Three Crooked Kings

by Matthew Condon

  In the middle of this, Brifman was throwing in her two cents’ worth.

  The pressure on the Brifman investigation, under Doyle, was immense.

  ‘I found there was a fair deal of paranoia within the team . . .’ remembers Clive Small, a junior on the Brifman investigation. ‘There were people more senior in the police who were very interested beyond what was reasonable or normal in the investigation.’

  He said the management and coordination of the investigation at higher levels was being done from Queensland and leaks were starting to emerge.

  Colin Bennett was also mentioning Brifman at length in state parliament and clearly had an inside knowledge of the police investigation. Where was he getting his material from? Who could be trusted?

  Brian Doyle’s interrogation of Fred Krahe was so intense that paint was coming off the walls.

  ‘Doyle and Krahe,’ says Small. ‘You didn’t want to be there and you knew it’d never happen again. Doyle and Krahe were two people who saw themselves as the best two detectives in the state. When they confronted each other it was sheer tension.

  ‘Clearly there was a hell of a lot of ego between the two men as well. A person like Brian Doyle, his ego would say, “I want to see them arrested and that’ll make me the next commissioner.” Krahe’s would have been saying, “I’ve done a lot for police, I’ve probably been paying people off, but what’s this bloke Doyle ever done?”’

  Krahe was also close to Assistant Commissioner Fred ‘Slippery’ Hanson – who was being groomed by Allan as the next police commissioner – and there was a feeling within the investigation that they were both hiding things from Doyle and his men.

  Small recalls: ‘There were a lot of people who didn’t like Krahe, but there were a lot of people who respected him. It caused a very severe split in senior police ranks.’

  Letters from the Past

  The indefatigable Colin Bennett had caused mayhem in state parliament many times since his election in 1960, notwithstanding his sparking the National Hotel inquiry in 1963.

  But with a brittle Brifman in the middle of her police interviews in Brisbane, Sydney gunman John Regan on the loose, and National Hotel manager Jack Cooper on the slab in the city morgue, there was never a better time for another Bennett strike.

  On Monday 12 October 1971, Bennett asked Police Minister Max Hodges a question without notice. If Bennett tabled Shirley Brifman’s record of interview thus far, would the minister correlate their contents dealing with the alleged corruption of Murphy and Hallahan with two letters written by Murphy to Brifman in 1963, prior to the National Hotel inquiry? And having done this, would Hodges then tell parliament what Police Commissioner Whitrod might do about it?

  Bennett had two aces up his sleeve – the Murphy letters, given to him by Brifman. The letters proved that Murphy knew at all times the whereabouts of Brifman prior to and during the National Hotel inquiry, and that he knew she was a working prostitute.

  On both counts, the letters contradicted Murphy’s evidence to the inquiry and on the surface amounted to multiple counts of perjury.

  Murphy and Hallahan hit back through their solicitors the next day, and it made front-page news in the Courier-Mail: detectives’ denials of claims in parlt.

  Their statement read: ‘That a member of the Legislative Assembly would see fit to use the privilege of parliament in this way must surely astound all thinking people.

  ‘Mr Bennett, while airing in parliament unfounded allegations that malign our reputation as police officers, has not seen fit to inform parliament of the background of this woman making these allegations.’

  In other words, who could trust a self-confessed perjurer and a prostitute like Shirley Brifman over the words and deeds of two of the state’s most famous and revered detectives?

  On the same day, Bennett landed some more uppercuts in Parliament House.

  At 12.06 p.m. he rose and stated: ‘I think it is of great interest that two detectives of the Queensland Police Force should see at this late stage, through the columns of the Courier-Mail, to denigrate a woman named Shirley Brifman, whom they both befriended for many years, whom they organised into becoming, from their point of view, the “darling” of the 1963 National Hotel Royal Commission.’

  Bennett went on to read passages from Murphy’s letters to Brifman in Sydney about gathering evidence against inquiry witness David Young, in which he claimed that no police from Queensland or New South Wales would ‘land on her doorstep at any tick of the clock and cause her trouble’.

