Jacks and Jokers (41 page)

What Milligan discussed in those 72 hours was explosive. He alleged that Lewis, Murphy and Hallahan controlled various aspects of crime and corruption in Queensland. ‘Glen’s the civil arm [of the trio],’ Milligan said. ‘Tony Murphy is in charge of security. Tony does the dirty work a lot.’

He said businessman, racing yachtsman and Bally poker machine importer, Jack Rooklyn, who had a mansion in Sydney’s Darling Point, was one of the few ‘heavies’ who controlled the police. He said whatever Rooklyn ordered was ‘accepted as a directive by Terry Lewis, and by Tony and by Glen in Queensland’.

Milligan had a clear memory of the Rat Pack when he was a young legal associate working in Brisbane in the mid-1960s. ‘The Rat Pack was the gang of five. That was Bischof, Bauer, Lewis, Murphy and Hallahan, and they were reputed amongst the legal profession to be the heavies of the CIB and the corrupt characters of the city. Legion were the stories about the corruption and the graft that went on,’ Milligan said.

He told in great detail stories of his past, his association with the killer Johnny Regan, his links with the highest echelons of organised crime in New South Wales, and his conversation with Hallahan about the impending death of prostitute Shirley Brifman, just days prior to her actual death by drug overdose.

Milligan admitted that over time he had dropped $26,000 into one of Hallahan’s bank accounts and that they had concocted a story that if it was ever queried, the money was for the sale of a parcel of Hallahan’s farm to Milligan. (There were never any documents to prove the sale.)

Milligan went on to indicate a conspiracy over the departure of the head of the Brisbane Narcotics Bureau, Max Rogers; Lewis, Hallahan and company had arranged for a former Queensland state police officer, and friend of Hallahan’s, to replace him, and that the transition was a ‘foregone conclusion’. ‘… We left it to Terry to do,’ Milligan said.

Milligan added if he ever had a query about police he might encounter he always sought counsel from Hallahan to see if ‘he is okay or not’.

The drug importer also explained why the Jane Table Mountain importation was finally given the green light. Organisers went ahead ‘after the power structure in Queensland had been consolidated after the State election up there [12 November 1977, won by the Nationals on a platform of law and order] and Lewis had been Commissioner for a couple of years so that there could be no immediate allegations against him if anything went wrong’.

There were details, too, of Hallahan arranging for an old friend and police colleague from the 1960s – who had subsequently enlisted in the Commonwealth force – to mock up an investigation into the Jane Table Mountain importation, including a record of interview with Milligan, to hedge off any serious scrutiny of the case prior to Shobbrook’s dogged work.

Milligan was under pressure on several fronts, not the least being that the Royal Commission into Drug Trafficking, under Justice Philip Woodward, had wound up and the commission’s report was weeks away from being delivered. The royal commission had been sparked by the disappearance of anti-drugs campaigner Donald Mackay on 15 July 1977. The hearings commenced on 10 August that year.

Also, the Williams Royal Commission of Inquiry into Drugs – which had been running since October 1977 and headed by Queensland judge Edward Williams – was set to conclude.

‘Why am I talking now?’ Milligan asked Shobbrook. ‘Because I don’t trust Hallahan, because I’m in a great deal of trouble with you people, I haven’t been protected from you, I don’t trust Hallahan now – I haven’t since the royal commission. I’ve felt that I’m expendable …’

It was an extraordinary tale. It involved murder, drugs and corruption within most levels of state and federal police departments, the judiciary and government. If true, what John Edward Milligan told John Shobbrook during the three days of interviews in Customs House, Circular Quay, Sydney, exposed corruption on a scale never before revealed in Australia.

As for Queensland specifically, Milligan outlined a deeply entrenched system of corruption that involved police and various members of government, its tentacles going to the very top.

