Jacks and Jokers

by Matthew Condon

  Both Hayes and Atkinson argued that Jeppesen had used no outside informants to assist with information and access for the raids. That, in turn, put into question moeity payments the Licensing Branch had made to these mythical informants on those specific jobs. (A moeity was a percentage of a fine imposed on a convicted person and paid as a reward to a successful informant.)

  In effect, Hayes and Atkinson were accusing Jeppesen of inventing informants and pocketing the moeity money.

  The accusers praised Constable Brian Marlin. Atkinson said: ‘Information received by us is to the effect that after a report was submitted by Sergeant DAUTEL of your branch, explaining the difficulties involved in obtaining evidence to raid these premises at Condor and in which he recommended that a competent undercover officer such as Plain Clothes Constable B.R. MARLIN be used to teach a police agent seconded from another section especially to cover this work on the Gold Coast and as a result of the acceptance of those recommendations, MARLIN and a Constable WHITBREAD were the police agents responsible for infiltrating the premises by way of a key … what I’m saying is that we have been advised that no outside informer was used and that the prosecution was successful through the actions of the police officers themselves. What do you say about that?’

  Jeppesen confirmed that outside informants were used in the Condor operation.

  They asked him what he had to fear by disclosing the names of his informants.

  ‘Threats have been made by Constable MARLIN I understand to kill another police officer, and his information, which you are relating to me, is not a truthful account of the entry to those premises,’ Jeppesen responded.

  They assured him any names offered would be treated confidentially.

  ‘It is with great regret that I cannot accept your assurances,’ he said.

  Jeppesen said he trusted his staff. Hayes and Atkinson then asked if he had trusted Brian Marlin up until very recently.

  ‘I don’t want to enter into any defamatory matters, but I consider that he has not told me the truth about an incident at the Cleveland Sands Hotel,’ Jeppesen replied cautiously.

  Monuments

  At the end of 1978 the Queensland National Party, forever faced with dwindling coffers, contacted accountant and fundraising expert Everald Compton for advice.

  The Brisbane-based Compton was known about town as the ‘Mr Millions’ of charity fundraising. In his late forties, he had raised, by his own calculation, over $40 million for various sporting bodies, political parties of all persuasions and charities since he became a full-time fundraiser in the early 1960s.

  He had just published a book – Ten Steps to Successful Fund Raising, in which he declared: ‘Nice guys never win. Leaders win. Be one.’

  Compton came to the attention of the Nationals as early as 1974, when he successfully marshalled $750,000 for the building of the new ALP headquarters – John Curtin House – in Canberra. Now Robert Sparkes and the Premier’s loyal supporter, the recently knighted Sir Edward Lyons, wanted to establish a secure financial base beneath Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen and the National Party.

  Mr Millions’ company, Compton Associates, was approached to assess the success or not of a fundraising campaign centred on the Premier. Everald Compton, as it turned out, had a long association with the Premier’s wife, Florence. As youngsters they had attended the same church together – the old red-brick St Andrews Presbyterian Chruch at the corner of Creek and Ann streets in Brisbane city.

  ‘I knew her as Florence Gilmore, and she was a leader of a group at the church around 1946–47,’ Compton remembers. ‘Then Joh turned up and married her. We kept in touch down the years. In the 1970s I had raised some money for the establishment of John Curtin House in the days of Whitlam and Hawke.

  ‘Joh rang me up and said, “If you can raise money for those socialists you’ve got to be able to raise millions for me.”

  ‘A few days later Sir Robert Sparkes phoned me and I went and met him. He had one of the most astute political minds I’d ever seen.’

  Compton was signed up to raise $2.5 million for what would be known as the Bjelke-Petersen Foundation. When the idea was first mooted, a newspaper described the foundation as ‘an ambitious scheme to use the cult-worship of the Queensland Premier’ to fill the Party’s bank account. Compton was given a 12-month contract to bring in the loot.

