Jacks and Jokers (22 page)

Hooper’s attacks were, as usual, disregarded.

Permission to Speak to the Media, Please

Senior Constable Bob Campbell, still being harassed by other officers at the Fortitude Valley station and studying for his degree at the University of Queensland, had decided to get out of the police force.

With a wife and two young sons, he saw a better future for himself free from the mire of corruption that he’d found himself in, and tried a number of ways to extricate himself from his job. On 19 October 1977, he informed the department that it was vital he complete his degree and additional doctorate ‘so that I may terminate my employment’.

Two days later he wrote to Police Minister Tom Newbery underlining his intentions and seeking permission to talk to the media about crime and corruption in the police force. If it was a tactical move to poke a stick at the hierarchy, it worked, but perhaps not in the way he intended. Campbell may have thought they would eject him immediately. Instead, the prickly and outspoken Campbell was in for an all-too-familiar form of workplace misery.

Newbery replied to Campbell: ‘You will no doubt appreciate that I have no direct jurisdiction over you as a member of the Police Force. Therefore, it is not possible for me to grant you permission to communicate with the media.

‘The Police Rules provide for members of the Police Force to air grievances through their District Officer or Commissioner. The Rules also place certain obligations on members who have knowledge of misconduct on the part of other members.’

The Minister concluded that if Campbell remained dissatisfied with his working conditions having ‘explored the Departmental avenues open to you’, he could write to the Police Minister once again.

Two days later Campbell tried another tack. He authored yet another report, this time alerting his superiors that he had injured his ankle earlier in the month on campus at the University of Queensland. In a desperate plea, he wrote: ‘In view of this, I have requested that I be placed before the Medical Examination Board as I feel that I should be discharged on the Police pension. My work in the Police Force has been criticised in recent times and this injury will by no means improve my work. I do not appear to fit in well with the Police Force and it may be practical for the Department to discharge me …’

Campbell’s action to go before the medical board was refused. Instead, a timeworn trapdoor for recalcitrant officers, for those who didn’t toe the line or keep their mouths shut, opened up under the young Fortitude Valley officer. He was transferred to Police Stores, home to the banished, the drunk and the indolent.

The department said it was to assist in Bob Campbell’s health and in the progress of his studies.

Three Corners

By 1977, a year in which parliament sat for just 38 days, Bjelke-Petersen was sitting high in the saddle, particularly with a strong police force at his beck and call to deal with the socialist radicals that wanted to bring the city to a standstill with their protests. He was tiring, too, of his Liberal coalition partners.

So for the state election of 12 November 1977, a vindictive Bjelke-Petersen decided to make it hard for them as well as the ALP. In a childish pique, his all-powerful National Party changed the rules of the game and challenged their Liberal colleagues in seats that had had their names changed following the redistribution. If the seat held the same name as it did prior to redistribution, no challenge was offered. The redistribution effectively vanished three Liberal-held seats.

In addition, the Nationals contested for the first time seats on the outer edge of the Brisbane metropolis. Three-cornered contests abounded. The ALP wrested back some of its heartland voters following the 1974 election fiasco, but still lost on preferences, as was to be expected. For the first time the National Party out-polled the Liberals by 27 per cent. It was the first shot in a long war.

Liberal Colin Lamont’s seat had been redistributed before the election and he lost. ‘I remember when I ran for re-election in 1977, [the former Police Commissioner Ray] Whitrod sent me a card with Snoopy on it,’ Lamont recalled in an interview years later. ‘He [Snoopy] had a tennis racket in his hand, and it had a $10 tag on it. And he’d written, “Snoopy’s boss is well named Peanuts if he thinks you can get a racket in Queensland for $10”.’

He said Bjelke-Petersen never understood political principles. ‘He was a very simple man,’ said Lamont. ‘He slept with a bloody goat in his farm before he met Florence. A very simple man. He didn’t understand the underlying principles of government. He didn’t understand the Westminster system. He didn’t understand anything about political philosophy.