  Bennett went to town: ‘Here is one detective in Queensland saying that he has such perfect control of the Queensland and New South Wales Police Forces that he can guarantee to this girl whose record he well knew, that no police would visit her premises.’

  Big Russ Hinze attempted to quell the slaughter of Murphy. ‘A self-confessed perjurer – and you are reading that rubbish in the House!’

  Bennett was unperturbed, reciting Brifman’s recent evidence against Hallahan into Hansard until his time expired.

  Hinze fired back at 12.35 p.m., criticising Bennett’s ‘diatribe’ against ‘highly respected police officers’. According to Hinze, Bennett was conducting a long-running vendetta, using his private practice as a lawyer to secure scuttlebutt to air in parliament.

  ‘What ethics has he when a person goes to him as a lawyer and later finds that whatever he told his lawyer is mentioned on the floor of Parliament?’ Hinze said.

  How could Bennett continue to throw mud at the state’s most famous detectives? Murphy was a good family man with several children. Hallahan was also a family man, having recently married Heather, a former barmaid at the Belfast Hotel. He had moved from his bachelor flat to a larger place at Kangaroo Point, just across the Story Bridge.

  Erring on the side of caution, Abe Duncan met with Crown Law that same morning to query the tabling in parliament of portions of the Brifman transcripts.

  It would be one of Duncan’s last duties regarding the Brifman investigation. Whitrod wanted matters ramped up.

  ‘He told me to hand over all those statements to the CIU and Norm Gulbransen and Jim Voigt,’ says Duncan. ‘I gladly handed it all over.’

  Another Overdose, Another Suspicious Death

  In the escalating heat of that 1971 spring in Brisbane, another petite prostitute stepped forward to seek both protection from police and to offer some confidential information.

  Cheryl Ann Mitchell, twenty-one, had been on the game for more than two years, working out of Sydney’s Kings Cross. For a time she had lived with gunman John Regan at his Sydney home in Kensington. He had occasionally ‘managed’ her as a prostitute.

  Falling out with Regan in late 1970, she fled to Kalgoorlie in Western Australia, then worked the streets of Perth before settling on the Gold Coast in time for Christmas that year and moving into a flat supposedly owned by a Sydney friend. He was Leslie Gigler, a former motorcycle racer who went under the name of John Trophy. Gigler was one of Regan’s mates and a former business partner. He, too, had fallen out with the gunman and had sought refuge in Queensland.

  Gigler was known to police as a bludger, despite his claims he had once operated a garage in Sydney and had other legitimate business investments.

  Mitchell settled with Gigler into Flat 2, Sorrento Flats, 24 Old Burleigh Road in Surfers Paradise, a brisk walk to the beach, and romance quickly blossomed.

  But Mitchell spent that Christmas in Sydney with her mother and took up again with Regan. They split soon after, this time over a car they had bought together. Regan had used her money to close the deal but demanded the vehicle for himself.

  When she took the car, Regan sent a tow truck to her mother’s Sydney home to fetch ‘his’ property. The car wasn’t there.

  Mitchell sold the car to get Regan off her trail, and returned to Gigle
r on the Gold Coast. A trained comptometrist, or billing clerk, she secured work at the Temple of Isis health studio in the Sundial Arcade building, Cavill Avenue, Surfers Paradise. It had six rooms and was known to be operating as a massage parlour.

  Brifman would later say: ‘I saw Regan in Lennons once . . . He was up here to kill Gigler. Regan said, “Nobody doublecrosses me . . . He’s got a girl with him that he should not have. Nobody takes something which belongs to me. I’m going to shoot him . . .”’

  With the CIU investigating bribery and corruption on the Gold Coast in September, it appeared that both Mitchell and her lover, Gigler, under threat of Regan, sought a measure of police protection by offering information in exchange for safety. Mitchell helped police, while Gigler agreed to an interview with Colin Bennett.

  It was Brifman who told police about Regan’s threat to kill Gigler, and it’s possible that she facilitated Gigler’s meeting with Bennett, her own lawyer.

