Jacks and Jokers

by Matthew Condon

  Whitrod took the latter option. He was also deliberately provoking the Premier. It would be a final test of Whitrod’s authority and that of his office in the face of Bjelke-Petersen. On the Monday of Whitrod’s decision – 5 October – state Cabinet was meeting in Cairns, and the Commissioner would be there coincidentally to open the new Cairns police station. A showdown loomed.

  Bjelke-Petersen, to be expected, stood firm. He said the government would not abdicate its responsibilities by setting up inquiries. ‘Allegations are being thrown at our police force that they are guilty of violation of civil liberties. I reject the claim.’

  The next day, in direct defiance of the Premier, Whitrod ordered that his top investigator, Don Becker with a junior officer, immedi­ately travel to Cairns and directly question the complainants from Cedar Bay. They were due up north within 24 hours. It was a direct order in contravention of the Premier’s directive.

  On Friday 29 October, Whitrod received Becker’s 403-page report and forwarded it to the Crown Law office.

  The next Monday, 1 November, the new Police Minister Tom Newbery took the report, in his locked attaché case, into a Cabinet meeting.

  The press speculated that the report was ‘hard-hitting’ and that at least two police were expected to be charged with arson as a result of its recommendations. In reality, four were to be charged, including Cairns inspector, Robert Gray.

  In the midst of this drama, Lewis in Charleville had a phone call from somebody – was it the member for Merthyr Don Lane or the Premier’s Press Secretary Allen Callaghan? – that he was likely to be Gulbransen’s replacement as assistant commissioner.

  His old mate Tony Murphy, in Longreach, drew up a typed list for Lewis to contemplate. It was a cheat sheet of who he could trust or not trust down at headquarters: Guests (Bischof); Friends (Sgts. Ron Redmond and Noel Dwyer, Ross Beer, Pat Glancy, Graham Leadbetter); Capable (Insps. Syd Atkinson and Brian Hayes, Sgt Graeme Parker); and Others (Whitrod, Bill Taylor, Jim Voigt, Arthur Pitts, Basil Hicks and Lorelle Saunders).

  Lewis extended the ambit of those he couldn’t trust. He handwrote at the bottom of the list: ‘all present CIU [Crime Intelligence Unit]’.

  The timing of Whitrod’s show of defiance was spectacularly bad. The Commissioner’s lie about the ‘kill sheets’ was fresh in Bjelke-Petersen’s mind, and now the police chief had the temerity to publicly snub his boss’s directive. In addition, Whitrod wanted to push four more police through the courts on serious charges, despite the string of failures prosecuted out of his Crime Intelligence Unit.

  The last straw came a week after Whitrod received his hefty Cedar Bay report – Jack ‘The Bagman’ Herbert and his co-accused were acquitted after their epic Southport Betting Case corruption trial. Herbert, who had retired from the force medically unfit prior to the verdict, crowed to the press that the force was in need of an administrative ‘shake-up’.

  Herbert said he was set to seek new employment. ‘It will be hard because I’m not trained for anything except police work,’ Herbert said. The Bagman had, indeed, been doing it tough in the limbo of his trial. Out of work, and in and out of court during a case that lasted almost two years, Herbert relied on the charity of his friends.

  One was Lewis’s old mate Barry Maxwell, proprietor of the Belfast Hotel in Queen Street. Belfast manager Les Hounslow remembers Maxwell taking pity on the Herbert family. ‘I always drove Barry Maxwell around because he was always pissed, but I recall one day him saying he had a couple of boxes of food – meat and vegetables – that he had to go somewhere and drop off,’ says Hounslow. ‘We went to East Brisbane. It was a pretty low-class looking unit. We went in there and it was Jack Herbert and his wife and the kids. I think he was out of work, yeah. That’s why he got the food. I [also] saw Maxwell handing him over a wad of money.’

  A Monster Comes Calling

  Over at the University of Queensland campus in St Lucia, Lewis’s friend in academia, the criminologist Paul Wilson, was working in his office when he received a very curious visit from a man called Clarence Osborne.

  Osborne, then in his late fifties, had been a chief court reporter in Brisbane before being transferred to Parliament House as a Hansard reporter. He was meticulous, exact, analytical and did not suffer fools gladly.

