Jacks and Jokers

by Matthew Condon

  On hearing Hicks’s theories in the early 1970s, Herbert told Hicks: ‘Well, everyone will get a quid … everyone will take a quid.’

  As Hicks later remembered, ‘I wanted to know at one stage who had actually had me shifted from the Valley, whether it was Murphy or Hallahan, and he said it didn’t matter whether it was Murphy, Hallahan or Lewis, they are all the one, they are all the same.’

  Herbert, clearly trusting Hicks, explained The Joke to him. He confided in Hicks about SP bookmakers and how they were protected by certain members of the Licensing Branch. Herbert explained that The Joke had been a little disorganised until Murphy had joined the branch in 1966.

  Hicks recalled: ‘He [Herbert] said there had been a lot of squabbling among those in The Joke and that they had busted each other’s bookies, but when Tony Murphy joined Licensing, he organised them and the system now worked well.’

  It was Hicks, as part of Whitrod’s CIU, who had gone on and arrested Tony Murphy on perjury charges in 1971 over the alle­gations of prostitute Shirley Brifman. It was Hicks’s CIU that had trapped Hallahan in New Farm Park receiving kickbacks from a prostitute, resulting in corruption charges against him and ultimately leading to his resignation from the force. And it was Hicks who had hidden under Arthur Pitts’ house with a recording device and recorded Jack Herbert offering a bribe that led to the Southport Betting Case and indirectly led to Herbert’s resignation from the force.

  In terms of Herbert and the Rat Pack, Hicks had used up all of his credit.

  Then someone found out about the prostitute called Katherine James, who by now, in 1978, was serving three years in prison on drugs charges. It was established that James, former owner of Kontiki, had also worked briefly as a prostitute at the notorious Matador Club in South Brisbane, then owned by Roland Short. During this time there were photographs taken of her having sex with a client.

  John Wayne Ryan, who helped install the Matador Club’s extensive security system, had seen the photographs. They were eight by ten inch black-and-white glossies. ‘The guy in the pictures did bear a resemblance to Hicks, even though it definitely wasn’t Basil Hicks,’ remembers Ryan. ‘Those photographs were taken in the Matador Club.’

  A plot was hatched.

  A rumour would circulate that photographs had been obtained of the supposedly incorruptible Basil Hicks having sex with prostitute Katherine James. While Hicks was acquainted with James as part of his investigative work, the story would be that Hicks was obsessed with James, and that she had arranged the secret photos to be taken to get him off her back and leave her alone.

  Was Lewis in on the scam? Or was this the handiwork of Tony Murphy, who had used this modus operandi – the deliberate assassin­ation of a person’s moral character – since the National Hotel inquiry in the early 1960s, and before?

  On 24 April 1978, Lewis notated in his diary: ‘Phoned M. Lewis [then Comptroller of Prisons] re interviewing … James at HM Prison.’

  Then on 27 April, something unprecedented occurred – Katherine James was brought from Brisbane Prison to the office of Deputy Commissioner Vern MacDonald to give a statement saying she had indeed had an affair with Basil Hicks in 1973 and that there were photographs to prove it.

  Lewis’s personal assistant, Greg Early, took the statement down in shorthand. At the close of business that day, Lewis wrote in his diary: ‘Deputy Commissioner MacDonald handed me statement by Mrs …, 25 years, re allegedly having sexual intercourse with Hicks. Off 6.30 pm.’

  Around this time Hicks was given a friendly warning from colleague Noel Creevey, who claimed to have seen a memo from policeman Graham Leadbetter that Hicks had had sexual relations with Katherine James. It wasn’t the only bullet against Hicks that the Rat Pack was loading into the gun.

  A Nambour police colleague Merv Roberts told him that Com­missioner Lewis had asked Roberts to sign a statement that Hicks, while stationed on the Sunshine Coast prior to being transferred to the Valley CIB in late 1969, had accepted graft from SP bookies, and that he had gotten pregnant a girl, 15, and induced her to abort the child.

  In the false statement, Roberts says that on the very first day Hicks started work at the Nambour CIB in the late 1950s, Hicks called him aside and asked him for the names and addresses of local SP bookies.

