Jacks and Jokers

by Matthew Condon

  Fancourt only recognised one other member of Bellino’s crew – a taxi driver with the nickname ‘Cyclone’, regularly seen parked outside Bellino’s nightclub, Pinocchio’s.

  The situation, Fancourt understood, was potentially extremely dangerous. What was Bellino doing? Was this a show of force after Scognamiglio’s arrest? Was this a threat?

  Fancourt didn’t wait to find out. ‘Bill grabbed his piece and I grabbed mine,’ remembers Fancourt. ‘We stood and pointed our guns at all five of them. Bill took two of them, Doc took another two, and I had Bellino and we marched them out into the kitchen.

  ‘I grabbed Bellino by the throat and backed him up against the freezers. He was telling me that he was a good man … I had the pistol pressed up into his nostrils.’

  All the while, as the confrontation unfolded, the Lotus Room’s owner and chef Ray Sue-Tin could be heard in the background continuing to chop vegetables.

  ‘I heard the toilet flush,’ says Fancourt. ‘Bill told me later he tipped one of the bastards upside down in the toilet. I’d upset the ant’s nest. It was a show of intimidation and it backfired on them.’

  In the end, Scognamiglio absconded on bail and fled to Italy. Several months later he returned to Brisbane and was arrested on the airport tarmac after officer Cacciola got a tip-off through his Italian contacts.

  The case against Scognamiglio went to the Crown Law office and a nolle prosequi was entered. It was incomprehensible to Fancourt that the case fell over.

  What he didn’t know at the time, however, was that someone had pieced together a fake official police statement from Fancourt over the Scognamiglio incident. The 12-page forgery was impeccably typed and went into some detail about conversations Fancourt had with Scognamiglio on those late-night visits to the illegal casino at 142 Wickham Street.

  Not only did the statement present at the very least prima faci evidence that Fancourt had induced the defendant into making certain admissions, but it introduced invented police and civilian witnesses within the casino at the time who could, if needed, be called as witnesses to the inducement and thus a conspiracy at the instigation of Fancourt.

  The statement was unsigned.

  Fancourt was shattered, it was the end of his attempt to smash Herbert and the Rat Pack. ‘I gave them the best shot available that they’d had for years,’ Fancourt says. ‘It was my career. I was very industrious. I would have made a good cop.’

  Defeated, Fancourt, who had always had an avid amateur interest in sapphires, applied for a transfer to the little town of Anakie, the centrepoint of the Queensland gemfields. He was successful, but by September 1976 he realised he had nowhere else to go with his career. He’d aimed high with the Scognamiglio bust but it fell off the corrupt system like water off a duck’s back. The dispirited Fancourt resigned, just weeks before massive regime change in the Queensland Police Force, and started prospecting full-time.

  For years he would dream the same dream – he would be walking down a dark, poorly lit alleyway in Fortitude Valley, Brisbane’s inner-city grid of vice. Out of the shadows, figures would repeatedly lunge at him with sharp knives, although somehow he always managed to avoid them and find, at the end of the long laneway, a small doorway or hatch to escape through. The dream not over, he would find himself inside Pinocchio’s – the nightclub, gambling den and massage parlour belonging to the Bellino brothers. In the dream, the men do not acknowledge Fancourt. He then makes his way through the club, out the front door and into the street.

  That’s when he wakes up in a panic. Fancourt would suffer the same dream for the rest of his life.

  No. 1 Has Directed So

  In the second week of November, Lewis began hearing firmer talk that he was set to be appointed assistant commissioner. He had telephone discussions with Tony Murphy and Member for Merthyr, Don ‘Shady’ Lane, and noted in his diary that someone coded 007 had supplied him with a tip: ‘Next Monday. No 1 [Bjelke-Petersen] has directed so. One at a time. You next time.’

  Lewis wasn’t the only one hearing mutterings about his appointment. Whitrod loyalists also got wind of the move and tried to head it off.

  One Saturday morning two of ‘Whitrod’s bloody henchmen’ telephoned Ron Edington [former Police Union chief] at home. They wanted to use Edington’s press contacts to gain traction for a ‘special meeting’ they had planned that Monday.

