Jacks and Jokers

by Matthew Condon

  Hicks strongly refuted the allegations in his memo in reply on 17 February. ‘I am deeply concerned at two matters which were inexplicably raised in your memorandum,’ Hicks wrote. ‘One matter is that the Unit was working contrary to its original charter. The second matter is that there was disquiet in the Police because they were being investigated by the Crime Intelligence Unit. Both statements are incorrect.’

  Lewis hit back on 17 March: ‘Please supply me with particulars of the field investigations conducted by the Crime Intelligence Unit which resulted in the prosecution of the six police officers mentioned in your report. Your report should include the names of the alleged offenders, the charges and dates preferred. A précis of the circumstances in each case is also required.’

  How much was Hicks willing to tell, given his knowledge of Lewis’s friendships with men like Jack Herbert, Glen Hallahan and Tony Murphy? Or did he tell all, reminding the new Commissioner that he was aware of a growing network of corruption, and that some of the major players had strong connections to the force’s highest office? In short, that he knew what the bad apples were up to.

  It was a dangerous game, and one that Hicks must have understood he could not win. His confidential six-page report to Lewis on 23 March laid out the skeletons in the closet. He mentioned – but not by name – the information of deceased prostitute and whistleblower Shirley Margaret Brifman, obtained by the CIU in late 1971, adding that her testimony ‘could neither be proved nor disproved’.

  An investigation into the extent of prostitution revealed that ‘official records did not give any indication of the true position regarding police corruption connected with prostitution’, and that field investi­gations in the early 1970s showed that ‘some Police Officers were giving protection to prostitutes’.

  His report detailed former officer Glen Hallahan being charged with official corruption over the Dorothy Knight pay-off in New Farm Park, and the Rat Packer counselling criminal Donald Ross Kelly to rob a bank at Kedron.

  According to Hicks, the CIU began to look seriously at SP betting in Queensland and found that the industry was worth in excess of $50 million a year, with more than 20 operators turning over $50,000 each a week.

  His report had some choice things to say about the Licensing Branch. ‘A number of Police in the Licensing Branch had been receiving protection money for some years, with one member receiving on behalf of himself and others in excess of $1000 a month,’ Hicks reported. ‘Honest Police Officers in the Licensing Branch were being neutralised or completely dominated by dishonest members.’

  Hicks wrote of the Southport Betting Case and the involvement of Jack Herbert.

  The report went on that in March 1976 – when Lewis was marooned as a lowly inspector in Charleville – ‘investigations were made by the Crime Intelligence Unit into the activities of Detective Sergeant A. [Allen] Bulger and a solicitor, Stuart Thomas Bale and a criminal Jeffrey Colin Jones. In March 1976, Sergeant Bulger was charged with others with conspiring to pervert the course of justice … the evidence was also that Bulger received money from Jones in consideration for giving him [this] protection.’

  He told Lewis that it was not possible to ‘seriously investigate’ police corruption without a ‘field force’. Finally he concluded: ‘Prior to the commencement of the Crime Intelligence Unit there was no real machinery to deal with the problem of Police corruption, especially where it was connected with organised crime, nor was there any encouragement to do something about it.

  ‘This is evidenced by the fact that the conditions which existed during that time, should have been obvious to both junior and senior officers, yet there is no trace of any such information ever having been recorded or investigated.’

  He urged ‘better steps’ be taken to deal with police corruption.

  Hicks was wasting his time.

  Within weeks – with a masterful touch of spite and irony – Commissioner Lewis would disband and re-badge the CIU, and put his old mate Tony Murphy in charge. Basil Hicks was ordered to head up the new Internal Investigations Unit, where he was given a small office, no equipment, and essentially, no work.

  Yet another Whitrod initiative was turned to dust.

  Murphy Takes Charge

  Constable Jim Slade was working at the Woodridge police station south of the CBD in early 1977 when he was told to report to Inspector Tony Murphy at headquarters.

