Then in 1969 Ross Fels, in his late teens, was walking along Adelaide Street in the city when he bumped into old ‘Uncle Frank’ Bischof. The Commissioner, due to retire within weeks, was walking alone in full regalia.
Fels stood in front of Bischof and blocked his path. ‘Do you remember me?’ Ross Fels demanded.
Bischof appeared confused. ‘You do know you’re talking to the Police Commissioner,’ he responded arrogantly.
Fels identified himself and Bischof turned pale. According to Ross Fels, in the late 1950s Bischof – his mother’s lover – sexually assaulted him. In addition, in the early 1960s, older brother Dennis Fels was instructed to go to one of Bischof’s Saturday morning clinics. He’d already been once or twice before. This time he refused.
‘He just wasn’t going to go, come hell or high water,’ remembers Ross Fels. ‘When he had to go back this time he disappeared. He was terrified about having to go back into that bloody place.’
Dennis vanished on a Friday night and was found on the family farm on the Sunday evening. He would later allege that he refused to be in the Commissioner’s company because Bischof had been ‘feeling him up’ at the sessions.
Dennis would not escape Bischof’s wrath. The police tailed him, harassed and provoked him. In the end and years later, he was forced to leave Queensland.
‘Our family was screwed over by the police,’ Ross Fels says. ‘What happened to me with Bischof when I was six, I thought nothing of it. It meant nothing to me. Well, not nothing. He scratched my genitals. But years later I started talking to my brothers …’
Then there was the older boy Geoff. Just before his death, decades later, Ross sat with him and they had a long talk. They discussed Bischof.
‘When we spoke about it, Geoff just cried,’ says Ross Fels. ‘A grown, adult man. He cried. I stopped at that point.’
The scandal of the Commissioner and Mary Margaret Fels had never been what it appeared. It was not about a woman who had fallen for the charms of the ‘Big Fella’, and been scorned by his rejection of her years later.
Was it in fact the story of a man – the most powerful police officer in the State – who had set up these Saturday morning clinics not for the benefit of troubled children and their parents, but as an arrangement to trawl for vulnerable kids and satisfy Bischof’s sexual proclivities? How many other children had Bischof laid his hands on, and how many other families were left destroyed in his wake?
It must have weighed heavily on Mary Margaret Fels, that she had unknowingly put her children in such an insidious position. But it was too late. The family had fractured beyond repair.
Throughout the final years of his tenure as Police Commissioner into the late 1960s, Bischof had been in and out of hospital with nervous breakdowns and bouts of poor health. Now, in retirement, he continually failed to find solid ground after life as one of the state’s most powerful and famous policemen. After decades of murders and hard criminals, of prostitutes and rapists, and then the privilege of the commissionership which saw him, like a spoiled child, take what he wanted when he wanted it – the lot of the pottering suburban gardener did not suit him.
At one point during his retirement he secured some menial employment, applying for work as a ticket seller with Mater Prize Homes. According to one witness he cajoled senior members of the organisation into taking him on, offering free dinners in some of the city’s finer restaurants. He was subsequently hired, but dismissed a few weeks later after being caught stealing money off the ticket sales.
The childless former Queensland Father of the Year had, in fact, been the father of the early incarnation of ‘The Joke’ – that system of graft and protection payments levelled at the state’s SP bookmakers that yielded hundreds of thousands of dollars to Bischof and his bagmen. Under his watch, he had established the culture for systemic police corruption that, by the time of his retirement in 1969, had taken root and flourished. But the Bischof ego found it all too hard to let go.
The humble cactus grower and dog lover of The Gap was becoming the suburb’s resident eccentric, and while he irregularly kept in touch with his earlier protégés – Terry Lewis and Tony Murphy, in particular – his crimes as Commissioner became legend within the police force.
What Bischof started in the late 1950s grew into a murderous and ruthless system of greed that ultimately distorted the democratic infrastructure of the state of Queensland. In the detritus, too, were broken families.
