KEY POINTS:
Suspended assistant police commissioner Clint Rickards is broke and says his career is in tatters - but insists he should still get his old job back.
Rickards, who has been stood down on full pay since rape allegations involving then 18-year-old Rotorua woman Louise Nicholas surfaced in 2004,
is believed to have spent $500,000 defending the historic claims - with no guarantee that he will be reinstated as Auckland police commander.
"Yes, I'm broke," he reveals in a TV3 television interview screening tomorrow night, but he says the financial cost has been nothing compared with the toll the two court cases have taken on his family.
"Yes, my career has been destroyed. Yes, my life has been destroyed. At the end of the day, it's the impact on my family that's been the major issue for me," he says.
Rickards maintains he should get his job back, despite serious questions now over his suitability for the role and fears that his reinstatement could further undermine public confidence in the police.
He says that while he is not proud of his behaviour, as far as he is concerned, he has done nothing wrong. He has confirmed that he was seen by deputy police commissioner Steve Long in 2004, days before the Nicholas allegations went public, when it was suggested that he consider resigning.
Rickards was astonished, as he had presumed he was innocent until proven guilty. "I did things I'm ashamed of, given I was in a relationship and had two young kids, but I'm no rapist," Rickards told the Sunday Star-Times.
He was reluctant to be drawn on whether it was an abuse of power for police officers to have "group sex", saying: "I think that if you say that, it's degrading to women. We are talking about consensual sex. I could have been Jo IRD or Jo Fireman. I'm not proud of some of the things I've done, and I make no excuses for them. A lot of it was my fault," he told the newspaper.
When Rickards discovered that Nicholas was going public with the allegations, he rang his former partner, who also now lives in Auckland, to inform her that he had cheated on her during their relationship. Rickards remembers her telling him he was an "arsehole".
However, this wasn't the only time Rickards had been unfaithful.
When he moved from Rotorua to Hawke's Bay in the mid-1980s, he began an affair with his current wife Tania Eden, who at the time was in a relationship with a Hastings freezing worker.
Eden had just entered the police force and like Rickards was later to enjoy a meteoric rise through the ranks. She has since quit her job as an inspector and now works for Work and Income.
Between them, the couple has five children, including 22-year-old Southland and Highlanders rugby wing Willie Rickards.
"Her partner was pretty cut up about it at the time. Rickards had befriended both of them and then ended up running away with Eden," a former colleague of Rickards told the Herald on Sunday.
Whether Rickards returns to his $150,000-plus-a-year job is now in the hands of the police, but some, like former Police Association boss Rob Moodie, suggested he would have a difficult time, given the fallout from the two trials and his criticism outside court last week of the Operation Austin investigation.
Last week, Rickards and former policemen Brad Shipton and Bob Schollum were cleared of charges of kidnapping and indecently assaulting a 16-year-old in Rotorua between November 1983 and August 1984. The verdicts were followed by the lifting of suppression orders that had prevented the jury from knowing that Shipton and Schollum were currently serving 8 1/2 years and eight years, respectively, in prison for the rape of a woman at Mt Maunganui in the late 1980s.
Shipton is now facing fresh allegations of sexual violation against a woman 12 years ago. Shipton is eligible for parole in 14 months and Schollum in a year. Rickards said words could not describe the relief at the verdict last week. "Bob broke first, Brad was next. I'd given Bob my hanky, but by the time it was down to the last few [not guilty verdicts], I needed my hanky back," he told a newspaper.
However, there is still more to come, with the Police Complaints Authority now clear to resume its investigations into the rape allegations.
A former senior officer with a significant role in police management in police national headquarters throughout the 90s told the Herald on Sunday that there had been disbelief that Rickards had progressed so far and so quickly within the police, given that the allegations had been so widely known. "It was the stuff of bar-room comment," the former officer, who did not wish to be named, said.
"Throughout a wide level of police management - and indeed around the country - there was consternation that someone like Rickards was on the road to rapid promotion.
"He had tattoos on his arm, a shaven head and was always wearing sunnies.
"He looked like a gang member, and there were concerns about whether this was the sort of image we wanted to portray."
The general belief was that former commissioner Rob Robinson, who worked with Rickards in Rotorua, was intent on making him commissioner of police.
Robinson could not be reached for comment but has previously defended promoting Rickards. He had been aware that Rickards had admitted to "consensual sex" with Nicholas, but he did not believe that was necessarily an employment issue.
Former detective chief inspector Rex Miller - who investigated the Nicholas rape allegations for the Police Complaints Authority - was reluctant to discuss the case or Rickards' future, saying only that he was "surprised totally" at last week's verdict.