BENT

In 1934 Mr Justice Macrossan, sitting in Brisbane, was suitably prescient when dealing with the talented, although often convicted, safe breaker Harry Terry. Then aged forty-nine, Terry pleaded guilty to yet another charge of warehouse breaking after tobacco and gelignite were found in a room in Union Street, Spring Hill. His story was that he had been asked by three detectives in 1929 to burgle the home of Judge Henchman, who had, they said, unfairly criticised them. They would fence the proceeds for him and he would get all the money. Unsurprisingly, the detectives denied this and Macrossan called his story a pack of lies, adding, ‘if it is accepted for one minute [this] would mean that the police force in Queensland needs a good sorting out’. Terry received five years and was declared a habitual criminal. He was carried fighting from the dock. His appeal against the declaration was dismissed.

Queensland police were part of a political machine. Brisbane was the equivalent of an old time American city and the police were simply the arm of corrupt state government. New South Wales was never as bad as Queensland.

One pre-condition of corruption is an illegal market, such as in alcohol, gambling, prostitution and drugs, which is widely popular. By the 1970s there was a seam of corruption running through the police, not merely at ground level but to the very top. The cause was the rake-off from permitting prostitution and illegal gambling. The rewards were high, and politicians—some of whom were beneficiaries—were unwilling to do anything about it.

Queensland had always had something of a laissez-faire attitude to prostitution, but when the talented, if corrupt, detective Frank Erich Bischof—another who set up a police pipe and drum band—was appointed commissioner of Queensland police in 1958, he shut down the brothels in the Brisbane inner city by the simple, expedient of padlocking the doors. The now closed houses included the best known, the Killarney, which was not far from South Brisbane railway station and had been operating since at least the Second World War and possibly for up to fifty years. From time to time it had housed Shirley Brifman, usually known as ‘Marge’, who had a side line as a police informant. Like so many in the trade, Brifman divided her working life between Queensland and New South Wales. Very quickly an arrangement was made with hotel managers to allow girls to solicit in the lounges, and one who did so was the quick-witted and garrulous Brifman.

From 1957 to 1965 Bischof, who had also set up a juvenile bureau with his protégé Terence Lewis in charge, had been collecting graft from bookmakers on a massive scale. The police minister interviewed him and he was allowed to continue in his position on an undertaking to stop the racket. He never did. Bets by him went into a book under the initial ‘B’. When he won the rest of his name was added and when he lost it was entered as a fictitious name beginning with ‘B’.

On 29 October 1963 the Labor member for South Brisbane, Colin Bennett, speaking in parliament, told members, ‘many of the (police) force are disillusioned, frustrated and discouraged’. He went on to maintain:

the Police Commissioner and his colleagues who frequent the National Hotel, encouraging and condoning the call girl service that operates there, would be better occupied in preventing such activities rather than tolerating them.

His allegations were quickly denounced as the product of ‘infantile imagination’.

On 3 November 1963 The Sunday Truth, a committed supporter of Bischof’s, attacked Bennett for having exposed the commissioner.

Its front page leader read:

The campaign Mr Colin Bennett MLA is waging against the Police Commissioner Mr Bischof is now completely out of control and in the public interest the State Government can move in only one way. It must order an immediate Royal Commission.

The facts are that the honour and integrity of the Queensland Police Commissioner have been attacked … His name has got to be cleared.

Bennett persisted in his attacks and some months later a royal commission was set up under Harry Gibbs QC and witnesses were asked to come forward. The response was limited. At that time Brisbane was still a large country town where anyone who was anyone knew everyone else. The locals could hardly be expected to speak up and damage their standing in the community, so it was left to outsiders. One who did so, to his cost, was David Young, a one-time barman at the National Hotel who also acted as a sort of night manager. Young would tell the commission that he had seen Bischof and other officers drinking in the hotel after hours. He also claimed that he had served the malign detective Tony Murphy and other officers with liquor after hours, and had seen prostitutes such as Brifman, Val Weidinger and Lilly Ryan soliciting at the hotel. He also told Gibbs that shortly before he was due to give evidence he had received a threatening telephone call warning him not to do so.

Much of the inquiry was given over to ‘kick Young time’, a game played with great enthusiasm and no little skill by the participating barristers and also to a lesser extent by Gibbs. Young’s past—the number of jobs he had held and had left in short order—was thoroughly raked over. Contradictions in his evidence were seized on with delight and he was also accused of running the girls himself. John Geza Komlosy, another witness who had also worked in the hotel as a porter, said that some of the girls actually lived in the place. Unfortunately, years earlier he had been convicted over a bounced cheque and his evidence was similarly trashed. There was some evidence that women were regularly sitting into the middle of the night drinking in the hotel. Quite what Gibbs thought they were actually doing there went unrecorded.

