Three Crooked Kings

by Matthew Condon

  Despite visits from former colleagues like Lewis, Murphy, and his driver Slim Somerville, Bischof’s world had gone from constant recognition, notoriety and global travel, to a small suburban block in Brisbane’s west.

  He would soon be giving the new police commissioner, Whitrod, the length of his tongue. And he’d also find himself embroiled in a police arrest.

  This time, shockingly, Bischof himself would be the defendant.

  A Confidential Meeting

  In the earliest days of Whitrod’s acting commissionership, Ron Edington – president of the Police Union, firebrand, father of fourteen and confidante to the member for South Brisbane, Colin Bennett – received a phone call at union headquarters at North Quay. Could he please attend a meeting at Parliament House with Police Minister Hodges and Police Commissioner Whitrod?

  Edington was notorious throughout the force for his booming voice and forthright opinions. He called a spade not just a spade, but a bloody spade. He was a knockabout on the surface, but shrewd and intelligent underneath. He was also close to Tony Murphy.

  Murphy often told a joke about Edington. Edington, his wife and their fourteen children are waiting for a bus. The bus pulls up and Edington ushers his wife and kids on board. There’s a blind man with a metal-tipped cane waiting to get on, but the bus driver tells both men the bus is full, they’ll have to take the train.

  So as Edington and the blind man walk to the train station, the blind man continually taps his stick on the footpath – tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.

  Edington, annoyed, turns to him and says, ‘Why don’t you put a rubber on the end of your stick?’

  And the blind man replies, ‘It’s a pity you didn’t put one on the end of yours, you bastard. We could have caught that bloody bus.’

  Edington met Hodges and Whitrod at Parliament House.

  ‘They asked me to assist them in ridding the force of the Rat Pack,’ Edington recalls. ‘Of course, I took to the defence of the Rat Pack.

  ‘I told them all these corridor assassins were making up stories . . . and it was not my responsibility to investigate Murphy, Hallahan, and Lewis for any misconduct. It’s the job of the administration.’

  After the meeting, Edington called the three officers to his own meeting, and he vowed to defend them against Whitrod’s perceptions.

  Almost twenty years later, Edington would use the same phrase – ‘corridor assassins’ – in defence of Murphy, Lewis, and Hallahan, at the Fitzgerald Inquiry into police corruption. He now admits he lied: ‘I perjured myself at the fucking Fitzgerald Inquiry.’

  Nevertheless, the meeting proved that Whitrod had brought a deepened distrust of the Rat Pack with him as baggage from Papua New Guinea.

  Shirley Loses Some Friends

  By late 1969, Shirley Brifman had continued to expand her empire, opening two brothels in the same block of flats in Wylde Street, Potts Point, a quick stroll uphill from the navy dockyards at Sydney’s Garden Island.

  But her foray in the press that year had sent a collective shudder through her corrupt network of police protectors. Instead of being an asset, and a profitable one at that, she had very quickly become a potential liability.

  By 1970, her old friends began to drop away. And the one she felt a strong emotional attachment to – Glendon Patrick Hallahan – was one of the first to turn his back on her.

  Brifman still had regular contact with Colin Bennett. Along with Ron Edington, Shirley was a touchstone of information for Bennett, which in turn was fuel for his attacks on the Bjelke-Petersen government. He was also the lawyer and confidant she retained in Brisbane.

  Hallahan, already paranoid about Brifman’s appearance in the Sydney newspapers, kept his crosshair on Bennett. With talk of tax investigators sniffing about, he didn’t need his name mentioned on the floor of Queensland parliament now that he had built his own corrupt network that was bringing in lucrative cash.

  Despite knowing Brifman for more than a decade, Hallahan made the decision to end their association.

  ‘I fell out with Glen in February or March 1970,’ Brifman recalled. ‘I fell out with him over I think Col Bennett. He was querying me about Col Bennett ringing up or coming to see me.’

