Jacks and Jokers (21 page)

Certain police, too, were beginning to avail themselves of free alcohol kept on many premises in anticipation of their visits, and some free ‘massages’ to boot. Despite Newbery’s pledges, the industry was as true and constant as the red beacon atop the Brisbane City Hall clock tower.

Taking to the Streets

Justice Lucas’s report, following the Inquiry into the Enforcement of Criminal Law in Queensland, compiled with the assistance of legal eagle Des Sturgess and retired Whitrod man, Don Becker, was delivered to the government in April.

At its heart it intuited that the police practice of ‘verballing’ could be removed with the mandatory audio tape or video recording of criminal confessions. It also saw a benefit in turning over staff more regularly within the Licensing Branch to avoid entrenched corruption.

The report was quickly forgotten. Instead, the end of Lewis’s first year as Commissioner was by and large preoccupied with forging a strong relationship with Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen. And it was the street-march legislation that perfectly aided and abetted this.

Around the time drug dealer John Milligan was wading through marshlands on Cape York looking for packages of heroin in September 1977, student marchers took to Brisbane streets over the dissolving of their right to march and the brutality and arrests began. Out of these clashes emerged a group calling itself The Right to March.

With the election set for November, Lewis pitted hundreds of officers against protestors in a protracted civil arm wrestle that extended over months. Hundreds of arrests were made. Civil liberty groups and members of the public complained about the show of police strength. Television footage of the clashes was broadcast across Australia.

As former commissioner Ray Whitrod had predicted on his resignation, Queensland was showing more than just signs of becoming a police state. That status had arrived.

‘They say Joh was against people and no, they couldn’t march,’ says Lewis. ‘But it wasn’t like that. They could march any day of the week after 6 p.m. Any time Saturday after midday and any time Sunday. You’ve got no idea how many people got in touch with us saying their kids [at All Hallows, Terrace and Brisbane Boys and Girls Grammar schools] have to go through the city to get home from school and we don’t want people marching … it would have disrupted tens of thousands of people and many of them young people.’

Lewis had other distractions during the turmoil.

There were matters of politicians calling about speeding tickets issued to them and their children; of having to provide ‘discreet security’ for mining magnate Lang Hancock when he paid a visit to Mount Isa; talking to the Premier about possibly installing a police radio in his official car.

Lewis was in constant touch with Bjelke-Petersen over the street-march problem. ‘Premier phoned re his views on Protest marches.’ ‘Premier phoned re no marches on road.’ ‘To Executive Bldg., and saw Premier re street marches.’

In the midst of all this, on 20 October his diary records that he saw Deputy Commissioner Vern MacDonald about a raid on an illegal gambling club run by a man called ‘Bellino’.

By the end of the year Lewis had time again to catch up with old friends. On Sunday, 18 December at 12.30 p.m., he joined Barry Maxwell and his wife Sheilagh at their Kangaroo Point home for a Christmas function.

He left at 3.45 p.m. and headed over to a three-level block of cream-brick flats at 49 Laidlaw Parade in East Brisbane. There he celebrated with ‘Jack and John [his son] Herbert’s birthday until 5 p.m.’

A Quiet Word

Around this time, the affable Jack Herbert had Geraldo Bellino – local illegal casino entrepreneur, one-time adagio dancer and songwriter (in August 1963 he had officially copyrighted a musical he called
Sharon, Oh Sharon
) – over to his house for a drink.

Bellino had a query. Would it be possible, he asked the former Licensing Branch officer of more than 15 years, to set up an illegal game without breaking the
Gaming and Vagrancy Act
? Was there a loophole that could be exploited?

Herbert claimed he sat down and poured over the Act.

‘He didn’t ask me to do anything illegal but in any case I couldn’t help him,’ Herbert said. ‘Since taking over at the Licensing Branch, Alec Jeppesen had instigated a purge of illegal casinos.

‘He was also coming down hard on SP bookmaking and prostitution. I told Gerry Bellino there would be no protection while Jeppesen was running things.’

