Bent Uncensored

by James Morton

  He found a complete culture of corruption in the city, so much so that he would be approached by members of his luncheon club and asked to cancel their traffic tickets. At the other end of the spectrum, he found that candidates did well in police promotion examinations—mainly because the questions were sent to police stations the night before the exams and handed to the applicants.

  Even his efforts to remove malign influences failed. In 1973 he sent Terence Lewis to work in Charleville, over 700 kilometres from Brisbane, for what was described as ‘the good of the force’. It was a strategic mistake, stemming from his lack of knowledge of Queensland’s geography. Not only did Lewis obtain kudos through his handling of a flood disaster there but also he charmed politicians when Charleville was the first halt on their whistle-stop tours of the state.

  Over a period of time Whitrod was undermined and defeated by the very strong Police Union. In July 1976, after student demonstrations, he announced that there would be an internal investigation over complaints that a young girl had been struck by a police baton. The police opposed the inquiry and the announcement was countermanded by Bjelke-Petersen. Police Minister Max Hodges, who had supported Whitrod, lost his portfolio. The police had now not simply been policing, they had identified with the interests they were protecting, for example, the Springboks rugby union team. The demonstrators had become the deviants.

  Throughout his term Whitrod and his wife were subjected to harassment and intimidation. Unordered taxis turned up, sometimes three or four times a night, to take him to the airport; although he had an unlisted number he would receive calls from strangers enquiring about his health; a specialist came to his house at three o’clock in the morning because he had been told by police headquarters that Whitrod was having a heart attack; he had a large load of gravel he had not purchased dumped on his front garden. He became so frightened for his and his wife’s safety that he took to sleeping with a revolver under his pillow. A large number of personal files detailing police corruption were mysteriously lost in transit between Brisbane and Canberra.

  During his time as commissioner Whitrod charged twenty-three officers with offences related to corruption. The Crown law department advised that the chances of a successful prosecution were excellent, but none of the officers was convicted.

  The last straw for Whitrod was the 1976 appointment of Lewis as his assistant commissioner. The position had become vacant, and Whitrod advised Cabinet of his preferred candidate and the names of two others also acceptable to him and to the Police Union. It had always been Cabinet practice to endorse the commissioner’s recommendation for his assistant. In this case, however, the Cabinet chose Lewis, still an inspector, who was less qualified for the position than at least sixty other men. Whitrod believed, quite rightly, that all his efforts over the preceding seven years to eradicate corruption would be undermined if the appointment went ahead. Now he told Police Minister Tom Newbery, ‘This is pretty shattering to me; it’s widely known in the force that Lewis was one of Frank Bischof’s bagmen’. Newbery replied, ‘That was when he was a sergeant; he wouldn’t do that sort of thing now’. When Whitrod asked him if that was Cabinet’s thinking, Newbery said that it was. Then Whitrod asked to speak to Bjelke-Petersen. The premier refused an audience, and he wouldn’t allow Whitrod to address Cabinet on the matter. That night Whitrod wrote his resignation. The question of Lewis’s alleged corruption was again raised in Cabinet, this time by Liberal Fred Campbell, but Lewis was appointed commissioner on 22 November 1976. Consumed by his belief that he had failed to eradicate corruption in Queensland, and believing that police chiefs Sir Robert Mark and Patrick Murphy had succeeded in London and New York respectively, Whitrod returned to South Australia. There he was a leading figure in founding the Victims of Crime Service that followed from the Truro and Family murders. He died at the age of eighty-eight in July 2003.

  Another opportunity to clean out corruption was seemingly lost at the 1980 Williams Royal Commission into alleged involvement in the illegal drug trade by Queensland parliamentarians and senior police. Part of the inquiry resulted from the arrest of John Ernest Milligan, a Brisbane district court associate turned drug dealer. Never the most reliable of men, Milligan, when short of money in his court days, was said to have done a little shoplifting at Myer at lunchtime and would hold a shirt sale when the court rose. In September 1979 he was caught following a heroin parachute drop at Jane Table Mountain in Far North Queensland, for which he received ten years.

