Jacks and Jokers

by Matthew Condon

  Lewis and his officers then proceeded to the Mount Thompson Memorial Gardens in Nursery Road, Holland Park.

  After farewelling his old mentor, Lewis went with wife, Hazel, to the Police Academy for lunch with Justice Lucas, then oversaw the induction of 36 fresh constables – the new generation.

  Empty Rooms

  While Federal Narcotics Bureau Agent John Shobbrook was making huge headway in his pursuit of drug dealer John Edward Milligan, his colleagues in the Brisbane office were running into brick walls all over the place.

  Geoff Pambroke had been in the bureau since 1975 and he was getting increasingly frustrated at what he perceived as Commissioner Lewis’s men intentionally thwarting the Federal Bureau’s cases.

  Pambroke, an investigative agent, noticed the same thing when Mr Asia, Terry Clark, and his couriers, Doug and Isabel Wilson, were brought in for questioning by the state police in 1978.

  ‘If anything, the State police tried to keep us away from them,’ Pambroke remembers. ‘The hierarchies of the Narcos and the Queensland police were playing games with each other. Lewis didn’t like a lot of our blokes. They were worried about what we could do and how well we could do it.

  ‘I remember when the local police were discussing Terry Lewis becoming Commissioner. They said, “This is going to be great. We’re all going to be looked after now”.’

  Pambroke was proud of the work the Federal Narcotics Bureau did, despite the staff being spread thin. With Shobbrook, he would modify vehicles for surveillance work, rigging out Kombi vans for long stretches of undercover work. Both often used their own money to acquit the mechanical changes.

  But increasingly that work was all for nought – they went on raid after raid following the exacting gathering of evidence, only to find that the suspects had been tipped off. ‘We’d organise a raid on the Gold Coast and there’d be nothing there,’ he says. ‘Someone had phoned them up. In one case we went into a place and there on a piece of paper were the number plate details of our vehicles.

  ‘If you went through the main street of Surfers Paradise in those days [within view of the offices of Gold Coast state drug squad detectives], then that was the end of it. We had to go in through the back blocks. We did not pull off one successful raid on the Gold Coast.’

  The same failure rate was being experienced by the state Licensing Branch. Former Licensing Branch officer Bruce Wilby remembers: ‘Everybody knew what the rumours were. In those days … I had no idea it was as organised as it was. [Syd] Atkinson on the Gold Coast tried to override us all the time. You’d get the message – we’d like you to stay away from this person.’

  Similarly, undercover detective Jim Slade faced similar frustrations. He was working on a case involving the Bellino family and their associates when the unthinkable happened. ‘I think I did a job with Fred Maynard, we had an undercover officer in there, and the Bellinos just came up to me and said, “We know you’re a copper because we’ve got inside information.”

  ‘I was so fucking wild. Here I was, having worked undercover for years, I’d worked with undercover agents, we were so successful with all of our operations, and here was some fucking mongrel, my workmate – someone dobbed us in. That really affected me. I had no time for those bastards.’

  Slade would soon be heading to North Queensland to do some serious investigations into the drug trade. He would not forget the Bellino incident. And if the name Bellino came up, he would not hesitate to push the investigation to its very limit.

  Wives and Mothers

  Despite an emotionally cold childhood, his mother, Mona, having left the family home in Ipswich for the bright lights of Brisbane and its horse racing tracks when he was a boy, and despite prohibitive work hours as Commissioner of Police, Terry Lewis and his wife, Hazel, had established a warm and loving family environment up on Garfield Drive.

  Lewis still heard from his mother – an habitué of the Doomben and Eagle Farm tracks – and says he relied on her for racing tips.

  ‘I know, as I worked my tail off and got up another notch, she used to use my name a lot, particularly in the racing fraternity,’ says Lewis. ‘But Hazel, she was such a gentle, friendly bugger, she’d go and kiss a blackfella if she felt like it.’

  Aware of her husband’s own upbringing, she encouraged him to be affectionate with his children and would urge Lewis to kiss the children more. ‘I’d kiss the two daughters reluctantly for a while there … only in fairly recent years I kissed the boys when I met them,’ he recalls.

