Three Crooked Kings

by Matthew Condon

  In addition, a teenage Mary Anne noticed how ‘loose’ the investigation seemed from the outset. The death scene wasn’t sealed. Detectives tramped in and out of the house.

  ‘They allowed me to go back in the room and sit next to my mother,’ she says. ‘I was in there for thirty or forty minutes, sitting in there by myself. I tried to tell them what had happened the night before, about the visitor, but nobody wanted to talk to me. The police were trying to avoid me.’

  Sonny Brifman lingered in the background, trying to look after his young children.

  Basil Hicks of the CIU was on the scene. He claimed to have found, wedged beneath the two mattresses under Brifman’s body, an empty Mogadon bottle.

  With the Clayfield flat in chaos, Graham was working at the petrol station when an unmarked squad car pulled up. He was not even aware Brifman was dead. He’d left for work before the body was discovered. He didn’t know that he was one of the last people to talk to Brifman and see her alive, except for Mary Anne and the stranger at the door.

  ‘Four cops pulled up in a car,’ he says. ‘They kept asking me, “Did you see anybody? Did you see anybody there?” I knew they were involved in it. It was a very dangerous situation. They could put you behind bars or dump you in the river, no problem.

  ‘I said to the cops straightaway – after what Shirley had told me – I said, “I didn’t see anybody.” I thought they’d do me in. “No mate, I didn’t hear anything.” They left me alone after that.

  ‘I have no doubt they did her in.’

  Graham returned to the flat and ‘couldn’t believe’ the number of police and media. ‘I’m ninety-nine per cent sure [Murphy] was there that day,’ he says. ‘He was the only one I recognised. I’d recognise him now if I saw him. I did see him a few times. I knew who it was.’

  Brifman’s body was taken to the city morgue. An autopsy would conclude that she died of barbiturate intoxication.

  Later that day, Sonny went to break the news to Shirley’s sister Marge. Niece Ellen Russell and her husband, Robin, were there when he came into the house.

  ‘It was on the Saturday,’ says Robin. ‘He said, “Oh, Shirley’s dead.” He was not excited about it. It didn’t seem as if it meant anything to him. He wasn’t broken up when she died.

  ‘Sonny didn’t care. It was just the money she brought in.’

  The coroner recommended no inquest into Brifman’s death, given the police report concluded there were no suspicious circumstances. Her file was classified IDU – inquest deemed unnecessary.

  The official police files – interview notes, photographs, evidence, fingerprinting results – disappeared into the Queensland Police Department archives.

  As for Brifman, her body was flown home to Atherton, the place of her youthful promise.

  On Thursday 9 March, a small service was held in the low-set, corrugated iron–roofed Presbyterian church at the corner of Jack and Alice streets. The service was presided over by the Reverend Roy Wright, then in his early thirties.

  He recalls one of the most unusual country funerals of his career: ‘The casket wasn’t an ordinary coffin . . . This would have been brought up from Brisbane. I know it was quite an expensive casket she was buried in.’

  He says the burial ceremony at the town cemetery was equally conspicuous.

  ‘There were lots of people around with sunglasses on,’ Wright says. ‘I’m not sure whether they were checking who was at the funeral . . . There were people there that were kind of taking note, I thought. I don’t know from which angle . . .’

  The reverend also noticed an expensive bouquet of flowers that graced the casket lid before burial. It was from a prominent QC, most probably her lawyer, Colin Bennett.

  Shirley Margaret Brifman was laid to rest in Section K, Plot 12, of the Atherton lawn and general cemetery. There was no headstone.

  Fracture

  Hallahan may have been arrested over a paltry sixty dollars received from prostitute Knight, but the situation was making his police and criminal associates in both Queensland and New South Wales extremely nervous.

  Not only was he the first ever Queensland public servant to be charged with official corruption, but his connections with the underworld were now vast and intricate. One slip and the entire murky infrastructure in two states could be exposed.

  Informant John Edward Milligan offered his support and assistance to Hallahan before the matter got to court.

