Jacks and Jokers (14 page)

Enter the Phantom

William Daniel Alexander [Alec] Jeppesen arrived at the Police Depot on Petrie Terrace for his cadet training precisely three days after Lewis had been sworn in way back in mid-January 1949.

By the mid-1950s he was posted to Townsville and Ayr and variously served in the CIB and Licensing Branch when he became embroiled in the Southport SP Betting Case along with Pitts, withdrawing as prosecutor in that case after allegations of misconduct were brought against him. He denied any wrongdoing.

Still, the stench from the Southport case lingered, though in terms of Jeppesen – highly regarded as an honest officer – it didn’t affect Ray Whitrod who, on 15 October 1976, and just prior to his resignation, proposed to Cabinet that Jeppesen be promoted to Inspector (Grade 4) and be put in charge of the Licensing Branch.

Cabinet approved Jeppesen’s promotion on 15 November – the day Lewis was himself promoted to Assistant Commissioner, and the trigger that ended Whitrod’s police career. Jeppesen was initially assigned to the Office of the Commissioner of Police (Staff Enquiry and Relieving). Then, on 2 December, just days after Lewis taking the top job, Jeppesen was instructed to head the Licensing Branch from late January, 1977.

Jeppesen was a straight shooter and admired by Whitrod. Why, then, did Lewis agree to him taking over Licensing, a cash cow for corrupt police and still effectively ‘managed’ by Jack Herbert and Tony Murphy? Did he feel he couldn’t block such an important appointment so early in his commissionership? That doing so would draw attention to the branch and raise suspicions?

From the outset Jeppesen conducted Licensing business to the letter of the law. He began cracking down on prostitution and SP betting – hundreds of charges were being laid week after week. Just months into his new appointment he heard within the branch and on the street that Tony Murphy and his consorters were set to take over the policing of prostitution and the massage parlours. He had already heard it from one of the Licensing Branch constables, Brian Marlin.

Marlin was relatively new to the Queensland force, though he had worked in Sydney as a policeman for four years, and prior to that had been a member of the Australian Army. He claimed he had been trained in police work by the legendary Ray ‘Gunner’ Kelly in Sydney (though Kelly had resigned from the force in 1966, years before Marlin was eligible to enrol). There was talk that Marlin had been removed from the New South Wales force on medical grounds, namely psychological reasons.

He was a tough young cop with a strange obsession – he was addicted to the comic hero The Phantom. Some officers had heard he even built a Phantom ‘cave’ in his house. Not only that, despite being new to the branch, he seemed to be a limitless font of information.

Licensing Branch officer Bruce Wilby remembers: ‘Marlin was with us for 12 months. When he first came he brought with him a wealth of information. It amazed us he knew so much.’ Wilby suspected that the anti-Jeppesen forces were feeding him.

‘Jeppesen fell for Marlin hook, line and sinker,’ Wilby says.

It would be a potentially fatal error of judgement.

A White Uganda

In the early afternoon of Thursday 17 March, Opposition leader Tom Burns readied himself in state parliament for a blistering attack on the Premier and the National Party. The Liberals also would not escape his ire.

The occasion was a debate on the proposed changes to the
Electoral Districts Act
prior to a state election later in the year. The Act had last been tweaked in 1971. Burns was all for an electoral redistribution, but a fair one. He knew that under the current arrangement, with the weight of votes in Queensland’s vast rural hinterland disproportionately skewed in favour of the Nationals, he and his Labor colleagues were looking at not just years but potentially decades in the political wilderness.

The redistribution, if the legislation was passed, would see three Liberal seats – Baroona, Belmont and Clayfield – eliminated, and new seats created on Brisbane’s ever-expanding urban fringe, taking into account the growth of places like Redcliffe and in particular the Gold Coast. The new seats gave Joh and his National Party an opportunity to contest for more seats. It was a win-win for the Nationals.

