Jacks and Jokers

by Matthew Condon

  Not only that, he entered a Licensing Branch where inter-personal suspicions and paranoia were literally palpable. There were officers in such a state of nervous disrepair that they could not hold a tea cup steady. The place was paralysed with secrecy.

  When Powell was rostered on for a job he would travel to a location with other officers and was only told at the very last minute what the job was, and who or what was the target.

  ‘I wanted to fit in,’ he says. ‘I went in believing everyone was good and these were the people I wanted to work with. If you walked up on a couple of officers in conversation, they’d just stop. People were paranoid.’

  Powell learned very quickly that there appeared to be a number of unwritten rules. There seemed to be an arrangement with the massage parlour girls whereby they were arrested on rotation and invariably pleaded guilty. And when a strip club and brothel called the World By Night, not far from the old National Hotel at Petrie Bight, was raided for illegal sales of liquor, they were back trading as normal an hour later.

  Powell, though, was considered a misfit by the older Queensland officers in Licensing. One gnarled detective asked him: ‘Are you nationalised yet?’ To which Powell replied: ‘Don’t you mean naturalised?’ The young man was instantly labelled a smartarse.

  One of his first jobs in the branch was an unusual situation at the Cloudland ballroom at Bowen Hills. On the night of 24 December 1979, Jimmy and the Boys, a shock-rock band headed by outrageous singer Ignatius Jones, described by one music journalist as a ‘high voltage package of filth, glorious filth’, were performing. Word had gotten out that the band planned to burn on stage an effigy of baby Jesus.

  ‘I was put on the balcony to signal to the guys below when it was about to happen,’ remembers Powell. ‘The marihuana smoke was drifting up to where I was. I was the lookout with the radio.

  ‘It was bizarre. Almost the entire Licensing Branch was there. It never happened, the burning of the effigy. What were we going to charge them with anyway if it did?’

  Still, his outsider status – not just within the branch but to the city’s criminal milieu – would prove to be an advantage. It was decided Nigel Powell would be sent undercover.

  He quickly grew a beard, suited up in civilian clothes, and began infiltrating clubs, gambling dens and health studios of Brisbane by night.

  ‘Corruption is about the great unsaid to me,’ says Powell. ‘The only time these things break down is when those involved get a bit confident. They don’t think twice that there might be a mole.’

  Powell burrowed into the underworld, not knowing that his work and his observations, his keen ear and the joining of a few elementary dots would, in the end, loosen the foundation of a monstrous edifice of institutionalised corruption that had been in full swing before Powell had ever even heard of Queensland.

  A Working Holiday

  Just prior to the start of the new decade, Commissioner Terence Murray Lewis gave an interview to the Courier-Mail to mark the third anniversary of his being in the top job. Lewis, at 51, told the reporter Jim Crawford that he wanted to remain Commissioner – ‘God willing’ – until he was 65 years old. That would keep him in the chair until late February 1993.

  On 1 January 1980, Commissioner Terry Lewis was back at his desk at 7.20 a.m. If he was anticipating a slow silly season, he would soon be disappointed.

  The pressure was on, particularly following the Milligan revelations and with the Williams Royal Commission of Inquiry into drugs set to reconvene. Both Lewis and Tony Murphy were required to give evidence. It would be Murphy’s first appearance before a royal commission since the National Hotel inquiry in 1963. The farmer Hallahan was also due down from Obi Obi to give evidence in the District Court.

  On 2 January, Lewis recorded in his diary: ‘Supt Murphy called re Royal Commission on Drugs.’

  Three days later, Lewis paid a visit to Frank Bischof’s wife at The Gap ‘and collected medals and uniform from Mrs Bischof’.

  On Monday 7 January, the day he was set to commence his recre­ation leave, Lewis was ‘interviewed by Messrs T. Wakefield and Bird from … Royal Commission on Drugs re my knowledge of Hon. Lickiss; G. Hallahan; W. [Sic] Milligan; A. Murphy; resignation of Mr Whitrod; Poker machines; National Royal Comm; and drug increase in Queensland. Off at 10 a.m. With Hazel and [son] John to Faraway Lodge [Gold Coast] on holidays.’

