Wilby was told to turn up at a certain time on a Thursday.
‘I saw it,’ says Wilby. ‘I wanted to see it for myself. Every Thursday, it was Murphy’s table where they used to go and sit. Towards the back. It wasn’t well lit.
‘Every Thursday. Always Murphy. Atkinson now and then. Definitely Lewis. Herbert was always there of course. That’s where they split the money.’
Innocent
In a stifling Boggo Road prison on Saturday 26 November 1977, convicted murderer John Andrew Stuart of the Whiskey Au Go Go bombing fame along with James Finch, had been granted a pass to the reception store of the gaol. He had complained that some of his property had gone missing, and gained the pass. It was around 8.20 a.m. Stuart was not under escort.
On the way back to his section of the prison he climbed a partly demolished brick wall onto an awning, then scaled a downpipe to the roof of A-wing, empty and set to be demolished. Once on the roof, Stuart separated the bars that held entanglements of barbed wire and proceeded to pierce holes in every sheet of corrugated roof iron. He removed some of the sheets and then dislodged dozens of bricks. Stuart had a message he wanted to pass on to the world.
The Comptroller-General of Prisons, Allen Whitney, when he discovered Stuart’s protest, told the press: ‘He can stop there as far as I’m concerned. He got up there by himself. He can get down that way too.’
Stuart perched on the sloped roof bare-chested and in long trousers. Initially, his act attracted little interest from the Dutton Park residents in the vicinity of the gaol.
He started throwing roof iron and bricks into the gaol yard. By Saturday evening, Stuart had still not come down.
On Sunday, he began constructing his message out of bricks. INNOCENT, VICTIMS OF POLICE VERBAL, F & S [Finch and Stuart].
Stuart paraded along the top of the roof. Sightseers dropped by to witness the spectacle. Police waited. The Prisons Minister, John Herbert, ordered prison warders to leave Stuart on the roof until he came down of his own volition.
At 12.45 p.m. on Monday, after more than 52 hours on the roof, Stuart was having a rest close to a hole in the roof when he was seized by two warders. As the Courier-Mail reported: ‘After a brief, violent struggle, he was brought to the ground as fellow prisoners cheered.’
Shortly afterwards, Works Department staff climbed up onto the roof and dismantled his protest message made of bricks. It was an irony that probably escaped most, but perhaps not Stuart, that a colloquial word for verballing, or the police fabrication of a criminal confession, is ‘bricking’.
The paper speculated that Stuart would lose some privileges and suffer a spell in solitary confinement. The convicted killer was just 36. He had just over two years left to live.
Campbell and the Boss
At some point over the Christmas and New Year period of 1977–78, word of the belligerent Senior Constable Bob Campbell, down in the Stores at the old Petrie Terrace barracks, had made it inside the Commissioner’s office.
Lewis, busy as ever during the festive whirl and into the New Year, made queries in March regarding the validity of Campbell’s eight-hour study leave. Campbell’s course, and university degrees undertaken by any other officers, had to be approved under the Police Department Study Assistance Scheme.
Lewis repeatedly approached the Department of the Public Service Board querying whether an officer who had expressed an intention to resign from the force upon the completion of a degree, might have the course disapproved by the police department.
Why would Lewis take such intense interest in the lowly Campbell? What rumours about Campbell had been circulating through the department that would see him as a threat within an office as high as the Commissioner’s?
It was known that Campbell had been a ‘Whitrod man’, but could Lewis’s venom towards his predecessor and his desire to rid anything even resembling a Whitrod influence within a country mile of his administration have included this studious young tennis-playing suburban constable?
Or did Lewis know nothing about Campbell, the scrutiny being applied by people like Deputy Commissioner Vern MacDonald? Whoever it was, and for whatever reason, Campbell was about to be forced onto the transfer roundabout again. This time he would be heading to the Woolloongabba CIB.
A System Set in Stone
By 1978 the barrister Tony Fitzgerald, with more work than he could handle, decided to move offices.
