Jacks and Jokers (24 page)

Stokes had written stories about the gang in the
Port News
. She said a man called Vince O’Dempsey actually used to call Hamilton ‘Clockwork Orange’ because of his ginger hair and tendency to wear a bowler hat.

Detective Pat Glancy, one of Murphy’s protégés, then appeared at the inquest. He said Stokes had told him in 1977, in the District Court where Stokes was appealing a six month prison sentence for possession of a concealable firearm, that he believed John Andrew Stuart, James Finch and the Clockwork Orange Gang had committed the Whiskey Au Go Go fire. (Stuart and Finch had been charged for the Whiskey bombing and were serving life sentences in Boggo Road – Stuart insisted he was innocent.) Glancy said Stokes had not accused the gang of involvement in the fire until after Hamilton went missing. Stokes initially thought Stuart and Finch were innocent, but told Glancy he was wrong to believe that.

Stokes and Glancy had a bit of history.

‘Billy McCulkin introduced me to Glancy at the Lands Office Hotel a couple of months before the Whiskey firebombing [in early 1973],’ says Stokes. ‘On the following Saturday at the races I again saw Glancy and he told me I had an old fine outstanding for a traffic offence and he asked me to accompany him to the police station to pay this fine.’ As it turned out, he allowed him to stay at the races for the next two events where he happened to back the two winners.

‘In 1977 Glancy led a police raid at my Broadbeach flat and charged me with having a gun. While I was in prison over this matter, Glancy organised witnesses to testify at a Coroner’s Court Inquiry into the disappearance of Tom Hamilton.’

Then a Brisbane real estate agent, Elva Ryan, told the court Stokes had told her he had abducted and killed a man when she rented a unit to Stokes at Toorak Road, Hamilton, in April 1975.

Stokes allegedly told her the reason he wanted that specific unit was because it overlooked a property where he took a man at gunpoint and killed him. She claimed Stokes told her Hamilton’s body was buried beside Barbara McCulkin. (Barbara was the estranged wife of Billy ‘The Mouse’ McCulkin, who had disappeared with her two young daughters not long after the Whiskey bombings.)

The real estate agent said she hadn’t believed Stokes, and that she’d thought it had been a boast. (Stokes would claim in an article in the June issue of
Port News
that he had been evicted from his rented home – Flat 7, York Flats, 66 Merthyr Road, New Farm – by his landlady 13 days after Hamilton was abducted.)

The court also heard allegations that Hamilton had played a part in Stokes’s wife leaving him and that Hamilton had made phone calls to Stokes taunting him with sexual allegations against his wife.

Stokes was committed for trial, despite the fact that there had been no evidence retrieved from the suspect vehicle and no evidence of threats made by Stokes to Hamilton. There was a lot of circumstantial evidence, but no body. There was also insufficient evidence to conclude how Hamilton met his death.

Despite this, Stokes was charged with having murdered Hamilton and awaited his trial in the Supreme Court.

Bombs and Knights

In the wake of the shocking Hilton Hotel bombing in Sydney on 13 February 1978, which killed two garbage collectors and an on-duty police officer, two legendary British police officers were flown to Australia to offer advice to local forces, Federal and state, on counter-terrorism. They were Sir Robert Mark and Sir James Haughton.

Sir Robert had had a stellar career. He was noted for the establishment in the early 1970s of an anti-corruption unit called A10. It uncovered police corruption on an unprecedented scale, leading to the arrest and imprisonment of top-ranking officers including Commander Kenneth Drury, head of the Flying Squad. Several more police were imprisoned, and nearly 500 more were sacked or forced to resign.

He was also knowledgeable regarding the IRA threat. He took command of the Knightsbridge Spaghetti House Siege in September 1975 and the Balcombe Street Siege just three months later in December. He would feel at home in Queensland under Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen as he loathed anti-establishment demonstrators and groups like the National Council for Civil Liberties. His Special Patrol Group was in the same family as Queensland’s Special Branch.