  Compton reportedly said: ‘There is [sic] a lot of people out there who think Joh is God – his philosophy is what they want. The reason they are giving to this foundation is because they strongly believe Queensland will be no good without him. They are investing in the future.’

  The plan was to delineate regions across the state with an executive of 25 financially influential people in each region. That executive in turn would be responsible for soliciting major gifts to the foundation. State electorates held by the Nationals were given an initial $60,000 target.

  Teams of National Party supporters would then blitz Queensland, lining up potential donors and organising fundraising functions. They would be fully trained by Compton Associates.

  The Liberal Party saw it as an alarming development. It argued that a political party with such a comprehensive money-making net in the name of Bjelke-Petersen could turn itself into an ‘institution’, and one that could put in jeopardy the careers of people and financial futures of businesses that did not contribute to the Joh fund.

  The money was supposedly being raised to build nine National Party local headquarters buildings.

  The press revealed that a $100,000 donation would get your name on one of the buildings, an honorary life governorship of the foundation, life membership of the National Party, and a private dinner with the Premier. It also bought you a scroll, personally signed by Joh.

  For $50,000 you got the lot except the building named after you. ‘People like kudos for what they do,’ said Compton. ‘They get a plaque or a building named after them. It’s something they can point to.’

  The establishment of the foundation was bound to be a political headache. The opportunity for the Opposition to point to it repeatedly as an instrument of corruption and a focal point for the purchase of ‘jobs for the boys’ would, as it ultimately transpired, be impossible to resist.

  Just months into the fundraising, Liberal Party State Director, Stephen Litchfield, said the National Party and the foundation were using ‘standover tactics’ to secure donations. No money, no government business.

  Compton replied that ‘each fundraiser had given an assurance that no standover tactics or any offer of kickbacks would be made’. Early in the fundraising, he guaranteed the people of Queensland that everything was above board after the Telegraph reported that a company had offered $250,000 to the foundation hoping for government kickbacks and favourable treatment.

  ‘But it took Sir Robert Sparkes and myself only 30 seconds to reject the donation,’ Compton reportedly said.

  Compton says the offer of the massive donation came from ‘one of those White Shoe Brigade men on the Gold Coast who wanted to get into mining’. ‘It was a mate of Russ Hinze,’ he recalls. ‘There were a few others like that who had a go. There were graziers who put money in to try and get their leases extended and we had to tell them to drop dead too.

  ‘In my presence, old Joh never, ever took money from anyone. He kept his hands clean of it.’

  Compton says he received some bad publicity over the project. ‘When you do political fundraising, you’re at risk,’ he says.

  It was a measure of the National Party’s hubris that criticism of the foundation was meaningless to power players like Sir Robert Sparkes and Sir Edward Lyons. Both men at this time were vying for the Premier’s attention, and both were drivers of the Bjelke-Petersen Foundation.

  As Bjelke-Petersen later said: ‘Because it was felt that the Party was investing too much money in property and other assets, I was used as a medium t
o raise money for what came to be called the Bjelke-Petersen Foundation.

  ‘I went around like a show pony with Bob Sparkes at the height of my career during the Whitlam years [it was actually the Malcolm Fraser years]. I made the speeches and Bob Sparkes raised the money.

  ‘Sparkes seemed to resent the fact that Lyons had grown so close to me.’

  So who was Sir Edward Houghton Lyons, and how had he managed in a handful of years to become probably the Premier’s closest and most trusted advisor?

  Lyons was born in Brisbane in 1914 and was schooled at St Joseph’s College, Nudgee. He worked for International Harvester before joining the finance company Industrial Acceptance Corporation (later to become Citicorp).

  In something of a surprise move, in the early 1960s Lyons joined the Katies fashion group. His business acumen turned Katies into a major fashion label and retail concern with stores across Australia. He became company chairman in 1971, when Bjelke-Petersen’s premiership was in its infancy.

  Around that time, the Premier was addressing a business function in Brisbane when the Liberal-voting Lyons approached him afterwards. ‘I just wanted to tell you I’ve been watching you for a long time,’ Lyons told him. ‘I like you, your attitude and your policies. I’m on your side now, and I’m going to help you.’

