THE FITZGERALD COMMISSION AND AFTER
When it came to it, the terms approved on 26 May 1987 for Queensland’s Commission of Inquiry into Possible Illegal Activities and Associated Police Misconduct were indeed narrow and relatively harmless—the remit only covered the previous five years—but Commissioner Tony Fitzgerald did not want to be tied to looking just at specific allegations against specific people. He wanted the freedom to look into ‘any other matter or thing appertaining to the aforesaid matters’, and not only at ‘related matters’ but at any matter whether it related or not. Deputy Premier Bill Gunn undertook to consider changing the terms if Fitzgerald felt it would help his inquiry, and the terms were expanded within the month. Now allegations of corruption would go back as far as January 1977.
Even before the hearings began there were problems with witnesses. One who had given evidence at the Sturgess inquiry into male prostitution thought he’d had enough and was refusing to appear, while bludger Warren Earl Armstrong was charged with threatening a woman with harm if she gave evidence. But two of the most important witnesses who had gone AWOL were prostitute Ann-Marie Tilley, said to be the brains behind brothel owner Hector Hapeta’s empire, and bagman Jack Herbert.
Later, former Assistant Commissioner Graeme Parker would say that Terence Lewis told him Don ‘Shady’ Lane, who had become a Cabinet minister in the Bjelke-Petersen regime, suggested Herbert leave the country. Herbert was not keen to go, thinking—probably correctly—that in his absence he would be a useful scapegoat for his colleagues. Then on 13 June he met up with Jack Rooklyn, from whom he had extorted protection money on behalf of Lewis for nine years over in-line machines. Rooklyn said that he, Rooklyn, should have ‘pissed off’ from the 1973 Moffitt inquiry, in which he was roundly criticised, ‘and suggested I do the same’. Herbert left Australia a week later.
On 27 July sittings began. Appropriately enough, the first witness was Commissioner of Police Sir Terence Murray Lewis, who told Fitzgerald that policing prostitution was a low priority for the Queensland force. Sir Joh and five successive police ministers had instructed him that prostitution should be tolerated. Illegal casinos and bookmakers were the priority. The first instructions he had to go after brothels came on 19 May 1987. After all, there were only fourteen massage parlours in Brisbane, which compared favourably with Melbourne’s seventy plus. And no, Sir Terence had not read the Sturgess report into male prostitution and paedophilia in Queensland.
As the first weeks of the commission passed it became clear that the police had indeed done very little to act against the bosses of prostitution and gambling in the city. Deputy Commissioner Ron Redmond added fuel to the fire by telling Fitzgerald that Police Minister Bill Gunn had told him massage parlours served a useful purpose, acting as a preferable alternative to rape.
By 25 August Fitzgerald had managed to have the goalposts widened again and the terms of reference once more expanded. By now there was more than a whiff in the air that it was not going to be the usual whitewash and there were suggestions that indemnities might be on offer to those willing to give evidence of corruption. That week Fitzgerald made a call for honest officers to come forward to give evidence. Few did, but the first of the brave was Aboriginal sergeant Col Dillon, who told the commission how he had been approached by Detective Senior Sergeant Harry Burgess from the licensing branch and offered $400 a month to keep his eyes and mouth shut.
The alleged brothel keepers and gambling-school owners were next to give evidence. Gambler Geraldo Bellino, who thought he was being treated as badly as Lindy Chamberlain, and Victor Conte admitted owning casinos but denied any connection with girls or drugs. Hector Hapeta refused to answer 164 questions on the grounds of possible self-incrimination, while Geraldo Bellino’s brother Antonio denied any involvement in anything. Ms Tilley was still AWOL.
On 28 August, the day journalist Phil Dickie began his evidence, Burgess admitted corruption and was given immunity. He now implicated Jack Herbert and Assistant Commissioner Graeme Parker, the third highest ranked man in the Queensland force, as well as licensing branch chief Noel Dwyer.