  There he socialised with John Meskell, Brian Hayes, Syd Atkinson and other policemen and their wives, all the while conducting police business by phone before returning to Brisbane six days later, then heading back to the coast for another week.

  During his break, Lewis read Justice Woodward’s 2080-page Royal Commission into Drug Trafficking report.

  Then on Monday 4 February, Commissioner Lewis gave evidence before Justice Williams in the District Court. Lewis said of Hallahan: ‘He resigned from our force, I understand, in 1972 and I have not seen him or spoken to him or communicated with him in any way since 1972.’

  Murphy, in evidence, said he knew of Milligan but didn’t know him. Hallahan said he had known Milligan since 1965. He was asked about the $26,000 that Milligan put into his account: ‘That was for a small section of my property that I sold to Milligan,’ Hallahan said. ‘I left it to him to take care of the paperwork.’

  Hallahan, one of the state’s most feted detectives in his younger days, said he didn’t have any idea that Milligan was a drug dealer. Their dealings were purely business. (Shobbrook had already been to the Queensland Land Titles Office and proved there was no deed of sale for the land Milligan supposedly purchased. The Williams Royal Commission made no such investigation and Hallahan’s story was accepted.)

  Shobbrook was in the court to observe Hallahan take the stand. ‘The day that Hallahan gave this evidence to the royal commission was the first time that I had physically laid eyes upon him,’ Shobbrook recorded in his memoir. ‘The name was so familiar, the face from several black and white photographs was familiar, and there he was – so near and yet so far. Little did I realise at the time that I’d never get closer to him.

  ‘As far as I was concerned I was still compiling a brief of evidence against Hallahan. I had submitted that incomplete brief of evidence to the Commonwealth Crown Solicitor’s office … for an unofficial opinion as to whether a prima facie case existed against Hallahan.

  ‘I was informed that there was already sufficient evidence to lead to a conviction.

  ‘But in spite of the encouragement that I had been given by the Commonwealth Crown Solicitor’s office, the case that I had put together against Milligan and Hallahan was being swamped by a torrent of cover-ups, lies and false accusations by my own senior Australian Federal Police officers, by Royal Commissioner Justice Edward Williams … by Terry Lewis and naturally by Glen Patrick Hallahan.’

  Retired assistant commissioner Abe Duncan telephoned Lewis to offer him his knowledge of Milligan that harked back to 1971 when Duncan was interviewing the late prostitute and brothel madam Shirley Brifman. Duncan remembered Hallahan bringing Milligan into the offices of the Crime Intelligence Unit to meet him and Norm Gulbransen.

  Murphy again telephoned Lewis: ‘re aspects of connection by Milligan and Peter Monaghan in Royal Commission Inquiry’. A nervous Police Minister Ron Camm rang, ‘re Milligan’s history’.

  Narcotics Agent John Shobbrook, who had chased down Milligan and uncovered what he believed was a massive network of corrupt police in Queensland, was called to give evidence before Justice Williams.

  To his shock, Williams was aggressive towards Shobbrook and accused him of making up Milligan’s allegations to harm the good name of the Queensland Police Force, and fine officers like Lewis and Murphy. He told Shobbrook: ‘If I can prove that you have perjured yourself before this commission then you will be going to gaol.’

  ‘I informed Justice Williams of the reel-to-reel tapes [of the Milligan inte
rviews] but to my knowledge Williams neither subpoenaed the tapes, nor did the Narcotics Bureau Central Office in Canberra, who held the original tapes, offer them to the [commission] to clear the smear of misconduct that Williams was implying against me,’ Shobbrook says.

  He later bumped into Detective Sergeant Barry O’Brien, one of the Queensland state police seconded to work with the commission, who said to him: ‘You are ratshit with the Queensland Police Force.’

  Shobbrook desperately sought support from head office in Canberra and his union, the Customs Officers Association. Shobbrook soon realised he’d been hung out to dry.

  How could one of the most important investigations into heroin trafficking in Australia to date, allegedly involving senior Queensland police, be cursorily dismissed by Justice Williams, and the investigator himself be accused of making up evidence so he and the Narcotics Bureau would look good?

  Shobbrook was an honest officer. He had pieced together the Operation Jungle saga with the utmost diligence and professionalism. How could this be happening?

