Jacks and Jokers

Matthew Condon is an award-winning author of several novels, works of non-fiction, and is the two-time winner of the Steele Rudd Award for short fiction. His novels include
The Motorcycle Café
,
The Pillow Fight
and
The Trout Opera
. His non-fiction titles include
Brisbane
and, as editor,
Fear, Faith and Hope: Remembering the Long Wet Summer of 2010–2011
. His bestselling first volume of the Lewis Trilogy –
Three Crooked Kings
– won the John Oxley Library Award 2013, and was shortlisted for the Queensland Literary Awards Queensland Book of the Year and the Waverley Library NIB Award for non-fiction. He lives in Brisbane.

PRAISE FOR
THREE CROOKED KINGS

‘A fascinating account of the corruption and the power struggles within the Queensland Police.’
W
EEKEND
A
USTRALIAN

‘
Three Crooked Kings
paints a compellingly dark picture.’
S
YDNEY
M
ORNING
H
ERALD

‘Hailed as the most explosive book of 2013
–
a riveting epic and unrelenting tour-de-force which will shock a nation. And it's all true.’
T
HE
C
HRONICLE

For the gang – Katie, Finnigan, Bridie Rose and

little Oliver George – with love

SHE DISCOVERED, SHORTLY AFTER, that the man who had just raped her was a policeman.

To add to the humiliation, when he had finished with her, several of his colleagues emerged from closets and doorways where they had been hiding, watching while their friend degraded her.

He thought it was funny. So did his mates. He produced his identification badge and she tried to read his name. She wanted to memorise it, because she was about to do the unthinkable. She was going to report the incident to the police. She didn’t want this to happen to other working girls.

Her name was Mary Anne Brifman, the eldest daughter of the former prostitute, brothel madam and police whistleblower Shirley Margaret Brifman, who had been found dead of a suspected drug overdose on 4 March 1972.

It was Mary Anne who had discovered the twisted corpse of her mother on that Saturday in the small room of the family flat in Bonney Avenue, in the Brisbane suburb of Clayfield. It was Mary Anne who only a year before her mother’s untimely death was being groomed against her will to take over her mother’s brothels in Sydney, before Shirley was charged with soliciting her own child for the purposes of prostitution. When the charge failed to disappear, even though Shirley had been paying off corrupt police like Glen Patrick Hallahan, Tony Murphy and Fred Krahe for more than a decade, she went on live national television and snitched on the whole rotten lot of them.

Following Shirley’s live-to-air interview the Brifmans had returned to Brisbane to hide, to disappear, to keep safe. Shirley and her husband Sonny had lived in the sub-tropical city from the late 1950s until 1963, when the National Hotel inquiry into police misconduct at the famous city watering hole got started. Shirley had been a star witness at the inquiry. At the time she had denied being a prostitute. She rejected any intimate association with Murphy and Hallahan. And no, she claimed, there was most definitely not a prostitution ring working out of the National. It was a classy joint. And what would she know of it anyway? She wasn’t a working girl.

Having perjured herself, Shirley then moved the family to Sydney. Almost ten years later, after blowing the whistle, she returned to Brisbane. Nine months after that she was dead.

Now Shirley’s daughter, Mary Anne, was in her twenties with two children of her own. She was working as a call-out prostitute for an independent outfit called Quality Escorts. The job on this particular night was slightly unusual. The client had asked to meet Brifman in an auto repair shop north of the Brisbane CBD. She accepted the job, but was unaware she was walking into a sexual ambush.

They didn’t know her real identity, of course. They didn’t know she was a Brifman. If they did, and word got back to headquarters, alarm would have spread through the building. It might have been several years earlier, but the stench of the Brifman ‘suicide’ still haunted the corridors of the Queensland Police Force. The tall, gangly officer Shirley knew from the Consorting Squad when she worked in the Killarney brothel over in South Brisbane, Terry Lewis, would rise to become Commissioner. And her friend and lover, Tony Murphy, would stand as the most powerful detective in the force.

In an eerie replica of another time, another Brifman was being used and abused by police. Mary Anne lodged an official complaint against the officer who had raped her and later gave a formal, detailed statement. She too, in a small way, was standing up to those who had disrespected her, just as her mother had done.

For a week internal police investigators visited her home to counsel and placate her. It was clear that while they appeared genuinely concerned for her wellbeing, they also didn’t want the press to get wind of the incident. The constable who raped you, they told Mary Anne, was engaged to be married and had since lost his fiancé because of his actions. He would be exiled to a police station in a remote part of the state.

Mary Anne Brifman didn’t proceed with charges. She didn’t want the world to know she was the daughter of the deceased Shirley Brifman. She didn’t want to live with the shame, so she stepped back into the shadows. From that moment on, for as long as she worked as an escort in Brisbane, she never heard from or came to the attention of the police again. They didn’t dare go near her, the daughter of the ghost of Bonney Avenue.

The Year of the Dragon

By mid-1976 Inspector Terence (Terry) Murray Lewis of Charleville, a dusty town in western Queensland, should already have known that he was in for a stellar year. To begin with, it was a leap year, and he finally got to celebrate his birthday – 29 February – on the actual date. Also, he was born under the Chinese astrological sign of the Dragon, and 1976 was coincidentally the Year of the Dragon. Lewis would be turning 48.

