Shirley Brifman later claimed that she met with Lewis around this time. ‘I saw Terry off when he went to England on the Churchill Fellowship,’ she said. ‘He rang me on the way back, at Sydney, and I went out and saw him.’
Lewis adamantly denies this: ‘I landed in Brisbane. Why would she come to the airport to see me? I never had anything to do with bloody Brifman.’
He was relieved to be back at his desk on Tuesday 23 July, where he saw all of his JAB staff then the police commissioner ‘about his overseas observations’. Telegraph journalist Pat Lloyd phoned for an interview.
It is possible that Lewis, in preparing his trip earlier in the year, might have crossed paths with local Dalgetys travel agent Gary Venamore, thirty-five, a gregarious socialite and man-about-town who lived with his mother in Rawlins Street, Kangaroo Point?
As a child, Venamore showed a talent for singing and on special occasions performed in his local church – the old stone Wesley Methodist in Linton Street, just seven streets from Venamore’s home. On Christmas Day in 1943, the Wesley congregation was treated to a solo performance by ‘Gary Venamore, nine-year-old boy soprano’.
As an adult, his friends called the bisexual Venamore ‘. . . the gay, witty, exuberant life of the party’. He also liked to hop bars and clubs.
One barman acquaintance 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 wasn’t just a case of asking for a beer or whiskey – it was always, “Peel me a grape, love.”’
While he enjoyed the hobnobbing of the Old Bailey Bar at Lennons Hotel, he would gravitate later in the night, and after consuming more alcohol, to the seamier National Hotel and a nearby club, the Playboy.
The Playboy, a venue with a risqué reputation where you could see drag queens and strippers, had a large bar upstairs that, while unlicensed, did a roaring late-night trade. In the early- to mid-1960s the club hosted a restaurant cabaret by young talent Bernard King, who would later make millions as a camp television chef and talent show judge.
It was King who spotted a young singer, Judi Connelli, and gave her a start on the small, cramped stage of the Playboy.
She remembers it as a bit seedy, but unique in Brisbane at the time for its eclectic clientele: ‘It was the first time I’d ever seen a man dressed as a woman. They were gorgeous people. You’d bump into canecutters from north Queensland who loved coming down to the city and dressing up as women at night.’
This was Venamore’s midnight milieu, edgy and bawdy.
On Tuesday 5 November 1968, Venamore met up with a friend, Richard Billington, at the bar of Her Majesty’s Hotel in Queen Street for a round of drinks right on 5 p.m. Billington observed that Venamore was carrying a roll of notes. They were met by another friend, shipping clerk David Peel.
At 6 p.m. they left the bar, and Venamore proceeded alone to Lennons Hotel in George Street to meet other friends. Billington knew Venamore well: he would continue drinking, possibly heavily, into the night.
Peel later joined Venamore at the Old Bailey Bar in Lennons with another friend. An hour and a half later, Venamore made motions to move on.
‘He intimated to us that he should be going home, and he left us about 8.30,’ Peel said. ‘I did not see him again.’
As the night deepened, Venamore found his way down to the National Hotel precinct, with its lovely views of the Brisbane River and the Story Bridge.
He may have gone in for a drink at the National. He was known there to manager Jack Cooper, and was probably acquainted also with the hotel’s famous tourist attraction: Warren Dennis, who ran Warren’s Bar within the hotel and dressed in drag. For the era, he was a scandalous curio, a spectacle, in his sequined dresses, silver wig, painted fingernails and jewellery, pirouetting as he pulled a beer off the tap.
By around 10.30 p.m. Venamore was at the Playboy, north of the National at the intersection of Queen and Adelaide streets. He told club doorman Reg Durston: ‘I’ve got no brass.’ It was arranged for him to cash a five-dollar cheque.
What happened between his arrival and when he left with two men at 2.20 a.m. remains conjecture. The club was known by police to be frequented by homosexuals, but they gave the Playboy little official attention.
Detective Ross Beer says of Venamore: ‘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.’