  He more than suspected that dark forces had been at work behind the scenes to, once again, diffuse and derail evidence against the corrupt practices of members of the Rat Pack. His thoughts echoed the suspicions of undercover expert Jim Slade, who suspected his boss Tony Murphy, and Justice Williams, had possibly joined forces in overblowing a Sunshine Coast drug raid in order to make the Federal narcs look inept.

  As for Hallahan, Justice Williams made no adverse findings against him and the allegations he was dealing in drugs with John Milligan. ‘The Commission merely records that evidence presently available to it falls short of establishing as even a reasonable possibility, that Hallahan has ever been involved in wrong-doing in connection with illegal drugs,’ Williams found.

  Hallahan was off the hook. Again.

  He told the Telegraph: ‘I had no doubt in my mind the Commission would come out unilaterally, publicly and absolutely absolving me … the suggestion I am still under investigation is wrong … if there was any evidence connecting me with any wrongdoing of any sort, someone would have done something about it by now.’

  Somebody did. His name was Douglas John Shobbrook.

  But nobody, not even a royal commissioner, wanted to know.

  Looking for the McCulkin Girls

  Six long years after Barbara McCulkin, wife of local gangster Billy McCulkin, and her two daughters – Vicky Maree and Barbara Leanne – vanished without a trace from their Highgate Hill home in the mid-summer of 1974, the public were finally going to learn the truth about one of the city’s most enduring mysteries.

  Police said the McCulkin vanishing rivalled the case of the Beaumont children in Adelaide who disappeared in 1966.

  In fact, police had a theory about the McCulkins that revealed something far more sinister. They were of the opinion that the McCulkin girls and their mother, along with the missing prostitute Margaret Ward, who vanished in 1973, and Vincent Raymond Allen, a Warwick railway yard worker who disappeared in 1964, were all in fact murdered by the one killer.

  All vicitms had dealings with a man who had a ‘heavy’ reputation in the Brisbane underworld. CIB Chief Superintendent Tony Murphy confirmed that they had a ‘very strong suspect’.

  Police wanted a joint inquest and were granted their wish. It opened on Monday 11 February 1980, at the Holland Park Magistrates’ Court before Coroner Bob Bougoure, SM. It would prove to be one of the most riveting coronial inquests the city had seen in years. The courtroom was heavily guarded by riot police, including an inspector and three detectives.

  One of the first witnesses was well-known criminal identity Vincent O’Dempsey. He was on remand for another unrelated matter and was handcuffed to the dock, deemed a ‘security risk’. He replied ‘no comment’ to the questions put to him.

  Later, Detective Sergeant Trevor Menary told the court that in 1964 Vincent Raymond Allen went on a trip to Sydney with O’Dempsey, and he told police in an interview about the robbery of a jewellery store in Toowoomba.

  O’Dempsey was later charged with breaking and entering over the jewellery and granted bail. Allen was set to give evidence against O’Dempsey over the case but disappeared before the matter came to court.

  Menary then gave evidence about Margaret Ward, saying she had worked as a prostitute at the Polonia massage parlour in Lutwyche. It was operated by Cheryl Diane Prichard, the de facto wife of Vince O’Dempsey.

  In 1973 Ward and Prichard had been charged with prostitution. Both women went to see a solicitor and Ward vanished after the meeting.

  Menary, in an interview with O’Dempsey in 1979, had put to him that he had murdered Ward to prevent her giving evidence against Prichard.

  As for the McCulkins, Menary would allege that O’Dempsey was seen leaving the McCulkin home in Dorchester Street, Highgate Hill, on the evening of 16 January 1974, in company with a criminal named Gary ‘Shorty’ Dubois.

  Billy Stokes, serving time after being found guilty of the murder of boxer Tommy Hamilton, got a mention early in the inquest. Stokes, in his former publication Port News, had accused O’Dempsey and Dubois of murdering the McCulkins.

  Billy ‘The Mouse’ McCulkin – former husband to Barbara – told the Coroner’s Court that after his family had gone missing he had warned O’Dempsey that he would blow the heads off anyone who harmed them.