  ‘I went over to see him, to see if there was anything I could do . . .’ Milligan said in an interview with federal narcotics agents years later.

  For the weeks leading up to the committal hearing, it was too dangerous for Hallahan to make direct contact with any of his informants, criminal friends or police colleagues.

  Milligan, and others, became Hallahan’s conduits.

  ‘Glen’s wife was meeting Billy Phillips at the bottom of the garden to try and collect information about a dozen different things . . . The immediate plan was to try and get the girl, the prostitute who’d set up Glen, and get her out of the way, to assassinate her,’ Milligan alleged.

  Somehow Phillips located Knight. She was being guarded by police, and a caravan – possibly the same one used in the Hallahan sting in New Farm Park – was stationed out the front.

  Knight naturally feared for her life. She, too, made the assumption that Hallahan would have her killed.

  Milligan, it turned out, knew a member of the family that was harbouring Knight, ‘a criminal in Queensland, a knockabout guy’, and was asked to ‘get in touch with him and pump him for information’.

  According to Milligan, associates of Hallahan sent the word out in Melbourne that ‘gangsters were needed’ to help ‘abduct the girl’. In ‘the crisis of Glen’s arrest’, Milligan met some of the heavy hitters of the underworld, including Lennie McPherson, one of the most powerful men in Australia’s crime scene.

  ‘Lennie came up personally to offer his services . . .’ Milligan said.

  According to Milligan, a member of the Queensland Drug Squad secretly met Hallahan at his Kangaroo Point home and passed messages back to McPherson.

  Milligan claimed that he saw McPherson – who needed to converse with Murphy but couldn’t be seen with him – in the vicinity of Hallahan’s house.

  Milligan said Murphy was tipped off that Whitrod and his CIU went to extraordinary lengths with their surveillance: ‘He couldn’t take the risk of going to Glen’s house, and so intermediaries were used . . .’

  Whitrod was gunning for Hallahan and Murphy, and shortly after Brifman’s death he went up another gear. Hallahan was charged with counselling a criminal, Donald Ross Kelly, to hold up a bank at Kedron in Brisbane’s north. The CIU said it had evidence that Hallahan had received part of the proceeds of the robbery.

  Whatever the motivation, one thing was patently clear: Hallahan was attracting too much heat.

  He’d have to go.

  A Round of Beers at the Belfast

  Five weeks after Brifman was found dead by her daughter and son in the flat in Bonney Avenue, Detective Murphy was formally acquitted on four counts of perjury.

  During the trial, Murphy’s counsel, Des Sturgess, claimed that the charges against Murphy were a ‘malicious prosecution of a political nature’, and that Murphy had been targeted by Whitrod and his minister, Max Hodges, for his strong affiliation with the Police Union.

  On Friday 7 April 1972, the magistrate concluded after a four-day hearing: ‘I don’t believe any properly instructed jury would convict Murphy on the evidence.’

  The forty-four-year-old detective, of Rosewall Street, Upper Mount Gravatt, was discharged from the Brisbane magistrates court.

  That afternoon, Terry Lewis recorded in his police diary: ‘Insp. Steele phoned re suspension of Det Sgt 1/c Murphy lifted immediately’.


  And that night, according to bagman Jack Herbert, one of Murphy’s favourite watering holes – Barry Maxwell’s Belfast Hotel in Queen Street – was packed to the gills with wellwishers. He recalled that it was so crowded it was difficult to get to the bar.

  ‘I have been fingerprinted, photographed and placed on file,’ an annoyed Murphy told the Sunday Sun on his acquittal. ‘It stinks; I’m as dirty as hell.’

  The headline for the page-four story on Murphy read: the end of all those ghosts from the national. The chief witness against Murphy had conveniently overdosed, but Shirley Brifman’s name was only mentioned once in relation to one of the four perjury charges. Her death was not mentioned at all.

  Sturgess would later say the death of Brifman was in fact a ‘calamity’ for Murphy ‘because it allowed vicious rumours to circulate that in some way he was responsible for her death’.

