Jacks and Jokers

by Matthew Condon

  Also, the Williams Royal Commission of Inquiry into Drugs – which had been running since October 1977 and headed by Queensland judge Edward Williams – was set to conclude.

  ‘Why am I talking now?’ Milligan asked Shobbrook. ‘Because I don’t trust Hallahan, because I’m in a great deal of trouble with you people, I haven’t been protected from you, I don’t trust Hallahan now – I haven’t since the royal commission. I’ve felt that I’m expendable …’

  It was an extraordinary tale. It involved murder, drugs and corruption within most levels of state and federal police departments, the judiciary and government. If true, what John Edward Milligan told John Shobbrook during the three days of interviews in Customs House, Circular Quay, Sydney, exposed corruption on a scale never before revealed in Australia.

  As for Queensland specifically, Milligan outlined a deeply entrenched system of corruption that involved police and various members of government, its tentacles going to the very top.

  Milligan admitted to Shobbrook that the only reason he embarked on the ambitious Jane Table Mountain drug importation was to earn money for Queensland and New South Wales crime syndicates in the absence of expected incomes from the introduction of poker machines in Queensland. He exposed a long-time underworld campaign to ensure government approval of the machines, and the millions of dollars for Bally Corporation, Bally employee Jack Rooklyn and a host of other well-known crime figures that would follow.

  Sydney businessman Jack Rooklyn and his associates, he said, had hoped to have had them installed in the Sunshine State much earlier. There was one major hurdle – Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen.

  ‘… it was taking so long to get Jo[h] Bjelke-Petersen organised with the poker machine thing … in fact in the end it was shelved for a couple of years and they’re being revived now.

  ‘Jack Rooklyn cracked up on them and said … and these are the words he used on the telephone, I was there – “It’s only a hillbilly State” – anyway and you know the financial return … it wasn’t so great compared with New South Wales that all this hassle and drama sort of continues with the Queensland politicians … proving too much of an extension for Rooklyn.’

  In the end, an impatient Rooklyn decided that if he could stop the introduction of the pokies into Queensland he could protect his investment in his in-line machines.

  It was an irony that the Premier and the decision on pokies was proving such a sticking point.

  ‘… they contained Bjelke-Petersen,’ Milligan said, going back into recent history since the removal of Police Commissioner Ray Whitrod in late 1976. ‘In the areas that they wanted, e.g. the Ministry of Police and the Ministry of Justice they had their men organised and there was such a conspiracy in Cabinet so as to keep Jo[h] Bjelke-Petersen under control in relation only to their matters and I’m particularly here referring to the matter with which I was associated with, e.g. the introduction of poker machines into Queensland.’

  Milligan alleged to Shobbrook that prior to the Whitrod coup he was instructed by Glen Hallahan to keep his head down and live quietly in his flat in New Farm until the regime transition had been effected. (Milligan did as he was told, and resided at the Glenfalloch apartments, Unit 1B, 172 Oxlade Drive, New Farm.)

  ‘One of the plans on the drawing board, which I was scheduled for involvement [in] was the introduction of poker machines in Queensland,’ Milligan said. ‘Jack Rooklyn had already handled the negotiations with San Francisco and they had a situation organised through [William] Lickiss [Liberal Attorney-General appointed in 1976] who was working for them, to arrange to introduce poker machines in Queensland subject to certain conditions and so on and so forth.

  ‘It was a very complicated plot and it was something that didn’t come to fruition because they couldn’t control Jo[h]. He’s just too erratic.’

  Another ‘friend’ was the member for Merthyr, Don ‘Shady’ Lane.

  ‘He’s too tidy and pug,’ said Milligan of Lickiss. ‘I gather, I haven’t anything direct here to prove it but he was going to get a share of the poker machine thing and another one was, um, Lane, the member for Merthyr … ex-policeman … they were very put out when he didn’t get a Ministry last time with Bjelke[-Petersen]. Oh, there’ve been many discussions.’

  Shobbrook was incredulous. And Milligan feared for his life.

