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Former mayor, businessman and active Wollongong citizen, Tony Bevan was a community man: founder of Wollongong’s shark watch patrol service, boss of a travel agency and real estate business (still operating in Wollongong), and owner of a collection of properties from the penthouse in the Creston Apartments in Wollongong to a farm in West Dapto. After serving a decade on the Wollongong City Council between 1961-1972 as mayor and alderman, Bevan was personally awarded a Certificate of Merit and a Gold Police Citizen Badge from then Commissioner of Police, Norman Allen.

Yet behind all this lurked repressed immorality: Bevan was attracted to underaged boys. He would take special trips across South East Asia, recruiting boys by showering them with gifts, taking them for rides in his private aeroplane, providing them with accommodation and allowances, and generally promising them a better life. Once he had developed relationships, the boys would be used to recruit others, initiating them into Bevan’s network of male prostitutes he circulated in Wollongong and Sydney. In the 1990s Royal Commission into Police Corruption, Justice Wood found that Bevan was at the centre of a Wollongong-based paedophile ring.

From the early 1970s until the late 1980s, Bevan presided over a chilling operation that involved prostituting boys to a network of wealthy businessmen and politicians in Wollongong and Sydney.

Under the codename of the ‘Royal Party’, Bevan would regularly accompany a group of boys (each of which he would give a female name such as Miss Revesby or Miss D), to Costello’s, a gay nightclub in Kings Cross. The club was known to be a hotbed of illegal activity, for which the ‘Golden Mile’ was renowned.  With the assistance of Costello’s owner John McClean, Bevan would use the upstairs rooms as a brothel, charging $80 per session with one of his boys.

Police corruption in the Cross was rampant. Before any raids on Costello’s, McClean would receive a phone call tip off from police, allowing him to clear out any illegal activities. Bevan’s boys were frequently forced to jump out windows or were hidden inside the club while the police conducted raids, usually in relation to liquor licence infringements.

On one particular occasion in 1979, police spoke to Bevan, who was accompanied by a thirteen year-old from Wollongong on club premises. Bevan apparently told police he was there “on business”, and was left alone – no further enquiries were made.

However, it wasn’t just the Cross cops who allowed such activity to go on undisturbed. The Royal Commission reported a series complaints made to Wollongong police about Bevan and paedophilic activity in the Illawarra. These ranged from sexual assault and rape accusations to complaints about Bevan’s ‘Royal Party’ trips to Sydney. It was not until the mid-1980s that police launched a small intelligence inquiry into Bevan’s activities and in late 1990 concrete information began to emerge.

A police informant reported that Bevan was hosting ‘paedophile parties’, similar to the nights at Costello’s, in his Creston Hotel penthouse. The informant also uncovered an alarming network of high-profile paedophiles operating in Wollongong. All this information was documented in a report, yet there was no further police investigation into Bevan’s associates.

Bevan died of cancer in 1992, well before most of his wrongdoing could be brought before the public.