Jacks and Jokers

by Matthew Condon

  Lewis was in constant touch with Bjelke-Petersen over the street-march problem. ‘Premier phoned re his views on Protest marches.’ ‘Premier phoned re no marches on road.’ ‘To Executive Bldg., and saw Premier re street marches.’

  In the midst of all this, on 20 October his diary records that he saw Deputy Commissioner Vern MacDonald about a raid on an illegal gambling club run by a man called ‘Bellino’.

  By the end of the year Lewis had time again to catch up with old friends. On Sunday, 18 December at 12.30 p.m., he joined Barry Maxwell and his wife Sheilagh at their Kangaroo Point home for a Christmas function.

  He left at 3.45 p.m. and headed over to a three-level block of cream-brick flats at 49 Laidlaw Parade in East Brisbane. There he celebrated with ‘Jack and John [his son] Herbert’s birthday until 5 p.m.’

  A Quiet Word

  Around this time, the affable Jack Herbert had Geraldo Bellino – local illegal casino entrepreneur, one-time adagio dancer and songwriter (in August 1963 he had officially copyrighted a musical he called Sharon, Oh Sharon) – over to his house for a drink.

  Bellino had a query. Would it be possible, he asked the former Licensing Branch officer of more than 15 years, to set up an illegal game without breaking the Gaming and Vagrancy Act? Was there a loophole that could be exploited?

  Herbert claimed he sat down and poured over the Act.

  ‘He didn’t ask me to do anything illegal but in any case I couldn’t help him,’ Herbert said. ‘Since taking over at the Licensing Branch, Alec Jeppesen had instigated a purge of illegal casinos.

  ‘He was also coming down hard on SP bookmaking and prosti­tution. I told Gerry Bellino there would be no protection while Jeppesen was running things.’

  It was becoming apparent that Jeppesen was proving an obstacle to lucrative channels of vice. Money should have been falling out of the sky for Herbert.

  He made a mental note and wondered – what if we could have Jeppesen removed from the Licensing Branch?

  The Premier Phoned

  With Lewis in the top job for just 11 months, Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen wasted no time in utilising the police force in whatever way he saw fit to exercise his will. If he needed to call on the boys in blue to silence a growing nuisance and critic of his government, then he had zero compunction in doing it.

  Such was the case of Brisbane businessman Mervyn Carey. In late 1977 Carey was a senior executive with BP Australia. The company’s Brisbane offices were a stone’s throw from the police department in Herschel Street, in the city.

  The unassuming Carey, married with children, began showing an interest in corporate crime following the collapse of several major Queensland construction companies and credit unions in late 1974 and early 1975, and was elected national president of the Australian Institute of Credit Management.

  In late 1976 the Courier-Mail ran a profile on Carey, describing him as ‘Queensland’s most ardent fighter against corporate crime for the past two years’. Carey, BP’s credit manager for years, told journalist Mark Williams: ‘I don’t want to be a Ralph Nader [the American political activist], but if I’m getting a Nader image and it will get some of his results with honesty being returned to the corporate area, then I don’t mind.’

  Then Carey unwittingly made a big mistake. On Wednesday 12 October 1977, he was a guest speaker at a seminar hosted by the Australian Institute of Management in Brisbane. He gave the keynote address.

  Carey had watched with increasing alarm the recent collapse of the Queensland Permanent Building Society (QPBS), and was questioning what had happened to missing society funds. In his speech, he slammed the Bjelke-Petersen government, accusing them of ‘pussy-footing around’ the company collapse. He called for a full inquiry into the matter and requested statements of missing funds from the society.

  ‘An inquiry would bring out the facts,’ he told more than 140 people at the seminar. ‘There are too many traumas and dramas within the building society industry. The public’s confidence will never be restored until the truth is ascertained.’

  Carey went on to directly accuse government ministers of not just falling asleep at the wheel, but deliberately obfuscating the facts behind the fraud. He said: ‘The industry has reached rock bottom and the State Housing Minister [Norm Lee, the MP who encouraged then Inspector Terry Lewis to give Police Minister Max Hodges an earful at the country Cabinet meeting in Cunnamulla in mid-1976] must bear full responsibility.