  ‘I’d never known it … I love the kids and I’m sorry I never showed them … I think my five kids realised what I thought of them.’

  In the Lewis household, the children were taught to be frugal. Certainly Hazel and Lewis watched their pennies. At Christmas time, the family arrangement was that no present could exceed $10 in value. For birthdays, Lewis usually got socks, pyjamas, belts or aftershave. With Hazel, it was perfume or nightdresses.

  Meals at Garfield Drive were simple and prepared with an eye on the budget. Hazel would prepare ox-tongue, or make pies out of chuck or skirt steak. Chops were braised in gravy and served with carrots, onions and turnips. There were mince-meat rissoles and meatloaf. Hazel always baked her own cakes and biscuits, and occasionally made a tomato relish.

  The fresh produce that came into the house was sourced from friends and relatives. The Lewis’s received tomatoes, butternut pumpkins, rockmelons and mangoes from a relative’s farm. Friends sent pine­apples from Gympie, cabbages, lettuces, potatoes, pumpkins, onions and beetroots from Gatton, apples and oranges from Stanthorpe. Fish was plentiful courtesy of two sons-in-law in the family who liked to throw in a line.

  As for household cleaning products, including soaps and deodorants, they were at some point supplied free of charge to Garfield Drive because they were damaged goods and unsaleable. So too cooking oil and margarines.

  The family had an old Corona motor vehicle. Hazel said a tank of petrol would last her three weeks. ‘We went in Terry’s office car almost everywhere,’ she would later say.

  As for entertainment, Lewis as Commissioner had an inexhaustible calendar full of invitations to the theatre, to films, to sporting fixtures and major cultural events, along with a similar number of lunch and dinner requests.

  Lewis remembers: ‘I was so bloody busy, one day … I got 11 invitations for the one day. Not that that matters now and not because it was me, probably because of my job more than anything else, but I was always getting invited by the banks, the insurance companies, and big, big companies like Mayne Nickless and Rothmans … and I tried as hard as I could to make sure I got to everyone once. You know so they didn’t think you were a bit of a twerp.’

  If the Lewis’s didn’t want to cook at home, they didn’t have to.

  When the Commissioner took his annual leave, the family invariably went down to the Gold Coast at the height of summer and lodged in flats owned by friends. When on holiday they enjoyed staying in and relaxing. It was an opportunity to step off the hectic carousel that was the life of a commissioner of police.

  When time permitted, Hazel Lewis occasionally caught up with Jack Herbert’s wife, Peggy. The two women had met at a police picnic in Davies Park at West End in the early 1960s. Peggy was a mother, too, and she would often cross paths with Hazel because of the children. They might bump into each other during school holidays on the Gold Coast. Hazel thought Peggy was gracious, gentle, quiet and always a lady. Another good friend to Hazel was Sheilagh Maxwell, wife of Barry Maxwell of the Belfast Hotel.

  Still, the life of the wife of a police commissioner was a demanding one too. She viewed her husband’s position as a 24-hour-a-day job, and that the family was never free of the rigour of high office. She thought it was stressful, but she loved her family and her husband. She was a police wife, as she saw herself. And a police mother, too.

  Up on 12 Garfield Drive, it was
Hazel Lewis, by necessity, who held the family together.

  As Lewis says: ‘There were a couple of ladies in my whole life that I struck that … my wife was one. She went out to help every bugger, black, white or brindle. She used to, well, almost annoy me sometimes. She’d get these black fellows and be shaking hands with them and bloody … Maureen [Tony Murphy’s wife] was another. There was a fellow called Sid Currie had a wife, his wife was Hazel, too. She died young but oh, she was a great wife. Some of them were lucky they had them. And some of them didn’t deserve them.’

  Lewis has a different opinion of Jack Herbert’s wife, Peggy. ‘I thought she was a bit of a mole,’ he reflects. ‘I met her, naturally. Can’t say I had a lot to do with her. She wasn’t a bad looking piece.’

  The life of a police family was difficult – temptations were everywhere. ‘Men like Merv Hopgood and Abe Duncan, they would never think of betraying their wives and there were many others like that,’ Lewis remembers. ‘Some of them, I know they did. They were looked upon as pants men, but not looked upon terribly favourably by everybody.

