Inside story: How a bikie debt collector brought down a Perth pillar of parliament

Laurence Bernhard Marquet — or Laurie to his vast and eclectic circle of friends — was a powerful servant of the West Australian parliament.

For 23 years, Marquet had been a trusted sounding board, confidante and troubleshooter to hundreds of members of parliament as they negotiated their way through the labyrinth of rules, standing orders, protocols, procedures and pitfalls that are part and parcel of being a legislator.

He was the clerk of the Legislative Council, also referred to as the upper house.

The role carried with it the official title of clerk of parliaments. It is a position integral to reviewing and passing laws with royal assent.

Marquet was also a secret drug addict and a fraudster.

With a daily need for amphetamines sourced from criminals, Marquet had become the most compromised senior public servant in the country.

At certain points of my career I have used the term “small town, big connections” to describe surprising links between elements of Perth’s establishment, corporate sector, and organised crime.

Back in the mid-2000s the city’s population was 1.4 million and the separation between power and corruption was becoming wafer-thin.

It would not be long before a newly formed corruption and crime commission would rock politics in Western Australia to its core.

In 2006-2007, four ministers in the then Alan Carpenter-led Labor government were sacked or forced to resign over a suite of revelations made possible by a CCC probe’s telephone taps, hidden microphones and visual surveillance.

In 2005, a year before that scandal began playing out publicly, the CCC was already focusing its crosshairs on Marquet.

But it was T3, the secret operative I’d met two years earlier in a Como hotel for the interview described in part one of this story, who closed the net.

On Monday, August 8, 2005, I was sitting at my desk in The West Australian’s Osborne Park office when colleague Sean Cowan came walking towards me excitedly waving a media release from the Corruption and Crime Commission.

“CCC charges senior state parliamentary officer,” it read.

“A senior officer of the parliament is to appear on 55 charges including corruption, stealing and drug offences.”

My blood was rushing and Cowan knew why.

One night over a few beers – or in Cowan’s case, Scotch and Coke with no ice – I relayed the tantalising tale shared with me about Marquet before swearing my workmate to secrecy. Keeping it to myself had been agonising. I had to tell someone just in case the seemingly far-fetched allegation of a speed junkie running parliament became a fact.

Without naming Marquet, the media statement said the public officer was charged with stealing more than $227,000 as a servant.

The kicker was that Marquet was charged with having methamphetamine in his possession after being arrested by the CCC. This was a truly sensational story and Cowan and I knew The Sunday Times would be sifting through the information provided by T3 to me almost two years earlier, which at the time I had been forced to relinquish and unable to report.

After wrestling with how to get myself back in the story before the weekend, I went and told my editor what I had known about Marquet. We decided the best approach was to track down T3 fast and interview him all over again.

Yes, I had kept the mobile phone number he gave me at the Broadwater in 2003, but I was fearful the “on the run” informant had ditched it long ago.

The first time I dialled there was no answer and I decided not to leave a message.

“Who is this?” read a text to my phone soon after.

“Gary Adshead. I met you in 2003,” was my reply.

T3 was not only aware of the charges levelled against Marquet, but he also claimed to have been crucial in the three-week CCC operation.

He agreed to meet once more, but this time I would have to go further than Como. I hung up and quickly headed home to pack for the airport.

T3 was almost 700 kilometres from Perth, working on a cattle farm on the outskirts of the southern coastal town of Esperance. There was an early evening flight and I didn’t want to miss it.

When I came face-to-face with T3 for the second time in as many years, the ex-soldier had more grey hair and was close to being a chain-smoker. Sitting in a drab motel room located on the Esplanade facing the Southern Ocean, T3 began.

A staff member of parliament had suspected the clerk of signing off on bogus invoices. A secret audit in mid-2005 confirmed something was amiss, and the CCC was informed.

According to T3, some of the fake invoices were in the name of a fictitious law firm and were supposedly issued by a partner of the bogus business.

That phantom partner had T3’s real name. When the CCC showed him proof of the fraud being carried out using his identity, T3 was furious.

The Zimbabwean-born former Selous Scout in the Rhodesian Bush War was adamant he had not played any role in the scam and agreed to help the CCC, which at that time included an investigator he knew well from the royal commission’s investigation into Gary Fagg.

T3 told me he was still bitter about his treatment by the commission, but he had moved on and relished the prospect of being useful to a new undercover operation.

He enjoyed the art of deception and was not at all sympathetic about Marquet’s personal plight.

By the time T3’s mission to expose the clerk’s illicit drug use and fraud began, Marquet was chronically ill and living at Cottage Hospice in the western suburb of Shenton Park.

Wearing a hidden microphone, T3 visited the hospice in July 2005, and confronted the dying man about “rumours” he had heard.

“I told him I thought there was an investigation into him stealing money and I demanded to know where the money had gone if it was true,” T3 explained.

“He told me he’d shot it all up his arm.”

That damning taped confession was more than enough evidence for the CCC to pounce on.

But soon after executing search warrants on Marquet – and allegedly finding the crystal meth – the anti-corruption agency realised it had a major integrity issue of its own.

There was, according to T3, “a rat in the ranks”. Someone senior inside the agency was suspected of tipping off Marquet by warning him his phone calls were being monitored as part of a broader CCC surveillance operation.

The sad story of a gravely ill public servant with a drug problem would escalate into a national scandal.

The person who told Marquet his phone was bugged turned out to be none other than an acting commissioner of the CCC.

Moira Rayner was a highly regarded human rights barrister. She was also a long-term friend of Marquet’s and, on August 2, 2005, she went to visit him in the hospice.

“I found him changed, physically and mentally,” she told Western Australia’s Parliamentary Inspector Malcolm McCusker during an interview two weeks after her visit.

“I was aware that Mr Marquet might have attempted to pervert the course of justice that very day. My concern was to discourage Mr Marquet from seeking to conceal or destroy evidence – and from suicide.”

Rayner – who described her warning to Marquet as “injudicious” – resigned from the CCC. She was later charged and acquitted of corruption after a jury found her comment to Marquet was a slip of the tongue.

Marquet quit as clerk of parliaments in disgrace and died nine months later in Royal Perth Hospital on April 22, 2006. He was 59.

The terminal illness formed lesions on his brain and would end his life before the string of corruption and drug charges hanging over his head could be judged by a court.

Eight months before his death, I sent Marquet a letter offering him an opportunity to put some context around his shameful public downfall.

“I find it difficult to believe that after the career you have experienced, you would want the last chapter of your life to be about a man addicted to drugs and stealing from the public,” I wrote.

He did not respond.

As for T3, he was accused by the CCC of leaking confidential information about the Marquet and Rayner investigations to me.

“While the use of informers in some operations is critical, not being officers of the commission, [it] can present risks,” wrote CCC Commissioner Kevin Hammond in a report to a committee of parliament.

But the threat of charges blew over, and the man who had shared some of the most startling true stories of my career disappeared again.

Two numbers, which I had relied upon to contact T3 during that intriguing three-year period, remain in my mobile phone directory to this day.

I tried dialling them both before beginning this series for WAtoday. Perhaps we might meet up one day at the Broadwater Hotel in Como and discuss what the man called T3 has been up to for the past 14 years, I thought.

There was no answer, and I remembered his remark during our first 2003 meeting.

“I doubt I will live to grow old through all this,” he said.

Perhaps we will never cross paths again.

Next week on The Reporter: This fugitive con artist fooled health departments across Australia. Until the day her phone rang

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