  Though Brifman continued to pay police, including Hallahan, for protection, it all stopped abruptly in June. The New South Wales Vice Squad – for years the recipient of her largesse – unexpectedly charged Brifman with procuring her own daughter, Mary Anne, then thirteen, for the purposes of prostitution. ‘It wasn’t a set-up charge,’ says Mary Anne. ‘It was a fact.’

  Brifman was flummoxed by the betrayal.

  It was the month Shirley’s substantial businesses began to collapse. And for the first time in a career that stretched back into the 1950s, she had no police protection.

  ‘My case was remanded hearing after hearing,’ Brifman said. None of her old friends in the police force were doing anything to make the charge go away.

  Tony Murphy’s wife, Maureen, recalls: ‘She asked Tony to help her. He wouldn’t be in it. He strongly objected to that. I think the same thing happened in Sydney.’

  While it dawned on Shirley that she could be facing some serious prison time, it also occurred to Krahe, Murphy, Hallahan, and the rest that she might start to talk.

  As a form of insurance, Fred Krahe physically tortured Brifman twice in Sydney in the latter half of 1970.

  Mary Anne Brifman witnessed the first incident.

  ‘I was very distressed and not coping with all the physical pain [of working as a prostitute]. I had been very innocent up until that time. They tortured her so I’d behave.

  ‘They were grooming me to take over my mother’s business. They knew she wouldn’t last long. She was overdosing all the time.’

  The second occasion was more brutal. Krahe burned Brifman’s feet with a cigarette lighter.

  ‘She didn’t walk for what seemed like a year,’ remembers Mary Anne. ‘It was a long, long time. I used to have to watch her standing on her tippy toes trying to learn to walk again. It was horrific.’

  A Brisbane cousin confirms Brifman’s injuries.

  ‘The soles of her feet – I’d never seen anything like it. You wonder if they drugged her and did it. She couldn’t walk. When she lost that protection . . . I remember thinking it was just too much for her. She thought she’d be able to get them off her back and she couldn’t.

  ‘Shirley had nowhere to turn.’

  Her Brisbane stockbroker friend, Robin Corrie, offered her encouragement, as well as monetary assistance. He was incensed that the police had turned on her after financially gouging her for years. Corrie firmly suggested that she bring them down with her.

  ‘You fight ’em, Shirley,’ he advised. ‘I know all about them.’

  ‘I paid all these years for protection,’ Brifman recalled in a police interview the following year. ‘[Now] I was in fear of my life. If I am going to go, they are going to go with me.’

  And despite their years of intimacy, she feared Hallahan the most. ‘I don’t mean physical violence with Tony, but Glen would be the type. I am more frightened of Glen as far as violence goes.’

  The tangible fear Brifman felt at that time did not escape her family, particularly her eldest daughter, Mary Anne, the epicentre of the charge against Brifman that would change her mother’s life.

  ‘A cold-hearted person like Hallahan, a man who can kill people and torture them as well . . . she captured his heart, yes,’ remembers Mary Anne. ‘I realised too late . . . that all these special people and high-ranking people and very good people in society’s eyes, all were corrupt. I believed any important person was like that. I thought that was the norm. I thought the whole world understood life like that.’

  With the case against Brifman adjourned over and over through 1970, she began to seethe. She’d
been treated poorly. She’d been used by friends and lovers she’d trusted. And without protection, her brothels were fair game.

  When she was tortured by her erstwhile lover Detective Fred Krahe of the New South Wales police, she’d reached a tipping point.

  It was time to blow the whistle.

  A Fiery Luncheon

  As Whitrod settled into the job, his perceived pomposity and apparent need to reform the force at breakneck speed was garnering enemies at a similar pace.

  If the commissioner’s aim was to unsettle the old guard then he was succeeding admirably.

  Over at the Special Branch – established during Police Commissioner Carroll’s tenure in the late 1940s, and tasked with handling subversive activities in the state – Don Lane, friend to Hallahan from their Mount Isa days, was also beginning to chafe at Whitrod’s leadership.

