Three Crooked Kings

by Matthew Condon

  Later, in Glancy’s old Vauxhall, Regan offered a unique public service regarding John Andrew Stuart.

  ‘I’ll kill him if you like,’ Regan said to Glancy. ‘Do you want him dead?’

  Glancy met Regan for breakfast on the Saturday morning, and the gunman flew back to Sydney.

  Stuart was arrested later that evening, following a tip-off from Stuart’s brother Dan.

  ‘We got a call from Danny saying Stuart and Finch were at his house at Jindalee,’ says Glancy. ‘There was a barbecue on at the house. A couple of car loads of us went out there.

  ‘As we arrived, a woman came out of the house. She said, “I’m getting out of here, it’s going to be a blood bath.”

  ‘I was the first one in and I saw that Stuart had something behind his back.’

  Glancy asked him what he was holding and raised his gun. Stuart produced a hunting knife. Glancy struck the knife and Stuart’s hand with the gun but then pulled back and cocked his weapon.

  ‘If you don’t drop it, I’ll shoot,’ Glancy ordered. Stuart threw the knife across the room.

  Stuart was cuffed and taken out to one of the police cars. James Finch, who was in the backyard of the property, bolted when he heard the fracas inside. He was picked up the next morning at a nearby shopping centre.

  ‘When we drove into headquarters, Stuart, who was in the back seat, wouldn’t shut up,’ says Glancy. ‘He had his head down and he was shouting that everyone was trying to kill him, that the police were trying to kill him.’

  Stuart and Finch were interviewed extensively by police. Present, among others, was Roger Rogerson. Unsigned statements were produced and both men were charged with murder.

  ‘I remember the day we had Stuart in the CIB,’ says Rogerson. ‘Whitrod came in . . . a little dumpy bloke. He came in with shorts on and white sandshoes and he was all confused and didn’t know what to say. [The other detectives] pissed him off as quick as they could so they could get back to work.

  ‘I don’t think Whitrod had ever seen a murderer before. He came in to have a look at one.’

  From the outset, Stuart volubly and violently protested his innocence, claiming he was verballed.

  On the Sunday after the tragedy, Police Commissioner Whitrod issued a public statement denying that he and Queensland police had been warned of the attack on the Whiskey:

  Mr Whitrod completely refuted suggestions and allegations that either Mr Brian Bolton, a journalist employed by the Sunday Sun newspaper, or Mr John Ryan, a private detective, had given police such a warning. The Commissioner stressed that at no time did any other individual or organisation give such a warning concerning the incident . . . It has been established that no such warning was ever given to the CIU.

  On the day of the fire, Lewis recorded in his police diary that he had been internally queried about whether the JAB ‘had been warned on the 7th inst that crime would be committed on Whisky Au Go Go that night’.

  Someone was telling lies.

  Meanwhile, Glancy took another call from John Regan.

  ‘He was extremely pleased that Stuart and Finch had been arrested.’

  Lewis on the Carousel

  Whitrod’s Education Liaison Unit – in competition with Lewis’s Juvenile Aid Bureau – was causing friction within the community and also inside government.

  High school principals complained through 1973 that the new unit’s direct, proactive approach of apprehending and charging all young offenders, as opposed to the JAB’s warning and counselling in the spirit of the Children’s Services Act, was a source of concern.

  In June 1973, Lewis was further given instruction that the Prosecution Section of the Queensland police would no longer handle any more Children’s Court cases on behalf of the JAB. In short, it could carry the burden itself.

  Incredibly to Lewis, one of the leading police officers heading up the rival Education Liaison Unit was none other than Lorelle Saunders, the young teenager he had repeatedly counselled for disruptive behaviour in the early days of the JAB.

  Despite everything, Police Minister Max Hodges made sure that Whitrod’s reform of the handling of juveniles went through.

  According to Lewis’s police diary, in August 1973 he was informed that he would be appointed inspector from 4 September. He had finally received his promotion. He was also told, in the same phone conversation with a Police Department secretary, that he was being transferred to ‘Communications’.

