James said she witnessed first-hand what happened to prostitutes who wanted to step out on their own. ‘Despite the fact that Hector seemed to be getting the lion’s share of the profits, it was never possible for girls to go out on their own,’ she said. ‘I can recall two girls who tried to set up on their own after working for Hector. Chantal tried to set up halfway to the coast, but Hector stopped her. Another girl [Melissa] opened at Kangaroo Point at Seafarer’s Lodge. She was assaulted by Hector outside Fantasia’s.
‘Even if a girl was working on her own, which was not supposed to be against the law, Licensing Branch would harass them.’
During this period word got back to Hapeta and Tilley that a Licensing Branch raid was imminent. Tilley ordered all of her brothels to close for the night.
‘She [Tilley] came to Warry Street, rang all the other houses from there and told the manageresses to send all the girls home, that we were being raided,’ James later recalled. ‘When I asked her who told her she said that Harry Burgess had rung her and just told her to close down for the night.’
James asked if they’d be open the following day.
‘It’ll be fine,’ Tilley replied.
Tilley, James and some of the girls then went to a nightclub for some drinks. James recalled: ‘I wanted to know how she was going to open again the next day and continue because if all these raids were planned they would surely plan them the next day and she [Tilley] said, no, that everything had been taken care of … it was costing them roughly 20 per cent of their earnings to pay police. [Hector] classed that as one of his overheads.’
Burgess was a regular visitor to Tilley. ‘Harry used to call around to see Anne [Marie] nearly most Wednesday nights … and Anne made it quite clear it was going to be Harry; that the money was being paid to Harry and Harry was the one relaying everything back,’ said James.
Hapeta called Burgess ‘Harry the Bagman’.
So Katherine James was back in business. And it wasn’t long after her return to the scene that, while working at New Horizons brothel at 45 Balaclava Street, the Gabba, she first met an energetic young Licensing Branch officer with a Pommy accent by the name of Nigel Donald Powell.
Powell first breached James for using premises for the purposes of prostitution in June 1981. He said that in the presence of men she was ‘lethal’ – a classic seductress.
‘She was quite short; she had a small frame but a big presence,’ Powell recalls. ‘She prided herself in the fact that no matter what was going on in her life, she could always get a job as a hairdresser. She always dressed well. She was tidy.’
Over time James grew to trust Powell. She confided information that Powell didn’t see the significance of at the time.
Besides, he was told by his Licensing Branch mate and partner, Nev Ross, not to pay too much attention to her allegations about the parlour scene in Brisbane and corrupt police. ‘He said that it was dangerous, almost stupid to listen to what she had to say,’ Powell recalls. ‘I didn’t really put any of this together.’
What Powell didn’t know was that Ross himself was corrupt and a part of The Joke. ‘I didn’t suspect him for a moment,’ says Powell. ‘Nev was my mate. I went to see all his relatives out west at St George on my holidays. He confided in me with personal issues.
‘Nev was everybody’s friend. He would just tell funny stories. We had a great time. I learned later that in every crew there was somebody they [The Joke] had.’
Monster Book
It wasn’t until 1981 that University of Queensland academic and criminologist Paul Wilson published his book on the paedophile Clarence Osborne, more than 18 months after the former Hansard reporter had gassed himself in his car in the garage of his humble home in Mount Gravatt. The Man They Called a Monster was released by Cassell Australia.
In its introduction, Wilson explained that he felt compelled to write the story in an accurate and fair way, claiming, ‘It may not be a happy story, but it is one that must be told.’ He added that he had received assistance from various quarters, including several of Osborne’s victims.
‘Despite the difficulties of writing a book about men who love boys, I received help and co-operation from a number of unexpected sources,’ explained Wilson. ‘Many of the men who, as youths, had had a relationship with Osborne, recounted their experiences with a frankness and honesty that I found invaluable. While they may have initially come to see me to find out whether the police or I had a record of their association with Clarence Osborne, they soon confided in me and gave me their trust. They can be sure that this trust has been, and will continue to be, respected.’
