Little Fish Are Sweet

by Matthew Condon

  As I watched on television an aged Rogerson being placed in a police van after the jury had reached its verdict, I was reminded of that dangerous intersection of the old-style policing of the 1960s and 70s and the modern world. Rogerson was an old-fashioned copper, immersed in the days of the police verbal, violence, unaccountability and corruption to the highest levels of the force. A time when actions took precedence over words.

  He was, again, a prodigiously talented detective, so close to his criminal sources that it took only a heartbeat for him to cross to their side. It was all about power and money. Rogerson had spoken to me with certainty about the psychopaths who he had known in the criminal fraternity. The press were now calling him a serial killer with a badge.

  When Rogerson murdered Gao, the plot reeked of hubris. In his role as detective Rogerson had murdered and gotten away with it before. He had been responsible for the 1981 shooting death of Warren Lanfranchi in Sydney, and in 1984 was acquitted of attempting to murder fellow police officer Michael Drury. What was there to suggest he couldn’t do it again?

  Rogerson had exacted a 1970s-style crime to a tee with Gao, but it hadn’t occurred to him that this time the eyes of the 21st century, in the way of seemingly endless CCTV footage, were on him.

  But back in 1978, Rogerson had also been captured on film during a visit to Brisbane. Seeing Rogerson on television I remembered one of the two personal photograph albums that Lewis permitted me to see for my research. In there, among professional portraits of Lewis and former police commissioner Frank Bischof and a shot of Lewis and his family at dinner in the National Hotel in May 1974, was a set of happy snaps taken at the farewell function for Queensland Assistant Commissioner Noel McIntyre.

  In the photograph, sitting in the front row next to McIntyre, was New South Wales Police Commissioner Merv Wood, who would resign in less than two years following allegations of corruption. And standing directly behind Wood, wearing a neat grey suit, a polka dot tie and clasping his hands in front of him, was Roger Caleb Rogerson, now a convicted murderer.

  The Shadow of Barkala Street

  For decades he was just a shadowy figure in the hinterland of my childhood. The suburban street where I grew up was no different from many others in Brisbane in the 1960s, the city an ever-expanding pond ripple of suburbia where young couples starting families clung to the outer edges of the city, until it was usurped by another ring of housing estates, and another.

  It was a time of fathers pitching together on a weekend and laying down concrete driveways. It was the flap of washing on the Hills Hoist out in the backyard, the fruit and vegetable truck dropping by, its tin scales swinging about off the end of the rear canvas canopy. It was racing Paddle Pop sticks down the gutters in heavy rain, and catching up on the latest episode of Astro Boy.

  We lived in the green folds of The Gap, in a little valley beneath the ever-blinking Mount Coot-tha television towers in Brisbane’s west. I had a wonderful and happy childhood in that street with its gentle dip and sharp hook at the end. At the fulcrum of the hook was a parcel of empty land, a patch of dirt and tall weeds. At the eastern edge, separating it from Barkala Street that ran parallel, was a massive clutch of bamboo – 15 metres tall – that hissed and swayed and creaked like an old ship, and contained little corridors through, and room-like spaces within, its formidable base. As children we would gather at this towering natural clubhouse to shoot the breeze, or roam the suburb on our bicycles until dusk, then when our mothers’ calls for dinner echoed down through the little valley and the street lights flickered on, we all pedalled for home.

  On these after-school adventures I would often pass a large American-style limousine parked outside a small house in Barkala Street. I remember, too, a man either waiting in or beside this impressive old car. Who was the important figure who lived in this entirely unimpressive little house, just a shout from our bamboo hideaway?

  It wasn’t until decades later, researching the Lewis books, that I finally realised that the important man was Queensland Police Commissioner Frank Bischof, the ‘Big Fella’, himself. The gentleman waiting at the car was Bischof’s personal driver, Slim Somerville.

  I didn’t know it at the time, but in the late 1960s as I steered my Malvern Star through that little nest of streets near my home, Bischof’s corruption was in full bloom.

