by James Morton
The police would have nothing of the allegations. They said they had never drunk there and Murphy, who claimed he had arrested more prostitutes than any other officer, said he did not know Brifman was a prostitute and indeed he had been unable to contact her to attend the commission. Officers who lined up to deny that the National was the late-night home-from-home for Brisbane’s working girls included Terence Lewis, Donald ‘Shady’ Lane, Ron Redmond and the English-born bagman Jack Herbert. All would feature prominently in the later Fitzgerald inquiry.
Detective Glen Hallahan, described by Don ‘Shady’ Lane as a man with a ‘taste for fashion and cologne’, didn’t recognise Brifman as a prostitute either, but Young identified him as the man who had made the threatening call to him. Gibbs was not told that Hallahan had just been suspended. A Gary William Campbell had pleaded guilty to having insufficient means of support and received six months. He appealed against the severity of the sentence and told the Full Court in September 1963 that he had been taken from his place of employment, a sound lounge, to his flat, where Hallahan had told him he would be loaded with house-breaking implements if he did not plead guilty to the insufficient means. Hallahan’s evidence was described as a ‘fraud on the court’. He was suspended a week before he was due to appear at the commission.
Later, in a closed disciplinary hearing, Hallahan was cleared of giving inaccurate information. He was fined £3 for not keeping his police diary up to date. The barrister in charge of the proceedings had apparently heard exonerating evidence from another detective and from John Hannay, Campbell’s then employer and later the manager of the ill-fated Whiskey Au Go Go nightclub.
There was one officer, however, who did identify Brifman as a prostitute, and so suddenly, on 28 January 1964, she appeared at the inquiry in a demure white suit and picture hat to refute any allegations that she was a working girl. Rehearsed by Murphy, she also took the opportunity of denouncing Young, telling the inquiry, quite falsely, ‘He done an abortion on me’ at a flat at New Farm. She also claimed that Young had told her about renting rooms and selling liquor at the National. She hadn’t heard about the inquiry until her name was mentioned, even though she had been in Brisbane over Christmas. There was nothing about it in the Sydney papers.
In April that year Gibbs wrote in his report:
Young is a man of poor moral character and unstable temperament and I cannot regard him as a witness whose evidence may be believed or acted upon unless corroborated by that of some other witness who is himself reliable.
Young did at least fare better than the even more unfortunate witness Komlosy, who was thought by Gibbs to be ‘not sane’. A priest had been called to say that the night porter could not be believed, but he was not allowed to be asked why. Gibbs wrote:
It is obvious Komlosy was quite unreliable as a witness. His evidence contained violent inconsistencies and a curious compound of fact, hearsay, exaggeration, theory, invention and even hallucination.
In his report Gibbs made a positive finding that:
No member of the Police Force … has been guilty of misconduct or neglect or violation of duty since the ninth day of October 1958 in relation to the policing of the National Hotel … no call-girl service was operated at the said Hotel, and no member of the Police Force encouraged, condoned or sanctioned in any way the practice of prostitution at that Hotel.
Which shows that justice can be blind. Gibbs also ruled that the limited terms of the commission did not require him to consider the policing of prostitution or to examine corruption in the licensing and consorting squads. Unfortunately, the failure of his commission encouraged the escalating corruption of the next twenty years. After the inquiry concluded, the unkind joke was that he was ‘the only man in Queensland who could not find a tart in the National Hotel’. It was a classic example of how to run a royal commission and come up with satisfactory answers for the government.
In general, in the twentieth century the judiciary at inquiries into police misconduct were often incapable of accepting, or unwilling to accept, evidence that at a certain stage of corruption officers feel they are quite able to act openly. In the 1982 Western Australian Dixon inquiry into police corruption, one officer alleged wholesale corruption and that payouts were made at a lunch party in the public dining room of a hotel. His whole evidence was trashed, among other things on the basis that it was impossible police would have handed out envelopes containing illicit money in public—rather like the belief that sex can only take place with the lights out. But the evidence worldwide is that corrupt police become impervious to public scrutiny. An example is the activities of the Scotland Yard obscene publications squad in the 1970s:
Thousands of pounds’ worth of pay-offs were changing hands every week in Soho’s pubs, coffee bars, clubs and mews often in full view of the public on the street.
