Jacks and Jokers (26 page)

What was at the heart of the unrest was Jeppesen’s relentless attack on SP bookmakers. They were paying Herbert and The Joke enormous sums of money for protection, and were not getting value for money – either the bookmakers would stop the payments, or the troublemakers in Licensing needed to be removed.

‘When we started to really get into the SP bookmakers is when we stirred up a hornet’s nest,’ remembers Bruce Wilby of the Licensing Branch. ‘There were your pub SPs – you’d go out on a Saturday with a fistful of dollars, and if you could get a bet on you’d pinch them. But it was Jeppesen who had the information coming in. We started to work out it was highly organised, not just blokes sitting in pubs taking a few bets. We were getting bigger and bigger fellows.’

One of Wilby’s biggest catches was bookmaker Bob Bax. He arrested Bax twice in a short period of time.

‘You won’t get me again,’ Bax told him after the second arrest.

‘You going to give it away, Bob?’ Wilby supposedly asked.

‘No, you are,’ Bax replied.

On Wednesday 5 April, Lewis’s diary noted: ‘Det. Sgt. Freier phoned re comments … Hicks and recently promoted Inspector “knocking” me.’ The latter could only have been Jeppesen.

The next day, hearing of the protagonists in the unfolding campaign of Chinese whispers, Lewis contacted Goleby: ‘Phoned J. Goleby, MLA, re policing in his electorate.’

Come Monday 17 April Lewis decided to confront Jeppesen in his office. ‘With Dep. Comm. to Licensing Branch and told Insp. Jeppesen what is expected of him re any complaints re Police.’

Jeppesen said to his boss he would police the Licensing staff as he saw fit. He took Lewis’s visit as a veiled threat.

On top of that, Jeppesen had recognised a constable driving slowly past his family home in Brighton, on Bramble Bay north-east of the CBD. Jeppesen himself was under surveillance.

As a consequence, he began tape recording information from informants and prostitutes. They began painting a picture of widespread corruption and the intrinsic involvement of Jack ‘The Bagman’ Herbert.

It was a road other honest officers had been down many times before. But in the late 1970s, with Herbert controlling a corrupt annual income of many millions of dollars, the stakes were high.

Jeppesen sat on his secret tapes, and as they liked to say in the office, kept ‘poking a big stick’ at the top brass.

Sweet

Hector Hapeta was bored.

In Sydney in the late 1970s, Hapeta had spent a good decade of his life selling pet meat out of two wholesale outlets in the western suburbs of Bankstown and Yagoona. He trained greyhounds on occasion, and was a co-proprietor of some pet stores. But as Hector, an illiterate who simultaneously had a brain for hatching business schemes, would later say, he was at that point ‘sick of sitting in a shop and selling pet food’.

Serendipitously, Hapeta’s de facto wife, Anne Marie Tilley, happened upon a newspaper advertisement for the vacant lease on a health studio in Brisbane’s notorious Fortitude Valley.

The studio was called the Top Hat, and was situated next to the Shamrock Hotel on the corner of Brunswick Street and St Paul’s Terrace, a stone’s throw from the ill-fated former nightclub the Whiskey Au Go Go. The Top Hat was also just across the road from the Top of the Valley building.

Meanwhile, Tilley had heard good things about the Sunshine State. It seemed a comparative paradise for those in the skin trade compared to the hard streets of Sydney’s Kings Cross and Darlinghurst.

The Top Hat was being leased by Brisbane’s then King of the Parlours, Geoff Crocker. Tilley phoned him from Sydney about the Top Hat. She used the name ‘Diane’.

‘I hear you have a place,’ she said to Crocker. ‘How much do you want for it?’

‘I want $1200 a month for it,’ he said.

‘Can I come and have a look at it?’

‘Yeah, sure.’

Tilley flew up the next day. Crocker picked her up from the airport and drove her into the Valley where she inspected the property.

‘It’s quite good,’ Tilley said. ‘I’ll take it.’