  Cooperation after an arrest is usually rewarded by a lesser sentence, and now Milligan began to make a series of statements incriminating a Brisbane customs officer along with Hallahan, Murphy and Lewis. The three all denied any misconduct, and Hallahan explained that he had borrowed money from Milligan on one occasion and that he had sold the drug dealer a piece of land and cattle. Williams, accepting the evidence of these fine officers, ruled that what evidence there was ‘falls far short of establishing as even a reasonable possibility that Hallahan has ever been involved in wrong-doing in connection with illegal drugs’. This was unsurprising. Milligan, probably realising on which side his bread was buttered, had backtracked in his allegations to the point where they were worthless.

  By then Hallahan had long retired after yet another scrape. In December 1971 he was charged with receiving money from prostitute Dorothy Edith Knight. Later the charge was amended to agreeing to receive money from her. In August 1972 he was discharged after telephone intercepts were ruled inadmissible and the case against him collapsed. Hallahan was reinstated on 10 October that year and minutes later resigned after reading a prepared statement that he ‘felt his future and that of his family would best be served in other spheres’.

  After his resignation his road was no less rocky. He sued The Courier-Mail for defamation after it had reported an unprovable allegation that he had been involved with the Beerburrum mail robbery two years earlier. In 1986 he was employed as chief investigator for government-owned insurance company Suncorp. That October he petitioned for his own bankruptcy, owing over $180 000 and having cash of $100. He was alleged to have been paid $3000 by bagman Jack Herbert to fix an insurance claim, something he vigorously denied when he appeared before the Fitzgerald inquiry in March 1988. Six months later he was suspended without pay by Suncorp.

  Yet another lost opportunity to clean up corruption was in relation to disclosures by a police constable in 1975 that a substantial portion of the evidence in one case had been concocted by police. It gave rise to the wide-ranging Lucas inquiry into police practices, with the Queensland criminal bar seeking once and for all to stamp out the widespread practice of verballing. The inquiry found evidence of assaults on suspects, planting of evidence, forgery of warrants and fabrication of confessions by police. Its most significant recommendation called for the routine mechanical recording of police interrogations in all cases involving indictable offences. The proposal met with resistance from the Queensland police and was not implemented. The government set up a three-man committee comprising Lewis, the solicitor-general and the under-secretary to the Department of Justice to review the report, and for all practical purposes that was the end of the matter for the next ten years.

  Gay brothels arrived, or at least were first noticed, in Brisbane in 1984 when Brett’s Boys, which operated across the street from a boys school, and The House of Praetorian opened. They were said to be owned by Hector Hapeta, possibly the king of Brisbane vice. Both offered similarly priced facilities, with a businessmen’s lunch half-hour special costing $30, and the first regular hour costing between $70 and $90, reducing after that.

  On 10 December 1984 The Courier-Mail published ‘The men of evil who prey on children’, relating to child pornography and male prostitution. It made four allegations: first, the police were taking payoffs to protect pornographers; second, ‘Mike’ of Inala was being protected by a senior officer; third, a female prostitute had sustained a ruptured stomach after being kicked by an inspector when she refused
to sign on for protection with him; and last, the commissioner had failed to act in response to several complaints about PC Darren Moore. Known as ‘Constable Dave’ on the television program Wombat, where he appeared with a puppet called Agro, Moore had been the subject of allegations since April 1982, but they had been ignored. In December 2010 Moore received a wholly suspended fifteen-month sentence after admitting to the possession of child pornography.

  The brothels were raided by the police the next day, but by then there had been a fire and the receipts and account books had gone up in smoke. Chief Commissioner Lewis claimed that the raid was the ‘culmination of two months’ intensive investigation’.

  The allegations by The Courier-Mail were referred to the Police Complaints Tribunal, chaired by Judge Eric Pratt. Rejecting the complaints, the tribunal found:

  another aspect of the Courier Mail article which appears to be either outdated or exaggerated information relates to the operation of brothels by a person known as Hector. It seems possible that the newspaper article is again a distortion of the facts.

