Three Crooked Kings

by Matthew Condon

  Bischof would be replaced by Brisbane CIB chief Norm Bauer, Hallahan’s mentor from his Mount Isa days, and a loyal lieutenant to the Big Fella for decades. A fellow Mason, Bauer knew the ropes. More importantly, he knew where the bodies were buried in the police force.

  His retirement meant the Big Fella would not be a thorn for Premier Bjelke-Petersen, as he had been for Frank Nicklin.

  Interestingly, there was early liaison between the new premier’s office and the officious head of the Juvenile Aid Bureau, Terry Lewis.

  By late 1968 the JAB chief had completed his Churchill Fellowship report and was binding it himself with a borrowed stapling machine. He planned to disseminate it to as many people of influence as possible, both within and outside the police force. The fellowship, too, had made him an increasingly popular speaker at schools, Rotary, Rotaract and Lions clubs and Christian and charitable institutions like the Salvation Army Ladies’ Home League. His profile in the media was on the ascent.

  On Monday 13 January 1969, he recorded first contact with the office of Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen in his police diary: ‘Phoned Det. Sgt. Linthwaite re: tour with Premier. Saw Commissioner re: statement that Premier will visit J.A.B – he approved my contacting Premier’s office re: suggestion of visit to J.A.B. by the Premier. Off duty at 6pm.’

  The following day, there was further contact: ‘Mr Shaffer, Premier’s Office, phoned to advise that Premier will probably visit J.A.B. in about three weeks.’

  Then, on Wednesday 15 January, Lewis was further emboldened: ‘Report with Fellowship Reports to Commissioner and Premier.’

  On Bauer’s orders, in early February he helped Bischof’s driver, Slim Somerville, pack up the outgoing commissioner’s office.

  According to Somerville, they discovered among other things a revolver, a wig and a paper mask. Lewis apparently bundled them into a suitcase, and later Tony Murphy asked Jack Herbert to temporarily secrete them, which Herbert says he did, behind some fish tanks under his house. Lewis says he can’t recall finding the unusual objects.

  Bischof finished up on Friday 14 February 1969. Did he enjoy the patronage of his old mates down at the National Hotel? It is likely he indulged in a long lunch: Lewis, Bischof’s protégé, noted in his police diary that he finished work that day at 11.30 a.m.

  Bauer’s commissionership was nothing more than a temporary measure – Bauer himself would turn sixty-five in 1970. But he was an old hand, was intimate with Bischof’s corrupt infrastructure, and was close to all the major players. The Joke and its adherents now had over a year to engineer a sympathetic replacement.

  But a major spanner – greater than the National Hotel royal commission – was about to enter the works.

  Allan Maxwell Hodges, member for Gympie and minister for works and housing, convinced Bjelke-Petersen that a premier holding a police portfolio could potentially be a dangerous thing. Any strife in the force and it would stick to the top dog.

  Hodges could see that the police were getting on top of Joh. He met with the premier and in May 1969 was granted the police portfolio.

  He immediately faced obstruction, indifference and inaction from Bauer when Hodges promoted various changes within the force. It quickly became evident to the new police minister that the only way to instigate reform would be to get Bauer out of the way and commence real work on slotting a smart, honest and efficient man – without a history with the old boys’ network – into the commissionership.

  First, Hodges toured Victoria and South Australia with Bauer, gleaning ideas for a reformed force. He was most impressed with South Australia, under the commissionship of Brigadier John McKinna.

  Following the interstate tour, Bauer was duly sent on a five-month, all-expenses-paid study tour around the world – what he would have done with his newly acquired knowledge, with less than a year left in the force, was debatable. Now Hodges could get to work.

  In a small but vital – and ultimately historic – victory for Hodges, Cabinet approved that McKinna visit Queensland and conduct a full audit of the force, including its education and training components.

  If the National Hotel inquiry was unable to find any corruption and wrongdoing within police ranks, perhaps Hodges and McKinna could deconstruct the corrupt network from the ground up and start afresh.

