Little Fish Are Sweet

by Matthew Condon

  The meticulous detail within the files also revealed another side to the man – when he made enemies, they remained enemies – and he had a formidable memory when it suited him.

  I often sat across from Lewis and marvelled at his recall of the past, of various incidents, names and dates. He talked for hours about his first weeks of training at the police barracks at Petrie Terrace in the summer of 1948, his time under Frank Bischof in the CIB in the 1950s, and the formation and early years of the Juvenile Aid Bureau (JAB).

  Equally, I found it puzzling when he could recall little about more controversial milestones in his career – the hours alone with Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen on the airstrip at Cunnamulla in the winter of 1976 when he was given the first inkling into his possible commissionership, the Clarence Howard-Osborne paedophilia case, the drama around Senior Constable Dave Moore in the early 1980s, and so on.

  Still, his cache of documents was impressive, many of them originals. But of all the records that came my way during the research for the books, the formal statement of police officer and straight shooter Charlie Corner – made and signed on 15 September 1975 – was one of the most interesting.

  Corner had claimed for years that Frank Bischof was corrupt, and had opposed his elevation to the commissionership in 1958, despite the potential havoc that that could have wreaked on his career at the time. In 1975, with Ray Whitrod still the police commissioner, the by then retired Corner typed out a single-spaced manifesto on the corruption he had come across in his 34-year career as a Queensland police officer. It began, ‘Charles Fenwick Shotton Corner states …’

  What Corner essentially outlined was the origin of a vast corruption network that would later evolve into what became known as The Joke, with Jack ‘The Bagman’ Herbert as its guiding hand. In its earlier incarnation, as Corner claimed, the corruption was controlled by Francis Erich Bischof.

  Corner had been sworn into the police force on 28 June 1938. Within months of joining the force, he was transferred to the wilds of Mount Isa. The officer in charge of the station was Sergeant Sam Rutter (sworn-in in 1912). As Corner outlined in his statement: ‘I was informed by a man named Mick Bjelicoe that he was paying Rutter money to conduct a Gaming House known as the “Shanghai” which was situated on the banks of the Leichhardt River. Rutter was also receiving protection money from Sly Grog operators at Mount Isa and those that would not pay him were kept under surveillance by police at Rutters’ instructions.’

  Corner noted that hotels were still trading into the early hours of the morning – well after the legislated 10 p.m. closing time, with the ‘full knowledge of the Police and the State Government’.

  He wrote:

  Mr Norman Smith, who was the State Government member for Carpentaria, was the licensee of the Mount Isa Hotel at the time and he informed me that it was Government policy for the hotels to trade behind doors.

  SP betting was rampant and the various premises where these offences were being committed were raided occasionally but the betting books were returned to the operators who continued their activities in full view of police.

  (In 1952, A.J. ‘Norman’ Smith was asked by the Courier-Mail if off-course betting should be legalised. He said: ‘My personal opinion is that the whole of the State should have legalised SP betting.’)

  Everywhere Corner looked, he found corruption. When he was transferred to Townsville, it was there as well. He viewed the town as ‘rotten with Gambling and Sly Grog trading’. When he landed at the State Licensing Branch in Brisbane, he was astonished at the laziness of his colleagues. Corner wrote:

  There was a game of baccarat being played at 31 Mary Street [the city] and I know that large sums of money were won and lost nightly. One night I was checking Brisbane clubs with Sergeant Bert Worth and I suggested to him that we raid 31 Mary Street.

  Worth stated that we would get into trouble if we raided the game without permission but he compromised by stating he would telephone Inspector Smith about the matter. I entered a phone box with Worth near the Repatriation Offices in Albert Street, Brisbane, and Worth contacted Inspector Smith and advised him of the game of baccarat. I distinctly heard the voice of Inspector Smith say, ‘Leave it alone’.

  Corner wrote that there was ‘so much interference’ at the Licensing Branch that he was unable to perform his duties. He applied to go back to uniform.

