Three Crooked Kings

by Matthew Condon

  He also voiced a belief that many officers knew to be fact: Queensland police were prepared to swear to anything on oath in order to secure a conviction. Bennett was attacking the tried and true police ‘verbal’, slang for the police fabrication of confessions.

  He noted that ‘very few voluntary confessions’ were extracted from suspects being interviewed at CIB headquarters when ‘customers’ were accompanied by parents, relatives or friends; yet, in their absence, full confessions miraculously appeared, worded in such a way ‘that one would think the confessors were lawyers’.

  Ken Morris was adamant there would be no inquiry, and Police Commissioner Bischof generously offered any member of the public with a grievance to call him direct at any time.

  One Saturday Night in Hendra

  On Saturday 22 April 1961, Detective Lewis reported for duty at CIB headquarters at 7 a.m. and commenced duties.

  According to his police diary and arrest log, he and Detective Price took a squad car and went to the home of a jug-eared, jut-chinned thirty-six-year-old man who lived in a Queenslander on busy Newmarket Road in inner-city Wilston. He was charged with attempting to defraud another man of fifteen pounds and taken to CIB headquarters, photographed and fingerprinted. He pleaded guilty in the Police Court later that morning and was fined five pounds.

  Lewis was back home in Ellena Street, Rosalie, by 3.30 p.m.

  Later that day, a race day, one of Jack Herbert’s colleagues in the Licensing Branch up at the police depot – Alan Pembroke – raided a house at 299 Nudgee Road, Hendra (two streets from Doomben racecourse) with Sergeant Ron Donovan and other police.

  Inside, they found Neil Cruickshank and Clarence Parsons conducting an SP bookmaking operation.

  Cruickshank, caught red-handed, asked if he could take the full brunt of the charges. He didn’t want Parsons involved.

  ‘This fellow wants to take this on his own,’ Pembroke informed Donovan.

  ‘No, charge both of them,’ Donovan said.

  Both men were conveyed to the Brisbane city watchhouse and their betting sheets and equipment were confiscated as evidence. Bailed, Cruickshank and Parsons were ordered to appear in court the following Monday.

  After their appearance, Parsons approached Pembroke and asked him if he could look at the seized betting sheets. He explained that clients were claiming they’d made bets on certain horses when he knew they hadn’t.

  Pembroke returned to the Licensing Branch offices and sought advice from Sergeant Gorrie, who approved the request, so long as none of the sheets went missing.

  Later, Pembroke met Parsons in the bar of Lennons Hotel in George Street. Parsons took the sheets into the men’s room and returned soon after. They shared a round of drinks.

  As they left the hotel, Parsons asked, ‘Can I get protection?’ He had heard from a friend that it was possible. He suggested ten pounds per week.

  ‘I told him I didn’t know anything about that,’ Pembroke later recalled. ‘I would check it up for him and I would get back to him.’

  Later, back at Licensing, Pembroke took the matter up with his colleague and friend Graeme Parker. Could he protect Parsons?

  ‘That’ll be all right,’ Parker said.

  Soon after, Pembroke and Parker drove an unmarked squad car to Anderson Street, not far from the gothic Old Brisbane Museum on the fringe of Spring Hill, to meet the two bookies.

  They parked the squad car in front of Cruickshank and Parsons, who got out of their own car and joined the officers. They hopped into the back seat.

  Parker was gruff and forthright. He told the bookies that their phone number for race day had to be phoned in to him or Pembroke. They weren’t to ‘move around’ on race day. They had to stick by that phone number. And their protection agreement had to remain confidential.

  They were to pay twenty pounds per fortnight. One fortnight Parker collected the money. The next, Pembroke.

  Cruickshank and Parsons had joined a growing list of about thirty protected SP bookmakers.

  Behind this tangled but efficient web was Jack ‘the Bagman’ Herbert. It was testimony to his organisational skills that Pembroke never had a discussion with Herbert about the protection racket, and in turn saw or heard nothing to suggest that Herbert, the mastermind, was corrupt.

