Jacks and Jokers (19 page)

‘A bill had been discussed on a Tuesday, read on Wednesday, and made law on Thursday. People ask me how, as a member of the government, I let this legislation pass. I wasn’t a member of the government. In Queensland the Cabinet is the government.’

Liberal MP Brian Lindsay said of the bill: ‘The lunatic fringe now seek to dominate society and society rightly expects us, the democratically elected representatives, to do something about it.’

Don Lane linked street marches to an international socialist plot to prevent the Western world developing its uranium capacities.

Local writer Bruce Dawe penned a poem – ‘News From Judea’ – in response to the government’s latest infringement on civil liberties.

And went out to meet them about six hundred

Officers of the law who had been told

By Herod himself There will be no more

Political marches. Clear the streets

of all whose ideas are not those

of the governing party. And they did

just that and the keepers of the public

purse

looked down on the streets packed with

chariots

and said It is good. Now there is law and

order

in the land.

And many more were brought before the

Courts than heretofore

And Herod said again There will be peace

In all my land …

And the land became exceedingly quiet;

But this was not peace.

Meanwhile up in Bundaberg, 365 kilometres north of Brisbane, Dr Harry Akers, a likeable and popular dentist in his late twenties, read of the ban on street marches in the local newspaper with incredulity.

Akers had graduated with a Bachelor of Dental Science from the University of Queensland in 1971. A few years earlier, aged 18, he had marched on the streets of Brisbane as a conscientious objector to conscription for the war in Vietnam, but considered himself without political allegiance.

After moving to Bundaberg and establishing a dental practice with a partner after his graduation, he had settled nicely into the sugar town. While still not considered a ‘local’ despite having been there for almost seven years, he had a superb reputation as a dentist.

By the spring of 1977 Akers was married with a young family, and they lived, with their pet cattle dog Jaffa, not far from Bundaberg’s pre-eminent geographical landmark – The Hummock – a dormant volcano at 96 metres above sea level between the township of Bundaberg and the neighbouring beaches of Bargara. Before public access was available in 1931, it had remained marooned in fields of sugar cane. The local Indigenous Taribelang people always referred to it as ‘Burning Mountain’.

Akers believed the forthcoming ban on street marches was unconscionable. He might have been domiciled in a small country town on the coast and a long way from the Big Smoke, but he was going to take a stand that people would remember for a long time.

Into Thin Air

Simone Vogel, aka Norma June Beniston, moved to Queensland from Sydney in 1970 with her husband Raymond Eugene Baptiste after a successful career as a prostitute and brothel madam.

Vogel, born in 1935, worked the streets of Kings Cross in her early twenties before hooking up with vice king Joe Borg, who owned and ran numerous brothels in East Sydney. Borg’s de facto, before her death of a suspicious drug overdose, was Ada, former wife to Brisbane gunman Gunther Bahnemann who had been famously disarmed by Lewis and Hallahan in the late 1950s – an action that delivered both young men the force’s highest honour, the George Medal for Bravery.

Borg himself was killed by a car bomb in North Bondi in May 1968. By then, Vogel was an astute business partner to Borg, and on his death she and Baptiste briefly set up a ‘massage parlour’ in Newport, Sydney, before settling in Queensland.

Whether she felt it too dangerous to branch out on her own in Sydney after Borg’s murder, or wanted to start business afresh in a new town, nobody knows. But the diminutive Vogel – 160 centimetres tall and, like Shirley Brifman, fond of wearing wigs – flourished in Brisbane and on the Gold Coast.

Her innovation was the ‘massage parlour’ – a brothel disguised as a health studio. She quickly established the Costa Brava in South Brisbane. This was followed by Golden Hands at Moorooka, The Executive Suite at Stones Corner, Napoleon’s Retreat at Lutwyche, Saunette in Adelaide Street, Beau Brummel at Zillmere and Kontiki at Kedron. (She had purchased the salubrious Kontiki off prostitute and parlour owner Katherine James in early 1976 for $125,000. James was having difficulty with a heroin addiction, but she stayed on for a short time after the sale to help Vogel run the health studio.)

By the mid-1970s Vogel’s net profit from her businesses exceeded $4000 per week. Around this time Vogel was interviewed on several occasions by Licensing Branch officer Kingsley Fancourt. She was anxious about her businesses, and he was starting to get some information out of her.

‘I got her in the office there at one stage,’ Fancourt recalls. ‘She was a very, very attractive woman. A $2000 a night job.

‘She was a well-spoken woman. She conducted herself in a very stately manner. I’d actually got two statements out of her.’

During their last talk, Arthur Pitts stuck his head into the interview room and asked to see Fancourt. Don Becker had telephoned and asked that Vogel be locked up. Fancourt protested – she knew all about police corruption and he had promised her she wasn’t going inside.

‘Pittsy and I had an outrageous blue over that,’ Fancourt says. ‘I was starting to … get information. That’s what we were supposed to do. I had to go back on my word. It was well known she was going to start name dropping and all the rest of it.’

A couple of years after this incident, in 1977, Vogel was living in a well-appointed canal-front home at 13 Alma Street, Coral Gables, Broadbeach Waters, with her new husband Steven Pavich, a plasterer and builder.

On the morning of Friday 16 September, she drove her white Mercedes SLC convertible to Brisbane, firstly stopping at a Mercedes dealership in Fortitude Valley to arrange for a broken tail-light to be repaired, before heading to The Executive Suite at Stones Corner, just south of the Brisbane CBD. She arrived there about noon.

