Little Fish Are Sweet

by Matthew Condon

  Knight said Ryan was running her prostitution service almost exclusively for bookmakers. Hallahan was ‘forever up there’.

  ‘Nobody was allowed in, how they screened them I have no idea,’ Knight added. ‘God, I could write a book on some of those people. I mean, oh, the money … I tell you what, Lily used to take a fair slice out of what we earned … at least 60 per cent. So if you had anybody that gave you extra, you took it.

  ‘Yeah, it was better to be with Lily because you had to go to the doctor and get checked out and everything.

  ‘Hallahan kept me away from everybody … I knew that Lily and Shirley Brifman had worked out of the Grand Central Hotel in the late 1950s and into the 1960s. I came in on the tail end of all that where I did not actually know Shirley Brifman but I’d heard her name … When all this started to come out I thought Shirley Brifman [was] incredible.’

  Knight continued to occasionally work out of the National Hotel and made her payments to Hallahan on time, except for when she was off the radar for a period having a child. The payments resumed when she returned to work as a callgirl.

  But the police scene changed dramatically during her association with Hallahan. Grafter Commissioner Frank Bischof had retired in 1969 and for those maintaining the corrupt system known as The Joke, their greatest nightmare occurred – the new Commissioner, Ray Whitrod, was educated, honest, and not from Queensland. Not only that, he’d been warned before taking up his new post in 1970 that there was a group known as the Rat Pack, and these officers had allegedly been bagmen for Bischof. Hallahan was named in that group.

  In addition, Shirley Brifman, who Knight had admired from a distance, blew the whistle on corrupt police in the winter of 1971, and was in deep and lengthy discussion with Whitrod’s CIU. It appeared, at least on the surface, that the old guard and their old ways were about to be swept out.

  So it was, that at some point in 1971, Whitrod’s CIU quite literally came to Knight’s door.

  ‘I got a knock on the door when I was in Moray Street [New Farm] and it was [police officer] Jim Voigt,’ Knight remembered. ‘He said, “My name is Detective Jim Voigt and this is Detective Basil Hicks.” Did you know Basil? Basil was a dog with a bone, love, he was.’

  ‘Did they come into the house?’ I asked Knight.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you sat down with them?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What did they say?’

  ‘They said they were from the Crime Intelligence Unit and I thought, what the hell is that? At that time I was paying Hallahan about $30 or $40 a week and then he was getting a cut off Lily as well, and this used to peeve me off a bit. Because I was paying Lily, right, and Glen and whoever – Murphy it appears – was getting … some off Lily, which I reckon would have been a good slice.’

  ‘So how did you get the money to Hallahan?’

  ‘I used to meet him,’ Knight said. ‘The old California Cafe in the Valley, on the corner. I used to take my daughter. She was only little then, one or two, and I’d go down and just sort of stand there and he’d pull up and he’d have his child in the car.’

  ‘And you’d just go over to the window?’ I asked

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And was the money in an envelope?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And off he went?’

  ‘Oh, we’d talk sometimes because we were getting hot stuff off the wharf,’ she said. ‘I’d say to Glen, “Do you know how I can get rid of any of this stuff?”

  ‘So Glen would say where, what, you know, we’d bring it back to Moray Street and Glen [would] come pick it up. Everything we got – clothes, we got good old red salmon, even today you pay a bit of a price, don’t you? – heaps of stuff, heaps and heaps.’

  ‘And Hallahan would take it away?’

  ‘Yes, he’d take it away and then you know what they used to do? They used to go up to the Brunswick Hotel and open up the boots of the cars, and everybody knew in the Bruns … they’d all go out there with cash money.’

  All these years later Knight said she couldn’t be sure about her motive for taking part in the sting against Hallahan. For one, it was a dangerous thing to do. Hallahan had a reputation for violence. He had stood over men and women, and wasn’t afraid to use maximum force to achieve his objectives.