  Osborne was so accomplished at shorthand that experts from the Pitman college in London contacted this diminutive public servant in Brisbane if they had a problem. He was, arguably in the opinion of his colleagues, one of the finest shorthand writers in the world. His obsessiveness not only applied to his professional work but to his hobbies. At one point he was a global expert on the breeding of budgerigars.

  Malcolm McMillan, then chief of staff to leader of the Opposition, Tom Burns, remembers Osborne as an affable oddball.

  ‘Osborne was a short man with a very friendly, outgoing personality, more often than not with a big smile most of the time,’ McMillan recalls. ‘He used to wear a chain or a leather band around his neck which had something on it. I’m not sure, but it might have been an elephant. The quality which I vividly recall was that he always used to holiday in Thailand – all the time. He would share that with people, not conceal or hide it.’

  Apart from travel, it transpired that Osborne had another more disturbing past-time. Since the mid-1950s he had engaged in sexual relations with over 2000 underage boys. In addition, he had kept meticu­lous files on each one – the majority of them children – including tape recordings (eight kilometres worth), explicit photographs and data on their genitals kept in an index card system.

  A colleague of Osborne’s, who worked with him as a trainee in the early 1970s, recalls dealings he had with the public servant: ‘He used to take and develop his own photos – eight by tens – of the boys he went with. He would show these photographs around at work. I saw hundreds of them. There were even pictures of babies.

  ‘He was on about it every day in the office, about picking up hitchhikers and rooting them. He was a little muscular fellow, had plenty of money and was very clever.’

  Osborne lived quietly in a single-level weatherboard house at 54 Eyre Street, Mount Gravatt. The southern fence line of the deep block fronted onto Orb Lane. Neighbours found the bachelor a bit eccentric but never had any trouble with him. In the backyard were two self-contained sheds with windows, as well as a garage down the side of the house. He owned a number of weights and other gym equipment and was often seen in the yard conducting health and fitness classes with young boys.

  When Osborne travelled to the University of Queensland campus to see Dr Wilson on that day in 1976 however, he was an agitated man. He arrived at Wilson’s office door with a bag stuffed with paperwork and other documents.

  Wilson, overworked and going through personal relationship problems at the time, agreed to talk with Osborne. The criminologist was wary of the stocky little visitor with ‘penetrating eyes’.

  As Wilson would later write: ‘He was seeing me, it appeared, because I was involved in the Queensland Civil Liberties Council and had a reputation … for attempting to protect the rights of the individual against the might of the state – particularly that agent of the state called the police force.’

  What concerned Osborne was that a pornographic film of men having sex that he had purchased by mail order from Denmark had been seized by Australian Customs.

  Osborne, normally superior of air and full of braggadocio, was tense. He told Wilson he wasn’t so much concerned about being arrested, but that police might confiscate his ‘research’ – the unprecedented and lurid documentation of his sexual activities with children that he had amassed over two decades. Some of the children caught in Osborne’s net, it would transpire, were by this time leading figures in Brisbane, some having come from privileged backgrounds. They were married, had children and reputations to uphold.

  ‘The significance of all this material was not apparent to Osborne
nor indeed to me,’ Wilson later wrote. ‘It was almost as though Osborne had collected data just for the sake of collecting it without any real objective in mind. He was certainly close to his material and several times called it his “life work” and continually worried about the Commonwealth Police taking it away from him and posterity.

  ‘Over the next two months I met Clarence Osborne on several occasions and each time he brought me new material to look at. Transcripts, tape-recordings and his manuscript documenting his own life were freely given to me and supplemented by face-to-face conversations of how he had met the young men in his life and why he acted as he did.’

  Had Osborne lost sight of the fact that his ‘life work’ also constituted criminal behaviour? It would appear ironic that a deputy-chief Hansard reporter might be so inexact with his private activities.

  Wilson says: ‘I got the strong impression he felt the end was near and he didn’t want this hugely important information to be lost to posterity. I think in his own mind he didn’t think it was a crime even though it was clearly a crime. He didn’t seem so much afraid of the police. He seemed more afraid about losing what he thought was really important research.’

