Little Fish Are Sweet

by Matthew Condon

  Last Drinks at the Playboy

  The body of Gary James Venamore, 35, a travel agent, dapper man about town and a favourite of Brisbane’s socialites, was found in the Brisbane River at New Farm on the morning of Wednesday 6 November 1968. He had been badly beaten and was thrown into the river some hours earlier while he was still alive. The government pathologist, Dr John Tonge, concluded that Venamore had died of ‘drowning, haemorrhage, a ruptured liver and multiple

  injuries’. Venamore’s killer or killers were never found.

  At the time the brutal murder shocked the city, and Commissioner Frank Bischof put one of his top detectives, Glen Hallahan, on the case. A month after Venamore was killed, Bischof recommended to the state government that a $5000 reward for information on the case be posted, given ‘the shocking nature of the crime’.

  Nearly 50 years later, Venamore’s death remains one of Queensland’s longest standing cold cases. The reward for any information leading to a conviction now stands at $250,000.

  Venamore, upon his death, joined that inglorious club of bodies left behind during those decades of police corruption that largely came to light courtesy of the Fitzgerald Inquiry in the late 1980s. Other members included prostitutes Shirley Brifman and Margaret Ward, Barbara McCulkin and her two young daughters, brothel madam Simone Vogel and a host of others.

  What makes Venamore’s case stand out is that there were many witnesses to his final hours. People who saw him leave the Playboy Club at Petrie Bight, where he was drinking heavily with two men. A taxi driver claimed to have driven the trio to a spot not far away in New Farm. Neighbours heard blood-curdling screams around the time Venamore was murdered. Yet no suspects ever materialised.

  Rumours also emerged from the outset that corrupt police were involved in the death, and that Venamore, on the night he died, had overheard a conversation in the notorious National Hotel between Rat Pack detective Glen Hallahan and somebody else – a discussion he shouldn’t have been privy to, and that he paid for that accident of chance with his life.

  Also, in small, cloistered Brisbane in the 1960s, Venamore was gay, flamboyant and a big talker. He was all that, just as corrupt police had clued into the fact that there was a lot of money to be made by blackmailing homosexuals from the top end of town.

  What did Venamore know, and about whom?

  Venamore, a graduate of the Church of England Grammar School, or ‘Churchie’, in East Brisbane, lived with his mother in Kangaroo Point and had been a talented singer as a boy. He often performed in his local church – the old stone Wesley Methodist in Linton Street, seven streets from the Venamore family home.

  Later, he became a travel agent for Dalgety and earned a reputation for being ‘the life of the party’ and being a man who was ‘gay, witty, exuberant’.

  At the time of his death, one city barman said of him: ‘Sometimes his jokes were a bit naughty … but he was the type who could tell them to just about anyone and get away with it. If he wanted a drink it was not just a case of asking for a beer or whisky – it was always, “Peel me a grape, love”.’

  When Venamore got on the grog, he had a pattern of drinking that saw him start an evening at the respectable Old Bailey Bar at Lennons at the top of the CBD, and through the night he would metaphorically begin his drinking descent down Queen Street. Ultimately he would end up at the seamier National Hotel and in the nearby Playboy Club, where showman Bernard King had a revue downstairs, and all manner of night creatures crowded the upstairs bar into the wee hours of the morning.

  The singer Judi Connelli performed there and told me: ‘It was very risqué, very much so. It was the first time I’d ever seen a man dressed as a woman. They were gorgeous people. You’d bump into cane-cutters from North Queensland who loved coming down to the city and dressing up as women at night. There was Cindy the Stripper, who used to perform with fire. She was very sweet. It had drag shows. It [the Playboy Club] was unique in Brisbane.’