  Was her motivation, in part, retribution, given that she ‘fancied’ Hallahan and he’d never reciprocated the same feelings?

  Even after being on the game for a few years she still considered herself naïve about that world and how it operated. She said it didn’t occur to her at the time that she might be making a potentially fatal mistake. ‘Oh, look, we [Knight, Gulbransen and Hicks] went through the whole thing,’ she recalled. ‘They were there for hours and Basil Hicks, he just never stopped doing this with his foot [tapping].

  ‘I was not threatened in any shape or form. No, I had fallings out with Basil only because he used to annoy the living daylights out of me with what we had to go through. Now it was his job, do you know what I mean? But sometimes he was too tough.’

  She said she definitely resented paying Hallahan the protection kickbacks. ‘Well, everybody did,’ Knight said. ‘I resented the fact that there were so many people involved, and you see I never woke up for a long time that this man [Hallahan] was keeping me for himself.

  ‘Lily’s money was going to Murphy as well, but I didn’t know that … I mean, here I was out of that marriage, did that with the cheques, got into this other thing and I hadn’t sort of knocked around a lot in my life.

  ‘I certainly learned a lot, I mean, I certainly did. But with Hallahan, he was my protector … and I did fancy him. I really have to say, yes, I did. But I never gave any moves either, right? I’ve gone through life and thought, thank God I didn’t, because I could have got myself heavily hurt, you know? Emotionally and everything else.

  ‘Because he [Hallahan] smothered me, he did … He used to come to the National Hotel many a night and sit and have a drink with me and talk to me, as a nice person. But … I was starting to grow up a bit in that world. I was hearing [about] people that were in gaol. If somebody told me the names I would remember these people … that Hallahan … set up for robberies … I started to knock around there and I started to have a drink and I heard things, yeah, I heard a lot.’

  It was remarkable to sit and talk with Knight in the comfort of her own home, so many decades on, and in a context so different from her early life on the streets of Brisbane. She had been a witness to an extraordinary period in Queensland’s criminal history, had been embedded in it, and yet only time had given her the distance to see the overall mosaic of grassroots-level police corruption with any clarity. She described the system of corrupt police having their ‘girls’, their earners, separated from each other. They were ‘owned’ by particular corrupt police.

  ‘Hallahan kept me away from Murphy and the only other person I knew [that Hallahan was involved with] was Shirley Brifman,’ Knight said.

  A deal was struck with Whitrod’s CIU. She would go ahead with the entrapment of Hallahan. In exchange, she was given verbal reassurances about any past offences in relation to the bad cheques she’d passed years before. ‘But, I had nothing in writing, and I still don’t,’ she said.

  I asked Knight about her being wired for sound with a microphone hidden in a matchbox and taped to her body. It was the first ever use of a hidden wire in Queensland. She said she and the police did a couple of tests for the wire in her house in Moray Street, New Farm. Basil Hicks played the role of Hallahan.

  She said Greg Early was also involved in the operation. She remembered the ‘command centre’, or caravan, that was used by police to monitor the bug worn by Knight. There were other police throughout the park on that morning, disguised as gardeners. ‘The bench where I met Hallahan was down near the river,’ Knight recalled. ‘I knew New Farm Park prett
y well. It was down where the bus thing goes around at New Farm Park. There’s a seat there and the big trees and you’re more towards the water.’

  She had pre-arranged to meet Hallahan. ‘It was morning, about 10 o’clock,’ Knight remembered.

  ‘And Hallahan was just dressed in plain clothes?’ I asked.

  ‘He had shorts on, looked good in a dirty rag. It’s true. Oh, he was a honey.’

  ‘So he came and sat on the seat?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you remember what he said to you?’

  ‘No, only like, “How did the week go?” … or he often used to enquire about Lily,’ Knight said. ‘The only thing that was out of the ordinary was that he wanted to drive me home. I couldn’t believe it.’

  ‘Hallahan was stressing that he wanted to drive you home?’