He may not have been familiar with the characteristics of the revered Dragon in Chinese astrology: inflated self-assurance, tyrannical with a stern demeanour, impressed by prestige and rank, devoted to work and lucky with money-making schemes – the Dragon was renowned for leaving a trail of wealth.

By winter Lewis had already had a frank and lengthy discussion with Queensland premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen on the airstrip at Cunnamulla following a country cabinet meeting of the ruling National Party, and he would soon be making a flurry of political contacts. He also wasted not a single opportunity – like his friend Anthony (Tony) Murphy up in Longreach – to disparage the administration of Police Commissioner Raymond (Ray) Wells Whitrod.

The day after Bjelke-Petersen flew back to the big smoke of Brisbane, Lewis returned to his desk in downtown Charleville, in the wooden police station beside the stone bank in the main street. It was a timely visit by the premier. Lewis had had enough of being stuck in western Queensland, and had actually applied for a vacancy in the Commonwealth Police. The Dragon could be stubborn and impetuous at times, and did not like taking orders – they could express flexibility and be amenable to life around them; but only to a point.

‘It crossed my mind to leave – that’s when I applied for a job in the Commonwealth [Police],’ Lewis recalls. ‘I made an application … I think there were two vacancies, one for an Assistant Commissioner somewhere, and a Superintendent. They flew me to Sydney.’

Lewis was picked up at the airport by New South Wales police officer Dick Lendrum who had married Yvonne Weier – one of Lewis’s favourites from his days in the Juvenile Aid Bureau (JAB) in Brisbane in the 1960s.

After his interview (he would later find out that he didn’t get the job), Lendrum arranged for Lewis to meet the New South Wales Police Commissioner Fred ‘Slippery’ Hanson, a foundation member of the legendary ‘21 Division’ unit, formed to smash post-war hoodlum gangs. Hanson had become Commissioner in 1972, succeeding the corrupt Norm Allan.

Hanson had made his views on policing very clear not long after he took the top job. ‘Every cop should have a good thumping early in his career to make him tolerant,’ he told the press. ‘A good thumping teaches a young policeman how to get along with people. It’s no use getting police recruits from university, the ones who have never knocked around the lower levels.’

It was rumoured Hanson had been corrupt New South Wales Premier Robert Askin’s organiser of paybacks from illegal casinos, as had Allan.

‘[Dick] took me and introduced me to Fred Hanson, whom I’d never met,’ Lewis says. ‘He’s the one who said [of Whitrod], “Oh yeah, how’s that fat little bastard up there who should be charged with assuming the designation of a police officer?’’’

Meanwhile, retired detective and former Rat Packer Glendon (Glen) Patrick Hallahan was trying to make a fist of the farming life. He had left Brisbane under a cloud following his abrupt resignation from the force in 1972, although for a while continued to live at Kangaroo Point before shifting to acreage in the Sunshine Coast hinterland.

He and the land would be an awkward fit. The big, powerful Hallahan, plagued with bouts of ill-health since the late 1950s, was a city creature, a habitué of bars, wine saloons and restaurants – he relished the bright lights of Sydney. Well into his thirties, he continued to enjoy the nightlife.

In the aftermath of his departure from the force, his good friend – newspaper reporter from the 1950s and now editor of the
Sunday Sun
newspaper Ron Richards – offered Hallahan an alternative career.

Hallahan, one-time crack detective, receiver of graft from prostitutes, accomplice to criminals in both Brisbane and Sydney and associate to drug dealer John Edward Milligan, would try his hand as a specialist writer and break exclusive stories about crime and corruption. Richards believed that Hallahan could utilise his extensive police (and criminal) contacts, both state and federal, and drum up some rollicking Sunday crime reads.

Despite the fact that the office of the
Sun
was located in very familiar territory to Hallahan – the heart of Fortitude Valley – life as a reporter didn’t work out. ‘He produced a story using Federal Police intelligence about the arrival of the phenomenon of the car bomb in Australia,’ recalls Des Houghton, then a young journalist on the
Sunday Sun
, based in Brunswick Street. ‘It caused a bit of a drama and there were questions asked about where he got his intelligence from.

‘Hallahan was aloof. He was a hit with the women in the office. Most of the time he asked for help in how to fill out his expenses.’

After the car bomb scoop, Hallahan virtually disappeared, resuming residence with his wife, Heather, in Obi Obi on the north coast, growing fruit and vegetables and toying with the idea of selling farm machinery. Despite the distance between them he was not lost to his old mate Tony Murphy. The two men remained in regular contact.

During this time in the state’s capital, the classified advertisements in the
Courier-Mail
newspaper were featuring – in the Beauty and Health section – a relatively new phenomenon to the Brisbane scene – the massage parlour.

In the preceding few years parlours such as the Brisbane Health Studio, The Oriental Bathhouse, The Coronet and others, actually dispensed what they advertised – qualified massages. Each was equipped with bona fide massage tables.

The first Brisbane ‘health studio’ to be prosecuted as a premises used for prostitution was the Carla-Deidre Health Studio in Enogerra in June 1970. A man called Bernard John Pack was prosecuted. The case against Pack established that ‘relief massages’ given to men fell under the prostitution umbrella.