Little Fish Are Sweet

by Matthew Condon

  ‘I personally was never sure whether Gibbs was aware or not, whether he was getting the full story. But his then associate, he came out at the beginning of this year, I don’t know what prompted it, and stated quite clearly that Gibbs was aware that he was not getting the full story.

  ‘I don’t think for one moment that Gibbs was corrupt. But it raises very interesting questions as to what is the duty of a Commissioner who is appointed to find the truth? Is he restricted from taking his own initiative? Does it depend on gaining the government’s further authority to investigate?’

  ‘So, who would have signed off, made the final decision about Gibbs as Commissioner?’

  ‘It would have been Cabinet,’ the former clerk said.

  ‘He certainly stuck by the terms of reference,’ I commented.

  ‘Yes, they knew he would, and one senior prosecutor assured Bill [Ryan] and the others that he would … that he would not deviate one iota from the terms of reference.’

  Our conversation turned to Bischof’s evidence at the inquiry. ‘Bischof treated the commission almost as a joke,’ I observed.

  ‘He did.’

  ‘With disdain.’

  ‘He did, because he knew, I think, at that stage … the outcome. Look, it was a joke because people who knew the detectives better than I did, they knew what they [the detectives] were up to. They … were perjuring themselves one after the other, it’s all been, you know, part of the evidence. It was a farce really, an absolute farce. It was all, as royal commissions often are, just window-dressing to get over this problem with the police.’

  ‘But it had a really important impact,’ I said. ‘Bischof knew he could escape a royal commission.’

  ‘He did, and Lewis and the others knew that as well, they knew they had a green light to the game. Yeah, there’s no doubt about that. Yes, it’s tragic.’

  ‘How long did he [Ryan] stay in the job?’

  ‘Well, he was there until retirement. I left in ’69. I was sick of the politics … to be honest. It was a very difficult, unpleasant place.’

  I arrive at Lewis’s house to see Prince on the balcony sniffing the air. There is a red car in the driveway. It’s Lewis’s carer/cleaner. Lewis looks like he’s just gotten out of bed – dark navy trousers, black shoes, a jumper rolled up above his elbows and another long-sleeved shirt underneath. The only thing impeccable is his 1940s hairstyle, the part just left of centre.

  He seems amiable around his carer and talks to me happily about Prince. He says this week was Prince’s tenth birthday. He stares down at the little terrier. It is eating from a bowl on the verandah. ‘Some people might think you’re crazy,’ he says to me, ‘but when I got off the phone to you before, I told him it was Matthew.’

  We have arrived at the point where we’ll discuss the lead-up to the Fitzgerald Inquiry, Lewis’s sacking and the subsequent charges against him and his trial. Lewis tells me he went to Kenmore yesterday and picked up his trial transcript from his lawyers.

  Today I ask questions about how Lewis felt when his life fell so swiftly and spectacularly into ruin from the Fitzgerald Inquiry announcement onwards. One moment he was the top police officer in the state, a knight of the realm, living in a new house he’d built at Garfield Drive, below the Bardon water tower (he insists the ‘rich people’ lived on the other side of the road, overlooking the city) and contemplating buying a unit at Burleigh Heads on the Gold Coast as well as considering a position as Agent-General in London or Los Angeles, as promised by Bjelke-Petersen; the next he was being interrogated by lawyers of the Fitzgerald Inquiry, stood aside, then sacked against his protestations, with his wife Hazel going on the dole.

  He had everything, and much to look forward to, then nothing.

  Once again during our interview he maintains his innocence. He never knew of corruption. He never knew Herbert was as corrupt as he was. He was shocked that Assistant Commissioner Graeme Parker admitted to corruption. It seems, talking with Lewis, he was the only person who didn’t know what was going on beyond his desk.

  He repeatedly tells me the whole thing was political. It was all engineered to get rid of Bjelke-Petersen. It was all about Bill Gunn wanting to become premier, and Ron Redmond wanting to become Commissioner of Police.