The police would have nothing of the allegations. They said they had never drunk there and Murphy, who claimed he had arrested more prostitutes than any other officer, said he did not know Brifman was a prostitute and indeed he had been unable to contact her to attend the commission. Officers who lined up to deny that the National was the late-night home-from-home for Brisbane’s working girls included Terence Lewis, Donald ‘Shady’ Lane, Ron Redmond and the English-born bagman Jack Herbert. All would feature prominently in the later Fitzgerald inquiry.

Detective Glen Hallahan, described by Don ‘Shady’ Lane as a man with a ‘taste for fashion and cologne’, didn’t recognise Brifman as a prostitute either, but Young identified him as the man who had made the threatening call to him. Gibbs was not told that Hallahan had just been suspended. A Gary William Campbell had pleaded guilty to having insufficient means of support and received six months. He appealed against the severity of the sentence and told the Full Court in September 1963 that he had been taken from his place of employment, a sound lounge, to his flat, where Hallahan had told him he would be loaded with house-breaking implements if he did not plead guilty to the insufficient means. Hallahan’s evidence was described as a ‘fraud on the court’. He was suspended a week before he was due to appear at the commission.

Later, in a closed disciplinary hearing, Hallahan was cleared of giving inaccurate information. He was fined £3 for not keeping his police diary up to date. The barrister in charge of the proceedings had apparently heard exonerating evidence from another detective and from John Hannay, Campbell’s then employer and later the manager of the ill-fated Whiskey Au Go Go nightclub.

There was one officer, however, who did identify Brifman as a prostitute, and so suddenly, on 28 January 1964, she appeared at the inquiry in a demure white suit and picture hat to refute any allegations that she was a working girl. Rehearsed by Murphy, she also took the opportunity of denouncing Young, telling the inquiry, quite falsely, ‘He done an abortion on me’ at a flat at New Farm. She also claimed that Young had told her about renting rooms and selling liquor at the National. She hadn’t heard about the inquiry until her name was mentioned, even though she had been in Brisbane over Christmas. There was nothing about it in the Sydney papers.

In April that year Gibbs wrote in his report:

Young is a man of poor moral character and unstable temperament and I cannot regard him as a witness whose evidence may be believed or acted upon unless corroborated by that of some other witness who is himself reliable.

Young did at least fare better than the even more unfortunate witness Komlosy, who was thought by Gibbs to be ‘not sane’. A priest had been called to say that the night porter could not be believed, but he was not allowed to be asked why. Gibbs wrote:

It is obvious Komlosy was quite unreliable as a witness. His evidence contained violent inconsistencies and a curious compound of fact, hearsay, exaggeration, theory, invention and even hallucination.

In his report Gibbs made a positive finding that:

No member of the Police Force … has been guilty of misconduct or neglect or violation of duty since the ninth day of October 1958 in relation to the policing of the National Hotel … no call-girl service was operated at the said Hotel, and no member of the Police Force encouraged, condoned or sanctioned in any way the practice of prostitution at that Hotel.

Which shows that justice can be blind. Gibbs also ruled that the limited terms of the commission did not require him to consider the policing of prostitution or to examine corruption in the licensing and consorting squads. Unfortunately, the failure of his commission encouraged the escalating corruption of the next twenty years. After the inquiry concluded, the unkind joke was that he was ‘the only man in Queensland who could not find a tart in the National Hotel’. It was a classic example of how to run a royal commission and come up with satisfactory answers for the government.

In general, in the twentieth century the judiciary at inquiries into police misconduct were often incapable of accepting, or unwilling to accept, evidence that at a certain stage of corruption officers feel they are quite able to act openly. In the 1982 Western Australian Dixon inquiry into police corruption, one officer alleged wholesale corruption and that payouts were made at a lunch party in the public dining room of a hotel. His whole evidence was trashed, among other things on the basis that it was impossible police would have handed out envelopes containing illicit money in public—rather like the belief that sex can only take place with the lights out. But the evidence worldwide is that corrupt police become impervious to public scrutiny. An example is the activities of the Scotland Yard obscene publications squad in the 1970s:

Thousands of pounds’ worth of pay-offs were changing hands every week in Soho’s pubs, coffee bars, clubs and mews often in full view of the public on the street.

