Jacks and Jokers (17 page)

‘Tony reported to Glen and Glen advised me that the Solomon Islands were perfect.’

Was this the braggadocio of a veteran criminal and liar? Or had Murphy and Hallahan discussed drugs and the use of light aircraft precisely when Milligan was about to embark on a major and audacious importation?

Milligan Plans the Drop

On 12 August, Commissioner Lewis had a busy day ahead of him – the usual 9 a.m. ‘prayers’ with his top men discussing police matters from the night before, meetings, a luncheon invitation and a matter of the past to deal with.

He chinwagged with a clutch of his most senior officers, including Superintendent Noel Dwyer and Inspector Tony Murphy, before taking lunch as guest of the Rural Fires Board with National Party Minister and Member for Roma, Ken Tomkins, at the Brothers Leagues Club in Stafford, just north of the CBD.

Back in the office, Lewis accepted the resignation of Ken Hoggett – Ray Whitrod’s former personal assistant and the alleged snitch who warned his new boss back in 1970 about Lewis, Murphy, Hallahan and the so-called Rat Pack. The resignation, Lewis noted in his diary, was ‘effective immediately’.

On that same day, John Milligan telephoned Hallahan and later transferred $1000 into his bank account. The heroin drop was ready to go.

The next day Milligan took an Alitalia flight to Bangkok with one of his associates, Graham Bridge, while another syndicate member, Bryan Parker, headed for the same city on a Singapore Airlines flight. Parker would buy the heroin and get it to New Guinea.

By the end of the month Parker and Bridge got between one and two kilograms of heroin to Port Morseby in a red tartan suitcase with a false bottom. Everything was going to plan. They secured the suitcase in the Davura Hotel’s ‘left luggage’ room, and both men returned to Sydney.

Milligan took a fortnight’s holiday while he was in Thailand.

Still No Letters from Home

Come August, Commissioner Lewis was enjoying the annual ritual of the Brisbane Exhibition or Ekka at the Royal National Agricultural and Industrial Association of Queensland showgrounds in the inner-Brisbane suburb of Bowen Hills. In his younger days he patrolled sideshow alley as a constable during the ten-day event. Now he had more illustrious duties. His diary for Wednesday 17 August recorded: ‘To Exhibition Grounds … inspected Police Mounted Escort, luncheon with RNA council members and wives.’

After looking over the Police Exhibit he then proceeded ‘to main Ring and took part in judging of Police Horses. With Hon. Sir Wally Rae … presented ribbons.’ Sir Wallace Rae was always good company. The former jackaroo, rodeo rider and grazier had held the huge seat of Gregory in western Queensland from 1957 to 1974, and was appointed by Bjelke-Petersen as Queensland Agent General in London.

Sir Wally was not averse to controversy. He was one of several Cabinet ministers who in 1970 had accepted Comalco shares from the company for a pittance. In 1975 he also went to Switzerland at the request of Bjelke-Petersen to hunt for documents relating to an alleged loan scam involving former ALP Prime Minister Gough Whitlam.

But Sir Wally loved a good Ekka in Brisbane, was a qualified show-riding judge and had himself in the past won several exhibition ribbons. He and Lewis no doubt discussed Commissioner Lewis’s imminent Interpol conference and global study tour that would take in Europe and the United States, and made tentative plans for dinner together in London.

At 7.30 a.m. the following Tuesday, Lewis was conveyed to Eagle Farm airport by his driver Gordon and commenced the long journey to Paris via Singapore, Bahrain, Frankfurt and Vienna.

He arrived at his hotel – the L’Ouest, in the central 8th arrondissement near the Champs-Élysées and the Louvre – at 11 p.m. on Wednesday 24 August. He wrote in his diary: ‘An amazing coincidence in being booked into very same room as I had in 1968 [while on his Churchill Fellowship].’

As a solo traveller, he had not improved since those earlier days. He was immediately lonely, and struck dumb by foreign customs that would never pass the grade in prudish Queensland. Walking through Montmartre, he noted the proliferation of ‘sex shops’. ‘Large photos on display of nude males and females in various sexual intercourse positions and even of women apparently preparing to allow dogs to have intercourse,’ Lewis recorded in his diary.