  He tells me he tried to warn Bjelke-Petersen about the political machinations, that Tony Fitzgerald was an ALP man and hated the Premier, that it was a fix to bring down the government. He says Joh took his eyes off the ball, that he was too preoccupied with becoming prime minister. He says Joh didn’t show his usual sharpness and adroitness when it came to the inquiry. Lewis couldn’t get through to the Premier the gravity of what was unfolding, and the dangers behind the scenes.

  The story he tells me has simple and familiar roots. It has become a

  Boy’s Own tale of good versus evil. Perhaps that is all that is left after thirty

  years of any story, even as one as big as his. That over time the detail evaporates, and Lewis, left here alone in the world and with decades to ponder it daily, comes away with a few distilled drops in a beaker. The drops are what he believes to be truth. His truth. Nothing will sway him from that.

  But I do notice, when the questions get harder, that the ground beneath his feet becomes less certain. There are gaps in his memory, forgotten names and incidents, a hesitancy. I can’t be sure if this is deliberate or legitimate given the distance from events. It is proving the phantom in the room – memory.

  As I get up to leave I tell Lewis I have a few theories about The Joke, the men who ran it, the men who ultimately controlled corruption in the force and how the puzzle fitted together behind the scenes. I tell him he must tell me if I’m on the wrong track.

  ‘I will,’ he says.

  I stress further that it is absolutely crucial that he tell me when I stray from the path, when the theories go off in the wrong direction. I tell him this is vital. That we’re writing for history.

  As I turn at the door he pats my shoulder reassuringly.

  ‘You are not on the wrong track,’ Lewis says.

  Marge

  In the first year of interviewing Terry Lewis in Brisbane I became fascinated with the alleged suicide of Shirley Margaret Brifman, the prostitute and brothel madam who was found dead of a drug overdose in the front room of a flat in Bonney Avenue, Clayfield, in early March 1972.

  Anyone with even the remotest interest in true crime in the Sunshine State had heard of the Brifman case. It was as if she was, for people of my vintage, a shadow on the landscape. Her death had been fortuitous for some. She had been due to appear as chief witness in the perjury trial of Detective Tony Murphy, stemming from evidence he gave before the National Hotel inquiry in late 1963 and early 1964. However Brifman didn’t live long enough to make her testimony against him, and in her absence the case against Murphy did not proceed.

  Brifman had come down from Far North Queensland in the late 1950s and worked in Brisbane as a prostitute – on occasion using the pseudonym ‘Marge’ – paying kickback money to the likes of Murphy and Glen Patrick Hallahan.

  She too had perjured herself before the National Hotel royal commission, denying she was a working prostitute. She had bolted to Sydney before the inquiry began its hearings, and had set up in the notorious inner-city suburbs of Kings Cross and Potts Point. She would build a formidable brothel empire through the 1960s and into the 70s.

  Then in 1971, she was charged with procuring her own daughter, Mary Anne Brifman, 13, for the purposes of prostitution. Given the amount of corrupt monies she’d paid to dozens of police both in Queensland and New South Wales, Shirley Brifman expected the charge to disappear. It didn’t.

  In retaliation, she appeared in a live interview on the ABC current affairs program This Day Tonight, alleging corruption in the police force. She had lit a sizeable fuse. After her public confession she was encouraged to return to Queensland with her
husband, Sonny, and her four children, where it was believed she would be safer. It was poor advice.

  Meanwhile, from mid-1971 and into 1972, Brifman was repeatedly interviewed by police about her corruption allegations. All of these interviews were transcribed. Not long after I started talking to Lewis it became clear that I had to find a copy of the Brifman transcripts, not just to get an insight into the woman herself, but to explore her allegations.

  On a whim one Friday night at home, I went onto Facebook and typed Mary Anne Brifman into the search engine. Up came a woman, perhaps in her mid-50s, who bore a strong resemblance to Shirley Brifman. I had nothing to lose, so I sent Mary Anne a private message, outlining who I was and the book I was working on with Terry Lewis.

  I got a response half an hour later, confirming that she was indeed the daughter of the late prostitute and brothel madam, and that she would be happy to talk. In less than a week we were on the phone to each other.

