Three Crooked Kings

by Matthew Condon

  She said that on the night of the attempted murder of Hallahan, Bahnemann had again attempted to force her back into prostitution and an argument developed, leading to his threat to kill her.

  In his account of the interview with Ada, Lewis curiously wrote: ‘She further informed us that her husband had “a set” on Detectives for stopping her at earning money from prostitution.’ This would appear to provide a flimsy motive for Bahnemann’s attack on Hallahan.

  There was a further glaring anomaly in the story, courtesy of Constable Morris’s official statement. He said he was on duty in Wynnum when, at 1.15 a.m., he received a phone call from Lewis, who told him that Ada Bahnemann had phoned a few minutes earlier and had informed Lewis that Bahnemann was threatening to kill her with a .303 rifle.

  But before Lewis and Hallahan arrived – Morris standing in the bedroom with the agitated Gunther Bahnemann – the crazed gunman made a special request.

  ‘I would like to talk to Mr [Buck] Buchanan or some Vice squad detectives,’ Bahnemann said to Morris.

  ‘We will go and try to get them for you.’

  Morris said he then left the room and communicated with the CIB ‘per medium of the police wireless’ and advised the branch that Bahnemann wanted to speak with Buchanan.

  But why would Morris leave the scene, and his junior partner staring down the barrel of Bahnemann’s loaded rifle, if he knew that Lewis and Hallahan were on the way? He could have asked for more backup from local police stations but instead simply passed on Bahnemann’s peculiar request.

  At his trial the following month, Bahnemann pleaded not guilty and claimed he’d been verballed. The jury found otherwise, and he was sentenced to seven years’ hard labour.

  Bahnemann claimed at the trial, and for decades later, that he became suicidal that night because he’d learned that his wife had been working as a prostitute. That’s patently untrue, if Lewis’s diaries and his record of contact with the Bahnemanns over the previous few years are to be believed.

  But did his arrest go according to the accounts of the police present on the night?

  At his sentencing in the Supreme Court of Queensland on 20 October 1959, the judge said: ‘Well, giving full weight to your condition of mind, I must also give full weight to the evidence, as it appears the jury accepted the evidence, and it is my duty to prevent you and others – who may be like-minded – from attempting to kill policemen, who, in the execution of their duty, are called upon to protect the lives of the citizens of this state.

  ‘I may say now the actions of the policemen concerned in this episode exhibited a very high degree of courage and devotion to duty. It seems to me, in particular, Hallahan, who attempted to disarm you by jumping upon you at point-blank range when you had a loaded .303 rifle in your hands menacing the four policemen who were present, had an almost miraculous escape from your murderous intentions.’

  Ada never visited Bahnemann in Boggo Road gaol. She quickly sold the house in Whites Road and moved to New South Wales.

  Almost thirty years after the incident, Bahnemann said in a newspaper interview that he had been verballed by Hallahan and Lewis.

  ‘I was mentally deranged . . . a very angry man,’ he recalled. ‘I took a whole lot of my wife’s tablets. I was going to commit suicide. I was on the bed. I had a .303 rifle. I had it lying on top of me with one hand on it. It had one bloody bullet in it. If the tablets didn’t work I was going to stick it in my mouth and pull the trigger and go out of this world that way.

  ‘My wife came home and she called the local police. They behaved decently . . . I don’t know how Hallahan and Lewis got into the act at 2.30 in the morning. My wife could have phoned them.

  ‘They came in fast. Hallahan grabbed at the rifle. My arms were powerless. I was so stiff from the tablets I couldn’t raise my arms.

  ‘Hallahan twisted it and he had his finger around the trigger and it went off. It hit the wall low down.

  ‘I made no threats. If I wanted to kill someone in that small room I couldn’t have missed.’

  Bahnemann said he believed the police had refused to allow Ada to attend his trial or give evidence, and that she relocated to Sydney at their instigation.

  As for the two Wynnum constables, Morris and Shearer, their memories of the incident also throw up anomalies.