‘And his view was – we are the government, the National Party is we, and I am the National Party, so I’m it. You know, I’ve got this job by dint of the will of the people, and you know, I can do what I like.

‘The suggestion that there were any constraints … I mean, you know, I don’t mean go out and commit a crime, but I mean, the suggestion that there were any constraints within, you know, normal bounds of power, just didn’t occur to him.’

What Wilby Saw

Everyone in the Licensing Branch was aware of the rumours of corruption, the so-called Rat Pack, and the involvement of former branch member Jack Herbert. They heard that huge sums of money were being passed over in corrupt payments. And intelligence was coming in that this wasn’t just a local operation, but a vast network that covered most of Queensland. In short, it was supremely organised.

Whenever Bruce Wilby and his fellow officers tried to execute raids on massage parlours and SP betting joints on the Gold Coast, for example, they’d arrive to barred doors and empty houses – Superintendent Syd Atkinson was in charge of the Gold Coast district.

‘A memorandum came through from Commissioner Lewis – if you do anything on the Gold Coast you had to let Atkinson know first,’ says Wilby.

‘[So] when you got down there, everything was shut up. There was nothing going on. We’d find out what was operating and get our warrants. All hell would break loose on Monday morning, with Atkinson screaming at the end of the phone.’

So if Lewis, Murphy, Atkinson, Hayes and others were supposedly benefitting from the largesse of illegal bookmakers through Jack Herbert, where was the money? How was it transacted?

Wilby decided to find out for himself. Acting on a tip-off from an extremely reliable informant, he went undercover and scoped the Belfast Hotel in Queen Street – owned and run by Murphy and Lewis’s good friend Barry Maxwell.

Here was Murphy’s favourite watering hole. Here Lewis had come on his arrival back in Brisbane following his promotion to Commissioner to show off his epaulettes and see his dear friend Maxwell after a brief exile in Charleville. Here Maxwell gathered a roll of cash for his mate Jack Herbert who did it tough during the Southport Betting Case and drove it, and a case of meat and vegetables, to the Herbert flat in East Brisbane.

If these men were to meet anywhere and supposedly divide ill-gotten gains, it would be in a place where all of them felt comfortable, indeed, felt at home.

Wilby was told to turn up at a certain time on a Thursday.

‘I saw it,’ says Wilby. ‘I wanted to see it for myself. Every Thursday, it was Murphy’s table where they used to go and sit. Towards the back. It wasn’t well lit.

‘Every Thursday. Always Murphy. Atkinson now and then. Definitely Lewis. Herbert was always there of course. That’s where they split the money.’

Innocent

In a stifling Boggo Road prison on Saturday 26 November 1977, convicted murderer John Andrew Stuart of the Whiskey Au Go Go bombing fame along with James Finch, had been granted a pass to the reception store of the gaol. He had complained that some of his property had gone missing, and gained the pass. It was around 8.20 a.m. Stuart was not under escort.

On the way back to his section of the prison he climbed a partly demolished brick wall onto an awning, then scaled a downpipe to the roof of A-wing, empty and set to be demolished. Once on the roof, Stuart separated the bars that held entanglements of barbed wire and proceeded to pierce holes in every sheet of corrugated roof iron. He removed some of the sheets and then dislodged dozens of bricks. Stuart had a message he wanted to pass on to the world.

The Comptroller-General of Prisons, Allen Whitney, when he discovered Stuart’s protest, told the press: ‘He can stop there as far as I’m concerned. He got up there by himself. He can get down that way too.’

Stuart perched on the sloped roof bare-chested and in long trousers. Initially, his act attracted little interest from the Dutton Park residents in the vicinity of the gaol.

He started throwing roof iron and bricks into the gaol yard. By Saturday evening, Stuart had still not come down.

On Sunday, he began constructing his message out of bricks. INNOCENT, VICTIMS OF POLICE VERBAL, F & S [Finch and Stuart].

