When Hallahan resumed his testimony, he said he was shocked to hear Komlosy describe him as a regular after-hours drinker at the National, as his kidney problems precluded him from taking alcohol. He admitted he had made some queries into Young’s background for Murphy, concerning break and enter charges, but nothing came of it. It was more damning hearsay entered into evidence against Young.
After Hallahan, the Big Fella swore on the Bible and took the stand. He had appeared briefly earlier in the inquiry to outline his friendship with Max Roberts (‘Slight,’ he said), but now he came armed with ten statements from senior police claiming no illegalities in relation to the National and its operations.
Bischof denied all of Young’s allegations. Showing the sort of agility he demonstrated in shutting down Mary Margaret Fels, he told Justice Gibbs that he first heard of Young’s allegations through his own anonymous phone call. ‘Two ALP members skived on their mates to tell me, Inspector Bauer and Detective Murphy about it.’
Bischof repeatedly strained credulity. He said he was unaware of the contents of Bennett’s attack in state parliament that had sparked the very inquiry in which Bischof sat.
He was further quizzed on his use of Rolly Roberts’s beach house on the South Coast and his attendance frequency at the National. He recalled a party thrown by Rolly to farewell him prior to his trip to the Interpol conference in Spain. Bischof grew heated when it was suggested there was an intimate ‘after-party’ to that function.
Justice Gibbs quizzed Bischof on the definition of ‘suspected prostitute’, and the police commissioner replied that they would be associated with other suspected prostitutes.
He was also asked about the rules concerning the keeping of official police diaries, as Hallahan’s and Murphy’s had revealed possible breaches of departmental regulations.
‘After the Royal Commission started,’ Bischof added, ‘I had all the records doubly checked to make sure that [Young’s] allegations couldn’t be correct.’
People were out to get him, Bischof decried: ‘I think it was said two thousand years ago, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.” I say it again now.’
It would have been difficult to beat the comedy of Bischof’s comparing himself to Jesus Christ, but for shock value the appearance in late January of Shirley Brifman trumped everything at the inquiry.
Unbeknown to Justice Gibbs and most counsel, she had been well and truly coached prior to her stint in the witness box. Murphy and Hallahan had been in touch with Brifman virtually every night during the inquiry hearings, to get her up to speed on the evidence.
On the day she was due to appear, Brifman and Ryan met a ‘client’ at Lennons Hotel and took him back to Ryan’s flat in Spring Hill.
‘Lily and I entertained him on Scotch at Bradley Street,’ Brifman would later recall. ‘Tony rang up when the court adjourned. He said, “Don’t come to court – you’re drunk.”’
She duly appeared, nevertheless, in a white dress and broad-brimmed white hat.
‘I talked to Tony before I went into the witness box,’ she said. ‘I talked to him that night. He kept telling me things I had to say and things I didn’t have to say.
‘[Hallahan and Murphy] didn’t actually tell me what the questions would be. 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.
‘I got into the witness box and took the oath. I think somebody read the oath to me. I recall it was an oath to tell the truth and I didn’t tell the truth.
‘Hallahan and Murphy told me that I had to destroy David Young and that I had to deny what Detective Sergeant Osborne had said, that I was a prostitute.’
Brifman did more than that. She said she was appearing at the inquiry to refute allegations, like the one from Osborne, that she was a prostitute. She further told the royal commission that she had only been in the National six times in the past four years. She admitted knowing Young, and was asked what had transpired when they once met in Brifman’s flat.
She answered, ‘David Young done an abortion on me.’
The response from Justice Gibbs and leading counsel was apoplectic. ‘Just a minute!’ the commissioner shouted.
He ruled that the evidence not be recorded.
Why did she give such blatant false evidence to the royal commission? She later reflected: ‘For a start I didn’t want my family to know [she was a prostitute] and I had to protect Tony and Glen and them. If I was a prostitute they would have been gone. I did know all of them. I even knew their wives.’