Thanks to the machinations of Murphy and others and the near-sightedness of Gibbs, Bischof’s reputation survived intact. The compulsive gambler retired in 1970 and four years later was charged with shoplifting. He had actually been committed for trial before the charges were dropped. It was only after his death on 28 August 1979 that allegations began to surface he had been involved in massive graft involving SP bookmakers. In 1982 the state treasurer revealed that as early as 1964 bookmakers paid annual protection to the police ranging from the equivalent of $80 000 in large towns to $20 000 in small country ones. Additionally, and this is what really riled them, top-ups were constantly being demanded. In 1989 Fitzgerald found ‘in some respects police corruption had acquired a quaint quasi-legitimacy by the Bischof era’.

Seven years on from the National Hotel inquiry, on 15 June 1971 Shirley Brifman came clean—or reasonably so—when she told This Day Tonight on New South Wales television that she had lied to the Gibbs commission. In fact she had been a working girl in Sydney from 1965 to 1969, conducting her business at one of the city’s well-known hotels with the full knowledge of the management, something she said was common in all large hotels. She had run a brothel and paid protection money to the Sydney vice squad. She had given evidence at the Gibbs inquiry at Murphy’s request, in return for the promise of protection both in New South Wales and Queensland. She had spoken with Murphy, been drinking with another girl and had picked up a client in the time between her arrival from Sydney and her giving evidence. She also said that Bischof had shut the brothels solely due to a fit of pique because while he was on holiday Murphy, Hallahan and Lewis, whom she knew as the ‘Collect Boys’, had moved in, picking up protection money due to him. By then, however, her confession was far too little and far too late.

In due course she and MLA Colin Bennett were interviewed by Assistant Police Commissioner Duncan. During the meeting she allegedly claimed that Hallahan had committed perjury: he knew very well that she and Irene Dale, who had over fifty convictions, were prostitutes. She also said that Murphy had lied when he said he did not know where she, Brifman, could be found and that he would be unable to help find her.

In September 1971 she told Superintendent Norman Gulbransen, who had once remarked, ‘The rewards for dishonesty are greater than for honesty’ and was described at his death as one of ‘the last of the honest policemen’:

Murphy was always there. He was at the hotel, everywhere. On duty, when he should have been somewhere he was with me. He would carry on his duty at the office and make me sit on the desk … Then Glen [Hallahan] came into the picture, and Terry [Lewis] was in the picture too.

On 5 February 1972 Murphy was charged with perjury. As might have been expected, his statement of denial was robust:

I have been charged because of untrue malicious statements by Shirley Brifman, a drug addict, a self-confessed perjurer, informer and prostitute.

On 4 March 1972 Brifman was found dead in her flat in Clayfield, Brisbane, apparently having committed suicide but leaving no note. She and her husband had been due to appear in Sydney on 17 March charged with procuring under-age girls, including her daughter. Investigation of the death was cursory. Coroner William Laherty thought that there would be no good purpose in holding an inquest, and he ruled that Brifman had taken her own life. Her file was marked ‘IDU’—inquest deemed unnecessary. Without Brifman in the witness box, after a four-day hearing the magistrate found that no properly instructed jury would convict and refused to commit Murphy for trial.

But who were these witnesses at the National Hotel inquiry, in particular Murphy, Hallahan and Lewis, who had given what was blatantly false evidence to Gibbs? They were a clearly established triumvirate who were in control of graft in the Queensland police. Two, Anthony ‘Tony’ Murphy and Glendon Patrick Hallahan, were from the Catholic faction and Terence Lewis had aligned himself with them. Ultimately, he was the highest ranking of them, a man who had been awarded a Churchill fellowship to go to England and whose later promotion from sergeant to commissioner had been meteoric. But firmly in charge of the ‘Rat Pack’, as they became known, was the then senior detective sergeant Tony Murphy.

Murphy, born in 1927, was ‘very corrupt and very sinister, a pivotal player’, said one Brisbane lawyer. In the mid-1980s a group of officers calling themselves the Committee of Eight wrote to the police minister and Premier Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, alleging that the Rat Pack was controlling crime. They suggested that close attention be paid to a number of incidents, all of which had involved Murphy, beginning with the death of Shirley Brifman and continuing with the death of Detective Sergeant JD Connor in the grounds of the All Nations club in Mareeba on 15 October 1978. The list of incidents included the 1973 Whiskey Au Go Go fire; arson at a tourist development on the Sunshine Coast; the murder of Jack Cooper, manager of the National Hotel, in 1971; TAB and other armed robberies carried out by the so-called Bikie Bandits; arson at a nightclub in Cairns running in opposition to the House on the Hill; drug dealing involving the Mr Asia group in the late 1970s and the use of police planes in drug and fauna smuggling; the disappearance of rub-and-tug madam Simone Vogler; and the 1976 Beerburrum mail and Bookmakers robberies in South Brisbane.

