Another third was the headline: i am that man.
Bischof had outed himself.
‘The Police Commissioner, Mr Frank Bischof, revealed that he was the “senior police officer” in the Bennett case,’ went the story, written by journalist and Bischof’s friend Ron Richards.
‘Mr Bischof [said] . . . he had been pestered for years by telephone calls from the woman concerned. He said there was not one scrap of truth in the allegations it was claimed she had made.’
Bischof added that he had read Bennett’s parliamentary speech on the issue when he returned from Madrid, and he revealed his relationship with Fels, who was unnamed in the Sunday Truth report.
‘About five or six years ago a woman, then unknown to me, came to my office at the Criminal Investigation Branch and enlisted my aid in a family upset. I was able to help her and her family,’ he recounted. ‘My wife and I were afterwards invited on a number of occasions to their home . . . Later the woman commenced to telephone me at my office and I had occasion to remonstrate with her.’
He then said the woman had started phoning him at home.
Bischof was congratulated by the Sunday Truth for his courage in stepping forward and ‘removing an intolerable slur from any member of the Police Force’ who might be considered Bennett’s ‘senior officer’.
The newspaper also declared the Bischof incident ‘one of the major political crises of the Nicklin Government’.
The soap opera continued. The next day Bischof lodged a Supreme Court writ against Mary Margaret Fels for alleged defamation. It had the effect of instantly gagging public discussion – everything was now sub judice – and exposed Fels to the public gaze.
It didn’t deter Bennett. He was prepared to stand in the chamber the next day, as planned, and let loose with more damaging allegations against Bischof, but a last-minute meeting of Labor’s central executive – led by the member for Brisbane, Johnno Mann, known to have close, and possibly corrupt, ties with police – muzzled Bennett.
The Speaker ruled that any debate over Bischof would be sub judice.
In the chamber, Bennett expressed his disappointment at being silenced. Bischof himself was there in Parliament House that night, sitting in a lobby with a police legal adviser not far from Bennett in the chamber.
Incredibly, the front page of the Sunday Truth for 2 December had yet another scoop on the saga. This time it was a huge photograph of Fels, affectionately touching the cheek of her husband, Alfonso.
i am that woman, the headline read. farmer’s wife speaks!
The story described Alfonso Fels as ‘a shiftworker in the city’, who also had a strawberry and cucumber farm. Fels said she’d be leaving the defence of the writ in the hands of her solicitors.
The farmer’s wife actually didn’t speak. There were no direct quotes from her. But there was a single, sad exclamation from Alfonso.
‘This has been a very trying time,’ he said. ‘I would like to see the whole mess thrashed out and over and done with.’
With Bennett gagged in parliament, the press silenced by the Supreme Court writ, and the Felses, out on their small farm off the Pacific Highway, left to deal with the pressures of public shame and years of waiting for the case to reach court, the scandal disappeared.
The personal fallout, however, was immediate. Mary Margaret Fels changed her name by deed poll to deflect attention. So did some of her children. And the marriage remained externally intact but behind closed doors was essentially over. The saga’s impact would tremor for decades into the future.
Meanwhile Bischof had yet again secured a victory against those who would slur his good name.
The next time he appeared in the local press, he was warning the good citizens of Queensland to take care on the roads.
Conferenceville
Commonwealth Police Commissioner Ray Whitrod, having been in the top job for a few years, was offered a unique view of policing across the country courtesy of the annual Police Commissioners’ Conferences.
Whitrod was entrenched in Canberra, a city that suited his temperament and his intellectual interests – here he developed his skills as a bureaucrat, studied economics and later sociology at the Australian National University (ANU), and reshaped the Commonwealth force on the back of tenets he would later attempt to apply to the Queensland police force: education and training.
Even in the early 1960s, Whitrod worried over the public perception of state police forces as populated with uneducated rednecks. In building his Commonwealth unit, he also had to establish meaningful cooperation with the individual state forces if his national vision was going to work. Whitrod would need their help.
