Three Crooked Kings

by Matthew Condon

  ‘We worked on a need-to-know basis in that office,’ Ron Lewis says. ‘If I didn’t need to know something I wasn’t told.

  ‘In those days it was difficult without a computer. They’d take a statement, underline any relevant points, put them on a card and cross-index them. They stored the cards in a shire hall. The floor collapsed with the weight of the cards they gathered. They were good workers.’

  In a memo to Whitrod dated 30 September, O’Connell indicated his final report would cover corruption and the possibility of a judicial inquiry. It was enough to satisfy Whitrod that Scotland Yard’s men were on the scent of what he had suspected for years.

  They flew back to London on 17 October. Their investigation was temporarily hamstrung by the drawn-out Herbert court case.

  As the memo to Whitrod hinted at, their brief but intense inquiries in Brisbane did seem to yield fruit. They were told that SP bookmaking and corruption was rife; the corruption was most concentrated in the Licensing Branch.

  Lawyers, police, and members of the public continually referenced the existence of a so-called Rat Pack, even two packs – one consisting of Lewis, Murphy, and Hallahan, and the other of Herbert and his cronies in Licensing.

  O’Connell and Fothergill wrote their report.

  ‘Their report went to Joh,’ says Ron Lewis. ‘I understood there was an order for its destruction from the Premier’s Department. That was my understanding. I never saw the report.’

  As for Terry Lewis, he didn’t think much of the inquiry. He says: ‘It was a waste of time and money. And I don’t think anyone took them down to the pub to have grogs with them.’

  Out West

  In late 1975, the news of Lewis’s transfer to Charleville caused enormous disruption up at 12 Garfield Drive.

  Lewis now had five children – the eldest daughter, Lanna, was in high school, and the youngest, John, was just six years old. How would they cope in the bush? Should the older children be pulled out of school at such a crucial time?

  Through contacts he made as head of the JAB, he managed in principle to secure his children’s schooling in the event his career never brought him back to Brisbane.

  Lewis headed out to Charleville alone, leaving wife Hazel at home to manage the transition: ‘I went into the empty [police] house,’ Lewis says. ‘We bought a second-hand bed and a duchess. I got some bits of wood and some bricks for a bookshelf. I thought I’d be out there for a while.’

  By chance, Lewis arrived to a flooded country town. With his experience in Darwin still fresh in his mind, he swung into action.

  ‘Having worked in an operations centre, I knew what should or perhaps could be done . . . and I got two helicopters up from the RAAF in New South Wales and got them into Charleville,’ Lewis recalls. ‘We didn’t lose a life and we got people in who were having heart attacks and all sorts of things, so that went over pretty well.’

  Lewis also made a point of travelling to every police station in his district. It took him a week to get from Tambo to Thargomindah to Hungerford, Cunnamulla and Morgan. His district encompassed 336,000 square kilometres.

  Even way out west, Whitrod continued to drive Lewis to distraction.

  ‘Every morning we’d go and inspect the district and in those days Mr Whitrod was mad about statistics,’ he says. ‘We used to have to ring the regional superintendent in Toowoomba and tell him . . . how many traffic tickets you’ve got in Charleville. The streets were half a mile wide with two men and a dog in them half the time. And you’d ring up: “Oh, not many tickets.”’

  Lewis, too, was a different style of officer to some of his Charleville predecessors. He had yet to learn the unwritten rules of rural hospitality.

  ‘Terry wasn’t the sort of bloke who’d walk out on the street and say hello and how ya going,’ says one local.

  But he quickly adapted, and set about impressing the community. His epic, tireless work stint during the floods had shown a commitment to the people of Charleville. It was, on the other hand, Lewis manifesting the belief that had kept him in good stead since he was a child – without the ability to express emotion, even to his own family, he earned affection and respect from others through sheer hard work.

  Over time he became a popular member of the community.

  More importantly, his stint out west gave him a crucial crash course in the ways of National Party politics and how it related to the men and women on the land.