The document concluded:

If you are a policeman, money is nothing more than a magnet attracting the ugly corollaries of robbery and violent crime.

The reference to the Bikie Bandits related to early 1983, when six police officers attached to the CIB were charged with perjury and four were also charged with providing heroin to two of the men while they were held in the watch house. None of the police was suspended and two were promoted while awaiting trial. Lewis was opposed to suspensions of the police involved because he did not think that the offences would be repeated and they were not ‘a very serious offence like going out and engaging in shooting of some sort’. After the Crown decided not to proceed with the prosecutions of the police officers, Lewis, along with politician Sir Edward ‘Top-Level Ted’ Lyons and other senior officers, attended a celebratory party.

Certainly Murphy had come under some fire in the 1983 Stewart report on drug trafficking. The commissioner thought information he had given journalist Brian Bolton contained sufficient material to confirm to a suspicious and vengeful Terrence Clark, leader of the Mr Asia syndicate, that two of his drug runners, Douglas and Isobel Wilson, had dobbed him in, so leading to their deaths.

Murphy was also alleged to have been involved in the 1979 disappearance of Norman ‘The Doorman’ Ford, a painters and dockers union hanger-on whom police wanted to interview about extortion and stolen-car rackets. Later a police officer on the Ford investigation said Murphy gave him a list of people to whom he could and could not speak. The list included two police officers who were ‘off limits’.

After he retired from the police in 1983, Murphy was controversially awarded the license for a TAB on Stradbroke Island, allegedly as the result of representations by National Party powerbroker Sir Edward Lyons who, curiously, had an apartment in the same block as bagman Jack Herbert.

Glen Hallahan joined the force in February 1952, at the age of twenty. He had first come under public scrutiny in 1958, when as the youngest detective in Queensland, he took part in the arrest at Mount Isa of Raymond John Bailey, who was later hanged for what was known as the Sundown Murders of Sally Bowman, her daughter Wendy and their friend Thomas Whelan in the northern South Australian outback. Much of the evidence against Bailey rested on a highly disputed confession to Hallahan.

According to notes from Superintendant Gulbransen’s questioning, in 1971 Shirley Brifman recalled:

Glen hit the pot over the Sundown murder … I used to cop it night after night. Hallahan said that the real killer was free. It did really play on his mind and I thought he was going to go off his head over it. At that stage I would say he was not crooked but after that he went bad. I never saw anything eat a man inside like that did.

Terence Lewis would later tell the Williams Royal Commission in 1980 that he had possibly worked with Murphy during an abortion inquiry but that he did not really know him. He certainly knew Hallahan and in most favourable circumstances. On 8 August 1959 the pair had been awarded the George Cross for bravery when they disarmed German-born seaman Gunther Ernst Martin Bahnemann, who had been bashing his wife, Ada. After he threatened her with a gun she telephoned the police, and when Lewis and Hallahan arrived to arrest him he fired at them. Bahnemann was convicted of attempted murder. Over the years doubt has been cast on whether he actually was the dangerous man portrayed by Lewis and Hallahan.

Less worthy was Hallahan’s relationship with robber and standover man Donald Ross ‘The Hammer’ Kelly, who in 1972 had been arrested over the August 1970 raid on the Bank of New South Wales at Kedron. Sentenced to eight years, he then made allegations that he had given Hallahan $900 of the takings of $2750. On 29 June 1972 the stipendiary magistrate ruled that there was no case for Hallahan to answer. Even if he believed Kelly, he was an accomplice, and there was no corroborative evidence. There had also been allegations that Hallahan had dealt in forged banknotes, and on one occasion a man arrested in Townsville with such notes claimed that Hallahan had given them to him.

The third of the trio was Terence Lewis, who before his appointment as commissioner had had a chequered career. On the credit side were the awards to him of the George Cross and a Churchill fellowship for his work in the Juvenile Aid Bureau. In the 1985 Police Source Book 2 brief histories of the forces were provided and the contributor on Queensland wrote:

The Lewis period [as Commissioner] has been relatively uneventful except for perhaps one significant change. In 1982 the government established a Police Complaints Tribunal as a result of massive public pressure surrounding allegations of police corruption and cover-ups.

