Jacks and Jokers
Page 21
‘I should also add that at about this time I was having a sexual relationship with Gerry Bellino. I would discuss business with him, but he never sought to take over my business nor to direct me in any way. The relationship with Gerry Bellino ended in about July 1975. It could have been as late as the end of 1975.
‘From his discussions with me I can say that the only business interests that Gerry Bellino had at that stage was Pinocchio’s and the other gambling place at Top of the Valley. He had no interest in massage parlours that I knew of. He showed no interest in that kind of work either.’
Crocker was incredulous at the move from Top Hat to the Top of the Valley. Hapeta and Tilley had promised they’d be renting his place for at least a year. Had they done a runner? What was going on?
He hopped on the next plane back to Brisbane. ‘I went around to Hector’s,’ he said. ‘I went around there and blew up. I said, “What the fuck do you think you’re doing? You told me you’d lease the place for a year”.’
‘Yeah, I am,’ Hapeta supposedly replied. ‘Here’s a cheque.’ Hapeta handed over the rest of the year’s due rent.
Hapeta and Tilley had set the cat among the pigeons in the Brisbane vice scene by agreeing to split takings fifty/fifty with their parlour girls. The workers’ wages had never been that high. Other parlours were complaining.
The Penthouse, not far from the Top Hat, was particularly vociferous. ‘She [the Penthouse leasee] complained like shit because once [Tilley] got going that’s when we found out about [Tilley] giving the girls 50 per cent of whatever money they earned,’ Crocker said. ‘I said to [her], you’re going to have to do it too.’
Hapeta and Tilley were already making an impact. Astute observers would have seen – even in the earliest months of their empire-building – that they would be a duo to be reckoned with.
The Elusive John Edward Milligan
Narcotics Agent John Shobbrook was settling back nicely into Brisbane life by the end of winter in 1978. As Supervising Narcotics Agent for the Brisbane bureau one of his jobs was to approve of the destruction of any redundant drug seizures.
In August, senior agent Greg Rainbow dropped a case file onto Shobbrook’s desk and asked for permission to destroy the heroin linked to the case. Rainbow requested that the file be marked ‘No Further Action’.
Naturally curious, Shobbrook reviewed the file and couldn’t believe his eyes. ‘I was surprised to see that apart from the actual seizure of the drug from a fisherman named David Ward, little investigation had been carried out in relation to this matter,’ says Shobbrook.
‘Rainbow informed me that he had received little encouragement or support to continue the investigation and that follow-up proposals that Rainbow had put forward had been rejected.
‘The fact that this was a sizeable seizure of heroin was of note, but equally as important as the heroin, was a small piece of paper attached to the file that had a telephone number and the name “John Milligan” written on it.’
Here he was again – John Edward Milligan, former drug dealer and Hallahan informant.
Milligan was well known to the Narcotics Bureau, particularly to Brian Bennett, who had arrested Milligan leaving the Tran Australian Airlines bond store at Brisbane Airport in possession of two rugs containing more than 30 kilograms of secreted hashish and Buddha sticks in the early 1970s. Bennett had also had an unforgettable meeting in a back alley at Petrie Terrace, near the police barracks, with Milligan’s associate, the notorious Sydney gangster John Stewart Regan, over Milligan.
It transpired that in the course of his investigation some months earlier Rainbow had headed to Cairns with two junior officers on a tip-off about a 380 gram package of heroin in the possession of the fisherman David Ward.
Ward had tried to offload the high-grade heroin in a few pubs on the Cairns waterfront, and word got back to the local Customs sub-collector. Rainbow and his men immediately put Ward under surveillance. Shortly after, Ward twigged and confronted the team.
‘We’re from the Narcotics Bureau,’ they said. ‘You’re in a lot of trouble.’
‘I don’t want trouble,’ Ward replied, and accompanied the men on a Customs launch up the Normanton River to his camp where he produced the parcel of heroin. Rainbow learned that it had been dropped from a light aircraft that had flown out of Papua New Guinea.