  I had been told by family and friends that Shirley Brifman, though diminutive in stature, was a human dynamo and had a savvy intelligence about her. I had heard that she was endearing and charming, and that if I ever had the opportunity of speaking with her daughter, Mary Anne, it would be like talking to Shirley herself.

  It was Mary Anne who had found her mother’s body on that Saturday morning of 4 March 1972. She was a teenager then; old enough to have powerful memories of that unforgettable moment when she had walked into that front room at Bonney Avenue with her little brother, Sydney, and seen her mother half-propped up on pillows, one hand held in a claw.

  I was due to head to the 2011 Sydney Writers’ Festival and arranged to meet Brifman in person for an interview. Mary Anne told me that I’d be picked up from my hotel and driven to her home in north-western Sydney. And so I found myself in Walsh Bay on a beautiful winter’s day, waiting outside the Pier One hotel when a convertible pulled up; my ride to the Brifman home.

  Within the hour I was in Mary Anne’s kitchen. Mary Anne was petite, a force of nature like her mother, swinging from humour to seriousness in quick succession, brimming with stories and observations, theories and facts about her mother’s untimely death.

  ‘I remember the day she [Shirley] died,’ Mary Anne said. ‘That evening I became hysterical and accused my father [of] doing something to her. I was 15. Not a lot of things were that interesting to me about my mother’s life at that time. But I always remembered that night.’

  Mary Anne would insist repeatedly to me over the next few years that a visitor had come to the flat the night before Shirley was found dead and had handed the brothel madam a vial of drugs. And the clear implication was – take these, or your children will be harmed.

  Sitting across from me in her lounge room, Mary Anne took me back to late that evening in March 1972. ‘My mother, in a conversation with me a couple of weeks before [she died], knew that she had to die,’ Mary Anne said. ‘She couldn’t take any more really.

  If she didn’t do it, they’d do it for her in a bad way. She’d had many overdoses. They delivered her something that was going to work.’

  Listening to Mary Anne I understood that she had had nearly forty years to think about that defining moment in her life. That she had seen things, back then, that no child should ever have seen.

  ‘Nobody would help her,’ she said of her mother during the latter months of 1971. ‘The more she told, the less they wanted to help her. I think she was conflicted over that. In the end, I think she was very desperate and thought naively that by saying all these things … she spent weeks in interviews, not days but weeks, and none of that stuff is out. I do think she was hoping this would buy her protection and bring some justice.’

  Shirley Brifman’s interviews with police constituted dozens of pages of transcript.

  The explosive television interview had occurred on 15 June 1971, at the ABC’s old Gore Hill studios in Sydney. By 9 July, Brifman was sitting in the office of her lawyer, Colin Bennett, at the Inns of Court in North Quay, Brisbane, ready to be interviewed by Assistant Police Commissioner A.B. ‘Abe’ Duncan.

  As I left Mary Anne’s house that day and returned to the writers’ festival I knew I needed to secure a copy of the Brifman interview transcripts. But how?

  In Brisbane, I had met the true crime writer and investigative journalist Tony Reeves and instantly warmed to him. I was immensely impressed by his skills as a writer. He had been writing about the Sydney criminal underworld and bent cops for decades, from the Juanita Nielsen murder through to George Freeman and Lenny McPherson. He had a vast knowledge of the period when Shirley Brifman was at the peak of her trade through the 1960s. When I asked Tony how I might go about procuring a copy of the notorious Brifman police interviews, he just grinned.

  ‘Ask me,’ he said.

  Reeves had a copy of portions of the records of interview, but primarily those that dealt with Brifman and corrupt Sydney police officers and the criminal milieu in the Emerald City. Tony slipped me a compact disc with the files. With his usual meticulousness, he had annotated the files, and written a sort of coda to the characters and incidents that littered the transcripts.

  For the Queensland component of the interviews, I reached out to Walkley Award–winning journalist Phil Dickie, who’d played a large part in triggering what would become the Fitzgerald Inquiry in 1987, alongside the extraordinary work of Chris Masters and his epochal Four Corners report, ‘The Moonlight State’. Dickie, living in Switzerland at the time, also offered to assist. He had a copy in his papers held by the State Library of Queensland, and granted me permission to view the records and make a copy.

