Lamont got to know and like Whitrod, particularly following the latter’s resignation in November 1976. Both men were well educated. Lamont, on his election to parliament, chafed at the intellectual paucity in the House. ‘I remember Don Neal [National Party politician and farmer from western Queensland] half laughing at me and saying, “You’ve got a Bachelor of Arts … what do you paint?” ’ Lamont remembered in an interview. ‘They weren’t very sophisticated people, some of them.’
At midday on 7 September 1977, Lamont rose and relayed an extraordinary story to the House. He was familiar with his old alma mater, and he was also familiar with street violence, experienced during his years as a police officer in Hong Kong. A pro-active politician who did what he said, he had gone out to the University of Queensland that morning hoping to prevent a student protest planned for later that day.
Lamont implored the students to desist in a soapbox address with logic and compassion. ‘I went out there in the hope that I could address the students because I knew that they were contemplating an illegal march,’ Lamont said. ‘When I arrived I found a couple of hundred students listening to a student leader who was reading out the rules of the march.
‘Mr [Derek] Fielding, the President of the Queensland Council for Civil Liberties, came across to me and said, “I think we are here in the same capacity today. We are trying to talk them out of it.” ’
Lamont was permitted to speak to the students. He later addressed parliament:
I told the students that I have a great concern, as do, I think, other members of this Assembly, for the right to freedom of assembly and the right to freedom of expression. I also told them that I felt that the decision to march in protest was made in ignorance of the decision made by government members yesterday afternoon. We made the decision yesterday afternoon as government members that permits should not be issued for street marches where it clearly appeared that such marches would be provocative and therefore probably result in violence.
You know as well as I do, Mr Speaker, that some marches are deliberately provocative. And we said that where violence was likely or probable we felt the permit should not be given. That was not directing the Commissioner of Police; this was supporting what the police themselves wanted.’
Lamont had explained to the students that if they continued to march they ‘would be marching deliberately to come into conflict with the police.’ The students accepted the logic and voted not to march.
Lamont gave the House an insight into the responsible attitude of the students to street protests by reading a document circulated by student leaders that morning. By exposing the extent to which students were prepared to abide by new draconian laws to curtail their civil rights, Lamont also highlighted the ridiculousness of the legislation itself.
The point-by-point protest march guideline stated:
1.The march must disband immediately when the marshalls give the direction to do so. Disbanding will take place at least 50 metres from any police lines.
2.Once the marshalls have directed the march to disband people should do so in the following manner:
i.Move away from the police and keep moving away.
ii.Move on to the footpath and form into twos and threes.
iii.Move quickly but do not run.
iv.Disperse over a wide area.
v.Cease chanting the moment the marshalls give the order to disband. Remain quiet and especially do not swear.
vi.Fold up all placards and banners.
vii.Observe all ‘Don’t Walk’ signs; when crossing the road do not obstruct traffic – cross in twos and threes.
viii.If you are close to the University grounds move back there.
ix.Make your way to Roma St. Forum Area.
‘I can see members of the Opposition looking terribly glum at this turn of events,’ Lamont concluded. ‘I hope that we can look forward to police not having to put their own selves in danger in the future. The smiles today are on the faces of the police officers who were at the site and were happy to be able to go back to a normal day’s work. I hope this augurs well for the future.’
According to Lamont, two hours after his address to parliament, an incensed Premier Bjelke-Petersen ‘lunged at me across the floor of parliament, waving a tape recorder and spluttered, “I’ve heard every word. You are a traitor to this government!”
‘I went out and spoke on a soapbox the morning that the students were ready to march for the second time. And I managed to persuade them to disburse,’ Lamont remembered. ‘And Joh had the police down the bottom end of Sir Fred Schonell Drive ready to beat the living daylights out of them and throw them into the clink, and say, “Righto, there you are, law and order issue, bang, let’s go to the polls.”
‘He … had a tape, or he had a … well, he said he’d heard, so I assume he had a tape recording of everything I’d said to the students. And the frightening thing was that it had got to his hands as quickly as I’d got back to parliament. So it was … you know, it would lead to the reasonable assumption that the police had … the Special Branch had reported direct to the Premier.’
In a couple of months, at the 1977 state election, the Premier would have a very special surprise for the prickly and unpredictable Colin Lamont.
But This Was Not Peace
Outside the south-east corner of the state, the street-march question was not one that engaged cane farmers in Ingham or cattle barons in western Queensland. It was a Brisbane problem, seen if at all through a telescope.
In Joh’s heartland, this was their Premier taking an iron fist to urban ratbags whose nebulous ideals and actions did nothing more than disrupt the social harmony of the capital. If the streets are clogged with demonstrators, how would the children get picked up from school? How would workers get home to their families after a long day in the office? And why should massive police resources be utilised to control university students and ill-kempt socialists determined to thwart the progress of the great economic juggernaut that was Queensland?
The bill to amend the Traffic Act was introduced to parliament on Wednesday 14 September at 2.15 p.m. The bill was passed, with the necessary amendments, at the adjournment of the House at 8.25 p.m.