At the beginning of September a prostitute given the pseudonym Katherine James began to recite the litany of corruption within the licensing branch, including bribes and free sex for officers. On 17 September Parker, described as ‘a man of high integrity’ when he was awarded the Queen’s Police Medal the previous year, admitted corruption and, given conditional indemnity, initially retired hurt to a hospital bed. Now calls came for Lewis to stand down until the end of the inquiry. He did not heed them and Gunn wrote requiring him to stand down. Lewis immediately transferred his interest in the family home to his wife, the reporting of which was seen by the then Lady Lewis as a gross breach of her privacy. Already the knives were out for Sir Joh, ensuring that he ‘did not slither out of taking responsibility for what happened to the police force’.
On 11 October Lewis, who had been commissioner since Whitrod, bravely said that in his forty years as a policeman he had never known or suspected that there was corruption in the force. It was probably fortunate that Judge Eric Pratt had not headed the inquiry, because he was described by Lewis as his ‘special friend’. On 14 October it had been alleged that Pratt had attended meetings with the Bellino brothers at Jack Herbert’s house to discuss which police should be transferred and which promoted. He stood down from the District Court on 30 October following a motion put forward by the state opposition for his dismissal. Lewis’ diaries showed that Pratt had disclosed police tribunal matters to him. Judge Pratt’s solicitors immediately issued a statement to the inquiry denying that he had attended the meetings or was guilty of any misconduct. The allegations against him were later put to a triumvirate of retired judges headed by Sir Harry Gibbs. They duly reported that there was no reason why Judge Pratt should not resume his position on the bench.
In November former Inspector Noel Dwyer admitted to corruption and alleged that Lewis, Herbert and Parker were involved. Parker, now out of his hospital bed, told how Herbert and Lewis were involved and in turn implicated Shady Lane. On 26 November Sir Joh stood down and on 1 December he announced his retirement from politics. The inquiry gathered pace and the now beleaguered Geraldo Bellino sent Christmas cards that read, ‘To all my friends I wish them well, and all the rest can go to hell’.
In February 1988 former Inspector William Boulton became the fourth officer to throw in the towel, admitting that he took bribes of up to $1000. At this point the inquiry began to look at the so-called Chinese connection. Allegations were made against Lewis and the then Police Minister Russell Hinze, known as the ‘Minister for Everything’, and their connection to Malcolm Sue, who owned a kung-fu school and was named as a standover man and brothel owner. A witness, ‘Mr Brown’, claimed that as a special treat Hinze had been offered the pick of the girls in a Sue house. Hinze denied it.
February also saw Shady Lane broken. He denied, not necessarily wholly convincingly, that he had been involved in corruption, saying most of his unexplained income came from cheating on his ministerial expenses and tax returns. Not that he was alone in this—fourteen other National and Liberal Party ministers did it as well. Worse, he named names.
In March 1988 Herbert and his wife were retrieved from England, to where they had fled, and returned to Queensland. Given indemnity, they were placed under armed guard to await their turns to give evidence. On 20 June Anne-Marie Tilley suddenly reappeared to admit that Hapeta ran a $30-million vice empire paying Herbert $38 000 a month and Burgess another $2000.
On 31 August the star witness, Herbert, appeared. He agreed that over the years he had given Lewis $600 000. He called him ‘Big Daddy’ or ‘The Shark’ ‘because he took the biggest bite’. He continued his evidence into September, detailing payments made to senior officers that totalled $1.5 million. His evidence caused some resentment. ‘Herbert should never have had indemnity; he was a mastermind’, said one barrister who watched the hearings.
Lewis was back in the witness box for nearly a month from 11 October, explaining that his wealth came not from corruption but from the old, old story of an 88 per cent success rate in backing horses. Unfortunately, he could not explain hundreds of his diary entries.
And so it went on until 1 December, when Sir Joh became the last witness, valiantly maintaining that he did not suspect police corruption.
In all, the six weeks set aside for the commission turned into two years, and nearly 240 witnesses were called. Fitzgerald released his report on 3 July 1989, making wide-sweeping recommendations but being careful not to make accusations. Instead he said that the commission had not been about the guilt or innocence of any individual, but the concern was the ‘pattern, nature and scope of the misconduct that has occurred and the lesson it contains for the future’. He did, however, comment about Commissioner Ron Redmond:
It reflects no credit on Redmond that, on the most favourable interpretation, he as Assistant Commissioner Operations remained ignorant of the problems within the licensing branch over that period.
