In Canberra, the Queenslanders formed a quick bond. Doc Gillespie was working in the Brisbane CIB during the late 1950s when he first met Hallahan. ‘He was a good detective,’ Gillespie recalls. ‘I got along very well with Glen.’
Ray Strong had also worked in the Brisbane CIB before serving time in Mount Isa and then relieving on the Gold Coast at the time he volunteered for Cyprus.
The contingent – with no formal powers of arrest – went over armed with .38 revolvers.
‘Glen and I shared a room in a hotel in Famagusta,’ Strong says. ‘Hallahan was experienced as an investigator and we, being the first in there, we had a hell of a job – we had to work with the leaders on both sides. Glen being Glen, he had know-how. He made sure everybody did their job.
‘I don’t think there’s a person in the contingent who had a bad word to say about him.’
Strong says Hallahan taught himself shorthand in the hotel room when he had time off: ‘He’d study the Pitman’s manual.’
Norm Webber, also a former Cyprus volunteer, remembers Hallahan as ‘a very shrewd, sharp operator . . . he had an air about him’.
‘He was a very presentable fellow and gave the impression that he knew what he was doing,’ Webber says. ‘It was a culture shock for all of us.’
Later, Hallahan settled in the capital, Nicosia, and assisted in administration. He was promoted during his secondment.
Strong says he was familiar with Hallahan’s nickname, ‘Silent’. ‘He was a very good source of information. Where it came from, I don’t know . . . He would never divulge any of his informants.’
Hallahan returned to Australia in 1965 – he had taken advantage of a free around-the-world air ticket offered as a bonus to all volunteers – and waiting for him was a New South Wales police officer who was very keen to do business. With the Sydney underworld operating at full tilt, its crimes and characters enmeshed with several corrupt police, why not expand the empire and get Queensland into the game?
That man was Detective Fred Krahe.
Life up on the Drive
A few months before Hallahan returned to Brisbane, Police Commissioner Bischof alerted Lewis to a child-neglect case in Charleville, 740 kilometres west of Brisbane. It was decided, as head of the JAB, that Lewis would personally travel to the town, retrieve the child, and place it in government protective custody.
He was seeing more and more cases of neglect, particularly in Brisbane, and it wasn’t just the province of the working classes. The kids of rich parents were also coming to the bureau’s attention, left with pockets full of cash as their parents indulged in the city’s nominal indulgences, particularly the races.
Lewis himself was working long days, attending university lectures at night and catching up on his study in a small office nook in the Queenslander in Garfield Drive, with its view across Ashgrove, Enoggera and beyond. Lewis seemed to be forever behind a desk.
As wife Hazel remarked: ‘The children only know you by the back of your head.’
On the night of Tuesday 5 January 1965, Lewis went to the police depot and picked up a brand new Ford Falcon, designated for a senior commissioned officer. The next morning at six, he drove from home to nearby Milton to pick up Miss McHutchison of the State Children’s Services Department and they headed for Charleville.
After filling up the car in Dalby, they drove for a short distance and stopped for a snack.
‘Miss McHutchison offered to relieve me with driving for a period,’ Lewis recorded in his police diary, ‘and after ascertaining that she had a Driver’s Licence; was authorised to drive Govt. vehicles and had done so for 14 years without an incident of any sort; was familiar with driving Falcons and was familiar with the road to Charleville, I permitted her to drive.’
Having passed through Miles and approaching Roma, east of Charleville, Miss McHutchison attempted to overtake a semitrailer.
‘We were alongside of it and I could see that in the truck’s rear-vision mirror the glass was missing – there was no way he could see we were coming alongside him,’ Lewis recalls. ‘The truck wriggled a bit and we went off the road doing sixty miles an hour. We went headfirst into a tree.’
The driver had cuts to her face but Lewis’s head went through the windshield and his body bounced back into the Falcon. He had fractured his pelvis and was bleeding profusely.
By good fortune, a vehicle coming behind them stopped. The driver was a RAAF man and his wife was a nurse. She stabilised Lewis before he was rushed to Roma hospital.