  Deep down, Hodges knew he had to disconnect the old circuit of commissioners and their bagmen, to dismantle a complex culture involving generational graft, verballing, and myriad corrupt practices that even extended to taking bribery money from stationery suppliers in exchange for contracts providing notebooks and pencils to the Queensland police force. He needed some fresh, honest eyes. And someone with a moral compass.

  With Bischof gone, and with Bauer in a brief holding pattern as police commissioner, Lewis needed some new footholds to find his way forward. He pinned his hopes on a long-time friend getting the top job: honest officer Abe Duncan. There was little to suggest, at that moment, that the old ways wouldn’t continue, business as usual.

  But first Lewis needed to get acquainted with the new police minister, and get the measure of the man.

  In mid-August 1969, with wife Hazel (four months’ pregnant with their final child, John), Lewis went on seven days’ leave to Sydney. He noted in his police diary: ‘Spent considerable time with Det. Sgts. Krahe; Smith and Day of the Breaking Squad.’ He had known Smith and Day from the 1950s. But what of Freddy Krahe? What was the reason for spending ‘considerable time’ with one of Shirley Brifman’s corrupt lovers? (Lewis says he doesn’t recall meeting with Krahe on that trip.)

  There may have been a good reason. Not only were the old, familiar police networks in Queensland about to face fresh scrutiny from an energetic new police minister, but the New South Wales side of the equation was also set to disintegrate.

  Shirley Brifman – the petite prostitute who used to work out of Killarney brothel on a bend of the Brisbane River, and now one of Sydney’s biggest madams, embedded with dozens of corrupt police from commissioners down – was garnering unexpected and unwanted media attention. And she was making some very tough and very senior police in both states extremely nervous.

  If Brifman went down, they’d all go down.

  As it happened, Brifman was in Wahroonga hospital when the Lewises visited Sydney. She had a substantial addiction to sedatives, particularly the barbiturate Tuinal, and with her history of poor health since childhood, her nerves were going. Did Lewis pay his respects while she was recuperating? Did he go to the Brifman household and say hello to Sonny and the children?

  Whatever transpired, Lewis was again back at his desk in the JAB on Monday 25 August.

  Just over a week later, Hodges’ first wife passed away in Gympie. Lewis and Ross Beer, along with Police Commissioner Bauer, attended the funeral in Gympie on 1 September.

  Two months later, Lewis would personally meet Hodges for the first time, at the Coorparoo State High School annual speech night, where the minister was guest speaker.

  He would make further attempts to get a private audience with Hodges, including hijacking the minister on his annual Christmas vacation on the Gold Coast.

  But why was Lewis so desperately anxious? Did he fear the end of his stellar promotional run under Bischof? Or the exposure of the Joke? Or both?

  On Thursday 13 November, he had a special visitor to his office: ‘Saw Brigadier J. McKinna re: functions of the Juvenile Aid Bureau.’

  Reform was on its way, and people were getting edgy.

  As for Detective Glen Hallahan – who at the end of the 1960s was ‘up to his eyeballs in major crime’, according to reporter Ken Blanch – he quickly identified the source of all looming troubles.

  It was his confidante and lover, Shirley Margaret Brifman. She knew too much, and she had recently become a lightning rod for the press.

  He would have to ke
ep a very close eye on her.

  The Wise Bald Man

  In 1969, in an uncharacteristically rash decision, Ray Whitrod left the Commonwealth police force, which he headed out of Canberra, to become commissioner of the Papua New Guinea police force. He and his wife, Mavis, were stationed in Port Moresby.

  Whitrod had enjoyed respect in the Canberra job and had seen his children grow and marry. He was in his mid-fifties when he went to Moresby, having travelled the world, guarded royalty, accepted the confidence of prime ministers and turned himself into a quasi-academic with several degrees.