  ‘I want to live,’ he implored Shobbrook. ‘I want to get married, I want to have kids; I can’t do this for the rest of my life. I can’t live the rest of my life getting deeper and deeper, and that’s what it’s becoming – has become.’

  He implied to Shobbrook that nobody had informed on the ‘Queensland group’ and survived.

  Death of the Monster

  After receiving his peculiar visitor – Clarence Osborne – at his office at the University of Queensland in 1976, criminologist Paul Wilson became fascinated with the psychopathology of the paedophile despite being disturbed by his physical presence. Wilson had authored many books on a variety of topics, and the Osborne case lured him in. Wilson was astonished at the breadth and range of Osborne’s sexual life. He would later write:

  The “boys” he formed relationships with came from diverse backgrounds. While the literature on boys who seek relationships with adult males suggests that they come from working-class homes marked by poverty, violence and general family breakdown, many hundreds, if not a thousand of the boys he had sex with, came from affluent middle-class homes … the rich, prestigious suburbs of semi-tropical Brisbane provided many young men who were, in some cases, to have clandestine affairs with a man who was old enough to be their father and, in some cases, their grandfather.

  Unbeknown to the solicitors, doctors and real estate salesmen who lived in the plushness of St. Lucia or Indooroopilly or in the hills of Hamilton, their sons were relating to a small, relatively insignificant man (at least as seen by others) with a degree of intimacy that they never manifested towards their socially and economically important fathers.

  Osborne, however, was far from a humble ‘father figure’ to lonely or neglected boys. His life was preying on underage males, so much so that everything in his life outside of his work as a court and then Hansard reporter was fashioned to facilitate his perversions. His house in Eyre Street was just 500 metres from the then main route to the Gold Coast, via Holland Park and Mount Gravatt. Osborne traversed the highway to the coast looking for and successfully picking up hundreds of young male hitchhikers.

  Also, he lived a short drive from the Garden City Shopping Centre, opened in 1971 and a magnet for the area’s youths. He would photograph boys in and around the complex, and once recorded his eternal gratitude to mothers who bought their sons ‘tight shorts’.

  Then, in late 1979, fate caught up with Clarence Osborne, world-class shorthand writer, bird breeder and child abuser. A Brisbane mother overheard her son discussing being photographed in the nude by an elderly male. The mother ultimately ascertained that someone called Clarrie Osborne had been taking pictures, not just of her son but other boys who had volunteered to pose naked.

  Without approaching the police, the concerned mother happened to mention the situation to the wife of a police officer at a social gathering. A sting was then put into play. The officer organised a stake-out of Osborne and witnessed the Hansard reporter photographing boys in bushland near the city.

  As Wilson would later record: ‘Police went to Clarence Osborne’s house [in Mount Gravatt], searched it thoroughly and took three car loads of tape-recordings, files and photographs, together with Osborne himself, back to police headquarters.

  ‘As the police involved were not from the squad which usually deals with such matters – the juvenile aid squad [sic] – they were reluctant to take further action against Osborne until the material had been more thoroughly perused and legal advice on what Osborne could specifically be charged with was obtained.

  ‘What we do know, howe
ver, is that the police were most cooperative with Osborne for reasons that are still unclear. They did, after all, drive him back to his house.’

  Extraordinarily, a man found in possession of thousands of photographs of naked children and audio recordings of his sexual encounters with them and who freely discussed with police his predilections and modus operandi during his short interview time with them, was free to go and in fact given a lift home to 54 Eyre Street.

  However, former Juvenile Aid Bureau officer Dougal McMillan says the JAB was not informed of the Osborne case on the day he was brought in by CIB officers and questioned. ‘They [the original investigating officers] never came near us,’ McMillan says. ‘I was absolutely stunned when I heard this story. I couldn’t understand why the CIB hadn’t followed it up and they’d let him go.’

  Had the case, of its type unprecedented in Queensland criminal history, been brought to the attention of Commissioner Terence Lewis? With Lewis as the spiritual father of the Juvenile Aid Bureau, as appointed by Frank Bischof, and with the voluminous details of Osborne’s activities only just being realised and referred on to the JAB, did word get back to the man at the top?

