Jacks and Jokers

by Matthew Condon

  At the age of 16, in a Kings Cross nightclub – the Lido in Roslyn Street, a notorious haunt for gangsters and callgirls – Tilley met her very own Nestor Patou. His name was Hector (Hec) Hapeta, not an honest policeman, but a retailer of pet meat based in the distant suburbs of western Sydney.

  Hapeta was hanging out with a prostitute ‘keeper’ called Bob. Tilley and a girlfriend wanted to get on the game. Bob threw some money on the table and asked young Tilley to go buy him and Hec a drink at the bar. She refused – ladies didn’t go to the bar – and Hapeta, dressed as he habitually was in a three-piece suit, told Bob to leave her alone. Hec would get the drinks.

  Hapeta was a ‘smiler’; he had a happy demeanour and a cheeky sense of humour. Tilley thought he was a gentleman. They would soon move in together in a flat in Liverpool, and Tilley would begin her notorious career as a prostitute and brothel madam.

  It would have been inconceivable to both Hapeta and Tilley that by the late 1970s they would find themselves drifting north to the sun and warmth of Queensland. There, with astonishing speed, they would build a vice empire of gargantuan proportions that would make them wealthy.

  It could have been a plot from one of the film-loving Tilley’s matinees, but this time a western. Two savvy operators ride into a hick town, take over the saloons and the houses of ill-repute, and laugh all the way to the bank. And they wouldn’t need to worry about the sheriff. Because very quickly, the sheriff would be handsomely remuner­ated to turn a blind eye.

  A Stellar Career

  Meanwhile, in the Queensland capital, Gerald (Tony) Fitzgerald, QC, aged 34 (and born in the Year of the Snake), was not only one of the busiest and most respected lawyers in town but was also juggling a young family – three children under the age of five. The Fitzgeralds lived on the Brisbane River in Rosebery Terrace, Chelmer, just across the Walter Taylor Bridge from Indooroopilly.

  Having taken silk the year before – one of the youngest to do so in the state – Fitzgerald had carved a lucrative niche for himself in commercial law. A Catholic, and son to a senior public servant, he had been something of a prodigy. He was called to the Bar in 1964 and for a time worked out of chambers above Cassells’ frock shop in Queen Street, dubbed the ‘Outs of Court’ (as opposed to the official home of Brisbane’s legal fraternity, the Inns of Court up on North Quay.)

  By the mid-1960s he was being mentored by the legendary lawyer Gerard Brennan and moved up to the Inns, on the same floor as knockabout barrister and South Brisbane MP Colin Bennett. Brennan was the epitome of ethics and fairness in the law. A Catholic himself, he was also a champion of gentlemanly distance between the courts and government. The son of Justice Frank Brennan, he, like Bennett, believed strongly in social justice for all. He had a profound impact on Tony Fitzgerald. Brennan’s father had died when he was just 21. Fitzgerald had lost his mother, Doris, to a kidney ailment when he was six years old. Both had risen out of humble financial circumstances.

  Fitzgerald, like many of his young contemporaries, had heard of the police practice of ‘verballing’ or fabrication of evidence. And like the rest of Brisbane, knew the gossip that former police commissioner Frank Bischof was corrupt and that his bagmen in the 1960s were known as the Rat Pack.

  Fitzgerald most likely heard much of the local tittle-tattle in the rooms of the Johnsonian Club in Adelaide Street. A beacon for barristers and journalists, the place was often packed with members for weekday lunch. It served a mean steak and offered the hottest English mustard in town. There, Fitzgerald rubbed shoulders with some of Brisbane’s most colourful legal practitioners, including the cigar-smoking Jack Aboud. The old barrister would often leave a burning cigar on a stairwell outside court and pick it up again on his way out. Aboud, his taste buds dead from smoking, adored lashings of the Johnsonian mustard.

  Fitzgerald also got to know the best legal minds of the day – Eddie Broad, Wally Campbell, Des Sturgess, John Macrossan, Bill Pincus and Paul de Jersey. Within such a small pool of lawyers, it was hard not to notice that those who allied themselves with Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s government and its legal work found themselves on the path to a successful career.

