Jacks and Jokers (11 page)

Lewis told the top police officers he would do his best and hopefully they would see that and cooperate with him. ‘When I finished the conference that week and thanked them they all stood up and clapped,’ Lewis says. ‘So I thought that was very decent of them.’

On Christmas Eve in 1976 Lewis sat down in his office with Arthur Pitts, Whitrod’s fearless corruption-buster and one of the stars of the Southport Betting Case trial, and discussed Pitts’ future. Lewis advised him point blank that there was ‘little likelihood of promotion’. Pitts was assigned the ultimate humiliation – he was put in charge of Stores.

On Tuesday 18 January 1977, Lewis caught up again with Scotland Yard’s Commander Terence (Terry) O’Connell. In late 1975, O’Connell and Detective Superintendent Bruce Fothergill had been flown to Brisbane to conduct an inquiry into Queensland police corruption following the public and political clamour that stemmed from Jack Herbert’s Southport Betting Case. Their report had been submitted to the Premier, but it had never been tabled in parliament, and word was that it had been shredded. Even so, O’Connell had been asked back to Brisbane to give evidence at the Lucas Inquiry.

O’Connell had been briefed in London on 15 November – coincidentally the day of Lewis’s appointment as Assistant Commissioner – by visiting Justice Minister Bill Lickiss. The men met in Queensland House on The Strand to run through O’Connell’s investigation the previous year and the evidence he planned to give on administrative matters only.

O’Connell, despite receiving volumes of information from police and prostitutes on corruption in the Queensland Police Force during research for his initial report in 1975–76, and the repeated assertions that figures like Tony Murphy loomed as being seriously corrupt, would compile a further report to assist Justice Lucas. He did not want to be branded ‘a whingeing Pom’ on his return visit.

While he was in Brisbane, O’Connell dined at Lewis’s home in Garfield Drive.

On 20 January, according to Lewis’s Commissioner’s diary, O’Connell met with Police Minister Newbery and Lewis and they discussed how there would be ‘no further inquiries needed’.

They did, however, talk about O’Connell’s observations on corruption in the force. ‘One particular person that I was concerned with from the information that I had been given was a man called Murphy,’ O’Connell later said. ‘From what I was told and his name was mentioned more than anyone else by police officers who I saw [during their interviews with O’Connell in late 1975], he was obviously one they feared, a dominant man and highly intelligent.

‘They spoke of him in awe … and you got this sense of fear … you got this sense they were frightened of him.’

Lewis says he later learned that when O’Connell interviewed Basil Hicks and Jim Voigt, of Whitrod’s prized Crime Intelligence Unit, for his report, much was mentioned about Tony Murphy. ‘O’Connell didn’t want to know about Murphy,’ Lewis recalls. ‘He said he didn’t want to know anything about him. It seems that somewhere along the line people don’t want to get involved in knowing about Murphy.’

On 24 January, O’Connell called Commissioner Lewis and assured him he had shredded the hundreds of statements he had taken during the initial stages of his investigation in 1975. O’Connell may have felt the need to reassure the new Commissioner in light of their expansive hospitality towards him during his visit to the Queensland capital.

Indeed, O’Connell decided he would not burden the new Commissioner with allegations of corruption and felt Lewis had a right to put his own house ‘in order’. O’Connell later said: ‘I was not telling lies. I was supporting the new regime.’

Before he returned to London, Lewis and Newbery presented O’Connell with ‘albums’ and a ‘print’ of an old etching of Scotland Yard as souvenirs of his return trip to Brisbane.

Old friends checked in. Eric Pratt telephoned for a natter about the Lucas Inquiry. Then on Wednesday 9 March, Lewis headed out to Eagle Farm airport to meet Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, in the city as a part of their 1977 Silver Jubilee tour. The Commissioner escorted the famous couple to City Hall and then on to Government House. Late that afternoon he was formally ‘presented’ to the Queen and Prince. The Royals were gone by Friday.

On that same day, Lewis met with Tony Murphy ‘re unsolved murders’.

