‘My father brought me up the right way. He always told me to do the right thing and so, for the first time in my life, I’m doing it.’
Brifman went on to admit that she had been working as a prostitute in Sydney with the knowledge of police and had kept brothels while paying weekly protection money to a member of the Vice Squad, presumably Krahe.
Then she fired a huge shot at Hallahan and Murphy up in Queensland, admitting that she had perjured herself at the National Hotel inquiry in 1963 and 1964, not for financial benefit but to save her life and those of her children.
Immediately after the interview, TDT staff took her back down to the bar.
‘They gave me a beer to steady my nerves and after it was all over they said: “We’ve been waiting for something like this to happen and we must say it is about time someone got stuck into Frank Bischof.”’
Her daughter Mary Anne remains nonplussed at her mother’s decision to go on television with her allegations.
Mary Anne says: ‘She mixed with corrupt police up to the premier in two states . . . Why would she think that she could tell on them and not get hurt?’
Not So in Hiding
After the TDT revelations, Brifman went into hiding in Sydney.
She had suffered, on a handful of occasions, the brutality of Fred Krahe, and knew what he was capable of. She had long heard the stories of his personally torturing criminals for money or information. Then there was an enraged Hallahan and Murphy to consider.
Brifman holed up in a narrow double-storey terrace at 191 Victoria Street, Kings Cross, a short walk towards the harbour from the red and white neon Coca-Cola sign. She also assigned herself a bodyguard.
Brifman’s revelations were front-page news in the Courier-Mail on Wednesday 16 June. The report led with the National Hotel perjury angle. The story quoted her as ‘Mrs Shirley Brickman’.
At 8.30 a.m. that day, respected Assistant Police Commissioner Abe Duncan, who had been taken into the trust and confidence of Whitrod, went and saw the police commissioner about the Brifman allegations.
On Friday, 18 June, New South Wales detectives Williams and Paull visited Brifman in her hideout. They interviewed her about the statutory declaration she had signed at the ABC studios earlier in the week, and asked her to check her signature – she always signed her name in full, Shirley Brifman, with a playful, childish loop on the tail of the ‘y’. The detectives had already conducted interviews with TDT staff about the night Brifman appeared on television.
They told Brifman that they would be conducting in-depth interviews with her in the near future. Paull phoned Duncan on that same day, telling him that detectives planned to fly to Brisbane to continue their investigation into Brifman.
The following day, she was tracked down by a reporter for Brisbane’s Sunday Mail newspaper. How did a journalist manage to obtain the secret address of probably the most wanted woman on the east coast of Australia – sought by both corrupt police and criminals alike – in a city the size of Sydney?
Remarkably, she granted an interview. The tone and quotes offered in the subsequent story hinted that she was either drunk or drugged, or both.
‘Mrs Brifman was sleeping fully dressed in a small, starkly neat flat when the Sunday Mail found her yesterday,’ the report said.
‘“I’m supposed to be in hiding,” she said as she raised herself on one elbow. “No one should know where to find me.”’
She pointed to her ‘bodyguard’, a large man snoring on a nearby bed. ‘I think I’m doing a better job guarding him.’
She told the reporter that she decided to blow the whistle on corruption when she was languishing in Silverwater gaol.
‘I was worrying about what would happen to my children . . .’ she revealed. ‘That’s the first time I have ever been in gaol and it was a real eye-opener for me.’
Soon after, she was also visited by notorious killer and psychopath John Regan. He said if she opened her mouth again she was dead.
Up in Brisbane, Tony Murphy was enraged at Brifman’s squealing on national television.
He phoned Brifman’s sister Marge Chapple at her home in Paddington, and went berserk.
Chapple later told police that Murphy demanded to know where Brifman was: ‘Has she gone completely mad?’ he said. ‘There will never be another royal commission in this state. We won’t allow it.’
Later, Murphy confided in Terry Lewis: ‘One woman I could trust with my life. She has now brought me undone.’
