Three Crooked Kings

by Matthew Condon

  Stokes had lit his own fuse. And the little Port News was about to punch way above its weight of influence.

  The Elderly, Bewildered Orphan

  At around 2 p.m. on Friday 12 July 1974, pensioner Frank Bischof was shopping in the Barry and Roberts department store in Queen Street, the city.

  Bischof was a regular customer of the iconic Brisbane store, not far from where he served the glory days of his working life as a leading detective in the old CIB headquarters on the corner of George and Elizabeth streets.

  On this day, Bischof, seventy, was browsing nonchalantly when he took a Barry and Roberts grocery bag from beneath one of the checkouts and placed inside several packets of cigarettes and a pouch of tobacco.

  Shortly after, he popped into the same bag a dog toy, nineteen fertiliser discs, a packet of plant nutrients and a tube of woodwork glue.

  Meanwhile, Bischof had attracted the attention of store security officer Yvonne Beckett. She kept a close eye on the former Queensland police commissioner as he proceeded to the checkout and paid for a single pack of cigarettes before leaving the store via its Elizabeth Street exit.

  Beckett followed Bischof and approached him. Would Mr Bischof be happy to accompany her back to the store security office? The old man agreed.

  Walking to the office, Bischof held up the bag and asked: ‘Can I pay for these here?’

  The police were called.

  ‘Does it have to go this far?’ he pleaded with Beckett. ‘Is Mr Barry in? I’m a personal friend of his.’

  Inspector W.L. Bennett of the city police arrived soon after, immediately recognising Bischof as the former police commissioner. Bischof engaged in some patter with the senior officer, telling him that his health and memory were good despite his occasional bouts of hypertension.

  Bennett levelled the allegation of shoplifting against him; Bischof said he’d see Mr Paul Barry and Police Commissioner Ray Whitrod on Monday and the matter would be cleared up.

  It wouldn’t. He was charged on a summons complaint with stealing goods to the value of $6.12.

  Bischof, officially listed as a ‘police pensioner’ of Barkala Street, The Gap, sought the assistance of legal legend Dan Casey, his old mate.

  Just prior to the committal hearing at the end of the year, Casey approached Des Sturgess.

  ‘One morning Casey came tapping on the door of my room looking glum,’ Sturgess recalled in his book The Tangled Web. ‘“I’ve got Bischof below,” he told me. “He insists on pleading guilty. Can you come and talk to him?”

  ‘I went to Casey’s chambers where I saw Bischof hunched in a corner.’

  Sturgess observed that all of Bischof’s ‘formidableness’ had disappeared over the years: ‘He now just looked like an elderly, bewildered orphan.’

  Sturgess attempted to slap some sense into the pitiable Bischof.

  ‘Good God, Frank,’ he said, ‘have you stopped to think about your friends who once admired you? You’re now going to reveal yourself to them as nothing but a cheap crook and let them know the people who ran you down were right all along.’

  It seemed to work. Bischof agreed to defend the charge.

  He was committed for trial after a psychiatrist concluded that Bischof was an ‘old and very sick man’, suffering a severe form of clinical depression. The psychiatrist detailed how, when Bischof was commissioner, police had to disarm him on one occasion to prevent him from taking his own life.

  In the end, the Crown filed a no true bill – a decision by the Queensland attorney-general that no indictment would be presented and that to continue against Bischof would not serve the community interest.

  The Big Fella went back to his cactus garden in Barkala Street and waited to die.

  The Relieving Inspector

  With Hallahan gone and Murphy posted to Toowoomba, up on the Darling Downs and a couple of hours’ drive out of Brisbane, Whitrod continued his war of attrition against Terry Lewis.

  After several months relieving in Communications and on mobile patrols, Lewis sought and was granted a meeting with the police commissioner. On Tuesday 22 January 1974, he noted in his police diary: ‘Saw Mr Whitrod, C.O.P., re positions of Compt-Gen of Prisons and C.O.P. Tasmania and my career possibilities in the Q.P. Force.’

  Lewis was having serious doubts about his future, and even contemplated changing careers.