Later, Ward asked Rainbow: ‘Would you like to take some barramundi fillets back for the missus?’
Shobbrook recalls: ‘They’re all drinking Fourex, loading up with barramundi. These three stooges fly back to Brisbane with their barramundi.
‘Rainbow wrote an indemnity for Ward at the camp. He had no authority to do that. It compromised the investigation.’
Shobbrook asked Max Rogers, the Regional Commander for Brisbane at the time, if he could reignite the case. ‘I realised nothing had been done on it,’ says Shobbrook. ‘I thought it could be followed up.’
He was told that if he wanted to do something about it he had to get in touch with Canberra and sort it out himself. He telephoned Narcotics Bureau National Enforcement Chief Inspector David Schramm for approval. We’re up to the ‘J’s’ in our investigations, Schramm told him. ‘Call it Operation Jungle.’
Shobbrook wanted to employ United States techniques on this case: a specialist team of his choosing; his own office space with a key to the door; and he didn’t want to be encumbered with any other investigations.
Shobbrook soon learned that John Edward Milligan had been one of Rogers’ prize informants. His informant number was 138. Within weeks of the operation kicking off, Rogers resigned.
‘Everyone was shocked,’ says Shobbrook. ‘There had been no pre-warning, no office rumours, it came out of the blue; no explanation was offered.’
Rogers’ abrupt resignation however had nothing to do with Milligan, Shobbrook or anything else. He simply felt, after long deliberation, that it was time to move on with his life.
Shobbrook and his hand-picked team, including John Moller, headed north to Cairns and began retracing the route of Milligan and his gang. They met up with Percy Trezise, owner of the Laura pub. Percy offered to fly the Narcs to remote locations in his single engine Cessna. The team tracked down fishermen on the Normanby River, and travelled in an aluminium dinghy up and down the Annie and North Kennedy rivers as well as crossing Princess Charlotte Bay.
Shobbrook was curious why their dinghy carried an axe.
‘[That’s] to kill any bloody crocodiles that get too friendly,’ the skipper replied. It was enough to stop him trailing his hand in the warm waters out the side of the boat.
The Operation Jungle team was meticulous. They took witness statements, gathered evidence, painstakingly put together a timeline of Milligan’s movements, and began assembling a picture not just of drug importation but a corrupt network that perhaps went to the very top of the Queensland Police Force.
A Private Dinner
By July 1978, select police officers were attempting to contact Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen directly with information about trouble in the ranks.
It should have spelled out two things very clearly to the Premier – that after less than two years as Commissioner of Police, Terry Lewis and his reign were proving a unique sort of problem, one that was quite the opposite to Ray Whitrod.
Whereas Whitrod and his reforms were slammed for their progressiveness, for their transparency, for their attempt to look forward and join the modern age, Lewis’s regime appeared to be looking back to the Bischof era, where power was all and graft just a supplement to a policeman’s average income.
The former long-term member for Greenslopes, Bill Hewitt, remembers an incident that tends to underline this. He recalls that Eddie Liu, the prominent Chinatown identity, had an organisation that used to meet in the Valley for a meal on a Sunday night every few months or so.
Hewitt says he felt obliged
to go and at one of the meetings got talking to Commissioner Terry Lewis. ‘He wasn’t discreet, he was vehement about the fact that he didn’t get paid as much as commissioners in other states,’ recalls Hewitt. ‘He was beside himself. It was a really big thing with him.
‘I often wondered if he thought – well, if they’re not going to give me what I’m entitled to, I’ll get it my own way.’
The other thing the Premier should have been cognisant of was that these disgruntled police officers, by going to him, could obviously not air their grievances with their own boss or superiors. Why not?
On one occasion, Redlands MP John Goleby and Constable Brian Marlin arranged a secret dinner at Lennons Hotel in the city with Licensing Branch chief Alec Jeppesen and the Premier. Also present at the dinner was the new Police Minister Ron Camm. During the course of the dinner, Bjelke-Petersen was alerted to police corruption courtesy of the taped interviews with informants Jeppesen had been privately compiling. He also had statutory declarations from SP bookmakers and working prostitutes. Jeppesen told Bjelke-Peteresen the names of senior police he believed were corrupt.
