‘I was one of the few who knew where she lived,’ Duncan recalls. ‘We found her unconscious . . . Val Barlow was a big, strong fellow and she was a small thing. Val lifted her up and we took her to hospital.’
Her stomach pumped, Brifman was housed in the Brisbane general hospital’s notorious Ward 16 – a locked psychiatric facility. She was discharged two days later and recuperated with her sister in Paddington.
Duncan had an urgent private discussion with Whitrod about Brifman, then later attempted to interview her about the Regan threat at police headquarters, but she became ill and the interview was abandoned. A police guard was placed on the Wilston safe house.
Then, almost a week later, Glendon Patrick Hallahan, estranged lover of Shirley Brifman and, along with Tony Murphy, one of the star culprits in her damning narrative, did something extraordinary.
He brought his informant John Edward Milligan, drug dealer and former Regan sidekick, into the heart of police headquarters.
Duncan recorded in his police diary: ‘Saw Det. Sgt. G.P. Hallahan 9.25am and he introduced John Edward Milligan, who was interviewed by me 9.30am to 11.45am re: Stewart John Regan, Sydney criminal.’
It underlined the arrogance and cunning of Hallahan. Under threat, he went straight into the lion’s den. He was showing Whitrod and Duncan that he was cooperating with the Brifman investigation, yet it also put him in a position to find out, first hand, the direction in which the investigation was heading. He showed no fear bringing Milligan into the centre of it all.
Just short of a week later, Duncan received another urgent call, this time from Brifman’s sister Marge Chapple. An anonymous female had phoned her house in Paddington, threatening the lives of the Brifman children.
Detective Paull flew back into Brisbane again soon after, and with him was a young detective called Clive Small.
Small – who would later become famous for solving the Ivan Milat backpacker serial killings during the 1990s – was a junior on the Brifman investigation, seconded as an interview transcript typist and a self-described ‘get me a cup of coffee sort of guy’.
He says of the Brifman interviews: ‘She looked quite a bit older than she was . . . like she’d had a hard life.
‘I thought she was a bit shaky . . . She didn’t come in as a “Here I am and I’ll tell you all I’ve got”. She appeared like a person under pressure.
‘The pressure from all sides – the good guys, the bad guys and the crooks – the pressure . . . would have been enormous.’
And it wasn’t just Shirley Brifman on the brink.
This Town’s Getting Too Hot
Assistant Police Commissioner Duncan was deeply worried about Brifman, and at 8 a.m. on Monday 6 September he telephoned Colin Bennett to discuss her health and the future of her police interviews. Would she be able to continue?
Duncan had a quick talk to Whitrod about the situation, then later that morning a squad car picked up Brifman and brought her into police headquarters.
Police needed to know more about the threat from John Regan and the identity of his blond associate, Milligan.
Meanwhile, the New South Wales head of the double-headed Brifman inquiry – Assistant Police Commissioner Brian Doyle – was, behind closed doors, starting to get tense. Not only had the Brifman revelations begun to internally polarise some elements of the New South Wales force, but information leaks were beginning to hamper the investigation, and many officers south of the border suspected they were coming out of Queensland.
In addition, Brifman continued to be a troublesome interviewee.
In his written assessment, Doyle described Brifman: ‘She is an extremely difficult woman to interview on account of her hysterical character, flight of ideas, rapid and dissociated talk and her insistence on saying whatever comes into her mind, even if it is not remotely connected with the subject being discussed.
‘She . . . goes into tantrum after tantrum, endeavouring to hold it over you that she won’t talk to you anymore unless she does everything her way.
‘She will make an appointment and immediately cancel it.’
Brifman again fell ill that day – 6 September – in the interview room with Abe Duncan, and returned to her sister’s house to recover.
What she didn’t know was that on the Gold Coast that same afternoon, two police officers were breaking into an exclusive multi-level beach house in Hedges Avenue, Mermaid Beach, in search of a missing person.
Once inside, they found their man dead in the main bedroom. It was stockbroker Robin Corrie.
