Jacks and Jokers (15 page)

If Lewis had found a father figure in former commissioner Frank Bischof during the 1950s and 1960s, he had another in the former Kingaroy peanut farmer.

Crossing the King

As escort services began cropping up throughout the city, the Vice Squad employed some creative tactics to nab girls and their pimps. One was to take a hotel room and order in a lady. Once she arrived the negotiation for sex would be made, the money paid, and the cash taken by her to her pimp waiting in a vehicle on the street. She would then return to acquit the contract and the police could make an arrest.

One evening, Detective Dennis Koch of the Vice Squad was employing that precise tactic in the city. He and another officer booked a hotel room and phoned an escort service for a girl. Koch’s partner, the ‘John’ or client, waited for the prostitute on this particular night while Koch hid in the closet.

‘She came in and we busted her,’ recalls Koch. ‘We went out to grab the pimp but by the time we got there he was gone.’

A short time later they tracked him down. It turned out it was ‘Graham’, the husband of Mary Anne Brifman, who had established her own prostitution service – Quality Escorts – following the suspect death of her mother, prostitute and madam Shirley Brifman, in 1972.

Graham seemed unconcerned when he was questioned by Koch and the other officer. ‘You can’t touch me,’ he said confidently. ‘Murphy will look after me.’

‘Who?’ the detective asked.

‘Tony Murphy.’

‘You mean Superintendent Murphy?’

‘Yeah,’ Graham said.

‘Why would he look after an arsehole like you?’ asked the detective.

‘I’ve got letters from Shirley Brifman,’ he said. ‘She was my mother-in-law.’

He told the stunned officers he could prove through letters – supposedly authored by Murphy – that Brifman had been ‘scared’ of Murphy prior to her death, and that ‘Murphy was out to kill her’. Brifman, on her death in March 1972, was just weeks away from appearing in court as chief witness against Tony Murphy, who had been charged with perjury following allegations Brifman had made on
This Day Tonight
the year before.

Koch, acting by the book, felt compelled to contact Murphy and let him know about Graham’s allegations. He had had some minor disagreements with Murphy over past investigations and wanted to keep the peace with his boss.

‘This guy says he has all these Brifman letters,’ Koch told Murphy. ‘I’m just letting you know.’

Murphy had an immediate solution. He sent over to young Koch a sawn-off .22 rifle with instructions that Graham be loaded up and charged with possession of a concealable firearm. It was an age-old Murphy method – the planting of a ‘present’ on defendants the police believed were good for the charge but may legally slip the net. Graham was also charged with living off the earnings of prostitution.

When the case got to court, Koch was stunned to see that Graham was represented by one of the state’s finest lawyers. ‘I was surprised to see [the lawyer] in the court,’ Koch says. ‘I was accused of trying to frame Murphy with the planting of the gun. They accused me of the plant.’

It was alleged in court that the suspect gun supposedly belonging to Graham was on the books of the Queensland Police Force. Koch felt he was being framed. The case against Graham was thrown out.

‘My name was mud,’ says Koch, who had a reputation as a straight-shooter. ‘Murphy was great at getting things on fellows and keeping them in reserve. [The defendant] walked out of there. I’m surprised Murphy didn’t have him bumped off. I was told that the attack on me was to get me out of the way.

‘Shortly after that I was shuffling papers over at the Fraud Squad.’ Not long after, Koch was transferred to western Queensland.

Koch remains in awe at the power and sway of Tony Murphy during his prime. ‘Murphy was the head honcho,’ Koch recalls. ‘He had his fingers in everything. Lewis was at his beck and call – a puppet. Murphy wouldn’t dirty his hands. He was too smart for any of those other fellows. All of his instructions, they were all verbal. Nothing was in writing – he was intimidating. He was like a “Godfather”.’

The Premature Death of Bob Walker

On the morning of 18 April 1977, Mrs Elaine Walker, having seen her two sons and daughter off to school earlier in the day, made her way up the hill to the wooden house on the 33-acre property she shared with her husband, Bob Walker, at Upper Brookfield, west of the Brisbane CBD.