  Vital to that education, too, was his friendship with Neil Turner, the young National Party member for Warrego. He’d only been a member for less than two years when Lewis arrived in Charleville. Undoubtedly, through Turner, Lewis began to appreciate on a whole new level what appealed to someone like Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen.

  The biggest problem for Police Commissioner Ray Whitrod in banishing Lewis and Murphy to the west was logical yet unforeseen – in the country, both men had time to think.

  And to plot.

  Surprise Visitors

  For a remote Queensland country town, Charleville in the early months of 1976 was attracting its fair share of VIPs.

  As Inspector Lewis worked away at the police station downtown, beside a solid and stolid brick bank, fielding calls from local mothers about an upcoming teenage dance to be held by the Warrego Pony Club, and meeting and greeting the locals, he received the unexpected news that Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen was planning to visit.

  In late February, prior to the big event, Lewis discussed the premier’s security with a superintendent in Toowoomba.

  Lewis noted in his police diary for 3 March: ‘To Airport and met Hon. J. Bjelke-Petersen and party. To State School, High School and Convent. Then to Warrego Club for lunch and meeting.’

  Lewis returned to the police station before rejoining the premier later in the afternoon, accompanying him to the local School of the Air. Then: ‘To Airport and farewelled Premier.’

  By the end of that month he would also meet the National Party member for Gregory, Bill Glasson, at the airport and dine twice with Queensland Health Minister Dr Llew Edwards. He would also have the opportunity to make the acquaintance of the premier’s personal pilot, Beryl Young.

  On Monday 12 April, Lewis was suddenly phoned by Whitrod’s right-hand man, Norm Gulbransen, about the plan to build new watchhouse cells attached to the Charleville police station – they had been damaged by fire some time before.

  Then on 28 April, Lewis was back out at the airport to pick up some surprise visitors – this time Police Commissioner Ray Whitrod and his minister, Max Hodges. Lewis took them back to the police station, where they inspected the watchhouse and discussed sites for the new cell blocks.

  Lewis was perplexed by the two most powerful men in the Queensland police suddenly gracing his district with their presence.

  ‘It was just a flying visit,’ says Lewis. ‘Hazel made some biscuits. They had that at the police station with a cup of tea and they left.

  ‘Nothing was discussed about me or my future. It was just bullshit, I think. It was just so that Hodges could come out and look down on me.

  ‘Why fly a minister and a commissioner out to have a look at a little country watchhouse?’

  There are numerous possible explanations for their turning up unexpectedly on Lewis’s rural doorstep. Hodges may indeed have wished to flex his muscle at Lewis, sending the inspector a message that he could expect to be in rural Queensland for the long haul.

  It was likely, too, that both men had learned of Lewis’s meeting with Bjelke-Petersen and his recent flurry of political guests. Arriving in Charleville showed that they were keeping a close eye on him.

  Also, Jack ‘the Bagman’ Herbert’s corruption trial was soon to commence in Brisbane. If Whitrod failed to score a conviction, the reputation of his Crime Investigation Unit would not only be in ruins, but a laughing stock tha
t began and ended with Whitrod.

  Throughout the force, Whitrod was being comically referred to by his new moniker – Koko the Clown.

  Over biscuits and tea in that old wooden Queenslander in downtown Charleville, the tension must have been palpable.

  Nobody around that kitchen table knew that a sequence of events was about to occur that would incinerate Whitrod’s grand reformation.

  One Night in Cooktown

  On the wall of Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s relatively new office in the Executive building in George Street was a huge map of Queensland.

  Fixed to it was a stubble of pins – green pins indicated that the premier had made a single visit to that city, town or hamlet, blue for two visits, and red for three.

  Bjelke-Petersen was obsessive about getting out of the south-east corner of the state and into rural Queensland or up and down the coast. He felt people in remote areas had a right to see their premier in person, so at first he used his own single-engine aircraft to travel intrastate; then the government leased a larger plane for this peripatetic leader.

  As for the dozens and dozens of pins on the map, they had a specific purpose. ‘They were to tell you where you hadn’t been,’ says Allen Callaghan, Bjelke-Petersen’s former government news and information officer.