Lamont remembered the passing of the legislation. ‘… I stepped out for a short time to attend to some business,’ he recalled. ‘When I came back I was astounded to hear that the bill had been read. “What, the first reading?” I asked. “No,” I was told, “all three readings.”
‘A bill had been discussed on a Tuesday, read on Wednesday, and made law on Thursday. People ask me how, as a member of the government, I let this legislation pass. I wasn’t a member of the government. In Queensland the Cabinet is the government.’
Liberal MP Brian Lindsay said of the bill: ‘The lunatic fringe now seek to dominate society and society rightly expects us, the democratically elected representatives, to do something about it.’
Don Lane linked street marches to an international socialist plot to prevent the Western world developing its uranium capacities.
Local writer Bruce Dawe penned a poem – ‘News From Judea’ – in response to the government’s latest infringement on civil liberties.
And went out to meet them about six hundred
Officers of the law who had been told
By Herod himself There will be no more
Political marches. Clear the streets
of all whose ideas are not those
of the governing party. And they did
just that and the keepers of the public
purse
looked down on the streets packed with
chariots
and said It is good. Now there is law and
order
in the land.
And many more were brought before the
Courts than heretofore
And Herod said again There will be peace
In all my land …
And the land became exceedingly quiet;
But this was not peace.
Meanwhile up in Bundaberg, 365 kilometres north of Brisbane, Dr Harry Akers, a likeable and popular dentist in his late twenties, read of the ban on street marches in the local newspaper with incredulity.
Akers had graduated with a Bachelor of Dental Science from the University of Queensland in 1971. A few years earlier, aged 18, he had marched on the streets of Brisbane as a conscientious objector to conscription for the war in Vietnam, but considered himself without political allegiance.
After moving to Bundaberg and establishing a dental practice with a partner after his graduation, he had settled nicely into the sugar town. While still not considered a ‘local’ despite having been there for almost seven years, he had a superb reputation as a dentist.
By the spring of 1977 Akers was married with a young family, and they lived, with their pet cattle dog Jaffa, not far from Bundaberg’s pre-eminent geographical landmark – The Hummock – a dormant volcano at 96 metres above sea level between the township of Bundaberg and the neighbouring beaches of Bargara. Before public access was available in 1931, it had remained marooned in fields of sugar cane. The local Indigenous Taribelang people always referred to it as ‘Burning Mountain’.
Akers believed the forthcoming ban on street marches was unconscionable. He might have been domiciled in a small country town on the coast and a long way from the Big Smoke, but he was going to take a stand that people would remember for a long time.
Into Thin Air
Simone Vogel, aka Norma June Beniston, moved to Queensland from Sydney in 1970 with her husband Raymond Eugene Baptiste after a successful career as a prostitute and brothel madam.
Vogel, born in 1935, worked the streets of Kings Cross in her early twenties before hooking up with vice king Joe Borg, who owned and ran numerous brothels in East Sydney. Borg’s de facto, before her death of a suspicious drug overdose, was Ada, former wife to Brisbane gunman Gunther Bahnemann who had been famously disarmed by Lewis and Hallahan in the late 1950s – an action that delivered both young men the force’s highest honour, the George Medal for Bravery.
Borg himself was killed by a car bomb in North Bondi in May 1968. By then, Vogel was an astute business partner to Borg, and on his death she and Baptiste briefly set up a ‘massage parlour’ in Newport, Sydney, before settling in Queensland.
Whether she felt it too dangerous to branch out on her own in Sydney after Borg’s murder, or wanted to start business afresh in a new town, nobody knows. But the diminutive Vogel – 160 centimetres tall and, like Shirley Brifman, fond of wearing wigs – flourished in Brisbane and on the Gold Coast.
Her innovation was the ‘massage parlour’ – a brothel disguised as a health studio. She quickly established the Costa Brava in South Brisbane. This was followed by Golden Hands at Moorooka, The Executive Suite at Stones Corner, Napoleon’s Retreat at Lutwyche, Saunette in Adelaide Street, Beau Brummel at Zillmere and Kontiki at Kedron. (She had purchased the salubrious Kontiki off prostitute and parlour owner Katherine James in early 1976 for $125,000. James was having difficulty with a heroin addiction, but she stayed on for a short time after the sale to help Vogel run the health studio.)
By the mid-1970s Vogel’s net profit from her businesses exceeded $4000 per week. Around this time Vogel was interviewed on several occasions by Licensing Branch officer Kingsley Fancourt. She was anxious about her businesses, and he was starting to get some information out of her.
‘I got her in the office there at one stage,’ Fancourt recalls. ‘She was a very, very attractive woman. A $2000 a night job.
‘She was a well-spoken woman. She conducted herself in a very stately manner. I’d actually got two statements out of her.’
During their last talk, Arthur Pitts stuck his head into the interview room and asked to see Fancourt. Don Becker had telephoned and asked that Vogel be locked up. Fancourt protested – she knew all about police corruption and he had promised her she wasn’t going inside.
‘Pittsy and I had an outrageous blue over that,’ Fancourt says. ‘I was starting to … get information. That’s what we were supposed to do. I had to go back on my word. It was well known she was going to start name dropping and all the rest of it.’