Thanks to the machinations of Murphy and others and the nearsightedness of Gibbs, Bischof’s reputation survived intact. The compulsive gambler retired in 1970 and four years later was charged with shoplifting. He had actually been committed for trial before the charges were dropped. It was only after his death on 28 August 1979 that allegations began to surface he had been involved in massive graft involving SP bookmakers. In 1982 the state treasurer revealed that as early as 1964 bookmakers paid annual protection to the police ranging from the equivalent of $80 000 in large towns to $20 000 in small country ones. Additionally, and this is what really riled them, top-ups were constantly being demanded. In 1989 Fitzgerald found ‘in some respects police corruption had acquired a quaint quasi-legitimacy by the Bischof era’.
Seven years on from the National Hotel inquiry, on 15 June 1971 Shirley Brifman came clean—or reasonably so—when she told This Day Tonight on New South Wales television that she had lied to the Gibbs commission. In fact she had been a working girl in Sydney from 1965 to 1969, conducting her business at one of the city’s well-known hotels with the full knowledge of the management, something she said was common in all large hotels. She had run a brothel and paid protection money to the Sydney vice squad. She had given evidence at the Gibbs inquiry at Murphy’s request, in return for the promise of protection both in New South Wales and Queensland. She had spoken with Murphy, been drinking with another girl and had picked up a client in the time between her arrival from Sydney and her giving evidence. She also said that Bischof had shut the brothels solely due to a fit of pique because while he was on holiday Murphy, Hallahan and Lewis, whom she knew as the ‘Collect Boys’, had moved in, picking up protection money due to him. By then, however, her confession was far too little and far too late.
In due course she and MLA Colin Bennett were interviewed by Assistant Police Commissioner Duncan. During the meeting she allegedly claimed that Hallahan had committed perjury: he knew very well that she and Irene Dale, who had over fifty convictions, were prostitutes. She also said that Murphy had lied when he said he did not know where she, Brifman, could be found and that he would be unable to help find her.
In September 1971 she told Superintendent Norman Gulbransen, who had once remarked, ‘The rewards for dishonesty are greater than for honesty’ and was described at his death as one of ‘the last of the honest policemen’:
Murphy was always there. He was at the hotel, everywhere.
On duty, when he should have been somewhere he was with me. He would carry on his duty at the office and make me sit on the desk … Then Glen [Hallahan] came into the picture, and Terry [Lewis] was in the picture too.
On 5 February 1972 Murphy was charged with perjury. As might have been expected, his statement of denial was robust:
I have been charged because of untrue malicious statements by Shirley Brifman, a drug addict, a self-confessed perjurer, informer and prostitute.
On 4 March 1972 Brifman was found dead in her flat in Clayfield, Brisbane, apparently having committed suicide but leaving no note. She and her husband had been due to appear in Sydney on 17 March charged with procuring under-age girls, incl
uding her daughter. Investigation of the death was cursory. Coroner William Laherty thought that there would be no good purpose in holding an inquest, and he ruled that Brifman had taken her own life. Her file was marked ‘IDU’—inquest deemed unnecessary. Without Brifman in the witness box, after a four-day hearing the magistrate found that no properly instructed jury would convict and refused to commit Murphy for trial.
But who were these witnesses at the National Hotel inquiry, in particular Murphy, Hallahan and Lewis, who had given what was blatantly false evidence to Gibbs? They were a clearly established triumvirate who were in control of graft in the Queensland police. Two, Anthony ‘Tony’ Murphy and Glendon Patrick Hallahan, were from the Catholic faction and Terence Lewis had aligned himself with them. Ultimately, he was the highest ranking of them, a man who had been awarded a Churchill fellowship to go to England and whose later promotion from sergeant to commissioner had been meteoric. But firmly in charge of the ‘Rat Pack’, as they became known, was the then senior detective sergeant Tony Murphy.