The man who turned police corruption into an art form was the tall, thin Jack Herbert, an English policeman who in 1947 emigrated first to Victoria and then to Queensland, where he joined the force in 1949. It was not until 1959 that he joined the licensing branch, a squad of around two dozen officers, and became involved in taking bribes from SP bookmakers and casino and brothel owners—a process known as ‘The Joke’. He maintained that he had first slipped from the path of righteousness when he had to pay heavy medical bills after his wife became ill. He would always deny that he was involved in the drug trade, but there is little doubt that drugs were washing around the Herbert-protected massage parlours in Fortitude Valley owned by Hector Hapeta.

In October 1974 Herbert retired from the force on the grounds of ill health and in December was charged with corruption. Two years later he was acquitted after cleverly turning the hearing into a trial of the officers accusing him. It was a tactic the Rat Pack regularly used, smearing and framing honest officers such as Arthur Potts, Basil Hicks and Alec Jepperson. From then on Herbert was more or less untouchable. In 1977 he began working for Jack Rooklyn of the pokie company Bally Machines and others in the ‘in-line’ gaming industry, and began making substantial payments on their behalf to senior officers. Four years later he was the Rat Pack’s official bagman, taking money from prostitutes, brothel owners, SP bookmakers and gambling and in-line operations. In all, he claimed that he had collected $3 million on behalf of Lewis and the other members of the pack.

The quartet was firmly behind Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen and equally firmly against undesirables such as homosexuals, Aboriginals, and demonstrating students and hippies, not necessarily in that order.

Bischof’s successor was South Australia’s Ray Whitrod, another sometimes described as ‘The Last of the Honest Cops’, but also as a ‘fence sitter’ and a ‘quitter’ by disgruntled officers. He became Queensland’s police commissioner in 1970 and immediately set out to eradicate corruption. At the time the standard of education of the force was abysmal. Whitrod tried to improve things, bringing women into all fields of policing and arguing that officers should be educated to at least the standard of an apprentice carpenter or bricklayer. He arranged for the Queensland education department to provide officers with classes in literacy and basic arithmetic, and as an inducement to attend, he offered an extra week’s leave for every subject they sat. The Police Union objected so strongly that they bypassed both Whitrod and the police minister, Max Hodges, and complained directly to the premier. Bjelke-Petersen, himself a former police minister, endorsed the union’s stand and publicly declared that ‘the Queensland people do not require their police to be Rhodes scholars’.

As an outsider, Whitrod did not realise that Brisbane was not as sophisticated as Melbourne and he got off to a bad start, something that told against him throughout his time as commissioner. He arranged a showing of the film Ryan’s Daughter on behalf of the Queensland Police Citizens Youth Welfare Association, but the bedroom scenes were too strong for the provincial Queensland audience and he was heavily criticised.

He found a complete culture of corruption in the city, so much so that he would be approached by members of his luncheon club and asked to cancel their traffic tickets. At the other end of the spectrum, he found that candidates did well in police promotion examinations—mainly because the questions were sent to police stations the night before the exams and handed to the applicants.

Even his efforts to remove malign influences failed. In 1973 he sent Terence Lewis to work in Charleville, over 700 kilometres from Brisbane, for what was described as ‘the good of the force’. It was a strategic mistake, stemming from his lack of knowledge of Queensland’s geography. Not only did Lewis obtain kudos through his handling of a flood disaster there but also he charmed politicians when Charleville was the first halt on their whistle-stop tours of the state.

Over a period of time Whitrod was undermined and defeated by the very strong Police Union. In July 1976, after student demonstrations, he announced that there would be an internal investigation over complaints that a young girl had been struck by a police baton. The police opposed the inquiry and the announcement was countermanded by Bjelke-Petersen. Police Minister Max Hodges, who had supported Whitrod, lost his portfolio. The police had now not simply been policing, they had identified with the interests they were protecting, for example, the Springboks rugby union team. The demonstrators had become the deviants.

Throughout his term Whitrod and his wife were subjected to harassment and intimidation. Unordered taxis turned up, sometimes three or four times a night, to take him to the airport; although he had an unlisted number he would receive calls from strangers enquiring about his health; a specialist came to his house at three o’clock in the morning because he had been told by police headquarters that Whitrod was having a heart attack; he had a large load of gravel he had not purchased dumped on his front garden. He became so frightened for his and his wife’s safety that he took to sleeping with a revolver under his pillow. A large number of personal files detailing police corruption were mysteriously lost in transit between Brisbane and Canberra.