The following Monday – 14 March 1977 – Commander O’Connell finally issued his sanitised report on corruption to the Queensland Government. It concluded: ‘No purpose would be served in pursuing our investigation any further. During the course of our enquiries we did not uncover sufficient evidence to justify a prosecution.’

The report, ring-bound and book-ended in thick, creamy cardboard, was a total of five pages long. It was filed and never made public.

Slacks

Lorelle Saunders was a police officer on the up and up. Not only was she Queensland’s first female detective, but she had been excited by former Commissioner Ray Whitrod’s reform agenda, particularly in relation to women in the police force.

She had only been in the force a little less than five years by the time Whitrod resigned and Terry Lewis took over the top job. When she had first joined, one of her first postings in late November, 1972, was to the JAB, then run by Senior Sergeant Terry Lewis. She spent only a few months there before being moved over to the Gabba CIB, then the City Police shortly after.

By April 1973 she was back in plain clothes at the JAB. While there, she said that a major disagreement occurred between Lewis and Tony Murphy towards the end of the year. The argument was over the location for the JAB’s annual Christmas party. Lewis had arranged for it to be held at the old National Hotel, epicentre of the inquiry into police misconduct in 1963. Murphy indicated they should never set foot in the hotel, owned by the Roberts brothers.

Curious, Saunders had started asking around about the National, and was told the story of Bischof, the Rat Pack – supposedly Lewis, Murphy and Glen Hallahan – and police corruption during the era.

Lewis would later deny that the argument with Murphy ever took place.

Later, Saunders was transferred to Whitrod’s new Education Department Liaison Unit (EDLU) – a body established in direct opposition to Lewis’s JAB. The EDLU would get tougher on juvenile offenders. In accepting the transfer, Saunders said Lewis went ‘crazy’ and accused her of disloyalty. If true, Lewis’s perception that you were ‘pro-Whitrod’ would be enough to seed an immovable enmity. From that moment, Saunders’ name would have been blacklisted.

Saunders later had a stint at the Inala suburban station west of the city before she was brought back in to the Metropolitan CIB, South Brisbane Area Office, in January 1977. By this stage, following his spectacular ascent, Lewis had been Commissioner for just a few weeks. One of the first notations in his Commissioner’s diary, however, would relate to Saunders. Lewis recorded: ‘Mr Riley mentioned re P/W Saunders and [P/W Janet] Makepeace soliciting signatures for petition.’

The petition that had become diary-worthy for Lewis was in fact in relation to overturning police regulations and allowing female officers to wear slacks on duty. Saunders contacted virtually every female Queensland officer seeking their signatures. Saunders and Makepeace also compiled a report on the issue.

Lewis believed policewomen should be dressed in the traditional sense – skirts, for example – and said slacks were not common practice in overseas police forces.

Saunders immediately contacted several international police forces, including Japan and the United States, to seek clarification on women wearing slacks while on active duty. The petition and research dossier were presented to Lewis for consideration.

To his credit, Lewis relented and permitted slacks to be introduced as a part of the official wardrobe of Queensland policewomen. Lewis, by and large, did not share Whitrod’s more liberated view in relation to women and policing. And he would have taken umbrage at Saunders not only stirring the pot with the petition, but correcting him on the wearing of slacks in other forces overseas.

Within weeks, reports from senior police expressing their dissatisfaction with the quality of Lorelle Saunders’ work were being generated and added to her official police file.

Saunders’ odyssey had begun. She could not imagine in her wildest dreams how it would end.

A Small Target

They would have looked like any typical young family over on the Redcliffe peninsula, a suburban outpost of Brisbane, 18 kilometres north-east of the CBD.

To get to it, you had to traverse the rattly 2.68 kilometre Hornibrook Bridge. Once there, it was a great place for families, with Suttons Beach and the Redcliffe Jetty regularly swept with breezes off Moreton Bay. It was also the perfect place to live for someone who did not want to bump into anything or anyone from the past in Brisbane. Redcliffe, in the 1970s, could have been its own small town by the water. In Redcliffe you could disappear.