Wilson also acknowledged thanks for the permission he was granted to interview officers seconded to the Osborne case. ‘Some officers went well beyond the call of duty and commented on earlier drafts of the manuscript,’ added Wilson. ‘To save them embarrassment I will not mention them by name.’
The respected academic took full responsibility for what he must have known would be controversial to say the least. ‘In writing about one of our society’s most taboo topics I alone must bear the brunt of any criticisms that arise from this book,’ wrote Wilson. ‘I am, however, satisfied that every effort which was humanly possible has been made to present the reader with an accurate account of what occurred between Clarence Osborne and his youthful partners.’
The book not only presented Osborne’s extraordinary story, it also examined issues of consent and power in sexual relationships and whether society itself paid enough attention to the physical and emotional needs of children.
In his memoir, A Life of Crime, Wilson noted that the publication of the book caused a ‘small storm’. The edition sold out but was never reprinted.
One newspaper article called Wilson ‘an indefatigable sociologist with an eye for the commercially successful publication’. It said Wilson, in his book, was trying to make the reader think of Osborne not as a ‘monster’ but a man in the great tradition of Greek Love.
It went on: ‘Wilson seems to be trying too hard with a thesis that might find some narrow academic attraction, but will be regarded with repugnance by the overwhelming majority.
‘Had Osborne not killed himself, I wonder whether he would have been received by the inmates of Boggo Road with the same kind of concerned academic detachment that Wilson shows?’
Others said Wilson should never have written the book in the first place.
Into the Valley
Jack ‘The Bagman’ Herbert’s influence on the Queensland Police Force under Lewis went far deeper than helping out an old mate with some tidbits of information about unlawful gaming and prostitution. In fact, Lewis consulted Herbert when it came to transfers and promotions, particularly within the Licensing Branch.
The new head of the branch, following Jeppesen’s demise and the temporary appointment of another inspector in charge who did not take Herbert’s bait about ‘getting something going’, was Noel Dwyer, a Catholic and a family man. Herbert approached Dwyer prior to Dwyer’s elevation to inspector and asked him if he’d be interested in taking over Licensing.
Dwyer said he would, but asked Herbert why he, a former policeman, was so heavily engaged in state police appointments. Dwyer was told by Herbert to go soft on illegal games in Fortitude Valley.
Prior to Dwyer’s appointment, Lewis showed Herbert a list of possible candidates. When Herbert chose Dwyer, Lewis supposedly responded: ‘Are you sure this time?’
A few months after Dwyer took up his new post, Jack Herbert had a meal with Geraldo Bellino and Vic Conte in the Swinging Gate Restaurant. Herbert had never met Conte. Bellino, living in Cairns at the time, had flown down especially for the meeting.
Conte offered Herbert $4000 a month to protect the illegal game at 142 Wickham. He and Bellino knew Herbert was ‘sweet with Noel Dwyer’.
‘I agreed on the spot,’ Herbert said. ‘Afterwards I to
ld Dwyer and the Commissioner. Fifteen hundred was for the Commissioner, $500 was for me, and the rest was to be split between Dwyer and the fellows in the Licensing Branch.’
Almost two years into the job, Dwyer furnished Commissioner Lewis with an up-to-date report into illegal gaming and prostitution in Brisbane. He said several premises had ‘come under suspicion’. They included: upstairs at 142 Wickham Street, Fortitude Valley (with a massage parlour, Bubbles Bath House, on the ground floor); 677 Ann Street (above the Valley Rocks Restaurant), Fortitude Valley; 701 Ann Street, Fortitude Valley; 648 Ann Street (above Kisses Nite Club), Fortitude Valley; 301 Wickham Street, Fortitude Valley; Corner of Gipps and Ann streets (under Malcolm Sue’s Kung Fu School), Fortitude Valley; and the Buffalo Memorial Club, Constance Street, Fortitude Valley.
Dwyer reported that at 142 Wickham, and on the first floor, were premises conducted by ‘Vittorio Conte of 116 Sackville Street, Greenslopes’. Conte was also named as the manager of the World By Night club at 546 Queen Street.
Dwyer wrote: ‘These premises are used mainly by persons of Italian origin … as a meeting place for social gatherings. It is known that they do play cards on these premises regularly. Members of the Licensing Branch have witnessed this on several occasions.’