During his time as commissioner Whitrod charged twenty-three officers with offences related to corruption. The Crown law department advised that the chances of a successful prosecution were excellent, but none of the officers was convicted.

The last straw for Whitrod was the 1976 appointment of Lewis as his assistant commissioner. The position had become vacant, and Whitrod advised Cabinet of his preferred candidate and the names of two others also acceptable to him and to the Police Union. It had always been Cabinet practice to endorse the commissioner’s recommendation for his assistant. In this case, however, the Cabinet chose Lewis, still an inspector, who was less qualified for the position than at least sixty other men. Whitrod believed, quite rightly, that all his efforts over the preceding seven years to eradicate corruption would be undermined if the appointment went ahead. Now he told Police Minister Tom Newbery, ‘This is pretty shattering to me; it’s widely known in the force that Lewis was one of Frank Bischof’s bagmen’. Newbery replied, ‘That was when he was a sergeant; he wouldn’t do that sort of thing now’. When Whitrod asked him if that was Cabinet’s thinking, Newbery said that it was. Then Whitrod asked to speak to Bjelke-Petersen. The premier refused an audience, and he wouldn’t allow Whitrod to address Cabinet on the matter. That night Whitrod wrote his resignation. The question of Lewis’s alleged corruption was again raised in Cabinet, this time by Liberal Fred Campbell, but Lewis was appointed commissioner on 22 November 1976. Consumed by his belief that he had failed to eradicate corruption in Queensland, and believing that police chiefs Sir Robert Mark and Patrick Murphy had succeeded in London and New York respectively, Whitrod returned to South Australia. There he was a leading figure in founding the Victims of Crime Service that followed from the Truro and Family murders. He died at the age of eighty-eight in July 2003.

Another opportunity to clean out corruption was seemingly lost at the 1980 Williams Royal Commission into alleged involvement in the illegal drug trade by Queensland parliamentarians and senior police. Part of the inquiry resulted from the arrest of John Ernest Milligan, a Brisbane district court associate turned drug dealer. Never the most reliable of men, Milligan, when short of money in his court days, was said to have done a little shoplifting at Myer at lunchtime and would hold a shirt sale when the court rose. In September 1979 he was caught following a heroin parachute drop at Jane Table Mountain in Far North Queensland, for which he received ten years.

Cooperation after an arrest is usually rewarded by a lesser sentence, and now Milligan began to make a series of statements incriminating a Brisbane customs officer along with Hallahan, Murphy and Lewis. The three all denied any misconduct, and Hallahan explained that he had borrowed money from Milligan on one occasion and that he had sold the drug dealer a piece of land and cattle. Williams, accepting the evidence of these fine officers, ruled that what evidence there was ‘falls far short of establishing as even a reasonable possibility that Hallahan has ever been involved in wrong-doing in connection with illegal drugs’. This was unsurprising. Milligan, probably realising on which side his bread was buttered, had backtracked in his allegations to the point where they were worthless.

By then Hallahan had long retired after yet another scrape. In December 1971 he was charged with receiving money from prostitute Dorothy Edith Knight. Later the charge was amended to agreeing to receive money from her. In August 1972 he was discharged after telephone intercepts were ruled inadmissible and the case against him collapsed. Hallahan was reinstated on 10 October that year and minutes later resigned after reading a prepared statement that he ‘felt his future and that of his family would best be served in other spheres’.

After his resignation his road was no less rocky. He sued The Courier-Mail for defamation after it had reported an unprovable allegation that he had been involved with the Beerburrum mail robbery two years earlier. In 1986 he was employed as chief investigator for government-owned insurance company Suncorp. That October he petitioned for his own bankruptcy, owing over $180 000 and having cash of $100. He was alleged to have been paid $3000 by bagman Jack Herbert to fix an insurance claim, something he vigorously denied when he appeared before the Fitzgerald inquiry in March 1988. Six months later he was suspended without pay by Suncorp.

Yet another lost opportunity to clean up corruption was in relation to disclosures by a police constable in 1975 that a substantial portion of the evidence in one case had been concocted by police. It gave rise to the wide-ranging Lucas inquiry into police practices, with the Queensland criminal bar seeking once and for all to stamp out the widespread practice of verballing. The inquiry found evidence of assaults on suspects, planting of evidence, forgery of warrants and fabrication of confessions by police. Its most significant recommendation called for the routine mechanical recording of police interrogations in all cases involving indictable offences. The proposal met with resistance from the Queensland police and was not implemented. The government set up a three-man committee comprising Lewis, the solicitor-general and the under-secretary to the Department of Justice to review the report, and for all practical purposes that was the end of the matter for the next ten years.