  ‘This Brifman allegation . . . had been retailed to the authorities by the reckless Col Bennett,’ recalls Sturgess. ‘Bennett was a very passionate sort of fellow. He exercised no care over what he said. He was not a bad person. He was an emotional fellow. He never looked before he leapt.

  ‘Murphy, of course, protested his innocence very vehemently, but that’d be Murphy, he was always very vehement in these things.

  ‘The prosecution proceeded. At the end of the case the magistrate threw it out, and that was that. And so he should. There was no bloody case at all.’

  A barman at the Belfast certainly heard the rumours surrounding Brifman’s sudden death: ‘Maxwell said he had either heard or suspected that Murphy gave her some “Minties”. That, you know, she died of poison.’

  Jack Herbert said he would have discussed the death of Brifman with Murphy and others but couldn’t recall any details of these conversations. He insisted that he had no knowledge of Murphy being connected in any way with Brifman’s death.

  One officer who knew Brifman from the late 1950s said: ‘Shirley was a tough old bird. She didn’t kill herself. I knew they’d do her in. I knew they would.’

  Meanwhile, Murphy’s exoneration was a huge victory for anti-Whitrod forces.

  The Police Union went to town, accusing Police Minister Hodges and his department of trying to deplete the union’s defence fund with its rash of charges against officers. And, in turn, break the union’s power.

  ‘There was no evidence against me in the first place,’ Murphy said. ‘The charges were brought simply because of my union activities.’

  Police Union President Ron Edington said that Murphy’s case exemplified a new low under Whitrod’s administration. In the past, tolerating one criminal informant often led to the apprehension of twenty or thirty other criminals. Now, by exposing informants like the late Shirley Brifman to the public gaze, a precedent had been set that jeopardised the informant–police relationship.

  Murphy went on sick leave after his court victory. He felt the case had prejudiced his future, and that his children had suffered over the slander on his name.

  On 23 May 1972, it was reported that Murphy was back on duty at the JAB.

  Lewis duly recorded the moment in his police diary.

  Mister Milligan, I Presume

  Down at the Federal Narcotics Bureau in Eagle Street, agent Brian Bennett got a compelling tip-off.

  An excellent informant who ran the Trans Australian Airlines bonds store out at the airport had phoned to report some suspicious rolls of fabric.

  The bureau had begun to log increasing illegal imports of cannabis and LSD. A new fad was also LSD in capsule form, known on the street as California Sunshine or California Traffic Lights for their distinctive red and green colours.

  Bennett headed out to the airport.

  Bennett’s informant claimed that two rolls of fabric had arrived from Nepal via Bangkok. Both were about three feet long and were ‘exceptionally heavy’ for what they were purported to be.

  Bennett says: ‘One in fact contained fifteen kilos of hashish from Nepal – black hash – and the other, fifteen kilos of Thai cannabis in the form of Buddha sticks, which were just starting to emerge on the Australian drug market, a new phenomenon.’

  ‘I examined this stuff and teed it up with my source to delay anyone picking it up, to get word to me and we’d be out there as quick as we could.’

  Soon after, the airline source phoned again and Bennett made a dash to the airport. There, walking out of the bonds store with a roll of fabric over each shoulder, was John Edward Milligan, habitué of Willie’s Bizarre, Hallahan’s informant and John Regan’s sidekick.

  ‘John Milligan,’ Bennett said, ‘I’m a senior narcotics agent. What have you got there?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Milligan said, unflustered. ‘I’m picking these up for a friend.’

  ‘You’re under arrest,’ Bennett said.

  Milligan was handcuffed.

  ‘Mr Bennett,’ Milligan said, ‘there’s no need for those handcuffs. You know I’m not a violent person.’

  Bennett never forgot that exchange of dialogue. Bennett had not identified himself by name to Milligan, yet the drug dealer knew who he was.

  ‘He was a smart cookie,’ says Bennett. ‘He had obviously carried out some counter-surveillance on me.’