  When Papua New Guinea’s incumbent police commissioner, Bob Cole, approached Whitrod, a friend, seeking help to find his replacement, Whitrod mulled over suitable candidates but came up empty. Respecting their friendship, he ultimately accepted the position to help out Cole.

  Why did he leave all that he knew to take on a challenging position in a country moving towards independence and the potential strife that that entailed?

  ‘I don’t know,’ Whitrod later said in an interview. ‘Partly, I think, because I felt that I’d largely achieved what I’d set out to do, that is, establish a Commonwealth police force, and I was working on my master’s thesis, which involved native cultures at the time, and partly, I suspect, because I wanted new . . . new fields to conquer. I don’t know. I never really examined my motives.’

  Soon after arriving in Papua New Guinea, he contracted malaria.

  McKinna, scrutinising the Queensland police force, didn’t waste any time compiling his reports. They were done by the end of 1969, and they were the old police guards’ worst nightmare.

  In short, he proposed the removal of the time-worn promotion path by chain of superiority. It would be replaced by promotion on merit. He also encouraged multi-skilling, external studies for officers, and the division of the state into four regional police commands.

  Along with a revision of existing police examination methods and a reduction in officers performing tasks for other government departments, he was recommending a total overhaul of the force. The past was to be detonated.

  McKinna, an Adelaide boy, also told Police Minister Hodges that Whitrod was the only man for the job.

  When McKinna got back to Adelaide, he phoned Whitrod in Port Moresby and urged him to apply for the role of Queensland police commissioner. Having just begun his post, Whitrod declined.

  McKinna rang once more but Whitrod again said no.

  Then David Mercer, Hodges’ undersecretary in the Department of Works and Housing, phoned Whitrod. The answer was still no.

  In a last-ditch effort to secure Whitrod, Hodges and Mercer flew to Port Moresby and stayed for two nights.

  They got their man.

  Ray Whitrod had no idea of the hell that awaited him in sunny Queensland.

  Shirley, the Wife’s Best Friend

  Just a few hundred metres from Macleay Street, Potts Point, down Greenknowe Avenue towards the harbour, there had always been a seemingly invisible division that separated the sex, sleaze and turmoil of Sydney’s Kings Cross from the mannered gentility of waterfront Elizabeth Bay.

  Here – among the grand old stone piles with turrets and yards that ran down to the harbour, and huge blocks of red-brick apartments with cage-door elevators – brothel madam Shirley Brifman reached the apotheosis not just of her empire but most probably of her life.

  The dirt-poor kid from a family of timber workers set up a new premises in the Reef, a modern, half-moon-shaped apartment complex on Ithaca Road.

  The swank apartment was Brifman’s crowning achievement, and it was Detective Fred Krahe who encouraged her to celebrate and host a housewarming party.

  The function was set for Friday 9 May 1969, and aside from Krahe she sent out invitations to up to ten other local police. Many were officers she’d been paying off for years, others not.

  Krahe didn’t know he would be mixing with other police, among the businessmen and call girls.

  As the party raged into the night, photographs were taken, many with Krahe in the frame.

  Somehow, Sydney’s Sunday Mirror got hold of them a week or so later and Krahe found out. He was apoplectic. If they were published, he needed a bogus excuse for his attendance at a party with some of Sydney’s best known prostitutes. Krahe asked Brifman to see New South Wales Police Commissioner Norm Allan: ‘He wanted me to explain away his presence at the party.’

  The meeting with Allan was arranged on the pretext of another concern, namely that Brifman had heard of plans to unseat the police commissioner and felt compelled to share them with him. Courtesy of that Trojan Horse, she could ‘explain away’ Krahe and the booze-up at the Reef.

  Allan had been police commissioner since 1962. He was tall, fair-skinned and wore heavy, horn-rimmed spectacles. He was renowned as a superb administrator but had old-fashioned, often intractable views, particularly regarding the death penalty, which he thoroughly supported.

  When Robert Askin was elected premier in 1965, the police commissioner struck up an almost immediate and seamless working relationship with the state leader, just as Bischof had cultivated with Frank Nicklin in Queensland.