He said ‘the card games witnessed by members of the Branch have not been of an unlawful nature, and no evidence has been obtained that any percentage was being taken by the house’.
He said attempts to have agents ‘penetrate unlawful games on these premises’ had been unsuccessful.
The Branch raided 142 Wickham three times between June 1980 and July 1981. Those arrested were charged with the lesser charge of ‘playing an unlawful game’ under the Vagrants, Gaming and Other Offences Act because of lack of evidence, as opposed to being charged under the Gaming Act. All of those charged failed to appear in court and bail was forfeited.
In Dwyer’s opinion, he considered the incidence of unlawful gaming at 142 Wickham as ‘not very high’.
‘It is inaccurate for anyone to suggest that a blind eye has been turned to this matter by the police, as the premises have received considerable attention from members of the Licensing Branch during the period I have been in charge.’
In conclusion, Dwyer reported to his Commissioner that ‘unlawful gaming is well contained, not only in the Valley but in other areas of Brisbane’. He also boasted that Brisbane now had only 12 massage parlours, whereas it had peaked at 56 just a few years earlier.
Meanwhile, Nigel Powell, who had taken a short sabbatical in the United Kingdom before returning to the Licensing Branch when Dwyer was in charge, re-entered his work with gusto.
‘The big games weren’t going on at that stage,’ says Powell. ‘But there were a lot of games down the Gold Coast. You only went down there if you were “invited” [by Gold Coast police].’
Anne Marie Tilley and partner Hector Hapeta were building their massage parlour empire, while the Bellino and Conte crew controlled gaming. According to Powell’s police diaries, and by his calculation, there were 16 massage parlours operating in Brisbane at the time of Dwyer’s report. But the young officer observed a turning point in the local prostitution landscape when branch officer Ron Lewis organised a major raid on the Tilley–Hapeta consortium in 1981.
The raid was pencilled in for April of that year. As usual, branch officers were told virtually nothing of the mechanics of a raid until they were physically in the vicinity of the target. In this instance, the men gathered at the branch at 7 p.m. At the same time, Tilley, who had been tipped off, closed her brothels in advance and partied with her employees.
Tilley was summoned to see Dwyer. She was unexpectedly breached and jailed for eight weeks. Meanwhile, Hapeta took off to Melbourne.
Later that year Hapeta came back to Queensland. ‘Tilley copped the charge; somebody had to go,’ says Powell. ‘There was a deal that was done. I am convinced I saw Hapeta come in and see Dwyer [near the end of 1981]. I happened to be there on that night and I saw Hector Hapeta go straight into Noel Dwyer’s office.’
After that, Powell says, he sensed a change. Tilley and Hapeta’s empire took off spectacularly. He was right.
A week after Tilley was released from prison on 5 June 1981, she went in to see Noel Dwyer at headquarters. A deal was struck.
Tilley remembers meeting Dwyer: ‘Ron Feeney and his wife Jenny were coming to Brisbane from Melbourne to see Noel Dwyer about opening a club. This encouraged Hector to do the same. Dwyer said it was okay.
‘I went and saw Dwyer and said, “How come Jenny Feeney can have a [massage] parlour and I can’t?’’
‘ “I’ll send someone to see you,” Dwyer said.’
Dwyer told Tilley that the man he would send would have a packet of Marlboro cigarettes. A couple of days later Tilley was in the lounge room at home in Spring Hill when someone came to the door. It was Vic Conte.
‘I’m not going to work with these Italians,’ Hapeta later told her. Until then Tilley thought Conte and the Bellinos were just nightclub owners in Brisbane and in northern Queensland.
In the meantime, Dwyer made contact with ‘The Bagman’, Jack Herbert. According to Herbert, Dwyer took him aside and asked him if he wanted to make a ‘red shilling’, or kickbacks from prostitution. ‘Dwyer told me Tilley would pay me $5000 a month. He said I shouldn’t worry about the details; he’d look after everything. All I had to do was make arrangements to collect the money,’ Herbert recalled.