Lewis now says there is no doubt that police drank after hours at the National. But would Murphy coach Brifman on her evidence before the inquiry? ‘I wouldn’t doubt that.’
Young had been demolished, and Komlosy was so aggrieved at his treatment he planned to flee the country.
The inquiry concluded on 24 February. It had sat for thirty-four days, featured eighty-nine witnesses and received 167 documentary exhibits.
Justice Gibbs presented his almost two hundred-page final report to Premier Nicklin on Friday 10 April 1964.
In short, Justice Gibbs found no evidence of a call-girl service being run out of the National Hotel, Petrie Bight, nor was there anything to suggest that Bischof and his cohorts drank there after hours.
‘To sum the matter up,’ the commissioner concluded in his report, ‘although the law relating to the sale and consumption of liquor on licensed premises after lawful trading hours was broken on many occasions over a period of years at the National Hotel, and most of those breaches remained undetected by the police, there is no acceptable evidence that any member of the Police Force was guilty of misconduct, or neglect or violation of duty in relation to the policing of the hotel, the conduct of the business or the operations or the use of the hotel, or the enforcement of the law in respect of any breaches alleged or reported to have been committed in relation thereto.’
Justice Gibbs did recommend that official police diaries supplied to detectives be ‘examined, initialled and dated’ once a week by the officer in charge.
Both Bischof and Murphy were awarded costs.
Years later, former Queensland treasurer Thomas Hiley remembered a story told to him by various policemen after Bischof and his boys were exonerated: ‘In the victory party that night . . . Bischof, by this time, is as full as a kite and he’s up on the mini-stage – it was the band area where the bands used to get up about one step off the floor – and he’s got these three fellows [Lewis, Murphy, and Hallahan] up on the stage and he’s doing his best to put his arms around three necks at once, rather a hard task, and he said, “I want you all to know that these are the boys who got me off this rap,” and he said, “I want you all to know I’m going to look after them.” He said, “You won’t stop until you go right to the top.”’
The party was held at the National Hotel.
Lewis says: ‘I don’t remember the party, but there could have been one. I was never at a party at the National Hotel when Bischof was present. And he would never put his arms around my neck, never, no matter how much he loved me.’
Empire Building
While the city’s attention was drawn to the royal commission and its colourful cast of characters during January and February 1964, Lewis continued to quietly shore up his future.
On Monday 20 January, as Bischof, Murphy and Hallahan were masterfully manipulating the inquiry, Lewis headed over to the University of Queensland in pretty inner south-west St Lucia and ‘saw Dr Harwood and then Dr Rawson re application for entry in Dip., Public Admin. Course’.
But he had not forgotten his mates. His police diary shows that on Tuesday 4 February, he arrived at the office at 8.30 a.m. and attended to files. He then ‘attended Royal Commission in Supreme Court with Detective Murphy’. ‘Off duty 5pm.’
February
14 saw Lewis back at the university, where he met Harwood and picked up his faculty handbook. He later ‘paid fees and submitted enrolment forms’.
Lewis went on two weeks’ leave from Wednesday 19 February, and by early March was back at the JAB, uncovering cases of child neglect in the city, responding to the discovery of an obscene letter at a high school, checking on reports of children in various stages of undress misbehaving in St Lucia, tracking down runaway kids, and generally delving into the domestic battleground of parents and their teenagers across Brisbane.
Meanwhile, Shirley Brifman had experienced enough of Sydney to understand that she could earn more than a decent living in the Emerald City. Moreover, after the publicity surrounding the National Hotel inquiry, it would have been close to impossible for her to continue practising her trade in Brisbane, even with the clandestine support of Murphy and Hallahan. The inquiry, though a triumph for Bischof and his boys, had marked her as a suspected prostitute and something of a city identity, albeit a morally bankrupt one.
Incredibly, given the circumstances of the inquiry, Murphy and Hallahan each pleaded with her not to permanently move south.
