Chapman asked him to forget the job and to join him at the Prince Consort Hotel in Fortitude Valley for a drink after 5 p.m. It was just weeks before Christmas, 1959.
When Herbert arrived at the bar he saw Chapman and several other members of the branch.
‘After a few beers I was told that from now on I’d be receiving twenty pounds a month as my share of the protection money coming from various SP bookmakers. They called it the Joke.’
Herbert was advised which officers in the branch he could talk to about the Joke. They included two sergeants and an officer called Graeme Parker.
‘Bob Johnson was the main organiser of the system and we became quite friendly,’ Herbert recalled. ‘He had a list of [phone] numbers of all protected SP bookmakers. These numbers were supplied to him by various members of the Licensing Branch.
‘On Saturday [race day] morning every person that was working that day would receive a phone call from Bob Johnson in the morning before he proceeded to work and would read out a list of numbers. Those numbers were taken with you to work and that was your list for the day should any numbers come up.’
In the event of any raids, Johnson was to be called in advance and he in turn would contact the bookmakers. When Johnson went on leave, he handed Herbert the operation of the Joke. Herbert was fastidious with most things, and the same applied to his organisation of the Joke.
When cars went out on Licensing Branch jobs, it was always arranged to have at least one member of the Joke in each vehicle so that all possible eventualities were covered.
At least half of the twenty-two-man branch was in on the corruption scam.
‘At first Peggy [Herbert’s wife] didn’t know where the money came from,’ Herbert recalled. ‘I used to tell her I’d had a good day at the races, although she knew I wasn’t a gambler. It didn’t take her long to cotton onto what we were up to . . . After that it became a favourite saying of ours. Whenever I handed Peggy some money I’d say, “Another good day at the races.”’
Lewis says that at some point in the 1950s he was invited to join the Licensing Branch by Sub-inspector Bob Nesbitt but immediately declined.
‘I didn’t like the work they did,’ he says. ‘And the fact that they called themselves detectives. I didn’t think they were detectives’ arseholes, any of them. And I didn’t like the idea of going around and pinching SP bookies because in those days most of them were hard-working, decent people. They were either a butcher or a hairdresser or someone working in a pub.’
Lewis says the Licensing boys ‘did nothing’ on prostitution.
‘But we used to do it in the bloody Consorting Squad because nobody else was doing it. Their job was to go around and check; they’d go around I suppose and say good day and get a quid from them if they could.’
It was clear to Lewis that there was money going around. The Licensing Branch men, for one, had a better cut of dress than the rest of the force.
‘They’d roll up to court,’ he says, ‘having pinched SP bookies by arrangement, there was no doubt about that. And they’d go before the court and when they arrested people they’d take possession of their documents and it was renowned – I don’t know if it was provable or not – that after the offender went before the court and was fined the cursory amount of licensing tax, that for a certain amount of money they’d get their records back.’
Nevertheless, Herbert had launched his alternative career as ‘the Bagman’. Lewis and Hallahan had escaped demotion over the Leigh Hamilton incident and owed Murphy for their careers. It was fortunate in many ways for Lewis. He was, by now, the father of three children – Terence, seven, Tony, four, and Lanna, eighteen months.
Bischof, in seeking the closing of the Brisbane brothels, had on one hand diverted attention from his corrupt practices and those of a select group of Queensland police officers. On the other, he had sent the city’s prostitutes into the CBD and suburbs, where they would compete for business, uncontrolled and unchecked.
Shirley Brifman soon began making her way from South Brisbane across the Victoria Bridge and into the lounges of the Grand Central Hotel and the National Hotel, looking for work.
Gunther Bahnemann sat in Boggo Road gaol, contemplating his seven-year sentence for attempting to murder Hallahan.
Ray Whitrod, director of the Commonwealth Investigation Service, was busily attempting to realise a truly cohesive federal police force. He had already set up a training school in the old quarantine barracks at North Head in Sydney, and through 1959 he held national training workshops for staff from all over Australia.