As for Alonzo Fels, he always held out hope that one day he would be ‘reunited’ with his wife Mary. He purchased two grave plots – side by side – in the lawn section of the Mount Gravatt Cemetery. He would die in the winter of 1980, aged just 67 years.
Today, the plot beside him remains vacant.
The Theatrical Constable Moore
He had wanted to be a movie star.
Instead, he ended up in the Queensland Police Force, and despite the blokey culture he found himself immersed in, young Constable David Moore found an unexpected ally in Police Commissioner Ray Whitrod.
By 1976, Moore, a constable for just two years, had done his penance in Mobile Patrols, based out of the old Petrie Terrace barracks. Mobile Patrols was famously the purgatory for recalcitrant officers, for those who bucked, however remotely, the status quo. It was also the final stable for senior mid-ranking officers limping towards retirement.
Despite this, Moore enjoyed the experience. ‘You were put with a senior officer, a constable first class or senior constable, and given a designated area,’ says an officer who worked with Moore. ‘You were largely sent out for an eight-hour shift; you handled everything given to you. You were vigilant. Some police weren’t.
‘Again, it was a tough thing. Back then it was a lot safer to be a police officer on the road because police were feared.’
There was something different about Moore, too. He was smart, artistic and was heavily involved in amateur theatrics across the city. He spoke well and was always presentable. Just four months into Mobile Patrols he was seconded to the Operations centre in the old Makerston Street headquarters.
Operations was on the first floor and Whitrod was on the third floor. Moore was put on radio. He did switchboard and telex. He did the old microfiche system – car registration numbers. He had multiple tasks; but again, he was surrounded by people who were being punished or old sergeants who didn’t want to do anything.
Meanwhile, Moore was performing in a play being staged at Brisbane City Hall. With cheek and confidence, he sent his boss an invitation to attend.
‘At that time Whitrod was being quite progressive,’ a colleague of Moore says. ‘He would do a newsletter. It was an interesting way he would identify different people in the force and compliment them or give praise to people if they’d done good work.
‘Moore contacted Whitrod and invited him to the play. He sent him tickets. Would he like to come? To his astonishment Whitrod turned up with his wife, and he brought his next door neighbour, a doctor.
‘Moore met with Whitrod after [the show] and his neighbour was ecstatic. Whitrod probably couldn’t believe it. Moore subsequently got a little write up in the newsletter.’
Unwittingly, Moore had raised eyebrows among the anti-Whitrod forces. Who was this young constable who had somehow inveigled himself with Coco (as Whitrod was facetiously nicknamed by his detractors)? And via the arts, of all things?
As Whitrod faced down the relentless heat of the Rat Pack and its formidable foot soldiers following the student protest march incident, Moore decided to pursue his dream and head off to London to seek fame and fortune. Movie stars didn’t man a police switchboard in a former egg board building on the bend of the Brisbane River.
Moore drafted a report and requested a 12-month leave of absence – unheard of in the Queensland Police Force. He didn’t submit it to his inspector first, but sent it straight to Whitrod instead. It
caused a furore. Moore was in serious trouble. He had overridden the system.
Whitrod had assistants, who looked at Moore’s application, and wrote a letter to tell him the leave was not approved. Whitrod saw it and the Commissioner crossed out ‘not’ and wrote ‘this is recommended’.
All of a sudden the other officers were asking – what power did Moore have that he could convince the Commissioner? ‘It was probably where the rot started for Moore in relation to that,’ the colleague adds.
Moore duly went to Europe and returned within six months, not famous and homesick. He slotted straight back into his old job in Operations. Within days he was summonsed to Whitrod’s office. ‘How did it all go?’ Whitrod asked.
Moore fibbed. He said it went very well.
‘I think you have enormous talent and I think you can do something for us,’ said Whitrod. ‘I’m going to make a position available at the Police Academy and get you to direct re-enactments of scenes of crime using drama.’
Whitrod had set up a specific crime scene investigation unit. He wanted to modernise it. He wanted to introduce new techniques. Moore would train members of the unit with his dramatic flair.