  On the night before he was found dead, Venamore had drinks with a friend, Richard Billington, at the bar of Her Majesty’s Hotel in Queen Street around 5 p.m. There they were met by another friend, shipping clerk David Peel. Around 6 p.m. Venamore parted company with Peel and Billington, and met other friends at Lennons. Peel met up again with Venamore in the Old Bailey Bar with another friend, Clementine Webster. At around 8.30 p.m., Venamore left them in the bar. Later that night Venamore may have gone into the National Hotel for more drinks. He was known to manager Jack Cooper. There’s little doubt Venamore also knew the hotel’s number one attraction – Warren Dennis – the cocktail barman of Warren’s Bar who wore make-up and painted his fingernails.

  By around 10.30 p.m. Venamore was at the Playboy Club, north of the National at the Queen and Adelaide streets intersection, and as he entered that night he told club doorman Reg Durston: ‘I’ve got no brass.’ Durston arranged for Venamore to cash a $5 cheque.

  It was later revealed Venamore left the Playboy Club with two men at about 2.20 a.m.

  So, what happened in those almost four hours in the Playboy?

  Ross Beer, a detective who was assigned to the Venamore investigation, told me: ‘He was a sort of Jekyll and Hyde. He was a ladies’ man when he was sober, a playboy and very dapper. He’d mix with the social set. But when he got on the drink he was a raving homosexual. He’d make approaches to people.’

  Did Venamore simply approach the wrong people in the Playboy?

  One of the last people to see him alive was the prostitute Dorothy Edith Knight, who in a few short years would be tasked with setting up Hallahan in the classic sting in New Farm Park that would see Hallahan resign from the force.

  Knight, who lived not far away in Moray Street, New Farm, knew Venamore well. They saw each other often in some of the city’s seedy pubs and bars. She told me she was in the Playboy Club with Venamore that fateful night.

  ‘I was sitting with him,’ Dorothy told me. ‘I knew him very well.’

  ‘You were sitting with him in the Playboy Club on the night he died?’ I couldn’t believe it.

  ‘Yes. I was having a drink with him … I always talked to him …’

  ‘People said Venamore was pretty drunk that night.’

  ‘He was fucking genuinely pissed. Yeah, he was a very heavy drinker …’

  Dorothy said she’d seen Venamore many times in the National Hotel, where she often worked looking for prospective clients.

  ‘What time were you with Venamore on that night in the Playboy Club?’ I asked.

  ‘The Playboy went forever, yeah. I would have gone across the road from the National … so I guess it would have been half past ten, maybe, you know, may have been even earlier. If I wasn’t doing anything I used to go over there.’

  ‘And he was just chatting away?’

  ‘Yeah, he chatted away for anybody, everybody. I think everybody knew he was gay. Yeah, it was a good atmosphere in there.’

  Knight left the club that night when she got called to a job.

  ‘The next morning. I don’t know whether the name came over [the radio] the next morning. I’m a great radio person … I’m not sure when I heard … maybe Hallahan rang me.’

  ‘Would Hallahan have known Gary Venamore?’

  ‘I’m not sure. He never mentioned him to me, and never asked me about him.’

  ‘So what did you hear about Venamore’s death?’

  ‘Look, this was years and years later,’ Dorothy recalled. ‘I didn’t put even two and two together … I mean, somebody must have had it out for him. I think the story was that that night, before he got to the Playboy Club, Venamore had been in the National … and overheard Hallahan … see Hallahan used to come to the National a lot, and I mean a lot, and he’d always come and have a drink with me and talk to me,’ Dorothy said. ‘… so that night when I was there at the National, Hallahan could possibly have been there.’
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  ‘You heard the rumours that Hallahan might have been involved?’

  ‘Of course we heard that.’

  Newspapers later reported that detectives Beer and Hallahan interviewed seamen from the 21 ships docked in Brisbane that night and interviewed members of the city’s homosexual community.

  Ross Beer would tell me: ‘We did an extensive investigation within the gay community at the time. They all came forward and we learned that a number of them had been bashed over a period of time but they had a fear of coming forward to report the incidents.’

  Hallahan flew to Sydney to follow up the merchant seamen angle, and interviewed two people who had been in the Playboy Club on the night. As was his habit, he met up with his old friend, prostitute and brothel madam Shirley Brifman.

