Jacks and Jokers

by Matthew Condon

  The raid took place just after 8.30 p.m. ‘It was pretty early in the evening,’ Julie Crocker later recalled. ‘When I say early, it was early because there was hardly anybody there. I was behind the bar and the next thing all these police come in, plainclothes police … and just said, “Don’t anybody move”, and they started taking down names and took everybody down to the watchhouse.’

  She recognised at least one of the officers from Brisbane – Harry Burgess. ‘I can remember Harry because at one stage I was behind the bar when everybody was coming in and I looked up and I think I smiled at him and he sort of just walked away like he didn’t want to know me, so I just didn’t worry about it,’ she said.

  Crocker couldn’t understand why the raid had taken place so early in the evening. Everyone was charged and processed, including Holloway and the Crockers. All pleaded guilty and were released on bail.

  On the Sunday, the officers spent the day inspecting licensed premises and were off duty by 4 p.m. En masse, the crew then headed to a popular Cairns nightclub called the House on the Hill, a palatial club in an historic building quite literally just out of town and sitting on a hill. It was run by the Bellinos.

  ‘We went in there just as they were closing,’ Powell recalls. ‘There was half a dozen of us. They were shutting the doors but somebody said we were from the Licensing Branch and we were off duty.

  ‘The next thing out comes Vince Bellino. “No, no, no! Start up the fires again!” he said. We were looked after. We had steaks and drinks. Then we went back to the Railway Hotel where we were staying.’

  The team headed back to Brisbane on the police plane the next day. For years Powell mulled over the purpose of the farcical raid.

  ‘They [Crocker and Holloway] hadn’t got permission [for the Traveltown casino],’ Powell says. ‘They’d exceeded their brief. The Licensing Branch was there to tell them that that wasn’t on. It’s the only explanation I can come up with.’

  Bandits on Trial

  Almost a year after their terrifying rampage through the streets of Brisbane, the two so-called ‘Bikie Bandits’ – Alfred Thompson and Steve Kossaris – went to trial in the Supreme Court before Justice Connolly. Both men faced a combined 26 charges for a string of armed robberies throughout the city.

  During the two-week trial, Justice Connolly received a death threat. The Sunday Sun newspaper revealed that a man had approached a court security officer and warned him that Justice Connolly would be killed with a shotgun.

  Counsel for Thompson and Kossaris moved that the trial be stopped. The jury was frightened, they said.

  Justice Connolly would have none of it. ‘Do you think the administration of criminal law should come to an end just because somebody makes a threat?’ Justice Connolly asked. ‘Because some little hoon wanders in and makes some wild statement about releasing the judge from this vale to tears with a shotgun, are you suggesting that the trial cannot proceed? It is ridiculous.’

  During the trial it was alleged that Thompson was the primary gunman in the armed robberies that had ‘sent shockwaves through the entire Queensland banking system’ and had induced terror in innocent civilians. Kossaris drove the getaway motorcycle.

  The proceeds from the robberies amounted to almost $100,000 for Thompson and $37,000 for Kossaris. Virtually all of the money was spent by both men on heroin.

  During the trial, there were extraordinary allegations that police had provided the defendants with heroin prior to their interrogation and the preparation of their formal statements, supposedly dictated by police.

  Police said the statements of Thompson and Kossaris were made voluntarily. Justice Connolly dismissed the police evidence and rejected the statements.

  Then clinical pharmacologist Dr P.J. Ravenscroft was called. Following the analysis of blood samples, he was decisive – the defendents had heroin in their systems during the time they were incarcerated in the Brisbane watchhouse following their early morning arrests.

  Justice Connolly told the court: ‘It is, in my opinion, beyond question that both prisoners were injected with heroin between midday and midnight on November 19th [1981].

  ‘The fact that they were injected with heroin while in custody is, of course, a matter for concern, but it by no means follows that I should accept the view that the police are responsible for such a monstrous act as is charged against them.

  ‘I make no finding adverse to the police officers in relation to the heroin, but I repeat what I said earlier, that it is a matter of concern that persons in the watchhouse, or indeed anywhere in custody, could have access to dangerous drugs. No doubt the authorities will give some thought to this situation.’