  Bennett’s new boss – Max Rogers, a former Victorian Homicide Squad officer who’d only recently joined the bureau – arrived and took charge. They conveyed Milligan back to the bureau office, where he was charged with two counts of possessing prohibited imports.

  ‘I caught him with the dope over his shoulder, clearly in possession,’ remembers Bennett, ‘and I gave my evidence at the committal, but he wasn’t convicted, it just sort of died away. Milligan then went on to work solely for Rogers as his personal informant.

  ‘Informant number 138 – that was Milligan.’

  White-anting Lewis

  Meanwhile, Ray Whitrod’s campaign against Terry Lewis – the final member of the so-called Rat Pack triumvirate yet to feel serious pressure from the police commissioner – was quiet, coordinated and relentless.

  As Lewis approached his tenth anniversary in charge of the JAB, Whitrod was steely in his determination not only to paint the bureau as a relic of the Bischof days, but to catch out Lewis as incompetent.

  Whereas other officers had their official police diaries checked by superiors once a month, for example, Lewis’s were looked over and ticked off once a week like clockwork.

  In mid-April 1972, Whitrod sent in a senior officer to run a fine-tooth comb over the JAB operations. Lewis was repeatedly interviewed and ordered to gather innumerable statistics.

  Lewis was given the onerous task of checking each file held by the bureau for instances of child recidivist behaviour. These, in turn, were cross-checked with adult fingerprint records.

  Further, Lewis was instructed to go through his own police diaries for 1971 and 1972 and itemise every visit to a juvenile offender’s home, each office interview, and how much actual time was spent on every case.

  If Whitrod thought he’d break Lewis with the sheer physical weight of the work, he was mistaken. Diarising and the collation of data were Lewis’s bread and butter. His focus and attention to detail were second to none. These precise qualities were the bedrock of Lewis’s entire working life. He had developed and perfected these skills, which he knew would elevate him through the force; it was an act of sheer personal will.

  For months Lewis did as he was asked. He had little time for family or friends, though his police diary does record that on a morning in June he was a spectator at the ‘Full Court re admission of E. Pratt to the Bar’.

  As the white-anting continued, Lewis must have twigged that Whitrod was planning to dismantle the JAB.

  On Wednesday 26 July, he wrote in his police diary that ‘Mrs M. Patrick, 45 Stanley Ter., I’pilly called re speaking with Mr Whi
trod and hearing that J.A. Bureau being closed. Miss R. Power, Channel 7 news later phoned re Mrs Patrick contacting them. Mr D. Lane M.L.A. and Brigadier Geddes phoned re same matter.’

  Lewis was naturally dismayed. For years he’d run what he thought was an efficient bureau based on warning troubled juveniles, rather than charging them and putting them through the court system. He favoured prevention over cure.

  Whitrod begged to differ.

  ‘He wanted to charge all youngsters to boost his statistical returns, and I opposed that,’ Lewis says.

  In a move that ensured Lewis’s complete alienation, Whitrod encouraged the establishment of a parallel unit to deal with juvenile offenders – the Police Education Liaison Unit – which operated under the umbrella of not the police force, but the State Children’s Services Department.

  An anecdote about the methods of the unit got back to Lewis and he used it as an example of a statistics-obsessed police commissioner gone mad – ‘One of the unit officers was recorded as interviewing one young boy who, on twelve occasions, had gone and stolen a pencil from a store, and he was charged with twelve charges of stealing.’

  Then from 1 January 1973, the inevitable occurred – the JAB came under the control of the Children’s Services Department.

  Lewis couldn’t stem the tide. Whitrod was slowly levering him out of the JAB, and he knew it.

  A Big Scalp

  Awaiting trial for nine months, the suspended Glen Hallahan was muzzled by his corruption charges, at least on the surface, and out of direct contact with his mates in the force.

  His implication in the bank robbery at Kedron had already fallen over in court; now he faced the matter of receiving payments from prostitute Dorothy Knight.