Taxi driver Jack Sangster picked up Venamore and the two men at 2.25 a.m. near the club and drove them to a block of flats in nearby Maxwell Street, New Farm, not far from Lighthouse Wharf. A witness remembered hearing a loud and prolonged scream from a man between 2 and 3 a.m.
Just after 6.10 a.m., a ferry launch master spotted a body floating face-up beneath the Story Bridge, a short distance towards Petrie Bight from the Lighthouse Wharf. It was a brutally bashed Venamore, his body shifting with the tide back towards the CBD. Ironically, anyone awake and taking in the fresh morning air on the balconies of the National Hotel that day may have seen it.
Detective Beer and Glen Hallahan were called in to investigate the murder.
‘He was really badly bashed about,’ Beer says. ‘Someone had taken to him with a fence paling or something like that.’
The coroner would find that Venamore had a .23 blood alcohol reading, and that the cause of death was drowning, a ruptured liver, haemorrhage, and multiple injuries. He had wounds consistent with being kicked around the head and being struck with a blunt instrument. There were also bruises on his wrists and ankles, suggesting an unconscious Venamore was then swung and thrown into the river by two people.
The estimated time of death was 4 a.m. The suspected motive was robbery, as Venamore’s watch – given to him by his late father – was missing.
Beer and Hallahan interviewed seamen from the twenty-one ships docked in Brisbane that night. They also questioned members of the homosexual community: ‘We learned that a number of them had been bashed over a period of time,’ Beer recollects, ‘but they had a fear of coming forward to report the incidents.’
Hallahan flew to Sydney to follow up the seamen angle. As always, he hooked up with Brifman: ‘He brought up the photographs to me. I saw all the marks on [Venamore’s] face. No motive of robbery.’
Brifman said the murder had given Hallahan a business idea – blackmailing homosexuals.
‘So they put . . . TV cameras on the Eagle Street toilets,’ Brifman said. ‘He said, “Shirley, the businessmen who are homosexuals, you would not believe it.”’
Hallahan and his cronies brought the surprised men in for questioning and threatened them with the show reels in which they featured. If Hallahan was to be believed, it was a good old-fashioned sting.
Venamore’s murder – violent, shocking, sudden – was uncharacteristic of Brisbane. It was a killing that would not be out of place in Sydney or Melbourne. Like the brutal rape and murder of Betty Shanks in 1952, was it epochal for the city?
Despite rewards offered and the promise of new clues, by August the following year the newspapers were comfortable printing that ‘police were not following any major leads concerning the murder of Gary James Venamore’.
The case was never solved. But the murder, in hindsight, would prove to be a mere prelude, an opening refrain, to a wave of violence and crime never seen before in Queensland.
Shirley, Businesswoman
Shirley Brifman had been making a comfortable living working as a prostitute out of Sydney’s Hotel Rex when, in February 1968, she had a major disagreement with the management and was barred from entering the premises.
She, in turn, issued them with a letter of demand that she be permitted to return or she would procee
d with a defamation writ. Detective Sergeant Mick Phelan, to whom Brifman had been paying protection money for some time, intervened. She could not take on the Rex, he told her. He had been protecting them, too, since the early 1950s, and turning a blind eye to prostitutes trawling the bars and lounges.
Phelan had another idea. He told her that he would procure on her behalf if she set up her own place. Soon after, Brifman opened for business in Earls Court, Flat 23, Earls Place, a seedy back lane behind Darlinghurst Road and just around the corner from the Rex. She took with her about twenty-five prostitutes from the hotel, which had to close down its hairdressing facility as a result of the sudden loss of trade.
And it was at Earls Court that she began to also pay off the notorious Detective Fred Krahe so she could run her brothel without impediment from the Vice Squad.
‘I would ring him or he would ring me,’ Brifman said. ‘He would usually come up and have a couple of drinks . . . I was intimate with him. It started the second day after he came to Earls Court. We were intimate about once or twice a fortnight.’ Hallahan, whenever he was in town, also stayed at Earls Court.
