Little Fish Are Sweet

by Matthew Condon

  When Bischof assured him the prosecution would go ahead, an angry Komlosy threatened police that he would go to the newspapers and expose late-night drinking by Bischof, Murphy and others, and the existence of a prostitution racket operating out of the hotel.

  To make matters worse for Komlosy, at this time his appeals for naturalisation were hitting bureaucratic dead ends over and over again. He had escaped a totalitarian regime hoping for a brighter future for himself and his family. He began wondering what sort of democracy he’d landed in.

  He again fell into unemployment courtesy of Bischof, Roberts and the bogus stolen liquor charge, and by late 1962 he’d had enough. On 6 December a desperate Komlosy featured in the Courier-Mail in a story headlined: ‘WANTS TO GO HOME’.

  ‘A 35-year-old Hungarian refugee has appealed to the United Nations to be shipped back to Europe because, he says, he cannot find work in Brisbane.’ Komlosy reportedly said, ‘I am very upset at having to leave Australia but I must find work somewhere to support my family.’

  That day on page 9 of the newspaper, the citizens of Queensland were informed that their Police Commissioner, Bischof, had returned from his Interpol conference in Madrid and was keen to tackle the problem of juvenile delinquency throughout the state.

  The Brisbane Telegraph followed up the Komlosy story the next week, also quoting the disenchanted immigrant: ‘Leaving Australia is a desperate solution to the problem,’ he said. ‘None of the children want to leave.’ He added that his son, Fred, 13, had been top of his class at the Acacia Ridge State School four years running.

  The plan was for the Komlosy family to leave Australia on

  9 January 1963 but it didn’t eventuate. Unbeknown to Komlosy, the state member for South Brisbane and noted barrister, Col Bennett, was accumulating information from sources about police corruption, and much of it centred on the National Hotel. What Komlosy had observed in those seven months at the National in 1960 was also being relayed to Bennett.

  During a parliamentary debate on the afternoon of Tuesday 29 October 1963, Bennett stood in the House and railed against Bischof, his force and rampant corruption. He said: ‘I do not wish to dally on this subject, but I should say that the Commissioner and his colleagues who frequent the National Hotel, encouraging and condoning the call-girl service that operates there, would be better occupied in preventing such activities rather than tolerating them.’

  It was a scandal. Almost two weeks later – on Monday 11 November – Premier Frank Nicklin announced a royal commission. It would be presided over by Justice Harry Gibbs.

  Komlosy decided to join another former National Hotel employee, David Young, and give evidence. His son, Fred Komlosy, said his frustrated father may have decided to appear before Justice Gibbs to take a swipe at Bischof. Fred wrote:

  In late 1963 … he was informed by the Department of Immigration that his application had been denied. As always, no explanation was given.

  During [his] time at the National Hotel he would undoubtedly have been responsible for providing Bischof with booze, girls and whatever else was required of him during the night. My father thought Bischof was behind his countless applications for naturalisation being refused. It was common practice at the time for the Police Chief to be asked if the applicant had a police record. If not, the Commissioner would at least issue a Certificate of Good Conduct.

  He [Komlosy] had also been set up, arrested and fined

  10 pounds by the Rat Pack (over the alleged stolen crates of beer) and never got to know why. Bischof had him thrown out of his office after my father stormed in there to ask him just that. Perhaps he had seen or heard too much and this was to warn him.

  Lewis and Murphy immediately set about digging for dirt on Komlosy, and they found a treasure trove in Komlosy’s files held by the Department of Immigration. In the end, Komlosy received a death threat via letter. It was postmarked Cowra in New South Wales. ‘Keep off the police or we will get [you] as they do in Hungary,’ it said. ‘If you value your life, say no more. Don’t show this to anyone. It will not pay.’

  Outwardly, Komlosy appeared not to be intimidated. But in reality his family was terrified.

  For the remainder of the time we were in Brisbane … my mother could no longer stand being alone in the bush [near Runcorn] all day with three kids and only an Alsatian dog for protection.

