Jacks and Jokers

by Matthew Condon

  Commissioner Lewis made no mention in his diary of the decision to form a committee on pokies for more than a week, despite direct contact with his Minister, though common sense would dictate that poker machines were discussed, however informally.

  It wasn’t until Friday 6 June, in a meeting with the Premier that the ‘cabinet minute of poker machines’ was discussed, along with a report on the activities of ‘International Socialists’, Australian Federal Police ‘intrusions’ and ‘our next minister’.

  The following day – a Saturday and Lewis’s day off – he read the 147-page ‘Report by Justice Moffitt, Royal Commissioner on “allegations of crime (organized) in clubs”.’

  The committee on pokies consisted of chairman Hayes, one of Lewis’s trusted right-hand men; Colin Pearson, Under Secretary for the Department of Justice; Cedric Johnson, Under Secretary for the Department of Welfare Services; and Stan Wilcox, Bjelke-Petersen’s former private secretary and the Director of Sport for the Department of Culture, National Parks and Recreation.

  The committee met through June and into July on the tenth floor of police headquarters. Its 18-page report was completed and signed off at the end of the first week of July.

  It summarised the detrimental impacts and possible consequences of the legislated introduction of poker machines as: implications for criminal activity (including organised crime); addictiveness associated with the peculiar nature of poker machines; weakened domestic relationships; impaired work effectiveness; and increased alcohol consumption.

  It quoted from the report of the Moffitt Royal Commission report, tabled in the New South Wales parliament in 1974, and in particular focused on the Bally Corporation, run in Australia by Jack Rooklyn, the cigar-smoking Sydney businessman who had met Lewis for food and drinks in the Mayfair Crest in Brisbane in 1979.

  The Moffitt report said that some club officials in New South Wales were receiving large cash incentives to take Bally poker machines in their establishments. It included other references: ‘Our information indicates that large amounts of American currency are being brought into the country illegally and it is this money, when converted, that is used in the payment of secret commissions.

  ‘Rooklyn has stated he believes poker machines will be legalised in Queensland and Victoria within the next two years and he wants to take over the lot.’

  The committee was mindful of the welfare of decent, upstanding Queensland families and the possible impact of pokies and their addictive qualities. ‘It is the experience of a number of government departments that gambling can be harmful to parents, children and family life and that it can be the catalyst which leads to criminal activity and imprisonment,’ their report said. ‘If the poker machines receive the cloak of legal respectability, it is possible that the remaning barrier to many social problems may be seriously diminished.’

  The committee complained that it did not have enough time to prepare a detailed response to the issue as ‘there is very little currently available in published form’ on the detriments of one-armed bandits.

  ‘Police enquiries reveal that the various police forces throughout Australia do not have substantive material which may assist in this regard,’ the report went on.

  ‘However, it is felt that the contents of this report may assist Cabinet to appreciate the detrimental effects which have been highlighted in papers and articles.’

  According to Jack ‘The Bagman’ Herbert, Lewis gave him a copy of the committee’s report.

  ‘I took it down to Sydney to show Jack Rooklyn and I went to his house in Vaucluse,’ Herbert wrote in his memoir The Bagman. ‘I remember he had a swimming pool with a mosaic floor. He read the report while I was there.’

  There was a reference to the way Rooklyn did business that Rooklyn didn’t appreciate. Herbert said: ‘Maybe that had something to do with him trying to renege on the $25,000. He said he only wanted to pay $15,000 and someone else could make up the rest.

  ‘It took a while to bring him around but in the end Jack Rooklyn agreed to pay the whole lot himself. What he didn’t know was that Terry was only keeping $15,000. The rest was a kickback for me, which I shared with two of Rooklyn’s associates, John Henry Garde and Barry MacNamara.’

  Herbert alleged the money was handed over to Lewis during a meeting again at the Crest, and Hebert was later given his share of the money. Lewis supposedly said: ‘That should do you.’

