Three Crooked Kings

by Matthew Condon

  Fortuitously, at least for Hallahan, on 8 July – just ten days after Campbell was arrested at TC’s – Sydney gangster Robert James ‘Pretty Boy’ Walker, twenty-six, was shot down with a machine-gun outside his home in Randwick, Sydney. He suffered six bullet wounds to the torso. In the aftermath of the murder there were several wild theories as to the identity of the perpetrator.

  One was Brisbane-born redhead Raymond ‘Ducky’ O’Connor, twenty-five, a standover man and feared gunman based in Sydney.

  Sharp as a tack, Hallahan seconded the Walker killing to plant his first ruse in the local press. On 28 July 1963, the Sunday Truth splashed with a sensational story by Richards about how the Sydney underworld figures, or ‘judges’, who had ordered Walker’s assassination were lying low in Brisbane and the Gold Coast.

  Richards continued: ‘Other information obtained in a top-secret trip to Townsville by Detective G.P. Hallahan last weekend could finally crack open the vendetta killing of “Pretty Boy”, a small-time hoodlum.’ The Sunday Truth said Hallahan had been directed to Townsville by the Brisbane CIB chief, Inspector Norm Bauer. Hallahan’s old friend.

  The article also stated that ‘two of Australia’s top detectives’ had made a secret visit to Brisbane the week before, concerning the Walker killing.

  One of those was Detective Ray ‘Gunner’ Kelly from New South Wales. Hailed as a brilliant, fearless investigator, he was notorious early in his career for either shooting criminals dead or discharging his firearm in pursuit of an arrest.

  His philosophy was famous: ‘If a man hits you, hit back. Hard. If a man shoots, shoot back.’

  Kelly would later be found to have been heavily entrenched in corruption with his longstanding contacts in the Sydney underworld.

  Kelly shared many characteristics of the young Frank Bischof and now Glen Hallahan. He always found himself in the right place at the right time in terms of major investigations. He appeared constantly in the press and cultivated specific journalists for exclusives and the lionising of his work and career.

  Kelly was just a few years off retirement when he bunked down at the National Hotel during his time in Brisbane in pursuit of Ducky O’Connor. There he settled into a familial atmosphere that only the top echelon of Queensland police, in their favourite pub, could provide. He ate well and had drinks with Hallahan and Brifman and the rest of the gang.

  They had only suspicion about O’Connor and his involvement in the Walker killing. But their suspicion gave Kelly a possible suspect, it publicly showed them active in the murder investigation, and it gave Kelly a chance to study Hallahan.

  It was, in a sense, a meeting of master and apprentice. And Kelly clearly liked what he saw. On his return to Sydney, Kelly would mention Hallahan to Detective Fred ‘Froggy’ Krahe, one of the most feared and, to some, ‘evil’ detectives in New South Wales. He, like Kelly, had a vast criminal contact network. He was taking kickbacks from numerous corners of the Sydney underworld.

  ‘Krahe, after Kelly meeting Hallahan, came up here on different occasions and he was told to get in touch with Hallahan,’ Brifman recalled.

  In the restaurants and bars of the National Hotel, the most corrupt cabal of the New South Wales police force had met its counterpart in Queensland. The doors were now open for some interstate business.

  Meanwhile, Hallahan’s heroics in the press continued prior to Gary Campbell’s full court appeal against Hallahan’s fabricated evidence.

  Just two weeks after the Sunday Truth’s exclusive on the ‘Pretty Boy’ Walker killing and Hallahan’s secret trip to Townsville, the young detective was on page one again, in another Ron Richards scoop.

  marihuana seized in swoop by police on weirdos, the headline read.

  On the right-hand side of the page was a full-length photograph of a huge, suited Hallahan ‘bundling’ what appeared to be a naked man, his genitals barely covered by a white towel, towards a police vehicle. The caption claimed the man was a ‘male striptease dancer’.

  The story went on: ‘Brisbane’s seamy night life was ripped wide open early yesterday when Vice Squad detectives sensationally swooped on four secret haunts and seized marihuana reefers and other dangerous narcotics.