  ‘We did a lot of these tours. [Later] we bought an unpressurised Piper Navajo. You could hop in and out and come home again fairly quickly.’

  By mid-1976 Bjelke-Petersen was hearing and sensing a lot of discontent within the police force. He didn’t like it. As he dropped in and out of little rural air strips right across the state, his first contact on these trips was the local police.

  When the premier started getting direct complaints over and over about the performance of Police Commissioner Whitrod, from even lowly constables, a pattern began to form in his mind.

  Callaghan says: ‘Whitrod was a breath of fresh air [when he first arrived], but . . . he was an academic cop. He really was an armchair general. There was a feeling within the government that the force needed reform, overhauling or modernising. The feeling later on was: now we know why the other forces got rid of him.

  ‘[The pattern of complaints] came from the country force,’ says Callaghan. ‘For them to speak out directly to the premier was almost unprecedented.

  Callaghan clearly remembers one trip to Cooktown in either late 1975 or early 1976. The premier and Callaghan had tea in the police residence attached to the local station. The sergeant in charge was Ray Marchant.

  Callaghan recalls Marchant’s key complaint: ‘Whitrod had set a quota of arrests and prosecutions per month. They were recorded on what was called “kill sheets”.’

  When Bjelke-Petersen seemed incredulous, Marchant produced an actual kill sheet to prove his point.

  Back in Brisbane, Bjelke-Petersen asked Police Minister Hodges whether this was correct – that all stations across Queensland were required to meet quotas. Whitrod apparently denied it.

  ‘I saw Joh’s Danish jaw come out,’ says Callaghan. ‘It’s something you wouldn’t want to trip over.

  ‘Whitrod had lied about something so important. This is what did Whitrod in as far as Joh was concerned. He had lied . . .’

  Waiting for a Plane in Cunnamulla

  During 1976 the premier travelled incessantly throughout Queensland, and he began putting a specific question to the array of constables, sergeants and inspectors he met straight off the plane: if you’re unhappy with the current police commissioner, who would you replace him with? Give me five names.

  ‘It was an unofficial poll in a sense,’ says Callaghan. ‘The name that kept coming up out of the rank and file was Terry Lewis.

  ‘We didn’t know him from a bar of soap. We were aware that he had been awarded the George Medal. But it was consistent across the ranks. Their answer [to Joh’s question] was Terry Lewis. No one came within a cooee of Lewis.’

  Callaghan confirms that Joh began making some inquiries about Lewis. He discovered that Whitrod had exiled Lewis to Charleville.

  ‘Lewis wasn’t aware of this,’ says Callaghan, ‘but [he] was under scrutiny. The next time Joh went to Charleville he made a point of meeting Lewis.’

  That historic moment occurred in Cunnamulla, in Inspector Lewis’s police district, on Sunday 16 May. In town for the 36th Country Cabinet Meeting, Bjelke-Petersen and his entourage arrived at the airfield in dribs and drabs throughout the day. The premier, along with his private secretary, Stan Wilcox, and ministers like Tom Newbery, flew in on the government aircraft at 5.30 p.m.

  And as was custom, there at the airfield waiting to greet the plane was a dutiful Inspector Lewis.

  ‘He was there to meet me when the plane arrived,’ Bjelke-Petersen said. ‘It was the first time I had set eyes on him, and I found him a very pleasant and obliging man, who seemed anxious to do anything he could to help me and generally make my visit enjoyable.’

  Callaghan also recalls the day the premier and the inspector first met: ‘I remember walking from the aircraft and there he was. He would have spoken to Joh about police matters affecting his district.’

  Had Callaghan been travelling with the premier during that earlier visit to Charleville on 3 March? If so, why would he say they didn’t know Lewis ‘from a bar of soap’? And why would Bjelke-Petersen assert that he first ‘set eyes on’ Lewis on 16 May, when Lewis’s police diary clearly reveals a fly-in, fly-out meeting between the two more than two months before this?

  The premier and the bulk of his Cabinet stayed at the New Cunnamulla Hotel in Jane Street – a classic two-storey brick and wood Queensland pub with long verandahs.