In the meantime, Moore would have to make up for his lack of hands-on police work while the academy specifics were ironed out. He had to work out of a suburban police station for a while. Where did he want to go?
Moore decided he would like to work at Mitchelton.
Neither Whitrod nor Moore could know that within a few short years Moore would, in a way, get at least part of his lifelong wish. ‘Constable Dave’ would become one of the most recognisable faces on Australian television. He would also become a lightning rod for trouble that would rock the Queensland Police Force to its foundations.
The Hippies of Cedar Bay
The beginning of the end for Whitrod was in fact sealed on a beautiful stretch of beach 2005 kilometres north-west of Brisbane and a little over 50 kilometres south of Cooktown. The place was called Cedar Bay.
Accessible usually by foot or boat, the bay area had been mined for tin from the late 1870s. By the mid-1970s, there was one former tin miner left – the hermit Bill Evans, or Cedar Bay Bill as he became known.
With his permission, two communes of hippies set up camp, one at the northern end of the beach and another to the south. The northerners were meat-eating and slaughtered pigs for food. The southerners were vegetarians, planted fruit trees and sheltered in well-tended huts. They smoked marihuana, lived naked, played music and reared children. They had ‘new moon’ parties and bothered nobody.
On the wet and humid morning of Sunday 29 August 1976, Laurel Pallister, with baby Tree on her hip, was enjoying the dawn at the southern end of the beach when she saw men in uniforms down at the water’s edge.
Offshore was the patrol boat HMAS Bayonet, and the narcotics vessel Jabiru. Soon a helicopter was circling overhead, dropping officers down onto the beach. Simultaneously, other police and drug agents arrived at the bay’s western flank by four-wheel-drive. A light aircraft criss-crossed overhead.
The pilot of the chartered helicopter – Wayne Knight, who was in his thirties – had at one time worked for the CIA’s Air America, flying covert operations in the Vietnam War. As he landed with two Narcotics agents at the northern end of the beach he ‘could see the faces of the hippies looking at us through the bush’.
The drug raid, ordered by the relatively newly installed Cairns Police District Inspector Robert Gray, saw 34 male officers and two females storm the communes. They chopped down fruit trees, set fire to huts and terrorised the residents. Many of the hippies were handcuffed. Twelve were taken to Cooktown to face charges of drug possession and vagrancy. In the end, police and Narcotics agents retrieved a glass jar containing 120 Indian hemp seeds, and 120 small Indian hemp plants.
It wasn’t until Tuesday 31 August that a small story about the raid appeared in the Courier-Mail: HIPPIES WOKE TO BIG DRUG RAID.
‘Early on Sunday the commune of 34 people, including several children, arose to find their normally tranquil retreat swarming with police and Federal Narcotics agents.’ The story quoted a police spokesman saying there was some resistance as police began to search the huts, but no real violence.
In fact, the story had been broken earlier by Steve Gray, a Cairns correspondent for the alternative 4ZZ radio station, and word had gotten to the impressive young reporter Andrew Olle, a gun on the national television current affairs show, This Day Tonight. Olle immediately headed for Cedar Bay.
With a teacher’s strike dominating the headlines in Queensland, the hippie raid disappeared from the news until the evening of Tuesday 7 September, when Olle’s story was aired on the ABC. In an instant the Cedar Bay raid had gone national.
The next day, Queensland’s Opposition police spokesman and the member for Rockhampton, Keith Wright, raised in parliament the allegations of police brutality during the operation, stemming from the television report. He said police had used ‘storm-trooper’ tactics, and demanded an inquiry.
In addition he had seen photographic evidence that revealed huts had been deliberately torched and children’s clothes and food had been piled in a heap and ignited with kerosene. Wright added that water tanks had been ‘shot up’ by police.
The new Police Minister, Tom Newbery, had a different version of events, the truth behind the Olle report that he considered ‘one of the most blatantly biased pieces of so-called objective reporting I have ever seen’.