  Since the ousting of Whitrod, and the ascension of Lewis, Murphy had been brought back to Brisbane to command the Consorting Squad and to dismantle and refashion Whitrod’s ‘police spy’ operation, the Crime Intelligence Unit or CIU. For years it had been known sarcastically among anti-Whitrod officers as the ‘ICU’. Murphy started duties back in the city on Monday 7 February.

  As Lewis noted in his diary: ‘Saw Insp. Murphy on arrival on transfer.’

  Lewis says he needed Murphy to get the team working again following the departure of Whitrod. ‘See the branch was in this disarray,’ reflects Lewis. ‘I don’t know why, because probably they’d had Whitrod’s men there. They’d had [Basil] Hicks. I don’t know who else.

  ‘But anyhow as soon as I could I brought Murphy back to the Branch and I brought Noel McIntyre back as Assistant Commissioner. Unfortunately he didn’t have that long to go before retirement because he was a really great bloke.

  ‘Murphy did get the Branch going I must admit. I wouldn’t have thought it was a mistake to bring him back there. It might have been a mistake to make him an Assistant Commissioner in retrospect …’

  Murphy wasted no time throwing out the old furniture. ‘The “ICU” was absolutely disbanded, shattered, taken over by Tony Murphy,’ says Slade. ‘Tony Murphy was the boss.’

  When Slade arrived in Murphy’s office, both men were surrounded by empty filing cabinets – the skeletal remains of Whitrod’s crack investigating force. Slade sat down before the famous detective. ‘I’ve had a look at what you’ve done in the Commonwealth Police,’ Murphy said. ‘I’m starting this new team.’

  It was a dream come true for Slade. ‘Here was me walking into a job that I’d wanted for years,’ Slade recalls. ‘I must say he was without a doubt the greatest police officer I ever worked under.

  ‘He taught me to be, and I would consider myself to be, a very good investigator. The only reason I’m patting myself on the back and giving myself that tag is because it’s something that is measurable and by a very good investigator, someone that puts a number of matters before a magistrate and there’s sufficient evidence to send it to a higher court, and the numbers of pleas of guilty and the success rate is the measure of a good investigator.

  ‘I had the most amazing record of pleas of guilty. I learned everything from Tony Murphy.’

  Murphy had other protégés – Alan Barnes, Pat Glancy and Barry O’Brien – but for whatever reason Murphy saw great promise in Slade, and gave him ‘special treatment’. Could an element of it have been Murphy’s own passion for photography in the early days of his police cadetship?

  With the unit re-badged the Bureau of Criminal Intelligence, Slade immersed himself in his work. ‘When I first went into the job with Tony [Murphy] our job was surveillance and it was my job to start a very, very proficient and efficient photographic section in there, to have equipment that was able to take really good telephoto shots, to be able to produce photographs in all light and really to be able to produce photographs for evidence that were worthy of evidence,’ says Slade.

  In no time Slade – fortuitously the owner of a face that could blend very quickly into a crowd – was doing undercover work. He had curly hair and grew a beard. Not even his children knew what he did for a living.

  ‘We never did one single thing on the brothels,’ he recalls. ‘We did do one job on an SP and I reckon it was just to get evidence to get him out of the way. We didn’t do anything after that in relation to SPs. But we did a lot of undercov
er work.

  ‘We had this system of being a squad that detectives could come and use and we would put the whole brief together for the detective. If they had an informant, we would work the informant, we’d go undercover, we’d be with the informant the whole time, we used tapes absolutely continually, listening devices. We were getting warrants for listening devices for every bloody thing.

  ‘We worked on murders, bank robberies, major break and enters, and drugs, they were the main areas.’

  It was a far cry from Whitrod’s CIU outfit, fighting to bring down the Rat Pack. That, now, was just a memory.

  ‘When I went in there all the files [from Whitrod’s unit] were gone but there were still tags on the empty files,’ Slade says. ‘They didn’t mean anything to me for quite some time.’

  Miss America

  The well-mannered Jack Herbert, now free of the Queensland Police Force, his malignant melanoma, and a custodial sentence following his epic Southport SP betting trial for corruption where he was found not guilty, was at a loose end.