  Norm Bauer, before going on his global study tour, and before Whitrod had taken his chair in the commissioner’s office, had issued a confidential memo to senior officers throughout the force, including the Special Branch, warning that he expected to be updated on any subversive activities that ‘intended to overthrow our lawfully constituted Government’. He singled out the Communist Party of Australia and the National Socialist Party of Australia, among others.

  Whitrod, once installed at police headquarters, swiftly removed the head of the Special Branch, twenty-year veteran Sub-inspector Leo de Lange, to general CIB duties. Rumours abounded that a new squad would replace the existing team, on the grounds that branch officers had become too easily recognised by the public, particularly demonstrators and agitators, over the years.

  It may also have been a response to a phenomenon that Whitrod found perplexing – often, when he raised issues with Bjelke-Petersen, he found the premier in possession of information, siphoned from the Special Branch, before he did. Who was the premier’s mole? Who was destabilising Whitrod? The rumour was it was Don Lane.

  Whitrod’s persistence with the education of the force also drew him into heated conversations with union boss Ron Edington.

  ‘Whitrod wanted everyone to become an academic,’ Edington recalls. ‘He said, “Now I’ll give you time off, departmental time, if you want to further your studies. You can go to university.”

  ‘And he says to me, “Now you being the leader of the union, you join up and do this bloody course.” And I said, “Like fucking hell, I’m not going to go and listen to some poofter from the university pushing this bloody shit down my neck.”

  ‘Anytime I ever sent anything to him I used to put: R.L. Edington. JP. NPAS – No Police Arts and Science course.’

  Lewis was also being consistently frustrated by Whitrod’s staff appointments to the JAB. It directly undermined Lewis’s authority, and he had little recourse to debate it.

  At least this was the case until Paul Wilson, one of Lewis’s academic friends and contacts from the University of Queensland, was approached by Whitrod to convene a casual weekend luncheon at Wilson’s home in St Lucia. Whitrod was acquainted with the young criminologist when he was head of the Commonwealth police force in Canberra.

  Whitrod wanted to meet the up-and-coming young men of the Queensland police in a casual setting. He wanted to hear their thoughts, opinions and concerns.

  Whitrod even set down some rules prior to the gathering – anyone, irrespective of rank, could say what was on their mind without fear of repercussion.

  Wilson invited Terry Lewis.

  ‘I also asked Ron Richards, who was chief of staff of the Sunday Truth,’ says Wilson.

  Lewis would have felt a measure of support with his old friends there at the barbecue at Wilson’s house overlooking the Brisbane River. Indeed, they may have fortified him. Despite Lewis’s reputation as a quiet man, he never backed away from an opportunity to forthrightly express his opinions.

  Wilson says: ‘[It] ended acrimoniously, with both men telling me later how much they did not trust each other. I can’t remember exactly why, but it was a combination of different personalities and different perspectives on what needed to be done to reform the Queensland police force.’

  Lewis remembers Whitrod, in short trousers, storming off.

  ‘So I went out there and I can still see it, in Paul Wilson’s backyard and the big table. We probably had a few beers and . . . I obviously touched on something that he bloody didn’t agree with, but I was very frank . . . Little Whitty. He stamped out with his fat little legs down the steps . . . He never talked to me again.

  ‘Oh, he was a very pompous man, if that’s not too rude a word.’

  Lewis, in fact, offered the luncheon a scathing attack on Whitrod’s managerial reforms to date. Whitrod would later tell Wilson that his aim was ‘to remove the man from his job’. The gloves were off.

  Not long after, Whitrod and Lewis found themselves alone in the elevator at police headquarters. Lewis, without compunction, called his commissioner a ‘fat pig’.

  Lewis, Whitrod thought, would eventually get his just deserts.

  In Lewis’s police diaries, he consistently referred to his boss as ‘Mr Whitrod’ or ‘Whitrod’. Never ‘Commissioner Whitrod’.

  Stories of Whitrod’s incompetence circulated.

  Abe Duncan remembers Whitrod rushing into his office one morning.