  ‘I showed little interest and attempted to change the subject,’ Roberts was supposed to have said. ‘He then said something along these lines, “Come on Merv, you have been here a long time. You know them all. We can arrange with them and organise something on a fifty/fifty basis.” ’

  Roberts declined to sign the statement, though his signature did turn up on the bottom of the two-sheet statement on an attached slip of plain paper and not police stationery. It was allegedly witnessed by T.M. Lewis.

  It was a dirty game, Rat Pack-style.

  Plenty of Kills

  While Basil Hicks might have been seen as a potential threat that needed to be dealt with, Licensing Branch chief Alec Jeppesen’s surreptitious accumulation of evidence of police corruption was starting to gain weight. He, too, was becoming a rising distraction.

  Jeppesen’s findings revealed the city’s illegal casinos and massage parlours were primarily run by the Bellino family, and were centred largely in Fortitude Valley. There were other operators of significance – Roland Short’s clubs and brothels, and the parlours of Geoff Crocker and Allan Holloway.

  In addition, rumours were circulating that police, particularly CIB members under the leadership of Superintendent Tony Murphy, were out of control and running rampant in the massage parlours. Out of the blue, the Licensing Branch was suddenly hitting a number of hurdles in its dealings with prostitutes. The former workable system was that prostitutes were ‘written up’, then reported for prostitution offences via a summons.

  Suddenly, prostitutes and madams were refusing to answer questions and producing legal counsel. Solicitors T.J. Mellifont and Co., represented many of the women and produced a form letter, addressed to the Commissioner of Police, which ended: ‘… she will not answer any questions relating to any matter concerning any offence alleged against her, nor will she voluntarily accompany any Police Officer to any Police Station’.

  It stated if ‘she’ were to be charged, she would have to be ‘arrested and forthwith taken to the nearest watchhouse and formally charged’. Some parlours also installed security gates, barring police entry.

  In addition to this, CIB officers were seen drunk and in the presence of known prostitutes in local nightclubs, and others were located in the actual health studios, demanding free sex.

  A feared senior officer, drunk in a club, was also overheard to say it wouldn’t be long before the CIB took over the control of parlours from Licensing, and that a graft network similar to that in Sydney would be installed.

  Someone was deliberately sabotaging and frustrating Jeppesen.

  A Call from Across Town

  Federal Narcotics Agent John Shobbrook was sitting in his office in Eagle Street in the city when the phone rang. To his surprise, it was Superintendent Tony Murphy of the Queensland Police on the other end of the line.

  Shobbrook had heard of, but never met, Murphy. ‘He said he had an informant who had some very substantial information about heroin coming into Queensland and could I come up and see him?’ Shobbrook recalls.

  Douglas John Shobbrook had been born in Brisbane and adopted out to truck driver Alfred Shobbrook – he worked for carriers W. Love and Sons, ‘Love Will Move It!’ – and his wife Sadie who lived at Kangaroo Point. It was a strict Catholic household.

  After a variety of jobs as a youth he noticed an advertisement in the Courier-Mail for vacant positions with the Customs Prevention Section within the Department of Customs and Excise and secured a job working out of the navy’s shore facility the HMAS Moreton on the Brisbane River in New Farm. Shobbrook acquitted himself well for a few years but soo
n needed more of a challenge.

  In early 1971 the Federal Bureau of Narcotics opened a Brisbane office in the old but splendid Coronation House at 133 Edward Street. Initially it had just three staff – Acting Chief Narcotics Agent Vince Dainer, Narcotics Agent Brian Bennett and a secretary, Janette Hollands.

  The following year Shobbrook applied for a job as a full-time narc and was successful. He moved to Sydney and began his training. In 1974 he married Jan – of the Brisbane office – and after engaging in several serious drug investigations over the years the couple returned to Brisbane in early 1978 on the death of Alf.

  By this time the Brisbane office had moved around the corner to more salubrious digs in Eagle Street. Shobbrook was soon promoted to Supervising Narcotics Agent.

  When the famous Tony Murphy of the CIB called him that day, Shobbrook, out of courtesy, walked up past City Hall to police headquarters in North Quay.