Sir James ‘Sunny Jim’ Haughton was a crack detective and fiercely anti police corruption. In January 1976 he was appointed Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary.

Both men were due in Brisbane on Monday 13 March. They were booked into the Gazebo Terrace Hotel.

Lewis and Deputy Commissioner Vern MacDonald were at Eagle Farm airport at 9 p.m. to greet Sir Robert and Sir James and ‘discussed purpose of their visit to Australia until 10 p.m.’, according to his diary.

The next day, the two esteemed officers were available to talk to senior Queensland police from 9 a.m. until 4 p.m. at police headquarters. Lewis was at the office at 7.45 a.m. and helped MacDonald and his personal assistant Greg Early complete arrangements for the day’s talks. Then, curiously, Commissioner Lewis left them to it. He was off on a regional tour of police stations, including Beaudesert, Stanthorpe, Texas and Goondiwindi.

Back at headquarters, Sir Robert was late. When he arrived he was introduced to the officers present by Deputy Commissioner Vern MacDonald. They included Tom Pointing from the CIB; Alan Lobegeiger, deputy head of the Emergency Squad; Superintendent Tony Murphy, head of the Criminal Investigation Branch; Ian Hatcher of the Press Unit; and of course Early.

It was, from the outset, a blokey affair. Sir Robert talked at length about counter-terrorism arrangements in the UK. He used expressions like ‘jolly good’. He discussed the press and its relationship with the police. ‘… we have one paper which always gives us a run, the
Sunday Sun
,’ piped up Vern MacDonald, ‘but we don’t worry too much about them anymore’.

MacDonald and others used every opportunity to blame the Labor Party for any perceived misgivings about the police force and its public perception.

Sir Robert admitted he was confused by Australian attitudes to police units like the Special Branch, and how they seemed to have ‘a sinister connotation’ among the general public.

‘Its purpose is to defend the state from subversion from within and if you want a loose definition given off-the-cuff, any organisation which seeks to undermine democracy by the achievement of a corporate state by unlawful means, so far as we’re concerned, is a fit objective for the attention of Special Branch,’ Sir Robert said stirringly. ‘And I don’t give a damn if the Australian press print that in letters six feet tall as far as I’m concerned.

‘A democracy which doesn’t protect itself from subversion from within as distinct from the possibility of an attack from without, really hardly deserves to continue to exist.’

Detective Tony Murphy offered wise local counsel: ‘I feel the real problem throughout is the fact that there is this state suspicion that the government today is getting mileage by reason of the access of the government to Special Branch. There is the existence of suspicion all the time that the government today is using the Special Branch facilities to spy on the Opposition.’

During their talk on X-ray machines, Vern MacDonald couldn’t resist telling an anecdote about former police commissioner Ray Whitrod, and how the Queensland Police had an excellent scanning machine that was situated directly under Whitrod’s chair on the floor below him.

When Whitrod found out about sensitive and potentially suspect packages and bags being X-rayed beneath his seat, according to MacDonald, he arranged for the machine to be moved. ‘But he didn’t trust everybody, Mr Whitrod, after that at all; he reckoned they may have been trying to get rid of him,’ MacDonald told the meeting.

In discussing complaints about police, Sir Robert produced statistics that less than one per cent were ever made against policewomen. ‘Because you see the police function is naturally abrasive and yet the ordinary male feels a kind of aversion from complaining about a woman,’ philosophised Sir Robert. ‘So even if you have got men doing the job with a woman there, they still won’t complain.

‘They [women] are expensive, they will get married and go after three and a half years and so on. But nevertheless, they do have their uses though one doesn’t like to admit it too loudly.’

At the end of the meeting Vern MacDonald stood and declared the session ‘one of the most interesting periods I’ve had I feel in my police career’.

In a telex message about the police and civilian careers of the two great knights sent to the Premier’s Department from Canberra prior to their arrival in Brisbane, Lewis underlined with a ruler and black felt pen just two sentences.

‘Sir Robert was awarded a Queens Police Medal in 1965, and in 1973 he was made a Knight bachelor. In the 1977 New Year’s Honours List he was made Knight Grand Cross of the order of the British Empire.’