  Did Wilson face a moral dilemma? Did he accept this extraordinary story that had come out of the blue and inform the authorities that a major paedophile was at work in Brisbane?

  ‘I think I did have that, but it was made pretty clear to me that he thought he was going to be arrested and that the police were going to be on it, if they weren’t on it already,’ reflects Wilson. ‘I didn’t see what else I could do as the police, as he was indicating, were going to be catching up with him. That was the reason he came to me. He thought he was going to be finished.’

  Indeed, in 1973 not one but two secret inquiries were held by the Public Service Board into Osborne. Allegations were gathered from court reporting staff who had seen the photos. As a result, the chief court reporter was moved to the Hansard Bureau at Parliament House where his contact with young people was minimised. Here was a case of paedophilia that, in its magnitude, was unprecedented in not just Australian criminal history, but globally. Yet it would be years before Osborne’s atrocities would be exposed, and he labelled a ‘monster’.

  The Regrets of Kingsley Fancourt

  By September 1976, while Inspector Lewis was building his contacts out at Charleville and seeing to the usual array of cattle theft offences and domestic disputes, about 700 kilometres north at Anakie, on the gemfields of western Queensland, a relatively young and talented police officer named Kingsley Winston Fancourt had decided to call it a day, and resign.

  Fancourt, born in Sydney, joined the Queensland Police Force in 1966 and immediately took to the job. He had found his life calling. Tall, powerful and intelligent, he had been stationed in Ayr, Far North Queensland, early in his career before settling in Brisbane. In 1973 he was seconded to the Licensing Branch and its headquarters in Upper Roma Street.

  ‘I was only in there about two weeks and they sat me down near Jack Herbert,’ Fancourt recalls. ‘He used to dress in a short-sleeved white shirt. Open neck. Spick and span. His way of talking was precise; he was very well spoken.

  ‘I spotted this black thing on his arm. I just had a mate die up in Ayr from a melanoma on his back. I said “Jack, give me a look at that? That’s a bloody melanoma.” It was like a black wart.’

  Fancourt suggested he go see a doctor.

  ‘He went and got it seen to,’ he says. ‘It had just gone into stage three melanoma, the point of no return. They took a huge piece out of his arm. Not long after that he went on sick leave. He left the police force medically unfit [in October 1974] because of this melanoma. He used to say to me: “Fanny, you’ve saved my life.’’’

  Soon, Fancourt was working undercover. He grew his hair, a beard, and dressed in jeans and leather jackets. But it wasn’t long before he began to see a pattern of vice and gambling in the city, particularly in the sleazy streets and back lanes of Fortitude Valley. Then in late 1974 he stumbled onto something that would change the course of his life.

  Fancourt had been hanging around Geraldo Bellino’s illegal casino at 142 Wickham Street, the Valley, run by Luciano Scognamiglio. At about 10 p.m. on Saturday 7 December 1974, he trudged up the narrow stairs and into the casino. He left his partner, senior officer Arthur Volz, downstairs in an unmarked car.

  ‘We were driving around Brisbane looking for something to do,’ Fancourt recalls. ‘We pulled up outside Wickham Street. Arthur said just slip in there and have a look and we can put it on the occurrence sheet that we’d been in there. I’d been in there many times.’

  Fancourt was met by Scognamiglio and they had a discussion.

  Fancourt:How has everybody been to you lately, Luci?

  Scognamiglio:Good, but what do you mean?

  Fancourt:Have you been paying anybody lately?

  Scognamiglio:No, what do you mean?

  Fancourt:Have you been paying anybody for tip-offs about raids?

  Scognamiglio:No, but why not?

  Fancourt:Are you offering me money to tip you off?

  Scognamiglio:Yes, why not?

  Fancourt:I don’t want any of your money.

  Scognamiglio:Why not? There is nothing wrong. I pay you, I even go off when you say.

  Fancourt:What do you mean ‘go off’ when I say?

  Scognamiglio:Pinch the game.

  Fancourt:I’ll see you again Luci and we’ll talk some more.

  Fancourt couldn’t believe what had just transpired. Even if much of the conversation was in jest, an illegal casino operator had intimated that Fancourt could come onto the books with corrupt payments for information about impending raids by the Licensing Branch. Fancourt had been invited inside the tent.