  Having pitched in during the great Brisbane floods of 1974, Lewis was at Roma Street railway station at 7 a.m. on Tuesday 25 April, and soon on a train heading to Mackay, about 970 kilometres north of Brisbane. It pulled into town at 4 p.m. and he was on duty at the local police station at 8 a.m. the next day.

  By August he was back working the Brisbane Exhibition at Bowen Hills, then in mobile patrols followed by relieving duties in the South Brisbane police district.

  On Monday 14 October, Lewis took temporary command of Redcliffe police station, then in November, Norm Gulbransen, now assistant police commissioner, told him to return to South Brisbane.

  On Boxing Day 1974, Lewis was offered what he might have interpreted as a glimmer of hope. His police diary recorded: ‘A/Comm Gulbransen phoned me at home re leading contingent to Darwin. He later phoned re departing TAA 3am on 27.12.74 with 11 other men.’

  His Cyclone Tracy tour of duty to Darwin must have indicated to Lewis that he was at some level a respected senior officer, and that the police commissioner had faith in his abilities. Lewis went on to perform admirably during the aftermath of Tracy.

  Had Whitrod punished him enough?

  It didn’t appear so. While his relieving duties were about to end, Whitrod had another surprise for Inspector Lewis.

  He would soon be on his way to the sheep and cattle town of Charleville, 740 kilometres west of Brisbane. Murphy would similarly be posted to Longreach, 1177 kilometres north-west of the capital.

  If Whitrod couldn’t get them to resign, then he’d stick both men way out west.

  It was to prove a colossal mistake.

  A Meeting at the Majestic

  At the height of the Rat Pack’s animosity towards Police Commissioner Ray Whitrod, private investigator John Ryan claims he got a curious phone call from Terry Lewis.

  Ryan was set to fly out to Papua New Guinea on a company fraud case.

  Lewis, Ryan alleges, asked him to a confidential meeting in the bar of the Majestic Hotel on the corner of George and Turbot streets in the CBD, not far from police headquarters in Makerston Street.

  Lewis was waiting. Sitting at a table not far from the bar was Detective Tony Murphy and some other officers.

  ‘I hear you’re off to New Guinea,’ Lewis said. Ryan was flabbergasted. Had Lewis found out about the trip through Ryan’s visa application?

  Lewis also knew that Ryan was seeing a friend of a friend who worked in government administration in Port Moresby.

  Lewis was interested in a dirt file on Whitrod, former Papua New Guinea police commissioner.

  ‘Here’s the offer, John,’ Lewis apparently said. ‘You and I know there’s a file. If a copy of that file was to be given to me, I guarantee that your security company will have every single government security contract for the next twenty years. You would be made for life.’

  Ryan had heard of the Whitrod file. It contained some damning material about an Australian prime minister and his illicit affair with a visiting national leader during a state visit to Papua New Guinea. It also may have contained information about Whitrod and the use of a government aircraft for personal purposes involving Whitrod’s wife. But Ryan didn’t concede that to Lewis.

  ‘It’s going to take a while, John,’ Lewis supposedly said, ‘but I am going to be the next police commissioner. This is the opportunity of your lifetime. Whitrod would be embarrassed out of the post.’

  Ryan said he’d do what he cou
ld.

  Ryan remembers: ‘The one thing I noticed was that Murphy, although seated some distance away, never let his eyes waver from us . . . I knew then that what I had suspected was true. Tony Murphy was the power.’

  If accurate, the attempt to gather incriminating evidence on Whitrod from a prior life had an uncanny resemblance to the Rat Pack’s digging into the lives of witnesses to the National Hotel inquiry – David Young and John Komlosy.

  Lewis denies the meeting ever took place.

  Get Herbert

  By 1974, Jack ‘the Bagman’ Herbert, running the Joke out of the Licensing Branch, was beginning to receive intelligence that Whitrod and his CIU were about to train a spotlight on him.

  Bill Osborne, who supported Young and Komlosy’s claims at the National Hotel inquiry, was sent back to run the Licensing Branch. There was talk that Whitrod had given him instructions to clean the place up and end the Joke. Osborne flatly told Herbert: ‘There’s to be no Jokes in the office, Jack.’