  ‘When I got back to the office and counted the money I found there was only $9000,’ said Herbert. ‘I phoned Barry MacNamara and told him we were $1,000 light. Barry was hopping mad.

  ‘He was all for docking $1,000 from Terry’s payment at the end of the month. I knew this wouldn’t go down well – it wasn’t worth taking on the Commissioner of Police over $1,000 so we agreed to let sleeping dogs lie.’

  Lewis denies he had anything to do with a report that would accommodate the needs of Jack Rooklyn in exchange for cash. ‘We thought it’d be alright for the government to let poker machines in,’ he recalls. ‘But I knew what Joh thought … he would have shot me.

  ‘I checked through it [the report]. It went back quite clearly saying – no, no way in the bloody world. If I was friendly with Rooklyn, I would have proposed that it be considered. He was the poker machine man. I would have said that. Why would he give me $25,000 to say no, you can’t have them?

  ‘Herbert would have said – leave it to me and we’ll get the money to him. The bloody bastard.’

  In fact, Herbert would later tell investigators he copied the report in the T&G Building in Queen Street before taking it down to Sydney to show Rooklyn.

  ‘I can’t recall whether I allowed Rooklyn to keep a copy against the wishes of the Commissioner of Police because Rooklyn’s that sort of person. He’s an abrasive sort of chap and gets his own way … but I do remember destroying a copy of the report on my return to the airport.

  ‘I do remember tearing … I tore some up and put it in a bin at Bondi, because I went to Bondi when I left his [Rooklyn’s] place because my son had a unit there.’

  Herbert said he never kept a copy of the report. ‘It was a load of old rubbish as far as I was concerned,’ Herbert recalled. ‘I knew it was a, well my term was a hoax, more or less, you know. I was firmly of the opinion Joh … wouldn’t allow poker machines into Queensland anyway. It [the poker machine report] was just a rort.’

  Treasurer and Deputy Premier Llew Edwards was fully cognisant of the public debate on the introduction of poker machines and their possible impact on the community. He was looking forward to seeing the committee’s report. He never did.

  Edwards later recalled: ‘As far as I knew until that time a report had been requested and I had no idea whether or not it had been completed. I am aware that such a report … was never submitted back to Cabinet.’

  Office Romance

  On Monday 16 June 1980, a farewell party was held at the Sandgate home of another policeman for Task Force officer Senior Constable Bill Douglas. He had been transferred to Caboolture. Lorelle Saunders was rostered on duty that night. Her boss, Lobegeiger, had instructed that she and other Task Force officers on duty attend the farewell party.

  ‘I may need you as my driver,’ Lobegeiger told Saunders. ‘I might let my hair down and have quite a few. The bastards want to send me north, after all I’ve done – then I might just stop working [and] be a drunk like the rest of them.’

  The party kicked into the evening. Lobegeiger drank beer. He was ready to leave the party around midnight. They drove to Saunders’ home where he was to drop her off. Lobegeiger invited himself into the house in Koola Street, Wishart.

  ‘I agreed and then made coffee,’ Saunders said. ‘Whilst we were having the coffee he took hold of me and told me he was in love with me and had been for some time.

  ‘We talked about our feelings for each other, he was holding me, kissing me for most of this t
ime.

  ‘He commenced to phone me daily. This was the commencement of a very deep and intimate relationship between us. He asked me not to mention our relationship to anyone in the Department.’

  The next month Lobegeiger was transferred to Cairns. He told Saunders he wished she was going with him on the long, lonely drive up to Cairns.

  It was, indeed, the beginning of a loving relationship.

  Saunders, however, wasn’t aware that having visited her for an hour to say ‘goodbye’, so to speak, he had then driven around to the home of another lover, Cecily Bull, and driven to the Far North with her.

  Meeting an Informant

  On 22 July 1980, Commissioner Lewis received a phone call from the Honourable Russ Hinze. Police Minister Ron Camm was retiring from politics. Lewis wrote that Hinze called ‘re possible appointment as our Minister’. Hinze was officially given the portfolio on 28 July.

