In the application, Bahnemann gave his home address as ‘care of’ Mrs Ruby, Whites Road, Lota.
The application was refused. In private correspondence within the Department of Territories in Canberra, Bahnemann was not to be given the entrance permit ‘under any circumstances’.
Did Bahnemann attempt to flee Brisbane after coming to the attention of police?
According to a Queensland police report compiled on Bahnemann, he had supposedly forced his wife into prostitution and she resisted. After several violent clashes with Bahnemann, Ada entered a ‘house of ill-fame’ in South Brisbane, funding him and his quixotic seafaring adventures. Police suspected Bahnemann was living off the immoral earnings of his wife, but they didn’t have enough evidence to prosecute.
Then, on Thursday 3 May 1956, Lewis recorded in his police diary that he went to ‘Nott Street brothel’ and ‘saw Ada Louise Bahnemann’, also known as Vengert, nee Ruby.
Soon, Ada would go to work at nearby Killarney brothel, next to the old Foggitt Jones fish cannery in Lanfear Street. Soon, she would be plying her trade alongside a young girl called Shirley Brifman from Far North Queensland.
The Time of the Mason
The mid-1950s was an excellent time to be a Catholic in Brisbane. The ruling Labor Party was brimming with them, as was the police force and its so-called Green Mafia. Both subsets had had an unusually good, and long, run.
Premier Gair was demonstrably proud of his Catholic faith. At a massive family rosary crusade in the spring of 1953, Gair addressed the 85,000-strong crowd gathered at the exhibition grounds in Bowen Hills. ‘The greater the number of families that engage in family prayer,’ he told them, ‘the more multitudinous becomes the innovation of God’s help in the community.’
In late 1954 he was accused by the Queensland Teachers’ Union of being more interested in Catholic schools than in the state education system. He labelled the accusation ‘in defiance of all logic, reason and justice’.
Addressing past students of his old school, St Joseph’s Christian Brothers’ College in Rockhampton, the same year, he warned of the need for a ‘realistic’ approach to the menace of communism.
The Rockhampton Bulletin reported the speech he made at a communion breakfast celebrating the school’s jubilee: ‘Most of you stand charged and found guilty of apathy and lethargy for many years when you succumbed to the belief that communism was an innocuous thing confined to Russia.
‘You have seen the progress made by communism in our country. I know you are more conscious of it now, but some twenty years ago, when someone tried to organise a front, what was the attitude adopted?
‘I appeal to you to be unselfish in this work. If you are not prepared to inconvenience yourself for this country and for the future of your children and generations to come, I say, God help Australia.’
By 1955, the Labor Party would split in Victoria over the matter of communist domination of the unions, the issue brought on by challenges from the Catholic ‘Movement’ – Catholic agitators who formed anti-communist factions and tried to seize control of the unions themselves.
This destabilising phenomenon would ultimately make its way to Queensland. Meanwhile, Labor’s central executive in Queensland had grown concerned at the gulf between the party’s philosophical imperative as an organisation for the working class, and Premier Gair’s parliamentary party and the extent to which he was implementing, or not, the party’s broader objectives. Who made the important decisions – the executive, or the premier?
In 1957, an industrial dispute in Queensland over increasing workers’ annual leave led to the party’s implosion – the Great Labor Split – and in April, Premier Gair was summoned to a central executive hearing, where he was expelled from the Labor Party for not accepting the party’s rules.
Premier Gair responded by gathering his supporters and forming the Queensland Labor Party. He continued to govern as head of a minority government but an election was called after the premier and his party were defeated on a supply bill.
After a quarter of a century in the cold, a coalition of Country Party and Liberal Party members won office, and ‘Honest’ Frank Nicklin became premier. Having spent a seemingly interminable sixteen years as leader of the Opposition, the old hand cautiously steered his party members through the opening months of the new government.