Whitrod was also knee-deep in writing and rewriting draft legislation for the establishment of a national policing body. It was increasingly what he loved about the job – the organisational side of policing, the lobbying, the translation of big ideas on paper to functioning bodies on the ground. He revelled in the intellectual rigour of the profession.
Premier Frank Nicklin was beginning to think about the state election the following year. His coalition government had benefitted from the Great Labor Split of 1957, but had they done enough to convince Queenslanders they were worthy of being returned to power? The feisty member for South Brisbane, Vince Gair, would be running again as leader of the Queensland Labor Party. Still smarting over the split, he had never stopped attacking his former colleagues in the Australian Labor Party, giving Nicklin and his Country and Liberal members a relatively easy run.
Meanwhile, Police Commissioner Frank Bischof, childless, was named Queensland’s first ever Father of the Year and presented, by the premier, with a silver tray. At the age of fifty-three and over one hundred kilograms, Bischof humbly accepted the honour and declared that – as police commissioner – it was part of his duty to look after the welfare of everyone else’s children.
He was applauded for his weekly ‘Saturday morning child clinic’, as he described it. ‘My wife and I have never had the luck to have our own children,’ he reportedly said. ‘But at least I intend to do my best for other people’s kids.’
Lewis ended the decade with a flurry of arrests for obscene language, car theft and aggravated assault. After the Leigh Hamilton incident in October 1959, he was never again partnered with Hallahan.
Big Frank Bischof had other plans for officer number 3773/4677.
The Little Boy Lost from Paradise Street
Just before 5 p.m. on Sunday 27 December 1959, Colin Bennett, his wife, Eileen, and their eight children arrived at the Davies Park public swimming pool not far from their home in Paradise Street, Highgate Hill, for a quick dip.
It was a happy time for the family. Six days earlier, Alderman Bennett, lawyer for the down-at-heel, and the Brisbane City Council’s Labor Party leader, had been preselected for the seat of South Brisbane in the forthcoming state election. One of his opponents would be the former premier, Vince Gair.
Bennett was relishing the challenge. And those close to him knew that he would be a formidable presence on George Street if he were elected.
In recent years, as he continued his pro bono work for the city’s vulnerable, he had heard dozens of interesting stories of the city’s underworld, and steadily a picture had emerged from the puzzle. He was told of protection money demands on prostitutes and SP bookmakers. He was informed of widespread police verballing. He was compiling a substantial dossier on corrupt police, politicians, public servants and even the city’s powerbrokers from these anecdotes coming off the streets – the earliest blueprint of a system that had aligned in the innocent 1950s, and would galvanise and deepen in the 1960s.
In state parliament, Bennett could finally take what he had learned and start holding certain people to account.
It was still hot that Sunday at the pool, despite the lateness in the day. Pool lessee Bill Fleming – an old friend of Colin Bennett’s from his days as a student at Nudgee College – had started dra
ining the pool and most of the crowds had left, but it was still half full when the Bennett children took to the water.
The pool, perched on the bank of the river at the end of Jane Street, used regular city water but, without chlorine added, had to be drained three times a week. Fleming simply released it directly into the Brisbane River. It took hours to completely empty the pool.
‘We often went down to the pool when it was emptying to do some swimming training,’ remembers Mary Bennett. She was fourteen years old that summer. ‘Little Colin had also just started to learn to swim. I was the eldest child and I didn’t want to go down to the pool that day, but I was a worry wart, I’d always be running around and counting the children.’
On arrival, Eileen Bennett quickly went to say hello to Mrs Fleming in the caretakers’ house adjacent to the pool. Colin Bennett, meanwhile, thought his five-year-old, Colin junior, was with his mother.
Within minutes, another swimmer yelled out: ‘There’s a kid on the bottom of the pool!’ Colin junior was pulled from the water.