  He began immediate regular contact with Lewis, as was to be expected. For example, on Wednesday 27 August, he called ‘re any files on Messrs Bishop or White MLA’s …’ Both Bruce Bishop and Terry White were members of the Liberal Party.

  Bishop was a vociferous critic of the Bjelke-Petersen regime and White had just been elected the year before. So just a month into the job, Hinze was using the police department to gain leverage against his political opponents.

  Lewis had considered Camm the best minister he had worked under. Now he had the voluminous and verbose Hinze to contend with. ‘Hinze was alright,’ remembers Lewis. ‘He was good as a minister in this sense – we’d say to him we need more cars, we need more men, and he’d get up in bloody Cabinet … and he’d pursue things very strongly.

  ‘But he caused you some problems too. Because he knew everybody, he was at the races, he’d get half-full of soup or three-quarters full or whatever. He had horses, he was in everything. You couldn’t dislike him but you couldn’t sort of take him home to dinner either.’

  Lewis’s diary for Saturday 4 October records that he ‘saw informant Jack’. The ‘Jack’ was in fact his old friend Jack Herbert. Lewis remembers that Herbert had, for some inexplicable reason, some information to pass on about vice in the city.

  ‘Herbert saw me – it wasn’t hard to see me – and said, look, I can give great information to you … that will help you show your men, you know, what’s going on,’ says Lewis. ‘And of course it was, you know, brothels here, SP betters there, and I wrote down, one … three, four, five, six, seven, eight, eighteen … and then put it in the back of a pocket book.

  ‘When the end of the year came up I put it in the back of the pocket book for the next year and then forgot about it because it really didn’t come to anything. I suppose I let him think that he was being a good boy and doing things to help.’

  The 1980 pocket book was black. (The following year’s pocket book was red.) The codes written in the back of the book were either single capital letters or abbreviations. There was a Jack R (Rooklyn?), Tony R (Robinson?), C (Crest Hotel?), FVG (Fortitude Valley game or illegal casino?), Syd (Atkinson, Gold Coast Superintendent?), Brian (Hayes, Assistant Commissioner?), Your H (Home?) and My H (Home?).

  Why would the Queensland Commissioner of Police take what purported to be confidential information on the whereabouts of various brothel and illegal gambling activities from Herbert, several years out of the force and himself up to his neck in profiting from brothels and SP bookmakers? Why abbreviate what may have been specific geographic locations? And why would Lewis take the data seriously enough to develop a ‘code’ system that he kept in a small personal diary over the work and indeed the resources of his own Licensing Branch? Just to make Herbert feel valued?

  Lewis complains that as commissioner he was used by many people he thought were friends. ‘I’d say Murphy used me, in all due respect,’ he reflects. ‘There wouldn’t be many of the others I’d feel used me. Some were against me … the likes of [John] Huey, [Ross] Dickson and those fellows. But I would think 50 out of 5000 would have been against me.

  ‘I suppose I was overly … too kind to undeserving bastards. I don’t regret it. I just wish I’d been a little more forceful in cutting off a few heads. I do feel I could have … if I’d been harder on a few, some of this probably would never have happened.

  ‘My dad was an easy-going … I don’t ever remember him raising his bloody voice.’

  Murphy to Cairns

  Near the end of 1980 Commissioner Lewis sent Tony Murphy, then 53, to take control of the Far Northern Region. He was based in Cairns. The posting was in part a response to Justice Williams’ special report to the Queensland Government on the illegal drug trade up north. Lewis says he posted Murphy because he felt it would be good experience for him as a senior officer.

  Jim Slade says the drug problem was getting out of hand. ‘If you look at the timeline that I’m talking about, it was at that particular time that things were going out of control in the drug scene, and there was massive money,’ Slade remembers.