  My father always said Murphy was prepared to go over bodies to keep the lid on things and [was] the most dangerous of them all. He often referred to the other three [Bischof, Hallahan and Lewis] as Curly, Larry and Mo, the Three Stooges – and was not afraid of them. Murphy was a liar at the National Hotel inquiry in many ways.

  Komlosy was destroyed in the witness box, his credibility and reputation in tatters.

  If we thought things couldn’t get worse, we were badly mistaken. Threatening letters started coming in by the sack-full, something most people will never experience in all their lives … [The threatening letter] dispatched from NSW … brought about my mother’s nervous breakdown.

  On 21 February 1964, Komlosy and his family fled back to Europe. Justice Gibbs held his final sitting of the inquiry three days later. Ironically, the Komlosy family returned to Europe with no money and no concept of their future, aboard the Fairsea – the ship that had brought John and Elsa Komlosy to Australia from a war-ravaged Europe in 1951. Fred Komlosy remembered the moment the ship set sail.

  There was no Aulde Lang Syne for us and no confetti. We children went to our berths around 11 p.m. and dozed off. I must have awoken some time later, due to the ship’s movement and looked out of the porthole where I saw some lights that could have been the oil refinery in Moreton Bay, and immediately knew that this would be the last I would see of Australia for a long time, if at all, and cried myself to sleep.

  On page 84 of Justice Gibbs’ final report, in a chapter headed, ‘J. Komlosy’s Credibility as a Witness’, Gibbs wrote: ‘It was obvious that Komlosy was quite unreliable as a witness. His evidence … contained violent inconsistencies, was a curious compound of fact, hearsay, exaggeration, theory and invention, and perhaps even hallucination.’

  Gibbs found no wrongdoing on the part of Bischof, Murphy, Hallahan and the police force in general.

  Later that year, once the heat of the inquiry had dissipated, Komlosy and his wife began pleading with Australian government officials to be allowed to return. The family had loved their new country despite their Queensland experience, especially Fred Komlosy. Also, siblings Helga and Peter had been born in Australia.

  It was an odyssey that went on for decades. Komlosy wrote to prime ministers Robert Menzies, Harold Holt, John Gorton and Gough Whitlam. Every request was dismissed.

  In another message, Fred Komlosy related the death of his father.

  [He] passed away on the 8 February 2008, after having suffered a stroke. Since the death of our mother in 1994, he had been living alone … we would visit him now and then.

  During his last years, he was getting more and more frail and forgetful, so that I had to go there more often … He at least had the sense to ask a neighbour from across the road to keep an eye on his windows. Should his blinds still be down at lunchtime, she was to call me.

  This happened on Feb. 9th. and I had no option than to alarm the emergency services and allow them to break down the door. By the time I got there, they had found him, confirmed his death and informed the local funeral parlour to pick him up. The doctor in charge then informed me that he had suffered a massive stroke sometime during the night which immediately killed him.

  Fred said that his father, in the end, at least did not suffer.

  What the Clerk Heard

  One of the perennial points of debate in this corruption saga has been how the National Hotel inquiry, under Justice Harry Gibbs, failed so spectacularly to find any evidence of wrongdoing on behalf of Commissioner Frank Bischof and his favoured boys, Ton
y Murphy and Glen Hallahan, in relation to late-night drinking at the hotel and allegations that a prostitution or callgirl racket was being run out of the premises in 1963–64.

  The National, owned by the Roberts brothers and run by Max Roberts, had evolved into a notorious hang-out for police, criminals, prostitutes, and wide-eyed Brisbanites who wanted to catch a glimpse of the wilder side of life. Sitting grandly at Petrie Bight, it became the favoured place of business for the city’s callgirls following Commissioner Frank Bischof’s famous padlocking of Brisbane’s major brothels in 1959. Without a place to work, the girls entered the city hotels, mainly the Grand Central and the National.