Brifman later recalled in police interviews: ‘When I told Tony and Glen I was going – was there a blue and a half. They said, “The girls [Ryan and Weidinger] have got to get out. You know we have only tolerated them because of you.”
‘They still wouldn’t wear it. They did not want me to go to Sydney. When they knew my mind was made up, they said, “We will give them a break, Shirl – five hundred pounds a piece.” That was to be paid the day I was leaving to Hallahan and Murphy by the other two girls so they would stay in this city because I was leaving it. They paid. They did definitely pay.’
Brifman broke the news to the girls in Ryan’s flat in Bradley Street, not far from the National Hotel. Ryan and Weidinger agreed to pay the cops to keep working, and the money changed hands in a lane behind the Port Office Hotel in Edward Street.
And with Brifman gone, Hallahan now dramatically raised the rates on payments from city prostitutes.
In Sydney, Brifman’s modus operandi was identical to her work out of the Grand Central Hotel and National Hotel. Like a moth to a flame, she headed straight to her new home’s traditional vice epicentre – Kings Cross – and conducted her business in the Hotel Rex, just down Macleay Street from Fitzroy Gardens with its Canary Island date palms and iconic watery dandelion, the El Alamein fountain.
The refurbished Rex was a stand-out city hotel when it was opened in 1953, and introduced to Sydney some novel features, including a ‘continental-style’ sidewalk café – a cramped, open-air vestibule partitioned from the street by a low stone wall and shrubbery and festooned with beach umbrellas – and an adjoining espresso bar. There were numerous places to take a drink in the hotel’s ‘bar block’ – a saloon, public bars and a bottle shop on the ground floor, and the ‘Canberra’ lounge and beer garden on the top floor. It also had its own hairdressing salon.
What may have appealed to Queenslander Brifman – even a decade after its grand unveiling – was the hotel’s deliberate sub-tropical atmosphere, its walls and features painted pastel pink, peach and putty.
The Rex became her base; one that she shared with several other street prostitutes.
After the National Hotel fiasco in Brisbane, she was fed up with police officers and the complications they gave to her already unconventional way of life. She had never attracted a single charge in Queensland, but Sydney, crime and vice capital of Australia, was a different story.
She soon confronted an almost mirror image of her situation in Brisbane. Sydney, too, had its tough detectives and vice squad officers who accepted a quid for protection. Where up north she had Hallahan and Murphy, down south she was to become entangled with their New South Wales twins, Ray Kelly and Fred Krahe.
Krahe was reputedly one of the most feared police officers in Australia. Like Murphy and Hallahan, he was a superlative detective and had innumerable criminal contacts, including some of the biggest gangsters in town.
In the early 1960s he visited Brisbane on business – like Ray Kelly – and got to know Hallahan. In turn, and keeping Brifman in his web, Hallahan gave Krahe Brifman’s phone number at Bunnerong Road, Maroubra, when she settled in Sydney in 1964.
‘I did not know who Krahe was,’ Brifman later revealed in police interviews. ‘I had enough of police after the royal commission . . . I was not going to get landed with the Sydney detectives. Krahe annoyed me that much with phone messages. He never gave up.’
Brifman eventually had a drink with the physically imposing Krahe in the old Hyde Park Hotel opposite the sandstone cenotaph near the corner of Elizabeth and Bathurst streets.
‘Have you ever dealt in money before, Shirley?’ he asked her.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, the same applies here as in Queensland.’ Krahe had clearly been briefed on Brifman by Hallahan. ‘You don’t work in this town unless you pay.’
Krahe outlined how things worked in New South Wales: ‘It’s like this . . . You get mugs with the knockabouts, you get in with them, you find out about their robberies.
‘When they sell their stuff, we give them one night with their money. Next morning we move in . . .’
This was another level of police corruption to what Brifman had experienced in Queensland. She was incredulous and said, naively: ‘You’re worse than the thief. You are letting them rob and you are getting the benefit of it and you are supposed to be a policeman.’