  Lewis was presented his new badge of rank by the police commissioner at a formal ceremony on Saturday 25 August. It was his day off, but Whitrod had requested his attendance.

  The following Wednesday, Lewis requested a new cap and pair of shoes. He was instructed, by orders of Hodges and Whitrod, to report for duty in Communications on Monday 3 September. It would be the start of a period when Lewis would be bumped around departments and police stations both in Brisbane and within the south-east corner of the state.

  Whitrod was clearly testing Lewis. Unlike Murphy and Hallahan, he had no opportunity to pursue charges of corruption and the like against Lewis. But could he tip Lewis out of the force by making his working life impossible?

  Despite his promotion he had already suffered: the new appointment included an unwritten insult to all officers who served in plain clothes. Lewis was going back to uniform.

  To the end, Lewis was still receiving calls about recalcitrant children and offering his advice.

  But it was all over.

  On the Saturday before he began his new job, Inspector Terry Lewis went into the JAB office one last time ‘and packed books and other material and moved it all’ home.

  The Missing Defendant

  A week after Lewis started his new job in Communications, the trial of Stuart and Finch commenced in Brisbane.

  At their committal hearing in the Holland Park magistrates court in June, Stuart’s brother Dan said Stuart had told him he planned to get into the Brisbane nightclub scene by extorting one hundred dollars a week from each venue.

  Stuart exploded: ‘You are lying! You are lying! You are lying for a reward, Dan.’ The government had issued fifty thousand dollars for information leading to a conviction.

  The court heard that when the actual fire was lit, Stuart was at the nearby Flamingo nightclub. It also heard that Finch had confessed the crime to police in an unsigned statement.

  The committal hearing was interrupted when Finch swallowed metal fragments and was admitted to hospital.

  Their trial was scheduled to begin in the Criminal Court on 28 August but Stuart had swallowed twisted paper clips prior to the opening day and was hospitalised.

  A week after the trial finally opened on 10 September, Stuart was once again in hospital having metal pieces removed from his stomach. It was a pattern that had repeated itself over weeks.

  Justice Lucas, tired of Stuart’s antics, instructed that the trial would go ahead in the defendant’s absence. He said Stuart would be provided transcripts of each day’s proceedings. Finch sat handcuffed in the dock.

  With no scientific evidence to tie Stuart and Finch to the scene of the mass murder, the prosecution went about dismantling Stuart’s crazed alibi about a Sydney takeover of Brisbane nightclubs.

  Called to the stand to dispute Stuart’s assertions were some of the most celebrated gangsters in Australian criminal history.

  Lennie McPherson, denying his nickname, ‘Mr Big’, said he had once met Stuart in a pub in Sydney but had had no contact with him since. He denied Stuart’s assertion that he and Stuart had arranged to meet on the Gold Coast in September 1972, where McPherson had a holiday house. McPherson admitted that he knew a man named Regan.

  Next, Graham ‘Mad Dog’ Miller, a self-employed salesman ‘of toys and blankets’, told the court that he never said to Stuart that he, McPherson, and Regan
had been interested in a new Brisbane nightclub called Blinkers.

  He admitted that he had bailed Stuart out of prison in December 1972 following the assault on senior police officer Karl Arkins. Miller recalled that Stuart was thinking of getting involved in the Brisbane nightclub scene; Stuart apparently said that soon he would be ‘Mr Big’ and McPherson would be ‘Mr Little’.

  Underworld figures James ‘Paddles’ Anderson and John Regan were also called. Regan was described as a ‘company manager’. He told the court he had no interest in Brisbane nightclubs, but was in town three weeks before and a day after the bombing (when he agreed to meet Glancy).

  On 11 October, the trial had to be convened at the Royal Brisbane hospital so Stuart could answer evidence brought against him.

  The special ‘hospital court’ was actually a seminar room in the hospital’s pathology building. Stuart, covered in a blue blanket, lay on his side on a gurney.

  ‘John Andrew Stuart, can you hear me?’ Justice Lucas asked.

  Stuart reportedly raised his head slightly then closed his eyes and ‘settled deeper into the blankets’. He ignored the entire proceedings, which lasted for just half an hour.