If it hadn’t been for the Labor split, Francis Bischof, too, may not have been elevated to police commissioner. Now, with Labor gone and the Catholics on thin ice, it was the time of the Mason.
When Nicklin came to power, Tom Harrold had been police commissioner for less than a year and was coming up to retirement age. More than two hundred applications were received for the position. One was from Bischof, another from the more experienced Jim Donovan.
Former Liberal Party leader Thomas Hiley, who had had some public run-ins with Bischof and the police in the early 1950s, was appointed treasurer and was part of the Cabinet discussions to choose a new police commissioner.
He recalled that prior to the new appointment he had become aware – through the complaints of constituents against individual police – of what he called ‘the cult of the solid police’.
Being ‘solid’, as Hiley understood it, was when an officer would do anything for another officer, ‘including lying in evidence, seeing and hearing nothing if a detained person was threatened or bashed by a fellow officer, giving false evidence to support an alleged confession’. This outlook, Hiley rightly concluded, became potentially more hazardous when it involved commissioned officers.
As a member of the selection committee for the next police commissioner, Hiley wanted to test the ‘solid’ cult with his applicants.
‘I can recall that Jim Donovan and Frank Bischof were the leading applicants for the job,’ Hiley later told the Fitzgerald Inquiry in the late 1980s. ‘When we interviewed Donovan he advocated no change in the status quo. He had no new ideas.
‘Bischof provided a complete contrast. He was confident, personally impressive, and he presented ideas for police development and practice. He refused to support the concept of the solid policeman.
‘I can recall Bischof saying that his duty to the state outweighed his duty to any fellow officer.’
Hiley, however, had been offered hearsay about Bischof being corrupt. Bischof loved the racetrack. He had developed a peculiarly intimate relationship with Brisbane prostitutes and their madams. No wrongdoing, though, could be substantiated.
According to Ron Edington, two policemen in the know about Bischof tried to block any chance he had at being appointed police commissioner.
‘There were two fellows, one named Charlie Corner, who went down to Parliament House and signed statutory declarations saying that Bischof was corrupt and shouldn’t be appointed,’ Edington recalls. ‘Charlie was a fanatical kind of bloke and everything he said was true but he was such an eccentric.’
Hiley later said he made an off-the-cuff comment to another member of the selection committee: Bischof should either be anointed police commissioner, or kicked off the force.
Bischof was formally sworn in as police commissioner on 30 January 1958.
His appointment saw him pictured on the front page of the Courier-Mail the next day, beaming alongside his wife – unnamed in the report – and their golden cocker spaniel, Sunny.
Readers were informed that Mrs Bischof was a woman ‘of quiet dignity’ who was locally renowned for her sponge cakes. She enjoyed hosting luncheons and cocktail parties in their Ashgrove home (Frank had a penchant for bow ties), and tending their cacti garden. Frank was responsible for planting the annuals. Lewis says he rarely met Mrs Bischof. ‘I’d drive him home sometimes or pick him up but I barely saw her. I can’t remember ever seeing her at any functions.’
Inside the newspaper that day, a staff reporter wrote how Bischof had ‘moved fa
st yesterday’ into the new job. At 1 p.m. he had been called to a ministerial conference in the Treasury building on George Street and told of his new position. He left the conference room at 2 p.m. and fifteen minutes later was installed behind the police commissioner’s desk at the police depot, Petrie Terrace.
Lewis remembers that the comical story of Bischof racing from the CBD to Petrie Terrace and into his new office did the rounds at the time. ‘He got there as quick as he could,’ he says, ‘before anyone could take the position away from him.’
What several of Bischof’s colleagues knew, but his wife and the general public certainly didn’t, was that Bischof had, a year prior to his big promotion, begun an affair with a Brisbane woman, Mary Margaret Fels, then in her late thirties.
Fels lived with her husband, balding farmer Alfonso, and their six children on a small property on Underwood Road at Eight Mile Plains, in the city’s south-east.