The day before, Corrie and his wife, Andree, and the children had been to a lunchtime engagement party. Conspicuously, Corrie was not eating. He said he had no appetite.
Later, he saw off his daughter at Brisbane airport. She was returning to school in New South Wales. He told Andree that he was going into his CBD office to do some work, but he never returned to the Corrie home in Clayfield.
The next morning, Andree arose at 5 a.m. and found her husband still missing. Perhaps he was on his boat, or had slept overnight in the office. She knew he had a business meeting at 8 a.m. and around that time she phoned his office. The meeting was in progress, but Corrie was not present.
Andree then reported Corrie missing to police.
At 12.15 p.m., two officers from Broadbeach police station on the Gold Coast arrived at the Mermaid Beach holiday house and jemmied a hopper window to gain entry to the property. Corrie was found on the bed. Two tablets and a headache powder in an envelope were found on the dressing table, and nearby a glass containing a small amount of liquid.
Also, police discovered several letters addressed to his family. A post-mortem revealed Corrie, who had just turned fifty-one, had died of a drug overdose (methaqualone or Quaaludes, a nervous system depressant, and pentobarbitone, a barbiturate taken for insomnia).
His son John Corrie, almost eighteen, had driven to the Gold Coast looking for his father. When he arrived at the beach house in Hedges Avenue, he was confronted by two large policemen. They had only arrived five minutes earlier.
They told him: ‘There’s no use going in there, son, your old man’s dead.’
When she learned the news, Brifman was shattered: ‘It is so hard to believe it is not funny. He wasn’t the type to kill himself but the type if he was hooked to protect his family.’
Brifman found Corrie’s suicide incomprehensible, knowing him as intimately as she did. He loved life, and to her knowledge had no financial difficulties, though he had confided in her that his second marriage was not running smoothly.
Then Brifman remembered Detective Hallahan boasting years earlier that he had struck a financially lucrative vein in blackmailing homosexual businessmen.
She wondered if Hallahan wasn’t at it again, with men like Corrie.
‘I thought . . . maybe Glen was blackmailing Robin because he knew that I used to fly up here for Robin,’ she reflected.
It echoed back a decade to the death by supposed overdose of prostitute Leigh Hamilton, having had a run-in with Hallahan.
John Corrie believes there was nothing to suggest that his father died by anything other than his own hand.
‘There were pressures from banks and overdrafts, personal pressures, and the business,’ he says. ‘He’d been through the mining boom of the late 60s, and 1970 and 1971 were terrible years, they were difficult years.’
In reality, his marriage to Andree was already faltering after just fourteen months. According to a family member, she never wanted to marry Corrie in the first place ‘but he threatened to kill himself with tablets if she didn’t’. He was also losing money and had a pathological ‘fear of poverty’. ‘He was broke but he actually lived like he had a lot of money,’ the family member recalls.
In letters left on the dressing table to his wife, children, sister and
company secretary, Corrie indicated that he was heading for financial disaster. He expressed regret for his actions, outlined his share values and asked that his children be well looked after.
The party in Armagh Street was over.
A Nice Man Dies in the Suburbs
John Regan was still haunting Brisbane in spring 1971 when on 18 and 19 September, Abe Duncan, acting on a tip from an informant, cruised O’Connell Terrace, which runs along the edge of the Brisbane Exhibition grounds in Bowen Hills, looking for any trace of the Sydney gunman.
With Regan and his former sidekick Milligan trying to frame each other with both the Queensland police and the Federal Narcotics Bureau, and with Brifman in hiding and Hallahan thrown into the mix, Brisbane for a moment must have suddenly appeared like a branch office of the Sydney underworld.
The next week, Jack Cooper, the physically imposing manager of the notorious National Hotel, was finishing his shift at around 2.40 a.m. on the morning of Sunday 26 September. Cooper was well liked by hotel patrons and had a reputation for being fair but firm.
Cooper was well acquainted, too, with the likes of Murphy, Hallahan, and the other police friends of hotel proprietor Max Roberts.