  It would be a mutually profitable friendship, but Lyons was not so revered with staff trying to get the Bjelke-Petersen Foundation off the ground. One staff member, who declined to be named, says Lyons was one of the first, and most persistent, at utilising the foundation for personal gain and that of his business associates and friends.

  ‘Every dodgy mate of Sir Edward Lyons was turning up,’ the staff member recalls. ‘He was not the sort of bloke you’d invite home for dinner. There were a few dust-ups with him. He was the most difficult bloke to work with.’

  New Year’s Death

  Commissioner Terry Lewis, after a long year, was looking forward to 33 days of annual leave, beginning Monday 1 January 1979.

  Firstly, he had an appointment to see Dr. R.M. Goodwin for a check-up. He would lunch at the famed Milano’s Galleria, owned and operated by Gino Merlo, whose restaurant cellar contained over 30,000 bottles of wine, many from Italy, and some chardonnays from California. The dishes on the menu included ravioli stuffed with minced chicken and Moreton Bay bugs in cognac with macadamia nuts. It was the place to be ‘seen’ with the city’s politicians, businessmen and lawyers.

  Lewis and his wife, Hazel, would then make their traditional pilgrimage to the Gold Coast. They would take lunch at Sea World with entrepreneur Keith Williams (who would, in the very near future, donate $25,000 to the Bjelke-Petersen Foundation) and have dinner at the Southport Yacht Club.

  And as ususal, Lewis’s voluminous holiday reading would not be for pleasure. It would take in the annual reports for police departments across Australia, the Report of the International Conference on Terrorist Devices and Methods, the Australian Police College Manual for Hostage Negotiation and an FBI report on ‘Prevention and Control of Mobs and Riots’. The latter may have helped him with Brisbane’s troubling street-march incidents.

  But before all this, on New Year’s Day he enjoyed an afternoon at the races at Eagle Farm, betting $50 each way on Decimate (it came second) and $25 each way on Ima Cheeta (it won) before heading home to Garfield Drive and the house in the shadow of the concrete water tower on the hill at Bardon.

  At 9.45 p.m. he received a call from R. Dunbar, ‘re John Andrew Stuart found dead in H.M. Prison at 9.37 pm’. A post-mortem examination was expected to be carried out the next day.

  On the Wednesday the press reported that the examination had been inconclusive, ‘apart from establishing there was no foul play and that violence had not been used. Pathologists who examined his body yesterday established that all marks and scars on Stuart were old ones,’ the Courier-Mail said.

  In the report, Assistant Commissioner Brian Hayes, who along with Syd Atkinson had arrested and charged Stuart for the Whiskey Au Go Go murders in 1973, reminisced about the dead criminal. ‘He was given a fair hearing, and a fair trial and made appeals to the highest courts in the land,’ Hayes said. ‘Now he has gone to a higher jurisdiction.’

  Stuart had always protested his innocence and said he had been verballed in police interviews. His statement about the Whiskey, compiled by police after his arrest, was unsigned.

  On Thursday 4 January 1979, the Courier-Mail reported that the Stuart clan wanted a royal commission into the Whiskey murders and Stuart’s treatment in gaol.

  ‘Stuart’s sister, who asked that her name be withheld, said there were too many unanswered questions on her late brother’s trial, and the circumstances of the fire, for the matter to be left to rest,’ the newspaper said. ‘As long as I’ve got a breath in my body I’m going to push for a royal commission into this matter,’ she claimed.

  To protest his innocence during his incarceration, on three occasions Stuart swallowed pieces of wire. He also sewed his lips together with wire to underline that his original confession to police over the Whiskey atrocity had been a police ‘verbal’, or concocted evidence. His self-harm saw him in and out of hospital.

  Stuart’s mother, Edna, 65, added: ‘I’m not being fanatical. We still don’t know how he died. I don’t think he committed suicide. He had stomach trouble from all the wire he had eaten. He was under medical treatment all the time.’