The Rat Pack had comfortably negotiated the full glare of a royal commission in the early 1960s, but since then things had become more complicated. Murphy had risen in rank and stature and was now entwined with Jack Herbert in the Licensing Branch. He was also in a business arrangement with Fred Krahe and Krahe’s police and criminal partners in Sydney.
Meanwhile, Hallahan had become a rogue operative. He had built a corrupt financial network with New South Wales police and was shoring up his finances with protection money from prostitutes and any other scam he could conceive of with criminal associates like tattooist Billy Phillips.
By 1971, too, he had a new potential partner, the brilliant, but eccentric, young John Edward Milligan. In the 1960s Milligan was associate to a judge in the District Court. In this capacity, Milligan crossed paths with Hallahan.
Milligan was looking at a stellar future until he was caught selling text books he stole from law libraries. It was typical Milligan – a cross between a thief and a prankster.
Colin Bennett’s daughter Mary remembers him from law school at the University of Queensland. ‘Milligan would eat an entire tube of toothpaste before an exam and make himself sick so he could take the exam at another time,’ she says.
But in the swinging 60s, the campus clown turned his mind to drugs and importation. By the time Shirley Brifman tipped the bucket on her police friends, Milligan was mixing with some heavy characters, including John Regan.
Lewis, as he had been for almost a decade, was quietly tucked away in the JAB.
Coinciding with the Brifman scandal, the Rat Pack had fastidious, intractable do-gooder Ray Whitrod threatening to unpick a fabric of institutionalised corruption that had been decades in the making.
Whitrod, in his first eighteen months in the chair, had assembled a small cadre of officers he could trust, an inviolable unit, including Duncan, Gulbransen, Hoggett, Voigt and Dautel, among others.
Just as Brifman made her allegations, Whitrod was toying with establishing a crack investigative unit that would solely concentrate on corrupt police within the force. It was a gamble – police seriously investigating other police – but to Whitrod’s mind it was another flank he could use to attack and hopefully dismantle the Rat Pack.
Brifman’s public admission that she had committed perjury at the National Hotel inquiry gave Whitrod the precise fissure he’d been looking for in the Rat Pack facade.
Shirley Flees North
Despite their recent animosity, Tony Murphy urged Brifman to return to Brisbane. She was also encouraged to come home by Norm Gulbransen. If she stayed in Sydney she would be murdered.
So almost eight years after Hallahan and Murphy had reluctantly accepted her leaving Brisbane, courtesy of the National Hotel fiasco, she was again the puppet being played by the Rat Pack.
Having family in Brisbane (sister Marge Chapple) may have influenced her decision. And facing the wrath of Fred Krahe, John Regan, and whoever else stood to lose from knowing one of Sydney’s biggest and now most infamous madams, would have been a major factor.
Did she trust Murphy? They had had a close relationship, and he had always been reliable in the past. ‘I never actually fell out with Tony,’ she said.
So Shirley, husband Sonny, and the three smaller Brifman children – Sonya, Helen and Sid – came back to Queensland in the middle
of winter 1971. Mary Anne, the subject of the procurement charge, was at that point not permitted by police to leave New South Wales and stayed with a relative in Moree in the state’s north, 480 kilometres from Brisbane.
The Brifmans moved into a rental property – an old Queenslander the police found for them – at 57 Vardon Street in the inner-north suburb of Wilston.
It wasn’t a cheerful return to her old stomping ground. Brifman was at the brink of a complete mental breakdown.
Abe Duncan recorded in his police diary that on Thursday 24 June 1971, he received a phone call informing him that Shirley Brifman was ‘in hospital from overdose of tablets’.
By 2 July, she had recovered enough to agree to meet Duncan for a formal interview in the office of her lawyer, Colin Bennett, at his Inns of Court offices in the city.
‘I had no knowledge of her,’ Duncan recalls. ‘I never met her when she was associated with the National Hotel or Killarney brothel. I never worked on the Consorting Squad.
‘She was determined to nominate many of those [police] who had personal associations with her, big shots . . . Whitrod put me on the job of contacting her and keeping in touch with her.