The next day a battered and bruised Lewis was taken by ambulance all the way back to Brisbane’s Princess Alexandra hospital. He was expected to be off work for six months. He was back in three.
‘In hospital my legs were up in the air,’ he says. ‘Everybody and his dog came to visit – Mr Bischof, Buck Buchanan.’
Lewis was back on duty at 8.15 a.m. on Thursday 8 April, bearing the scars of the accident on his forehead.
A man keenly tethered by routine, Lewis slotted straight back into life in the JAB and Garfield Drive. On Sunday evenings he would religiously buff and polish his four children’s school shoes so they were ready for Monday morning. On his way to work he would drop off his daughters, Lanna and Loreen, at the prestigious All Hallows’ Catholic boarding school in the city.
On Saturday nights the family would often attend the Paddington Picture Theatre down on Given Terrace (‘I knew the man who ran the theatre – Ted James – and he’d let me know what was coming up,’ remembers Lewis) and went to mass every Sunday at the imposing red-brick St Brigid’s at nearby Red Hill.
The house, though still more spacious than their previous residence down the hill at Rosalie, remained a squeeze for the young family, especially with four children.
It had a main bedroom, a small side bedroom for the girls, and another slightly larger room for the boys. There was a lounge, dining room, kitchen and an upstairs internal lavatory.
In the steep yard out the back, Lewis tied an old tyre to a tree for the children.
Meanwhile Hazel, an excellent cook, was doing some part-time work as a cooking demonstrator.
It was a full life for Lewis, especially studying for his diploma in public administration. He saw the diploma both as a tool to seek promotion through police ranks, and to better understand his work in the JAB. By 1965 he had five full-time staff.
‘I was dealing with a lot of doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers and all sorts of professional people,’ he says. ‘I thought it was wise to learn a little bit about what they were involved in. The diploma had eight different subjects that ranged across many of these areas.’
The JAB and study had also lifted him out of the predictable cycle of drinking in the city after a shift with other officers.
‘I was very happy to leave that,’ Lewis adds. ‘Occasionally I’d have a drink with some of them. But a lot of police officers then, particularly detectives, were very heavy drinkers. For the sake of my children, I was glad I had so many years in the JAB.’
It did not escape anyone in the upper echelons of the force that Bischof, while appearing robust, was suffering from hypertension. Lewis heard it second-hand from the greatest source of all, Bischof’s driver, Slim Somerville.
For the first time in his long career, the Big Fella’s powerful presence was showing some hairline cracks.
To the Satisfaction of Both Parties
More than two years after Mary Margaret Fels was exposed as some deranged and obsessive Brisbane housewife harassing Police Commissioner Bischof, his defamation writ against her was finally set to appear in court.
Just a year after the sensational, though ultimately anti-climactic, National Hotel inquiry, the city was ready for another titillating insight into the conduct of their controversial top policeman.
In early 1965 the p
ress revealed that Bischof was seeking twenty thousand dollars in damages from Fels for defamation. The hearing was set down for 22 March in the Supreme Court.
Bischof’s claim asserted that between February and November 1962, Fels ‘falsely and maliciously’ wrote – and published or caused to be published – to the general secretary of the Police Union, Merv Callaghan, and the minister for education and migration, Jack Pizzey, certain defamatory statements. (Pizzey’s portfolios now also incorporated the Police Department.)
The crux of the defamation was Fels’s allegation that Bischof ‘had intercourse’ with her ‘on diverse occasions from early in 1957 until in or about August 1960, at Jeays Street, Fortitude Valley, and Underwood Road, Eight Mile Plains [the Fels family home]’.
Bischof claimed that the allegations had ‘seriously injured’ him, that he was ‘likely to be injured in character, credit and reputation’, and that he had been ‘brought into public scandal, odium and contempt’.
Fels was represented by the legendary Brisbane barrister Dan Casey.