  ‘In one raid at Herston police uncovered a flat full of weirdos being entertained by a male strip teaser.’ The paper continued that the stripper had been entertaining ‘potted’ guests at midnight when police burst in.

  ‘The early morning raids followed weeks of master planning by Brisbane CIB chief, N.W. Bauer, and Detective G.P. Hallahan of the Consorting Squad.’

  It was the old Mount Isa crew, working in concert once more.

  The sexy scandal did little to ingratiate Hallahan to the full court. When the Campbell appeal was heard in August and September, the judges learned that Campbell was in fact not an unemployed vagrant, but working as a bouncer two days a week at TC’s when Hallahan brought him in.

  Hallahan’s tried and true method for securing voluminous convictions – and one of the many things, along with manufactured publicity from friends in the press, that had contributed to his standing as one of Queensland’s most efficient and outstanding young detectives – had been exposed.

  Justice Stanley: ‘Such a disparity between truth and statement cannot be fairly reconciled with mere negligence of hasty generalisation. It is difficult to imagine a more unsatisfactory trial . . . I have come to the conclusion that, whether by deliberate intention or mere recklessness, the statement submitted to the stipendiary magistrate on this case amounted to a fraud on the court.’

  Justice Hart: ‘I would have gone further, and found the true story as to why Campbell pleaded guilty . . . Fraud in presentation of evidence is clear.’

  The full court quashed the conviction and ordered Hallahan to pay costs.

  Police Commissioner Bischof dutifully ordered an internal police investigation into the matter of Hallahan and false evidence.

  Former TC’s employee John Ryan claims there’s no way Hallahan would have ‘recognised’ Campbell as a Sydney criminal when he first made the arrest: ‘Hallahan was around the Top Cat all the time. Why? Girls. Girls. Girls. He was a bit loopy at that stage, Hallahan. I politely told him once to move on. Gary wouldn’t have been so polite. He would have told Hallahan to get his filthy hands off the young girls or he’d “knuckle” him. That’s what would have triggered the arrest.’

  Campbell, despite his victory in court, couldn’t get work around town after the case concluded. Ryan believes Hallahan would have had something to do with that, too.

  As for the male stripper and reefer scandal, a few weeks after the Sunday Truth exclusive, Colin Bennett, the member for South Brisbane, received a three-page typed letter from a concerned Brisbane citizen called T.N. Armstrong. Armstrong was the near-naked stripteaser who had appeared on the front page of the newspaper, with sales of over 240,000 copies.

  He had previously written to see if Bennett would represent him in any future defamation case he may proceed with, and wrote to explain precisely what happened on the night of the ‘master planned’ police raids on the ‘weirdos’.

  Armstrong explained in his letter to Bennett, ‘I was invited to the party that night by a person called Billy Phillips [William Garnet Phillips, Hallahan’s closest informant]. I was warned not to go but as the flat belonged to a girl I called a friend, I decided to go.

  ‘I was only at the Herston party for little over half an hour. I was asked to dance, having danced for quite a number of years professionally. I most certainly wasn’t doing a striptease . . . [but a] belly and muscle control dance exactly as I have did in public before lots of people.’

  Armstrong didn’t know what marihuana was and had never smoked a reefer. The police rushed in around midnight and he was taken outside by Hallahan.

  ‘The Sunday Truth photographers were waiting for me,�
� he continued to Bennett. ‘I was held and told how to stand while they took at least four photos of me . . . The towel was arranged by Mr Hallahan across the front of me which when in print in Truth looked like I had nothing on.’

  At CIB headquarters he was further photographed and provided with a single pair of ‘filthy’ trousers. ‘I begged to be allowed to dress in my own clothes but was refused. I had nothing else on . . . and was told I could go home.’

  He said since the incident he had been pulled up three times by detectives, one who asked, ‘Hello, how’s drugs and vice?’

  Armstrong added in a ‘p.s.’ that he later learned the girl who lived in the flat was not home at the time of the party and not even aware it was being held. Billy Phillips had broken into the premises and organised the whole thing without her knowledge.