  Understanding the gravity of the situation, he went back downstairs to meet Volz. It was close to 11.30 p.m.

  ‘I got back in the car. I was like a goldfish gulping air. I couldn’t believe it,’ says Fancourt. ‘He put it on me; would I be interested in giving him information and being paid? Fifty dollars a month. I was only earning $119 a fortnight.’

  Fancourt asked Volz to take him directly to police headquarters.

  ‘What the bloody hell for?’ Volz asked.

  ‘Arthur, I can’t tell you, please just trust me.’

  At headquarters, Fancourt approached the duty inspector. ‘I want to see the Commissioner,’ Fancourt said.

  ‘What do you want to see him about?’

  ‘None of your business,’ said Fancourt. ‘It’s extremely important and it’s highly confidential.’

  Commissioner Ray Whitrod was, as it transpired, out of the country at the time. Bill Taylor was in charge. ‘I want to see Bill Taylor, then,’ Fancourt insisted.

  Taylor, who was at home in bed, came in to see Fancourt. ‘We sat there until 1 a.m.,’ Fancourt remembers. ‘I told him that I was aware of all the corruption in the police force and where it was and my knowledge was they’d been trying to crack it for seven years. He didn’t disagree with me.’

  Arthur Pitts, the head of Licensing, was confidentially informed, as was senior officer Alec Jeppesen. The latter was appointed supervisor of the Fancourt situation. The imperative was to get hard evidence against Scognamiglio and to go deeper into his connections with corrupt police. It was decided Fancourt would wear a wire.

  ‘I had to be very guarded,’ Fancourt says. ‘This had come down from the CIU [Whitrod’s elite Crime Intelligence Unit]. They took me up to headquarters and fitted me up with this microphone. I had to engage him [Scognamiglio] in a conversation, get the admissions of what I had to do on tape, collect the money.

  ‘I went there on a Sunday during the day. Mick [Cacciola, a fellow Licensing Branch officer] was in the boot of my Fairlane [with the wire’s receiving equipment]. I pulled the Fairlane up just down the road from 142
Wickham Street. We did a couple of dry runs; we had to work out where the best reception was. We worked out this thing was good for about half a mile.’

  Fancourt managed to tape conversations with Scognamiglio on three separate occasions throughout December. On 22 December, just as Fancourt and the team had hoped, Scognamiglio began revealing information about Herbert and the Rat Pack.

  Scognamiglio:Jack [Herbert] was a good man.

  Fancourt:You were friendly with Jack, were you?

  Scognamiglio:Oh yes, good friends for five years.

  Fancourt:Yes, very, very sad, actually Luci, very sad.

  Scognamiglio:Yes, I am friendly with … the boss.

  Fancourt:My own boss?

  Scognamiglio:No, no, no, he still in the police, he no more Licensing Branch … big fellow he was, seven years.

  Fancourt:Oh, Kev Foley.

  Scognamiglio:No, [Tony] Murphy.

  Fancourt:Who?

  Scognamiglio:Murphy.

  On Sunday 29 December, Fancourt returned to 142 Wickham Street and lured Scognamiglio out of the club and onto the footpath. The Italian was arrested on the spot by Alec Jeppesen.

  ‘We had the hard evidence,’ says Fancourt. ‘My evidence both visual and audible; the money I’d been paid.’

  In the first weeks of 1975 – not long after Scognamiglio’s arrest – Fancourt was on night duty in the city when he and his partners decided to take a meal at the Lotus Room restaurant in Elizabeth Street, an eatery much favoured by the police. On this night he noticed a grey Mercedes reverse parking not far from Festival Hall. He thought nothing of it.

  The next night, Fancourt again returned to Ray Sue-Tin’s restaurant for a late dinner. He went downstairs, following the maitre’d, Sheree, and he and two of his partners, Bill McKechnie and Bob ‘Doc’ Gillespie, sat down at a table and ordered.

  It was then that Fancourt noticed Geraldo Bellino and four other men coming down the stairs. Fancourt quickly took his .38 revolver from its holster and hid it under a napkin on the table. The memory of the vehicle from the night before now made sense. It was one of Bellino’s cars.