  ‘The Deputy Premier [Bill Knox] and Mr Lee have tried to throw a smokescreen around their own failures and inadequacies to handle the situation in a business-like manner. Now $3.8 million is unaccounted for in the latest collapse and Mr Lee still rejects an inquiry.’

  Carey directly accused the Bjelke-Petersen government of ignoring major white collar crime. His inflammatory comments were published on page three of the Courier-Mail the following morning. The Carey story sat beneath a picture story on Premier Bjelke-Petersen, rehearsing for his election policy speech to be given in City Hall that night. The state election was set for 12 November.

  The day the story was published, life became hell for Merv Carey. ‘I got called in by my boss,’ Carey remembers. ‘He said the Premier had just phoned him and told him to sack me. I was raked over the coals.’

  Later that day he received a call at his desk from an old friend, Assistant Police Commissioner Don Becker, the trusted and incorruptible former Whitrod confidant. Becker made the call from a phone box. ‘Don told me to shut my mouth and that Lewis had been in touch with the Special Branch and they were investigating me,’ Carey says. ‘He said the boys involved were bad boys, they had a bad record and that people had been killed as a result of the activities of these men.’

  Shortly after, Carey received another phone call. This time it was anonymous. ‘He said, “If you open your mouth again, it’ll be for the last time,” ’ says Carey. ‘I felt dead scared. I was frightened, not so much for myself but for my family. That’s the way Joh used to work. I never spoke again after that.’

  The anonymous threat bore all the hallmarks, going back decades, of Detective Inspector Tony Murphy, head of the CIB.

  ‘About that time I was walking down George Street,’ Carey says, ‘and I saw Tony Murphy walking towards me. I knew who he was. He gave me a good looking over.’

  The afternoon Carey received his death threat, Bjelke-Petersen’s Cabinet held an emergency meeting into the QPBS collapse. The government resolved that the society would be propped up financially and merge with the State Government Insurance Office (SGIO) and that none of the 140,000 QPBS investors would lose any interest.

  The merger immediately showed the public – in the run-up to a state election – that the Bjelke-Petersen government cared about Mum and Dad investors in the community. The missing $3.8 million would, according to the new Queensland Permanent Building Society Act 1977, be replaced from the government’s Contingency Fund.

  Conversely, the bail-out masked the corporate fraud behind the missing millions. They were never accounted for.

  Angels Fear to Tread

  There was no stopping the Member for Archerfield, Kevin Hooper, when he got on a roll on the floor of the chamber in Parliament House, and Thursday 6 October 1977 was no exception. It was the last state parliament sitting for the year.

  On that day he was prepared to take the Bjelke-Petersen government to task over its financial record, and in particular the building society crisis.

  He would describe Treasurer Llew Edwards as ‘a reasonable man – colourless, perhaps, a puppet of the Premier, perhaps’, and Police Minister Tom Newbery as ‘inept’.

  But that would come later in his florid address. First, he wanted to put on record some facts about the mysterious disappearance of brothel madam Simone Vogel.

  Hooper was in his element. He railed that Minister Newbery and the government had done nothing to control massag
e parlours in Brisbane, despite an explosive growth in the trade. He further accused the government of ‘turning a blind eye to the ways and means available to any state government that wishes to stamp out this brand of vice. It can be stamped out.’

  On prostitution, he slotted in a reference to the Vogel case: ‘It is a type of undesirable underworld activity which, under the Queensland Government’s inept administration, has allowed a prominent massage parlour owner to disappear without a trace after she borrowed $6000.’

  Hooper continued belting Minister Newbery: ‘I would have thought that he [Newbery] would tell the House that in the matter of the disappearance of Simone Vogel, where there is a possibility that a life is at stake, I have made every endeavour to assist the police.