It was becoming apparent that Jeppesen was proving an obstacle to lucrative channels of vice. Money should have been falling out of the sky for Herbert.

He made a mental note and wondered – what if we could have Jeppesen removed from the Licensing Branch?

The Premier Phoned

With Lewis in the top job for just 11 months, Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen wasted no time in utilising the police force in whatever way he saw fit to exercise his will. If he needed to call on the boys in blue to silence a growing nuisance and critic of his government, then he had zero compunction in doing it.

Such was the case of Brisbane businessman Mervyn Carey. In late 1977 Carey was a senior executive with BP Australia. The company’s Brisbane offices were a stone’s throw from the police department in Herschel Street, in the city.

The unassuming Carey, married with children, began showing an interest in corporate crime following the collapse of several major Queensland construction companies and credit unions in late 1974 and early 1975, and was elected national president of the Australian Institute of Credit Management.

In late 1976 the
Courier-Mail
ran a profile on Carey, describing him as ‘Queensland’s most ardent fighter against corporate crime for the past two years’. Carey, BP’s credit manager for years, told journalist Mark Williams: ‘I don’t want to be a Ralph Nader [the American political activist], but if I’m getting a Nader image and it will get some of his results with honesty being returned to the corporate area, then I don’t mind.’

Then Carey unwittingly made a big mistake. On Wednesday 12 October 1977, he was a guest speaker at a seminar hosted by the Australian Institute of Management in Brisbane. He gave the keynote address.

Carey had watched with increasing alarm the recent collapse of the Queensland Permanent Building Society (QPBS), and was questioning what had happened to missing society funds. In his speech, he slammed the Bjelke-Petersen government, accusing them of ‘pussy-footing around’ the company collapse. He called for a full inquiry into the matter and requested statements of missing funds from the society.

‘An inquiry would bring out the facts,’ he told more than 140 people at the seminar. ‘There are too many traumas and dramas within the building society industry. The public’s confidence will never be restored until the truth is ascertained.’

Carey went on to directly accuse government ministers of not just falling asleep at the wheel, but deliberately obfuscating the facts behind the fraud. He said: ‘The industry has reached rock bottom and the State Housing Minister [Norm Lee, the MP who encouraged then Inspector Terry Lewis to give Police Minister Max Hodges an earful at the country Cabinet meeting in Cunnamulla in mid-1976] must bear full responsibility.

‘The Deputy Premier [Bill Knox] and Mr Lee have tried to throw a smokescreen around their own failures and inadequacies to handle the situation in a business-like manner. Now $3.8 million is unaccounted for in the latest collapse and Mr Lee still rejects an inquiry.’

Carey directly accused the Bjelke-Petersen government of ignoring major white collar crime. His inflammatory comments were published on page three of the
Courier-Mail
the following morning. The Carey story sat beneath a picture story on Premier Bjelke-Petersen, rehearsing for his election policy speech to be given in City Hall that night. The state election was set for 12 November.

The day the story was published, life became hell for Merv Carey. ‘I got called in by my boss,’ Carey remembers. ‘He said the Premier had just phoned him and told him to sack me. I was raked over the coals.’

Later that day he received a call at his desk from an old friend, Assistant Police Commissioner Don Becker, the trusted and incorruptible former Whitrod confidant. Becker made the call from a phone box. ‘Don told me to shut my mouth and that Lewis had been in touch with the Special Branch and they were investigating me,’ Carey says. ‘He said the boys involved were bad boys, they had a bad record and that people had been killed as a result of the activities of these men.’

Shortly after, Carey received another phone call. This time it was anonymous. ‘He said, “If you open your mouth again, it’ll be for the last time,” ’ says Carey. ‘I felt dead scared. I was frightened, not so much for myself but for my family. That’s the way Joh used to work. I never spoke again after that.’

The anonymous threat bore all the hallmarks, going back decades, of Detective Inspector Tony Murphy, head of the CIB.