Gay brothels arrived, or at least were first noticed, in Brisbane in 1984 when Brett’s Boys, which operated across the street from a boys school, and The House of Praetorian opened. They were said to be owned by Hector Hapeta, possibly the king of Brisbane vice. Both offered similarly priced facilities, with a businessmen’s lunch half-hour special costing $30, and the first regular hour costing between $70 and $90, reducing after that.

On 10 December 1984 The Courier-Mail published ‘The men of evil who prey on children’, relating to child pornography and male prostitution. It made four allegations: first, the police were taking payoffs to protect pornographers; second, ‘Mike’ of Inala was being protected by a senior officer; third, a female prostitute had sustained a ruptured stomach after being kicked by an inspector when she refused to sign on for protection with him; and last, the commissioner had failed to act in response to several complaints about PC Darren Moore. Known as ‘Constable Dave’ on the television program Wombat, where he appeared with a puppet called Agro, Moore had been the subject of allegations since April 1982, but they had been ignored. In December 2010 Moore received a wholly suspended fifteen-month sentence after admitting to the possession of child pornography.

The brothels were raided by the police the next day, but by then there had been a fire and the receipts and account books had gone up in smoke. Chief Commissioner Lewis claimed that the raid was the ‘culmination of two months’ intensive investigation’.

The allegations by The Courier-Mail were referred to the Police Complaints Tribunal, chaired by Judge Eric Pratt. Rejecting the complaints, the tribunal found:

another aspect of the Courier Mail article which appears to be either outdated or exaggerated information relates to the operation of brothels by a person known as Hector. It seems possible that the newspaper article is again a distortion of the facts.

In 1985 DPP Desmond Sturgess QC, whose practice had been almost exclusively criminal defence work, conducted a limited inquiry into police corruption in Queensland in connection with male brothels. A preliminary report was said to contain harrowing details, but it was not released. On 28 November that year Sturgess delivered his final report. In it he gave a clear, if coded, indication of just who was running what. He referred to five ‘prominent’ organisers of Queensland prostitution, to the immunity from prosecution apparently enjoyed by these main offenders, and to the fact that the Lucas inquiry’s advice on staffing of the licensing branch had not been implemented. He also referred adversely to Jack Herbert and other key figures in the licensing branch. Sir Terence Lewis did not read the report, which was roundly attacked, in part because the figures relating to prostitution differed from those advanced by the licensing branch, and the vice industry continued unimpeded on its merry way.

Thirteen months after the report twenty-one brothels were still operating. That April there were more illegal casinos—the best known of which was over Bubbles Bath-House in Fortitude Valley, to which losing high rollers were sent to ease their losses free of charge—than there had been the previous year when Police Minister Gunn had ordered their closure.

Other marchers along the road to Fitzgerald were led by Phil Dickie of The Courier-Mail, who by 1987 was calling for an investigation into police corruption in Queensland following allegations of money in brown bags. Bob Gordon, his chief of staff on the paper, later wrote of him, ‘I must say his courage and thoroughness were such that our society will always be in his debt’. His investigations had apparently begun on what Gordon called ‘a slow news day’ in December 1986. Dickie, then a relatively junior reporter, was sent out to find why corruption, prostitution and drug dealing were flourishing both in Fortitude Valley and on the Gold Coast, and specifically who owned smart brothel The Top of the Valley (Hector Hapeta again, this time with Ann-Marie Tilley). Other reporters had tried and failed to uncover the ownership, but Dickie decided that a full-frontal approach was the way forward. That afternoon when he went to a brothel and asked who owned it he was obliged to run from the bouncers. During the first months of 1987 The Courier-Mail published a number of Dickie’s reports as he dug deeper and deeper into who owned Brisbane’s brothels and how they survived unmolested by the police, searching The Yellow Pages and then making searches of company directorships and car-registration numbers.

Others before Dickie had chipped away at the Lewis regime, and they included Constable Robert Campbell. After Bjelke-Petersen’s confidante Ted Lyons was stopped on the South-East Freeway, leading to an alliterative Courier-Mail headline: ‘Top-level Ted—full as a fowl’, within a matter of minutes he had rung Lewis, who ordered his officers to drive him home.