  When his work put him in contact with prostitutes and the city’s brothels, he was confronted with a new problem. After arresting a prostitute for vagrancy in the Nott Street brothel at West End, he was called into the office of then Inspector Bischof. Corner recalled:

  … he questioned me on the arrest of the prostitute. Later at the court, Inspector J. Mahoney, Prosecutor, informed me that Bischof had telephoned him and instructed that he get the prostitute a remanded bail in her own bond and she would ‘go through’. This was done and the prostitute left Brisbane.

  Inspector Bischof’s action interfered with the course of justice and he assisted the prostitute to abscond from the charge.

  Corner was later told by brothel madams that ‘Inspector Bischof was collecting weekly from the houses of ill-fame in Brisbane’.

  Another suspect character Corner observed was none other than one of the famed members of the so-called Rat Pack and purportedly one of Bischof’s bagmen. Corner had no time for the young up-and-coming detective they nicknamed ‘Silent’.

  A Detective named Glen Patrick Hallahan operated at the CI Branch and whilst he was a junior member of the Police he was allowed by [the] Inspector to do just as he pleased. [The inspector] informed me that Hallahan was doing jobs for Mr Bischof and himself. It was general knowledge at CI Branch that Hallahan was collecting graft for Bischof … Hallahan was known to be allowing criminals to commit offences in exchange for information and his information was invariably tied up with prostitution.

  The diligent Corner concluded that a royal commission was the only method of ‘flushing out’ police graft. ‘I am prepared to give sworn evidence at any inquiry into police corruption but I hope that any inquiry does not start from the bottom of the seniority list which is usually the case in Queensland,’ he said.

  Corner was spot on. But the inquiry he had longed for would not emerge for another 12 years.

  As I was finalising material to be included in the trilogy, Corner’s daughter, Janette Harris, wrote to me from her home in Sussex in the United Kingdom. She said her father was a ‘deep, clever man’ but ‘very hard to live with’ and ‘a difficult father’. ‘He was an incredibly hard worker, having the house and garden immaculate,’ she wrote.

  I never saw him idle, always writing [and] studying. He had a punch bag under the house and used it every day as well as fast skipping. He loathed laziness, drunks, prostitution, law-breakers and dishonesty.

  At 69, I now realise as a man battling against corruption

  (I was always aware of this as a child) he must have been under tremendous pressure. There were times when he felt threatened and slept under the house with a loaded gun. I was just aware there were people who had a grudge against him and you could feel an atmosphere.

  When Inspector Charles Corner retired in 1972 after 34 years in the service, he dumped his Queensland police uniform in a rubbish bin. He later told the press he had wasted his career, mired as it was in the corruption of others.

  When I recently pulled Charles Corner’s clippings file from the library at News Queensland headquarters, I found tucked inside a letter he had written to the editor of the Sunday Mail, dated 16 August 1987 – a month or so after the commencement of the Fitzgerald Inquiry hearings. Corner was responding to a feature in the newspaper. Headlined EIGHT LONG DAYS, the piece contained extracts of the diaries of then Assistant Commissioner and friend to Terry Lewis, Don Braithwaite, and outlined how the reputations of good and honest senior police had been maligned by the inquiry, and in particular, by journali
sts who were willing to shred people’s reputations on the slightest premise.

  The article had so incensed Corner, he typed his one-page letter on the day of publication from his home in Catto Street, Toowoomba.

  If Mr Braithwaite considers that Police have become Society’s dustmen then it is because of their own making, and if proper administration and supervision had been exercised in the first place there would be no reason for ‘Four Corners’ programmes or Commissions of Inquiry.

  My heart bleeds for the Political toadying of our senior Police, but I must away as my tears may saturate this document.

  The Dodger

  It took some time for me to establish an interview rhythm with Terry Lewis. There in his dark study, we’d pick up where we left off the time before, slowly but surely grinding through the years of his life and career.

  In the week or two between our meetings, I would use the intervening time to follow up on things we’d discussed. Specific incidents, a certain crime, perhaps. It might have been a case that Lewis had been involved in or a crisis that had hit the force at a particular time. I’d gather documents independent of Lewis, then try and track down any living players who could shed light on the era we happened to be discussing. In that way, week in, week out, I could try and test the veracity of Lewis’s information.