‘About that time I was walking down George Street,’ Carey says, ‘and I saw Tony Murphy walking towards me. I knew who he was. He gave me a good looking over.’

The afternoon Carey received his death threat, Bjelke-Petersen’s Cabinet held an emergency meeting into the QPBS collapse. The government resolved that the society would be propped up financially and merge with the State Government Insurance Office (SGIO) and that none of the 140,000 QPBS investors would lose any interest.

The merger immediately showed the public – in the run-up to a state election – that the Bjelke-Petersen government cared about Mum and Dad investors in the community. The missing $3.8 million would, according to the new
Queensland Permanent Building Society Act 1977
, be replaced from the government’s Contingency Fund.

Conversely, the bail-out masked the corporate fraud behind the missing millions. They were never accounted for.

Angels Fear to Tread

There was no stopping the Member for Archerfield, Kevin Hooper, when he got on a roll on the floor of the chamber in Parliament House, and Thursday 6 October 1977 was no exception. It was the last state parliament sitting for the year.

On that day he was prepared to take the Bjelke-Petersen government to task over its financial record, and in particular the building society crisis.

He would describe Treasurer Llew Edwards as ‘a reasonable man – colourless, perhaps, a puppet of the Premier, perhaps’, and Police Minister Tom Newbery as ‘inept’.

But that would come later in his florid address. First, he wanted to put on record some facts about the mysterious disappearance of brothel madam Simone Vogel.

Hooper was in his element. He railed that Minister Newbery and the government had done nothing to control massage parlours in Brisbane, despite an explosive growth in the trade. He further accused the government of ‘turning a blind eye to the ways and means available to any state government that wishes to stamp out this brand of vice. It can be stamped out.’

On prostitution, he slotted in a reference to the Vogel case: ‘It is a type of undesirable underworld activity which, under the Queensland Government’s inept administration, has allowed a prominent massage parlour owner to disappear without a trace after she borrowed $6000.’

Hooper continued belting Minister Newbery: ‘I would have thought that he [Newbery] would tell the House that in the matter of the disappearance of Simone Vogel, where there is a possibility that a life is at stake, I have made every endeavour to assist the police.

‘In view of earlier information I have provided in this House I would have expected him to tell honourable members that, on the day of her disappearance, armed with $6000, Simone Vogel set out for a hotel car park to keep an appointment with the notorious Roland Short. This gentleman’s attributes I have previously described to the House.’

He revealed further details. Vogel was to meet Short in the car park of the legendary Breakfast Creek Hotel, the French Renaissance-influenced pub at 2 Kingsford Smith Drive and within sight of its namesake. Here, in 1824, the founder of Brisbane, John Oxley, and explorer Allan Cunningham, met local Indigenous clans for breakfast. A minor skirmish had occurred when one of the clansmen grabbed Oxley’s hat.

‘Where is Roland Short now? Where is his associate Ron the Maori? Who is running his [Short’s] call-girl and massage parlour operations? Who is collecting the money?’ Hooper queried. ‘It is sad to have to report that the underworld has moved into a state in which, if we are to believe the Premier, angels fear to tread. Perhaps the Minister for Police is afraid to attempt to clean up the criminal elements in this state. When his predecessor [Max Hodges] tried to do this, the Premier moved in and took the portfolio from him. Let government members deny that.’

As his police force was being publicly picked apart by Kev Hooper, Lewis received a peculiar visit in his office. A Susan Antonieff, 20, of Kelvin Grove, saw the Commissioner about whether or not he was actually her father. Lewis noted in his diary: ‘… Has taken every drug and being treated at R.B.H. [Royal Brisbane Hospital].’

Later in the day, Lewis and his wife, Hazel, were then driven to Eagle Farm airport by Greg Early, where they met Minister Newbery and his wife, before they all departed on TAA Flight 458 for Mackay. That night they all settled into their rooms at Gorries Motel on Nebo Road in West Mackay. The Commissioner was doing what he loved best – conducting, with full entourage, a short tour of regional police stations. This time he went along with royalty – a government minister.