  In 2010 I drove over to Brisbane’s bayside suburbs and had a coffee with veteran police reporter, Ken ‘Digger’ Blanch. Blanch had been at the game a long time, even reporting on the famous Betty Shanks murder in September 1952.

  I asked Blanch what Bischof was really like. ‘Very good dresser, he was a big man of course, they used to call him the big fellow,’ said Blanch. ‘He was … a jovial sort of a bloke, very outgoing and friendly, and he knew a lot of people.

  ‘I used to drink with him a fair bit. He used to ring me up and say, “Do you want to spend two bob?” And we’d go and meet in a pub somewhere and spend a couple of hours together. I knew him fairly well professionally.

  ‘He didn’t have much of a private life as far as I know. He was married but he had no children. He was very friendly with Ron Richards, who went on to become editor of the [Brisbane] Truth. He was at that time a police roundsman at the Truth. He [Bischof] was very friendly with Richards. And for that matter he was very friendly with me.’

  Blanch agreed that Bischof was a great source for police stories.

  ‘Oh, yeah, I mooned off Bischof for years,’ Ken laughed. ‘But of course at that stage [throughout the 1950s until 1958] his reputation wasn’t publicly tarnished. It wasn’t until he became Police Commissioner that he became publicly besmirched.

  ‘He always cultivated the media and he used to say that the police were without eyes and ears without the media. And his angle always was that you disclose everything you possibly could to the media, which of course he didn’t. But … as far as solving crime was concerned he always believed if you disclosed, divulged as much information as you could to the media you were likely to get the right information and it worked fairly well for him, too. He had an impressive record of “kills”. I think he investigated 31 murders and he got 29 convictions, or something like that.’

  Despite the later allegations of corruption and accusations of child molestation – during my research for the Lewis books one of the male children of Margaret Fels, Bischof’s mistress in the late 1950s, claimed he had been molested by his mother’s lover and there were suggestions his siblings had also been abused – was Bischof in fact good at his job as a police officer?

  ‘Oh, he was very good at his job, but you see most bent coppers are,’ Blanch said. ‘That’s their power base; they’re such good policemen that they can get away with anything. Nobody looks at the other side of their activities, they only look at their successes in investigations.

  ‘Now I’m not prepared to say that Bischof always got his convictions by fair means. Or means that would have been accepted by the courts. I think he did a fair bit of verballing in his time. I think he was a bit of a master of the verbal but without examining them at close range it’s hard to say in which cases he verballed people and in which cases he didn’t.’

  After a study tour of the United Kingdom, Bischof famously established the Juvenile Aid Bureau (JAB) in 1963, seen as visionary for law enforcement in Australia at the time. Bischof put his loyal young acolyte Terry Lewis in charge.

  Bischof’s mission was to secure a decent future for JD’s, as they were known, or juvenile delinquents. ‘Now why he chose Lewis I don’t know, but his avowed intention was to avoid youthful offenders incurring a record, therefore going on to become hardened criminals, as he called them,’ recalled Blanch.

  ‘He used to hold these sessions in his office on Saturday mornings when he was Commissioner … he used to have juvenile offenders attend in his office at these sessions. He used to lecture them on the evils of crime and tell them how it would ru
in their lives if they persisted in offending. He was friendly with a bloke named Harry Ginsberg.

  ‘Harry Ginsberg used to make nylon shirts in the days when nylon shirts were an innovation. They were bloody awful nylon shirts, too, I’ll tell you. But Harry Ginsberg had this clothing factory at South Brisbane and he used to make nylon shirts among other things. After Bischof finished his lecture to these kids he used to present them with a nylon shirt as an evidence of good faith, you know, go away and offend no more.

  ‘It was at that time when he was publicly pursuing a policy of rescuing kids from lives of crime that he earned the accolade of Father of the Year in Queensland. [Bischof was the first man to ever receive this honour, despite the fact he had never had any children.] Everybody thought it was a huge joke, but that was Bischof. He was a flamboyant front-runner.’