  More than half a century later, Morris is still reluctant to discuss that night. ‘I’m not a person that discusses it with too many people,’ he says. ‘Well, I don’t discuss it because people ask and I’m not prepared to tell them . . . We did our job that particular night and we just became involved in that particular incident. It wasn’t our choice; that was a part of our deal, that’s a part of being a police officer.’

  Jim Shearer says it was not Lewis who first took the call about the unfolding drama that evening: ‘I was of the opinion that Johnny Morris took the phone call and I’m of the opinion it came from her [Ada]. And she was ringing from a phone box up the road.’

  Both men went to the house and met with Ada. They encouraged her to stay away from the scene while they entered the house and confronted Bahnemann in the small bedroom.

  Shearer adds that Bahnemann ‘said he wanted to talk to Hallahan and Lewis and so Johnny Morris left – he was the bravest one, he was the smart one, he left and he went out and called out over the car radio to Hallahan and Lewis – and we didn’t even know whether they were working or not, but anyway they were’.

  As for Bahnemann deliberately trying to murder Hallahan as the heroic detectives attempted to disarm the gunman, Shearer says: ‘Yeah, well, you know, we sort of had some doubts. Johnny and I talked about it naturally afterwards, and whether he was actually trying to shoot us or . . . whether it just accidentally discharged.

  ‘A far as a medal went, yeah, I felt Lewis should get one but it was a bit of a toss-up who would get the top one and who would get the bottom one, and I think they just wrote a better story than we did . . . They sort of embellished their part a bit, where we were just the boys in blue in the background.’

  Police Commissioner Bischof gave all four police officers commendations, and it was recommended that Lewis and Hallahan be put up for the police force’s highest honour – the George Medal for Bravery.

  Miss Hamilton Has Had Enough

  Hallahan and Lewis were the toast of the town after the Bahnemann conviction.

  In the CIB, rumours began circulating that the pair had ‘planted’ the rifle on the former German war veteran and engineered their own heroics. But other police believed the conjecture was yet again the work of the branch’s entrenched ‘corridor assassins’, intent on upholding the age-old sectarian rifts within the police force and using any circumstance to undermine Police Commissioner Bischof.

  Bischof himself took a week’s leave in early October. It wasn’t by choice. Bischof never took holidays, especially now that he had the top job and with his deputy – the Catholic Jim Donovan, passed over for Bischof’s position – breathing down his neck. The police commissioner was ordered to have a break.

  As he had before, he spent his vacation at hotelier Rolly Roberts’s holiday house on the Gold Coast. He often took his lover Mary Fels, and another rumour riffled through the CIB that a photograph of Bischof and Fels sunning themselves on the beach was in existence. Catholic spies within the force had been diligently documenting Bischof’s every move, waiting to entrap him.

  While Bischof was out of town, and with Donovan as acting police commissioner, the city’s heroes, Hallahan and Lewis, took a small matter of business into their own hands. They went to pay a visit to Miss Leigh Hamilton.

  Hamilton, then in her late twenties, had emigrated to Australia from Germany in the early 1950s and ended up in Brisbane a few years later. The brunette worked as a prostitute in the city’s tolerated brothels but was deemed a ‘troublemaker’ by the other girls and
by 1959 was working out of her apartment in Ashgrove, in the city’s inner west, as a solo operative. She used contacts within Brisbane’s taxi fleet to help drum up business.

  In Bischof’s absence, Hallahan and Lewis visited Hamilton and told her that protection money had now doubled, and they would be around to collect on the next Saturday. Lewis says that Hallahan, who invariably liked to work alone and often disappeared on police partners, went in to see Hamilton that day while Lewis stayed outside the property. He says he wasn’t aware of what was said between Hallahan and Hamilton during that meeting.

  Incensed, Hamilton made a personal complaint to Acting Police Commissioner Donovan. Here, at last, was an opportunity to entrap Bischof’s bagmen and potentially bring down the police commissioner himself.