  Fitzgerald, however, had little interest in day-to-day politics, though his attitude to police corruption may have been a little different. His grandfather, Casey, had been a Queensland police officer. Fitzgerald was, by choice, a lawyer who kept a low profile and treasured his privacy. He might have a regular game of tennis with a few close and trusted mates, but he did not court the social set nor did he have any interest in seeing his name in the newspapers.

  Ironically, his future included a couple of years where he would become perhaps the best known legal practitioner in Australia and would embed his name in Queensland history.

  The Key Club

  Across town, some enterprising entrepreneurs like the petty criminal Roland Short were starting some new business ventures in the skin trade.

  The city had a few illegal gambling dens and some fledgling massage parlours and ‘health studios’, but Short was taking things to a whole new level. Short already had the Penthouse Health Studio in Brunswick Street, and another parlour in suburban Indooroopilly, west of the CBD. His centrepiece, though, was the new Key Club at 584 Stanley Street, Woolloongabba, within sight of the Brisbane Cricket Ground.

  Short had asked his friend, barman and parlour manager Geoff Crocker, to pop around and take a look in mid-1976: ‘I’d never seen anything like it before in my life, lovely ladies there and everything,’ Crocker said later.

  Crocker checked out the club. There was gambling in two gaming rooms, pornographic movies being screened in a bar, separate areas with spa tubs and women coming out of the saunas with ‘their boobs hanging out of the towels’. It was a scene from a Roman orgy.

  Short told Crocker that if he looked after the parlour for him and did a good job, he would eventually end up running the place. ‘So that was a bit of incentive for me, I liked the place, it looked good, you know?’

  Uniquely, Short had instituted a special membership subscription to the Key Club. It cost $500 to be a member, and you put another $500 on an account card. Cash changed hands only in the gaming rooms. As a member, you were identified by your Key Club number and your birthdate. It cost $100 an hour to be with a girl.

  Crocker observed that the club was ‘a class above’ anything else he’d seen in Brisbane. ‘[There were] no rough-spoken ones,’ he said of the women employed at the Key Club. ‘No tattoos, we couldn’t employ a girl if she had a tattoo, it was Roland’s orders … if their hair wasn’t right or their dress wasn’t up to standard, I’d say go home and get changed or do something with your hair and come back … if you do it again I won’t let you in.’

  The gaming side of the operation was run by a man called Luciano Scognamiglio, who had games going right across the city. The thin, sickly-looking ‘Luci’ was also known to punters as ‘Louis’. Crocker estimated that Short was making $25,000 to $30,000 each week off the illegal games at the Key Club.

  Private investigator John Wayne Ryan was called in to fit out the club’s security. ‘Roland always had the latest technology,’ he recalls. ‘If he wanted closed-circuit television, he’d order the latest from the United States.

  ‘Roland was a bit of a heavy. He had a reputation. And he was fairly well connected. He had something to do with a couple of coppers and he’d help them out on stuff. Because of the people who were coming into his clubs – magistrates, parliamentarians, lawyers – he had a lot of potential blackmail material. He also had a lot of things on a lot of cops.’

  According to Ryan, Short was an associate of both Tony Murphy and former detective Glen Hallahan. He claimed that when Hallahan had been facing corruption charges in October 1972, Short had compiled damaging material on the judge set to hear Hallahan’s case – Eddie Broad. In the end the Crown offered no evidence against Hallahan and the case was dismissed. Halla
han resigned from the force shortly after.

  Still, the incident highlighted that Short – though he had a well-known detestation of police – worked with them when required. As for the Key Club, Ryan befriended some of the girls working there and they called on him on several occasions to help them with personal security.

  ‘I did a couple of favours for the girls,’ Ryan says. ‘They were receiving threats for money. One of the threats came from Glen Hallahan, though he was no longer in the police force. The cops at the Gabba were weighing in too, asking for favours and money.

  ‘The girls were under a lot of pressure. They were working the parlours by day and then coming into the Key Club at night. Most of the time they were carrying huge sums of money and I’d escort them to their cars. Or I’d grab their money and put it in the night safe. Then when the cops pressed them, they could say to them they were running a bit short on money that night.’