  In the 1930s the Brisbane Telegraph reported on Harry Ginsberg when he was sentenced to three months in prison for breaching the Bankruptcy Act. The story described Ginsberg as a former ‘stable boy, a dancing master, champion dancer of Australia, a performer in a musical comedy’ who had interests in fruit and retail shoe businesses. He was also known as a bookmakers’ clerk. Precisely the sort of character that would have appealed to a man like Frank Bischof.

  Blanch remembered clearly Bischof driving around in his black

  FJ Holden during the mid-1950s. ‘It didn’t even have a radio in it. He used to pick me up in it sometimes and we’d go boozing together,’ Blanch said. ‘We used to drink at the Majestic in George Street mainly. He parked outside the Majestic one day and we came out to find a motorcycle copper writing him a ticket, a parking ticket.

  ‘Bischof said to this copper, “Do you know who I am, constable?” [The officer] said, “No, who are you?” He said, “I’m Inspector Bischof from CIB,” and the copper said, “Are you really?” Bischof’s car was unmarked, you see.

  ‘The motorcycle cop said, “Well you’re still parked illegally,” and continued to write out the ticket. Bischof reached into the back of the car and pulled out the biggest hand of bananas I’ve ever seen and he said, “Stop writing constable and put these in your saddle bags.” And the copper looked at him and said, “I don’t take fucking bribes,” and kept on writing the ticket.’

  On another occasion Blanch was summoned by Bischof to CIB headquarters. ‘He had a huge sense of humour,’ the old reporter recalled. ‘He rang me up one day and he said, “Have you got a few minutes?” I said, “Yeah, why?” He said, “Come over here, I want you to see something.”

  ‘His office was only one block from the back of the old Telegraph building … so I dropped whatever I was doing, which was probably bugger-all anyway, and I went over to his office. I sat down beside his desk and Bischof said, “Sergeant bring that fellow in here.” So one of the bloody detective sergeants, I can’t remember which one it was, but he was one of the tougher ones, brought this poor hapless little bloody slip of a man in … he was about five foot three and as skinny as a rake, and his clothes hung on him like a bloody scarecrow. I can still see him.

  ‘Bischof says to this copper, “Stand him over here in front of my desk.” He was a huge man, Bischof, and this poor little bastard is standing in front of his desk and Bischof says, “Drop your pants.” And the bloke sort of looked at him and he repeated, “I said, drop your pants.”

  ‘So the bloke undid his belt and dropped his pants and he had women’s underwear on, suspender belt and everything, and stockings. He was obviously a transvestite …

  ‘Bischof turns round to me and he says, “What do you think of that, doctor?”’

  Blanch recalls that Bischof then dismissed the man from his office. ‘This poor bastard pulls his pants up and the very next day I discover this bloke working in the dock at the Telegraph.’

  In a curious twist, when Bischof retired as Commissioner of Police in 1969 it was up to Terry Lewis and Tony Murphy to clean out his office. In a cabinet they found a box with numerous items, including a handgun, a set of handcuffs and a wig. Murphy deemed the find controversial enough to ask Jack Herbert to store the box under his house for a number of months. Herbert, an indemnified witness at the Fitzgerald Inquiry, said in his evidence that he was asked to look after the box.

  Herbert said Murphy delivered the box to his home at Mount Gravatt. ‘Murphy arrived unannounced with a carton and asked me if I would mind it,’ he told the inquiry. ‘He said the carton belonged to Bischof and Terence Lewis had got it out of the office because Bischof was going round the bend.

  ‘I was one of the few people that he and Terry would trust to keep these things.’ Herbert said he stored the material under his house. Murphy later returned and took the box away.

  But what would have been so alarming about the contents of that box that necessitated it being hidden?

  Years into my research I went over to the Sportsman Hotel in Spring Hill in inner-Brisbane and spoke to its long-time proprietor, Neil McLucas, a man legendary in the city’s gay scene. McLucas had been running gay bars, restaurants and clubs in Brisbane for decades. We discussed the difficulties for gays and lesbians in conservative Queensland, and then started talking about former police commissioner Frank Bischof.

  ‘I had heard some stories, but they were only hearsay, stuff that you hear in the gay community, you know,’ McLucas told me.