At 12.15 p.m. she received a phone call from her only son, Mark Baptiste, who was then living in Sydney. Immediately after that she got another telephone call. Vogel’s assistant, Marcia Barnard, heard her boss say to the caller: ‘You name the place and I’ll meet you there.’ She soon left the parlour and didn’t discuss her movements with Barnard.

Vogel was back in the office at 3.30 p.m. and received another call. She responded: ‘I’ll meet you in the same parking spot that I met you at before, about half past six.’ She asked Barnard for a loan of $3000 from the business account. A cheque was written and cashed by Vogel at a nearby bank.

The brothel owner then drove over to Kontiki at Kedron and borrowed a further $3000, drawn in cash earlier in the day at Vogel’s behest from the parlour’s account. She left Kontiki at 6.15 p.m.

Pavich expected his wife at home on the Gold Coast at her usual time – 6 p.m. When she didn’t arrive he phoned Barnard, who told him what had transpired that afternoon. Pavich then phoned all the other parlours without any luck. At 9 p.m. he called the Surfers Paradise police with his concerns.

They knew Pavich as an associate of criminals and did not give his report a high priority. No official police enquiries into Vogel’s whereabouts were made that night. The following day, Pavich called a friend, former Gold Coast detective Greg Bignall, and asked him to make some enquiries.

On Sunday 18 September, Bignall found Vogel’s unlocked car at Brisbane Airport. She had vanished into thin air.

Simone Vogel’s disappearance soon became a murder investigation. Two detectives from the Homocide Squad were assigned to the case and they began by interviewing Pavich and employees of Vogel’s brothels.

One of the detectives, Keith Smith, recalls: ‘Our early investigations naturally included an interview with Pavich. This interview took place at the home at Coral Gables on a Gold Coast canal. Theirs was a luxurious house, probably at that time worth at least $750,000.

‘We found out very early in the piece that Pavich was an extremely heavy spirits drinker. He was drunk when we first spoke with him and despite his condition he did show emotion which on the surface seemed genuine and reflected concern for his missing wife.

‘The interview was not satisfactory and we decided to revisit him very early the next day hoping to find him sober. Our early interviews with Pavich disclosed nothing that was inconsistent with the conduct of a husband whose wife had gone missing. He had enquired around all of their immediate friends and acquaintances. He had also contacted a private investigator who he knew on the Gold Coast to make enquiries in Brisbane at the health studios to see what he could find out.

‘Of course Pavich was well aware of the nature of Simone’s business affairs and no doubt had benefitted financially from her business.’

Smith also managed to interview Vogel’s full-time Filipino housekeeper, Lina. ‘She came across as an honest hard-working woman who had grown attached to Simone and like others she was very worried about her,’ the detective remembers. ‘We asked her to discreetly observe Pavich’s conduct while she was in the house with him. She did tell us that since Simone had failed to come home, from what she had seen, Pavich had been genuinely worried about Simone and had been drinking heavily and phoning a lot of people asking about Simone.’

The detectives, during the course of the investigation, found power of attorney documents signed by Vogel. They gave Steve Pavich power of attorney. The signatures proved to be forged, which Pavich later admitted to. He was subsequently charged.

Vogel’s assistant, Marcia Barnard, told them that she was regularly visited by members of the Licensing Branch – in fact, she knew most of them by their first names. Vogel was paying large sums of protection money to the Licensing Branch, which reported directly to Commissioner Terry Lewis. (At this stage the Licensing Branch was still headed by Jeppesen, although he was not in on The Joke.)

The Licensing squad had an additional advantage when it came to corruption in the mid- to late 1970s. Its members had carte blanche on policing massage parlours and brothels. The Consorting Squad, against traditional practice, was excluded.

As for Vogel, her husband, Pavich, seemed genuinely puzzled and distressed at her disappearance, and friends and associates were incredulous. There was no way she would deliberately run out on her family, given her beloved son, Mark’s,
twenty-first birthday was just a few weeks away. She had discussed the milestone event with him many times, and a big party was planned. Besides, detectives found no evidence that she had flown out of Brisbane, despite her car being found at the airport.

So what happened to the petite madam who famously had a passionate dislike of drugs and banned any drug use in her health studios? And why had she hastily got together $6000 in cash on that Friday?

As the two homicide detectives patiently and expertly exhausted any leads, they came to an extraordinary theory. Had Vogel, who had intimate knowledge of The Joke, finally decided to leave the parlour trade behind and, using her business acumen, legitimately start afresh?

If so, was the $6000 cash a final corrupt payment to the Licensing Branch, or the price of getting out of The Joke?

With her intricate knowledge of the corrupt police network, though, what if Simone Vogel, at some point, decided to blow the whistle, as Fancourt had believed she would do a few years earlier? An unchecked brothel operator like Vogel could be extremely dangerous to high-ranking police.

If this theory was in any way close to the truth, it naturally followed that police might have been involved in the disappearance.

‘Simone, over many years, had become a central part of this corrupt system even if as a willing participant in what was described as victimless crime,’ Keith Smith says. ‘She had become quite friendly with the senior officers of the Licensing Branch. Her knowledge of what was later to become known as The Joke was vast and if she ever decided to blow the whistle for whatever reason, she could bring down the whole Licensing Branch with serious repercussions through to the very top police officers in the state.’

It was a notion investigating officers couldn’t shake. Who better to make someone vanish than corrupt and experienced police officers?

Smith recalls: ‘In what I believed to be a confidential conversation, I expressed my concerns of possible police involvement to my immediate superior officer … he gave me a good hearing but I could tell that he was somewhat disturbed by what I had related to him and virtually told me that I was on the wrong track and that I should forget about any such conspiracy theories.