He found Notre Dame cathedral ‘very dismal’.

As in his 1968 world tour, he made numerous social observations. ‘In Paris there are many petite women, many appear suntanned, dainty feet and generally well proportioned. There are many black men with white girls and a fair number of old men with quite young girls, some quite good-looking. Men and women shake hands every time they meet, even at work each day.’

By 1 September Lewis was ensconced in Stockholm, Sweden, already feeling ‘very lonely’. He was deprived of a sidekick, unlike his mentor Frank Bischof when the Big Fella attended the 31st Interpol conference in Madrid in 1962.

But on the first day of the conference he did hook up with New South Wales Police Commissioner Merv Wood, who was approaching his first anniversary in the top job. Wood was ten years older than Lewis and famed as a gold medal–winning Olympic rower. Despite the age difference, they had some common views. In an interview with the
Sydney Morning Herald
, just months before the conference, Wood had declared Sydney was ‘a big city and you can’t drive everything underground. You’re foolish to try. It’s better to let a thing exist where you know everything about it. I remember years ago we tried to eradicate prostitution. The next thing we knew they were popping up in the better suburbs. None of these things are felonies. They’re what we call social offences, SP betting and so forth.’

Lewis, between conference duties, walked the streets of Stockholm. He declared it a ‘swinging’ city, and wrote: ‘… very little business for bra makers’.

He dined with Wood who regularly got drunk. ‘A terrible boaster,’ Lewis recorded in his diary. At dinner on the last night of the conference, 8 September, Wood and Lewis clashed again. ‘… I got up Merv re his claim that New South Wales only real police. Left them as soon as I finished dinner. Completed letter home.’

The following morning Lewis was on board a Pan Am Boeing 707 headed for London. After checking into the Bristol Hotel he was picked up by his old acquaintance, detective Terry O’Connell, whom he’d seen and dined with in Brisbane earlier in the year, and they went to New Scotland Yard for talks. Lewis was ‘very annoyed’ there had been no mail from home waiting for him at the hotel.

He later dined at O’Connell’s home in Epsom, outside London. O’Connell’s wife, Margaret, prepared a meal of meat, beans, potatoes, marrow and rhubarb, which Lewis considered ‘quite nice’.

During the rest of his London leg, he caught up with Sir Wally Rae at Australia House on The Strand and repeatedly socialised with O’Connell, taking in a meal and a show at The Cockney on Charing Cross Road.

Lewis flew out to Toronto on Saturday 17 September, suffering neck pain and homesickness. ‘Feel quite insignificant on world scene,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Still no mail from home. Really fed up.’

He went on to Baltimore. ‘STILL NO MAIL FROM HOME,’ he diarised with emphasis. ‘More blacks in streets than whites. Extremely lonely.’

A week later in Los Angeles, he discussed the policing of prostitution and pornography laws with Captain J.R. Wilson, officer in charge of the Administrative Vice Division for the LAPD. ‘Cannot have nudity where liquor sold. Viewed “Hustler”, “Cum Licker” … nudity not illegal. Only bestiality, children urinating or sadistic torture is unlawful. Movies of all types including women masturbating stallion; oral sex with hog etc. Have Fist Fuckers America book. $12.50. Unbelievable.’

Back at his hotel, he checked on the number of Lewises in the local phone book and found four with the Christian name ‘Hazel’.

On the morning of Friday 30 September, Lewis attended the International Symposium of Chiefs of Police, addressed by LA Mayor Tom Bradley and others, before flying to San Francisco and on to Australia. He was back in Brisbane on the Sunday morning, met by Vern MacDonald and his assistant Greg Early. They welcomed him home with a few beers at the Hamilton Hotel.

Lewis was back at his desk and in control the next morning.

That week, Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen phoned him with concerns about the rash of protest marches in the city. It was as if Commissioner Lewis had never been away.

Tales of Roland and Ron the Maori

If the people of Brisbane were in need of stories of sex and sleaze and the sordidness of the city’s underworld, they need only have gone into the public gallery of the chambers in Parliament House, that splendid Classical Revival pile on the corner of George and Alice streets, facing the Botanical Gardens.