  Both Thompson and Kassaris were ultimately convicted of the offences. The jury took just 20 minutes to find them guilty. Justice Connolly said that despite the fact nobody was injured as a result of the robberies, the weapons used were loaded at the time of the offences. Thompson was jailed for 10 years. Kossaris got eight years.

  Immediately after the trial, two senior public servants lodged a complaint about what would come to be known as the Brisbane Watchhouse Heroin Affair to the relatively new Police Complaints Tribunal, presided over by Justice Bill Carter.

  ‘We had dealt with other cases, quite minor stuff,’ recalls Carter. ‘There is no doubt that this was, I think I can say correctly, the most important case from a public point of view that we had to deal with.

  ‘After the conviction of Thompson and Kassaris, the public defender took the bit between the teeth and made the complaint to the tribunal.

  ‘We had to do our own investigation. I got Frank Clare [of the Crown Law Office] and Tom Pointing [of the police internal investigations section] to do the investigation. It was unprecedented as far as we knew.’

  Bill Carter’s report would be done before Christmas. And there would be little cheer contained in it for the likes of Commis­sioner Lewis, Police Minister Russ Hinze and the Bjelke-Petersen government.

  Ghosts

  Commissioner Terry Lewis had a frenetic August and September in 1982 leading up to the Commonwealth Games being staged in Brisbane. Not only were 46 Commonwealth countries and terri­tories competing, but the Duke of Edinburgh was to open the games on 30 September, and Queen Elizabeth would perform the closing honours on 9 October.

  It had been almost 30 years since Lewis first saw the Queen in person. As a young constable he had stood at the corner of Albert and Turbot streets on 17 March 1954, to see the Royal couple passing through the city to the cheers and applause of the people of Brisbane. This time around, his circumstances were completely different.

  Still, some ghosts from the same era would appear before Lewis began a whirl of Royal functions, cocktail parties and other Games-related ceremonies where he would rub shoulders with the nation’s elite, including Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser.

  The first spectre from the past was the sudden death of former caretaker Commissioner Norwin [Norm] Bauer, the man who had taken Rat Packer Glen Hallahan under his wing when they worked together in western Queensland in the 1950s. Bauer had filled in briefly as Police Commissioner following the bizarre exit of the manifestly corrupt Frank ‘Big Fella’ Bischof.

  Lewis recorded in his diary on Saturday 28 August: ‘… Noel McIntyre phoned re death of Bauer.’

  Bauer had apparently been selling raffle tickets in Queen Street when he dropped dead on the spot of a massive heart attack. The funeral service for Bauer was held in St Paul’s Anglican Church in East Brisbane. Lewis attended with his sidekick, Inspector Greg Early.

  Shortly after the ceremony, Lewis headed across the river to Parliament House where he had a meeting with Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen, Llew Edwards, Angus Innes, Bill Hewitt and others. They discussed, according to Lewis’s diary: ‘… Crawford Productions, changing ministers, Supreme Court Justices, Max Hodges, arrest over phone threats, majority verdicts for juries, Co
stigan, Q.C., Labor supporter …’

  On that same day, ‘Hon. Hinze phoned re bullet-proof vest ordered for him’. The large Police Minister might have been worried about external threats, but maybe he should have been looking at assassins closer to home.

  On Monday 13 September, Lewis had another meeting with the Premier and discussed, as his diary recorded, ‘not wanting Hon. Hinze’.

  The second ghost appeared on the front page of the Courier-Mail on Saturday 18 September 1982. Across the top the newspaper was crowing an exclusive.

  Here were the explosive revelations of Sir Thomas Hiley, the former Deputy Premier and Queensland Treasurer under Frank Nicklin. Hiley, once a fancy dresser with a dandy’s cane and a flower in his lapel, had decided to speak out in his retirement that he was comfortably acquitting in Noosa Heads, north of Brisbane on the Sunshine Coast.

  THE WILD MEN OF BRISBANE, the headline said. EXCLUSIVE: The Hiley File.