Then Brifman’s business took off, and with the cash flowing in she was beginning to attract attention.
‘The brothel got too big,’ she said. ‘Fred told me that he would protect me against them if I paid him. I have got to give him credit, he did. Fred got keen on me.’
Within a year she would open more brothels in Wylde Street, Potts Point, and in the fashionable Reef in Ithaca Road, Elizabeth Bay, with its view of Sydney Harbour. In a very short time she was establishing herself as the premier madam in inner-city Sydney. And while her protection outlay, which grew to more than thirty-five police in Queensland and New South Wales, was substantial, the two brothels at Wylde Street alone were bringing her in, after wages and expenses, more than five thousand dollars a week.
Brifman was now effectively running a large business. ‘She was bright and quick, she had a good mind,’ says her daughter Mary Anne.
In addition, Brifman was using her brothels and private home as storage and distribution warehouses for stolen goods and cash, she was often acting as a go-between with gangsters and corrupt police, and was paying off, and sleeping with, some of the most dangerous police on Australia’s east coast.
She was inextricably bound up in a volatile social mix that included the likes of Lennie McPherson, George Freeman, Abe Saffron, Stewart John Regan and Raymond ‘Ducky’ O’Connor.
Then there was Joe ‘the Writer’ Borg, the king of the Palmer Street brothels.
Borg, whose East Sydney brothel network extended to twenty premises, was a fanatical animal lover. He was also a reputed gunman and thief. Police believed his operations brought in up to ten thousand dollars a week in clear profit.
By the spring of 1968 the fabulously wealthy Borg was in mourning. The previous November he had lost his wife to a drug overdose. She went by several names, including Anne Borg, Anne Brown and Anne Williams. In another life, north of the border, she was known as Ada Bahnemann, ex-wife of convicted German gunman Gunther Bahnemann.
Borg himself didn’t have to mourn for long. On 28 May 1968, he hopped into his car outside his house in North Bondi to go to the hardware store for some interior house paint when a massive gelignite bomb exploded under the driver’s seat. It decimated his lower body and he died en route to hospital.
It was a blast that Brifman must have felt over in Potts Point or Elizabeth Bay. A rival had lost his life, but who was gunning for Borg and his business? And would they come for her?
The Borg assassination also put brothels and prostitutes onto the front page of newspapers. Sydney was shocked by the killing. It suddenly wanted to know all about the machinations of the underworld.
And soon, the press would be knocking on Shirley Brifman’s door.
The Haunted Mind of Frank Bischof
By 1967, having endured a royal commission, a personal sex scandal, the private exposure of his corruption before the premier, and decades of heavy drinking, Bischof’s health was falling apart.
On 17 April he was admitted to St Andrew’s War Memorial hospital on Wickham Terrace and treated for hypertension. The sixty-two-year-old was discharged two weeks later and recuperated on the Gold Coast before returning to his big desk and chair in early June.
Days later he fell ill again and was rushed to the Mater hospital in South Brisbane.
According to the Courier-Mail, the news of this latest turn ‘caused a sensation in police and Government circles’. Premier Nicklin ordered a medical report into Bischof’s condition.
What the public didn’t read about was the alarming deterioration in Bischof’s mental health.
Thomas Hiley, now retired from parliament, heard whispers of Bischof’s peculiar behaviour during his hospital stays. Hiley was convinced that Bischof’s exposure before Premier Nicklin many years earlier – over the SP bookmakers’ delegation from western Queensland – fed the former commissioner’s hypertension.
Hiley said that in hospital Bischof became ‘a victim of his own fears’: ‘He’d hide in the laundry rooms, he’d hide in the ironing rooms. He’d hide anywhere. And there were search parties out . . . trying to find Bischof after dark, you see, and when they’d get him he’d be a quivering, shaking morsel: “They’re after me, I can hear the voices, they’re after me . . . ”’
Mad or not, when he finally got back to work he held a closed-door conference at police headquarters with twenty of his top officers and gave them a fierce dressing down.