  When Colin Bennett, the member for Kurilpa (ALP), hinted at the scandal and this hotel of ill-repute during a speech in parliament, Premier Frank Nicklin quickly called for an inquiry into police misconduct. It was the first ever royal commission into the police in Queensland history.

  Only two witnesses were brave enough to step forward and give evidence against Bischof and his acolytes, and in short shrift, Gibbs found no evidence of a callgirl operation, nor police misbehaviour.

  Bennett railed before, during and after the inquiry that the terms of reference were so narrow the inquiry could not possibly deliver a meaningful conclusion. Little did Bennett know what had gone on behind the scenes in relation to the terms.

  Some years into my project, I was contacted at work by a man who wanted to meet for coffee in the Brisbane CBD. He had something to tell me about a moment in history he witnessed as a young legal intern in the Treasury Building in 1963. At the time, he had been working for Solicitor-General Bill Ryan.

  We met in the shadow of the City Hall clock tower, and he told his incredible story, revealing what he knew about William Edmond Ryan. ‘One of his biggest friends and close contact was the then parliamentary draftsmen and counsel, a fellow called Seymour. And pretty well every day Bill and he would meet in one pub or another over lunch and they would exchange … experiences. I think the Parliamentary Council kept him informed on developments from ministers of the government and legislation and all that sort of thing.’

  The former clerk went on to describe events that had transpired in the offices of the Solicitor-General in the final months of 1963. Another clerk, senior to the source, had recently been employed at the offices. ‘This man, unfortunately, was plied with liquor one night by various members of his office and he spilled the beans about a few things that were going on. Word got back to Ryan and he [the senior clerk] was out on his ear the next week, very quickly. I [later] bumped into Ryan quite by accident when we were both getting up to the men’s. He said, “Who are you?” I introduced myself and he said, “Oh well, from now on you’re going to be my personal clerk.” Then he spelled out what had befallen the previous man and that absolute confidentiality was the order of the day. I didn’t appreciate that I was to remain in his office, at that time on critical occasions.

  ‘It soon became clear when certain people were coming into his office to seek advice and discuss matters that I had to remain there. Much to the discomfort, I must add, of many of them. But he insisted on that and that’s how it was.’

  ‘Why do you think he ensured that?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, I think he was concerned for his position, looking back on it, and he wanted someone to back him up on certain things having been said. Because at critical times he used to remind me of the nature of a conversation – what had been proposed and that sort of thing.

  ‘For example, there was one time when [Gordon] Chalk [former leader of the Queensland Liberal Party] was trying to get access to funds which were in trust. But he [Ryan] made it clear that it was simply not on. They were not always as controversial as that, but that sort of thing. There’s a lot of politics involved with much of what the Solicitor-General does, unfortunately, and it’s one of the big difficulties of the office.’

  ‘You were in the Treasury Building on the first floor?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes … the Solicitor-General’s office was the office next to the Under-Secretary of Justice. And then fanning up that corridor, which faces George Street, was the Common Law Division and the Conveyancing section. The rest of the office, which faced Queen Street and went into the building, was the Criminal Law division.

  ‘One of the difficult things at that time in the history of the prosecution section was that they were not independent. The office of Crown Prosecutor had not been set aside as a separate entity answerable directly to parliament. So there was a lot of political interference going on, which was a great difficulty at many times in terms of the influence which was thought to be … one politician and then another in relation to friends and that sort of thing.

  ‘Then along came Col Bennett in 1963 … it was obvious among the … legal fraternity that things were not good and had not been so for a long time and I’d picked that up, that there was a lot of concern about … verballing was rife. These three figures were notorious, you know, they were well known – Lewis and Hallahan and Murphy. They were numbered as a trio.

  ‘There was a lot of concern and people were well aware of what Col Bennett was coming out with.’