  In extensive police interviews prior to her death in 1972, Brifman talked about ‘the time the homosexual was drowned in the Brisbane River’. She said, ‘He [Hallahan] brought up the photographs to me. I saw all the marks on his [Venamore’s] face. No motive of robbery.’

  Brifman said Hallahan discussed with her a lucrative sideline – blackmailing homosexuals.

  Brifman told investigators: ‘So they put – Glen told me – the TV cameras on the Eagle Street toilets, I’m sure he said TV cameras. He said, “Shirley, the businessmen who are homosexuals, you would not believe it. We had the TV cameras on the Eagle Street toilets. We pulled in the businessmen one by one and the businessmen would arrive at the Eagle Street toilets, meet different ones and leave with them.”

  ‘They [the police] pulled them in. They would show them [the pictures] and be asked a terrific amount of questions. They would deny it and so forth, and to shock them all they [the police] would show the strip of them arriving and them leaving with so on and so forth. Naturally they were shocked. I believe there was a terrific amount of businessmen they got there.

  ‘So the murder [of Venamore] to this day has never been solved but those big businessmen, the blackmail angle came into it – homosexuals, the big businessmen, happily married and their families and so forth – blackmail.’

  Dorothy Edith Knight said she never forgot those last drinks with Gary James Venamore. ‘They did some pretty crook things to him, you know?’ she said. ‘Didn’t deserve that, did he?’

  Get a sense Lewis is shifting a little since the death of Murphy. He asks me from the outset why I wanted to speak with his only sister, Lanna? He tells me a confidential story about why he has not spoken to her in years and isn’t likely to. He also asks me why I want to speak with his defence lawyer at his trial – what is my specific interest in that case? He expresses his disdain for the legal representation at his trial – John Jerrard – his loathing again for journalists Evan Whitton, Tony Koch and Quentin Dempster.

  I ask him about his prison diaries and he says he gave the loose sheets to his daughter when she visited him almost every week. She kept the pages at her home and returned the batch to Lewis on his release. ‘Hazel never read them,’ he says. ‘Nobody has read them.’

  He says his birthday is coming up soon and he wants me to be clear that he has left all of his ‘intellectual rights’ – the books, the files, the notes and papers and diaries – to his children. He says he is drafting a new will that has changes of no great consequence.

  We talk about the Whiskey Au Go Go bombing and he has very little to offer. Says he was bunkered down in the Juvenile Aid Bureau at the time. He intimates it was likely John Andrew Stuart and Jimmy Finch were ‘bricked’ or verballed. He says he never set foot inside the Whiskey when it was operating as a nightclub.

  He talks of Norm Gulbransen, Jim Voigt and Basil Hicks ‘reigning supreme’ at the time. He discusses Arthur Pitts and how he was giving some woman ‘a grease and oil change’ in the same period. ‘None of them were outstanding detectives,’ Lewis says.

  We discuss the warning from Commonwealth police about the bombing of the Whiskey a few weeks before it happened. Lewis says Whitrod did nothing.

  I get onto the subject of drugs. Lewis looks bemused, childlike. He says it was a flaw of the Fitzgerald Inquiry not to examine drugs and corruption. He says he doesn’t doubt they were around.

  We talk about the Mr Asia Syndicate, and how police had Terrance Clark in custody in Brisbane before he was extradited to New Zealand. Lewis says he was extremely annoyed and disappointed when Tony Murphy issued a press release to journalist Brian ‘The Eagle’ Bolton that resulted in two of Clark’s drug couriers being murdered. Lewis says he gave Murphy a ‘dressing down’.

  ‘From then on Murphy was wary of me,’ Lewis says.

  I have a feeling Lewis, in our recent meetings, is trying to now distance himself from Murphy, and is attempting to establish a history of that distancing. Before Murphy’s death he rarely spoke about him, avoided questions and played down their close friendship. Since death, he has hinted that Murphy was corrupt, that Murphy fell out of favour with him as early as 1979. He is quietly mounting a case for Murphy as another person, alongside Herbert, who got him into strife. He has found and given me important documents about Brifman and Murphy.