That morning, the Adelaide-born former caterer, instead of heading home to his family in Stafford, nine kilometres north of the CBD, drove a few blocks from the hotel to 203 Elizabeth Street, where he had a meal in the kitchen of the Lotus Room restaurant and nightclub. He was joined by good friend and club owner Ray Sue-Tin.
‘He came straight through to the kitchen and sat at the kitchen table while I prepared a meal,’ said Sue-Tin. ‘He came in about three times a week after finishing work and always sat in the kitchen while we talked and had a meal.’
Cooper, Sue-Tin asserted, always enjoyed Chinese food.
Sue-Tin had operated the Lotus Room since 1969 and had a rare 3 a.m. licence. It was one of Brisbane’s few late-night clubs, along with the Playboy down at Petrie Bight. Diners were entertained by the Billy Blackmore Trio, a piano, bass and drum ensemble that played everything from jazz to the latest popular songs.
Sue-Tin’s wife, Quorling, remembers Cooper coming to the Lotus Room virtually every night for a meal after the National closed.
‘He was a very, very nice man,’ she says. ‘I remember Terry Lewis and Tony Murphy coming in all the time, almost every night during the week. I remember Glen Hallahan coming not as often.’
After his meal, Cooper regularly drove Sue-Tin and Quorling to their home at the corner of Jean Street and Days Road, Grange, on his way back to Stafford.
On that morning, Cooper arrived at Sue-Tin’s modest red-brick house, with its poinsettias and a Hills hoist exposed to Jean Street out the back, at around 4.25 a.m.
‘He didn’t say anything in particular when I got out of his car . . . just “goodnight” or “see you later” or something like that,’ remembered Sue-Tin.
Cooper then headed towards his home in Brennan Street, just over five minutes’ drive away. When he approached his regular left turn off Shand Street, he noticed in the headlights a barricade of wooden fruit boxes.
He stopped the car and stepped out to remove the boxes when he was cut down by gunfire. The ninety-five kilogram Cooper, forty-eight, was struck by five bullets from a .22 calibre weapon fixed with a silencer. Fifteen bullets had been fired at him. A security dog at an industrial plant opposite the murder scene raised no alarm.
The killer or killers then dragged Cooper’s body off the road and dumped it under a nearby tree. The car was left with the keys still in the ignition. Cooper’s spectacles had dropped into a pool of his own blood.
Who would want to kill Jack Cooper? He carried no money from the National Hotel’s nightly takings, and had no keys to the hotel’s safe.
If robbery was the motive, the perpetrators were pitifully informed.
Or had he, as the hotel’s eyes and ears since 1966, been accidentally privy to some confidential information? Robin Corrie’s death had recently been front-page news. And Shirley Brifman was in town being investigated by police in two states. Had some old police friends of the National, agitated over the current state of affairs, maybe a little drunk in the early hours of that Sunday, or in recent days, let something slip in front of Cooper?
One of the detectives assigned to the murder case was Glen Hallahan.
In a breakthrough in the investigation a month later, the crates were traced to a fruit and vegetable store in inner-city New Farm. Police then identified the murder weapon as a .22 calibre collapsible Armalite survival rifle, and traced its sale to a Fortitude Valley disposals store.
At dawn on 5 November, New Farm businessman Donald John Maher, thirty-one, was arrested and charged with Cooper’s murder.
Maher, represented at his trial by Des Sturgess, later admitted in his statement to police that he was present at the shooting of Cooper – the culmination of a robbery attempt gone ‘haywire’ – but didn’t shoot the hotel manager. Maher, who had previous convictions for car theft but was trying to get his life back on track, refused to identify the killer.
His trial, though, revealed a convoluted plot leading up to the slaying. A criminal, Perry Vincent, gave evidence that Maher had offered him money to concoct a story implicating Hallahan in the murder.
Vincent alleged Maher told him that Hallahan, with someone named ‘Murphy’, had control of brothels on the Gold Coast, and that Hallahan was ‘in it, up to his neck’.