  ‘You had the opportunities insofar as there were pubs everywhere, you walked everywhere a lot … as far as I can recollect, except one at the National Hotel, people working in the pubs were all girls. That was a great chance for them to pick up …’

  Lewis himself says he never cheated on Hazel. One woman, though, did catch his eye earlier in his career. It was Yvonne Weier, his partner in the formation of the Juvenile Aid Bureau in the early 1960s. ‘If I’d been a single man she’d be one I’d contemplate marrying,’ he says. ‘Her and Hallahan were friendly for a little while, I don’t know what transpired there.

  ‘Her father had been a police officer. I had a good relationship [with her], none of it sexual. She was a really nice person.’

  How did Hazel Lewis cope with her husband working in a confined office with an attractive young woman?

  ‘I didn’t dare ask her,’ he says.

  Suite

  Now that Jack Herbert had transferred his expertise across to Jack Rooklyn and the Bally Corporation, it may have seemed prudent to try and get his new boss and the Police Commissioner together for a casual chat.

  Lewis had supposedly mentioned to Herbert that Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen was talking a lot about poker machines and whether or not they should be introduced in Queensland. If so, it would be the end of the lucrative in-line machine business. But another door would open up with the pokies. Perhaps bigger riches awaited.

  ‘I told Terry that Jack Rooklyn was anxious to keep in-lines in Queensland and that he’d probably pay $10,000 to secure an adverse report on poker machines,’ Herbert wrote in his memoir. ‘Terry sent me back to talk to Rooklyn’s people. They were worried by an article they’d read in the paper about poker machines coming to Queensland and they asked if Terry Lewis would take $25,000 to keep the pokies out. I knew he’d have taken $10,000 so I didn’t need to ask.’

  Herbert telephoned Doug Ryan, general manager of the Mayfair Crest Hotel on the corner of Roma and Ann streets to arrange a room for a meeting between Rooklyn and Lewis. Ryan knew Herbert through his brother-in-law, Barry Maxwell, close friend to Terry Lewis. He later described his relationship with Herbert as a ‘nodding acquaintance’.

  ‘I do recall on one occasion him [Herbert] ringing me to organise a room in which to have a meeting,’ Ryan said. ‘This in itself was not out of the ordinary as in our capacity as hoteliers we have been called on by ASIO and Special Branch to let them have the use of a room for confidential meetings.’

  Ryan knew Herbert was not a policeman at the time, ‘but I had a feeling that he was doing something for the force’.

  He added that he didn’t remember if the room Herbert was booking was for Commissioner Lewis. ‘I’m sure that if he had mentioned that I would have thought it a bit strange that Terry Lewis hadn’t rung me as I knew him a lot better than Jack Herbert,’ Ryan added.

  Lewis’s diary entry for Tuesday 12 June 1979, read: ‘To Crest Hotel re luncheon re machines in Police Club.’ Could this have been the meeting with Rooklyn that Herbert was arranging for the Commissioner?

  The maitre d’hotel at the Crest was Serge Pregliasco. He was responsible for the service of breakfast in the hotel’s Early American Inn, and lunch in its First Floor restaurant. He had worked at the Crest since April 1977, but had extensive experience in the hotel industry. For example, he had been the maitre d’hotel at the Chandeliers Restaurant in the Chevron Hotel in Sydney for some time. It was there he first met Sydney businessman Jack Rooklyn.

  ‘Mr Rooklyn acknowledged me on occasions when I saw him and attended to him at the hotel,’ Pregliasco recalled later. ‘Rooklyn is of a very distinctive appearance and is well known in Sydney.’

  While Pregliasco had a drinking problem that had come to the attention of his superiors, he was good at his job and well liked by staff.

  Then one day he said he was given a special assignment. ‘I can remember one occasion when the hotel general manager, Mr Doug Ryan, requested me to take a bottle of wine to one of the two penthouse suites,’ he recalled. ‘I do not recall whether the bottle was of wine or of champagne.

  ‘It was not a very common occurrence for me, as maitre d’hotel, to take wine up to the rooms as this would normally be done by the room service waiters. However, sometimes with special VIP guests, Ryan told me that it was better to have a more senior man perform this task.’