‘She made a complaint against police from the olden days and the National Hotel. She did mention Tony Murphy and she mentioned Bischof and Hallahan.’
Duncan learned that Brifman was still on bail over the New South Wales procuring charge and he wanted to let that court matter be resolved before further interrogating Brifman over her accusations against potentially corrupt Queensland police.
Whitrod disagreed. He needed her questioned immediately. So Duncan began a series of formal interviews with Brifman. Signed transcripts were produced.
Duncan remembers: ‘She was reasonably bright and reasonably intelligent, and fairly smart when she was done up. There was no doubt she had been a prostitute from a fairly early age. And there was no doubt she had some association with some police over the years.’
The Duncan interviews with Brifman were recorded in shorthand and typed by policewoman Pat Ryan. Duncan found her a difficult interviewee. She was an emotional mess. One moment she’d be calm, the next agitated. She might appear to be cooperative then suddenly stand and walk out. Police often had to coax her back.
She destroyed her credibility with Duncan early when she told a story about Police Commissioner Whitrod himself. It was so preposterous that Duncan neither entered the story into the record of interview, nor ever told Whitrod the precise details. When Hallahan was a young detective in the late 1950s, Brifman told Duncan, he often flew to Sydney and Melbourne, and once, while in the Victorian capital, he was actually a guest at Whitrod’s home. Brifman went on to implicate Whitrod in a counterfeit money racket.
‘Whatever you say about Whitrod, there’s no way in the world he’d be dishonest. She said she knew it was right.
‘I’ve never released that statement to anybody. All I told Whitrod was – “You can’t believe her because she’s told me something about you that I couldn’t believe.”’
By July 1971, her lawyer, Colin Bennett, had already made substantial use of his dedicated ‘Brifman briefcase’.
Brifman herself was exhausted. As ever that winter in Brisbane she took great care over her dress, turning up at police headquarters in a knee-length white fur coat, expensive woollen dresses, leather gloves and her customary black wigs. Still, her face, for such a young woman, was deeply lined and her eyes weary.
Just weeks after returning to Queensland she received a surprise visit at her Wilston safe house from Sydney gunman John Regan.
‘He came in a little red sports car with a New South Wales number plate,’ Brifman said. ‘There was another chap sitting in the car, a young fellow.’
This was most probably Regan’s sidekick John Edward Milligan, who Brifman would later describe as ‘that blond joker’.
‘Regan came to the door and said to me, “Have you got the lease of the mine they talk about in the paper?”’
Brifman did own a small mine called ‘Last Chance’ at Herberton, a town on the Atherton Tableland not far from where she grew up.
‘How did you find out where I live?’ Brifman asked him.
‘I have ways and means,’ Regan said.
She was shocked that her secret address had been compromised, and by someone as violent and unpredictable as Regan. Considering her safe house had been arranged for her by police, the leak could only have come from within the force.
Meanwhile, Brifman’s fantastic stories of corrupt police – of pay-offs for protection, of detectives in both Queensland and New South Wales actually organising armed robberies and splitting the cash, of relentless verballing of defendants, of ‘presents’ or false evidence being planted on suspects, of violence, murder, torture, sex and mayhem – took a back seat to a looming political event.
The Springboks, the South African rugby union team, were coming to Brisbane, and it would be a moment that would define the premiership of Joh Bjelke-Petersen.
The Eyes of a Killer
In March 1971 the Federal Narcotics Bureau put out its first shingle in Brisbane. It had a small office in Eagle Street in the CBD.
One of the junior recruits was Brian Bennett, a Customs officer who’d transferred from Newcastle to Brisbane the year before.
As a young investigator, Bennett was looking for action. The importation of cannabis, cannabis resin or hashish, and LSD was on the rise. But in those initial months, there was little to get excited about in the Queensland capital.
‘In those early days we were scratching around for work,’ Bennett recalls. ‘Because we were federal, the local state drug squad was a little bit in awe of us. I think they thought we were bigger and better than we actually were.’