The Liberals, still smarting over the fierce debate with their Coalition partners during the last redistribution in 1971, decided to go down a quieter path this time around. As David Ford, former research officer for the Queensland Liberal Party would later surmise: ‘The 1977 redistribution was a reflection of the Liberal Party’s weakness within government … the Liberal Party believed that it would be political folly to embark only months before an election on what would be undoubtedly another acrimonious intra-Coalition struggle.

‘Uncertain gains in some seats seemed poor compensation for the public wrangling and the inevitable upheaval in marginal seats which would follow a redistribution.’

As for the Nationals, the prospective redistribution was more than tantalising. It would underline Bjelke-Petersen’s growing sense of personal power and indirectly his disdain for Liberal leader Bill Knox. To expose Knox and his party’s collective sheepishness and their willingness to bend at will to the Premier could only be good for Bjelke-Petersen and his cronies.

‘To the National Party, however,’ wrote Ford, ‘the prospect of causing considerable disturbance within the Liberal ranks, while, at the same time, assisting marginal National Party members in the south-eastern zone, seemed most appealing.’

At precisely 2.40 p.m. on that Thursday, with Bjelke-Petersen out of the country trying to drum up mining business in the Middle East, Burns let fly.

‘Today this parliament is asked to dishonour democracy,’ he began dramatically. ‘We are asked to remove the last legal obstacle so that the Premier and his 28 per cent National Party can further disfigure – indeed, rape – the parliamentary system of this state.

‘Labor acknowledges the urgent need for a full, fair redistribution but will not lend its approval to the predetermined electoral rort that is going to be given to us here today. There is not one person inside or outside this parliament who imagines for a moment that any redistribution manipulated in the secrecy of existing guidelines by the Premier and the back-room busybodies of the National Party will be just.’

Burns quoted extensively from the editorial of that day’s issue of the
Courier-Mail
: ‘The present system of distributing electorates based on four zones created in the
Electoral Districts Act
of 1971 is totally slanted in favour of the Nationals. The Act is grossly unfair, even iniquitous.

‘It may rearrange boundaries and lessen some anomalies in the process, but the root cause of the Queensland gerrymander is to be ignored … if they follow him [Bjelke-Petersen], the Liberals will make themselves partners in one of the shabbiest deals the State has known – and it has known a fair number.’

Burns drew comparisons to the state of democracy in Queensland with crazed dictator Idi Amin’s Uganda. In 1977,
Time
magazine described Amin as a ‘killer and clown, big-hearted buffoon and strutting martinet’.

Burns railed: ‘This legislation, without accompanying revision of the entire
Electoral Districts Act
, takes Queensland one step nearer to becoming a European Uganda. One could say an Oceanic Uganda – a white Uganda. In jest, the Premier recently likened himself to Idi Amin, a comparison which I fear is much closer than he would concede.’

Burns offered a withering character summation of Liberal leader and Treasurer Bill Knox, describing him as a ‘schoolboy obeying his headmaster’, and that ‘he comes quivering to the parliament with a National Party amendment for a National Party redistribution on National Party lines’.

The National Party’s ‘political gangsterism’, he went on, made a mockery of the Westminster-style of democratic government.

Not to be outdone, Kev Hooper, member for the seat of Archerfield, threw his weight into the debate. Following an interjection by Bob Katter, Hooper quipped: ‘The honourable member who just interjected is an expert in figures – but the only figures he is interested in are the ones that he finds available in the Diamond Drill and the World by Night [owned and run by the Bellinos in Fortitude Valley] restaurants.’

That day, as the three parties slugged it out into the evening, Commissioner Terence Lewis went to lunch with several dignitaries, including two knights of the realm – Sir David Muir, former Queensland Agent-General in London and Inaugural Chairman of the Queensland Cultural Centre Trust, and Sir Theodor Bray, former long-time editor of the
Courier-Mail
and founder of the newish Griffith University.