  He needed a job, despite the continued generosities of hotelier Barry Maxwell and former police mates like Tony Murphy. Herbert, however, wasn’t broke. Before the trial he’d sealed $30,000 in cash inside a number of Besser bricks which he’d waterproofed and cemented over.

  By chance, he was paid a visit by friend and local nightclub entrepreneur Tony Robinson Snr. Robinson had been friends with the likes of Terry Lewis and Tony Murphy since the 1950s, when the young consorters kept a constant eye on the city’s saloons and wine bars, and shared long dinners and drinks at Sue-Tin’s Lotus Room restaurant and cabaret in Elizabeth Street.

  Robinson had recently ventured into the gaming machine business. He had an amusement arcade in the city. He was smart enough to know that Herbert had a vast array of contacts and just might be able to help him secure his lucrative ticket machines in clubs and hotels.

  The machines became known as Joh’s Pokies – given the Premier’s staunch opposition to regulation poker machines in Queensland. You inserted a 20 cent piece, received a numbered ticket and potentially won a prize. It was illegal for proprietors to replace the prize with cash, but this is how the machines were used. They quickly became popular in club land. Robinson ran Austral Amusements. Obviously the more machines that were in circulation, the more money could be made.

  Also taking advantage of Queensland’s pokie deprivation was Sydney businessman and famed yachtsman Jack Rooklyn. The cigar-puffing Rooklyn was the Australian distributor for the American Bally poker machine company.

  Indeed, just four years earlier, Bally Australia came under the microscope of the royal commission on organised crime in Sydney clubs, presided over by Justice Athol Moffitt. Moffitt concluded that Bally was a front for organised crime and accused Rooklyn of lying before his commission. Moffitt said it was a risk to have the Bally organisation trading in Australia.

  One of Rooklyn’s companies, Queensland Automatics, supplied ‘in-line’ machines to clubs north of the New South Wales border. In-line machines were similar in appearance to flipper-operated pinball machines. Silver balls were sent onto the playing surface which contained grids of numbers and depressions able to accept the balls. The object was to secure four or five numbers in a line with the balls and match the numbers shown electronically on the game’s headboard. Getting balls ‘in-line’ yielded a free game.

  From the moment in-line machines were legally permitted in Queensland, however, the free games were illegally replaced with cash prizes and their popularity went through the roof. Dozens of suppliers competed for a slice of the action, but two immediately controlled the market – Robinson’s Austral Amusements and Rooklyn’s Queensland Automatics, the latter dominating Austral by a factor of four.

  Not only were the machines a licence to print money for the suppliers and clubs, but they provided substantial income to the government. A permit for an in-line machine was ten times that for a regular amusement machine. By 1977, each machine, of which there were hundreds, funnelled up to $600 each per year into government coffers.

  Robinson suggested Herbert start working for Rooklyn, and the three men met later that year at Lennons Hotel in the city.

  Herbert was a handy man to know. When he agreed to work for Rooklyn he immediately got in touch with his old friend Don ‘Shady’ Lane, MLA. Lane, as it happened, was a member of the Justice Committee reviewing the permit system for in-line machines in Queensland.

  Herbert’s favourite in-line machine was Miss America – on its illuminated backboard stood two voluptuous blondes. One was wearing a red evening gown. The other, a red bikini.

  Committee of Eight

  Commissioner Lewis would find very quickly that the residue of Ray Whitrod and his ambitions still lingered within the force he had inherited. Whitrod had his fair share of acolytes, the intelligent, hand-picked officers who agreed with his reform, the ‘incorruptibles’ who had put their neck on the line to support the boss in a police culture that by and large loathed him.

  Word got to Lewis that a handful of them were meeting and talking behind his back, plotting and scheming to undermine his regime. They became known as the Committee of Eight.

  ‘They were a little group that were against me and they were probably I suppose still pushing Mr Whitrod’s ideals,’ Lewis remembers. ‘See, I was told, well a number of people said to me when I was appointed – when you get there, get rid of all Whitrod’s supporters. Every bugger was talking to me then. And I said no, no, no I can’t … and anyhow that’s easier said than done. But what I did do, I still promoted some of them, which I was probably a little bit … too lenient in relation to that.’