Then Bennett got a call from Detective Sergeant Lou Rowan, chief of the Queensland Drug Squad and famous Australian test cricket match umpire.
‘I’ve got a well-known southern criminal as an informant,’ said Rowan. ‘He’s talking big-time drug importations. It’s too big for us. Do you want to talk to him?’
Bennett and the head of the small bureau, Vince Dainer, jumped at the opportunity.
‘Lou set up a meeting for us,’ says Bennett. ‘The rendezvous was set – a laneway on the northern side of [Cathie Street, off Petrie Terrace]. It did a dogleg to the right – that’s where we had to meet this fellow.
‘We pulled up and it was John Regan.’
There, alone in the lane, was one of Australia’s most feared gangsters. He wore, as always, a bulletproof vest beneath his civilian clothing.
‘He just jumped out of his mugshots: he had the coldest eyes, he had chillingly blue eyes, the coldest eyes on a human being I’ve ever seen,’ remembers Bennett.
Regan, while terrorising Shirley Brifman, was also conducting a little business in Brisbane. He had a sideline renovating properties with his associate and ‘legal adviser’, John Edward Milligan.
But the two had had a falling-out.
‘Regan was very fit,’ Bennett said. ‘When he got into the car you could almost see the muscles in his legs bulge. He told us he was a businessman from Sydney.
‘He said that he’d met this fellow, John Edward Milligan, and . . . he discovered that Milligan was heavily involved in the importation of drugs on a large scale. He said he was against drugs. It was very strange.’
Regan confided that Milligan had secreted evidence from Regan’s solicitor’s office that would be revealed, and would ‘destroy’ Regan, if Milligan was harmed. Regan felt he’d been doublecrossed. He described Milligan as ‘slippery and dangerous’.
‘He produced these photographs, big blow-up black and white photos of Milligan taken from the front and side. Obviously he or someone else had a gun on Milligan when the pictures were taken. Milligan was posing, not looking happy.
‘He gave us these and other documents that belonged to Milligan. He handed over file boxes containing cardboard [index] cards.’
Regan claimed that Milligan opened one of these ‘files’ on anyone he ever met. One card contained details of a young film director in Sydney by the name of Peter Weir. ‘It was a crude intelligence database,’ remembers Bennett. ‘This was a criminal well ahead of his time.’
Regan told Bennett and Dainer: ‘I’m going back to Sydney shortly. Go for this bloke, he’s big-time and it’ll pay off.’
Milligan subsequently became the Federal Narcotic Bureau’s first major target.
It learned from Regan that Milligan ran a nightclub called Willie’s Bizarre, not far from the National Hotel in the city. It was, according to police, a ‘leading drug hangout’.
Bennett commenced some surveillance. Not that it was hard to miss Milligan.
‘He was well-dressed, always wore business attire, usually a waistcoat,’ recalls Bennett. ‘He was very dapper. He was only a smallish man, with a small frame. He had a receding chin, and sort of wavy hair but receding from the front. And he was always clean-shaven.
‘A few years later, I was up in Kings Cross in Macleay Street and lo and behold Milligan walks down the street. He was wearing pinstripe trousers, spats, and he was twirling a gold-topped cane. Talk about theatrical.’
Soon after, Dainer was transferred back to Sydney and replaced.
Interest in Milligan dropped off under the new regime. But the dandy drug dealer would soon cross paths in a major way with Brian Bennett.
A State of Emergency
Despite his friendship with Terry Lewis, criminologist and academic Paul Wilson had also grown fond of happy and bubbly Ray Whitrod.
They lived in the same suburb and often dined at each other’s houses. In summer, the pair did laps at a local swimming pool in Toowong.
Wilson happened to be in Whitrod’s house in July 1971 when Bjelke-Petersen phoned. The premier informed Whitrod that a state of emergency had been declared for the Springboks’ upcoming match in Brisbane. The South African rugby union team’s six-week tour of Australia was finally bringing them to Queensland.
Three Crooked Kings Page 24