  Why?

  Inside the Whiskey

  Of the many major locations in the landscape of the trilogy, the site of the Whiskey Au Go Go nightclub fire remained, to me, the horrific epicentre of all the crime and filth, the corruption and deaths that came before and followed that tragic night in March 1973, when 15 innocent people lost their lives.

  The second floor of that long, rectangular building, on St Paul’s Terrace and fronting Amelia Street, had for some reason become totemic as the project progressed. In the course of my ordinary day I would drive past it often, month after month, year after year, and think back to that night when fuel was splashed into the foyer of the club and lit, and a roaring sheet of flame fired up the stairwell, devouring oxygen and setting human beings alight.

  I would, over time, come across people who had different perspectives on that singular moment in the city’s criminal history, and in the end sit across a cafe table from Donna Phillips, a young drinks waiter at the club that night who escaped with her life. She would tell me of the moment she saw the fire come up the stairs, of a young man in flames, of the black smoke and the scramble to safety.

  She had been there, inside that moment in history, and still, after 43 years, she was looking for answers. It had changed her life, that night, and still it would not let her go.

  While two men – John Andrew Stuart and James Finch – were tried and convicted of the Whiskey Au Go Go nightclub fire bombing, the case has never stopped smouldering. At the Whiskey, the dark deeds of some of the city’s most notorious criminals and corrupt police collided, and in the aftermath further atrocities were committed to hide the secrets of the fatal fire. It was this domino effect that played itself out for years and then decades.

  For weeks leading up to the fire, dangerous criminal Stuart had been spreading rumours all over town about a cabal of Sydney gangsters who planned to stand over Brisbane nightclubs for protection money. He tipped off journalist Brian ‘The Eagle’ Bolton, who duly published these wild stories of imminent fire bombings.

  It has since been alleged that Sydney hard men had nothing to do with, for example, the bombing of Torino’s just weeks before the Whiskey, and that that job was the handiwork of members of the notorious Clockwork Orange Gang in Brisbane, including Peter Hall, Garry Dubois and Tommy Hamilton.

  Still, much has been made over the years of the famous unsigned police records of interview with Stuart and Finch, and whether or not both men were ‘verballed’ by the police. Indeed, it was attested that Finch’s record of interview was clearly and simply a confession that damned both men to life in prison.

  When Finch was interviewed, on the evening of 11 March 1973, there were plenty of police interested in the proceedings, from the lead interviewers to young constables on duty down at headquarters. W
hen the typed record of interview was done and handed to younger officers to produce copies, a number of extra copies were made and the juniors pocketed them as ‘souvenirs’. The Whiskey was, at that time, the worst mass murder in Australian criminal history.

  More than 40 years later, one of those constables, having read my books, posted his ‘souvenir’ of Finch’s record of interview to me.

  It remains a fascinating document at the heart of one of the era’s great mysteries. Was Finch verballed, as even Lewis suggested? Is the document a true account of the interview? Or was this ‘confession’ just too good to be true?

  The interview was conducted by then Detective Senior Sergeant Brian Hayes, and present were Detective Sergeant Syd ‘Sippy’ Atkinson, Detective Sergeant Evan Griffiths, as well as New South Wales police officers – Detective Sergeant Noel Morey and Detective Senior Constable Roger Rogerson.

  The record commenced at 5.45 p.m. on Sunday 11 March, four days after the fire. The typist for the interview was Detective Sergeant Ron Redmond. (Most of the questions asked of Finch carried no question marks in the record of interview.)

  HAYES:

  We have already introduced ourselves. I intend to interview you in the form of a record of interview, when all my questions to you will be recorded on the typewriter in the record of interview in your presence and your replies, if any, will be recorded also in this record of interview. Do you understand.

  FINCH:

  Yes, that’s O.K. by me.

  HAYES:

  What is your full name.

  FINCH:

  James Richard FINCH.

  HAYES:

  What is your place and date of birth.