Milligan admitted to Shobbrook that the only reason he embarked on the ambitious Jane Table Mountain drug importation was to earn money for Queensland and New South Wales crime syndicates in the absence of expected incomes from the introduction of poker machines in Queensland. He exposed a long-time underworld campaign to ensure government approval of the machines, and the millions of dollars for Bally Corporation, Bally employee Jack Rooklyn and a host of other well-known crime figures that would follow.

Sydney businessman Jack Rooklyn and his associates, he said, had hoped to have had them installed in the Sunshine State much earlier. There was one major hurdle – Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen.

‘… it was taking so long to get Jo[h] Bjelke-Petersen organised with the poker machine thing … in fact in the end it was shelved for a couple of years and they’re being revived now.

‘Jack Rooklyn cracked up on them and said … and these are the words he used on the telephone, I was there – “It’s only a hillbilly State” – anyway and you know the financial return … it wasn’t so great compared with New South Wales that all this hassle and drama sort of continues with the Queensland politicians … proving too much of an extension for Rooklyn.’

In the end, an impatient Rooklyn decided that if he could stop the introduction of the pokies into Queensland he could protect his investment in his in-line machines.

It was an irony that the Premier and the decision on pokies was proving such a sticking point.

‘… they contained Bjelke-Petersen,’ Milligan said, going back into recent history since the removal of Police Commissioner Ray Whitrod in late 1976. ‘In the areas that they wanted, e.g. the Ministry of Police and the Ministry of Justice they had their men organised and there was such a conspiracy in Cabinet so as to keep Jo[h] Bjelke-Petersen under control in relation only to their matters and I’m particularly here referring to the matter with which I was associated with, e.g. the introduction of poker machines into Queensland.’

Milligan alleged to Shobbrook that prior to the Whitrod coup he was instructed by Glen Hallahan to keep his head down and live quietly in his flat in New Farm until the regime transition had been effected. (Milligan did as he was told, and resided at the Glenfalloch apartments, Unit 1B, 172 Oxlade Drive, New Farm.)

‘One of the plans on the drawing board, which I was scheduled for involvement [in] was the introduction of poker machines in Queensland,’ Milligan said. ‘Jack Rooklyn had already handled the negotiations with San Francisco and they had a situation organised through [William] Lickiss [Liberal Attorney-General appointed in 1976] who was working for them, to arrange to introduce poker machines in Queensland subject to certain conditions and so on and so forth.

‘It was a very complicated plot and it was something that didn’t come to fruition because they couldn’t control Jo[h]. He’s just too erratic.’

Another ‘friend’ was the member for Merthyr, Don ‘Shady’ Lane.

‘He’s too tidy and pug,’ said Milligan of Lickiss. ‘I gather, I haven’t anything direct here to prove it but he was going to get a share of the poker machine thing and another one was, um, Lane, the member for Merthyr … ex-policeman … they were very put out when he didn’t get a Ministry last time with Bjelke[-Petersen]. Oh, there’ve been many discussions.’

Shobbrook was incredulous. And Milligan feared for his life.

‘I want to live,’ he implored Shobbrook. ‘I want to get married, I want to have kids; I can’t do this for the rest of my life. I can’t live the rest of my life getting deeper and deeper, and that’s what it’s becoming – has become.’

He implied to Shobbrook that nobody had informed on the ‘Queensland group’ and survived.

Death of the Monster

After receiving his peculiar visitor – Clarence Osborne – at his office at the University of Queensland in 1976, criminologist Paul Wilson became fascinated with the psychopathology of the paedophile despite being disturbed by his physical presence. Wilson had authored many books on a variety of topics, and the Osborne case lured him in. Wilson was astonished at the breadth and range of Osborne’s sexual life. He would later write:

The “boys” he formed relationships with came from diverse backgrounds. While the literature on boys who seek relationships with adult males suggests that they come from working-class homes marked by poverty, violence and general family breakdown, many hundreds, if not a thousand of the boys he had sex with, came from affluent middle-class homes … the rich, prestigious suburbs of semi-tropical Brisbane provided many young men who were, in some cases, to have clandestine affairs with a man who was old enough to be their father and, in some cases, their grandfather.