  On Monday 17 May, Cabinet convened in the Paroo Shire Council chambers for their meeting. During that day, one item of business was the approval of a number of senior police promotions. All went through, with Police Minister Max Hodges present at the meeting.

  A Cabinet dinner was held at their hotel, followed at 8.30 p.m. by an informal ‘open’ function, ostensibly for members of the public to meet their government representatives.

  Inspector Terry Lewis was also invited.

  ‘I certainly will never forget meeting [Bjelke-Petersen] at Cunnamulla . . .’ says Lewis, who had drinks that night with various ministers, including Norm Lee and Tom Newbery.

  At some point early in the evening, Lewis says either Stan Wilcox or Allen Callaghan showed him the approved list of promotions and asked for his opinion. Callaghan denies he produced the list to Lewis: ‘Stan might have but why would he do that if it was the first time he had met Lewis?’

  Nevertheless, Inspector Lewis thought some of the promotions were ‘ridiculous’ – awarding young officers portfolios they simply didn’t have the experience to handle, gifting others ranks two or three beyond the expected progression. Lewis, outcast in Charleville, was incensed.

  As with that ill-fated luncheon at Paul Wilson’s house by the Brisbane River six years earlier, Lewis decided to give Hodges the benefit of his uncensored opinion.

  ‘The promotions and transfers came up,’ recalls Lewis. ‘I told Hodges what I thought. I said some of them were terrible. So we ended up exchanging words and I can still hear Norm Lee saying, “Give it to him, go on, don’t back down, give it to him!”’

  Lewis believed he had nothing to lose.

  The next morning, the ministers began making their way back to Brisbane. It was up to Lewis and other local officers to ferry ministers and their staff from the hotel and out to the airfield.

  Lewis unluckily scored Police Minister Hodges, who was due to fly out at 8 a.m. aboard a King Air charter.

  ‘Hodges sat in the front seat of my car and never spoke to me,’ says Lewis. ‘We only had two cars so I took them out then went back and took others.’

  The government aircraft had already left at 7.30 a.m. It was schedu
led to arrive at Eagle Farm at 9.30 a.m., and head straight back out to Cunnamulla to pick up the premier.

  Why was Joh Bjelke-Petersen one of the last to leave Cunnamulla that day? Only he and his private secretary, Wilcox, remained for the late flight.

  It was Inspector Lewis who drove the premier and Wilcox to the airfield.

  ‘There was quite a considerable wait for the aircraft and during that time he just talked to me and I talked to him,’ says Lewis. ‘It was just a pure fluke that I was the one that took him to the airport. I can’t say why he wasn’t the first person on the plane earlier that morning. Whether he deliberately didn’t get on an earlier aircraft I will never know.’

  Up until that meeting, Bjelke-Petersen claimed Lewis was only known to him as ‘a name’, principally, as the officer whose ‘fine work’ had founded and built up the Juvenile Aid Bureau, and as the recipient of the prestigious George Medal for Bravery.

  According to Lewis they talked ‘for what seemed like a couple of hours at least’.

  ‘We were standing at the fence,’ recalls Lewis. ‘It was hot. I was in my full uniform.’

  Lewis says they discussed Police Commissioner Ray Whitrod, Police Minister Max Hodges and Lewis’s own ideas for restructuring the force. Callaghan thinks the discussion at the airfield would have been at most ‘exploratory’, with the premier getting the measure of the man who seemed so popular with rank and file officers across Queensland.

  ‘The premier did ask . . . “What would you like to do . . . ?” And I said what I’d really like one day was to be the superintendent in charge of the academy to teach young people to be police officers.’

  It was extraordinarily ambitious of Lewis. Here was a private audience with the premier of Queensland. And if word got back about his disloyalty to the police commissioner, what did it matter? Lewis was convinced he would be exiled in the bush for years, if not the rest of his career. He had already informed Hazel to pack her bags and bring youngest son John out to the sticks. The Lewises weren’t going anywhere for a long time.