His two most significant recommendations were the establishment of the Criminal Justice Commission (CJC) and the Electoral and Administrative Review Commission, which was to review electoral boundaries to stop gerrymandering. The need for freedom-of-information legislation in the state was noted, as was the need to review laws relating to public assembly and guidelines for the disclosure of parliamentarians’ pecuniary interests. The CJC was to be responsible for investigating specific individuals mentioned during the inquiry. In 1989 Premier Mike Ahern promised to implement the recommendations of the Fitzgerald inquiry, ‘lock, stock and barrel’.
As for the police, for the decade after the inquiry Jack Herbert received round-the-clock protection, said to have cost $1 million, at his New Farm home. His book Confessions of a Bagman was published shortly before his death from cancer in 2004, at the age of eighty. By then he and his family had done well for themselves in the real-estate business. But, of course, he had received around $3 million in bribes, which would have provided a decent springboard.
It was former commissioner Terence Lewis, Herbert’s one-time friend, who crashed the hardest. In 1991 he stood trial on twenty-three counts of perjury, forgery and corruption. He was acquitted of the perjury allegations but convicted of accepting $700 000 in bribes, as well as forging the premier’s signature on an official document in 1981. Although he had denied that he had ever met poker-machine identity Jack Rooklyn, there were diary entries to show that he had done so on a number of occasions. Lewis was never charged with this particular lie, something many thought would have been easy to prove. He was sentenced to fourteen years and was stripped of his knighthood, while complaining bitterly that much of the evidence against him came from Herbert. In this respect he was no different in his complaint from Victorian police officer Paul Higgins, who had disliked being convicted on the evidence of murderer Sandy MacRae. Lewis has continued to protest his innocence.
Lewis’ wife, Hazel, also always denied that she had received parcels of bribe money from Herbert’s wife, Peggy, and in May 1995 she told The Courier-Mail that she still loved her husband of forty-two years and believed in his honesty.
Towards the end of his sentence there were rumours that Lewis saw himself as a scapegoat and was planning a tell-all to expose other neglected aspects of corruption in Queensland, something that would hardly fit with his protestations of innocence. He must have thought better of it. He was paroled in 1998 after serving 10½ years. He retained the support of Bjelke-Petersen. ‘He was only found to be corrupt’, said Sir Joh loyally.
Harry Burgess, the first to roll over, went to work in a metal factory. Graeme Parker, who had there not been indemnities on offer might have brazened things out and become the next commissioner, was stripped of his Queen’s Police Medal. He was later acquitted of perjury for not telling the truth to the inquiry and so allegedly breaching his indemnity. He turned to Christianity and dropped from public view. In 2005 he was reported to be selling patchwork quilts made by his wife.
Other officers were prosecuted, including Allen Bulger, who was sentenced to twelve years’ gaol in 1990 after pleading guilty to official corruption and perjuring himself at the Fitzgerald inquiry. He was released on parole after less than four years. The Australian Taxation Office ordered Bulger, who became a taxi driver, to pay almost $180 000 in unpaid tax.
Tony Murphy, who for some reason was never called to give evidence and never broke his silence, died in 2010. Time may yet show that he was the most sinister of all players in the inquiry.
And the politicians? The wash-up saw the National Party heavily defeated in the December 1989 election and the Australian Labor Party returned to power for the first time in over twenty years. As for the individual politicians, pride of place must, of course, go to Sir Joh, who resigned as premier in November 1987 and the following year gave evidence that paper bags full of cash had been delivered to his office. When he was prosecuted for perjury over a $100 000 cash payment from a Singapore developer, the jury failed to agree. It was later revealed that the foreman had been a member of the Young Nationals, part of Sir Joh’s political party, and was a member of the ‘Friends of Joh’ campaign. The commission’s special prosecutor, Doug Drummond QC, decided not to seek a retrial. Bjelke-Petersen died in 2005, aged ninety-four.