  ‘In view of earlier information I have provided in this House I would have expected him to tell honourable members that, on the day of her disappearance, armed with $6000, Simone Vogel set out for a hotel car park to keep an appointment with the notorious Roland Short. This gentleman’s attributes I have previously described to the House.’

  He revealed further details. Vogel was to meet Short in the car park of the legendary Breakfast Creek Hotel, the French Renaissance-influenced pub at 2 Kingsford Smith Drive and within sight of its namesake. Here, in 1824, the founder of Brisbane, John Oxley, and explorer Allan Cunningham, met local Indigenous clans for breakfast. A minor skirmish had occurred when one of the clansmen grabbed Oxley’s hat.

  ‘Where is Roland Short now? Where is his associate Ron the Maori? Who is running his [Short’s] call-girl and massage parlour operations? Who is collecting the money?’ Hooper queried. ‘It is sad to have to report that the underworld has moved into a state in which, if we are to believe the Premier, angels fear to tread. Perhaps the Minister for Police is afraid to attempt to clean up the criminal elements in this state. When his predecessor [Max Hodges] tried to do this, the Premier moved in and took the portfolio from him. Let government members deny that.’

  As his police force was being publicly picked apart by Kev Hooper, Lewis received a peculiar visit in his office. A Susan Antonieff, 20, of Kelvin Grove, saw the Commissioner about whether or not he was actually her father. Lewis noted in his diary: ‘… Has taken every drug and being treated at R.B.H. [Royal Brisbane Hospital].’

  Later in the day, Lewis and his wife, Hazel, were then driven to Eagle Farm airport by Greg Early, where they met Minister Newbery and his wife, before they all departed on TAA Flight 458 for Mackay. That night they all settled into their rooms at Gorries Motel on Nebo Road in West Mackay. The Commissioner was doing what he loved best – conducting, with full entourage, a short tour of regional police stations. This time he went along with royalty – a government minister.

  Hooper’s attacks were, as usual, disregarded.

  Permission to Speak to the Media, Please

  Senior Constable Bob Campbell, still being harassed by other officers at the Fortitude Valley station and studying for his degree at the University of Queensland, had decided to get out of the police force.

  With a wife and two young sons, he saw a better future for himself free from the mire of corruption that he’d found himself in, and tried a number of ways to extricate himself from his job. On 19 October 1977, he informed the department that it was vital he complete his degree and additional doctorate ‘so that I may terminate my employment’.

  Two days later he wrote to Police Minister Tom Newbery underlining his intentions and seeking permission to talk to the media about crime and corruption in the police force. If it was a tactical move to poke a stick at the hierarchy, it worked, but perhaps not in the way he intended. Campbell may have thought they would eject him immedi­ately. Instead, the prickly and outspoken Campbell was in for an all-too-familiar form of workplace misery.

  Newbery replied to Campbell: ‘You will no doubt appreciate that I have no direct jurisdiction over you as a member of the Police Force. Therefore, it is not possible for me to grant you permission to communi­cate with the media.

  ‘The Police Rules provide for members of the Police Force to air grievances through their District Officer or Commissioner. The Rules also place certain obligations on members who have knowledge of misconduct on the part of other members.’

  The Minister concluded that if Campbell remained dissatisfied with his working conditions having ‘explored the Departmental avenues open to you’, he could write to the Police Minister once again.

  Two days later Campbell tried another tack. He authored yet another report, this time alerting his superiors that he had injured his ankle earlier in the month on campus at the University of Queensland. In a desperate plea, he wrote: ‘In view of this, I have requested that I be placed before the Medical Examination Board as I feel that I should be discharged on the Police pension. My work in the Police Force has been criticised in recent times and this injury will by no means improve my work. I do not appear to fit in well with the Police Force and it may be practical for the Department to discharge me …’

  Campbell’s action to go before the medical board was refused. Instead, a timeworn trapdoor for recalcitrant officers, for those who didn’t toe the line or keep their mouths shut, opened up under the young Fortitude Valley officer. He was transferred to Police Stores, home to the banished, the drunk and the indolent.

  The department said it was to assist in Bob Campbell’s health and in the progress of his studies.