Murphy, born in 1927, was ‘very corrupt and very sinister, a pivotal player’, said one Brisbane lawyer. In the mid-1980s a group of officers calling themselves the Committee of Eight wrote to the police minister and Premier Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, alleging that the Rat Pack was controlling crime. They suggested that close attention be paid to a number of incidents, all of which had involved Murphy, beginning with the death of Shirley Brifman and continuing with the death of Detective Sergeant JD Connor in the grounds of the All Nations club in Mareeba on 15 October 1978. The list of incidents included the 1973 Whiskey Au Go Go fire; arson at a tourist development on the Sunshine Coast; the murder of Jack Cooper, manager of the National Hotel, in 1971; TAB and other armed robberies carried out by the so-called Bikie Bandits; arson at a nightclub in Cairns running in opposition to the House on the Hill; drug dealing involving the Mr Asia group in the late 1970s and the use of police planes in drug and fauna smuggling; the disappearance of rub-and-tug madam Simone Vogler; and the 1976 Beerburrum mail and Bookmakers robberies in South Brisbane.
The document concluded:
If you are a policeman, money is nothing more than a magnet attracting the ugly corollaries of robbery and violent crime.
The reference to the Bikie Bandits related to early 1983, when six police officers attached to the CIB were charged with perjury and four were also charged with providing heroin to two of the men while they were held in the watch house. None of the police was suspended and two were promoted while awaiting trial. Lewis was opposed to suspensions of the police involved because he did not think that the offences would be repeated and they were not ‘a very serious offence like going out and engaging in shooting of some sort’. After the Crown decided not to proceed with the prosecutions of the police officers, Lewis, along with politician Sir Edward ‘Top-Level Ted’ Lyons and other senior officers, attended a celebratory party.
Certainly Murphy had come under some fire in the 1983 Stewart report on drug trafficking. The commissioner thought information he had given journalist Brian Bolton contained sufficient material to confirm to a suspicious and vengeful Terrence Clark, leader of the Mr Asia syndicate, that two of his drug runners, Douglas and Isobel Wilson, had dobbed him in, so leading to their deaths.
Murphy was also alleged to have been involved in the 1979 disappearance of Norman ‘The Doorman’ Ford, a painters and dockers union hanger-on whom police wanted to interview about extortion and stolen-car rackets. Later a police officer on the Ford investigation said Murphy gave him a list of people to whom he could and could not speak. The list included two police officers who were ‘off limits’.
After he retired from the police in 1983, Murphy was controversially awarded the license for a TAB on Stradbroke Island, allegedly as the result of representations by National Party powerbroker Sir Edward Lyons who, curiously, had an apartment in the same block as bagman Jack Herbert.
Glen Hallahan joined the force in February 1952, at the age of twenty. He had first come under public scrutiny in 1958, when as the youngest detective in Queensland, he took part in the arrest at Mount Isa of Raymond John Bailey, who was later hanged for what was known as the Sundown Murders of Sally Bowman, her daughter Wendy and their friend Thomas Whelan in the northern South Australian outback. Much of the evidence against Bailey rested on a highly disputed confession to Hallahan.
According to notes from Superintendant Gulbransen’s questioning, in 1971 Shirley Brifman recalled:
Glen hit the pot over the Sundown murder … I used to cop it night after night. Hallahan said that the real killer was free. It did really play on his mind and I thought he was going to go off his head over it. At that stage I would say he was not crooked but after that he went bad. I never saw anything eat a man inside like that did.
Terence Lewis would later tell the Williams Royal Commission in 1980 that he had possibly worked with Murphy during an abortion inquiry but that he did not really know him. He certainly knew Hallahan and in most favourable circumstances. On 8 August 1959 the pair had been awarded the George Cross for bravery when they disarmed German-born seaman Gunther Ernst Martin Bahnemann, who had been bashing his wife, Ada. After he threatened her with a gun she telephoned the police, and when Lewis and Hallahan arrived to arrest him he fired at them. Bahnemann was convicted of attempted murder. Over the years doubt has been cast on whether he actually was the dangerous man portrayed by Lewis and Hallahan.