He had, as had legions of lawyers since 1960, been labouring away in the cramped confines of the Inns of Court – the former Johnson and Sons boot factory at 107 North Quay. In its heyday, the factory produced Queensland’s finest footwear, from the Imperial, Pall Mall and Piccadilly brands through to the Maranoa, a sturdy buckled boot favoured by stockmen.
The Inns, by the late 1970s, was tired, and Fitzgerald and a few colleagues shifted to the more modern surrounds of the new MLC building with its distinctive weather beacon up at 239 George Street. Two groups of lawyers, including Fitzgerald, Bill Pincus and others, put out their shingles on the 17th floor. From that rarefied loft, far from the boot factory and the river and the city’s squalid back lanes, the city’s best legal minds went about their work, their briefs taking them interstate, the milestones of their young children’s lives – the end-of-year concert, the sports final – often sacrificed to the millstone of law.
Many of them still held similarly lofty beliefs that the civil legal system was pure and unblemished. Yet in their hearts, men like Fitzgerald, and many other Queenslanders, knew there was a gathering stain at the core. By the late 1970s Queenslanders had become immured to the one party state system. As for the civil area of legal practice, there were some players allied with political parties. Those who hitched their star to the establishment wagon did well. Many who didn’t often failed to get anywhere.
Fitzgerald, meanwhile, hoed his own field without detriment. He and his colleagues knew, as if by osmosis, that toeing the National Party line had its immense benefits. But there were alternative paths to follow. As for politics, Fitzgerald simply had no interest in it. More accurately, he wasn’t disinterested but a busy practice and a family of small children took up the bulk of his time.
The Crown at one point sent over to Fitzgerald a large brief seeking his advice on evidence along with the fee he was expected to accept. Fitzgerald agreed that it was the sort of work that he specialised in, but he rejected the fee. They never briefed him again.
What was common knowledge throughout the old Inns of Court, the MLC chambers and others in the Ansett Building on Turbot Street, however, was the endemic police verballing that had become a virtual fixture of the Queensland courts system. The constant scuttlebutt that began in the era of Police Commissioner Frank Bischof continued apace with Terence Lewis in the big chair. There was verballing and police misconduct, and for whatever reason it was understood by the city’s legal practitioners that this behaviour was to some extent condoned by the courts.
The judges, as everyone knew, were pillars of the establishment. They were members of the Queensland Club.
It was how Queensland worked.
The Boxer
Little red-headed Ian Thomas (Tommy) Hamilton grew up in a Housing Commission home in Nielson Street, Chermside, and was a likeable, rouseabout sort of kid who loved to talk. Tommy could talk all day long.
He went to Wavell Heights Primary School with his mate Peter Hall. Two classes up from him was a boy called John Wayne Ryan. Ryan’s family lived a block and a half away from the Hamiltons, at 43 Unmack Street. ‘Tommy was a real nice kid,’ remembers Ryan.
Ryan used to train for judo at the Railway Institute in the city, and soon Tommy was in there. He’d taken an interest in boxing. ‘He’d be training five or six days a week, he was fanatical,’ remembers Ryan. ‘And he was a pretty good fighter. He was just a little naive.’
As children in late 1950s Brisbane, both Ryan and Hamil
ton were acquainted with an older teenager, John Andrew Stuart. He in turn knew a man called William (Billy) Stokes from their days in the Westbrook Home for Boys up on the Darling Downs.
By the early 1970s, Hamilton, who had been involved in petty crime as a juvenile, decided to turn his life around. He wanted to go straight, and he saw boxing as a means to that end. So he devised a punishing fitness and traning regime. ‘He would get up early and go for a five-mile run, from Kedron to Aspley and back,’ recalls his sister, Carolyn Scully. ‘He had a job as a builder’s labourer, mainly working as a plasterer, and he’d go to that all day. Then he’d head over to Jack Kelso’s gym and train. He had to train. He had to get fit. He didn’t even smoke, though he might have had some pot on occasion.’
He boxed under the name Ian Thomas, though professionally he was making little headway.
It was Hamilton who had torched the Torino nightclub in the Valley in February 1973 on the orders of Billy ‘The Mouse’ McCulkin. The latter – who had the image of a mouse tattooed on his penis and was an informer to former corrupt detective Glen Hallahan – promised all the perpetrators $1000 for the job. The gang apparently only got half of what was pledged.