How, though, could he overcome the reality of the situation? When he sat down with the top state commissioners, he was virtually the only one in the room with a tertiary qualification, let alone a university degree. When he then met with federal government bureaucrats and ministers to discuss and debate Commonwealth police business, everyone at the table had higher education qualifications. He needed to find a way to build bridges with the states.
The annual conferences – through the prism of the state commissioners – gave him at the very least a thumbnail sketch of those disparate forces, courtesy of the individuals who were running them.
It was how he first came into contact with Police Commissioner Frank Bischof.
‘Big, tall, imposing man,’ Whitrod recalled in an interview. ‘Never, never volunteered much at police commissioners’ conferences. Never contributed much in the way of new ideas . . . Seemed happy with the world. [We] spent most of our weekends at conferences, but he would go to the races . . .’
Another senior officer who attracted Whitrod’s attention at the conferences for all the wrong reasons was Fred Hanson from New South Wales.
Whitrod set up a number of senior police executive workshops for investigating the future of policing. He recruited into the workshops a number of academics from the ANU; his aim was ‘to interest these pragmatic deputy police chiefs in an intellectual task’.
It was onerous. ‘Try as my academic friends would to interest [Hanson], he sat most of the time looking out the window.’
One of Whitrod’s great friends and mentors was Police Commissioner Brigadier John G. McKinna of South Australia. McKinna had had a distinguished military career and experience in business. After the war he worked at Quarry Industries – a local operation that would grow into a national quarry, asphalt and concrete concern. He had a degree in engineering from the University of Adelaide.
When he joined the South Australian police force as an older recruit in 1956, he was met with some suspicion, but soon became one of the force’s most admired and respected figures. He was made police commissioner in 1957.
Another Whitrod supporter was Chief Commissioner Major General Selwyn Porter of Victoria.
‘The three of us were interested in introducing businesslike management practices into our forces,’ Whitrod recalled. ‘The other commissioners were very much in favour of the status quo.
‘They had risen through the ranks and were now comfortably positioned. The world was their oyster, so why change it? Why indeed when, in some cases, the world was supplying an income considerably greater than that normally earned by the head of a police force?
‘At the time I had little understanding of how entrenched corruption was in the eastern states and I don’t think McKinna or Porter were any better informed.’
Indeed, as Whitrod slaved away with his academic and business template for future police forces, his horse-loving acquaintance Frank Bischof was about to face his greatest challenge – the first-ever royal commission into police corruption in Queensland.
Courtesy of the Author
Gunther Bahnemann, the crazed German gunman from Whites Road, Lota, had in the meantime settled into prison life a
t Boggo Road gaol and kept himself busy.
Before he allegedly attempted to kill Glen Hallahan on that strange night in late 1959, Bahnemann, as unconventional as ever, had been struggling with a memoir of his time in Rommel’s Afrika Korps during the Second World War. With boats to build, wives to divorce, and minor run-ins with the law, he never got traction on the manuscript.
In gaol, though, with seemingly infinite time on his hands, he returned to his literary career. He dubbed his cell the ‘publishing office’, and finally produced I Deserted Rommel. It was released to acclaim in 1961 and serialised in several Australian newspapers, including the Brisbane Telegraph.
Detective Terry Lewis, on publication of the book, paid Bahnemann a visit in prison and got him – the man who had attempted to kill his colleague Hallahan with a shot from a .303 rifle – to inscribe his copy.
Why would a senior detective take the time to visit a thwarted cop killer? Lewis says: ‘I don’t know. He had been a soldier . . . he took up with a prostitute and that didn’t do him much good . . . I don’t know whether I was at the gaol for something else and went and said hello out of a feeling of . . . I don’t know . . . not withstanding what he did, you can still think the poor bugger’s in gaol. I didn’t have any motive, or anything I wanted him to do or not do.’