  ‘The Government’s going to appoint Lewis as Whitrod’s Assistant Commissioner. We’re going to let the public know that he’s not fit to be appointed. We want you to get the cooperation of the press on Sunday to blow this up,’ they told him.

  ‘Bullshit,’ Edington replied. ‘Fight your own battles. I’m not becoming involved in that.’

  Edington immediately got on the phone to Lewis. ‘They’re going to appoint you Assistant Commissioner?’ Edington enquired.

  ‘Oh,’ Lewis supposedly said, ‘I didn’t know anything about that.’

  ‘Don’t bullshit. Of course you know,’ Edington retorted. ‘It’s like the old what’s-his-name who got you promoted, you know, the bloody wool broker.’

  Whitrod, oblivious, put forward to Cabinet the names of several candidates for the Assistant Commissionership, including Vern MacDonald and Alec McSporran. After the Cabinet meeting, he received a phone call from his new minister, Tom Newbery. Inspector Terence Murray Lewis of Charleville would be the next assistant commissioner. Lewis had vaulted 122 other equal or more senior officers to take the job.

  ‘That’s astounding,’ Whitrod said. He immediately asked to see Newbery in his office. Whitrod repeated he was flabbergasted.

  ‘Well,’ said Newbery, ‘that is how it’s going to be.’

  ‘That is pretty shattering to me because it is widely known in the force that Lewis was one of Frank Bischof’s bagmen,’ Whitrod exclaimed.

  ‘Oh,’ Newbery replied, ‘well that was when he was a detective sergeant – he is now an inspector and wouldn’t do that sort of thing.’

  ‘Well, I don’t agree with you,’ Whitrod went on. ‘Can I talk to the Cabinet or the Premier because it’s important to me. I’ve been conducting an anti-corruption program here for seven years, and everybody in the police force knows that Lewis is corrupt.’ Whitrod added that Lewis’s appointment would nullify all his efforts.

  ‘I will talk to the Premier,’ Newbery said. An hour later the Police Minister phoned Whitrod: ‘The Premier does not want to see you, nor will he allow you to address Cabinet.’

  When asked why senior officers with better qualifications had been overlooked, Newbery replied: ‘It was the Premier’s decision.’

  For almost two years Officer Gregory Early had been the irregu­lar personal assistant to Whitrod, along with Early’s friend Ken Hoggett. Early had joined the force in 1956 and as a cadet showed an unusual flair for typing and shorthand, making him a valuable commodity. Through the 1960s he was seconded to the Legal Section, and befriended the commissioner at the time Frank Bischof and Terry Lewis of the Juvenile Aid Bureau.

  Early was trusted by Whitrod, but he showed substantial political savvy by remaining on the good side of people like Inspector Lewis. He was also acquainted with Hallahan and Murphy.

  Early remembers the final days of Whitrod: ‘I recall a day in 1976 … when several officers in the trusted category were called into the large conference room on the Commissioner’s floor. Jim Casey, the departmental secretary, was there, as was Basil Hicks, Jim Voigt, John Dautel, Ken Hoggett and myself. He [Whitrod] indicated that he had put up via a Cabinet submission that a certain officer [probably Superintendent Vern MacDonald] be made an Assistant Commissioner and that Minister Tom Newbery had just called him and indicated that he would be replaced by Inspector Terry Lewis.’

  Early says Whitrod declared the situation untenable and that he would be resigning. He asked Jim Casey to find out the particulars of his superannuation entitlements.<
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  ‘Why would you have to resign over a matter like that?’ Early says he asked.

  ‘They would put him in a back room and bypass me for him and that would not work,’ Whitrod allegedly replied. As it was, the government was extremely well prepared for whatever indignant reaction might come from Whitrod.

  Former Police Union boss Ron Edington confirms the plot to unseat Whitrod. ‘Joh had to get rid of him because he bailed up on Joh and told Joh that he wasn’t answerable to him,’ remembers Edington. ‘So he wasn’t going to be dictated to by bloody Joh. Then old Whitrod goes down and he objected to it and they said, “Oh well, perhaps we could make him [Lewis] a Chief Commissioner.” Whitrod went back and called all his staff together and had a discussion with them all as to what he should do.’