‘Tommy boasted to me that he’d done Torino’s,’ says John Wayne Ryan. ‘He told me straight to my face in Kelso’s gym. He wouldn’t shut up about it. I don’t know what he was doing hanging out with a lot of those guys. He was out of his depth. He was smoking a bit of dope and might have been introduced to a bit of heroin.’
Carolyn Scully admits her brother, along with Peter Hall, Gary Dubois and Keith Meredith, did bomb the Torino nightclub at the behest of Billy McCulkin. It was an insurance job, she said.
‘Tommy did blow up Torino’s,’ she says. ‘I bought the gelignite that they used on Torino’s. I walked into Compression Hire Service in Geebung and bought it – four or five sticks. It was done from the inside. They also turned a gas tap on. They knew there would be nobody inside at the time.
‘They got the idea from the movie The Mechanic (the action thriller about a professional hitman starring Charles Bronson and released in 1972. The film’s publicity went: ‘In this box are the tools of his trade. He has more than a dozen ways to kill and they all work. They call him the mechanic.’)
‘The boys got carried away. But they all knew each other – John Andrew Stuart, Billy Stokes, Billy McCulkin.’
John Wayne Ryan says Hamilton’s boxing career suddenly improved. ‘After Torino’s his career started to take off, if you know what I mean,’ says Ryan. ‘The fights were done, fixed. He was winning them clean but they were fixed. I think it was done to divert his attention, to get him to stop talking about bloody Torino’s. That’s what went on down at Festival Hall.’
Hamilton’s boxing statistics only partially bear this out. He had two bouts prior to the Torino bombing in February 1973. On 26 March of that year, less than two months after Torino’s went up and just 18 days after the tragedy at the Whiskey Au Go Go, he won by technical knockout against Glen Mackay at Festival Hall. Tommy went on to win four of his next six fights, the last being his Queensland Welterweight championship against the talented, hyper-kinetic boxer Ian Looker on 25 October 1974. He stopped Looker in the fifth round. It would be Tommy’s last fight.
A month earlier, Hamilton’s house at 210 Turner Road, Kedron, directly opposite the Lutwyche Cemetery, had been blasted with a shotgun and the bullet had narrowly missed the boxer. He was showered with timber debris and glass when the shot was fired at his bedroom window.
Police believe the shooting was linked to Hamilton refusing to throw a fight. A syndicate lost $1800 in bets on the fight that Hamilton refused to throw. Tommy had last won against Lyle Law by knockout three months earlier on 14 June.
Then around 10 p.m. on Friday 10 January 1975, Hamilton was drinking with a new girlfriend in a house at Hamilton, not far from the CBD, when an armed intruder marched him outside and drove off.
The man, with a stocking over his head, burst into the lounge room at Hamilton as Tommy and his 17-year-old girlfriend sat listening to records. The couple had dined at the nearby Coral Trout Restaurant before buying a bottle of tequila at the Breakfast Creek Hotel and returning to the house in Atkinson Street. They sat at the dining room table, cut up lemons and drank the tequila. ‘We were both expecting Tommy’s friend [Gary Dubois] to come and pick him up,’ the girl later said. ‘I saw a person walk into the lounge room and that’s who I thought it was. As the figure got closer I realised it wasn’t Gary Dubois. It was someone else.
‘Tommy turned around to see what I was looking at. At that point this person told Tommy to stand up and Tommy did.’ Hamilton dropped the knife he’d been using to cut up the lemons.
The girlfriend later said the man was wearing a flesh-coloured stocking pulled tight over his head and had a pistol strapped with plaster to his right hand and a rifle in his left. ‘I recognised the man as Billy Stokes,’ she said. ‘Stokes whispered to Hamilton and they walked outside to a blue car.’
She followed them out and saw them standing beside the car. ‘Stay out of it. This has nothing to do with you,’ Hamilton supposedly shouted to her. She identified Stokes by his voice, facial features and build.
