investigation was proceeding and the penthouse was still full of customers and potential defendants, Detective Pat Glancy of the Gold Coast CIB stood in the middle of the penthouse and abused me savagely, calling me a (expletive) and accusing me of ‘giving up my mates’.’’

All Fall Down is the third and final instalment in former Bulletin reporter Condon’s trilogy about crooked cops, bagmen and blackmail.