  Not according to his Commissioner’s diaries. On Tuesday 11 September 1979, the day Osborne was questioned at headquarters, Lewis does however coincidentally record, as his last business for the day, prior to knocking off at 6 p.m., a call he made to ‘Dr Paul Wilson re course for prospective Supt’s’.

  That night, Osborne, sitting at home in Eyre Street, surrounded by his ‘life’s work’ inside a house rigged with secret microphones and recording equipment, wrote a note explaining he had been questioned by police and that ‘this was the best way’.

  He then went into the garage down a driveway on the northern side of the house. He hooked a hose up to his exhaust pipe and into the cabin of his vehicle, started the engine and pressed ‘record’ on the audio equipment he had similarly rigged in the vehicle, and used countless times to record his illicit conversations with boys and the sounds of their sexual trysts.

  Osborne, ever the pedant, allegedly recorded his own last words: ‘I’ve been sitting here ten minutes and I’m still alive …’

  Osborne’s body was discovered the following day – Wednesday 12 September.

  That day, Lewis spoke with a fellow officer about the behaviour of Licensing Branch officer Bruce Wilby, called a Dr Ian Wilkie regarding an upcoming Child Accident Prevention Conference, and attended a cocktail party at the Crest Hotel in the city. Before that, however, he had reason to phone Dr Paul Wilson again regarding the academic’s ‘biased view and comments’ made on a Nationwide television report. There is no mention of Osborne or his death, despite talking with Osborne’s future biographer twice in two days.

  On the Thursday, Lewis again remonstrated with Wilson regarding his ‘incorrect claims on Nationwide’. Wilson recalls that he later approached Lewis about the possibilities of interviewing detectives in relation to the Osborne case.

  Dougal McMillan went out to the Mt Gravatt house after Osborne’s body had been removed. He took with him a Justice of the Peace. With Osborne dead, there was no one on whom to serve a search warrant.

  ‘There were stacks of files – some of them quite old – on all sorts of things,’ he recalls. ‘He’d also been conducting some bodybuilding in the backyard. He really had stuff there that wasn’t fit to broadcast. There were many photographs of boys at certain stages of development. They were not appropriate. We found out he’d had a big fire in the backyard on the night that he died.’

  The Osborne files were moved to JAB headquarters on the fourth floor of the old Egg Board Building in Makerston Street and secured in a safe. ‘My understanding is the case went as high up as the Premier’s office because of who Osborne was,’ McMillan says.

  Osborne was cremated in the last week of September. On Thursday 20 September, a small death notice appeared in the Courier-Mail. ‘Osborne, Clarence Henry, of Eyre Street, Mount Gravatt. Passed away at home 12.9.79. Sadly missed friend of John and Pauline and “Uncle” of Peter and Geoffrey. There will be no funeral service as requested.’

  It wasn’t until 30 September that the Sunday Mail outlined details of the case of the MONSTER SNARED BY HIS CAMERA.

  Detective Sergeant Don Reay, of the Juvenile Aid Bureau, reportedly said it would take three months for three officers to work through the Osborne material, stored in steel filing cabinets. ‘There must be a message in all this, but at this stage we can’t work it out,’ Detective Seargeant Reay said.

  He encouraged Osborne’s victims to come forward. ‘We would like them to witness destruction of their files,’ Reay added. The files, he said, would be reduced to ashes following their analysis.

  At the time of the ‘monster’s’ death, Dr Paul Wilson was galvanising his idea to write a book on the life and times of Clarence Osborne, having waded through a selection of the eccentric stenographer’s photographs, index cards and unpublished memoir. The book – The Man They Called a Monster – would be published two years after Osborne’s death. It would argue that Osborne had been misunderstood, and that he had basically acted as a father figure to young boys who had little or no meaningful communication with their own fathers.

  In one of the notes accompanying the book, Wilson thanks a good friend for his help in being able to interview several detectives in the Juvenile Aid Bureau who worked on the Osborne case.