She handed Crocker $1200 cash in advance and promised to pay rent at the beginning of each month. Crocker knew his new tenant as Diane Tilley. She returned to Sydney that same night.

Two days later Crocker got a phone call from Hector Hapeta to let him know he and his wife were driving up to Brisbane straightaway. They had a GT Falcon. Crocker recalled: ‘They had an old Falcon, one of those shaker ones … two days after that I got a phone call and it was Hector on the phone and he was stuck in Lismore … this bloody car, it nearly killed him and his wife, the exhaust pipe had come off it and they had no money to fix it so I had to telegram, get some money to Lismore to fix this bloody car up so they could get to Brisbane.’

Hapeta and Tilley met Crocker at his home in Everton Park for a discussion about the Top Hat, then booked into a city motel. While Tilley was setting up the massage parlour Hapeta used to wander over to Crocker’s place and play pool during the day. He started to open up about his past. He told Crocker he was chased out of Sydney by criminals.

‘I said to him, what were you doing wrong that they chased you out of Sydney?’ Crocker related the conversation. ‘He said to me that he had sold some drugs in Sydney, right, and he undercut the big boys’ price and they found out about it … he lived in a little terrace house … he told me he was sitting there one day about lunchtime watching television, two guys ran in, broke his kneecaps with iron bars and told him to get out of Sydney in 24 hours or he would be dead. That was the story he told me.

‘I believed it to be true,’ Crocker said, ‘because he was a big guy and he walked funny you know.’

The Top Hat went well under the guidance of the astute Tilley. ‘We were told there was no corruption, and you just opened up places and it was all sweet,’ remembers Tilley. ‘We came up and bought this parlour off someone else. We opened it up. That night the police turned up.’

One of Tilley and Hapeta’s earliest visitors was Harry Burgess of the Licensing Branch. ‘Harry was around in the beginning there,’ Tilley says. ‘He just started talking to me one night. He said not to bring underaged kids in here. I said I wouldn’t be doing that.

‘He said if the girls get pinched every three weeks, sorry, then they’d leave us alone. “As long as we know who they are and there are no underages, then we’ll leave you alone,” Harry said. There was no money [for protection] in those days. It was controlled by the police. They’d come in and have a Scotch or something, and that was about it.’

Tilley discovered in herself a talent for organisation. She had a natural business brain that was not, at the time, impeded by her heavy drinking and the occasional abuse of hash.

The first girl employed at the Top Hat under new management was an overweight girl, about 20, with ‘a very pretty face and long red hair’.

‘She was such a big girl,’ Tilley remembers. ‘I told her to be careful hopping in the spa. I was worried it’d overflow. She ended up as a receptionist after a couple of weeks.’

Across Brunswick Street, the Bellinos were running an illegal game upstairs in the Top of the Valley building. Tilley and Hapeta soon heard about their neighbours, but they were kept busy getting their foot in the door of Brisbane’s fledgling vice industry. To boot, there was no sign of them having to pay a cent of ‘funny money’ to corrupt police.

Eventually, both would be surprised at how fast their business interests grew. And how lucrative it would become.

Marlin Goes Fishing

The industrious Licensing Branch Constable Brian Marlin, teeming with interesting information for his boss, Alec Jeppesen, and an enigma to his colleagues, gave himself a confidential assignment. Marlin decided he would immerse himself in Brisbane’s gay culture and produce a comprehensive and up-to-date report on the city’s homosexuals.

In short, Marlin would compile what would effectively be a directory of gay beats, the covert language used by gay men looking for sex, the city’s gay hotels and a list of ‘suspected persons’.

Had this unusual mission been requested by Police Commissioner Lewis? On Friday 10 March 1978, Lewis had personally seen Marlin in his office regarding ‘his duties generally’, and Tony Murphy had met with Lewis in the winter of that year to talk about, of all things, lesbian policewomen in the force. But gay men had not received such special attention to date, until the indefatigable Marlin came along.

‘He was a weird person,’ says one officer who went through a detective training course with him. ‘He was just downright weird. He would make out he knew all these top influential people. Word got around and no one would have anything to do with him. He would walk in and people would just leave.