  In 1985 DPP Desmond Sturgess QC, whose practice had been almost exclusively criminal defence work, conducted a limited inquiry into police corruption in Queensland in connection with male brothels. A preliminary report was said to contain harrowing details, but it was not released. On 28 November that year Sturgess delivered his final report. In it he gave a clear, if coded, indication of just who was running what. He referred to five ‘prominent’ organisers of Queensland prostitution, to the immunity from prosecution apparently enjoyed by these main offenders, and to the fact that the Lucas inquiry’s advice on staffing of the licensing branch had not been implemented. He also referred adversely to Jack Herbert and other key figures in the licensing branch. Sir Terence Lewis did not read the report, which was roundly attacked, in part because the figures relating to prostitution differed from those advanced by the licensing branch, and the vice industry continued unimpeded on its merry way.

  Thirteen months after the report twenty-one brothels were still operating. That April there were more illegal casinos—the best known of which was over Bubbles Bath-House in Fortitude Valley, to which losing high rollers were sent to ease their losses free of charge—than there had been the previous year when Police Minister Gunn had ordered their closure.

  Other marchers along the road to Fitzgerald were led by Phil Dickie of The Courier-Mail, who by 1987 was calling for an investigation into police corruption in Queensland following allegations of money in brown bags. Bob Gordon, his chief of staff on the paper, later wrote of him, ‘I must say his courage and thoroughness were such that our society will always be in his debt’. His investigations had apparently begun on what Gordon called ‘a slow news day’ in December 1986. Dickie, then a relatively junior reporter, was sent out to find why corruption, prostitution and drug dealing were flourishing both in Fortitude Valley and on the Gold Coast, and specifically who owned smart brothel The Top of the Valley (Hector Hapeta again, this time with Ann-Marie Tilley). Other reporters had tried and failed to uncover the ownership, but Dickie decided that a full-frontal approach was the way forward. That afternoon when he went to a brothel and asked who owned it he was obliged to run from the bouncers. During the first months of 1987 The Courier-Mail published a number of Dickie’s reports as he dug deeper and deeper into who owned Brisbane’s brothels and how they survived unmolested by the police, searching The Yellow Pages and then making searches of company directorships and car-registration numbers.

  Others before Dickie had chipped away at the Lewis regime, and they included Constable Robert Campbell. After Bjelke-Petersen’s confidante Ted Lyons was stopped on the South-East Freeway, leading to an alliterative Courier-Mail headline: ‘Top-level Ted—full as a fowl’, within a matter of minutes he had rung Lewis, who ordered his officers to drive him home.

  His breath-analysis certificate and charge sheet went into the police-station bin, only to be retrieved and given to Campbell. In early 1982 he went to Labor politician Kev Hooper and together they went to the ABC, whose reporter Alan Hall began to look into things; he produced the first coherent picture of the decline of law enforcement in Queensland. Campbell told all he knew of the bribes, the protection rackets, the gambling, the prostitution and the money.

  Hall’s investigation soon led to the Rat Pack, but there was a leak and life became extremely difficult for Campbell, for his family and for ABC staff. Campbell and his family were woken late at night with threats and he was called a dog at work; ABC staff members were routinely followed when they left the studio at night. On 17 March 1982 Hall’s program was shown across Australia. Police Minister Russell Hinze immediately called a press conference declaring that he would see Hall out of a job, and denouncing Campbell and all that the report had revealed. Lewis and Tony Murphy, now his assistant commissioner, immediately sued the ABC for defamation, claiming that they had been identified with the Rat Pack. Campbell left the force and the state and went to Tasmania.

  The final push, however, came from Chris Masters’ ‘Moonlight State’ on ABC’s Four Corners on 11 May 1987, which alleged links between organised crime and high-level police corruption. Much of the material in the program had been raised previously in state parliament or published in the Queensland media and ignored. For months, Deputy Premier of the National Party and Minister for Police Bill Gunn had been supplied with evidence of flourishing brothels and illegal casinos, operating in breach of his assurances that either they did not exist or, if by some misfortune they did, they would be closed.