The bushy property at 435 Upper Brookfield Road – with less than two acres cleared for the house and gardens – had been in the Walker family since the 1920s. Recently, however, Elaine had been living with the children in a caravan some distance from the house. Bob had been drinking heavily – mainly beer – and was violent when he was drunk. She was loyal to her troubled husband, but things had become untenable.

That day, Elaine entered the house and found her husband dead in bed. A post-mortem revealed he had suffered an enlarged heart and the ravages of alcoholism. Robert Thomas Walker was just 48.

Walker had been born in Brisbane and attended Brisbane State High. His father Thomas was a policeman, and while Bob flirted with the idea of settling in Melbourne and training to be a professional dancer, he remained in Brisbane and also entered the force in 1950, just one year after a young Terry Lewis.

In the late 1950s he was working in the Special Branch and made the acquaintance of a teenage Greg Early. ‘I always got on well with him but he was a bit different,’ Early recalls. ‘From recollection he had a rough crew cut. He lived at Upper Brookfield on, I think, acreage. He ran a Morris sedan into the ground and left it there and then bought from me an Austin A40 for $100.’

Walker had a stable career and after a transfer to Townsville with the Special Branch in the early 1960s he had settled back in Brisbane by 1964 – the epitome of a happy family man – enjoying holidays at the beach with Elaine and the children, Tony, Fiona and later young Robert.

In the early 1970s – upon the arrival of Commissioner Ray Whitrod – Walker entered the Licensing Branch. There he came into contact with Jack Herbert and Tony Murphy. An early supporter of Whitrod’s reform, Walker was excited by the new boss’s commitment to further education. He began studying a part-time course at the University of Queensland.

At work, Walker quickly became aware of the incessant undermining of Whitrod. He learned that when Whitrod took the top job certain police had conducted a thorough search of his background looking for any skerrick of dirt they could use against him. They found nothing.

If they’d gone all the way back to Whitrod’s childhood in Adelaide they would have sourced the man’s dedication to honesty and truth. As a boy, Whitrod had once hopped the fence at a local Australian Rules game without paying admission. Later, wracked with guilt, he had returned to the grounds and paid up. He vowed from that moment to lead a clean life.

As for Walker, he was acutely aware of the reputation of the Rat Pack – Lewis, Murphy and Hallahan – and their pursuit to unseat the Commissioner. Near the end of the notorious Springboks tour, the Queensland Police Union held a meeting at Festival Hall in Albert Street, the city, on the night of Thursday 29 July. More than 400 police, including Walker and Whitrod supporter Basil Hicks, attended. The meeting was closed to the press.

Almost immediately, a ‘no confidence’ motion in Whitrod and his handling of the Springboks state of emergency was put to the floor. The union, led by Ron Edington at the time, later declared that the motion had been carried by at least six to four in favour. It also claimed this was followed by a unanimous vote of confidence in Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen. (The Premier, days earlier, had promised extra recreation leave for any officers involved in the Springboks fracas.)

At the meeting, which in itself threatened to become riotous, Walker tried to speak against the motion of no confidence in Whitrod. He was told that enough speakers had already been heard.

Lewis remembers: ‘They had a mass meeting down at the bloody Festival Hall … of no confidence in him [Whitrod]. I think it was Bob Walker was probably the only fellow that walked over the other side and wouldn’t support it … he was quite odd.’

Outside the hall at the end of the meeting, an indignant Detective Sergeant Walker spoke to a reporter from the
Courier-Mail.
He claimed that when the vote was taken a large number of police remained in their seats and ‘no attempt was made’ to check their attitude to the vote. Walker’s opinions were quoted in the newspaper the following morning.