  ‘I’m sure that if you could get all of the information from the Italian desk of the Australian Bureau of Criminal Intelligence down south, and then what the Bellinos were doing, their method of operation and how they were getting crops done, and a couple of the other people that the Bellinos stood on or that Murphy got out of the way, I think you’d start to see a picture of why he went up there. I honestly don’t know. There was no reason other than that.’

  The Telegraph police reporter Pat Lloyd reported on the transfer. His story read: ‘Supt Tony Murphy would “tear the heart out” of the drug-running trade in the far north of Queensland, a senior police officer said today.

  ‘The move is seen by police observers in Brisbane as a declaration of war in the worrying “hot spot” of the drug trade.

  ‘As well, police pointed out, success in controlling his first regional appointment would virtually ensure Supt Murphy promotion to Assistant Commissioner in 15 to 18 months.’

  In an interview with Ric Allen of the Sunday Mail in Brisbane, Murphy said it was time authorities in Australia realised that importers of hard narcotics like heroin were in fact ‘murderers’.

  ‘Not a week goes by in Australia without a drug addict over-dosing or over-dosing other people,’ Murphy said.

  The detective believed that his recent efforts in organising the Bureau of Crime Intelligence in Brisbane had prompted the Cairns transfer and that he was looking forward to the challenge.

  He assessed drug operators as the ‘lowest creatures in the world. And if we’re going to get the big operators then we’ll need help from informers.’

  A new sheriff was in town.

  More of the Same

  In the weeks prior to the 1980 state election, there were whispers that Joh Bjelke-Petersen and the National Party had actually done a behind-the-scenes deal with Ed Casey and his Labor colleagues to crush the Liberals.

  Curiously, one Liberal might not have had much to be concerned about following the election on 29 November.

  On Monday 3 November, Commissioner Lewis had phoned his friend, the Liberal member for Merthyr, Don Lane, and they discussed ‘various matters including future Cabinet appointments’. Did Lewis have the inside rail on the constitution of the future Cabinet?

  On 15 November, the Commissioner was up on Mount Coot-tha making an appearance on Fiona MacDonald’s wildly popular live children’s television show on Channel 7, starring Constable Dave Moore.

  On this morning Lewis hitched a ride on his star, swearing in Agro ‘as Special Police P.Rel. Officer’.

  The day before the election, Lewis received a flurry of election-related calls. One from the Premier. Another from Russ Hinze. With his wife, Hazel, he zipped up to Government House on Fernberg Road for the Royal Humane Society Awards, over to the Queensland Cricketers’ Club for lunch, and later to the Park Royal Hotel for a cocktail party.

  In the meantime
Sir Robert Sparkes phoned to report fraudulent how-to-vote cards discovered in the district of Toowong.

  After a bizarre campaign that saw a passive-aggressive Premier first taunt, and then agree to work in coalition with the Liberals, the result looked predictable.

  The ALP tried to remind the Queensland voting public of the drama and controversy of the previous three years – the destruction of the Bellevue Hotel, the street marches and thousands of arrest, the special treatment given to the Japanese developer Yohachiro Iwasaki who had bought up land and built a resort near Yeppoon in Central Queensland. The Bjelke-Petersen government had in 1978 introduced the Queensland International Tourist Centre Agreement Act 1978 that released Iwasaki from several Queensland statutes. It gave Iwasaki the legal right to purchase and lease Crown land. The construction of the resort was well underway.

  In the end, the number of National Party seats in the new Parliament remained unchanged. The ALP gained two and the Liberals lost two.

  On the day of the election, a bomb ripped through the Iwasaki development in Yeppoon, causing $1 million damage. Two men were charged with the bombing but later found not guilty in court after a key witness appeared to have conspired with police.

  Another perfect day in Queensland.

  Mona and the Jockey

  Mona Ellen Lewis, mother to Commissioner Terry Lewis, must have had a few loves in her life, but at the very top of the list was horse racing. She had, after all, abandoned her husband and young son Terry in dreary Ipswich, and headed back to Brisbane, and in particular to its racing calendar.