‘The moment I heard that, I just knew it was Colin,’ Mary says.
There was immediate panic. Bill Fleming raced to the boy’s aid. He had recently learned the new technique of cardiopulmonary resuscitation and pushed water out of the child’s lungs. Just a few months earlier Fleming had saved another boy in similar circumstances by using the life saving method. He applied mouth-to-mouth to Colin until the ambulance arrived.
The other Bennett children were herded towards the kiosk, where, still wet from the pool, they kneeled around a wooden table, beneath the advertisements for Golden Top pies, and recited decades of the rosary.
Mary hurried into the kiosk and tried to phone the family’s parish priest at the small wooden St Francis of Assisi Church up on Dornoch Terrace, not far from Paradise Street.
‘It was one of those old-fashioned dial-up phones, and I was shaking so badly I couldn’t get my fingers in the holes,’ Mary recalls. ‘I was told that Monsignor Keating was having a rest and couldn’t be disturbed.
‘Then I rang Father Thompson down at St Mary’s. I wanted Colin to receive the last rites. I was worried that because he had not yet had his first communion he didn’t need to get the last sacraments.
‘Father Thompson said I needed to get Monsignor Keating to perform the duty. I said to him: “Are you going to let a little five-year-old boy die without the last rites? If so, then don’t bother coming.”’
Thompson arrived within minutes. Meanwhile, the ambulance officers were working on Colin junior, trying to get oxygen into his lungs. They didn’t realise their oxygen cylinder was empty.
‘It was harrowing,’ Mary says. ‘They got my brother back for a moment. Bill worked out the tank was empty and ripped out the fixed tube from Colin’s throat. It was suffocating him.’
During the entire poolside emergency, the boy supine on the concrete, Bennett cradled his son’s head and shoulders beneath his left arm. Eileen led the children in prayer, then joined her husband, kneeling at the boy’s feet, touching his legs.
In a desperate attempt to save the boy a full oxygen tank was retrieved from the car of the Courier-Mail’s police roundsman, who had subsequently arrived on the scene. As the ambulance left for the hospital, Bill Fleming broke down, inconsolable.
Colin junior was pronounced dead shortly after.
During the inquest into his son’s death Bennett got an early taste of the malevolence awaiting him in broader political life. His enemies – and there were many after a decade as a Brisbane city councillor and a lawyer of unimpeachable ethics, who went out of his way to fight for human rights, whatever your social status, and abhorred corruption – attempted to lay blame for the boy’s death on Bennett and his wife, citing parental negligence. At the election in May 1960, Eileen would be berated at a polling booth by a Liberal–Country Party supporter, implying that Colin junior’s death was a consequence of being associated with the Labor Party.
Bennett tried to protect his children from the inquest and its publicity. He took to hiding the daily newspapers during the hearings.
The coroner’s findings were inconclusive. Colin had been born with a strangulated hernia and was constantly in and out of hospital. It was nothing, Mary recalled, to come home from school and find out their brother had yet again been admitted overnight.
The family discussed the possibility that Colin may have had a heart attack – stemming from his multiple illnesses over five years – that led to his drowning. Or that the act of drowning had brought on an attack to an already damaged heart and caused his death.
Bennett put on a brave face.
At the funeral at St Mary’s later that week, mourners filled the church and spilled from side and front doors, the crowd covering the small lawn and pressing towards the gates facing Peel Street.
‘It certainly did change him,’ Mary says of her father and his response to the tragedy. ‘Dad became, in a sense, frenetic. He had to find something else to focus on.’
She later overheard her father saying to a friend that ‘it would be easier if I didn’t have the other children’. ‘I was initially very hurt by this,’ Mary says. ‘But later I realised he was probably referring to taking his own life. It was because of us that he just had to get on with things.’
Colin Bennett was poised to become one of the legendary fighters of Queensland parliamentary history, its bare-knuckle conscience.