  Then Inspector Basil ‘The Hound’ Hicks took the stand. Hicks said Billy McCulkin had telephoned him at the Crime Intelligence Unit in 1974 and said he believed his wife and children had been taken and murdered. Hicks said McCulkin was convinced O’Dempsey had murdered them.

  At the time, Hicks had interviewed Janet Gayton, a friend of the young McCulkin girls who lived directly across the road. She told him she had seen two men enter the McCulkin house on 16 January and went over and asked the girls who their visitors were. They replied the men were their father Billy’s friends Vince O’Dempsey and ‘Shorty’.

  Another neighbour, Peter Nisbet, told the court McCulkin had complained to him at the time that her husband Billy was giving her a hard time. Nisbet said he had had several conversations with her about the Torino and Whiskey Au Go Go nightclub fires in 1973. Barbara told him she would be able to ‘put him away for five years’ given the information she had on Billy and the fires.

  In the end, the Coroner recommended that O’Dempsey and Dubois be charged with the murder of the McCulkins. He found there was a body of circumstantial evidence sufficient enough for a jury to find the two men guilty of murdering Barbara and the girls.

  O’Dempsey told the Coroner: ‘I’m not guilty. I’ve never murdered anyone.’

  A year later to the day, the Crown would drop all charges against O’Dempsey and Dubois. Attorney-General Sam Doumany entered a nolle prosequi.

  The McCulkins would be added to the police department’s already bulging Cold Case files.

  Milligan Takes the Stand

  In early March in Sydney, Milligan pleaded guilty to the charges laid against him stemming from Shobbrook’s investigation. He appeared before Justice Barrie Thorley in the New South Wales Supreme Court.

  Shobbrook, presenting the facts and antecedents, made sure Glen Patrick Hallahan’s involvement in the case was outlined to the court and entered into the record.

  ‘Has this man Hallahan been charged?’ Justice Thorley asked Shobbrook.

  ‘Not yet, your Honour.’

  ‘When he is charged I want him brought before my court.’

  The judge asked Milligan if he would prepare a signed statement outlining Hallahan’s involvement in his case. Milligan stayed silent.

  ‘Well, Mr Milligan, I will postpone sentencing and remand you in custody for one week while you consider your answer to that question,’ Thorley said.

  As prison officers prepared to take Milligan back to Long Bay Gaol, he indicated to Shobbrook he would get
the statement together. He wrote the statement on 18 March and it was given to Federal Police officer Bill Harrigan.

  The allegations in the statement included: that in 1977 Hallahan and Milligan discussed importing heroin into Queensland using light aircraft; that Hallahan provided $1000 to Ian Barron to charter a light aircraft to New Guinea on the first dummy run; Milligan took $3000 from Hallahan to buy the heroin in Thailand; that Hallahan was called on the telephone when the drugs were purchased and the drop was made over Jane Table Mountain; that when Milligan informed Hallahan the recovery of the drugs would be difficult, Hallahan ordered him to continue searching for them; that the single parcel recovered was sold in Sydney, and some of the proceeds were transferred into Hallahan’s Commonwealth Trading Bank account in King George Square, Brisbane.

  On 19 March, Justice Thorley sentenced Milligan to 18 years’ gaol on three heroin charges – two pertaining to a conspiracy to import over the Jane Table Mountain situation, and a third to an unrelated importation involving a female federal undercover agent.

  The next morning Milligan was escorted to Brisbane to appear before Williams’ inquiry. John Shobbrook was in the public gallery. Milligan asked the commission if his evidence could be heard in camera. Understandably, he felt his life was at risk if he gave evidence against Hallahan in an open court.

  Justice Williams replied: ‘There has been too much said to this Commission off the record; if you have any allegations to make then you’ll make them in public.’

  Incredibly, Williams expected Milligan to incriminate Shobbrook about the fabrication of the Operation Jungle evidence.

  Milligan lied and told the commission he knew nothing of Hallahan’s involvement in drug trafficking. It may have saved his life.

  Milligan was then asked to confirm that Shobbrook was lying. Instead, the convicted drug importer said: ‘It is unfair to Shobbrook to say anything that infers that we concocted a story or he was concocting a story. He believed that what he was doing was in the best interests of the Bureau and was honest. So it is untrue to say that … he wanted as much information as I could give him.’