  Allan left illegal gambling and SP bookmaking alone, as did his Queensland counterpart in the 1960s, and corruption within the force flourished.

  Despite the demands of his position, Police Commissioner Allan obviously had the time to see Sydney’s leading madam.

  Allan and Brifman discussed the potential coup against him, which he said he already knew about. Furthermore, according to Brifman, he told her that she could ‘carry on’ her business and that anyone who touched her would ‘have to answer to him’.

  It didn’t stop the press.

  In early June, the Sunday Mirror ran with the story of the cops in the bordello. ‘When it was published everybody panicked,’ Brifman said. Over the next six weeks the newspaper ran two further stories on Brifman-related activities.

  In an aftermath, she was put in touch with Peter Grose, who had recently founded the Curtis Brown literary agency. His office was a couple of rooms in the basement of his house in Paddington. They discussed her extraordinary story. He wanted to sell her memoir and call it Shirley, the Wife’s Best Friend.

  Grose recommended to Brifman that she appear on national television to stop the flow of newspaper stories coming out of the Sunday Mirror. Grose confirms that the meeting with Shirley and Sonny Brifman took place. He says: ‘She approached me. I met her and Sonny, but no book materialised.’

  Hallahan was highly agitated over the newspaper stories. Brifman said: ‘He was in a panic . . . He told me that the taxation men were in Brisbane investigating all the police I had been connected with. Glen and I fell out not long after the papers in 1969.’

  And although she never fell out with Murphy, their regular contact ceased after the publicity.

  The storm died down. Brifman continued to successfully run her brothels, despite increasing spells in hospital for her health. She continued to pay her crooked police friends, and she went on working as a prostitute herself.

  She was still only in her early thirties but had packed at least two lives into one; everything was taking its toll on Shirley Brifman.

  By New Year’s Eve 1969, the central phone number for her brothels – 35 38 37 – was still ringing off the hook and was known, by her own account, to ‘millions of men’.

  Shirley Margaret Brifman, protected by police in two states and earning a fortune, was unaware that she was finished. The forces that made her were set to break her.

  At the dawn of 1970, she had less than fifteen months to live.

  Before the Storm

  On the eve of 1970, the respected Brisbane criminal lawyer Des Sturgess found himself in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, on a case.

  He knew the place well. Straight out of univer
sity, and armed with a law degree, he went to work in Port Moresby in 1953 to cut his legal teeth. His first ever case was a rape. The third, a murder.

  Sturgess had of course heard of Whitrod’s appointment as commissioner-elect of the Queensland police force. Sturgess himself had had a handful of encounters with one of Whitrod’s predecessors, Frank Bischof, and found him gruff and self-interested. But Sturgess liked Terry Lewis, and especially Tony Murphy. He occasionally drank with the detectives at the Treasury in the city.

  Once, he was stunned at the tenderness of Murphy. Queensland’s big detective with a capacity to instil fear by his sheer presence had sought Sturgess’s advice on a matter that was extremely unsettling to Murphy. The man who had solved murders and personally taken on gangsters and heavies up and down the eastern seaboard was fretting that one of his teenage daughters may have surreptitiously taken up cigarettes. Sturgess was agog at this different side to Murphy.

  Whitrod was not due at Makerston Street until April 1970, and was still in Papua New Guinea when Sturgess landed in town.

  One night, a friend of Sturgess invited him and Whitrod to dinner.

  ‘I remember the occasion well,’ Sturgess later wrote in his part-memoir, The Tangled Web. ‘Whitrod bounced in to surprise me with his immediate affability.

  ‘I began some congratulations [over his appointment] which he interrupted.’

  Whitrod asked: ‘What do you think of the job?’

  ‘Among the hardest in Australia,’ Sturgess warned.

  Whitrod laughed. ‘Why?’

  ‘You won’t know the goodies from the baddies.’

  ‘You tell me then,’ Whitrod said, seriously.