By 1963 – four years into his sentence – Bahnemann was finishing off his next bestseller. The novel Hoodlum, ‘a dramatic expose’ of the bodgies, widgies and teen gangs infesting the Western world on the back of rock’n’roll, purported to be based on true stories told to Bahnemann by young offenders incarcerated in Boggo Road gaol.
this story is based on fact! the Horwitz Publications paperback screamed. ‘You have never read a story quite like this!’ Here was Larry Loring, the jean-wearing, leather-jacketed hood who lied, cheated, stole and fought to get whatever he wanted. Here was his woman, Kathy Morris, Jonno the prisoner, Lorna, companion to bodgies in her tight sweaters, and Detective Sergeant Jason, ‘a tough but fair policeman battling with his fellow officers against the hoodlums . . . to make the streets safe’.
Bahnemann dedicated the book to Boggo Road gaol chaplain Brigadier Harold Hosier, and he inscribed Lewis’s copy thus: ‘To Terry Lewis, Yours is a difficult job, Terry, may you succeed in your department, Gunther Bahnemann.’
The bard of Boggo Road, however, was not popular with other inmates. They claimed that he was being treated with ‘kid gloves’. That he was given the privilege of daily hot showers and unlimited visiting rights. In his cell he had a typewriter, desk and stationery. He also had the opportunity to develop and patent a marine engine.
Bahnemann was released on parole in May 1963. He told the press he had no animosity towards Lewis and Hallahan: ‘I hope to go up to police headquarters sometime and say hello to Glen.’
Shortly after his release, Bahnemann wrote Lewis a letter, addressed to CIB headquarters, from a friend’s home on Old Cleveland Road in Belmont.
‘Dear Terry, this is just a brief note enclosed with a copy of my book “Hoodlum”. I am presenting you with this autographed copy because I remember a man with courage – namely you – who did not feel too big to come into prison some years ago and ask for an autograph when my first book appeared on the market.
‘That, Terry, after what had happened – or did not happen – at an earlier stage, took all of a man and moral courage to boot.
‘I can only ask you to look upon the past as being “past” and therefore let us concentrate on the future . . .’
Why would Bahnemann ask Lewis to move on from the past, over an incident that happened ‘or did not happen’?
A Secret Meeting with the Premier
Thomas Hiley, the minister in charge of racing in the early 1960s, had a vexing problem.
His departmental staff was reporting enormous amounts of SP betting activity across Queensland, and yet according to statistics the police were securing virtually no convictions for the offence. First-time offenders were being fined, but where were the big operators behind the SP betting rings?
Hiley pondered this when, by chance, he was called on by a delegation of SP bookmakers from west of the Great Dividing Range. And they had an astonishing story to relay.
‘These SP bookmakers told me there was an organised SP ring operating under a direct arrangement with the police,’ Hiley recalled in an interview and statements later. ‘An annual fee was set and collected from the SP operators. It was $80,000 . . . for major Queensland towns, and $40,000 for some lesser towns then $20,000 for smaller towns again.
‘In return the police were to leave the bookmakers alone.’
The bookmakers believed that half the money went to local police, and the rest to Brisbane, as in Police Commissioner Frank Bischof.
Hiley asked them if they would give evidence in court. They replied, ‘Mr Hiley, we’d be dead, we’d be dead.’
Hiley subsequently uncovered Bischof’s ‘Mr Baystone’ betting scam. How could a commissioned officer on a public service wage regularly plunge 2,000 pounds on a single race at Eagle Farm?
After further investigations by his department, Hiley had enough evidence to present to Premier Nicklin. He met with Nicklin and told him the story, emphasising a lack of evidence. So they hatched a plan to bluff Bischof.
The police commissioner was summoned to George Street on a Wednesday – cunningly of Hiley, a local race day – along with Alex Dewar, the police minister.