  As for Finch, he denied ever lighting the fire. He said that on the morning of the deadly blaze he was home in bed.

  On the evening of 22 October, both Finch and Stuart were found guilty on a joint charge of having murdered Jennifer Denise Davie, one of the Whiskey victims. It took the jury just two hours to return the guilty verdicts.

  Stuart was well enough to attend court on 23 October for sentencing. He was brought manacled from the hospital and under heavy police guard. He spat in the face of Chief Crown Prosecutor L.G. Martin, QC, saying: ‘You’ll never wash that off – you’ll have it on your face until the day you die.’

  The judge sentenced the pair to life imprisonment. Stuart’s final court appearance lasted three minutes.

  In the Shadows of the Blackall Range

  Just as he had done as a young man when his career in the RAAF evaporated, Glen Hallahan repaired to the Sunshine Coast hinterland after resigning from the Queensland police force.

  As a teenager he’d cut timber in Cooran. Now he left the city behind and settled on acreage in the tiny district of nearby Obi Obi, with its school of arts and community hall and a smattering of farms flush on Obi Obi Creek.

  Overnight, Hallahan had gone from consorting with some of the most significant police and felons on the east coast of Australia, to being a fledgling farmer in the shadows of the Blackall Range.

  At some point he secured the local post office sub-branch. He also toyed with growing fruit and vegetables.

  It couldn’t have been a greater contrast to his prior life.

  Then, late in 1973, he was back in the newspaper headlines. The tabloid Sunday Sun, now under Ron Richards, had hired him as a special investigative reporter. Hallahan’s tenure was short-lived and he produced no memorable stories on crime and corruption.

  Clearly, Hallahan was trying to make ends meet the best way he could.

  Yet despite his apparent tree change, he still kept in close contact with John Edward Milligan.

  The Whiskey’s Other Victims

  On a warm Friday in January 1974, Barbara McCulkin, housewife and mother, was desperately trying to find private investigator John Ryan, former bouncer at the ill-fated Whiskey Au Go Go nightclub and owner of a business that used dogs and muscle to protect Brisbane’s car yards at night.

  McCulkin was the estranged wife of Billy ‘the Mouse’ McCulkin, an alleged member of the Clockwork Orange Gang that also included the boxer Tommy Hamilton and criminals Vince O’Dempsey and Gary Dubois.

  Despite Stuart and Finch being imprisoned for life for the Whiskey bombing, there were persistent rumours around town that the Clockwork Orange Gang was involved in the mass murder and possibly the Torino bombing as well.

  Billy McCulkin, a former hotel yardie, was a one-time dog to the former detective Glen Hallahan.

  Just two months before Barbara’s frantic phone calls, Billy had moved out of the family home in Highgate Hill with a new girlfriend. Barbara, left with two daughters, Vicky Maree, soon to turn thirteen, and Barbara Leanne, eleven, was feeling the pinch over the Christmas and New Year period without Billy’s support. Though he still came around often to see her and the children, Barbara was getting angry.

  In fact, in the lead up to January, she had started intimating in public – at bars and clubs – that she knew the real story of the Whiskey bombing, and that it wasn’t just the handiwork of Stuart and Finch.

  The word on the street, too, was that Barbara McCulkin was going to be ‘knocked’. She was talking too much.

  Barbara eventually did get Ryan on the phone that Friday, and what she told him was extraordinary.

  ‘She said she was going to blow her guts on the Whiskey, she’d had enough, and she wanted to get into a safe house, she wanted to be hidden away,’ Ryan remembers. ‘John Andrew Stuart had been to her home a few times in the lead up to the bombing. And she said she was present when Billy McCulkin was on the phone making arrangements about the fires, plural.

  ‘She had information on the Clockwork Orange Gang and its links to some Queensland police.’

  Ryan’s instinct was to go around to the Highgate Hill house immediately and make an assessment of the risk she was under. He suggested it, but Barbara put him off.

  ‘It was her daughter Vicky’s birthday on the Sunday and they were going to have a party . . . Also, on the Monday, Billy was due to come around and see the children.’