  ‘Yes, I guess it was nothing. I mean, that’s good manners, isn’t it? I mean, he knows me, he’d known me for quite some time by then.’

  ‘And then he was arrested, and was he handcuffed?’

  ‘He was, but I didn’t … I fainted … they [the police] took me straight home.’

  ‘Were you guarded by police from that moment?’

  ‘No.’

  Not long after Hallahan’s arrest, Knight said that one evening she heard strange noises coming from the roof of her cottage in Moray Street. Knight and her partner called the police and she was given full-time police protection the following day.

  In the meantime, Hallahan had been released on bail. Just nine weeks after the sting, and five weeks before Shirley Brifman was to stand trial and give evidence against Murphy, Knight heard that Brifman was found dead in her home.

  ‘I was to be protected for 12 months, and it came to the stage I was protected for 14 months, and then I was left like a dirty rag,’ she said. ‘I was a bit unhappy about that. Anyway, but listen … I didn’t want that to go on in my life forever either, for Christ’s sake.’

  The next time Dorothy Edith Knight saw Glen Hallahan was around the time of the Fitzgerald Inquiry into police corruption in the late 1980s. Hallahan, at that stage, was seriously ill.

  Knight said she foolishly telephoned Glen. He asked if he could meet up with her and she agreed; Hallahan said he wanted to bring his wife.

  At that stage Knight was working as a cook in a truck stop. ‘They came to my place at Moorooka, and my God, I didn’t recognise him … I didn’t know then that he was that sick, to be quite honest. Hallahan sat downstairs. His wife came up and she said to me, “What do you want?”

  ‘I said, “No, I don’t want anything.”

  ‘She said, “I don’t think you’ve ever got over it. You were in love with Glen and this is what made you do what you did.”

  ‘Anyway, Glen came up. He was noncompos mentis, whether he was on pain killers or whatever, he was dying then, right before your very eyes, and he didn’t say too much … he just said, “What are you doing with your life?”

  ‘I said, “I work at truck stops.”’

  Knight said there was a brief altercation with Hallahan’s wife and the couple left. She resumed her life working as a cook. Nobody knew of her past. She had started a new life.

  A week after the Hallahan visit, her boss pulled her aside and said: ‘Dorothy, I’m sorry. You don’t need to say a word, you’re going to have to resign.’

  ‘So I resigned,’ she said.

  Following the publication of Jacks and Jokers in April 2014, Knight phoned to tell me that she had received a death threat on the telephone at home. A male voice told her that if she opened her mouth about what she knew, she’d never open it again.

  She was naturally concerned. The ghosts of her past were back. Was it related to the books on Lewis? We will never definitively know.

  I have invited Lewis over for Sunday lunch. When he arrives my son calls: ‘Mr Lewis is at the door.’

  Lewis arrives at the house five minutes early and is carrying an umbrella in one hand and a bottle of wine in a little silver gift bag in the other. He is freshly showered and extremely neat, his hair combed.

  He meets my wife, Kate, and shakes her hand with boyish embarrassment, his mouth open. He calls my daughter Bridie, ‘Birdie’.

  In the kitchen he seems awkward with the protocol expected of him. Where to stand. Where not to be in the way. He is tentative, self-conscious, too self-aware.

  I try to talk to him about things other than the book. He says he’s had a terrible week – health problems, an argument with his oldest son, Terry. He talks at length about another son going off to China to find a bride and the extremely short skirt she wore when he and Hazel met them at the airport in Brisbane. (I’m presuming they were Sir Terence and Lady Lewis at the time of the insult.)

  As I prepare the barbecue on the back deck, Kate has a discussion alone with Lewis in the kitchen.

  At lunch it takes a long time for Lewis to eat his meal. He gathers huge dollops of butter for his bread in the way I saw my grandfather do as a boy. I wonder if he’s not enjoying the meal when he says: ‘This steak is so nice I’m savouring it, and won’t stop until I finish it all.’