But come day one of the hearing, Bischof was nowhere to be seen. Bischof’s counsel, John Aboud, told the Supreme Court that the police commissioner was in Mount Isa on official police business.
Despite Fels’s annoyance at the adjournment, the matter was stood over for the next Civil Sittings.
Three months later – on 21 June – the defamation case was abruptly settled. The Acting Chief Justice was told that the matter had been settled ‘to the satisfaction of both parties’, and the action was struck out.
Bischof, his nerves fraying after years of seemingly relentless public scandal, may have felt the ghosts of his past were catching up with him. Given that Fels’s counsel requested, in the March appearance, that Bischof be ordered to pay costs for the untimely adjournment, and her angry phone calls to Colin Bennett years before, urging him to take up the sex scandal in parliament, it would appear she wanted the matter heard once and for all in a public court, and her former lover to be held to account, at last, for his actions.
Whatever the reason behind the settlement – that the police commissioner had agreed to pay Fels’s mounting court costs may have indicated a weakening confidence – Bischof was once again saved embarrassment in a court of law.
His position, though, in the eyes of the public, some of his men and a mounting number of members of parliament, was showing signs of becoming untenable.
Silent Gets Rowdy in the Emerald City
It was a different Glen Hallahan who returned to Brisbane from peacekeeping duties in Cyprus in 1965.
While he was admired for his professionalism and organisational abilities overseas by the many men who worked with him in the peacekeeping force (though one detractor described him not-so-cryptically as an ‘entrepreneurial’ policeman), he landed back in the Consorting Squad with grander ambitions. He wanted more illegal income, and he could only get that by teaming up with the big boys in Sydney.
As usual, he was given enormous latitude by his superiors – Bischof and Bauer – and literally did as he pleased.
If he desired to head down to Sydney, he found cases with a Queensland hook to swing into. And a local link was not even always required: in 1967 and 1968, for example, he would use the investigation into the disappearance of Prime Minister Harold Holt to visit Melbourne to afford his expertise to the case – and catch up with friends.
His sojourn overseas may have given Hallahan time to reflect on future plans. He began to gravitate to Sydney and his old friend and lover Shirley Brifman, who was still trading her body successfully out of the Hotel Rex in Kings Cross.
Brifman recalled in later police interviews: ‘After Glen came back from Cyprus and I threw him into Freddie [Krahe], he was never away from Sydney.
‘Freddie knew I had Brisbane in the palm of my hand and he wanted Glen Hallahan. I had a hold on Glen. Glen would do what I wanted . . . I put Freddie and Glen together. They were two top men in different states . . . and Glen trusted me.’
Instantly, the two men were a potent mix. Krahe controlled pockets of the Sydney underworld. He could use Hallahan to help expand criminal empires into the comparative backwater of Queensland. And Hallahan wanted to make more cash. Their ambitions dovetailed.
In Sydney, forging his friendship with Krahe, Hallahan invariably stayed at the Hotel Rex. There he entertained Brifman, other known prostitutes, their bludgers, and an assortment of Sydney criminals.
Once, Brifman was in Hallahan’s room at the hotel, packing the detective’s bag for his return flight to Brisbane, when Krahe arrived. ‘What would Glen do without you?’ Krahe remarked. Krahe then drove Hallahan to the airport.
Their plan was to organise robberies – sharing criminals for interstate jobs – and then divvy up the proceeds. It was a far cry from Hallahan hitting up Brisbane prostitutes for protection money. He had struck a rich, albeit dangerous, vein with Krahe.
There were parties. Restaurants. Dinners at the Mandarin Club and a French eatery in Potts Point. Then Hallahan would invariably fly home and return to his small bachelor flat in a red-brick block of six in St James Street, Petrie Terrace, directly across the road from the Normanby Hotel, and a short and pleasant walk to the old police depot and CIB headquarters in the city.
It was common knowledge in the police force that Bischof gave his boys – Lewis, Murphy, and Hallahan – an unusual degree of free rein. This was flagrantly exploited by Hallahan and Murphy.