  Pembroke, when he got on board with the Joke, could only speculate about who else in the Licensing Branch might be corrupt, by monitoring who got along well at work. If several men were friendly with Parker, then it was highly likely they were a part of the protection rackets.

  The genius of the system was to maintain silence between participants of the Joke, isolate them, keep them guessing. From day to day no one knew who was on the take or not. No one knew who they could trust. That, in itself, was a very powerful form of insurance.

  Herbert, meanwhile, was never mentioned. Never implicated. Never suspected. He was deeply embedded, the watermark on the bank note.

  Terry Moves House

  By the end of 1961, and still knee-deep in the Company Squad, Lewis was finding the Ellena Street house a bit of a squeeze with four children. Hazel Lewis, who had a keen eye for real estate, had spotted a house for sale up on nearby Garfield Drive, in the shadow of the Bardon water tower.

  For decades, reaching back into the nineteenth century, Garfield Drive had been the address of politicians, bank managers and surgeons. It was premier inner-Brisbane real estate, the drive itself running crookedly across the top of what was once referred to as Archibalds Hill. At one hundred metres above sea level, it commanded spectacular views across the CBD and out towards Moreton Bay to the south-east, and from its north-west aspect it took in Ashgrove, The Gap, and beyond to the hills of rural Samford.

  Just a dozen or so houses were positioned on Garfield Drive, and for the Lewises it was socially a light year from the occasionally flooded floor of Rosalie, just a few hundred metres away. It was the sort of place where ladies held card afternoons to raise funds for the local church.

  In November 1961 Terry and Hazel purchased 12 Garfield Drive for 5,500 pounds – an old Queenslander with views away from the CBD and sitting on tall stumps on the northern rump of the hill. They had sold Ellena Street for 4,250 pounds. Garfield Drive proved to be an extremely canny investment.

  Lewis’s police diaries reveal that he went on extended leave on 4 November presumably to give him time to move his family and their chattels up the ridge to their new home. He did not return to work until 1 January 1962.

  He says: ‘We were on the left [entering from Macgregor Terrace]. The rich side was on the right, looking over the city and the university.’

  He may now have had surgeons and company executives for his neighbours, but in the CIB in the city Lewis must have wondered, in the New Year, where his future lay in the police force.

  He was still close to Bischof, and the likes of Murphy and Hallahan, but nearing thirty-three years of age, with a large family and two years already served in the Company Squad – his office a pokey room in an outbuilding at the back of CIB headquarters, next to the even smaller office of the Motor Squad and a stone’s throw from the commissioned officers’ toilets – he must have pondered the opportunities available to rise through the ranks.

  Lewis was clever, cunning, and fiercely ambitious. He did not need his picture in the newspapers – unlike Bischof and Hallahan, and to a lesser degree Murphy. If there was an alternative route to higher rank where he could fly under the radar and progress without attention or fuss, he would find it.

  He had come a long way for a boy who left school at twelve. But he had to go further. He needed to work longer hours to show Hazel and the children how much he loved them.

  He needed to be smart. Smarter. And it may have been in that small Company Squad room that it occurred to him that education just might be that path to glory. A single univers
ity degree would, in one fell swoop, make him one of the most educated men in the force.

  The End of the Affair

  In September 1962, Police Commissioner Bischof, with offsider Senior Sergeant Cedric Germain, jetted out to the thirty-first Interpol General Assembly in Madrid, Spain. Bischof had been selected to be Australia’s representative at the conference – a meeting of the world’s top police officers.

  The Big Fella loved to travel. And he had judiciously chosen his travelling companion. Germain, from the police commissioner’s Legal Services – a small group of officers not legally trained but who worked as the boss’s general dogsbodies – was as tall and imposing as Bischof, and always presentable.