In the cool of the lofty gallery on Tuesday 30 August, the tireless ALP firebrand Kev Hooper pressed on with piecing together his mosaic of Queensland’s unsavoury criminal present, dragging in what he saw as a puerile Police Minister (Tom Newbery), a blinkered National Party government and corrupt police. Week after week, month after month, he built his picture.

On that Tuesday, he gave the public a glimpse into the dangerous world of massage parlours and gambling dens in Brisbane and on the Gold Coast. Always colourful, always biting, Hooper told the House he had recently driven a massage parlour out of his home suburb of working-class Inala with the help of the police and the media. Thanks to big Kev, ‘The Seventh Heaven’ of Begonia Street was no more. He now had bigger prey in mind.

‘One could almost call the massage racket in this city a cottage industry,’ Hooper said. ‘Unfortunately it is in the hands of some of the nastiest criminal elements at large in this state.

‘Undoubtedly the best known frontman is Roland John Short, who has managed to establish some friends in high places as well as indulge in his brutal tendencies. He is nothing but a standover thug.

‘Short is well known to the police, and has a very heavy grip on massage parlours and vice dens in Brisbane and on the Gold Coast.’

Roland Short was part-Burmese, tall and powerfully built. He often worked out in gyms across the city. He dressed sharp and had a fervent interest in the latest technical equipment that he utilised in his clubs and parlours. He was one of the first in the Brisbane club scene to install sophisticated closed-circuit television cameras. He was also obsessed with security, and spent small fortunes barricading his enterprises against police intervention or that from his professional rivals.

Hooper listed Short’s businesses: the Matador in South Brisbane, a one-stop shop of gambling, pornography and prostitution; the Koala Court gambling joint in Surfers Paradise; the Penthouse Massage Parlour in Fortitude Valley; the Oriental Bath Massage Parlour in Logan Road, Mt Gravatt; and an out-call prostitute service called Charlie’s Angels.

Short’s most ‘despicable accomplice’, Hooper went on, was ‘a Maori with bullet marks across his shoulders known as Ron. He was formerly employed as a bouncer at the Sunnybank Hotel, where he was known for the merciless thrashings he dealt out to hotel patrons.’

Ron now stood over Short’s parlour girls. ‘He forces them to perform sexual acts with him whenever the desire takes him, and metes out brutal thrashings to those who protest,’ said Hooper. ‘He is the lowest of men and should be deported immediately to where he came from.’

Hooper in part blamed the state government for ‘sick minds reaping fortunes from organised vice in this city’.

While the government banned numerous classifications of pornography, Hooper opined, it allowed explicit advertisements for vice dens in local newspapers. He described some of the ads as ‘disgusting’ and said the government ‘had ample scope … to act in this area’.

‘It is vital the government provide the law enforcement agencies with adequate means to clean up the streets of our cities,’ Hooper declared. ‘The terms “massage parlours”, “health clubs”, or whatever they are called, are nothing but euphemisms for brothels.’

And he closed with a classic Hooper line: ‘Some honourable members, because of their cloistered upbringing, think that brothel is the name of the soup of the day in the Parliamentary Refreshment Room.’

It may have drawn some laughs, but Hooper was making a serious point.

Just as the new Country Party, elected after decades in the wilderness in the late 1950s, had moral dilemmas when it came to the city’s then six tolerated brothels and the dark whispers concerning corrupt commissioner Frank Bischof, Hooper had identified the hypocrisy in a National Party government that banked on its perception as Christian and proper and tough on law and order. Why did they do nothing?

Hooper further observed that the Matador Club was open just days after the March raid.

‘This reminds me of the old days of the SP bookmakers,’ he reflected. ‘They were raided one day, later paid their fine and were open for business again the next day. They were virtually paying a licence fee, and the same thing is happening in connection with the Matador Club.’

The next day, a frustrated Police Minister, Tom Newbery, berated Hooper. Newbery defended the police raid on the Matador by pointing out that, ‘[Roland] Short had received such advanced notice of the raid from his “senior police contacts” that he was apprehended attempting to escape through the roof of a toilet on the premises.’