Newbery said police had seized not 120 small hemp plants, but a virtual crop worth $20,000 on the street. He described the northern Cedar Bay commune as a group of undesirables who lived in complete squalor – ‘the stench of excrement was overpowering and the rotting carcasses of two wild pigs lay near a sluggish creek which served as a water supply’.
Newbery added that many residents of the area were armed and fired shots at police when they fled into the jungle. ‘There will be no haven in North Queensland where people can disregard the law,’ thundered Newbery. ‘This obvious campaign to discredit police action only increases my own resolve and that of the Queensland Police Force to attack the drug problem with renewed dedication and vigour. I give my full support to the Queensland Police Force in their efforts to stamp out the presence of this evil in our society.’
Bill Hewitt, who was then the Liberal Party member for Chatsworth, never hid his distaste for Bjelke-Petersen. He had no problem with police carrying out drug investigations, but he couldn’t understand why ‘they had to be belted, why their homes were burned down’.
‘It was an excess use of authority by the police,’ Hewitt remembers. ‘I made a statement that the police conduct should be inquired into. That made it into the press.
‘At a joint party meeting I had no illusions. I knew I was going to get a bit of stick. Joh barely said a word when the subject of Cedar Bay was introduced. Then six or seven fellows, one after the other, stood up and did me over. It was brutal. I was a mess when I came out. I took it very badly.’
The demand for an official investigation into police behaviour grew louder, with members of the communes threatening to lay charges against police. Bjelke-Petersen said he did not personally order the raid. ‘The first I knew of it was when I read of it in the Courier-Mail,’ the Premier said.
Towards the middle of September, ALP Queensland Senator Jim Keeffe tabled in Federal Parliament photographs of the damage done by police to the communes during the raid. The political heat over Cedar Bay further intensified.
To nullify it, local newspapers in Brisbane, particularly the Sunday Mail, began running stories week after week about the dangers of drugs to society. In addition, a new method of rating senior police, introduced by Whitrod, was leaked to the press.
‘A new system under which it is claimed commissioned officers – ranked at inspector and above – are being secretly assessed by other commissioned o
fficers has sparked off a bitter new row in the Police Force,’ it was reported.
The messages of the twin diversion from the Cedar Bay story were obvious – drugs were the bane of a moral, civilised society, and those associated with them were therefore immoral and a danger to the community; and the hapless Queensland Police Commissioner, Ray Whitrod, had lost control of his men.
(Lewis himself underwent two such ‘secret’ assessments around this time and emerged with almost perfect results. One described him as a ‘shrewd, intelligent thinker’, whose ‘potential should be used and stretched to the utmost while he is still a comparatively young man’. Another concluded: ‘Has capacity to carry higher ranks and acquit himself well in those ranks.’)
These media distractions, however, managed to halt the march of the story of the Cedar Bay fiasco.
In the middle of all this Whitrod suffered another serious blow from a different quarter. He had lost an ally in his minister, Max Hodges. Then one of his most trusted men and assistant commissioner, Norm Gulbransen, retired on 15 September.
By the end of September – a month after the scandal began – the Liberal Party state executive called for an inquiry into the police actions at Cedar Bay, as did the president of the Young Nationals state council, Peter Slipper. Bjelke-Petersen and his colleagues ignored the pleas.
Then came the bombshell: Janice Lambert and Michael Ballister, both victims of the Cedar Bay raid, filed complaints against police in Cairns.
On Friday 2 October Commissioner Whitrod declared he would decide the following Monday if he would order an investigation into the growing controversy. He was once again between a rock and a hard place – the raid had gone ahead on his watch, though it appeared to be an initiative directly out of Cairns and divorced from decision-making at headquarters in Brisbane.
Did Whitrod stay quiet and take responsibility for it? Or, as in the student protest incident at the William Jolly Bridge just weeks earlier, did he go forward and investigate the poor behaviour of his officers?
Jacks and Jokers Page 4