Tilley went back to see Noel Dwyer and told him she didn’t want to work with people like Conte and the Bellinos. Dwyer told her he’d send somebody else ‘called Tom’. Tilley was told to wait for a phone call.
When ‘Tom’ eventually made contact they arranged to meet at the Coca Cola factory (a bottling plant in James Street, New Farm) in the Valley. He had a little van.
‘It was Jack Herbert. I always called him Tom. I didn’t know who he was. He spoke with an accent that I had to listen really hard to,’ recalls Tilley.
‘Okay, we will have to do some business here,’ Herbert said. ‘You can open up your places again – and you pay me so much a month.’ Tilley recalls the amount was about $4000 a month.
Herbert said to her: ‘You either pay this and you go and open your businesses and you can stay in Queensland and you won’t go to gaol. Just bring me the little bag.’
They made plans to meet once a month at the same time and place. ‘He would ring and arrange to meet,’ Tilley says. ‘We paid in cash. He had the same sort of humour as me. That’s what it was. They called it The Joke. We never did. But our life was like a joke.’
Tilley was immediately resigned to paying Herbert for protection. She called it the ‘funny money’. ‘It was a shitload amount of money,’ she recalls. ‘Sometimes we made no money. You’d sort of offset it.
‘The nightclub [Pharaoh’s] was making very good money, maybe $5000 to $10,000 a night. One of the parlours might have gone broke. We’d offset it. I had this accountant who reckoned … when I think back, it was absurd. He reckoned that in one year we paid $40,000 in taxation. I just gave that to him in a cheque – there’s $40,000.
‘None of it ever went to taxation. I thought I was sweet, that I’d paid tax. That was it.’
Herbert later alleged: ‘I gathered that Dwyer had been doing business with Tilley for some time and that the reason I was invited into the prostitution side was to pay the commissioner. I had a feeling Dwyer was trying to cover himself – that he was worried we’d find out if he didn’t include us in the system.
‘I took it for granted that Terry would be interested in the money. I told him it came from a respectable businessman who’d just started running escort services and massage parlours. Terry was quite happy about that. I didn’t give him a name and he didn’t ask for one.’
If Herbert was telling the truth, he was proposing, without realising it, a c
urious historical parallel. In the late 1950s and through the 1960s, Commissioner Frank Bischof had had his alleged bagmen in the Rat Pack. Now, two decades later, this construct was mirrored with Lewis, who having been a supposed bagman to Bischof, now had his own in ex-cop Jack Herbert.
Were corrupt police simply in parity with the Bjelke-Petersen government and, in particular, the mood engendered around the Bjelke-Petersen Foundation and the supposition that it existed to buy favours from government? Wasn’t that another form of The Joke, where favours were bought for cash? Were Herbert, Lewis and company, simply reflecting the zeitgeist?
In Bischof’s day it had been common knowledge that the police, going right to the apex of the pyramid, were corrupt, and a passive Queensland community accepted it and went about its business. After the departure of former commissioner Ray Whitrod, the return of Tony Murphy to take charge of the CIB, the character assassinations of honest police, the apathy towards the Lucas Inquiry and the unending allegations of police and government corruption in parliament by Kevin Hooper, the public remained unmoved. Why?
The Woolloongabba Worrier
Bob Campbell, still stuck in the Woolloongabba CIB after his study leave had been cancelled, was inching towards completing his university degrees and his resignation from the force. The heavy-handedness of the treatment towards him had rightly ignited a level of vindictiveness towards his superiors.
So, in an act of pique and undergraduate rebellion that may have been inspired by his years on the University of Queensland campus, he helped produce a comedic ‘underground’ news sheet that lampooned government and police hierarchies. It was called The Woolloongabba Worrier – a small, four-page publication printed on both sides of an A3 sheet of paper and folded in half.
Beneath the masthead it stated: ‘The official organ of the honest Police Officers attached to the Woolloongabba Police Station.’
The Worrier – which extended to just three editions – was irreverent and cutting. A caption beneath a photograph of the Commissioner, for example, read: ‘The Hon. T.M.Lewis, G.M., O.B.E., B.O., D.I.C.K.H.E.A.D., B.A., Dip. Pub. Admin.’
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