He claimed that he knew the names of the ‘assassins’ who were hoping to read his ‘obituary and obsequial rites’, and were planning his successor during his last bout of sickness. He accused them of suffering ‘blabberitis’.
The Courier-Mail reported that several of the officers present were ‘visibly shaken’ when they left the meeting.
Bischof was clinging on. But for how long?
Enter the Country Bumpkin
Frank Bischof wasn’t the only figure of power in Queensland suffering the strains of office.
In January 1968, at the age of seventy-two and after ten and a half years as premier, ‘Honest’ Frank Nicklin announced his retirement. He handed the reins of the state over to his loyal deputy, fellow Country Party stalwart Jack Pizzey.
Pizzey was the logical successor. Born in Childers, 325 kilometres north of Brisbane – renowned sugarcane country – he was educated, loved cricket, had worked as a school teacher in rural Queensland and had been an effective education minister under Nicklin. He was widely recognised as the premier’s right-hand man.
Pizzey, too, had a major health concern looming over him. He had already suffered one heart attack in office, and, though he had fully recovered, it led political commentators to hint at the importance of the selection of Pizzey’s Country Party deputy, should his health deteriorate again.
Mines and Main Roads Minister Ron Camm was the favourite. Lands Minister Alan Fletcher was also in the race. So, too, was the fifty-seven-year-old works and housing minister, Johannes Bjelke-Petersen, the peanut farmer from Kingaroy. Bjelke-Petersen won with a majority in the first ballot.
Despite having been in parliament for almost twenty-one years, little was known about Bjelke-Petersen, except that he was a God-fearing man, he flew light aircraft, and tore down scrub with the use of tractors and chains.
In the first Pizzey ministry – with Liberal Gordon Chalk as deputy premier and treasurer – Bjelke-Petersen held onto his portfolio and added another: ministerial responsibility for police.
By July, Pizzey had settled in well to the premiership and had the coalition on course for the next state election, due in May 1969. He made important trade trips to Europe and Japan.
On 31 July 1968 Pizzey suffered a second major heart attack and died close to midnight in Chermside hospit
al.
That night, the increasingly paranoid police commissioner, Frank Bischof, was attending the annual police ball at the iconic Cloudland Ballroom in Bowen Hills. Bjelke-Petersen was also present.
According to the Courier-Mail, as the balloons were to be released from the ceiling, the news of Pizzey’s death arrived at Cloudland.
‘Mr Bischof called for a minute’s silence in the memory of the former Police Minister and senior policemen stood with bowed heads,’ the newspaper reported. ‘Couples who seconds before had been dancing stood to attention in silent tribute.’
On 1 August, Deputy Premier Gordon Chalk, a Liberal, was sworn in to the top office. His tenure would be fleeting, with the Country Party holding twenty-six seats in the Legislative Assembly, and the Liberals nineteen.
The Country Party would not hand over what it saw as its right to the premiership. On 7 August, Bjelke-Petersen was elected as leader of the government. The next day, Chalk resigned as premier – he had lasted eight days – and Bjelke-Petersen and his ministry were sworn in. Chalk, again, was relegated to deputy. The new premier also became minister for state development and he retained the police portfolio.
Queensland, historically lumbered with singular premiers for lengthy terms, had now had two in six months, and a third counting Bjelke-Petersen.
Bischof, meanwhile, had made the decision to retire. There was talk that he was shoved from the commissionership because of his ailing health and the many controversies that had dogged his reign.
The Police Acts stipulated that the police commissioner ‘continue in office during such period he is of good behaviour [a notion repeatedly questioned by Colin Bennett] and until he reaches the age of sixty-five years when he shall retire from office’.
Bischof had accumulated 240 days’ leave, despite his sporadic trysts in the Roberts brothers’ beach house on the South Coast. If he formally went on leave on 14 February 1969, and acquitted those holidays, it would take him to 14 October, two days after his sixty-fifth birthday and official retirement age. As in all things, the canny Bischof had done his maths.
Three Crooked Kings Page 20