An attractive honey blonde, Fels was having minor trouble with one of her sons and Bischof, always obliging to wayward teenagers, stepped in to counsel the boy.
The kindly Bischof opened the door of his office – before and after becoming police commissioner – to the city’s wayward youth every Saturday, and the press made much of his dedication to the children of Brisbane. But Saturday was also race day, and underling police officers on duty could barely concentrate with Bischof’s radio blaring with all the news from the track. Did he really care so much for troubled kids, or did Saturday in the office give him an opportunity to keep his eye on corrupt payments being collected from SP bookmakers on the busiest race day of the week?
The affair with Fels began almost immediately, and the pair had sex at the Fels family farm and at a house in Fortitude Valley. The rumour around the police force was that Bischof was even bold enough to take Fels away on vacations to the South Coast.
It was dangerous territory for a new police commissioner in a small town like Brisbane.
‘They said [Fels] wasn’t a bad-looking mother – the story then around the ridges was that he was rather attracted to her,’ says Lewis. ‘I never saw Bischof with his wife at any function probably because she was very deaf . . . This other lady, we were told, was rather presentable. I suppose he thought he better hop in for his chop.’
Still, as the Big Fella celebrated his new position, a spectacular murder case was playing itself out in far-off Mount Isa. Glen Hallahan, in charge of the local CIB, had just collared a brutal killer in a case that would become known as the Sundown Murders.
It would, overnight, make Hallahan the most famous young detective in Queensland.
The Curious Corruption Incubator of Mount Isa
James Michael Jorgensen, thirty-five, itinerant barman, sometime station hand, drinker and renowned pub brawler, was buried at the Mount Isa Sunset Lawn Cemetery on 14 March 1956, in grave number 805.
The tale of Jorgensen’s death, largely forgotten now, is a small window into not only how tough the frontier mining town of Mount Isa was in the 1950s, but also its police. There, in the far north-west of the state, were smelters and sprawling corner pubs, miners’ dormitories and unpaved, treeless streets of wooden cottages. It was a place of heavy drinking and heavy gambling. It was populated with a high degree of misfits and eccentrics.
One of them, a German army deserter by the name of Gunther Bahnemann, bemused locals for years while he constructed a large motor boat in his yard.
Local Dick Bentley remembers Bahnemann coming to the house and regaling him and his family with tall tales of his military experiences, of engineering and captaining vessels off the north Queensland coast.
‘He always wanted sour milk, and he ate raw mince,’ Bentley, who was a boy at the time, says. ‘We once went up to Thursday Island on an old 112-foot Fairmile wooden boat – they were used in the war – skippered by Bahnemann. He had about twenty South Sea Islanders on board and they’d hunt for trochus, spear turtles and Torres Strait pigeons.
‘I had some spears I’d brought back from New Guinea and he asked me if he could have them to decorate his new boat. I liked Gunther immensely. He was a great storyteller. I never had a bad opinion of him.’
Dick’s mother, Clare, loved a flutter, particularly with the local SP bookmakers, and held regular poker nights at the house. Her other preoccupation was gossip.
She certainly knew of Mount Isa’s outstanding young detective, Glen Hallahan, and kept notes on the progress of his career. ‘She thought he was a rogue,’ says Dick, ‘a pretty crooked policeman. As for Hallahan and Bahnemann, there is absolutely no doubt they knew each other in Mount Isa. They were well known to each other.’
The death of James Jorgensen in early 1956, while shocking, would not have seemed out of place in a town like Mount Isa. Here, the plain-clothes officers wore full suits and felt hats even at the height of summer. When they walked the main streets of town, pedestrians stepped off the footpaths to let them pass.
As for Jorgensen, he had a history of alcohol abuse and violence, and was well known to proprietors and patrons of the town’s three major hotels – the Mount Isa, the Boyd and the Argent. On 7 February 1956, he was drinking with a friend who was arrested for being drunk and disorderly. Jorgensen was also threatened with arrest and he questioned police: ‘What for?’ He said he’d done nothing wrong.