According to Jeppesen, Goleby, on hearing stories of corruption within the police ranks, quipped: ‘You have to be careful with those informants otherwise they’ll end up with cement boots.’
Jeppesen said he told Bjelke-Petersen at the 1978 dinner that he had been informed that Tony Murphy collected ‘$10,000 a time’ from SP bookies for the legal defence of Jack Herbert during the famous Southport Betting Case.
Brian Marlin then told the guests at the dinner that the consorting squad – on the instructions of Murphy – intended to take over the massage parlours. Marlin, who was supposedly from New South Wales though his past remained a bit of a mystery, believed the scene would become ‘as corrupt as Sydney’.
Jeppesen reportedly said: ‘Marlin told them the Consorting Squad was taking over the massage parlour scene. He singled out Murphy as the one organising it.’
Jeppesen wanted two former senior members of the Crime Intelligence Unit, set up by Whitrod, to investigate the claims. ‘I suggested Voigt and Hicks investigate it and Camm said, “Voigt was a Whitrod man”,’ Jeppesen reportedly said. ‘Camm lost interest in it then.
‘The Premier asked me if I would stay in the Licensing Branch for some months but with Camm’s attitude, I could see myself in some jeopardy.’
Four Photographs
When Murphy and his crew went in pursuit of Basil ‘The Hound’ Hicks throughout 1978, they did so with professionalism and vigour.
Their timing was impeccable. Just as they faced yet another hurdle, an incriminating piece of paper emerged from nowhere to shore up the case against Hicks. Now Hicks would feel what it was like to be investigated by Tony Murphy.
‘You would never, ever want Tony Murphy on your tail,’ says Jim Slade. ‘He had the most incredible memory. There were some crims who used to really hold him in awe.
‘He was the greatest thing to happen to me regarding doing the job properly. He was a very, very smart man … I learned how you position informants, how you put in your undercovers, figure out your plan, if you’re going to interdict at this point here, think back six months, establish tactics; he was absolutely brilliant. I have seen Murphy convince people to do a thing when no other human being could convince them to do it.’
So it was that at police headquarters in Brisbane on 24 July 1978, police officer Reginald Neal Freier gave a statement witnessed by Deputy Commissioner Vern MacDonald about Hicks and the prostitute Katherine James.
As it turns out, it was Freier who allegedly became aware of the existence of the compromising pictures of Hicks and James way back in 1974, during the time Freier was suspended from the force over the Southport Betting Case corruption fiasco. Now the reinstated policeman had something to offer against Hicks. Freier, in his statement, said he located James at the Kontiki massage parlour and sent in an informant to talk with her. The informant then gave her a message, asking her to meet Freier ‘up the road’, in fact at the corner of Gympie and Rode Roads, south of Chermside.
James agreed. Freier says he ‘had taken the precaution of having my solicitor … nearby’.
‘I introduced myself to her and I told her that I was a Detective under suspension and that I had received information that she was in possession of a number of photographs of her and Hicks in bed,’ the statement went on. ‘She asked me what my interest in the matter was and I told her that I was no friend of Hicks and that they could possibly be put to some use during my trial.’
James allegedly told Freier that she had been having an affair with Hicks for years and that he was harassing her for sex and she wanted to get him off her back.
‘She told me that there were a total of four photographs taken – that she in fact had given Hicks one of the photographs and warned him that if he continued to come and see her she would send the remainder to his wife,’ Freier stated. ‘I offered to buy the photographs of her and Hicks from her for $500. She laughed and said she would make that much money in a massage parlour in one day.’
Freier revealed how he had given her his personal details and that she had contacted him on a few occasions but never relinquished the incriminating pictures. He concluded: ‘Whilst I have never seen the alleged photographs, I have no doubt, from my conversations with [James], that there are photographs of her and Hicks in bed together in existence.’