  Following Col Bennett’s speech in parliament, Cabinet met with the Minister for Justice and Attorney-General Peter Roylance Delamothe, who was instructed to get Ryan, as Solicitor-General, to draw up the draft terms of reference for a royal commission, which would become known as the National Hotel inquiry.

  ‘What do you remember in the office when this was happening?’ I asked.

  ‘I was stuck in Bill Ryan’s office at that stage.’

  ‘And it was his job to draw up the draft?’ I questioned.

  ‘His job was to draw it up, yes,’ the source said. ‘No doubt, under instructions from Delamothe … so then I don’t know how the draft terms of reference got into the hands of Frank Bischof, but obviously they did. I don’t know whether it came directly from Bill Ryan himself or from Delamothe’s office.

  ‘Of course, there were only very few people who were involved in this, very, very few people indeed. It couldn’t have been anyone other than, really, those two things that I’ve mentioned. I’m just trying to remember whether anyone else was involved with Ryan with the actual draft and I can’t recall that anyone was at that stage.’

  ‘So, in short, Frank Bischof, Commissioner of Police, had seen a draft of the terms of reference?’

  ‘Correct, yes. That’s right. Sordid, isn’t it? Extraordinary lack of proper process.’

  ‘And you believe that to be true because?’

  ‘Bischof rang Ryan,’ the former clerk recalled. ‘I answered the phone. I told Ryan that Frank Bischof wished to speak to him urgently and Ryan rang him back. And the very same afternoon Bischof entered his office; he was uncomfortable with my presence. Ryan insisted on my remaining in the office.’

  ‘So, they had a sit down?’

  ‘I can’t recall in detail the conversation, but I can clearly recollect that he was agitated and that he stated to Ryan that the terms of the reference needed to be narrowed, they were far too broad in this [draft] document.’

  ‘Did you ever sight the original draft of the terms of reference?’ I asked him.

  ‘No, I didn’t.’

  ‘I’m just wondering what Bischof meant by too broad?’ I queried.

  ‘Yes, I can’t give you detail of that, but it [the original draft] was going to involve looking at matters in addition to those relating to the National Hotel. I wasn’t privy to those statements that had been received by the government and been handed to Ryan for the drawing up of the terms of reference. Now, obviously Bischof was concerned that it was … going to be very difficult for him to manage.

  ‘I don’t believe Ryan to be a corrupt person, I think he was clearly concerned for his position. I’m pretty sure he knew Frank Bischof as a result of their earlier days when Ryan was in the Public Defende
r’s Office … he was actually … one of the senior prosecutors. During that period he would have had a lot to do with Bischof, who was the leading criminal investigator of the day in relation to some quite important trials.

  ‘It was, it would have been – I’m clear on this – at the request of the Attorney-General to narrow, to go ahead and comply with the request. And I’d be pretty satisfied about that because there seems to have been a communication, I think, between the Attorney-General’s office and Bischof.’

  ‘So, do you think that communique happened before Bischof sat down in Ryan’s office?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m just not sure about that, it’s impossible for me to know.’

  ‘But that would be your supposition?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So that would mean Delamothe comes into the picture?’ I asked.

  ‘I just don’t know the machinations of that, but the end result was that it was redrafted more narrowly to focus simply on the activities in and around the National Hotel. It represented a clear narrowing of the initial draft.’

  ‘Well, Col Bennett was massively outspoken on the narrowness right from the outset,’ I said. ‘So hearing that story from you, it seems logical that Bennett would have heard talk of Bischof having had a hand in narrowing in terms of reference. ’

  ‘Yes, oh yes,’ the former clerk said. ‘And maybe the final story is the selection of the Commissioner,’ he added. ‘Ryan sought counsel from a couple of his leading criminal lawyers … and the view was expressed that it was important that a lawyer’s lawyer was selected who would stick to the terms of reference.

  ‘They announced [Gibbs as] the Commissioner and I went over a couple of times just to sit in on the hearings. The talk among us law clerks and the prosecutors was that the story [was] … not going to get out, even now. It was inevitable.