  The police commissioner believed that some of his men weren’t happy with his appointment to the top job and were conspiring against him. In Cunnamulla in western Queensland, a prisoner had simply walked out of the watchhouse and Whitrod believed police had deliberately left the door open. He immediately sent Chief Inspector Hugh Low out to investigate any negligence on the part of police.

  While Low was still out there, Whitrod burst into Duncan’s office again.

  ‘Get onto Hugh,’ Whitrod said. ‘Another prisoner has escaped in Hughenden. Get him to have a look at it while he’s there. He can slip across to Hughenden.’

  Whitrod was unaware that Hughenden was over eleven hundred kilometres north-east of Cunnamulla.

  ‘You wouldn’t be serious, would you?’ Duncan asked.

  On another occasion, those in Whitrod’s inner-circle quickly learned that he hated to be kept out of the loop when it came to major crime incidents. He was afraid to be caught on the hop by the press. So he insisted that he be regularly briefed.

  One day Duncan learned that a serious siege involving a weapon was being played out in the southern Brisbane suburb of Inala.

  I better tell Whitty, Duncan thought.

  He went directly to Ken Hoggett, Whitrod’s minder, and insisted he see the police commissioner.

  Hoggett disappeared into Whitrod’s office and emerged shortly after.

  ‘Abe, can you hang on until two o’clock tomorrow?’ Hoggett said. ‘He’s writing his [commissioner’s] newsletter.’

  Duncan says: ‘These were the sort of things that went on.’

  Shirley Goes Live

  Throughout 1970 and well into the following year, Brifman’s court case over procuring her daughter for prostitution kept being set back. She was tired of the game.

  Though she was still in touch with Fred Krahe in New South Wales and Tony Murphy in Queensland, she was indignant over being charged. All the while, her health was failing and she was losing weight.

  In early June 1971 Brifman was finally committed for trial, and was remanded in custody at Silverwater gaol, twenty-one kilometres west of Sydney’s CBD.

  Granted bail, she had to wait more than a week before she was set free. She learned later that the petty criminal assigned to bail her had pocketed the money and absconded. She believed it was at the urging of the New South Wales Vice Squad.

  Again she rang Peter Grose at the Curtis Brown literary agency. He told her straightaway that the ABC current affairs program This Day Tonight (TDT) had been looking for he
r. Brifman immediately called TDT reporter Gerald Stone.

  It was payback time.

  Brifman arrived at the Gore Hill ABC television studios by taxi between 4 and 4.30 p.m. on Tuesday 15 June 1971.

  She was taken upstairs to meet with Stone, and two other TDT crew.

  ‘I was assigned to do the interview and I do remember she was pissed off at how the cops were no longer doing her any favours,’ says Stone. ‘She was a very thin woman at this stage, very fragile. She was hardly what you’d call a stunner.’

  Brifman was briefed by Stone then signed a statutory declaration. Stone said: ‘This is just to protect the station.’

  Brifman said that before the interview they took her down to the bar and got her ‘half shot’: ‘I was introduced to all of them.’

  TDT, which began broadcasting in 1967 and was hosted by Bill Peach, was hugely popular across the country. Brifman, with her ‘unremarkable, working-class Australian voice’ (as Stone remembered it), the belle from Atherton, and slightly intoxicated, was about to sign her own death warrant on live television.

  Did TDT know that Brifman airing allegations of paying off dozens of senior New South Wales police, including an unnamed Krahe, was potential dynamite?

  ‘Yes, of course,’ says Stone. ‘TDT was an important program for an Australia in transition. Everything was outlawed still – brothels, abortion, gambling. This was huge money in the hands of corrupt police and politicians. Police corruption was a big story.’

  Did Brifman tell the truth on air? ‘Oh yes, there’s no doubt about that,’ Stone adds. ‘The stories she was telling about cops and clients . . . there was no doubt she was what she was.’

  Stone asked her during the interview why she had decided to step forward: ‘Because I am now on charges and my children are suffering for this.