  If Hallahan were capable of organising a break and enter for the purposes of a bogus sting and to manipulate the press and time the publication of manufactured stories for his own benefit, what else might he be capable of?

  The Bum Smackers

  By the winter of 1963 Detective Lewis had been back in the Consorting Squad for several months after years in the Company Squad.

  While he was not specifically partnered with Hallahan, they did work together on a major job in January of that year on the Gold Coast. They prowled Surfers Paradise for criminals following tip-offs from informants and turned up several unlicensed Browning pistols along with detonators.

  Later in January, Lewis joined Tony Murphy and others on a case of multiple break and enters, and in April he was again working with Murphy, this time at Eagle Farm racecourse. Later that month he was back with his former consorting partner Hoppy Hopgood.

  On Monday 13 May 1963, however, Lewis’s career was literally about to change overnight.

  He arrived for duty at the new CIB headquarters in Makerston Street at 5.45 on that brisk morning, having travelled down from Garfield Drive, and met his partner, Hopgood. In Car 12 they patrolled Spring Hill and the south side of the city, arresting two men for being vagrants with insufficient means.

  They returned to CIB headquarters and saw Inspector Bauer, then had their lunch.

  Lewis was then called to Police Commissioner Bischof’s office. He recorded the encounter in his police diary: ‘Commissioner advised P/W Yvonne Weier and I to commence work there tomorrow, in Juvenile Aid Bureau . . . Off duty at 4pm.’

  The next day, at 8.45 a.m., Lewis again turned up for work at Makerston Street. The old Queensland Egg Board building, constructed in the 1930s, was the new home to the Queensland police, and its four floors absorbed the CIB from down at the church buildings in Elizabeth Street, Traffic Branch, Legal Services, and virtually every other police department. Bischof’s office was moved from the old police depot to the third floor of the building. The police commissioner had a view of Makerston Street, and possibly a glimpse of a bend of the Brisbane River.

  Juveniles would often pass the building and shout out, ‘There are some bad eggs in there!’

  Lewis, on his first day in charge of the Juvenile Aid Bureau (JAB), was joined by policewoman Weier, the daughter of a policeman.

  The attractive Weier, one of a handful of female officers in the force, was in demand in numerous departments but Lewis was pleased to have her appointed alongside him. Among her peers she would develop a reputation for being ‘secretive’, and ‘the best person to keep those secrets’ – whatever they were – contained in Lewis’s JAB.

  ‘Bischof gave me absolutely no warning I was going from Consorting to the JAB,’ Lewis says.

  The first thing they did was again see Bischof. Then they were off to the State Stores Department in Margaret Street to forage for equipment. The JAB was given a room next to the commissioner’s office.

  From its formation, Lewis’s bureau was immediately known within the force as ‘the bum smackers’.

  As it happened, Lewis, now in his early thirties, was tiring of the shift work and demands of Consorting. He’d worked diligently around the clock for more than fourteen years, and had missed a significant portion of his own children’s early years. The JAB gave him a more civilised routine, with weekends off, but he continued to work longer hours than his time sheet demanded.

  The JAB was, importantly, Bischof’s baby. Over the years the police commissioner had carefully cultivated a reputation for caring for the community’s disadvantaged and wayward children. He lectured them and presented them with nylon shirts. He had been Father of the Year. The bureau extended the childless Bischof’s public image as ‘father’ to the state’s children.

  Some police were perplexed at the JAB’s location, so close to the commissioner’s office. Weren’t there more important considerations for Bischof than Lewis and a policewoman waving a cautionary finger at naughty youngsters? Lewis says: ‘I don’t know why he put us on the same floor. It suited us. We could have access to him even if it was just passing him in the passageway.’

  Lewis, as ever, took his orders without complaint, and began to assemble the new bureau.

  ‘Bischof did go to England in the early 1960s and he must have had a look at a scheme that was being run by the London metropolitan police,’ Lewis remembers. ‘Bischof came along one day and said he’d like to start off a similar type of thing that they were doing in England.