  I was soon able to put together the full Shirley Brifman records of interview. When I finally read them, typed and tight-spaced, I immediately recognised, in Shirley’s recorded answers, the same free-flowing method of recollection and annunciation that her daughter Mary Anne possessed.

  The testimony of Brifman is extraordinary, and although the police questioning from both Queensland and New South Wales detectives does not move forward linearly, the transcript detonates on route with stories of prostitution, bank and jewellery store robberies, murders, sex, parties, thuggery, blackmail, prison, booze and corrupt police. With what I had learned about the flawed National Hotel inquiry, it was thrilling to revisit the behind-the-scenes action from her point of view.

  On 28 September 1971 Brifman was interviewed by Superintendent Norm Gulbransen at the home of her sister, Margaret Chapple, a leafy Queenslander at 38 Brindle Street, Paddington. Shorthand notes were taken by Senior Constable Greg Early.

  Shirley was reminded by Gulbransen that in an earlier interview she had told police that Detectives Tony Murphy and Glen Hallahan had allegedly told her ‘what to say’ in her evidence before the inquiry.

  ‘Murphy and Hallahan actually told you what the questions would be and the answers you were to give?’ Gulbransen asked.

  ‘They didn’t actually tell me what the questions would be,’ Shirley said. ‘They told me they would see the barrister and tell him the questions to ask me and I was tutored on the questions and answers. They more or less interviewed me. When I took the witness box [it] was late in the afternoon and the only one who got to me was the Crown. That night I was worded well and I kept on being tutored.’

  Gulbransen asked her about her assertion before the inquiry that one of the commission’s witnesses, former National Hotel employee David Young, had actually performed an abortion on her in a flat in New Farm. It caused a furore in court. She admitted she was told to drop the lie by Murphy and Hallahan. ‘Glen did threaten to shoot him [David Young],’ Brifman told Gulbransen.

  Was Brifman telling investigators the truth? If she had been willing to perjure herself at a royal commission, might she feel the urge to do the same to police in her records of interview?

  Again, I was faced with the difficulty of procuring key documents from crucial moments in th
is narrative. Justice Gibbs’ final 190-page report had been released on 10 April 1964 but was never tabled in parliament. In the end I had to trawl through the library of Queensland Newspapers, where I found a file with a blue spine tucked into a brown cardboard box, on which was written: ‘ROYAL COMMISSIONS: National Hotel’. Inside was a fading ring-bound copy of Gibbs’ report, and with it were old newspaper articles and a clutch of black and white photographs.

  There was an image of David Young, the discredited witness, in his black suit and narrow black tie, on a walk-through of the National Hotel with Gibbs and other commission lawyers. Gibbs, in his dark grey suit, spectacles and pork pie hat was photographed at the entrance to one of the National’s bars with a lawyer standing a few paces behind him. In another, they were wandering past the public telephones in a vestibule of the National, beneath a large sign advertising the Monday to Friday smorgasbord on the first floor and the ‘new’ steak house on the fourth floor.

  And then there was Detective Sergeant Tony Murphy in suit and tie walking past the stone and ironwork gates of the old Brisbane Supreme Court with a half-smile on his face. In the background is Commissioner Frank Bischof’s legal counsel, Walter Campbell, QC.

  All of this a lifetime ago, with most of the players dead.

  Talk to Old Abe

  A year after beginning formal interviews with Lewis, we settled into a good working relationship and had grown, I felt, comfortable with each other. I began to understand a number of things about him. He possessed a highly efficient and organised mind, and if the man before me in his early eighties was anything to go by, he would have been viewed, at his peak, as an unqualified workaholic.

  He would tell me often that in his prime as Commissioner he was working anywhere between 70 and 80 hours a week. Despite his advancing age I could still see that capacity in him. Month after month he had produced documents for me to review that he had personally catalogued – family history, private papers, official police documents and, of course, his famous diaries.