A couple of years after this incident, in 1977, Vogel was living in a well-appointed canal-front home at 13 Alma Street, Coral Gables, Broadbeach Waters, with her new husband Steven Pavich, a plasterer and builder.
On the morning of Friday 16 September, she drove her white Mercedes SLC convertible to Brisbane, firstly stopping at a Mercedes dealership in Fortitude Valley to arrange for a broken tail-light to be repaired, before heading to The Executive Suite at Stones Corner, just south of the Brisbane CBD. She arrived there about noon.
At 12.15 p.m. she received a phone call from her only son, Mark Baptiste, who was then living in Sydney. Immediately after that she got another telephone call. Vogel’s assistant, Marcia Barnard, heard her boss say to the caller: ‘You name the place and I’ll meet you there.’ She soon left the parlour and didn’t discuss her movements with Barnard.
Vogel was back in the office at 3.30 p.m. and received another call. She responded: ‘I’ll meet you in the same parking spot that I met you at before, about half past six.’ She asked Barnard for a loan of $3000 from the business account. A cheque was written and cashed by Vogel at a nearby bank.
The brothel owner then drove over to Kontiki at Kedron and borrowed a further $3000, drawn in cash earlier in the day at Vogel’s behest from the parlour’s account. She left Kontiki at 6.15 p.m.
Pavich expected his wife at home on the Gold Coast at her usual time – 6 p.m. When she didn’t arrive he phoned Barnard, who told him what had transpired that afternoon. Pavich then phoned all the other parlours without any luck. At 9 p.m. he called the Surfers Paradise police with his concerns.
They knew Pavich as an associate of criminals and did not give his report a high priority. No official police enquiries into Vogel’s whereabouts were made that night. The following day, Pavich called a friend, former Gold Coast detective Greg Bignall, and asked him to make some enquiries.
On Sunday 18 September, Bignall found Vogel’s unlocked car at Brisbane Airport. She had vanished into thin air.
Simone Vogel’s disappearance soon became a murder investigation. Two detectives from the Homocide Squad were assigned to the case and they began by interviewing Pavich and employees of Vogel’s brothels.
One of the detectives, Keith Smith, recalls: ‘Our early investigations naturally included an interview with Pavich. This interview took place at the home at Coral Gables on a Gold Coast canal. Theirs was a luxurious house, probably at that time worth at least $750,000.
‘We found out very early in the piece that Pavich was an extremely heavy spirits drinker. He was drunk when we first spoke with him and despite his condition he did show emotion which on the surface seemed genuine and reflected concern for his missing wife.
‘The interview was not satisfactory and we decided to revisit him very early the next day hoping to find him sober. Our early interviews with Pavich disclosed nothing that was inconsistent with the conduct of a husband whose wife had gone missing. He had enquired around all of their immediate friends and acquaintances. He had also contacted a private investigator who he knew on the Gold Coast to make enquiries in Brisbane at the health studios to see what he could find out.
‘Of course Pavich was well aware of the nature of Simone’s business affairs and no doubt had benefitted financially from her business.’
Smith also managed to interview Vogel’s full-time Filipino housekeeper, Lina. ‘She came across as an honest hard-working woman who had grown attached to Simone and like others she was very worried about her,’ the detective remembers. ‘W
e asked her to discreetly observe Pavich’s conduct while she was in the house with him. She did tell us that since Simone had failed to come home, from what she had seen, Pavich had been genuinely worried about Simone and had been drinking heavily and phoning a lot of people asking about Simone.’
The detectives, during the course of the investigation, found power of attorney documents signed by Vogel. They gave Steve Pavich power of attorney. The signatures proved to be forged, which Pavich later admitted to. He was subsequently charged.
Vogel’s assistant, Marcia Barnard, told them that she was regularly visited by members of the Licensing Branch – in fact, she knew most of them by their first names. Vogel was paying large sums of protection money to the Licensing Branch, which reported directly to Commissioner Terry Lewis. (At this stage the Licensing Branch was still headed by Jeppesen, although he was not in on The Joke.)
The Licensing squad had an additional advantage when it came to corruption in the mid- to late 1970s. Its members had carte blanche on policing massage parlours and brothels. The Consorting Squad, against traditional practice, was excluded.
As for Vogel, her husband, Pavich, seemed genuinely puzzled and distressed at her disappearance, and friends and associates were incredulous. There was no way she would deliberately run out on her family, given her beloved son, Mark’s, twenty-first birthday was just a few weeks away. She had discussed the milestone event with him many times, and a big party was planned. Besides, detectives found no evidence that she had flown out of Brisbane, despite her car being found at the airport.
So what happened to the petite madam who famously had a passionate dislike of drugs and banned any drug use in her health studios? And why had she hastily got together $6000 in cash on that Friday?
As the two homicide detectives patiently and expertly exhausted any leads, they came to an extraordinary theory. Had Vogel, who had intimate knowledge of The Joke, finally decided to leave the parlour trade behind and, using her business acumen, legitimately start afresh?
Jacks and Jokers Page 14