Former policeman and then minister Don ‘Shady’ Lane was sentenced to twelve months’ imprisonment for falsifying his expense accounts to the tune of around $4500. Before his death in March 1995 he published his autobiography, Trial and Error. Geraldo Bellino eventually stood for Lane’s old parliamentary seat and lost.
One-time police minister Hinze, who had denied that there were any brothels in Fortitude Valley and for his pains had been cartooned as a bulldog with a white stick and dark glasses standing outside one, resigned from parliament in 1988. The inquiry was told that he had accepted bribes and—far from not accepting that such places existed—had been seen in a Valley brothel. He died, aged seventy-two, in June 1991 before pending charges of corruption against him could be heard.
Brian Austin, who was one of those named by Lane as an abuser of ministerial expenses, was sentenced to fifteen months’ jail after being convicted on twenty-five counts of misappropriating public funds, involving $8700 spent on private accommodation, travel and meals. He later sold real estate.
Herbert’s old friend and adviser Jack Rooklyn escaped prison. Born in London, possibly in 1908—his date of birth changed to suit the occasion—he was around eighty-two when he was charged with making corrupt payments. He had already had a heart bypass operation and collapsed in the dock. On 25 May 1992 he was fined $35 000. Uncharacteristically, Rooklyn later admitted his guilt, saying, ‘I shouldn’t have done it’. His Queensland scam alone had earned him millions. He died in 1996.
As Fitzgerald had recommended, the CJC was established and for several years, in addition to investigating police and public-sector misconduct, it worked with police to investigate organised crime. In 1997 the newly formed Queensland Crime Commission (QCC) took over investigations into organised crime and also investigated paedophilia. The Crime and Misconduct Commission was born in January 2002 when the CJC and the QCC were merged under that name.
The idea that the Fitzgerald inquiry would have cleaned out all corruption in Queensland’s police force is a triumph of hope over experience. There will always be rotten apples in the barrel. The best that can be hoped for is that the whole barrel is not full of rotten fruit. For a time in the late 1990s it looked as though the latter might be the case.
In February 1998 former Whitsunday officer Damon Kirkpatrick was jailed for eight years for his involvement with a North Queensland drug ring. He pleaded guilty in Mackay to trafficking in a dangerous drug, official corruption, breaking and entering a watch house, and stealing marijuana plants. He had gone into partnership with service-station operator Peter Crossley, who received six years.
That year Gold Coast detective sergeant John Swift, head of the casino crime and break and enter squads, was another who fell from grace when, caught in a CJC sting, he received 5½ years for corruption and perjury. He had agreed to provide protection to a man he believed to be a major cocaine dealer for an initial $10 000 for six months and then $1000 a month after that. Another officer who found himself in trouble was former Gold Coast detective Carl Gibson, who received four years for passing on information about a police investigation to a drug dealer for a fee of $3500.
In July 2009, in a speech at Griffith University, Fitzgerald told the audience he believed that the Labor government had backslid and that under Peter Beattie it believed ‘there were votes to be obtained from Bjelke-Petersen’s remaining adherents in glossing over his repressive and corrupt misconduct’. He added:
Unfortunately, cynical, short-sighted political attitudes adopted for the benefit of particular politicians and their parties commonly have adverse consequences for the general community. The current concerns about political and police misconduct are a predictable result of attitudes adopted in Queensland since the mid-1990s. Despite their protestations of high standards of probity, which personally might well be correct, and irrespective of what they intend, political leaders who gloss over corruption risk being perceived by their colleagues and the electorate as regarding it as of little importance. Even if incorrect, that is a disastrous perception. Greed, power and opportunity in combination provide an almost irresistible temptation for many which can only be countered by the near-certainty of exposure and severe punishment.
Unfortunately, errant police officers follow the general underworld doctrine that they will not be found out; if they are, they will not be prosecuted; if they are by mischance prosecuted, they will be acquitted; and if they are convicted, they will not go to prison. But, just sometimes, it doesn’t work that way.