Vincent said he was to tell the police that Hallahan had been standing over Cooper’s body, and that Maher had exclaimed: ‘What have you done?’ And that Hallahan replied: ‘It’s done now.’
Maher claimed that he was physically assaulted while being questioned at CIB headquarters. He also said that Hallahan remarked to him: ‘There is a lot of heat on and somebody has to go for it.’
He later protested that his statement was signed under extreme duress, and that his admission that he was present at the shooting of Cooper was ‘pure perjury’ by police.
Maher was found guilty and jailed for life.
Years later, Whitrod wrote in his memoir: ‘I was told confidentially that a second person, who could have been a police officer, was involved in the murder. I was told Donald Maher, who was convicted of the murder, admitted a second person was involved but was too scared to name him to police.’
Under the Microscope
According to Lewis’s police diaries, his work at the JAB remained untroubled by the Brifman revelations and the Corrie and Cooper deaths in the latter half of 1971.
He was forging ahead with his university diploma, delivering lectures at the police college, giving interviews to the local press, checking duty rosters and drafting responses to questions asked of his minister, Max Hodges, in Parliament House.
On the day that Corrie’s body was discovered, he briefed Tony Murphy on the functions of the JAB.
Still, Whitrod, via Ken Hoggett and others, would not leave Lewis alone.
In late September, Lewis had an actual audience with Whitrod regarding a new police station in Upper Mount Gravatt. The police commissioner wanted Lewis to train officers appointed to the station in how to deal with juveniles.
Was Whitrod trying to marginalise Lewis by sticking him in the suburbs? Lewis soon expressed to Whitrod his ‘disinterest’ in the idea.
‘He wanted to get rid of me,’ says Lewis. ‘I had passed the exams to qualify for inspector and I was likely to become a commissioned officer. Whitrod thought I should get some uniform experience. He wanted me to go [to Upper Mount Gravatt] as a uniformed senior sergeant.’
In addition, the police commissioner continued to foist staff on Lewis and the JAB. Then came a curious request later in the year. ‘Insp. M. Hopgood called at the office re: Diaries completed by me whilst in C.I. Branch.’ A few days later he handed to Hopgood his thre
e diaries for ‘1959–1962, inclusive’.
Why had this period in Lewis’s career – the Bahnemann conviction, the closing of the brothels by Bischof, the exposure of the sensational affair surrounding Mary Margaret Fels – suddenly demanded scrutiny from higher powers?
Was it related to Brifman and her time soliciting out of the National Hotel? Or was it just a play by Whitrod to unsettle Lewis?
Two Bulls Lock Horns
New South Wales Assistant Police Commissioner Brian Doyle – described by an officer who worked with him in Sydney in the early 1970s as ‘the paradigm honest cop, the no-nonsense tough guy who succumbed to no pressure and took no money’, and in charge of sifting through Brifman’s allegations against dozens of Sydney police – was about to put on a show that would never be forgotten by those who witnessed it.
He was set to conduct a series of one-on-one interviews with his doppelganger in the force – Fred ‘Froggy’ Krahe. It was Doyle’s job to get to the bottom of Krahe’s association with Brifman and the graft he’d been allegedly collecting for years.
But senior New South Wales police were not going to risk another major scandal over the squealing of a drug-addicted prostitute. In late 1971 it was still suffering the reverberations of the Detective Sergeant Phillip Arantz revelations.
Arantz, head of the newly formed Computer Bureau, began feeding in police crime statistics and immediately discovered a discrepancy between the computer tabulations and the figures published in the Police Department’s annual reports. He learned that the crime rate in 1971 was in fact seventy-five per cent higher than that publicly presented by Police Commissioner Norm Allan and Premier Robert Askin.
When Allan and other superiors showed no interest in his findings, Arantz leaked the data to the Sydney Morning Herald. The response was explosive.
Arantz was deemed insane and was sent to be tested for mental illness at a psychiatric unit. He refused to answer questions when a departmental investigation was launched; he was then suspended without pay.
Three Crooked Kings Page 26