  He said he saved some of the Whitrod faction because he believed they were reasonable police officers. He would come to regret it.

  ‘They [members of the Committee] talked to whoever their friends were in the media,’ says Lewis. ‘And it was all bullshit, total bullshit.

  ‘My quick promotion, that got a lot of fellows’ noses out of joint. One of them was a fellow called [Jim] Voigt of course and a few others. When I became Commissioner … there was a group of police who called themselves a “Committee of Eight”. Now I’m not too sure who they all were, I’m sure I know some of them and they set about to wreck me.

  ‘And they did it through feeding stuff, concocting stuff and feeding it to [the member for Archerfield] Kev Hooper who’d throw it in parliament. One fellow was a fellow called [Bob] Campbell … he wrote articles. I think from memory it would have to be Voigt and [Basil] Hicks and Campbell and a fellow called Peter Dautel. [Ross] Dickson certainly would be, Huey certainly was … the two Hueys [John and Hilary] probably.’

  Walking to a Different Beat

  Across the other side of the world, in the West Midlands city of Birmingham in the United Kingdom, Police Constable Nigel Powell, 25, was walking the beat.

  While technically not a rookie, Powell had been sworn in on 5 September 1975, and was beginning to find his feet. He patrolled, as part of B-division, everything from the rarefied streets of the suburb of Edgbaston, to the working-class housing commission estates of Quinton.

  Powell, who had dabbled in catering, was encouraged by a friend to enlist. Despite the horrific Birmingham pub bombings in November 1974 that killed 21 people and injured a further 182, and the stabbing death of young West Midlands police constable David Green in the summer of 1975, Powell was not deterred from a career in law enforcement.

  In fact, he relished the job. Living in a police house at King’s Heath with his wife Heather, Powell had found his calling. He could not know that in a little over three years he would be domiciled in far-off Brisbane, joining a very different police force, and culture, from what he was used to.

  Powell would leave behind a force that placed enormous emphasis on how officers worked on the streets and how they reacted to, say, incidents of football-crowd hooliganism. Pa
rt of his training was spent learning how to march properly and how to resolve violent domestic disputes. He also participated in full-on, in-your-face physi­cal training.

  As for Brisbane, he would be heading into a force whose members in their cadet training sat at little wooden desks like schoolchildren and learned aspects of policing and the law by rote. As in Lewis’s time, training consisted of a few hours in the exercise yard at the Petrie Terrace depot playing with old rifles, or jumping fully clothed into the nearby Ithaca public pool – just in case their policing saw them in the drink.

  He didn’t know it at the time but Powell was on his way to a place so languorous and informal that he would not believe his eyes.

  A Visit to the Matador Club

  On the evening of 3 March 1977, Commissioner Lewis was enjoying a meal out at the Police College on official business after a busy Thursday.

  Earlier in the day he had personally seen Superintendent Tony Murphy ‘re functioning of CIU’, and had been briefed on yet another upcoming Royal tour. So by the time he’d gotten home to Garfield Drive in Bardon, he was due for a rest.

  Over in South Brisbane, however, his troops were readying themselves for a raid on the notorious Matador Club, owned and run by petty gangster Roland Short. The Matador Club advertised regularly in Brisbane newspapers and promoted as a feature its fortress-like security. It ran games of Manila and blackjack, along with pornographic movies, prostitution and ‘all manner of obscenities’, in the words of the ALP attack dog from Inala, Kev Hooper.

  On Saturday evenings at the Matador you could join in ‘Swingers’ Night’, an event that attracted clients from as far afield as Dalby, Warwick and Toowoomba. Its newspaper advertisement read: ‘BIG SWINGERS PARTY NIGHT. Come and meet new faces at our Swingers Party relaxing atmosphere in Spanish style setting. All couples welcome. Single girls invited. All amenities available. Ring Geoff – 446345.’