  Herbert was snookered.

  ‘I could feel the storm clouds gathering over my head,’ Herbert said. ‘I was a detective sergeant but the powers that be wanted me out of the Licensing Branch. I’d received the gypsy’s warning from a friend that the CIU was investigating me.’

  On 7 June, Herbert – due to be transferred on promotion to the CIB – met with Norm Gulbransen. ‘He informed me that he was under specialist treatment for a malignant growth,’ Gulbransen recalled, ‘and made a very emotional appeal to be allowed to remain at the Licensing Branch on the grounds that the stress and worry of taking up a new position . . . could adversely affect his chances of recovery . . .’

  The CIU’s Basil Hicks told Gulbransen not long after the interview that he had confidential information ‘from a very reliable source’ that off-racecourse phone betting was thoroughly organised and that Herbert oversaw police protection for SP bookmakers.

  After a number of abortive raids on SP bookmakers, both Herbert and Osborne were transferred to the Public Relations Section.

  With friends Lewis and Murphy being hammered by Whitrod, and the Joke having temporarily evaporated, Herbert retired medically unfit – he had recently had an operation on a melanoma. Bill Osborne retired the same day, his assignment from Whitrod seemingly a success.

  The new inspector in charge of Licensing was the imposing Arthur Pitts, fifty-six, a no-nonsense policeman who had been given orders to crack down on illegal SP bookmaking.

  Pitts laid seventeen charges in his first three months. The branch’s arrest statistics for SP bookmaking prior to Pitts had been three prosecutions in four years. Bookmakers caught in the rash of arrests included Herbert’s Gold Coast friends Stan Saunders and Brian Sieber. According to Herbert, both men saw him after their arrests and asked what he could do for them.

  In the early weeks of his retirement, and following Pitts’s blitz, Herbert heard that SP bookmakers wanted to start up a new Joke, and wanted him to act as an intermediary with Pitts.

  Could Herbert have a word with Arthur and get something going?

  Thinking he was set to play the game, Herbert and Detective Neal Freier introduced a bookmaker named Paddy McIntyre to Pitts at the new Licensing chief’s home in Newmarket on 11 December 1974. McIntyre handed twelve hundred dollars to Pitts. It appeared the new Joke was born.

  However, with Pitts’s cooperation his house had been wired, and Basil Hicks was present, hiding in another room when the money was handed over.

  ‘By gee, you’ve got a good spot here, Arthur,’ said Herbert, complimenting Pitts on his home.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Pitts said.

  ‘Bloody beautiful,’ Herbert added. ‘I bet you’ve had many a glass of beer and swallowed it out there?’

  ‘I’ve had some enjoyable evenings out there with my wife. You care for a drink?’

  ‘Not for me, Arthur.’

  Herbert told Pitts that word had spread around that Herbert had ‘got a quid’: ‘I’m not as bad as I’ve been painted,’ Herbert said, ‘but then again I’m bad enough.’ He said if Pitts came on board, he could expect fifteen hundred a month.

  Herbert, Freier and McIntyre were arrested on the orders of Whitrod just two days later and charged with having attempted to corrupt Pitts.

  So began the so-called Southport Betting Case, an epic trial that would end up embarrassing Whitrod and his entire crack CIU team, and exemplify the supreme cunning of Jack Herbert.

  In over three years Whitrod and the CIU hadn’t laid a glove on the Rat Pack and Herbert. And Premier Bjelke-Petersen and his Cabinet colleagues were beginning to notice.

  The Southport Betting Fiasco

  In the lead up to the trial of SP bookmakers Sieber and Saunders at the Southport magistrates court in mid-1975, then the corruption charges against Herbert, Freier and MacIntyre later in the year, the anti-Whitrod forces had had enough.

  It was time to fight fire with fire.

  Upon Herbert’s arrest early that December morning, his solicitor contacted Des Sturgess. Could Sturgess appear in court and apply for Herbert’s bail? He did.