  Three Corners

  By 1977, a year in which parliament sat for just 38 days, Bjelke-Petersen was sitting high in the saddle, particularly with a strong police force at his beck and call to deal with the socialist radicals that wanted to bring the city to a standstill with their protests. He was tiring, too, of his Liberal coalition partners.

  So for the state election of 12 November 1977, a vindictive Bjelke-Petersen decided to make it hard for them as well as the ALP. In a childish pique, his all-powerful National Party changed the rules of the game and challenged their Liberal colleagues in seats that had had their names changed following the redistribution. If the seat held the same name as it did prior to redistribution, no challenge was offered. The redistribution effectively vanished three Liberal-held seats.

  In addition, the Nationals contested for the first time seats on the outer edge of the Brisbane metropolis. Three-cornered contests abounded. The ALP wrested back some of its heartland voters following the 1974 election fiasco, but still lost on preferences, as was to be expected. For the first time the National Party out-polled the Liberals by 27 per cent. It was the first shot in a long war.

  Liberal Colin Lamont’s seat had been redistributed before the election and he lost. ‘I remember when I ran for re-election in 1977, [the former Police Commissioner Ray] Whitrod sent me a card with Snoopy on it,’ Lamont recalled in an interview years later. ‘He [Snoopy] had a tennis racket in his hand, and it had a $10 tag on it. And he’d written, “Snoopy’s boss is well named Peanuts if he thinks you can get a racket in Queensland for $10”.’

  He said Bjelke-Petersen never understood political principles. ‘He was a very simple man,’ said Lamont. ‘He slept with a bloody goat in his farm before he met Florence. A very simple man. He didn’t understand the underlying principles of government. He didn’t understand the Westminster system. He didn’t understand anything about political philosophy.

  ‘And his view was – we are the government, the National Party is we, and I am the National Party, so I’m it. You know, I’ve got this job by dint of the will of the people, and you know, I can do what I like.

  ‘The suggestion that there were any constraints … I mean, you know, I don’t mean go out and commit a crime, but I mean, the suggestion that there were any constraints within, you know, normal bounds of power, just didn’t occur to him.’

  What Wilby Saw

  Everyone in the Licensing Branch was aware of the rumours of corruption, the so-called Rat Pack, and the invo
lvement of former branch member Jack Herbert. They heard that huge sums of money were being passed over in corrupt payments. And intelligence was coming in that this wasn’t just a local operation, but a vast network that covered most of Queensland. In short, it was supremely organised.

  Whenever Bruce Wilby and his fellow officers tried to execute raids on massage parlours and SP betting joints on the Gold Coast, for example, they’d arrive to barred doors and empty houses – Superintendent Syd Atkinson was in charge of the Gold Coast district.

  ‘A memorandum came through from Commissioner Lewis – if you do anything on the Gold Coast you had to let Atkinson know first,’ says Wilby.

  ‘[So] when you got down there, everything was shut up. There was nothing going on. We’d find out what was operating and get our warrants. All hell would break loose on Monday morning, with Atkinson screaming at the end of the phone.’

  So if Lewis, Murphy, Atkinson, Hayes and others were supposedly benefitting from the largesse of illegal bookmakers through Jack Herbert, where was the money? How was it transacted?

  Wilby decided to find out for himself. Acting on a tip-off from an extremely reliable informant, he went undercover and scoped the Belfast Hotel in Queen Street – owned and run by Murphy and Lewis’s good friend Barry Maxwell.

  Here was Murphy’s favourite watering hole. Here Lewis had come on his arrival back in Brisbane following his promotion to Commissioner to show off his epaulettes and see his dear friend Maxwell after a brief exile in Charleville. Here Maxwell gathered a roll of cash for his mate Jack Herbert who did it tough during the Southport Betting Case and drove it, and a case of meat and vegetables, to the Herbert flat in East Brisbane.

  If these men were to meet anywhere and supposedly divide ill-gotten gains, it would be in a place where all of them felt comfortable, indeed, felt at home.