  ‘When I got there, he [Murphy] said: “Mr Shobbrook, I’ve got this informant, and this is a Narcotics Bureau matter and not a state matter … the only problem is my informant is going to want a few thousand dollars for the information. If you come up with an ­envelope with a few thousand dollars, give it to me and I’ll give it to the informant.” ’

  Shobbrook said he was stunned. ‘How stupid did he think I was? I told Canberra and they laughed their heads off.’

  It might have been funny at the time, but Murphy’s little scheme and the character of the man stayed with Shobbrook.

  Within months the names Murphy and Hallahan would come across his desk in a very different and darker context.

  Jeppesen Smells a Rat

  From the outset, Brian Marlin was demonstrably supportive of his boss Jeppesen. He was eager to please, sometimes a little too eager. The young constable, on hearing of a plot by Tony Murphy and the CIB to take control of the policing of the massage parlours across the city from the Licensing boys, wanted to take it to the highest level.

  He insisted Jeppesen and he go to his friend John Goleby, the member for Redlands, and even the Premier himself. Jeppesen didn’t think Marlin had the evidence of a CIB takeover and initially stayed out of it.

  Lewis got wind of the shenanigans.

  How could junior police secure a secret audience with the Premier without his knowledge? Lewis learned there was unrest building between Licensing and the CIB over control of the massage parlours. Murphy was flexing his muscle and his opponents saw it as an opportunity to destabilise him and his power base. The power play over the parlours was, however, a ruse.

  What was at the heart of the unrest was Jeppesen’s relentless attack on SP bookmakers. They were paying Herbert and The Joke enormous sums of money for protection, and were not getting value for money – either the bookmakers would stop the payments, or the trouble­makers in Licensing needed to be removed.

  ‘When we started to really get into the SP bookmakers is when we stirred up a hornet’s nest,’ remembers Bruce Wilby of the Licensing Branch. ‘There were your pub SPs – you’d go out on a Saturday with a fistful of dollars, and if you could get a bet on you’d pinch them. But it was Jeppesen who had the information coming in. We started to work out it was highly organised, not just blokes sitting in pubs taking a few bets. We were getting bigger and bigger fellows.’

  One of Wilby’s biggest catches was bookmaker Bob Bax. He arrested Bax twice in a short period of time.

  ‘You won’t get me again,’ Bax told him after the second arrest.

  ‘You going to give it away, Bob?’ Wilby supposedly asked.

  ‘No, you are,’ Bax replied.

  On Wednesday 5 April, Lewis’s diary noted: ‘Det. Sgt. Freier phoned re comments … Hicks and recently promoted Inspector “knocking” me.’ The latter could only have been Jeppesen.

  The next day, hearing of the protagonists in the unfolding campaign of Chinese whispers, Lewis contacted Goleby: ‘Phoned J. Goleby, MLA, re policing in his electorate.’

  Come Monday 17 April Lewis decided to confront Jeppesen in his office. ‘With Dep. Comm. to Licensing Branch and told Insp. Jeppesen what is expected of him re any complaints re Police.’

  Jeppesen said to his boss he would police the Licensing staff as he saw fit. He took Lewis’s visit as a veiled threat.

  On top of that, Jeppesen had recognised a constable driving slowly past his family home in Brighton, on Bramble Bay north-east of the CBD. Jeppesen himself was under surveillance.

  As a consequence, he began tape recording information from informants and prostitutes. They began painting a picture of widespread corruption and the intrinsic involvement of Jack ‘The Bagman’ Herbert.

  It was a road other honest officers had been down many times before. But in the late 1970s, with Herbert controlling a corrupt annual income of many millions of dollars, the stakes were high.

  Jeppesen sat on his secret tapes, and as they liked to say in the office, kept ‘poking a big stick’ at the top brass.

  Sweet

  Hector Hapeta was bored.

  In Sydney in the late 1970s, Hapeta had spent a good decade of his life selling pet meat out of two wholesale outlets in the western suburbs of Bankstown and Yagoona. He trained greyhounds on occasion, and was a co-proprietor of some pet stores. But as Hector, an illiterate who simultaneously had a brain for hatching business schemes, would later say, he was at that point ‘sick of sitting in a shop and selling pet food’.