Unbeknown to the solicitors, doctors and real estate salesmen who lived in the plushness of St. Lucia or Indooroopilly or in the hills of Hamilton, their sons were relating to a small, relatively insignificant man (at least as seen by others) with a degree of intimacy that they never manifested towards their socially and economically important fathers.

Osborne, however, was far from a humble ‘father figure’ to lonely or neglected boys. His life was preying on underage males, so much so that everything in his life outside of his work as a court and then Hansard reporter was fashioned to facilitate his perversions. His house in Eyre Street was just 500 metres from the then main route to the Gold Coast, via Holland Park and Mount Gravatt. Osborne traversed the highway to the coast looking for and successfully picking up hundreds of young male hitchhikers.

Also, he lived a short drive from the Garden City Shopping Centre, opened in 1971 and a magnet for the area’s youths. He would photograph boys in and around the complex, and once recorded his eternal gratitude to mothers who bought their sons ‘tight shorts’.

Then, in late 1979, fate caught up with Clarence Osborne, world-class shorthand writer, bird breeder and child abuser. A Brisbane mother overheard her son discussing being photographed in the nude by an elderly male. The mother ultimately ascertained that someone called Clarrie Osborne had been taking pictures, not just of her son but other boys who had volunteered to pose naked.

Without approaching the police, the concerned mother happened to mention the situation to the wife of a police officer at a social gathering. A sting was then put into play. The officer organised a stake-out of Osborne and witnessed the Hansard reporter photographing boys in bushland near the city.

As Wilson would later record: ‘Police went to Clarence Osborne’s house [in Mount Gravatt], searched it thoroughly and took three car loads of tape-recordings, files and photographs, together with Osborne himself, back to police headquarters.

‘As the police involved were not from the squad which usually deals with such matters – the juvenile aid squad [sic] – they were reluctant to take further action against Osborne until the material had been more thoroughly perused and legal advice on what Osborne could specifically be charged with was obtained.

‘What we do know, however, is that the police were most cooperative with Osborne for reasons that are still unclear. They did, after all, drive him back to his house.’

Extraordinarily, a man found in possession of thousands of photographs of naked children and audio recordings of his sexual encounters with them and who freely discussed with police his predilections and modus operandi during his short interview time with them, was free to go and in fact given a lift home to 54 Eyre Street.

However, former Juvenile Aid Bureau officer Dougal McMillan says the JAB was not informed of the Osborne case on the day he was brought in by CIB officers and questioned. ‘They [the original investigating officers] never came near us,’ McMillan says. ‘I was absolutely stunned when I heard this story. I couldn’t understand why the CIB hadn’t followed it up and they’d let him go.’

Had the case, of its type unprecedented in Queensland criminal history, been brought to the attention of Commissioner Terence Lewis? With Lewis as the spiritual father of the Juvenile Aid Bureau, as appointed by Frank Bischof, and with the voluminous details of Osborne’s activities only just being realised and referred on to the JAB, did word get back to the man at the top?

Not according to his Commissioner’s diaries. On Tuesday 11 September 1979, the day Osborne was questioned at headquarters, Lewis does however coincidentally record, as his last business for the day, prior to knocking off at 6 p.m., a call he made to ‘Dr Paul Wilson re course for prospective Supt’s’.

That night, Osborne, sitting at home in Eyre Street, surrounded by his ‘life’s work’ inside a house rigged with secret microphones and recording equipment, wrote a note explaining he had been questioned by police and that ‘this was the best way’.

He then went into the garage down a driveway on the northern side of the house. He hooked a hose up to his exhaust pipe and into the cabin of his vehicle, started the engine and pressed ‘record’ on the audio equipment he had similarly rigged in the vehicle, and used countless times to record his illicit conversations with boys and the sounds of their sexual trysts.

Osborne, ever the pedant, allegedly recorded his own last words: ‘I’ve been sitting here ten minutes and I’m still alive …’

Osborne’s body was discovered the following day – Wednesday 12 September.