  During dessert – a baked cheesecake – he says he’ll just finish up and be ‘out of your hair’.

  After lunch he immediately starts clearing the table, stacking dishes, retrieving sauce bottles. Then he insists on seeing my study and where I work.

  As he leaves, Mr Lewis – as my two-year-old daughter has insisted on calling him too – says thank you for a most pleasant lunch.

  Later, I ask my wife what Lewis discussed with her in the kitchen before the meal.

  She says he very quickly began talking about prostitution in Queensland and interstate and told her everyone ‘was on the take’.

  The Confidant

  One rainy, blustery day in mid-2014, I drove over to a small café in the heart of New Farm – one of those cramped suburban coffee houses that have taken over Brisbane in a former corner store – to meet one of the late Jack ‘the Bagman’ Herbert’s closest friends.

  We had communicated by telephone some months earlier and despite being initially cautious, and artfully minimal with what he revealed to me about Herbert and the corruption system known as ‘The Joke’, it was clear he knew an enormous amount.

  This man was not a police officer and had nothing to do with any government agency. He had simply struck up a close friendship with Herbert who, in turn, trusted him enough to allow him to witness aspects of Herbert’s private life that only a handful of people had seen. The confidant was present when Herbert entertained at his various homes in Brisbane during the 1970s and 80s, before Herbert fled Australia when the Fitzgerald Inquiry was announced in 1987.

  We met one weekday afternoon at a tight, corner table inside the New Farm cafe. He spoke on condition of complete anonymity.

  ‘Oh, I saw an awful lot,’ he said. ‘You know, it’s a minefield. Like, so many people were involved, you know? It’s unbelievable, and you know the worst one was bloody, a politician. What’s his name? He ran the whole thing – Don Lane … Jack always told me he was the big boy.’

  The confidant said he had an enormous amount of time for Herbert. He described his old friend as charming and uproariously funny, and who just happened to run a system of widespread corruption that would enter the annals of history.

  ‘I’ve heard he had impeccable manners,’ I said.

  ‘Impeccable,’ the confidant agreed. ‘He bordered on, you know, where everything has to be in line, and everything has to be lined up. He was immaculate. He had records … every record was cross referenced … oh, I’ve never seen anything like it. Even keys to his rental properties had to be hung on a board in a certain way … He was fanatical.’

  I asked about the records Herbert kept. ‘What were they for?’

  ‘Everything.’

  ‘Everythi
ng?’ I asked.

  ‘I think they all got shredded.’

  ‘So those records would contain the entire operation of The Joke …’

  ‘Everything. Jack was so meticulous, he documented everything, and he also had a pretty good memory.’

  He explained that Herbert’s wife, Peggy, used to do the drop-offs of corrupt money, and that when both of them couldn’t he did some himself.

  I asked him if Herbert was ever worried for his safety.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘He had the backing of the Queensland police, I suppose. It was handy for me,’ he admitted. ‘I couldn’t ever get booked. If I got a speeding ticket – gone. You know how they do it, don’t you? Their booking pads are all numbered and accounted for. They sign them in, sign them out with the pages, and they’re all numbered. So you can’t write a ticket out and lose it … but those booking pads go in, and they transfer it from the booking pad to a computer. That’s when they lose them.’

  We discussed how Herbert’s system had managed to survive undetected for so long.

  ‘Look, you can cover anything up,’ he said. ‘I’ve still got friends high up in the police force, and I’ll tell you now, if anyone thinks it’s not the same as it was before, they’re joking. It’s just different players.’

  The confidant said he was in communication with Herbert right up to his death on 7 April 2004. Herbert’s memoir, The Bagman, was published later that same year. The confidant said there was ‘a lot left out’ of the book. ‘He [Herbert] said, “None of our friends are mentioned”, and they weren’t. Everything that was there was true, but there wasn’t much there. He had to … he couldn’t implicate anybody.’