  The Sunday Mail of 7 January declared that an acute heart infection may have killed Stuart. A spokesman for the State Microbiology and Pathology Laboratory told the newspaper that a ‘microscopic examination’ had revealed Stuart possessed a heart infection, possibly the result of a virus, capable of causing sudden death. Suicide had been ruled out.

  ‘He said chemical tests had shown the only drugs in Stuart’s body were those legally prescribed by the prison hospital and they were in normal quantities,’ the newspaper added.

  In the same article, mother Edna Watts declared her son innocent. ‘Johnny told me six months after he started this sentence that he had given his heart to Christ,’ she said. ‘He told me Christ was his witness when he told me: “Mum, I have never killed anyone in my life.”

  ‘I’m not pretending he was a saint. He fought all his life. But he wasn’t a killer.’ She said she wanted to see her son’s body before the funeral so she could ‘touch him just once’.

  On the morning of Wednesday 10 January, a service was held for John Andrew Stuart in the K.M. Smith funeral director’s chapel in Wickham Street, Fortitude Valley. Stuart’s death certificate had been released – it stated he had died of natural causes.

  After the service, Stuart’s casket was taken to the Lutwyche Cemetery, where he was buried with his father, David James Stuart (who had died in 1956) in section nine, grave number eleven.

  Many, many questions were buried with him.

  Operation Jungle

  The trail had been cold for 18 months, but it didn’t deter Federal Narcotics Agent John Shobbrook from going after drug dealer John Milligan.

  Having flown north to Cairns, Shobbrook and his team immediately began the painstaking task of manually checking hotel and car rental records around the period Milligan was suspected of having taken possession of his parcel of heroin in September 1977.

  They soon got a hit. The Narcotics team found a receipt in Milligan’s name for a Budget Rent a Car four-wheel-drive in Townsville. The odometer revealed a sum mileage that was consistent with a round trip from Townsville to Princess Charlotte Bay. Townsville hotel records also indicated a link between Milligan and his associate Graham David Bridge. Bryan Parker’s and Ian Barron’s names were also found on other documents linking them to Milligan during the suspect time period.

  The team headed to the little town of Laura, where pictures of the alleged conspirators were identified by Percy Trezise and other residents. In fact Trezise, a former Ansett
pilot, offered to fly Shobbrook to remote places in the region where potential witnesses could be interviewed.

  The single engine Cessna, however, wasn’t a smooth ride. The plane had an oil leak and other alarming idiosyncrasies. ‘We also found a hornet’s nest in the engine bay; very reassuring,’ Shobbrook remembered.

  On a return flight to Cairns with Trezise two things stayed with the drugs agent. ‘Firstly, I recall every hiccup that Percy’s Cessna made (probably a bit of dirt in the fuel line, Percy had explained). Secondly, I became very aware that there aren’t too many level emergency landing areas between Laura and Cairns and that there are a lot of rainforest-covered mountains.’

  He could visualise the newspaper headlines: Famous North Queenslander, and someone else, Die in Light Aircraft Crash.

  On the positive side, the Jungle team eventually collated enough evidence, they believed, to arrest both Milligan and Glen Patrick Hallahan, farmer of Obi Obi and corrupt former Queensland police officer.

  Dear Mr Premier

  After Brian Marlin had been rescued by Tony Murphy following the shocking incident at the Cleveland Sands Hotel over by the bay, he transitioned his loyalty from Alec Jeppesen. He was now Murphy’s boy.

  ‘There is no doubt about it that Marlin and Murphy were really close,’ says Jim Slade. ‘He thought the sun shone out of Murphy’s arse. Murphy was the sort of bloke who could put Marlin in as a bloody spy. This was the sort of person that Murphy was.

  ‘Also, there is no way in the world that a civilian could have the stamp that Brian Marlin had. Even me, who has witnessed every different kind of arsehole, recognised straightaway – here was an arsehole that learned, he learned that from somewhere. You don’t learn that coming out of a security company or the army.’