‘He would dob other police in. Anyone who was a dog – that was the biggest fear for any copper.’

Marlin completed his detailed dossier.

‘I’ve seen it, it was shown to me. I was horrified,’ says the officer. ‘He went undercover on his own volition and did this thing on the homosexual underground scene and he gave reports on gay cruising in public parks, listed all the toilets, the Hacienda [Hotel at 394 Brunswick Street, Fortitude Valley], all the venues, the whole lot, terminologies, suspected persons, and all of that. Lewis would have got that.’

The task was a world away from young Marlin’s usual duties in the Licensing Branch, though he had already shown a taste for prowling Brisbane’s seedy gambling dens, and he wasn’t averse to using his fists, or the butt of a firearm, to get his point across.

Jim Slade, the CIB’s undercover young gun and intelligence expert, says he worked on the Marlin operation with his partner Norm Sprenger.

‘I remember we did a job … why did we suddenly have this big interest in paedophilia and gays?’ Slade recalls. ‘It was a massive job, it went on and on and on.

‘It had something to do with Rose’s Café in the Valley. We ended up identifying teachers that took kids from their classes in there. That was my first association with paedophilia. Brian Marlin was the one who instigated this whole bloody thing through Tony Murphy.

‘Norm Sprenger and I did the whole thing. Marlin would steer us in a certain direction and we would get the evidence or we would establish whether there was anything there. I can’t remember if there were any arrests out of that bloody thing, but the intelligence was incredible.

‘Looking back on it now, I think it was to identify all of the major players and use that information at a later date. It had nothing to do with crime. It had nothing to do with children’s safety. It was to identify major players.’

Some of those players also happened to be working as Queensland police officers. Out of Marlin’s investigation came a separate one – an intense look at the sexuality of the force’s female officers. This became known as the Lesbian Investigation, and was dictated by Tony Murphy.

One of the female officers interrogated was ‘incensed’. ‘The matters canvassed with these female officers were their own business and no one else’s. No allegations were made about policewomen not working, that they were corrupt or that their work was substandard … As far as I am aware those, the subjects of the investigation, had contempt for [Tony] Murphy as a result of his questioning.’

A gay male officer at the time said it was a fearful workplace for homosexuals. ‘There was this really homophobic element in the police and it was just very oppressive,’ he says. ‘We had police living in absolute fear like it was the Nazis. I was aware there were other gay officers. I was aware there were relationships happening. Senior police having relationships and all that.

‘It was hugely prolific with the female officers. But you couldn’t be homosexual … it was illegal.’

Mr Asia Books a Room

On the morning of Friday 9 June, staff at the Terrace Motel on Wickham Terrace had grown suspicious of the behaviour of two guests – a man who had booked himself in under the name J. Petersen, occupation M.P. (a joke at the expense of the Queensland Premier) and another man registered as Wilson. They had also racked up a substantial room service bill that included French champagne. Staff called the police.

Four detectives – Melloy, Chantler, Pickering and O’Brien – headed up to the relatively new brick hotel with commanding views over Albert Park and Roma Street, not far from police headquarters.

They located Wilson and took him back to the CIB for questioning. His real identity was drug runner James William Shepherd. He was charged with being in possession of a large sum of money that was suspected of being illegally obtained.

With Shepherd in custody, a phone call was intercepted in his motel room. This led police to the Coronation Motel on Coronation Drive at Milton. There police found Douglas Robert Wilson and his wife Isabel Martha Wilson. They too were taken in for questioning.

The couple chatted convivially until Detective Sergeant Barry O’Brien brought up the fact that a dog bowl had been located in the Jaguar they had been driving. ‘Where’s the pup?’ he asked.

The couple suddenly went quiet.

The Wilsons, just the month before, had been drying out in a Sydney hospital – both were heroin addicts – when ‘Petersen’ visited them and suggested a holiday ‘in the sun’ in Queensland once they were discharged. Nothing like the sun to beat a Sydney winter, he told them.