Bray was a fierce Royalist and an early admirer of Premier Bjelke-Petersen. He said in an interview in the early days of Bjelke-Petersen’s premiership: ‘Mr Bjelke-Petersen, is a man who believes in his own honesty. He believes in his own strength as a man who has made a success of business, he is a business farmer, a man for whom I have great respect and a man who can be quite tough in the party rooms. He has learnt the hard way …’

Lewis may have been oblivious to the accusations being hurled about the parliamentary chamber regarding the erosion of the Westminster system in Queensland, but he was, unwittingly or not, an unsung part of the debate.

Bjelke-Petersen had learned not just the hard way, as Sir Theodor had suggested, but well, specifically from the Springbok riots of 1971. Combining his leadership with the power of the police force was appealing to Queenslanders. And now the Premier had a police commissioner in place who would do his bidding.

Between 1 January 1977, and the day of the debate in the third week of March, Lewis had had contact with the Premier, or his personal staff, no less than 18 times, or roughly once every four days.

Lewis met with the leader of the Opposition, Tom Burns, just once in the same timeframe.

Learning to Work with Joh

From the moment of their frank and wide-ranging discussion together in the winter sun on the airstrip at Cunnamulla prior to Lewis becoming commissioner, Lewis held the Premier, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, in some form of awe.

While Lewis had no time for the vanquished commissioner Ray Whitrod, after straining under his leadership for years, he had an instant rapport with the church-going Joh.

For Lewis, the equation was simple – as Police Commissioner, he served the Premier with every ounce of his being.

‘I never had a cross word with him, and he never had one with me,’ Lewis says. ‘As I said he was always out and about, he used to either have Allen Callaghan with him or [private secretary] Stan Wilcox or whoever … he had my direct line and he’d ring you and say, “Oh, Joh here”.

‘Or frequently it would be Allen or Stan ringing and saying, “Look we’re up at somewhere … there are no major problems.” You know? He needed this or he needed that or he wanted a transfer. And you’d have a look at it and sometimes you could do it and sometimes you couldn’t. And you’d ring back and you’d get back to Joh … “Oh, sorry Premier”.

‘ “Oh, that’s a shame Terry,” he’d say. “Can’t do it? No. Oh well, thanks for trying”.

‘He wouldn’t say, you know, go and get nicked.’

Lewis’s working relationship with the Premier was also at times casual and always cordial. ‘Joh used to say, “Come and see me from time to time,” ’ remembers Lewis. ‘He’d say, “I get around the state and I’d like you to fill me in if there’s anything I should know.”

‘So I’d go and see him … every time I went to see Joh about anything, the next day or two I would see the Minister … so that I never, ever, ever went behind the Minister’s back.’

Lewis says his relationship with the political leader of the day, as far as he saw it, never compromised the doctrine of the separation of powers – the division of the institutions of government into three branches: legislative, executive and judicial, working interdependently.

‘No, that didn’t matter,’ says Lewis. ‘How do you not have it? [A strong relationship with government.] If you have a Premier or Minister they’re supposed to be the supreme power, okay?

‘You have to have a working relationship with your Minister and they can, as I understand it, say to you we’re going to give you another hundred men, the government wants you to put 50 of them, say, on traffic work, 50 in the country.

‘That’s not unreasonable I don’t think. They’re providing the resources. I would put an application in each year saying, we need this, we need that, we need them here and there – and normally they’d go along with that. But your Minister is entitled to have … he can sack you if he wants to.

‘You can’t tell the Premier or the Minister that you’re not going to take any notice of them.’

Lewis says Bjelke-Petersen’s greatest virtue was his singular focus on the job as leader. ‘He wasn’t interested in getting full of piss or backing it on race horses or chasing sheilas as some of them were,’ Lewis says. ‘And he devoted his energies to being the bloody Premier and I don’t know if anyone could do it now.

‘I can’t recall him ever having malice in what he did. He never rang me and said, “Look Joe Blow’s a shithouse who is … is there anything you can find on him?” I don’t think it would be in his nature to do that, I think he’d be more likely to tell the fellow to his face what he thought of him.’