  ‘They give young people a chance to be spoken to, young people who were getting into trouble, not necessarily committing crimes, but getting into trouble and causing their parents and their communities concern.

  ‘They said pick a policewoman. In those days we had a total of seven policewomen. I was lucky to get Yvonne Weier.

  ‘Bischof said, “There’s a room there, there’s a couple of desks, away you go.”’

  Reporter Ken Blanch contends that the proximity of the JAB office to Bischof’s was no coincidence. As far as the Rat Pack as bagmen went, Blanch says Hallahan and Murphy were the ‘enforcers’ and Lewis ‘the bookkeeper sort of thing’.

  At Lewis’s farewell function from the CIB, many of his old colleagues raised a glass and threw some money into a hat, including Tony Murphy. Hallahan was not on the invitation list. Civilians invited were Sunday Truth journalist Ron Richards and Lewis’s early mentor, Wally Wright from the Fuel Board. Lewis isn’t sure now but thinks the function was held at the National.

  Lewis, at his quiet desk in the JAB, secured a typewriter and started from scratch.

  ‘We didn’t have a thing,’ he says. ‘It was a matter of sitting down and thinking, Who do we need to get on side? Most of our work came from two sources – the retail stores and the high schools. The retail stores because young people go in there and knock off little bits and pieces.’

  Lewis met with the city’s department store security officers and asked them to let the JAB handle any incidents of shoplifting, whereby offenders would only be cautioned and their parents informed.

  ‘Then I went around the various schools and we started on the high schools because most of the youngsters who came to our notice would be probably between twelve and sixteen. Most of the state high school principals were marvellous. Then we went on to some of the private schools . . . Everybody was pleased to cooperate.’

  Lewis says ‘the bum smackers’ were not immediately accepted by rank and file police, despite his experience as a detective.

  He adds: ‘But then, after a while of course, it really was, and then everybody’s sort of kids came to our notice, from university professors to prostitutes’ kids to policemen’s kids.’

  In fact, one recalcitrant teenager who attracted the attention of the JAB in its first week of operation was a fifteen-year-old named Lorelle Saunders.

  Lewis noted in his police diary for Tuesday 21 May 1963: ‘8.30am. Collected car. On duty with P/W Weier. To 25 Alamine Street, Holland Park, and saw Mrs Lindall Rose Saunders re: cond
uct of her daughter, Lorrelle [sic] Anne Saunders.’

  The following morning, the diary continued: ‘To Cavendish Road State High School and saw John Stephen Wilson, H’master, then Mr Gherke; Mr Brennan and Miss Parker re: conduct of Lorrelle [sic] Anne Saunders. To Holland Park police re: same. To 25 Alamine Street, Holland Park, and saw Mrs Saunders and then Lorrelle [sic] Anne Saunders, 15yrs, and then Mr Saunders.’

  Lewis vividly remembers the case. ‘She’d had a crush on the school teacher and he obviously didn’t reciprocate, and she and a couple of others got a hose, went to his house, shoved it under his door and flooded the house.’

  Twenty years later, Saunders would be, as a member of the Queensland police, at the epicentre of one of the biggest scandals of Lewis’s career, and involving an attempted murder charge against Saunders, the theft of weapons, a sexual tryst and allegations from her of corruption within the police force.

  Lewis, by fate or design, had begun a ten-year period in his career where he virtually went off the radar. In his warren near Police Commissioner Bischof, he quietly worked nine to five, visiting high schools, sitting down with parents and children, putting the next generation of Brisbanites on the straight and narrow.

  And in that environment he began to plot his road map to the police commissioner’s chair.

  A Crowded Hour

  Colin Bennett, in his few short years in state parliament, never missed an opportunity to strike at Police Commissioner Bischof, but by late 1963 the volume of information he was receiving from hundreds of sources about corruption in the force was overwhelming.

  Since his election as the member for South Brisbane in 1960, Bennett’s reputation as a straight shooter and whistleblower had grown steadily. He became the lightning rod for tales of crooked cops, verballing, perjury, trumped-up crime statistics, police bashings, kickbacks, and dodgy internal police politics.