  Lewis’s new appointment was announced on Monday 15 November 1976. He was deluged with phone calls, cards, letters and telegrams of congratulations. Lewis’s diary noted for that day: ‘The Premier phoned congratulations on promotion. Numerous other callers. Off duty at 6 p.m. Received 44 telephone calls up until 11.30 p.m.’

  One typed letter came from none other than Whitrod staffer and supposed loyalist Greg Early, who divulged some interesting political machinations around the decision.

  ‘Dear Terry,’ he wrote, ‘congratulations on your promotion. It seems likely that you will go one step further. Two weeks ago I was talking to ‘Shady’ [Lane]. He said that next week (last week) was to be a very important week. I took from that comment that there would be some movement but I never thought it would be as big as it has turned out to be.’

  (If Early is accurate, Don ‘Shady’ Lane knew about, and was freely discussing, Lewis’s elevation to Assistant Commissioner from the week beginning Monday 1 November. It was on that precise day that Newbery took Whitrod’s controversial Cedar Bay report to Cabinet for discussion. It was most likely the moment the decision about Lewis was sealed. Five days later, Lewis would have his meeting with National Party president Bob Sparkes in Charleville.)

  Lewis also received a telegram from his old mate in Sydney, former detective Ray ‘Gunner’ Kelly. ‘Warmest congratulations. STOP. Your appointment heralds reprieve of wonderful service. STOP. Sincere wishes long successful reign, warmest regards, Ray Kelly.’

  And another: ‘Congratulations best wishes for future, Glen and Heather Hallahan.’

  Also a note on writing paper featuring an illustration of flowers and a teapot, from Lewis’s daughter Lanna. ‘Dear Dad,’ she wrote, ‘this is just a short note to say how pleased I am about your new promotion to Assistant Commissioner. I would just like to say that I am very proud of you and love you very much.’

  Lewis also says he received a call in Brisbane later that afternoon, concerning Whitrod’s objection to his appointment as Assistant Commissioner.

  ‘I’ll tell you something … not to name people but somebody phoned me … when I got appointed Assistant Commissioner he [Whitrod] said apparently he wouldn’t work with me,’ claims Lewis. ‘And apparently the Premier – again I wasn’t there – I was told that the Premier said either to him or to the Minister [Newbery] to tell him if that was going to be his attitude he’d make Lewis a Chief Commissioner and Whitrod could work for him.’

  Lewis’s diary for 15 November recorded that apart from the Premier ringing with his congratulations on his new appointment, he was also phoned by ‘Mr [Ken] Crooke, Press secretary to Min. for Police … Mr N. Turner M.L.A … numerous other callers’.

  As for Raymond Wells Whitrod, he immediately offered his resignation, defeated.

  The Man with a Light Touch

  Whitrod’s sudden departure shocked the state.

  The press reported the following day that Whitrod personally handed in his typed resignation to Minister Newbery, and it was taken straightaway to Cabinet and approved unanimously. Whitrod cited personal reasons for leaving.

  (Lewis says he got a call from Don ‘Shady’ Lane in Brisbane about the Cabinet vote: ‘I assume it was Don Lane – they said when it came up in Cabinet about Mr Whitrod putting in his resig­nation, [Russ] Hinze said, “Accept it before the bastard changes his mind.” ’)

  Speed seemed to have been of the essence. The Courier-Mail reported that following the unanimous vote ‘… a minute was sent immediately to the Governor [Sir Colin Hannah] for his signature, to make it an Executive Council decision.’

  The haste wasn’t the only insult to Whitrod. The government also announced an inquiry into criminal law enforcement, presentation of evidence and police investigation, interrogation, search and arrest techniques. (It would formally become the ‘Committee of Inquiry into the Enforcement of Criminal Law in Queensland’, or the Lucas Inquiry, presided over by Justice Geoffrey Lucas.) An investigation into any allegations of police corruption or malpractice was not included in the terms of reference.

  This gave a powerful if erroneous impression that the Bjelke-Petersen government wasn’t looking into any poor behaviour by the force itself, but was moving in to sort out the mess made by Whitrod’s shoddy tenure.

  Furthermore, on the day Whitrod resigned, Cabinet announced other police changes, one being that Brisbane Metropolitan Traffic superintendent, Inspector Michael Beattie – the officer charged with beating the female student on the head with his baton during a demonstration just over three months earlier – was given a promotion. It was another clear stab at Whitrod.