A week later, a still-simmering Walker attended a meeting of the University of Queensland Strike Committee over the Springboks issue and violence against students and civilians. More than 300 people were in attendance, including the press. Walker took to the stage and detailed that the previous week’s Police Union meeting had been held in a ‘state of anarchy’, and that any officers opposing the motion against Whitrod had been shouted down by an angry mob.

‘To this day, no one really knows whether the motion was carried or not,’ Walker told the meeting. He said the real issue at hand was conflict between a ‘larrikin’ element in the force and the office of the Commissioner. ‘And we cannot have our public image ruined by larrikinism.’

Walker dared to say in public that the force had never been properly trained, which was why Whitrod had been brought in. He added there was no doubt police brutality had been used during the Springboks riots, and questioned its justification. More dangerously, he said the ‘doors in the corridors of power’ within the police force had been closed to ‘a certain clique of policemen’ since Whitrod’s arrival. It was an oblique, but powerful, reference to the Rat Pack.

Union president, Detective Sergeant Edington, immediately hit back. ‘The union feels this matter has been completely resolved and it is distressing to think that Mr Walker is attempting to continue a slanging match for his personal satisfaction to the detriment of the good name of the Queensland Police Force.’

From that moment, Walker was a marked man.

Edington clearly remembers the issue: ‘There was a fellow named Bob Walker, he used to be in the Special Squad [Branch] going around looking for Communists and things like that, and Bob was a bit eccentric. But Bob went out to the university and he addressed a team of bloody university students and he told them that the police were corrupt and that the police used to bash people to get confessions out of them. And anyway, somehow or other Whitrod got onto it and … he took advantage of it to … nominate them [Lewis, Hallahan and Murphy] as being corrupt and he called them the Rat Pack.’

Murphy was apoplectic. He demanded Walker be expelled from the union.

At this time son Robert Walker, who was only six years old when his dad took his dangerous stand, had fond recollections of his father leading up to mid-1971. ‘I have really good childhood memories,’ he says. ‘He would take me into the surf when we went to the beach. I remember catching my first wave. I remember a good man. Then it turned bad. It all just imploded.’

Robert says his father would often mention the members of the Rat Pack in derogatory terms. He would talk about corruption in the force. ‘He was by the end a chronic alcoholic,’ says Robert. ‘That’s the legacy of his time in the police force. Our family life was terrible. What he did to our mother was reprehensible; unforgivable. She held us together.’

Greg Early recalls that time: ‘I never heard of him using the term [the Rat Pack] and linking it to those three [Lewis, Murphy and Hallahan], but that was the buzz at the time.’

During Walker’s decline, his son Robert remembers one particular day. ‘He was taken to Wolston Park [mental health facility] at one point,’ he says. ‘Police officers came to the family property to take him. My sister and I hid in the shed and watched. It was a scary thing for me.’

Union boss Edington, who was legendary in the force for his lack of fear in standing up to senior officers – particularly his memorable stoush with Frank Bischof – or championing something he believed in contrary to popular opinion, felt pity for Walker and his predicament. He explained to Walker that his resignation from the Police Union precluded him from any future pay rises.

‘Bob,’ Edington told him, ‘now you’re not entitled to any increase because the government maintains that you had to be a member of a union. Now, any increase given by the Industrial Court, to the union, you’re not going to get it. They won’t pay you.’

Edington said, as a result Walker lost a lot of money over the years and in a gesture to the ailing police officer he moved that he be reinstated as a union member. ‘So he came back and he got reinstated but then he … something happened, he got crook,’ Edington recalls.

Walker retired medically unfit from the force in 1974 and drove taxis in Brisbane for a couple of years. At one point he received in the post a greeting card from Commissioner Ray Whitrod.

On the day of his death, Robert and his siblings – who were attending class at Upper Brookfield State School – began hearing rumours that something was wrong at home. They found their mother waiting for them with the sad news at the front gate of the property.

Years later their father would be disparagingly referred to as ‘Crazy’ Bob Walker, and wrongly tagged as the author of the phrase ‘the Rat Pack.’ (The term had been booted around the force since the 1960s.)