  Ryan, who had been intimately connected with Brisbane’s club and vice scene since the 1960s, was walking a fine line. And Brisbane city was more volatile than anyone in the suburbs could have imagined.

  Following the supposed suicide by drug overdose of the prostitute Shirley Brifman in her flat in Clayfield, the murder of Jack Cooper, manager of the National Hotel in Queen Street, and the Whiskey Au Go Go bombings that killed 15 people, it emerged that Brisbane had a dangerous underworld.

  ‘I was walking around with two guns,’ Ryan reflected. ‘I was in the middle of everybody. Billy Phillips [tattooist, petty gangster, stolen goods fence and former informant or ‘dog’ to Hallahan] would give me a hug like I was his brother, but I was keeping an eye out for him pinning my arms and being stabbed by someone.

  ‘When I helped some of my police contacts, I’d be thanked personally for the work I’d done and wait for my arms to be grabbed and another copper to shoot me. That’s what it was like.’

  Detective Saunders

  The face of the future of the Queensland Police Force, Lorelle Anne Saunders, a former army sergeant, had joined the force just weeks after the death of brothel madam Shirley Margaret Brifman in 1972. Less than three years later she was appointed by Police Commissioner Ray Whitrod as Queensland’s first female detective. She was just 26.

  In a profession dominated by men, the Saunders appointment was big news. SHE BEAT MEN FOR DETECTIVE VACANCY, said one newspaper headline. And another: GENTLEMEN WHEN LAW IS A LADY.

  ‘Even hardened criminals have been known to melt when arrested by Detective Constable Lorrelle [sic] Saunders,’ a local Brisbane newspaper reported. ‘It’s amazing – they can be really polite,’ Saunders was quoted in the article. ‘You get a hard, rough crim yet he will talk to you, open doors and pull out chairs for you.’

  Detective Constable Saunders could also stand on her record. She had a prodigious work ethic, effecting more than 650 arrests and her bravery in the line of duty was evident. In July 1974 a man threatened to blow up a building in Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley if he wasn’t paid $10,000. Saunders was used as a decoy. (The extortionist was apprehended before any rendezvous with Saunders.)

  Saunders was the embodiment of modern Whitrod reform. He wanted more women in the force and he wanted them in senior pos­itions. It was a measure that he hoped would go a long way towards tempering an old-fashioned, ill-educated and misogynist police force. She was not an ornament but a bona fide detective.

  Yet soon after her historic appointment Saunders would upset the Rat Pack, and in particular the legendary detective Tony Murphy. Coupled with her powerful advocacy for women’s rights in the force, a sense of justice and a knowledge of entrenched police corruption, she would soon suffer the same games exercised by corrupt members of the force against perceived enemies – public and professional humili­ation, intimidation, direct death threats, concocted evidence, verballing and, incredibly, time in prison courtesy of a fabricated charge that she attempted to secure a hitman to kill a fellow police officer.

  Dozens of promising police careers had been destroyed by the Rat Pack and its supporters, but nothing approached the venom directed at Saunders. ‘As long as I can remember I have wanted to be in the force,’ she told a newspaper following her elevation to detective.

  As long as she could remember, too, she had had an acquaintance with Terence Murray Lewis. Interestingly, in the first week of his duties as head of the new Juvenile Aid Bureau back in the winter of 1963, Lewis had paid a visit to 25 Alamine Street, Holland Park, the home of a Mrs Lindall Rose Saunders and her daughter, Lorelle, then 15.

  Lorelle had been in some minor trouble involving some undesirable young local boys and a teacher at her school, Cavendish Road State High, when the head of the JAB and his sidekick, policewoman Yvonne Weier, turned up to help set the girl on the straight and narrow.

  Just over a decade later Saunders would be one of Whitrod’s bright young hopefuls. A decade after that she would be in solitary confinement in prison, wondering where it all went wrong, suspended from duty and awaiting a charge of attempted murder.

  Keeping an eye on every movement of her case was her boss, the kindly officer who had come to the door of her family home all those years before, Inspector Terry Lewis.

  Politicking

  Out west, the campaign against Commissioner Whitrod continued unabated.