  Mitchell, who had often talked of wanting to ‘work square’ – or leave her illicit activities for a conventional job – was working as a comptometrist in Brisbane’s Spring Hill in the first week of October 1971. Workmates viewed her as a calm and quiet young woman.

  Then at 11 p.m. on Tuesday 5 October, firefighters and police rushed to the Sundial Arcade building in Cavill Avenue. The Temple of Isis, sold just weeks earlier, had been torched and razed. Police Minister Max Hodges addressed parliament after the fire, saying the Temple of Isis was ‘the subject of a police investigation’ into bribery and corruption on the Gold Coast.

  Later that week, Bennett tabled a document that received little to no attention from the press. It was his seventeen-page record of interview with Gigler, concerning graft, police corruption, and the massage industry on the Gold Coast.

  Did Bennett speak with Mitchell and Gigler about exposing the document? Did he argue that this public knowledge would somehow act as a form of security barrier for the couple?

  If he did, he may not have appreciated the full dimension of Regan’s violence and madness. This man thought nothing of killing his friends, no matter how close, if he felt it gave him an advantage.

  Mitchell and Gigler may also have been given a measure of comfort from a pronouncement by Hodges, again in parliament. The police minister assured Queensland that the Police Department was aware Regan was in the area, and that the Sydney criminal was ‘under surveillance’.

  Still, Mitchell continued to have nightmares about being beheaded by Regan, and she also heard whispers that a private investigator was hunting for her in the streets of Surfers Paradise.

  On Sunday 31 October, Mitchell and Gigler took his speckle-headed Great Dane down to the beach for a gallop. Gigler’s brother, passing through the Gold Coast, met up with the couple and it was suggested they hit the town. Mitchell declined, retiring to the Old Burleigh Road flat.

  It was hot – the end of spring – and Mitchell dressed for bed in a pair of shortie pyjamas. She had her crossword puzzles and a bottle of Pernod for company.

  When Gigler finally returned home, he found her dead in the bedroom. The dog was still lying with her across the bed. Gigler immediately reported the death to Southport police.

  They subsequently discovered a bottle of pills near her body. Once again, an overdose of barbiturates was suspected. She died less than a couple of kilometres from Robin Corrie’s beach house in Mermaid Beach, where he had expired facing the same ocean just eight weeks earlier.

  Whitrod quickly assigned CIU chief, Norm Gulbransen to the case.

  Back in Brisbane, Abe Duncan was knee-deep in the Jack Cooper murder investigation. On Tuesday 2 November, the day after Mitchell’s body was discovered, suspect Donald Maher was brought into CIB headquarters for questioning. Duncan recorded in his police diary that Maher was under ‘strong suspicion’.

  On the same day, Duncan’s work was interrupted by a curious phone call. Hallahan informant, and former Regan sidekick, John Edward Milligan wanted to talk about a ‘note allegedly written by deceased Cheryl Mitchell some time ago’.

  Duncan wrote in his police diary: ‘Contacted Det. Sgt. G. Hallahan, who later handed in copies of the note which he had obtained from an original shown to him by an informant. Saw Hallahan re: letter 1.45pm. Saw C.O.P [Whitrod] re: same . . . Later saw John Edward Milligan 3.40pm to 4.10pm. Spoke to Supt. Gulbransen and handed copies of documents obtained from Hallahan . . . to P.C. Const. Early.’

  Hallahan claimed that a month before Mitchell’s death, an informant had shown him the letter. Hallahan had had the foresight to make a copy of the original before handing it back.

  The letter, written in Mitchell’s distinctive longhand, was addressed ‘To Whom It May Concern’.

  It read: ‘This is to say that it is my belief that a man by the name of John Regan, of 56 Duke Street, Kensington, will make an attempt on my life. Up until several months ago I was living with him and he was taking the money that I earnt as a prostitute in Kings Cross. Cheryl Mitchell.’

  It contained a postscript: ‘. . . I’m sorry that I can’t write this letter in more detail, but at the moment I am finding it hard to write even this much.’