  In part one of a three-part investigation, journalist and veteran crime reporter Ken ‘Digger’ Blanch explained that Hiley had finally decided to shine some light into Queensland’s shadowy police and political corners as a public service.

  Hiley said: ‘… the public should be reminded of incidents that have occurred here in the last 40 years so that they may appreciate the chances of the same things being repeated on the much-expanded state of today.’

  Part one dealt with the deep-seated corruption of Frank Bischof, former police commissioner, who had died in late 1979.

  Under another headline on page 21 – THE CASE OF THE CORRUPT COMMISSIONER – Hiley laid out the misdeeds of Bischof in office, especially his extortion of SP bookmakers and his fraudulent behaviour at the racetrack, where he was a compulsive and exorbitant gambler.

  As Blanch began: ‘Sir Thomas Hiley, former Queensland Treasurer and Deputy Premier, has no trouble recalling his worst mistake in public office. It was, he says, the day he voted for Frank Bischof to become Queensland’s Police Commissioner.’

  It was only later that Sir Thomas discovered Bischof was bent ‘beyond belief’. He told Blanch that he thought the example set by Bischof might still be ‘white-anting some levels of the police force’.

  Hiley went on to tell the story of the meeting with Premier Frank Nicklin, Minister responsible for Police, Alex Dewar, and himself at Parliament House in the 1960s, where Bischof’s corruption was outlined by Hiley. Bischof pledged to reform himself.

  Hiley said in the article: ‘I have shown how a Police Commissioner was tempted by graft of the order of $400,000 a year. The present assemblage of opportunity could run to millions of dollars annually.

  ‘Some successor to Mr Hinze or Police Commissioner Lewis might find such a temptation irresistible.’

  The scoop was a profound one for Ken Blanch, who knew Bischof and the Rat Pack well during the 1950s and 1960s. ‘I was up there at Noosa and spent several days with Hiley,’ Blanch recalls. ‘He told me the Bischof story. You know a lot of people don’t believe it but I think he was probably telling me the truth.’

  He recalls:

  People defended Bischof after this became public. Bischof had died by then, of course. They said … it’s picking on a dead man who couldn’t defend himself. They also argued there was no evidence of Bischof having had a lot of money when he died. Well that would be because of his bloody lifestyle, he used to bet on anything.

  There were always certain coppers who would tell you the big fellow was bent but I never saw any evidence and without evidence you can’t do anything. I had a number of prostitutes contact me and told me they were being stood over for money by Glen Hallahan after the brothels closed [in the late 1950s]. But there again nobody would take any action on the word of a prostitute, that was why they came to the media.

  I don’t know what I can tell you about Murphy without getting myself killed.

  The front-page picture story beneath the Hiley exposé was headlined LOOK, IT’S JOH COOL.

  The report documented Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen opening the new Corkscrew rollercoaster at entrepreneur Keith Williams’ Sea World Theme Park on the Gold Coast. Bjelke-Petersen could be seen stoically gripping the safety rail in the first carriage of the rollercoaster, his stony face unmoved during the ride. Beside him is his pilot, Miss Beryl Young.

  He later said: ‘It was very good, pretty fantastic.’

  He also paid tribute to Keith Williams as a ‘man who made things happen … You have achieved a tremendous amount in your short life,’ the Premier lauded the businessman.

  Lewis was clearly perturbed by the revelations about his old boss, mentor and father figure, Frank Bischof. On that Saturday he went into the office and stayed there until 3.15 p.m. He received a call from rouseabout journalist Brian ‘The Eagle’ Bolton regarding the damning article on ‘the late F.E. Bischof’. Lewis also phoned his old newspaper mate Ron Richards about the Ken Blanch scoop. Richards was the newly appointed Managing Director of the Daily Sun/Sunday Sun, direct competitors to the Courier-Mail and the Sunday Mail.

  The next day Lewis, with wife, Hazel, and son John Paul, headed across the river to Davies Park, home to the Souths Rugby League Club, than back to Lang Park for the local competition’s Grand Final.