  Germain’s job in Madrid from 19 to 26 September – and later in the United Kingdom and the United States on their six-week trip – would be to sit in conference presentations and take notes on proceedings, while Bischof did as he pleased. ‘Cedric was a very decent fellow,’ Lewis recalls. ‘If Bischof asked him to jump, Cedric would ask how high.’ Bischof was not the conference type.

  Prior to the Interpol gathering, however, Mrs Mary Margaret Fels was feeling more than a little slighted. Her affair with Bischof had continued uninterrupted for almost five years. He had taken her on holidays to the South Coast and promised her overseas trips.

  Now Bischof was planning to wing his way around the world, all expenses paid, with Germain. Had he at one point in early 1962 vowed to take his lover to Spain? And had he, at the last minute, reneged?

  Whatever the reason, it began to dawn on Fels that Bischof was a liar, that he was using her, and that he would never leave his hearing-impaired wife, tending her cacti garden over in Ashgrove.

  So Fels approached the secretary of the Police Union, Clyde Behm, a powerfully built former detective with a reputation as being a bit of a ladies’ man himself. Behm had been married to Calliope Claire Behm, who had drowned in the Brisbane River in 1958.

  Terry Lewis was acquainted with Calliope. They had both worked for the US army at the Bulimba shipyards during the Second World War.

  ‘She was very pretty and I remember Behm, a big policeman then, coming in and talking to her at that time,’ Lewis says. ‘I heard from other people that he liked the ladies and that he had a reputation for violence . . . The story was that she jumped in the river to get away from him and drowned.’

  Soon after, Fels sat down and penned a three and a half page summary of her life and times, since 1957, with Frank Bischof, Queensland Commissioner of Police. She detailed the sex. She outlined their clandestine meetings. She revealed his broken promises to her. She was not only accusing the 1959 Queensland Father of the Year and the state’s symbolic moral gauge of flagrant infidelity, of being a no-good philanderer, but she was, conversely, exposing herself to the same charge. She was still living on the small family farm in Underwood Road, Eight Mile Plains, with husband Alfonso and six children.

  In short, her rage must have been of sufficient depth and heat that she was prepared, in a conservative city, to destroy her own reputation and, by proxy, that of her entire family.

  Behm took the statement to well-known Brisbane solicitor Arnold Hopgood, brother to Merv ‘Hoppy’ Hopgood, Lewis’s friend and regular partner in his Consorting Squad days.

  ‘Bischof had been rooting her and promising her everything . . . to take her on this trip overseas on a fact-finding tour – it was going to be a fuck-finding tour, we all said,’ says former detective Ron Edington. ‘Anyway, Behm takes the statement and Bischof finds out about it.’

  Bischof hauled Behm into his office. According to Edington, the police commissioner said, ‘I understand you had an interview with Mrs Fels.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ Behm replied. ‘I’ve got the statement and it’s in my safe.’

  Bischof replied: ‘In my safe I’ve got a file here where your wife was drowned in the Brisbane River and she had several bruises and I’ve since found out that you had a lot of domestic disputes. I suggest that you keep that statement locked in your safe and I’ll keep my file locked in my safe.’

  Soon after, Behm resigned as secretary of the union and was replaced by Merv Callaghan.

  Fels’s damning and salacious statement was signed by two witnesses. Solicitor Hopgood subsequently arranged a meeting with himself, Fels and the member for South Brisbane, Colin Bennett.

  Bennett promised to give the document ‘due consideration’, and tucked it away in a desk drawer. And there it stayed.

  ‘Throughout my sixteen years of public life I have never failed to deal with a complaint and I have always had such complaints, whether large, small, complicated or simple, properly and suitably investigated,’ Bennett said of the incident in private correspondence. ‘This one was a particularly difficult one and I decided to give it consideration before taking any precipitate action.’

  Since joining the Queensland parliament in May 1960, Bennett had never shied from attacking Bischof and what he considered an increasingly corrupt police force. But the case of Fels was more than just a political opportunity to bludgeon the police commissioner.