Stuart paraded along the top of the roof. Sightseers dropped by to witness the spectacle. Police waited. The Prisons Minister, John Herbert, ordered prison warders to leave Stuart on the roof until he came down of his own volition.

At 12.45 p.m. on Monday, after more than 52 hours on the roof, Stuart was having a rest close to a hole in the roof when he was seized by two warders. As the
Courier-Mail
reported: ‘After a brief, violent struggle, he was brought to the ground as fellow prisoners cheered.’

Shortly afterwards, Works Department staff climbed up onto the roof and dismantled his protest message made of bricks. It was an irony that probably escaped most, but perhaps not Stuart, that a colloquial word for verballing, or the police fabrication of a criminal confession, is ‘bricking’.

The paper speculated that Stuart would lose some privileges and suffer a spell in solitary confinement. The convicted killer was just 36. He had just over two years left to live.

Campbell and the Boss

At some point over the Christmas and New Year period of 1977–78, word of the belligerent Senior Constable Bob Campbell, down in the Stores at the old Petrie Terrace barracks, had made it inside the Commissioner’s office.

Lewis, busy as ever during the festive whirl and into the New Year, made queries in March regarding the validity of Campbell’s eight-hour study leave. Campbell’s course, and university degrees undertaken by any other officers, had to be approved under the Police Department Study Assistance Scheme.

Lewis repeatedly approached the Department of the Public Service Board querying whether an officer who had expressed an intention to resign from the force upon the completion of a degree, might have the course disapproved by the police department.

Why would Lewis take such intense interest in the lowly Campbell? What rumours about Campbell had been circulating through the department that would see him as a threat within an office as high as the Commissioner’s?

It was known that Campbell had been a ‘Whitrod man’, but could Lewis’s venom towards his predecessor and his desire to rid anything even resembling a Whitrod influence within a country mile of his administration have included this studious young tennis-playing suburban constable?

Or did Lewis know nothing about Campbell, the scrutiny being applied by people like Deputy Commissioner Vern MacDonald? Whoever it was, and for whatever reason, Campbell was about to be forced onto the transfer roundabout again. This time he would be heading to the Woolloongabba CIB.

A System Set in Stone

By 1978 the barrister Tony Fitzgerald, with more work than he could handle, decided to move offices.

He had, as had legions of lawyers since 1960, been labouring away in the cramped confines of the Inns of Court – the former Johnson and Sons boot factory at 107 North Quay. In its heyday, the factory produced Queensland’s finest footwear, from the Imperial, Pall Mall and Piccadilly brands through to the Maranoa, a sturdy buckled boot favoured by stockmen.

The Inns, by the late 1970s, was tired, and Fitzgerald and a few colleagues shifted to the more modern surrounds of the new MLC building with its distinctive weather beacon up at 239 George Street. Two groups of lawyers, including Fitzgerald, Bill Pincus and others, put out their shingles on the 17th floor. From that rarefied loft, far from the boot factory and the river and the city’s squalid back lanes, the city’s best legal minds went about their work, their briefs taking them interstate, the milestones of their young children’s lives – the end-of-year concert, the sports final – often sacrificed to the millstone of law.

Many of them still held similarly lofty beliefs that the civil legal system was pure and unblemished. Yet in their hearts, men like Fitzgerald, and many other Queenslanders, knew there was a gathering stain at the core. By the late 1970s Queenslanders had become immured to the one party state system. As for the civil area of legal practice, there were some players allied with political parties. Those who hitched their star to the establishment wagon did well. Many who didn’t often failed to get anywhere.

Fitzgerald, meanwhile, hoed his own field without detriment. He and his colleagues knew, as if by osmosis, that toeing the National Party line had its immense benefits. But there were alternative paths to follow. As for politics, Fitzgerald simply had no interest in it. More accurately, he wasn’t disinterested but a busy practice and a family of small children took up the bulk of his time.