  If the letter was genuine, how did it fortuitously come into the hands of Hallahan, to be tucked away for a month prior to Mitchell’s overdose? And why was Milligan angling to ensure the Sydney gunman became a prime suspect for the death? Was this payback for Regan’s attempt to set up Milligan with the Federal Narcotics Bureau a few months earlier?

  Or was Gigler somehow involved? By the time of Mitchell’s inquest, Gigler and several other potential key witnesses had simply vanished.

  A week after Mitchell’s death, Gigler happily gave an interview to a local newspaper and posed for a photograph with his dog.

  ‘These girls might see themselves getting married, but to who?’ he asked philosophically. ‘They’ve got no respect for the ordinary bloke. He’s a mug. They’re taking his money all the time.

  ‘All that’s left is the shyster.’

  The Caravan and the Bug

  In late 1971 Detective Glen Hallahan was spreading himself a little thin.

  As Brifman continued to sing like a canary to Detective Inspector Norm Gulbransen of the CIU, Hallahan was attempting to pin the murder of National Hotel manager Jack Cooper on Donald Maher, and appeared to be at least peripherally involved in the suspicious death of Cheryl Mitchell.

  Still, there was the day-to-day business of his graft collections to consider, and in the last week of December Hallahan planned to make a pick-up from one of his regulars, New Farm prostitute Dorothy Edith Knight.

  Knight had been working the riverside suburb as a prostitute since early 1968, and from day one had paid Hallahan twenty dollars a week for immunity from prosecution.

  Hallahan had been under surveillance for several weeks, and the CIU had evidence that he first met Knight years earlier in a Brisbane hotel lounge, and had directed her to work with a group of prostitutes out of a city premises. The call girls were often warned of impending police raids.

  The CIU’s investigations opened a small window into Hallahan’s complicated life. They uncovered that criminals had been paying Queensland officers to commit crimes in the state, and that forged ten-dollar notes had been brought north of the border by police. Shirley Brifman’s crazy claims were starting to firm into fact.

  On that day in December, Hallahan arranged to meet Knight at their usual bench seat overlooking the Brisbane River in New Farm Park.

  What Hallahan didn’t know was that Whitrod’s CIU had had him in its crosshair for some time. With Murphy shelved in the JAB, Whitrod’s corruption busters now went directly after Hallahan with an elaborate sting.

  The idea was to affix an electronic bug to Knight – the first use of a concealed recording device in Queensland police history – and tape their conversation pri
or to the money handover. Then police would immediately arrest Hallahan.

  There was a whiff of the Keystone Cops about the operation from the outset.

  Inspector Tom Noonan – head of the Radio and Electronics Section – was given the job of making the device. He eventually produced a microphone that could be concealed in a Bryant and May matchbox. Wires from the box were then attached to a tape recorder.

  The CIU didn’t have a recorder on their inventory, so they used one personally owned by Jim Voigt.

  Next, they had to set up a discreet observation post.

  Senior Constable Greg Early, who was in on the sting, recalls: ‘It was resolved to use [Jim’s] father’s caravan, which had to be towed by Jim’s vehicle because the CIU vehicles didn’t have a tow bar and would have been easily recognised anyway.’

  Detective Inspector Gulbransen, who headed up the trap, took no chances. He even asked Early to get his fitness up to speed: ‘I’d played football and he urged me to get back into training . . . When we nicked Hallahan and he ran or swam I had to apprehend him. I started running again in Grinstead Park near my home.’

  Early was almost taken off the case when word got back to Whitrod that he was friends with Hallahan. Both had recently attended one of the new arts and science courses at the Kangaroo Point Technical College. Whitrod wanted Early taken out of the unit, but Gulbransen stood by him.

  On the morning of the bust, the caravan was positioned on a driveway within the park, not far from the bench seat. Gulbransen, Noonan and two others huddled in the caravan. They were later joined by Voigt and Early.

  The bug itself was taped to Knight’s torso by Detective Sergeant Basil Hicks.

  Hallahan arrived as expected, parking his car not far from the caravan, and joined Knight on the bench seat.

  Then disaster struck.

  A council tractor towing several mowers started up nearby and the racket could be clearly heard inside the van.