She told him she wasn’t interested. She didn’t know who she was dealing with.
‘If you repeat one word of what we have said here today to the Queensland police,’ Krahe said, ‘I will shoot you stone dead, and anything you have to say to them, naturally they will repeat back to me.’
Later that night she phoned Hallahan and told him to get Krahe off her back.
Lewis also knew Krahe, and, on one of his visits to Brisbane, Lewis picked up Krahe from the airport and dropped him at the National Hotel.
‘I went in with him,’ Lewis recalls. ‘You know how you put your hands on people . . . I felt he had a shoulder holster and revolvers on both sides.
‘The supposition is one [gun] was your official one and the other is if you shot someone and he didn’t have a gun you’d give him one. Or if you unlawfully shot someone you’d use that other revolver.’
Shirley Brifman was a long way from Atherton. And in those early days in Sydney she couldn’t have known – meeting strange men in the bars at the Rex and pulling tricks shoulder to shoulder with a gaggle of other well-dressed prostitutes – that in a few short years she would be the most celebrated madam in Sydney.
Peacekeeper
Frank Bischof and his men were given a clean slate by Justice Gibbs early in 1964, but there was a lingering hangover to the celebrations. It was Glendon Patrick Hallahan, and the internal police investigation into the arrest of Gary Campbell at the Top Cat Sound Lounge.
Hallahan was facing three charges, two of preparing misleading and dishonest statements regarding the case, and failing to keep his police diary current.
The Queen’s Counsel charged with conducting the case reversed the Full Court conclusions. Hallahan was simply found guilty of the diary charge, and fined. Again, Colin Bennett and others attacked the outcome in parliament.
While it was another victory for the Rat Pack member, Hallahan’s appearance at the royal commission, the allegations aired against him, and now the publicity over the internal police investigation must have chafed with Bischof. Brifman was out of the way. Maybe it was time that Hallahan, too, stepped from the spotlight for a while.
In far off Cyprus, the continuing violence between Greek and Turkish Cypriots triggered the United Nations Security Council’s Resolution 186, and a peacekeeping force was mobilised. It included Br
itish, Irish and Australian troops.
Australia would send forty men – a combination of Commonwealth and state police – and Queensland was asked for five volunteers. Individuals would have to express their interest to Police Commissioner Bischof, then be vetted and approved. One of those men was Hallahan. He had just turned thirty-two. The rest were young officers in their early twenties. Whether Bischof had quietly suggested to Hallahan that it might be a good idea to vanish from the local scene for twelve months will never be known.
Hallahan flew to Canberra in May for intensive training at the Royal Military College, Duntroon. The Courier-Mail featured a photograph of Hallahan at Brisbane airport: ‘The other four Queensland constables will fly south today.’
Among those joining Hallahan in the Queensland contingent were Ray Strong and Bob ‘Doc’ Gillespie. They were farewelled at the airport by Bischof and Dewar, the police minister, and due to fly to Cyprus on a chartered Qantas Boeing 707 from Canberra on the evening of Sunday 24 May.
Hallahan, despite his immense experience as a detective, was at first glance an unusual fit for the job. He was a decade older than most of the others in the peacekeeping force. He would, because of his senior rank, hardly be on patrol of small Cyprian villages looking for strife. Then again, he had huge organisational skills – courtesy of his growing stable of informants – and in a sense was proven as a people facilitator.
Was there a settled home and love life to consider given the year-long secondment? He had apparently been engaged to a Sydney journalist in the early 1960s, but given his long hours and his proclivity to work the bars and clubs at night, personal entanglements were obviously not a factor.
During their training, the peacekeepers were briefly addressed by Commonwealth Police Commissioner Ray Whitrod. He congratulated the contingency and reminded them they had a job to do in Cypress. It would be Hallahan’s first contact with his future boss.
Three Crooked Kings Page 17