  Donovan instructed two inspectors to hide in Hamilton’s apartment on the day of the pick-up and catch Hallahan and Lewis in the act.

  That Saturday, Hallahan and Lewis were on the 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. shift. They had arranged to meet Hamilton at her home at 3.30 p.m. By chance, Murphy was on duty at CIB headquarters that day when he received a call from another prostitute, tipping him off about the Hamilton sting.

  When Hallahan and Lewis arrived for duty, Murphy took them aside and warned them of the trap. The two men had to think quickly – clearly Jim Donovan was onto them, and this had the potential to develop into a major incident. After the Bahnemann success just weeks earlier, the city’s heroes now faced exposure as Bischof’s collect boys.

  With Norm Bauer, now head of the Brisbane CIB, also on leave, Hallahan and Lewis went in to see the acting CIB chief, Bill Cronau – the legendary detective known to all police as ‘Uncle Bill’ – and tried to pre-empt the fallout.

  They spun a story that they had been contacted by a prostitute by the name of Leigh Hamilton, who had made a complaint about a German taxi driver extorting money from her. Could Hallahan and Lewis go out and hide in her apartment and capture the rogue trying to extort from her?

  Cronau exploded: ‘You’ve been tipped off. Get out of my office, you bastards.’

  Jim Donovan wasn’t so dismissive. He instantly demoted the two officers and told them to report for plain-clothes duties on Monday morning at Roma Street police station. Their glittering careers seemed over in an instant.

  Lewis’s police diary number 896, beginning in February 1959, abruptly ends with a short entry for Saturday 3 October. He clocked on at CIB headquarters at 9.30 a.m. that day, attended to files, wrote up his police diary, went to Doomben racecourse with Hoppy Hopgood, then finished work at 6 p.m. The remaining sixty-three pages of the diary are blank. ‘The diary was confiscated,’ Lewis says.

  Hallahan and Lewis telephoned fellow officer Ron Edington, who in the recent past had had a number of legal confrontations within the force.

  ‘We met at the Highway Hotel at Rocklea,’ Edington remembers. ‘They gave me the whole story about Leigh Hamilton and Donovan standing them down. They were terrified about what was going to happen. This was it. Donovan was going to expose Bischof and prove he was using men like Hallahan and Lewis – the Rat Pack – to pick up money for him.’

  Word got through to Bischof and he rushed back from the coast to Donovan’s office up at the old police depot on Petrie Terrace. He immediately terminated the transfers on the proviso that Hallahan and Lewis would not work in the Vice Squad.

  Reporter Ken Blanch, who used to pop in to CIB headquarters at least three times a day – the Telegraph offices were a short walk away, in Elizabeth Street – remembers entering the old church building shortly after this incident and seeing Lewis at the top of the stairs.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Blanch asked. ‘I thought you were on your holidays?’

  ‘Cronau tried to set me and Hallahan up,’ Lewis replied.

  That was not the end of the drama. Bischof could see a sectarian stand-off looming, or worse, the entire fiasco finding its way to government ears. It could hit the press, and be the end of his commissionership.

  He proceeded to invent a fantastic story to cover up the ructions on the ground in the police force, and Hallahan and Lewis’s exposure as his bagmen.

  Thomas Hiley, the state treasurer of the day and no fan of Bischof, recalled the extraordinary fallout from the incident.

  ‘One day [Liberal Party leader] Ken Morris came in . . . with a Minute to Cabinet – no warning about it – that we close all the brothels. And I remember as well as can be Premier Frank Nicklin looked a bit surprised.’

  When questioned by his colleagues about the recommendation, Morris said Bischof was angry with the brothels because they were not passing inside information on the movement of local or interstate criminals back to police. He said they weren’t keeping ‘their part of the bargain’, so the brothels would be padlocked.

  Hiley protested that the action would drive prostitutes onto the streets and into hotels and bars in the city.

  ‘Oh well,’ Morris replied. ‘This is Bischof’s recommendation and I’m submitting it.’