  As a Catholic with seven children, he understood the sensitivity. Here was Fels – a married woman of longstanding with six children of her own. Her public exposure in the affair – even at her own urging – would bring a lightning strike of shame and disgrace to the Fels family. Fels would be pitted against one of the most powerful men in the state, a man with infinite resources who was not afraid to use them. Then there was Dorothy Bischof to consider. She, too, would be hurt and aggrieved.

  This wasn’t a case of police drinking after hours or taking protection money from prostitutes and SP bookmakers. This could potentially decimate two families.

  And once the press got a whiff, it would detonate as a huge public scandal.

  Bennett, always ready to swing a punch on behalf of the voiceless, sat on the Fels case and pondered. Here was information that could demolish reputations and ruin lives, but it also had the power to severely damage the Liberal–Country government, and potentially bring it down.

  Mrs Fels, growing more indignant towards Bischof by the day, pushed for action.

  ‘During this time I was besieged with phone calls from Mr Callaghan, Mr Hopgood and Mrs Fels (sometimes before breakfast) demanding I do something,’ Bennett reflected. ‘Mrs Fels on one occasion even suggested that I might have “cold feet”.’

  Bennett was aware that if he didn’t do anything, it might come back to embarrass him, so he made an appointment to see Premier Frank Nicklin. After reading Fels’s document, Nicklin agreed it was ‘a serious matter’.

  ‘I informed him that I did not want to use the matter politically, or to have any public attention drawn to it, but suggested that it was something that should be investigated at Cabinet level with which he readily agreed,’ Bennett said.

  ‘I also made the comment or commenced to make the comment: “Hell hath no fury like a”, and he finished off, “woman spurned”.’

  Bennett assured the premier that he had ‘no personal animosity’ towards Bischof, but as a Catholic man ‘and as a man who demands certain standards of conduct’, he believed that Bischof was ‘wholeheartedly unsuitable for his present position’.

  Bennett waited more than two months for the premier to act. Nicklin did nothing. As a last resort, Bennett brought Fels to Parliament House in George Street to meet with the premier. He refused.

  The member for South Brisbane felt he had no option but to air the matter on the floor of the parliamentary chamber.

  Fels had telephoned Bischof before he flew out to Madrid, warning him to expect the details of their affair to be outlined in state parliament.

  On Wednesday 24 October 1962, Bennett did just that, though he didn’t name Bischof and Fels.

  ‘A certain allegation in writing containing three foolscap pag
es was made against a top member of the Police Force,’ Bennett told a shocked house. ‘The information was widely circulated and known throughout the Police Force and unfortunately the great majority of those who know of it believe it.

  ‘It is a very serious allegation. Contained in the same report is a suggestion that the series of offences, committed over a long period of time, was committed in premises owned and controlled by the leading and well-known operator of a chain of houses of ill-fame in this city.’

  Bennett further titillated parliament by exposing a series of questions he recently posed to Police Commissioner Bischof, and the answers he received.

  Bennett:Would you say cohabiting with other people’s wives is not very serious?

  Bischof:I said it was a serious matter.

  Bennett:Would you say a police officer who cohabits with another person’s wife whilst on duty would be committing a serious offence?

  Bischof:I would say so. His conduct on and off duty should be exemplary.

  Bennett:Would you say a police officer who cohabits with another person’s wife whilst on duty and in uniform should be dismissed from the police force?

  Bischof:If there were no extenuating circumstances I would say that might be an appropriate penalty.

  It was a brilliant Bennett strategy. He had embedded the answer to the riddle – who was the senior Queensland police officer sleeping with another man’s wife? – in his parliamentary bombshell.

  The affair was the talk of Queensland. Bennett pledged to name the philanderer in state parliament at his next opportunity – Tuesday 27 November 1962.

  Then Bischof made his move. Forty-eight hours before Bennett’s parliamentary appearance, the Sunday Truth splashed with an eye-popping front-page exclusive. A third of the page was filled with a photograph of Bischof, his hair brushed back and neat, his tie, shirt and suit coat immaculate.