  A couple of days later Sturgess attended the Queensland Police Union’s Christmas party.

  ‘The party was nearly over . . .’ Sturgess recalled. ‘Among the people still remaining were Lewis and a police officer named Murphy who immediately joined us and began to talk about Herbert . . .’

  Murphy was furious about Herbert’s arrest.

  At Sturgess’s suggestion the three left the union office and had a beer in a nearby hotel.

  ‘Once more Herbert’s prosecution became the topic,’ said Sturgess. ‘I suggested Murphy and Lewis had enough troubles of their own and should keep their noses out of it.’

  ‘I always stick to my mates,’ Murphy yelled in the crowded and noisy bar. He then repeatedly said of Whitrod: ‘If only I knew how to fix him.’

  On the footpath outside the bar as they were leaving, Sturgess dropped a valuable insight into Murphy’s lap.

  ‘He’s got an Achilles heel, you know,’ Sturgess said of Whitrod.

  ‘What?’ asked Murphy.

  ‘The verbal,’ the lawyer answered.

  At some point this intelligence was passed on to Herbert, who concocted a brilliant scheme. He secured a small tape recorder and instructed a constable working in the Licensing Branch to secretly tape Pitts and the other officers involved in the case. It would prove to be a masterstroke.

  The constable captured hours of discussions as Pitts and his men built their prosecution cases against the bookmakers and Herbert and his crew. The transcripts, later produced in court, revealed that Pitts had failed to get a proper warrant to search in the case of Sieber and Saunders. Months later, and just days before the case was to go to court, Pitts and other members of the branch drew up a number of false warrants. The conversations between Pitts and his men concerning the issue of the warrants were all recorded in crystal clarity by Herbert’s battery-powered recorder.

  The magistrate found the police evidence tainted, and Sieber and Saunders were discharged.

  The result ignited a furore in parliament. This had been a highly publicised case and here were Whitrod’s lily-white crime busters conspiring to fabricate evidence in a court of law.

  The public clamour prompted Bjelke-Petersen to call for an official inquiry into police corruption. In effect, the premier, beginning to tire of Whitrod’s theatrics and faced with a police force on the brink of mutiny, wanted to detonate the Criminal Intelligence Unit.

  It was time to call in Scotland Yard.

  O’Connell and Fothergill

  In response to Bjelke-Petersen’s promise of an inquiry, Police Minister Max Hodges asked the agent-general of the Queensland government in London to find two senior independent officers to prosecute the task.

  On Friday
22 August 1975, Scotland Yard investigators Commander Terence O’Connell and Detective Superintendent Bruce Fothergill flew to Brisbane to commence inquiries. They had eight to twelve weeks to get the job done. Police Commissioner Whitrod outlined the inquiry’s terms of reference.

  Their brief was to ‘investigate allegations of corruption and malpractice by members of the Queensland Police Force’, made during Sieber and Saunders’s hearing in the Southport magistrates court.

  The Queensland police gave the investigators assurances they would have ‘unrestricted access to all documentary information in its possession, and to serving members of the Force’.

  O’Connell and Fothergill faced immediate hurdles. The public prosecutor was appealing the Southport decision, and Herbert and his co-defendants were still waiting to be committed for trial. Any evidence from material witnesses would be sub judice.

  Nevertheless, they set about interviewing as many officers as they could – particularly Licensing Branch members going back a decade – under the restrictions.

  They were welcomed by the police force as warmly as Whitrod had been in 1970. Even worse, they were Poms.

  Lewis remembers the two Englishmen.

  ‘I was at the Gabba then and they asked me to come over to headquarters and be interviewed,’ he says. ‘Neither of them were dynamic detectives. I mean it’s ridiculous. You would know better than most people to bring two outsiders into your bloody joint and get them to start questioning the boys about whatever. You know, where do you go?’

  By mid-October, O’Connell and Fothergill had interviewed 298 police officers and civilians.

  Ron Lewis, who was working in Whitrod’s CIU, was seconded to assist the two Scotland Yard detectives. He took numerous statements from police officers and provided these to O’Connell and Fothergill.