  Labor Opposition leader Tom Burns was touring western Queensland towns with his private secretary Malcolm McMillan when they turned up in Charleville. Burns, a popular working-class knock­about who had been elected to the Brisbane bayside seat of Lytton in 1972, loved to get among the people. An ALP powerbroker, he had been quickly elevated to leader of the Opposition and in a short time had had some memorable stoushes with Premier Bjelke-Petersen and his National Party cronies in Parliament House. He was quick on his feet and cunning of mind.

  In Charleville, they of course made the acquaintance of Inspector Lewis.

  ‘He came to see Burns,’ remembers McMillan. ‘The essence of the discussion was that [Police Minister Max] Hodges was no good and had to go, and Whitrod was no good and had to go. Lewis was discreet, polite, deferring, diplomatic. Lewis quite clearly understood the make-up of government and opposition.’

  The next day Burns and McMillan continued on to Longreach. That night, both men were working late in Burns’ motel room when there was a knock at the door.

  ‘It was Tony Murphy,’ says McMillan. ‘He apologised for arriving unannounced. He repeated verbatim what Terry Lewis had told us the day before. This was clearly a concerted campaign [against Whitrod] going on right around the state.’

  While it was not unusual for members of parliament to meet civic leaders and law enforcement officials while touring rural areas, Murphy’s tete-a-tete was memorable. How did he know precisely where Burns and McMillan were staying that night in Longreach? And what was so urgent that a police inspector felt impelled to track down the leader of a state opposition political party late at night and share his opinions about a minister of the Crown and the number one police officer in Queensland?

  The war against Ray Whitrod had become brazen.

  In Brisbane, some strange machinations were also at play. Edgar Bourke, a career public servant and staff clerk to the Commissioner of Police, had seen and heard a lot of things since becoming attached to the police department as a young man in 1948.

  As Lewis and Murphy were trying to sway politicians in the bush, Bourke was in a meeting with several other colleagues at head­quarters when the phone rang. ‘It was Stan Wilcox from the Premier’s Department,’ Bourke recalls. ‘He wanted to know what sort of bloke Terry Lewis was, and would we ask around.’

  Bourke says the staff remembered Lewis well from his lengthy secondment to the JAB under former commissioner Frank Bischof. But the call from Wilcox was a bolt out of the blue. ‘We thought Terry was quite good but we had no idea where all of this was leading,’ Bourke remembers.

 
Incredibly, Premier Bjelke-Petersen was also making secret enquiries about how Whitrod might be legally removed for breach of contract. He ordered his press secretary Allen Callaghan to seek advice on the possibility of terminating Whitrod’s tenure. A memo came back offering Bjelke-Petersen a number of options on how to eject the Commissioner.

  Meanwhile, Lewis, on leave in the city several days after meeting with Bjelke-Petersen in Cunnamulla, dropped into the Premier’s Department and added to his private file (# 246) a sheaf of documents. Among other things, the file contained rumour and innuendo about Whitrod that had been gathered from six years earlier: ‘31 August, 1970. Mr G. [Gough] Whitlam visited Mr Whitrod at police headquarters.’ And: ‘On 22/12/70. Inspector Ron Eddington [sic] said the ALP not only liked Mr Whitrod, they love him.’

  In the dossier Lewis also included a list of people who could provide glowing character testimonies on his behalf. The list starred two Supreme Court judges, six District Court judges and five members of parliament. Lewis then noted to the Premier: ‘If Mr Whitrod hears I have spoken to you he will immediately engage in the character assassination that he learned so well from his ALP friends in Canberra.’

  The irony that Lewis himself was assassinating Whitrod’s character with his secret missives to the Premier seems to have escaped the inspector.

  Without Whitrod’s knowledge, and coming from several quarters, the grooming of Lewis for higher rank had begun in earnest.

  The Shooter

  James (Jim) Slade, from the small town of Kyogle in the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales, and not far south of the Queensland border, was seemingly born for intelligence work. His great-­grandfather emigrated from Ireland and became a New South Wales police officer, one of many who hunted the notorious bushranger Ben Hall in the 1860s. His father, Edward, had worked undercover in Occupied Greece during World War II.