While all officers had to report to a senior sergeant when they went out on a job, including its location and what squad car they’d be travelling in, not so the Rat Pack.
Ron Edington recalls: ‘They’d walk past the senior sergeant and he’d say, “Where are you going?” [Then they’d reply] “Aw, it’s got nothing to do with you, it’s a private job.” The sergeants were starting to oppose them, you know, to resent them . . . these three blokes were walking over the top of them.’
Edington says their unaccountability extended to interstate travel, especially to Sydney. He says a system evolved whereby Sydney criminals coming to Queensland had to pay ‘rent’ – about one thousand dollars a week – to Hallahan. The reverse applied to Krahe and Queensland criminals in Sydney.
‘This is where the corruption started,’ says Edington. ‘They were planting bloody guns on blokes and . . .’
In one instance, a criminal was pinched. He had eight guns in his possession, but was only charged over a single firearm. Hallahan and Murphy kept the other seven. When Edington asked Murphy why the bloke was only charged with carrying one gun, he replied: ‘We’re keeping them [to plant on] seven other cunts!’
As business with Krahe intensified, so did Hallahan’s Sydney visits. He was soon dropping down at least twice a month.
Mary Anne, Shirley Brifman’s daughter, was a schoolgirl when Krahe and Hallahan’s partnership really took flight. She remembers the Brifman family home at 25 Maitland Avenue, Kingsford, being used as a ‘store house’ for the proceeds of various robberies – everything from cash to transistor radios to women’s clothing.
‘There were kids running in and out, there were four of us,’ Mary Anne recalls. ‘We had a full-time housekeeper. We’d come home from school and they used to [be there] divvy[ing] everything up . . .’
Brifman said the splitting of protection and other monies between Krahe and Hallahan was ‘just an everyday occurrence’. She said it usually happened in the lounge of her home.
Mary Anne says she knew all the Queensland and New South Wales players because they all came to the house – Murphy, Hallahan, Lewis, Krahe, and the rest. Lewis denies he ever went to Brifman’s house in Sydney.
‘Mum actually believed them to be her friends,’ Mary Anne says. ‘Workmates. They were a team of people, and my mother was a very important part of that team . . . They needed someone they could trust. My mother
wouldn’t steal. But she was still a naive country girl.’
As for Hallahan, he was in a peculiar sort of relationship with Shirley Brifman. The Atherton prostitute had fallen for him, and the feeling was mutual. Hallahan confided his deepest secrets to her.
‘Hallahan . . . he had some conscience, and he struggled with that,’ remembers Mary Anne. ‘My mother talked about that. Because she was emotionally involved with Hallahan, he would yield to her.
‘She had a very soft spot for him, and her soft spot was built on compassion for him. There was not that about Tony Murphy from her, ever . . . Hallahan couldn’t cope, emotionally and mentally, I don’t think, with what he’d done. I think it affected him gravely.
‘I really do believe she was having proper affairs with Tony Murphy and Glen Hallahan. The chemistry with Glen Hallahan became a problem for Tony Murphy.’
There were other minor problems for Murphy. Fellow senior officers were beginning to resent the Rat Pack’s charmed life under the protection of Police Commissioner Bischof. After the National Hotel whitewash, the ‘untouchable’ attitudes of Murphy and Hallahan, in particular, were beginning to chafe.
Senior Detective Don (Buck) Buchanan couldn’t stand Murphy. It may have involved a bit of professional jealousy from the senior cop, but the animosity was so pronounced that Buchanan refused to speak to Murphy, even when the latter offered a simple ‘good morning’ at CIB headquarters.
‘Everybody knew about the Rat Pack in the 1960s,’ says one former officer who worked closely with senior detectives at the time. ‘Tony was on the take. I knew he was. I let him know I knew and he just laughed. They were that bad. They used to laugh about taking the oath and telling lies in court.’
For this officer, whatever decent ‘kills’ the triumvirate brought to the table through legitimate police skills, their good work was undermined by the hypocrisy.
Three Crooked Kings Page 18