When the abduction hit the press, Tommy’s mother, Mrs Margaret Hamilton, warned the perpetrators: ‘Unless you tell us what you have done with Tommy it will be an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ She said there would be ‘war’ if the abductor didn’t show his hand. ‘He’d better give some indication soon as to what he has done with Tommy. If he doesn’t I will see that he remembers us. You won’t have to print any more. He’ll get the message. And to show just how much I mean it, tell him this: I drove around in a car for five hours on Friday night just looking for one house. He’ll figure it out from there.
‘I am challenging him to come out in the open. If he doesn’t, let him know I mean business.’
Mrs Hamilton and her daughter Carolyn both believed Tommy had been murdered. They and the police also believed they knew who had abducted Hamilton.
After Hamilton vanished, Stokes, who was editor of the Port News magazine, started writing about Hamilton and his friends as being part of something dubbed the Clockwork Orange Gang, after the popular and shocking Stanley Kubrick film of 1971 – A Clockwork Orange.
Hamilton allegedly walked around wearing a bowler hat and swinging a cane, fashioning himself after the film’s ruthless main protagonist, the teenager Alex. His sister Carolyn Scully denies this was Hamilton’s regular garb. She said he returned from a trip to Sydney and dressed up in black jeans, a grey, purple and green tank top, and a bowler hat. ‘He liked to dress up,’ she says.
Stokes wrote in Port News about Hamilton:
As a youth, well before the LSD scene, he was attracted by the bizzare, and the unusual. He was in fact once caught by Brisbane police in the act of driving stolen property away from a break and enter offence by using an ambulance.
Some years ago Clockwork Orange entered the boxing ring, initially as a means of keeping fit – he wasn’t a good fighter but he was always a trier. However, in the past year, in Brisbane’s Festival Hall, Clockwork Orange has surprised all by winning fight after fight.
At present, Clockwork Orange is reported missing, is said to have been abducted at gunpoint from a residence at Breakfast Creek recently. The matter is being treated by Brisbane police as a suspected murder.
In a subsequent issue, Stokes wrote that the most interesting ‘effect’ of his series of stories in Port News about the Clockwork Orange Gang and who really bombed the Whiskey Au Go Go nightclub was that police made it known to the media they wanted to interview him about Hamilton’s disappearance.
‘Earlier, in Sydney, police had arrested me on a charge of vagrancy regardless of the fact that I was staying at a motel, had $250 in my pocket, was neatly dressed, and had been in full employment for years,’ Stokes wrote
. ‘Later, when the charge of vagrancy came up for hearing before a magistrate the police simply withdrew prosecution.
‘Meanwhile, in Brisbane the local police had contacted my landlady and told her that they wanted to search my residence. A search warrant wasn’t necessary. The voice of authority was sufficient and she let them do so when I wasn’t there.’
The coronial inquest into Hamilton’s disappearance and presumed murder was held in Brisbane on 22 January 1978, before Coroner W.J. McKay. At the inquest, a Sydney builder, Thomas ‘Con’ Tziolos, 34, of Coogee, said not long after Hamilton’s disappearance his friend Billy Stokes had turned up in Sydney and asked him if he knew anyone who could repair his car.
Stokes had told him vandals had damaged the vehicle. The car’s front seat had been slashed and according to Tziolos, smelled of human excrement. He noticed the front floor mats had been removed. The court heard Stokes told him he had just cleaned the car.
Tziolos approached his neighbour, motor mechanic John Smith, and said to him: ‘Billy’s got a bit of trouble with his car. Someone’s got in and ripped it up a bit.’ He asked Smith if he knew a good trimmer. ‘It smelled as if someone had been to the toilet in it,’ Smith told the court. ‘It was all hosed out but there seemed to be that smell in the air. Inside, the floor had nothing on it. Even the underfelt was ripped out.’
The inquest was adjourned shortly after it began because major witness William Anthony Stokes had not had a chance to organise legal representation.
Mrs Margaret Hamilton told the court she went looking for her son night after night following his disappearance. She said after her son went missing she received a phone call from a female: ‘Billy Stokes has done to your son what they did in the film A Clockwork Orange.’
Jacks and Jokers Page 17