  The Lewises lunched with former Senator and head of Queensland Rugby League, Ron McAuliffe and then watched the big game. Wynnum Manly defeated Souths 17–3.

  Lewis’s diary noted that he ‘visited Souths dressing room’ and later had ‘drinks with Ron’.

  Still, the death of Bauer and then the public flaying of Bischof as a profoundly corrupt public official, must have given Commissioner Lewis pause for thought.

  Wrath

  If Kingsley Fancourt, one of the whistleblowers on the Nationwide television exposé in early 1982, thought his life would resume as per normal after the show went to air, he was sorely mistaken.

  The other whistleblower, Bob Campbell, had fled with his family to remote southern Tasmania. Fancourt went back to his property on the gemfields outside Anakie in western Queensland.

  Since he’d resigned from the police force in 1976, Fancourt was convinced his name had been blacklisted by both police and government. His suspicions were heightened when he applied for several mining leases outside Anakie. He pegged the lease areas and submitted his applications for the leases, through his solicitor Dale Smith.

  Fancourt was swiftly informed that his applications had been unsuccessful. He received a short, personal letter from Mines, Energy and Police Minister Ron Camm that his applications were ‘not in the interests of the public’. The leases were granted to another miner. ‘They were taken off me,’ says Fancourt.

  Fancourt was advised by his local mining warden to appeal and the leases would revert to him. At a cost of about $2000 per lease to make the applications to appeal, he backed away. ‘It broke me financially,’ says Fancourt.

  Following his star turn on Nationwide, Fancourt found himself under attack on several fronts. He had a small gold lease in Monto, about 500 kilometres north-west of Brisbane. ‘I was behind on my rent and I got a phone call to say that all my gear at the mine was being repossessed and auctioned,’ says Fancourt. ‘Usually when you’re behind they just send you dirty letters for two or three years and then everything’s fine. But they repossessed everything. I had a 28-ton excavator and a loader and the plant itself. That cost me over $400,000.

  ‘This is how the bastards get to you without pointing a gun and pulling a trigger.’

  Gravely, there were four attempts on Fancourt’s life after the corruption show aired on national television. On three occasions the wheel nuts on his car were loosened. Twice the wheels flew off when Fancourt was travelling at high speed but he was not injured. The brake lines on one of his trucks were also severed.

  In the end, the pressure took a terrible toll on his wife Val and their four children.

  Th
e marriage disintegrated.

  The Candidate

  Towards the end of 1982, ALP chief of staff and mover and shaker Malcolm McMillan received a surprising phone call in his office in the city. At the other end of the line was Assistant Commissioner [Crime], Tony Murphy.

  McMillan had encountered Murphy when he had been in charge of the Longreach district, 1176 kilometres north-west of Brisbane, banished there by then Commissioner Ray Whitrod in the early 1970s. McMillan had been visiting the town with MP Tom Burns, when Murphy had shown up at their motel late one night, offering his low opinion of Whitrod and Police Minister Max Hodges.

  ‘He … just oozed self-confidence,’ says McMillan. ‘And he oozed guile. He … was regarded by his contemporaries in the police force as a brilliant detective in the CIB, but had an extraordinary way of engaging.’

  In 1982 McMillan says ‘ … suddenly out of the blue he called me in my office and said, “Could we have a drink?” When you’re in [politi­cal] Opposition you talk to everybody.’ Information was gold.

  McMillan recalls he and Murphy met at a hotel in the Brisbane CBD: ‘During that conversation where it was only he and I there, he said to me that he held a silent ALP membership in Toowoomba. That’s a member where you’re on the books but you never go to meetings and you never sort of talk about it.’

  McMillan says Murphy then surprised him further. ‘He said he’d like to run for state parliament at the next election in 1983 and, in particular, against Rosemary Kyburz in her seat of Salisbury,’ McMillan says.

  Murphy, following a year that punished his reputation, was toying with the idea of resigning from the force. He had always known he would never make Police Commissioner – his past and his reputation for speaking his mind probably precluded him from the top job and over time he accepted his lot.