After just 16 months in the top job, was Commissioner Lewis already thinking of such honours for himself?

On Burning Mountain

The pacifist dentist from Bundaberg, Dr Harry Akers, continued to smoulder over the National Party’s dictatorial street-march legislation and decided to act.

He needed to come up with an ingenious way of exposing the nonsense of the new laws. ‘I decided that something had to be done about this,’ Dr Akers recalls. ‘It was really bad legislation for a whole range of reasons. So I called a public meeting.’

Akers set a time and place – a hall in downtown Bundaberg – and was stunned when more than 50 people turned up, including supporter Philip Barnsley, the young station master from the nearby farming town of Avondale, 24 kilometres north-west of Bundaberg on the Kolan River.

Akers would discover later that the bulk of the crowd were men and women from the National Civic Council – the Catholic political movement originally founded by B.A. Santamaria. Everything proposed at the meeting that night was continually voted down by the interlopers. In the end, Akers proposed that the group apply for a legal street-march permit. The motion was opposed 40 to three. Only Barnsley and one other stood behind him.

‘I couldn’t understand this,’ Akers remembers. ‘I decided to march and needed a fairly clever strategy. April Fool’s Day was coming up. So I applied for a permit.’

Akers lodged his request for a permit to march with the Bundaberg police on 10 March 1978, where it was received by local Traffic Superintendent K. Seaniger. Akers said he planned to march with his dog Jaffa (a cattle dog covered in spots of red, like the jaffa confectionary) at 2.45 a.m. on 1 April, for a distance of 100 metres on a No Through Road not far from The Hummock. He would be holding a placard.

The application, which stressed that the march would be peaceful, was rejected on the grounds that it was a protest march.

Superintendent Seaniger told Akers: ‘If you do this we’re probably going to leave you alone. But if anyone else sets foot on that road with you, you’ll be arrested.’

A number of quandaries presented themselves to Akers. He could march illegally and get away with it. He could forget about the whole enterprise. Or he could march in company with another person and get himself arrested.

The presence of Jaffa, too, proved a small quandary for police. Was Akers protesting in defiance of the new legislation? Or was he just a man out walking his dog in the dark?

Akers’ rejection attracted an initial smattering of local press. On 16 March the
Courier-Mail
reported that Akers’ protest would be against the street march legislation and ‘the forces of apathy’.

The dentist decided to go ahead with his plan anyway. ‘I was really frightened, to be truthful,’ Akers says. ‘I’d dug a hole for myself and I had to go ahead and do it.

‘On one side of the road there was a vertical embankment about 10 to 15 feet high, and on the other side it was a vertical embankment down. Police couldn’t direct you onto the footpath. It was only a couple of feet wide and you’d fall down the embankment.’

On the night of the march he took Jaffa on a heavy chain. Akers wasn’t sure what he’d encounter. It was raining heavily. Barnsley turned up to witness the event, as did a
Bundaberg News-Mail
reporter and photographer, and young supporter Peter Leonard.

Akers, dressed in a short-sleeved shirt, shorts and thongs, carried a small sign that read: ‘The majority is not omnipotent. The majority can be wrong and it is capable of tyranny.’

‘The Special Branch was there,’ he says. ‘I know because I saw a number of cars go up beforehand. There were police there, too. I had a speech I yelled out in the middle of the night. It was raining. A lot of people disagreed with me and others admired my guts.

‘I had no political leanings or aspirations whatsoever. I stand back and I dissect issues and what politicians do, then I decide what I’m not going to be a party to. I saw the police force under Lewis as just another extension of the National Party. A lot of provincial people in Queensland couldn’t see that.’

Philip Barnsley says Akers’ protest was an attempt to cut through the rural messianic worship of Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen to show people what was really going on in the corridors of power in George Street. ‘As Harry always pointed out, if you make a fool of a certain law you help your cause rather than just fighting against it, if you can point out how silly it was,’ he says.