His breath-analysis certificate and charge sheet went into the police-station bin, only to be retrieved and given to Campbell. In early 1982 he went to Labor politician Kev Hooper and together they went to the ABC, whose reporter Alan Hall began to look into things; he produced the first coherent picture of the decline of law enforcement in Queensland. Campbell told all he knew of the bribes, the protection rackets, the gambling, the prostitution and the money.

Hall’s investigation soon led to the Rat Pack, but there was a leak and life became extremely difficult for Campbell, for his family and for ABC staff. Campbell and his family were woken late at night with threats and he was called a dog at work; ABC staff members were routinely followed when they left the studio at night. On 17 March 1982 Hall’s program was shown across Australia. Police Minister Russell Hinze immediately called a press conference declaring that he would see Hall out of a job, and denouncing Campbell and all that the report had revealed. Lewis and Tony Murphy, now his assistant commissioner, immediately sued the ABC for defamation, claiming that they had been identified with the Rat Pack. Campbell left the force and the state and went to Tasmania.

The final push, however, came from Chris Masters’ ‘Moonlight State’ on ABC’s Four Corners on 11 May 1987, which alleged links between organised crime and high-level police corruption. Much of the material in the program had been raised previously in state parliament or published in the Queensland media and ignored. For months, Deputy Premier of the National Party and Minister for Police Bill Gunn had been supplied with evidence of flourishing brothels and illegal casinos, operating in breach of his assurances that either they did not exist or, if by some misfortune they did, they would be closed.

The allegations made in ‘Moonlight State’ were, naturally, ridiculed. At least Bjelke-Petersen admitted to the rotten-apple theory: ‘There may be one or two policemen who are not doing the right thing’. Commissioner Lewis—now Sir Terence Lewis, having been knighted in the last honours list—thought the program ‘Disgraceful’. Justice Minister and Attorney-General Paul Clauson described it as ‘Airy-fairy’.

But the general reaction to ‘Moonlight State’ forced Bill Gunn into action. His initial comment had been, ‘A series of police ministers have had these types of allegations hanging over their heads. They are not going to hang over mine’. Had Bjelke-Petersen been at home, he would almost certainly have ignored the allegations and refused to hold an inquiry. His sensible, if unhelpful, attitude had always been never to have an inquiry until you knew what the result would be. But, unfortunately for him, at the time he was touring the country in support of his grandiose scheme to become prime minister of Australia, and left holding the parcel was Bill Gunn. The next day Gunn called what governments have always tried, usually successfully, to avoid: an open and public inquiry.

If Gunn had followed the tried and tested rules for setting up a royal commission—narrow the terms of reference as much as you possibly can, choose the chief investigator and the legal team, and finally, choose the judge—all should not have been lost. The terms of reference for this royal commission were initially restricted to allegations raised on the Four Corners program. In summary, the questions posed in the initial terms were:

During the period 1 June 1982 to 26 May 1987:

Were any of Geraldo, Antonio and Vincenzo Bellino, Vittorio Conte, and Hector Brandon Hapeta involved in the use of premises for prostitution, unlawful gambling or unlawful drugs?

Did the Bellinos, Conte or Hapeta give police financial or other favours in return for non-enforcement of laws in relation to the premises?

Are existing legislation and procedures adequate to ensure that conduct of the above kind is detected and reported?

Did the Bellinos, Conte or Hapeta make a payment of $50 000 to any Queensland political party on or about 8 September 1983?

Lewis and policeman turned politician and powerbroker Don ‘Shady’ Lane tried to arrange for another former police officer, Judge Eric Pratt of the District Court and chairman of the Police Complaints Tribunal, to head the inquiry. With luck, it might even be held in camera under the aegis of the tribunal. However, there had long been criticism of the tribunal since it had been established in 1982, with observations that it was often a bucket of whitewash—including the particularly egregious example of how Barry Mannix had come to make a false confession to the murder of his father. Lane had also earlier wanted Pratt to chair an inquiry into child pornography.

The chief justice simply refused to make Pratt or any other judge available for the inquiry, originally estimated to run for four to six weeks. That was bad enough. But the next mistake was that, instead of appointing a tame chairman such as Harry Gibbs and despite being threatened by Bjelke-Petersen with removal, Gunn took the advice of Ian Callinan QC to appoint the fiercely independent but then little-known Gerald Edward (Tony) Fitzgerald QC, a one-time federal judge who had returned to private practice.

It was a decision that Bjelke-Petersen and Lewis would come to regret deeply.