It was where Mary Anne Brifman settled with her husband ‘Graham’ after they had married just a few days after Mary Anne’s 16th birthday in December 1972, just nine months after her mother’s death.

It was Graham who was sleeping over in the apartment in Bonney Avenue the night that Shirley died. It was Graham who witnessed a visitor come to the door close to midnight and hand her a small amber jar of drugs. Later, in the early hours of the morning, he had also seen an anxious Shirley moving about the apartment before standing before him in the dark in her floral nightie with side pockets.

‘What’s wrong?’ he had asked her quietly.

‘Nothing,’ she replied.

So Mary Anne and Graham had married, and in 1975 had their first child, Christiaan. The next year they had a daughter, Ingrid.

‘I was working as a waitress for a while but I was still haunted by all the things that I’d gone through,’ Mary Anne says. ‘I went back to doing what I hated and what they had trained me to do [in Sydney] when I was 13.

‘He [Graham] had been sheltered in a very religious household most of his life, he didn’t have much life experience. I couldn’t get my husband to do anything. So I had to go to work. It was a repeat of my mother and father’s marriage.’

She said she deliberately made herself a small target. ‘I tried to keep a very low profile,’ she says. ‘Nobody knew who I was. I never mentioned my mother. I didn’t want to get involved in anything too organised, where the girls were bullied by the men who ran the parlours.

‘I was scared stiff of being recognised. I decided I would work as an escort.’

Confidential

Just three months into his commissionership, Lewis wasted no time drafting a confidential memo to Inspector Basil Hicks, head of Whitrod’s cherished Crime Intelligence Unit. It was time to let Whitrod’s old faithful know who was boss. And to delineate what actual intelligence the unit had on corrupt serving officers. What did they know? How much?

Lewis’s memo – dated 10 February 1977 – not only requested details of the machinations of the unit, but accused it of being disruptive to police morale and operating as some sort of unaccounted for rogue body persecuting good policemen and wantonly besmirching reputations.

Hicks strongly refuted the allegations in his memo in reply on 17 February. ‘I am deeply concerned at two matters which were inexplicably raised in your memorandum,’ Hicks wrote. ‘One matter is that the Unit was working contrary to its original charter. The second matter is that there was disquiet in the Police because they were being investigated by the Crime Intelligence Unit. Both statements are incorrect.’

Lewis hit back on 17 March: ‘Please supply me with particulars of the field investigations conducted by the Crime Intelligence Unit which resulted in the prosecution of the six police officers mentioned in your report. Your report should include the names of the alleged offenders, the charges and dates preferred. A précis of the circumstances in each case is also required.’

How much was Hicks willing to tell, given his knowledge of Lewis’s friendships with men like Jack Herbert, Glen Hallahan and Tony Murphy? Or did he tell all, reminding the new Commissioner that he was aware of a growing network of corruption, and that some of the major players had strong connections to the force’s highest office? In short, that he knew what the bad apples were up to.

It was a dangerous game, and one that Hicks must have understood he could not win. His confidential six-page report to Lewis on 23 March laid out the skeletons in the closet. He mentioned – but not by name – the information of deceased prostitute and whistleblower Shirley Margaret Brifman, obtained by the CIU in late 1971, adding that her testimony ‘could neither be proved nor disproved’.

An investigation into the extent of prostitution revealed that ‘official records did not give any indication of the true position regarding police corruption connected with prostitution’, and that field investigations in the early 1970s showed that ‘some Police Officers were giving protection to prostitutes’.

His report detailed former officer Glen Hallahan being charged with official corruption over the Dorothy Knight pay-off in New Farm Park, and the Rat Packer counselling criminal Donald Ross Kelly to rob a bank at Kedron.

According to Hicks, the CIU began to look seriously at SP betting in Queensland and found that the industry was worth in excess of $50 million a year, with more than 20 operators turning over $50,000 each a week.