  ‘The Commissioner of The [sic] Queensland Police Force granted me permission to interview … detectives. His assistance in this respect is gratefully acknowledged.’

  Boxes

  Jim Slade was finally where he wanted to be.

  He was working in the Bureau of Criminal Intelligence, and was being mentored by Tony Murphy, one of the finest police officers he’d ever worked under.

  But after almost two and a half years of exciting, non-stop work in the bureau, he began to see things that didn’t quite fit. The lifestyles and habits of some of his colleagues weren’t matching their salaries.

  ‘Alan Barnes would go in on raids and it was nothing for him to take us all out to dinner later, and for him to sit down and drink two bottles of Dom Pérignon Champagne,’ Slade remembers. ‘When I found out it was $100 a bottle I nearly died. There was no way in the world he could afford $100 bottles of wine. I knew something was going on there.’

  Another officer had a new car every year. Others had boats worth thousands of dollars, purchased without a loan. Some officers regularly bought and sold houses.

  ‘It was quite obvious to me and Norm [Sprenger] that some of them were on the take,’ says Slade.

  Other officers were often exceedingly violent against certain offenders. One had a depth of violence that shocked even Slade.

  ‘He possessed an incredible violence,’ Slade recalls. ‘He was a very, very good boxer. He just showed no mercy. Where another police officer would hit once, this guy couldn’t stop. He’d absolutely just tear that person down.

  ‘If he was sent to do a job by anyone … whoever he was set upon they’d have to watch their p’s and q’s.’

  To Slade’s mind, some of them were not only capable of grievous bodily harm, but murder. ‘By that time in life I was able to pick some of the corrupt people, and a most interesting thing came to my attention,’ he says. ‘Most people that were protégés of most people I knew to be corrupt turned out to be corrupt. But most people who were protégés of people who were honest like Fred Maynard and a few others were never corrupt.

  ‘When I say corrupt I’m talking about going in, picking up a briefcase full of money, and walking out with it and splitting it.

  ‘Another interesting thing I reckoned was that most of those people not corrupt had really strong family backgrounds, the corrupt ones didn’t. Maybe the importance of family was a consideration with the corruption side of things.

  ‘I was able to put them i
n boxes. You work with him? I’m going to have to look out for you. Nine times out of ten I’d be right.’

  Slade said he never personally saw Murphy or Barnes take money.

  Then again, by his own admission, he wasn’t looking very hard. ‘I tried to explain to my wife that I was so engrossed in what I was doing – it was nothing for me to have major investigations like Terry Clark, the painters and dockers … undercover operations where we were running informants for other detectives,’ says Slade.

  ‘I cursed myself for not identifying it and doing more about it. But when you’re in that situation … if it’s not affecting you, maybe you let it go.’

  Spy vs Spy

  In the first week of November 1979 an extraordinary collision of events rang alarm bells not just with Lewis and the other members of the old Rat Pack, but within government, both state and federal.

  Firstly, Terrance Clark, head of the Mr Asia drug syndicate, was arrested and held in London following the discovery of the handless body of Christopher Johnstone in a quarry in Lancashire. Clark had been wanted for questioning over the Wilson murders, among others, after he had slipped the net in Brisbane.

  Secondly, the interim report of Justice Williams’ Royal Commission of Inquiry into Drugs recommended that the Federal Narcotics Bureau, described as inefficient and only mindful of its own image, be disbanded and its duties taken over by the new Australian Federal Police Force.

  Thirdly, Justice Woodward in New South Wales tabled his own report into drug trafficking, and in it named several major gangs responsible for the bulk of Australia’s drug importations. One was ‘The Milligan Group’.

  Brisbane-based Federal Narcotics Agent John Moller, recuperating from a serious motorcycle accident, was incensed at the proposed dismantling of the bureau, and was nominated by his fellow agents to defend the bureau on a local talkback radio show. He spoke on condition of anonymity. His quotes about Milligan and his links to Queensland police and politicians were subsequently picked up by the Courier-Mail.