The statement was typed not on department stationery but on plain paper. It was a small but nevertheless timely piece of further evidence in the mosaic being compiled against Basil Hicks. It gave the so-called photograph scandal involving a supposedly squeaky clean officer who had once been one of Ray Whitrod’s most trusted and loyal sidekicks some history – the saga went right back to 1974, when Hicks was a powerful figure in the force and heading its anti-corruption body, the Crime Intelligence Unit. By backdating the story to that period, it showed Hicks as a hypocrite and a man of dubious character.
‘The only way to get Hicks was to besmirch his character,’ says private investigator John Wayne Ryan, who knew James and also Roland Short, the owner of the Matador, the swingers club in South Brisbane. ‘Roland Short set it all up. They got a guy that looked a bit like Hicks and the photographs were taken in the Matador.
‘James would later say on oath that I was there, hiding in the bathroom or the closet. She had a couple of conflicting locations in her statements that the photographs were taken in her bedroom at home. They weren’t.’
Ryan claims that at one point Roland Short called him into his office and showed him the photographs. He told Ryan the photos were of Hicks
‘I told him no way, not under any circumstances did that guy in the photographs look like Basil Hicks,’ recalls Ryan. ‘He tried to get me involved in it. I think they were hoping to kill two birds with one stone – to get both me and Hicks. It was a complete set-up, and Murphy was organising it into 1978.’
Set-up or not, somewhere along the line some of the mud hurled at Basil Hicks was bound to stick.
Circumstantial Evidence
William Anthony (Billy) Stokes went to trial for the murder of Tommy Hamilton on Monday 21 August 1978. Stokes pleaded ‘not guilty’ to charges of murder and deprivation of liberty.
The Crown’s case was that a man identified as Billy Stokes wore a mask and armed with two pistols entered a house in Atkinson Street, Hamilton, on 10 January 1975. He then held a gun to Hamilton’s head and forced him out of the house and into a blue car.
As the Telegraph reported: ‘The Crown case was that Stokes and Hamilton had been good friends until Stokes refused to pay a fine for Hamilton and some of his companions who had been convicted on a drug charge at Caboolture in 1973.
‘Justice Connolly said it was common ground that Hamilton bore a grudge against Stokes and he received numerous telephone calls from Hamilton and his companions mocking him,
threatening and making obscene suggestions about Stokes’ estranged wife.
‘He said Hamilton had told his companions that he was trying to “crack the chicken”.’
Stokes, defending himself, said the Crown had not proved its case. He did not call witnesses or give evidence. He addressed the jury for a few minutes.
At 3.40 p.m. on Thursday the jury retired to consider its verdict but had not reached a decision by 9.15 p.m. The jury was locked up overnight.
The next day, at 10.15 a.m. their verdict was delivered – guilty.
Stokes, in the dock, shook his head and reportedly said: ‘How could you?’
Detectives at the back of the court room shook hands in congratulations. Stokes was jailed for life.
The case didn’t warrant a mention in the Commissioner’s diary. On that Friday he fielded a call from reporter Pat Lloyd of the Telegraph regarding a ‘civic parade’ for Tracey Wickham. (The 16-year-old Brisbane schoolgirl had just won gold medals in the 400-metre and 800-metre freestyle events at the Commonwealth Games being held in Edmonton, Canada.) Superintendent Tony Murphy called about meeting Police Minister Ron Camm. The Commissioner later addressed the Queensland Press Club on ‘Juveniles, Crime and Demonstrations’ at the Crest Hotel down by City Hall.
Meanwhile, Stokes was transferred to his cell.
Five years after the Whiskey Au Go Go tragedy and the arrest and conviction of John Andrew Stuart and James Finch, aspects of the story were still bobbing up in various court cases and missing persons investigations. So too the mysterious case of Barbara McCulkin and her missing daughters – it, like the supposed drug overdose of the prostitute and whistleblower Shirley Margaret Brifman in a small bedroom in a flat in Clayfield in March 1972, wouldn’t go away.