  The premier was concerned about it. According to Hiley, the then Liberal member for Toowong, Attorney-General and Minister for Justice Alan Munro issued a warning: ‘If we refuse . . . and it comes out that after getting a recommendation from the Commissioner of Police that brothels be closed, and this Cabinet intervened to keep them open, we would have some awkward explaining to do.’

  Cabinet agreed to the recommendation.

  Bischof’s smokescreen had worked seamlessly, and he immediately ordered Bauer and others to go around to all the brothels and put brass padlocks on the doors.

  Shirley Brifman was working at Killarney brothel when the order came down. She recalled in a police interview years later: ‘The collect boys were Lewis, Murphy, and Hallahan. That went to Bischof. How much they got and how much Bischof got I do not know. They were his trusted boys.

  ‘Once he went on holidays and they decided that the fees would go up and collect a bit more for themselves. Bischof came back. He could not charge them. The only thing he could do was to close [the brothels] and shut his mouth.’

  The day after the controversial lock-up, a small story featured in a local newspaper: ‘Police have taken action on certain houses in Brisbane . . . Last night their doors were shut and fastened with big brass padlocks. It is the first “serious” shut-down since the houses began operating before the First World War.’

  The Sunday Truth went even further on 18 October: ‘Two detectives were taken off the Consorting Squad of the Brisbane Criminal Investigation Branch, and transferred to other duties, this week.

  ‘This was a prelude to further overhaul of the Squad which is now planned, and other action to be taken by the Police Commissioner, Mr Bischof.

  ‘Another result of the moves was that the Government decided to direct the Commissioner to clamp down on certain serious vice activities in the city. As a result, a number of houses regarded as undesirable resorts were closed down during the week, without notice.’

  While politically ingenious at the time, Bischof’s successful protection of two of his ‘trusted boys’ and his own personal kickback scam would have huge ramifications for him, the Rat Pack and the force in the near future.

  Almost two years later, to the day, the body of prostitute Leigh Hamilton was discovered in a house in Hawthorne, in the city’s east. She lived alone and had been dead, apparently from an overdose of sleeping tablets, for about three weeks.

  The Sunday Truth reported: ‘Miss Hamilton, one of the city’s most notorious good-time twilight girls a few years ago, hated policemen so much that she was prepared deliberately to trump up charges against them.

  ‘Leigh Hamilton is believed by many to be the woman responsible for the closing of Brisbane’s houses of ill-fame in 1959. It has been claimed that because of her vicious under-cover attacks on police that the word finally we
nt out to close the houses.’

  In the end, the press asserted – and the public was given to believe – that the brothels were shut down because of the vicious rantings of an alcoholic drug addict and prostitute with a loathing for the law and the men who enforced it.

  And Leigh Hamilton – in death – had unwittingly garnered the honour of being the first of several prostitutes to die of a drug overdose after crossing paths with Glendon Patrick Hallahan.

  Another Good Day at the Races

  When Jack Herbert first reported for duty at the Licensing Branch, on 21 May 1959, on level one of the dour old police depot on Petrie Terrace, he was immediately struck by one thing: these detectives didn’t dress like any others he had worked with in Queensland.

  Herbert recalled in his memoir: ‘Their clothing and cars and what-have-you were much better than what I had been used to and I was older than most of them. That was one inkling I had that there must have been, as I put it, a quid around . . .’

  It was whispered, too, that one officer – Senior Sergeant Harry Falcongreen – was taking money for protecting SP bookmakers. Herbert decided to test the rumour.

  ‘I went with Harry Falcongreen one Saturday morning and asked him for a loan of the police motorbike – permission to go to the garage to receive it,’ Herbert said. ‘He asked me – why did I require the motorbike? – and I falsely stated to him that I was going to follow a bookmaker and obtain the address where he was going to and then I was going to raid the place. It seemed to give him some concern and I also mentioned that to a number of men in the office.’

  As he made his way towards the garage at the back of the police depot, fellow officer Doug Chapman tugged at Herbert’s coat and asked where he was off to. He explained his plan to nab an SP bookmaker.