  At one point we got to the tragedy of the Whiskey Au Go Go nightclub fire in March 1973, and through interviews with several people I learned that a particular New South Wales police officer, Roger Rogerson, had been sent to Brisbane on the morning after the blaze at the nightclub in St Paul’s Terrace, Fortitude Valley, to help investigators track the culprits.

  Fifteen people lost their lives in the fire, which was considered to be Australia’s worst mass murder at the time. Ultimately, John Andrew Stuart and James Finch were charged and sentenced. Stuart protested his innocence and claimed he was verballed in police interviews. Six years into his life sentence he was found dead in his Boggo Road cell.

  Through contacts, I managed to get Rogerson’s mobile phone number, and I called him one morning about the Whiskey firebombing and his involvement as a crack Special Crime Squad officer from Sydney.

  Rogerson, at the time of the Whiskey inferno, was in his early thirties and on the rise, well on his way to becoming one of the most highly decorated police officers in New South Wales history. On the phone he was gregarious and forthcoming. He was generous with his time and our discussion proved to be a rambling jaunt down memory lane.

  ‘When it [the Whiskey fire] happened … Noel Morey and myself were sent up from Sydney. We worked with the homicide blokes up there, Syd Atkinson … we investigated homicides and any special type of thing that came along. Our job was mainly underworld murders and a lot of others as well. The Toe Cutter Gang … we worked on that for a long time.’

  The Toe Cutters were a notorious Sydney gang who, in the early 1970s, wanted to muscle in on the takings of the $500,000 Mayne Nickless robbery in the Sydney suburb of Guildford, 25 kilometres west of the CBD. Not long afterwards, three Melbourne underworld figures who committed the robbery disappeared. Sydney police believed the three men were tortured by the gang and had their toes cut off with bolt cutters. Soon after, members of the gang also started vanishing. One, Kevin Victor Gore, was said to have met his fate at the hand of gangster Stewart John Regan.

  Queensland police told me that Regan himself had flown up to Brisbane at the time of the Whiskey incident. James Finch, who would ultimately be charged with starting the fire, had been gaoled in Sydney seven years earlier for attempting to shoot the young Regan.

  I asked Rogerson if, in those early years, he was acquainted with the so-called Queensland Rat Pack – Glen Hallahan, Tony Murphy and Terry Lewis.

  ‘I had little to do with Tony Murphy but I got to know Glen pretty well,’ Rogerson recalled. ‘Prior to working with Noel Morey I spent nine months on the Motor Squad in Sydney; organised car theft and stripping of cars, that sort of thing. There was a murder up in Queensland, some girl got murdered. There was a huge investigation trying to track down a particular motor car. I remember two or three guys came down from Brisbane, among them was Glen Hallahan. I think he was working as a homicide investigator.

  ‘That was the first time I met Glen. Nice enough bloke to get on with and socialise with. Once you meet a guy you remain in contact. He often rang me and I’d ring him.’

  Rogerson said he’d ‘met Murphy up there, but he was a fair bit senior to me’, and that he’d never met Terry Lewis. He could well recall the controversy surrounding the death of Shirley Brifman in 1972, because of the allegations that circulated for years that she was murdered by corrupt New South Wales police detective Fred Krahe.

  ‘It was a tragedy about Fred,’ Rogerson recalled. ‘Fred was one of the smartest blokes you’d meet in your life – a great organiser. He did some bloody great investigations here in Sydney. Late on in life … he and Noel Morey worked on the Safe and Arson Squad. He’d drink a bottle of scotch in his office a day. Cranky. Never hold a conversation with him – he just lost it.’

  Could Krahe have possibly travelled from Sydney to Brisbane in March 1972, gained entry into Brifman’s safe house in Bonney Avenue, Clayfield, and forced drugs and scotch down her throat and killed her, as the rumours went?

  ‘Fred was never on the Vice Squad. He was in charge of the Breaking Squad. Very abrasive. If you upset him he’d give you a gobful. He was jealous of anyone who he thought was being good at their job. I didn’t like him …

  ‘Fred, he had a bit of a streak in him. Married man. Lived in a nice home around Coogee or Bronte. He would only have been looking after things on behalf of Hallahan. In reality, as far as protection, it would have to have been … Fred would have had to have gotten onto someone on the Vice Squad.