  ‘What did you hear?’ I asked.

  ‘About him [Bischof] dressing up, and he liked wearing women’s clothing. I was told at various times they had some really wild parties dressed as women, you know, and really deviant parties with all the boys … like a drag party.’

  It begged the question – was Bischof’s box from his office squirrelled away for safekeeping by Herbert because it contained a woman’s wig?

  Lewis comes to the door looking a little tired. Prince barks and circles around. Lewis has the odour of an old man today. He’s wearing a blue chequered winter shirt and what look like denim trousers with white socks and scuffs.

  As usual, we go through some paperwork and folders he has assembled on the dining room table and he checks with me to see if I have made copies of various documents. He then has his list of questions ready. Today he sits opposite me and stays there. He wonders how long the project might take in light of him having to go to hospital for a prostate operation in the future. He says the doctors informed him he’ll be knocked around for about a month afterwards.

  He comments on a column I recently published in the Courier-Mail about the desecration of graves at Toowong Cemetery. He says with all the rates we pay, the council could at least keep the graves in good order.

  He tells me that his friend (and former Director of Prosecutions) Des Sturgess, has been in the Wesley Hospital for about a week with heart troubles.

  We pick up the interviews with the arrival of former Commissioner Ray Whitrod in 1970. He again tells me of their mutual dislike of each other. Lewis says he can’t explain why Whitrod had something against him; he can only think that Whitrod had heard some ‘gossip’ about him.

  We talk of Lewis’s exile in Charleville then move onto his meeting with Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen at the airport in Cunnamulla in the winter of 1976. Lewis discusses his rapid appointment to Assistant Commissioner then Commissioner after Whitrod’s resignation. He continues to talk about his ‘enemies’ within the force.

  Then I ask him about Tony Murphy. He instantly becomes agitated and says he doesn’t want to go into Murphy at the moment. ‘Maybe later,’ he says. I ask him – off the record – why he doesn’t want to talk about Murphy. He starts to jumble his words and sentences. He asks me, for the first time in almost four months, if I’d like coffee, tea or water. He then says he has his doubts about Murphy and his association with Herbert.

  It is the first time Lewis has even come close to showing cracks in his story, to deviating from his perennial line about not knowing anything of corruption, the Rat Pack, etc. I
n our earlier interviews he was perfunctory but defensive of Murphy and his character. Now there’s a slight slip.

  I wonder why he says he might discuss this ‘later’. Whether he has decided to save elements of truth for another time in this process. I’m encouraged that there is a possibility he may be prepared to put new matters on the record.

  At the end of the interview he takes me into a small storage room I have never seen. He calls it his ‘secret archive’. Inside is the full transcript of the Fitzgerald Inquiry in numerous arch-lever folders. There are, too, several photograph albums, some personal, some containing pictures of every police station in Queensland.

  As he walks me to the door he tells me something extraordinary. He says he’s 82. If he got a gun, he tells me, and shot a number of people that he would like to shoot, what would it matter? ‘There are several,’ he confesses, ‘that I’d like to shoot.’

  A Matter of Lingering Doubts

  Some time after speaking with reporter Ken Blanch about Frank Bischof and his mastery of the verbal – or the concoction of false testimony from defendants – I came across a book about one of Bischof’s successful ‘kills’.

  The book was Lingering Doubts by Sunshine Coast grandmother Deb Drummond, and her cousin Janice Teunis. It re-examined in forensic detail the arrest, trial and conviction of Drummond and Teunis’s grandfather, Reg Brown, in 1947. Brown had been found guilty of murdering his own young secretary in what would famously become known as the Wallace Bishop Arcade Murder in Brisbane’s CBD. One of the chief investigators on the case was none other than Frank Bischof.

  In the early 2000s, Deb Drummond, nee Brown, wanted to find the grave of her paternal grandfather, Reginald Wingfield Spence Brown. The humble and diminutive Brisbane accountant had passed away in March 1947, aged 50, and Deb had never even seen a picture of him, let alone known where he was interred. In some quarters of the Brown extended family, it was said he died of pneumonia.