A hijacked Bischof quietly listened to Hiley’s allegations: ‘Bischof caved in front of us. He made no denials of the statements that I made about the organised graft from bookmakers.’
‘“What do you want me to do?” Bischof asked.
‘“You started all this,” Hiley responded. “You stop it.”’
For a time police attention towards SP bookmaking increased dramatically. But Hiley would later admit the bluff was a grave error.
‘We should have pressed home our advantage and retired him there and then,’ Hiley said. ‘I was silly enough to think that like a beehive, if you destroyed the Queen Bee, the whole hive will perish.’
He was wrong, he later admitted: too many officers had been exposed to the ‘Bischof infection’, and the ‘seeds of corruption’ were sown in the junior ranks.
Bischof, again, had evaded the noose.
Silent, Liar
Detective Hallahan, with his bouquet of cologne and deep voice, was his own one-man Consorting Squad on the streets of Brisbane by mid-1963.
He would be partnered with other officers on the roster sheets but even on two-man jobs he’d disappear during a shift. He seemed to have carte blanche to travel intra- and interstate on a whim. He would shoot up to Townsville in the hunt for a murderer, or down to Sydney and Melbourne on the trail of counterfeiters and safe-blowers. The keeping of detailed and accurate official police diaries was, unlike Lewis, anathema to Hallahan. Unless it suited his needs.
His impulsiveness, too, seemed to have developed – since the Sundown Murders triumph and the George Medal victory – into an aphrodisiac. It was nothing for him to pull someone out of a hotel or off the street, at a whim, and falsify evidence against them on the most minor charges. He sensed, with his self-inflated reputation and the powerful consorting laws behind him, that he had become untouchable.
It was an error of personal judgement.
On 28 June 1963, Hallahan was in the Brisbane CBD and customarily nicked another city ‘vagrant’ – this time a man Hallahan said he recognised as a Sydney criminal with an extensive record, Gary William Campbell, twenty-three, labourer – from the doorway of TC’s, or the Top Cat Sound Lounge, in Elizabeth Street.
As a club, TC’s was a sensation. When you walked in off Elizabeth Street and down a long corridor, you emerged into a large room. On the left were small platform stages with rubber bars for the go-go dancers. And stra
ight ahead was a bar where two Greek boys from West End served freshly cooked hamburgers.
The owner, a white-suited entrepreneur from the Gold Coast, hit on a phenomenon when he opened TC’s to teenagers on a Saturday afternoon. No alcohol was served.
‘It was incredible,’ says John Ryan, who became a bouncer and later the ‘cooler’, or head bouncer, for TC’s. ‘It was the place to go. The underage kids were hanging from the rafters. They had a DJ playing vinyl records. There were young girls everywhere.
‘Gary was a tough guy. From Sydney. We think he may have coined the word “bouncer” because when he was throwing someone out of TC’s, he’d carry them down that long corridor and bounce their head off the walls as he went.’
On that winter night in June, Campbell was escorted by Hallahan to his flat, where police searched for missing blankets and pillows from Campbell’s prior residence, which police claimed had been stolen. They merely unearthed several hotel beer glasses.
Hallahan told Campbell: ‘If you haven’t got them, you know who has and we’ll charge you with having housebreaking instruments. We’ll load you right up and make sure you get put away.’
Campbell admitted he only had ‘five bob’ in his possession, and Hallahan added that he would be charged for vagrancy.
In the magistrates court the next morning, Campbell pleaded guilty.
The prosecutor outlined the facts as provided by Hallahan: Campbell was an active criminal located in the city area; he had no money and no legitimate source of income; he’d made no effort to secure employment.
Campbell was sentenced to six months’ hard labour.
Stunned, Campbell appealed. The hearing was scheduled for August. So Hallahan got busy preparing a deflection to any impending criticism from the full court, confecting his supremacy as a detective in the local press, especially with the help of his mate Ron Richards of the Sunday Truth.
Three Crooked Kings Page 13