  ‘If Shirley ran a really nice joint in Ithaca Road and had a good clientele base, there’d never be a complaint about girls knocking off blokes’ wallets. The high-class girls knew you only got into trouble doing that. Unless he popped down there to have a poke himself, he wouldn’t have been able to do much for her. The places that ran well didn’t have to pay, there was no reason for it.

  ‘I can’t imagine what Brifman would have had over Fred, unless they were dealing in stolen goods or diamonds. I couldn’t imagine Fred getting off his arse and going anywhere, really. He was a huge man and he was always half pissed. He was on the way out. A lot of these things just don’t make sense.’

  I asked Rogerson about Norm Allan, who was New South Wales Police Commissioner in the early 1970s during this dramatic period. Allan later resigned from the force amid allegations of corruption.

  ‘Norman Allan. The bloke was an idiot,’ said Rogerson. ‘He had no street sense. I know “Bob” Askin has been written up as [the] most corrupt Premier. Bob Askin loved a punt, loved a bet. Bob lived at Manly. When he was a local member, you could go down to the Steyne Hotel on the Corso at Manly at 11 a.m. and have a few beers with him; anyone who had any problems, they could meet him there.

  ‘All the speakeasies, all the joints, started well before Bob came along. He loved a punt. I ran into him a few times. If you were at a function, he’d always come over and say g’day and tell everyone they were doing a good job …

  ‘I had a hundred days overtime owing in the back of the duty book, rest days … I’d worked on murder cases and was supposed to take them off but I never could. Askin brought in paid overtime. I actually got a cheque from the government for all those days I’d worked. He honoured his promise; he put a bit of extra fruit on the sideboard for us, and he honoured his promise.’

  Rogerson spoke nostalgically about an era that was long gone. ‘When [former New South Wales Premier] Neville Wran got into power [in 1976] he promised all these casino people, if they weighed in heavily to his fighting fund, that things would continue as is. I know for a fact they put in $500,000,’ said Rogerson. ‘Afte
r Wran got into power – lies just seem to roll off politicians’ lips easier than the truth … he was going to close the illegal casinos down. He said to [then Police Commissioner] Merv Wood, “Shut all these places down”. But that was 6000 people out of work. It was an industry even though it was illegal.’

  Rogerson remembered John Andrew Stuart, convicted of the Whiskey fire, as a psychopathic lunatic. ‘I can only think of three loose cannons as big as Stuart: Mr Rent-A-Kill Christopher Dale Flannery; Stewart John Regan – he was an absolute psychopath; and [Queenslander] Ray “Ducky” O’Connor.’

  In the winter of 1967, O’Connor, on bail for murdering a woman in Melbourne, was standing over nightclubs in Sydney when he entered Sammy Lee’s Latin Quarter Nightclub in Pitt Street.

  A shot was fired and O’Connor fell to the floor. He’d been shot clean through the brain. Gangster Lenny McPherson was in the club at the time of the murder. He told police that O’Connor had tried to ‘knock’ him and two friends he was sitting with in the club. Nobody was ever charged with the murder.

  ‘We were feted at the CIB [in Brisbane] for coming up [for the Whiskey investigation] and giving them a hand and locking up these arseholes,’ Rogerson said.

  I asked him about the allegations concerning himself, that he was corrupt and on the take?

  ‘If I was on the take, if I made all this money, I wouldn’t be here, I’d be over on the Riviera,’ he laughed.

  Thinking again of Queensland, he said he had a vague recollection of attending a farewell party for a retiring officer, Noel McIntyre. ‘I think Terry Lewis might have been the Police Commissioner,’ he said.

  It was an interesting conversation with Rogerson not least because of the revelations that would materialise a few years after our telephone interview. In 2014, Rogerson and former detective Glen McNamara were charged with murdering student and drug dealer Jamie Gao in Sydney, and with stealing almost $750,000 in methamphetamines off Gao. Gao’s body was found dumped in the ocean off Cronulla. Both men were later found guilty.