He was then punched by the arresting officers – Constables Paul McArthur and Eric Murray – and transferred to cells at the Mount Isa police station. He was charged with inciting a prisoner, his friend, to resist arrest.
A coronial inquest into Jorgensen’s death revealed that once the prisoner was in his cell, McArthur, twenty-one, and Murray, twenty-four, entered. ‘I told Jorgensen to take off his shoes, but he didn’t,’ McArthur told the inquest. ‘Murray said: “You heard what he said,” but still Jorgensen didn’t take off his shoes. Murray then cuffed him over both ears and hit him in front of the neck with the back of his right forearm.’
Jorgensen alleged in a statement that a police officer had driven two hard punches into his stomach.
That night, Jorgensen suffered acute pain and an ambulance transferred him to the local hospital. After several operations, he died of severe internal injuries. Constables McArthur and Murray were later charged with unlawful killing and suspended.
Seven months after the incident, the two young officers were discharged. The judge ruled that the case against them was based solely on circumstantial evidence.
This was Detective Glen ‘Silent’ Hallahan’s small world. As CIB chief, his work rate was prodigious. The police district encompassing Mount Isa was based out of Cloncurry and run by District Inspector Norwin ‘Norm’ Bauer. Whenever the Circuit Court came to town, Hallahan travelled down from Mount Isa for trials.
Young Constable Don Lane – the sensitive recruit from Warwick who preferred a hostel over the police dormitory – had been posted to Cloncurry in 1957 and remembered the impact of the glamorous detective from Mount Isa.
‘I got to know him as well as anyone could,’ Lane recalled in his memoir, ‘largely because of the fact that he was a notorious loner.
‘Hallahan would invariably have 80 per cent of the cases going to trial before the Circuit Court . . . and was highly regarded for his police work by both his colleagues and the legal profession.’
Here, Hallahan would have begun his professional friendship with Bauer, a farm boy, horse breaker, and hunter from the hills around tiny Swanfels, east of Warwick.
Bauer, in the great tradition of future senior Queensland police, left school aged thirteen and worked as a bullock driver transporting timber. He proved an adept horse rider and regularly competed as a teenager at country carnivals and shows. He joined the force at twenty-four and was seconded to the Brisbane Mounted Police, later working as a trooper in the St George police district, quelling sheep thefts and assisting in law and order during
the famous shearers’ strike in 1931.
He was brought to Brisbane in 1932 and worked out of Roma Street police station as a bicycle night patrol officer, then served at Bulimba and Southport police stations before joining the CIB in 1936.
He spent more than seventeen years in the Southport CIB and then Brisbane, where he developed a loyal friendship with Bischof.
In 1956, the year Jorgensen died after being assaulted in the Mount Isa police cells, Bauer was appointed Cloncurry district inspector. He was, by that time, heavily involved in Masonry, and would ultimately become grand master of the United Grand Lodge of Queensland. He also penned short stories for True Detective.
Constable Don Lane had an unexpected run-in with Bauer not long after he started work in Cloncurry, courtesy of a new arrival, reputable investigator and incorruptible officer Don Becker. Becker had landed in the Wild West in pursuit of a quick promotion. The police gulags hadn’t always existed for the purposes of punishment or misdemeanours.
In his memoir, Lane recalled that Becker, on his first weekend in the country town, had wandered the main streets and become suspicious of two premises, both run by Joe and Bob Bakhash, well-known businessmen and proprietors of a jewellery store, a tobacconist, and a billiard hall.
Lane told Becker that the two premises were renowned SP betting shops, but police had been instructed to ignore them. Becker didn’t. He approached the shop and interrogated one of the Bakhash brothers, securing several ledgers and placing them under lock and key at the police station. Becker advised that he would be taking out summonses in relation to the SP bookmaking.
Three Crooked Kings Page 6