Less worthy was Hallahan’s relationship with robber and standover man Donald Ross ‘The Hammer’ Kelly, who in 1972 had been arrested over the August 1970 raid on the Bank of New South Wales at Kedron. Sentenced to eight years, he then made allegations that he had given Hallahan $900 of the takings of $2750. On 29 June 1972 the stipendiary magistrate ruled that there was no case for Hallahan to answer. Even if he believed Kelly, he was an accomplice, and there was no corroborative evidence. There had also been allegations that Hallahan had dealt in forged banknotes, and on one occasion a man arrested in Townsville with such notes claimed that Hallahan had given them to him.
The third of the trio was Terence Lewis, who before his appointment as commissioner had had a chequered career. On the credit side were the awards to him of the George Cross and a Churchill fellowship for his work in the Juvenile Aid Bureau. In the 1985 Police Source Book 2 brief histories of the forces were provided and the contributor on Queensland wrote:
The Lewis period [as Commissioner] has been relatively uneventful except for perhaps one significant change. In 1982 the government established a Police Complaints Tribunal as a result of massive public pressure surrounding allegations of police corruption and cover-ups.
The man who turned police corruption into an art form was the tall, thin Jack Herbert, an English policeman who in 1947 emigrated first to Victoria and then to Queensland, where he joined the force in 1949. It was not until 1959 that he joined the licensing branch, a squad of around two dozen officers, and became involved in taking bribes from SP bookmakers and casino and brothel owners—a process known as ‘The Joke’. He maintained that he had first slipped from the path of righteousness when he had to pay heavy medical bills after his wife became ill. He would always deny that he was involved in the drug trade, but there is little doubt that drugs were washing around the Herbert-protected massage parlours in Fortitude Valley owned by Hector Hapeta.
In October 1974 Herbert retired from the force on the grounds of ill health and in December was charged with corruption. Two years later he was acquitted after cleverly turning the hearing into a trial of the officers accusing him. It was a tactic the Rat Pack regularly used, smearing and framing honest officers such as Arthur Potts, Basil Hicks and Alec Jepperson. From then on Herbert was more or less untouchable. In 1977 he began working for Jack Rooklyn of the pokie company Bally Machines and others in the ‘in-line’ gaming industry, and began making substantial payments on their behalf to senior officers. Four years later he was the Rat Pack’s official bagman, taking money f
rom prostitutes, brothel owners, SP bookmakers and gambling and in-line operations. In all, he claimed that he had collected $3 million on behalf of Lewis and the other members of the pack.
The quartet was firmly behind Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen and equally firmly against undesirables such as homosexuals, Aboriginals, and demonstrating students and hippies, not necessarily in that order.
Bischof’s successor was South Australia’s Ray Whitrod, another sometimes described as ‘The Last of the Honest Cops’, but also as a ‘fence sitter’ and a ‘quitter’ by disgruntled officers. He became Queensland’s police commissioner in 1970 and immediately set out to eradicate corruption. At the time the standard of education of the force was abysmal. Whitrod tried to improve things, bringing women into all fields of policing and arguing that officers should be educated to at least the standard of an apprentice carpenter or bricklayer. He arranged for the Queensland education department to provide officers with classes in literacy and basic arithmetic, and as an inducement to attend, he offered an extra week’s leave for every subject they sat. The Police Union objected so strongly that they bypassed both Whitrod and the police minister, Max Hodges, and complained directly to the premier. Bjelke-Petersen, himself a former police minister, endorsed the union’s stand and publicly declared that ‘the Queensland people do not require their police to be Rhodes scholars’.
As an outsider, Whitrod did not realise that Brisbane was not as sophisticated as Melbourne and he got off to a bad start, something that told against him throughout his time as commissioner. He arranged a showing of the film Ryan’s Daughter on behalf of the Queensland Police Citizens Youth Welfare Association, but the bedroom scenes were too strong for the provincial Queensland audience and he was heavily criticised.