  Pregliasco said he took the bottle to the room. ‘When I entered the room I recognised two people,’ he later recalled. ‘One of these people was Jack Rooklyn, who I recognised from my time in Sydney. The other was … Terence Lewis. I recognised … Terence by virtue of the fact that he is a prominent person and you generally recognise prominent people. I had no doubts that it was … Terence. I have a vague recollection there may have been someone else in the room, but I really cannot be certain of this.’

  Pregliasco said Rooklyn recognised him. ‘You are from Sydney?’ he supposedly asked.

  ‘Yes,’ replied Serge.

  Rooklyn was chuffing on his customary cigar. ‘From my obser­vations of Mr Rooklyn when I knew him in Sydney he almost always had a cigar,’ the maitre d’hotel said. ‘I was not in the room for more than a few minutes. I opened the wine bottle and poured drinks. I think there was already food in the room.’

  Herbert later claimed he too was at the meeting, and that he had heard Rooklyn offer Lewis $25,000 for an adverse report.

  ‘Terry nodded and Rooklyn said to him, “Don’t let the other side get to you.” Terry replied, “I never change horses mid-stream.”

  ‘They shook hands.’

  Jobs for the Boys

  Heading into the winter of 1979, rumour was rife in political and media circles in Brisbane that Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s long-time media officer, Allen Callaghan, was to resign. Callaghan had been with the Premier since joining Bjelke-Petersen’s personal staff in May 1971, having been an ABC Queensland political reporter. He was 31 years old.

  Callaghan had performed miracles with Joh, turning a country bumpkin into a polished, albeit eccentric media performer. The soil of a Kingaroy peanut farm was still in Joh’s delivery, but he learned how to be quick on his feet and appealed to the public as a straw-chewing hillbilly who also happened to be a brilliant politician. The ultimate masterstroke, however, was to turn Bjelke-Petersen into a sort of befuddled clown and redneck who had nothing but Queensland at the forefront of his mind.

  Joh’s comic quips, devoured by the media – particularly in southern states – masked what was really going on in the Sunshine State, and may have contributed to a lack of genuine scrutiny of political, and indeed, police corruption. Joh was just a silly old duffer who didn’t need to be taken seriously. Or so it seemed.

  Eight years later – his work done – Callaghan had become a little jaded. He needed a change.


  Lewis says Callaghan was a ‘likeable bloke’. ‘I always found him a bloody good brain,’ Lewis says. ‘I believe he built Joh up. I found Joh a decent bloke but he wasn’t the polished bloody politician or performer that I think Allen turned him into. He put words into his mouth. I give him great credit.’

  Bjelke-Petersen himself recorded in his memoir: ‘Some people have said Allen made me accessible to the media. That is not true – I had always been accessible to the media. What Allen Callaghan did do was to make the media more accessible to me and so help me promote myself.’

  The rumours proved to be true.

  Callaghan resigned and was almost immediately installed as Deputy Coordinator and Promotions Officer for the Department of Culture, National Parks and Recreation. In Bjelke-Petersen’s own words, the Premier had ‘found him a senior government job’.

  Fortuitously, on 1 July, the Queensland Film Corporation moved from being under the auspices of the Department of the Premier and Cabinet to that of Callaghan’s new department. Fulfilling a long-held ambition, he became its chairman. In the arid cultural landscape under the National Party, Callaghan had his work cut out for him.

  A Cheery Hello from an Old Soldier

  On 27 August 1979, a typed three-page letter landed in Commissioner Lewis’s in-tray.

  The professional letterhead declared it was from a fibreglass boatbuilding business called Sea Strike Enterprises, based in Harvey Creek Road, Bellenden Ker, 50 kilometres south of Cairns in Far North Queensland. The author was none other than Gunther Bahnemann – former World War II sniper under Rommel, defector, sailor, author and attempted murderer of Glen Patrick Hallahan.

  In 1959, Lewis and Hallahan had been virtual celebrities in Brisbane after they disarmed the ‘crazed gunman’ Bahnemann one strange night in Lota, east of the city. Both men won the George Medal for Bravery – the state’s highest honour for a policeman.