  The allegations made in ‘Moonlight State’ were, naturally, ridiculed. At least Bjelke-Petersen admitted to the rotten-apple theory: ‘There may be one or two policemen who are not doing the right thing’. Commissioner Lewis—now Sir Terence Lewis, having been knighted in the last honours list—thought the program ‘Disgraceful’. Justice Minister and Attorney-General Paul Clauson described it as ‘Airy-fairy’.

  But the general reaction to ‘Moonlight State’ forced Bill Gunn into action. His initial comment had been, ‘A series of police ministers have had these types of allegations hanging over their heads. They are not going to hang over mine’. Had Bjelke-Petersen been at home, he would almost certainly have ignored the allegations and refused to hold an inquiry. His sensible, if unhelpful, attitude had always been never to have an inquiry until you knew what the result would be. But, unfortunately for him, at the time he was touring the country in support of his grandiose scheme to become prime minister of Australia, and left holding the parcel was Bill Gunn. The next day Gunn called what governments have always tried, usually successfully, to avoid: an open and public inquiry.

  If Gunn had followed the tried and tested rules for setting up a royal commission—narrow the terms of reference as much as you possibly can, choose the chief investigator and the legal team, and finally, choose the judge—all should not have been lost. The terms of reference for this royal commission were initially restricted to allegations raised on the Four Corners program. In summary, the questions posed in the initial terms were:

  During the period 1 June 1982 to 26 May 1987:

  Were any of Geraldo, Antonio and Vincenzo Bellino, Vittorio Conte, and Hector Brandon Hapeta involved in the use of premises for prostitution, unlawful gambling or unlawful drugs?

  Did the Bellinos, Conte or Hapeta give police financial or other favours in return for non-enforcement of laws in relation to the premises?

  Are existing legislation and procedures adequate to ensure that conduct of the above kind is detected and reported?

  Did the Bellinos, Conte or Hapeta make a payment of $50 000 to any Queensland political party on or about 8 September 1983?

  Lewis and policeman turned politician and powerbroker Don ‘Shady’ Lane tried to arrange for another former police officer, Judge Eric Pratt of the District Court and chairman of the Police Complaints Tribunal, to head the inquiry. With luck, it might even be held in camera under the aegis of the tribunal. How
ever, there had long been criticism of the tribunal since it had been established in 1982, with observations that it was often a bucket of whitewash—including the particularly egregious example of how Barry Mannix had come to make a false confession to the murder of his father. Lane had also earlier wanted Pratt to chair an inquiry into child pornography.

  The chief justice simply refused to make Pratt or any other judge available for the inquiry, originally estimated to run for four to six weeks. That was bad enough. But the next mistake was that, instead of appointing a tame chairman such as Harry Gibbs and despite being threatened by Bjelke-Petersen with removal, Gunn took the advice of Ian Callinan QC to appoint the fiercely independent but then little-known Gerald Edward (Tony) Fitzgerald QC, a one-time federal judge who had returned to private practice.

  It was a decision that Bjelke-Petersen and Lewis would come to regret deeply.

  13

  THE FITZGERALD COMMISSION AND AFTER

  When it came to it, the terms approved on 26 May 1987 for Queensland’s Commission of Inquiry into Possible Illegal Activities and Associated Police Misconduct were indeed narrow and relatively harmless—the remit only covered the previous five years—but Commissioner Tony Fitzgerald did not want to be tied to looking just at specific allegations against specific people. He wanted the freedom to look into ‘any other matter or thing appertaining to the aforesaid matters’, and not only at ‘related matters’ but at any matter whether it related or not. Deputy Premier Bill Gunn undertook to consider changing the terms if Fitzgerald felt it would help his inquiry, and the terms were expanded within the month. Now allegations of corruption would go back as far as January 1977.