  Serendipitously, Hapeta’s de facto wife, Anne Marie Tilley, happened upon a newspaper advertisement for the vacant lease on a health studio in Brisbane’s notorious Fortitude Valley.

  The studio was called the Top Hat, and was situated next to the Shamrock Hotel on the corner of Brunswick Street and St Paul’s Terrace, a stone’s throw from the ill-fated former nightclub the Whiskey Au Go Go. The Top Hat was also just across the road from the Top of the Valley building.

  Meanwhile, Tilley had heard good things about the Sunshine State. It seemed a comparative paradise for those in the skin trade compared to the hard streets of Sydney’s Kings Cross and Darlinghurst.

  The Top Hat was being leased by Brisbane’s then King of the Parlours, Geoff Crocker. Tilley phoned him from Sydney about the Top Hat. She used the name ‘Diane’.

  ‘I hear you have a place,’ she said to Crocker. ‘How much do you want for it?’

  ‘I want $1200 a month for it,’ he said.

  ‘Can I come and have a look at it?’

  ‘Yeah, sure.’

  Tilley flew up the next day. Crocker picked her up from the airport and drove her into the Valley where she inspected the property.

  ‘It’s quite good,’ Tilley said. ‘I’ll take it.’

  She handed Crocker $1200 cash in advance and promised to pay rent at the beginning of each month. Crocker knew his new tenant as Diane Tilley. She returned to Sydney that same night.

  Two days later Crocker got a phone call from Hector Hapeta to let him know he and his wife were driving up to Brisbane straightaway. They had a GT Falcon. Crocker recalled: ‘They had an old Falcon, one of those shaker ones … two days after that I got a phone call and it was Hector on the phone and he was stuck in Lismore … this bloody car, it nearly killed him and his wife, the exhaust pipe had come off it and they had no money to fix it so I had to telegram, get some money to Lismore to fix this bloody car up so they could get to Brisbane.’

  Hapeta and Tilley met Crocker at his home in Everton Park for a discussion about the Top Hat, then booked into a city motel. While Tilley was setting up the massage parlour Hapeta used to wander over to Crocker’s place and play pool during the day. He started to open up about his past. He told Crocker he was chased out of Sydney by criminals.

  ‘I said to him, what were you doing wrong that they chased you out of Sydney?’ Crocker related the conversation. ‘He said to me that he had sold some drugs in Sydney, right, and he undercut
the big boys’ price and they found out about it … he lived in a little terrace house … he told me he was sitting there one day about lunchtime watching television, two guys ran in, broke his kneecaps with iron bars and told him to get out of Sydney in 24 hours or he would be dead. That was the story he told me.

  ‘I believed it to be true,’ Crocker said, ‘because he was a big guy and he walked funny you know.’

  The Top Hat went well under the guidance of the astute Tilley. ‘We were told there was no corruption, and you just opened up places and it was all sweet,’ remembers Tilley. ‘We came up and bought this parlour off someone else. We opened it up. That night the police turned up.’

  One of Tilley and Hapeta’s earliest visitors was Harry Burgess of the Licensing Branch. ‘Harry was around in the beginning there,’ Tilley says. ‘He just started talking to me one night. He said not to bring underaged kids in here. I said I wouldn’t be doing that.

  ‘He said if the girls get pinched every three weeks, sorry, then they’d leave us alone. “As long as we know who they are and there are no underages, then we’ll leave you alone,” Harry said. There was no money [for protection] in those days. It was controlled by the police. They’d come in and have a Scotch or something, and that was about it.’

  Tilley discovered in herself a talent for organisation. She had a natural business brain that was not, at the time, impeded by her heavy drinking and the occasional abuse of hash.

  The first girl employed at the Top Hat under new management was an overweight girl, about 20, with ‘a very pretty face and long red hair’.

  ‘She was such a big girl,’ Tilley remembers. ‘I told her to be careful hopping in the spa. I was worried it’d overflow. She ended up as a receptionist after a couple of weeks.’

  Across Brunswick Street, the Bellinos were running an illegal game upstairs in the Top of the Valley building. Tilley and Hapeta soon heard about their neighbours, but they were kept busy getting their foot in the door of Brisbane’s fledgling vice industry. To boot, there was no sign of them having to pay a cent of ‘funny money’ to corrupt police.