But at the dawn of 1960, with his family tucked away safely in their old Queenslander at 20 Paradise Street, Bennett’s thoughts were dominated by one thing – the death of an innocent.
Dear Sir, I Have Been Directed to Inform You
At the start of the new decade, with his brush with demotion and humiliation over the Leigh Hamilton incident still fresh, Detective Lewis trod quietly and carefully.
In those first few months of 1960 he arrested, among others, a boy who stole a bicycle, and a man who shoplifted a small tin of tobacco.
And while he’d had some experience with Bischof’s Bodgie Squad a couple of years earlier, it was clear that this rock’n’roll phenomenon was not going away. It, and the arrival of television, had an instant impact on Brisbane.
Suburban and city teenage dances proliferated; and along with the dances came a new wave of home-grown bands, their managers, and their bouncers – the latter usually disaffected young men from the suburbs who had found, by chance, a way to be remunerated for their natural taste for thuggery and violence.
The biggest band in the city in 1960 was unquestionably The Planets. And their bouncer was the huge, oafish John Bell. Bell went everywhere with the band, organised illicit alcohol for backstage parties, and provided his own version of law and order for the actual performances.
In the early, exciting days of rock’n’roll in Brisbane, The Planets were different. They were trained musicians who shunned the city’s established promoters and organised their own affairs – from the takings to the publicity and venues. They were so popular they started their own club – Birdland, in the old Centennial Hall in Adelaide Street – where they would play a weekly gig.
John Hannay, a menswear attendant at Myer department store, became their manager. He had a talent for networking before the term was invented, and looking after The Planets began a long association between Hannay and the nightclubs of Brisbane.
Ultimately, the relationship between Hannay and the band soured.
As band member Len Austin recalled in It’s Only Rock’n’Roll But I Like It: ‘John Hannay used to do the banking at the end of the night. It was a considerable sum of money in those days. He came into us and said, “Someone’s got into the boot of my car and all our money is gone.” No one actually believed him. We’re all pretty sure that he did it himself.’
It was this music phenomenon that gave rise to a small petty criminal set in B
risbane.
Another bouncer at the time, John Wayne Ryan, remembers the police struggling with the new clubs, the bodgies and widgies, and the whole roiling medusa of rock’n’roll.
‘I was bouncing one night in the Valley and this big black Ford pulled up,’ he says. ‘Out stepped Murphy, Hallahan, and Lewis. They confronted a group of bodgies and they literally ordered them to take their shirts off and gave them white shirts and ties to put on. It was unbelievable.’
Police Commissioner Bischof frequently gifted troubled young men with respectable shirts and ties during his Saturday counselling sessions.
‘He never had any children,’ recalls Lewis. ‘I think the job was his life, like others, and he used to – he got ridiculed in the media for it once – showing leniency towards young people . . . I don’t know how this came about but he got some boy who got into trouble and got the mother in and presented him with a shirt or some such thing. And of course that was ridiculed by some.’
Meanwhile, Lewis was living with Hazel and their now four children in a high-set Queenslander at 28 Ellena Street, Rosalie, two houses up from the local Baptist church, and a few hundred metres downhill from Government House. They’d shifted there from a small house in Fifth Avenue, Coorparoo, in June 1957. Ellena Street cost them 3300 pounds.
Their home might have been on the floor of the little valley created by the ridges of Latrobe Terrace and the top of Baroona Road, where the older and finer homes and the red-brick churches and presbyteries perched, and it may have abutted Rosalie’s clutch of old worker’s cottages in Beck Street, but the Lewis family was incrementally moving in an upward direction.
The house was also closer to CIB headquarters than any of their previous homes, and Lewis would take the short tram ride through Rosalie village, past the barber’s and the butcher’s and the petrol station and the small picture theatre, and into work.
In mid-June 1960, Lewis received a letter in the post from nearby Government House, regarding the presentation of his bravery medal over the Bahnemann arrest and conviction.
Three Crooked Kings Page 10