  When asked about Whitrod’s resignation, Bjelke-Petersen answered: ‘I did not expect it.’

  The former commissioner gave two weeks’ notice, and the press speculated that he was set to ‘blast’ the government before returning to civilian life. His final day would be Friday 26 November. On the following Monday, he planned to give a press conference. The government forthwith called for submissions for a new commissioner, though few doubted Lewis was the prime candidate.

  Throughout the rest of the week the press focused on the humble Inspector Lewis, seeking out public opinion in the Charleville police district. He was described as an ‘arch-diplomat when he was a judge at the recent local Booga Woongaroo Festival tiny tots competition’, and ‘a man who has the secret of getting on with people’. He had learned his ‘light touch’ as head of the JAB. In short, he had the respect of the people of Charleville and beyond.

  Days before the Cabinet meeting to formally appoint Lewis as Commissioner, the head of the CIU, Basil ‘The Hound’ Hicks, was contacted by then Transport Minister Keith Hooper, the Liberal member for Greenslopes.

  Hooper surreptitiously approached Hicks seeking information on Lewis. They then met secretly in Hooper’s car outside his house on the Sunday night before the Cabinet meeting. In short, Hooper wanted incriminating evidence on Lewis to stop his appointment to Commissioner.

  ‘He [Hooper] said some Liberals didn’t want the Premier to make Lewis Commissioner,’ Hicks later said. ‘They said he [Lewis] was corrupt.

  ‘He [Hooper] wanted something in writing – he wanted copies of files from the CIU. He said the Premier would not do anything until he got something in writing. I told him that if Lewis was made Commissioner, my head would be on the chopping block [if the files were supplied].

  ‘He [Hooper] said that if you can’t give me anything in writing, Lewis will be made Commissioner within a few days.’

  On Monday 22 November, just six months after Lewis and Bjelke-Petersen had chinwagged at that lonely airstrip out in Cunnamulla, state Cabinet took ten minutes to crown Lewis the new Queensland Police Commissioner. Lewis was the only name submitted to and discussed by Cabinet.

  Bjelke-Petersen said: ‘He’s a straight-shooter.’

  Minister Newbery added: ‘I am confident he is the right person to take over a very difficult and demanding job.’

  Needless to say, the Premier wanted him to step into his new role immediately. The congratulations poured in. Ray ‘Gunner’ Kelly wrote a note, aski
ng if Terry could help out an old friend who had fallen on hard times. New South Wales Police Commissioner Fred Hanson rang to offer his fullest cooperation. Jack Roberts of the National Hotel wrote in a telegram: ‘Best wishes many true words said in jest.’ Bob Sparkes also telegrammed: ‘Hearty congratulations on your well merited elevation.’ Judge Eddie Broad wrote a note out of his District Court chambers: ‘… best wishes for a successful career as Commissioner.’

  And Wally Wright, the former policeman who urged Lewis to move from the Fuel Board and join the ranks in the late 1940s, sent a one-page typed letter. ‘Congratulations of the most sincere feelings,’ said Wally. ‘No one was more enthused than I was of learning of your appointment which can be understood when I claim some involvement in your entering the police and your later appointment to the CIB. Best of luck, but you have no worries.’

  Wright’s touching letter was an example that some saw Lewis’s meteoric elevation to the top position as some sort of Horatio Alger rags-to-riches fable. The poor boy from Ipswich climbs to the top of the mountain. While that was technically a part of the story, what was not understood at the time was the relentless, well-organised and vicious campaign that had been waged to unseat Whitrod since his first weeks as Commissioner.

  This was an assault by stealth on several fronts over many years, involving senior police, the powerful Police Union and a network of anonymous informants from within and outside the government. It involved personal harassment, public slanging and the ceaseless shovelling of private harmful chatter. (Drug dealer and Hallahan informant John Edward Milligan would later, in a police interview, describe the campaign against Whitrod as ‘a coup’ and a ‘political overthrow’.)

  The eloquent and educated member for South Brisbane, Colin Lamont, had befriended Whitrod and admired his honesty and integrity. Lamont had his own theories about the resignation of Whitrod and the meteoric rise of Lewis.