  In the meantime, Ryan made a few calls and provisionally arranged a safe house for Barbara and her daughters in northern New South Wales. It made sense that Barbara would want her daughters to see their father for the last time before they went into hiding.

  Early that week Ryan heard nothing from Barbara, so on the Tuesday he and his business associate went to the Highgate Hill house to investigate. They saw uncollected mail in the letterbox. Nobody answered the door.

  Ryan made some casual inquiries with neighbours and learned that there’d been a huge ‘domestic’ at the McCulkin house the night before. Nobody reported it to police because it was a regular event at Barbara’s place.

  Another neighbour reported seeing Barbara being forced into a waiting car, and possibly one of the children being shoved into the boot.

  ‘I couldn’t believe it,’ Ryan says. ‘I couldn’t believe nobody called the coppers.’

  Billy McCulkin later alleged that he went around to the house the next day, on Wednesday 16 January, and similarly found it deserted. The lights were still on and a blouse was beneath the needle of a sewing machine.

  The McCulkin girls had vanished without a trace.

  Billy Sets His Own Fire

  It was hardly a publication that raced off the newsstand.

  The Port News – the journal of the Waterside Workers’ Federation (Brisbane Branch) – was published every two months. In 1974 it was edited by William (Billy) Stokes.

  Stokes was no angel. He’d had numerous run-ins with the law since he was a teenager and graduated to theft and other petty crime. As a boy, his mother had actually taken him into CIB headquarters one Saturday morning, where he was given a good talking-to by every child’s friend, Frank Bischof. The ‘go straight’ chat was like water off a duck’s back to Stokes.

  Fleeing charges in New South Wales, Stokes bolted to New Zealand in the early 1970s, where he worked selling advertisements into small magazines. It gave him enough experience to take up the editorship of the Port News when he eventually returned home.

  In Brisbane, Stokes was acquainted with Tom Hamilton, an aggressive petty criminal and boxer (under the pseudonym Ian Thomas). Hamilton and his droogs caused mayhem in Brisbane as the Clockwork Orange Gang, named after the novel abou
t youth and violence by Anthony Burgess and the subsequent film, directed by Stanley Kubrick in 1971.

  Stokes knew that Hamilton and his gang were paid by Vince O’Dempsey and Gary Dubois to bomb Torino nightclub in Fortitude Valley, prior to the Whiskey fire. He had witnessed them bragging about it.

  So after the Whiskey bombing, and as editor of a local journal, albeit small and not particularly influential, Stokes decided to slowly but steadily publish what he knew and learned about the mass killing.

  Was it an attack of conscience from the boy who refused to take Bischof’s path to righteousness? Or was the Port News a form of public insurance for Stokes? Whatever the explanation, he began his Whiskey campaign in the April 1974 issue, a year after the bombing.

  The cover featured an uninspiring photograph of a damaged ship container being hoisted in the air by a crane. But inside was a three-page feature on the Whiskey bombing, bearing the headline: the whiskey – a whitewash?

  Stokes’s article concentrated on the numerous warnings given to police prior to the fatal bombing, in particular from Bill Humphris of the Commonwealth police. He also reproduced the letter sent from Commonwealth Police Commissioner Davis to Queensland Police Commissioner Whitrod after the bombing, reiterating that Humphris had visited Whitrod’s CIU on 27 February – the week before the Whiskey blew – and had passed on information to Jim Voigt.

  Stokes also published an extract of Humphris’s confidential data gleaned from an informant. In it, Humphris detailed the informant’s extensive contact with criminal John Andrew Stuart in the lead up to the bombing. Elsewhere in the account, Stokes questioned the validity of Stuart’s and James Finch’s so-called confessions and other aspects of the trial.

  Reading between the lines, Stokes believed at the time that Stuart was innocent.

  Stokes, who was clearly intelligent and could write, had begun a rolling J’accuse-style series of feature articles that would ultimately culminate in an explosive exposé on the real figures behind Brisbane’s series of nightclub firebombings, and in particular the tragedy at Whiskey Au Go Go.