Jacks and Jokers (25 page)

‘That helped them down in Brisbane, where they were having the big protest marches and coming up against a lot of police. When do you make the stand and say enough is enough?’

Akers’ bold move received a battery of publicity across the country and provoked debate and editorials throughout the Australian press. He had made his point in spectacular fashion – the new street-march laws were petty and puerile.

Akers told the
Courier-Mail
he had marched as ‘a protest against the erosion of civil liberties in Queensland’. The newspaper further reported: ‘With placard in hand and heavy rain falling, he collected his cattle dog Jaffa and began his 100 metre walk.

‘During his speech addressed to the flora and fauna, the rain-soaked Mr Akers said he represented the minority in the community which “must have its rights recognised”.’

Some years later Jaffa was struck by a car and the vet determined he’d have to amputate his front right leg and back left leg. The decision was made to put the dog down.

No matter how heroic, you can’t have a dog with just one leg at either end.

Hunting the Hound

If anything raised the usually laconic Commissioner Terry Lewis’s ire, it was being talked about behind his back, especially if those rumours impugned his image and reputation in the eyes of the one person he wanted to please the most – Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen.

A close second to that was criticism of his police allies and friends, such as Tony Murphy.

So on Tuesday 4 April, when the Premier’s press secretary, Allen Callaghan, rang Lewis to discuss complaints about Murphy and corruption, it reflected poorly on Lewis himself and his stewardship of the police force. He did what he had always done. He contacted his trusted lieutenants and at some time over the next two and a half weeks, it was decided that the person who had been spreading the rumours that had reached the ears of the Premier had to be Basil Hicks.

Hicks had a history with the Rat Pack that went back to the 1950s. He believed both Murphy and Glen Hallahan were ‘on the take’ from the 1960s. In the early 1970s he had also met and befriended Jack Herbert at a training course. They jogged together most mornings and it had left no doubt in Hicks’s mind that the detectives were corrupt.

Hicks had talked to Herbert about how he’d tried to effect the arrest of prostitutes at the Interlude Club, run by Sydney gangster and standover man Donnie ‘The Glove’ Smith, supposedly sent to Brisbane by corrupt cop Fred Krahe to operate the bar in Queen Street. Hicks, working out of the Valley CIB at the time, understood that both Murphy and Hallahan were protecting the club in exchange for payments.

Following the Interlude incident Hicks had been told by two informants that Hallahan had told them that he would be ‘put in his place with the kids’. Soon after, Hicks was sent to the Children’s Court where he worked as a prosecutor.

On hearing Hicks’s theories in the early 1970s, Herbert told Hicks: ‘Well, everyone will get a quid … everyone will take a quid.’

As Hicks later remembered, ‘I wanted to know at one stage who had actually had me shifted from the Valley, whether it was Murphy or Hallahan, and he said it didn’t matter whether it was Murphy, Hallahan or Lewis, they are all the one, they are all the same.’

Herbert, clearly trusting Hicks, explained The Joke to him. He confided in Hicks about SP bookmakers and how they were protected by certain members of the Licensing Branch. Herbert explained that The Joke had been a little disorganised until Murphy had joined the branch in 1966.

Hicks recalled: ‘He [Herbert] said there had been a lot of squabbling among those in The Joke and that they had busted each other’s bookies, but when Tony Murphy joined Licensing, he organised them and the system now worked well.’

It was Hicks, as part of Whitrod’s CIU, who had gone on and arrested Tony Murphy on perjury charges in 1971 over the allegations of prostitute Shirley Brifman. It was Hicks’s CIU that had trapped Hallahan in New Farm Park receiving kickbacks from a prostitute, resulting in corruption charges against him and ultimately leading to his resignation from the force. And it was Hicks who had hidden under Arthur Pitts’ house with a recording device and recorded Jack Herbert offering a bribe that led to the Southport Betting Case and indirectly led to Herbert’s resignation from the force.

In terms of Herbert and the Rat Pack, Hicks had used up all of his credit.

Then someone found out about the prostitute called Katherine James, who by now, in 1978, was serving three years in prison on drugs charges. It was established that James, former owner of Kontiki, had also worked briefly as a prostitute at the notorious Matador Club in South Brisbane, then owned by Roland Short. During this time there were photographs taken of her having sex with a client.

John Wayne Ryan, who helped install the Matador Club’s extensive security system, had seen the photographs. They were eight by ten inch black-and-white glossies. ‘The guy in the pictures did bear a resemblance to Hicks, even though it definitely wasn’t Basil Hicks,’ remembers Ryan. ‘Those photographs were taken in the Matador Club.’

A plot was hatched.

A rumour would circulate that photographs had been obtained of the supposedly incorruptible Basil Hicks having sex with prostitute Katherine James. While Hicks was acquainted with James as part of his investigative work, the story would be that Hicks was obsessed with James, and that she had arranged the secret photos to be taken to get him off her back and leave her alone.

Was Lewis in on the scam? Or was this the handiwork of Tony Murphy, who had used this modus operandi – the deliberate assassination of a person’s moral character – since the National Hotel inquiry in the early 1960s, and before?

On 24 April 1978, Lewis notated in his diary: ‘Phoned M. Lewis [then Comptroller of Prisons] re interviewing … James at HM Prison.’

Then on 27 April, something unprecedented occurred – Katherine James was brought from Brisbane Prison to the office of Deputy Commissioner Vern MacDonald to give a statement saying she had indeed had an affair with Basil Hicks in 1973 and that there were photographs to prove it.

Lewis’s personal assistant, Greg Early, took the statement down in shorthand. At the close of business that day, Lewis wrote in his diary: ‘Deputy Commissioner MacDonald handed me statement by Mrs …, 25 years, re allegedly having sexual intercourse with Hicks. Off 6.30 pm.’

Around this time Hicks was given a friendly warning from colleague Noel Creevey, who claimed to have seen a memo from policeman Graham Leadbetter that Hicks had had sexual relations with Katherine James. It wasn’t the only bullet against Hicks that the Rat Pack was loading into the gun.

A Nambour police colleague Merv Roberts told him that Commissioner Lewis had asked Roberts to sign a statement that Hicks, while stationed on the Sunshine Coast prior to being transferred to the Valley CIB in late 1969, had accepted graft from SP bookies, and that he had gotten pregnant a girl, 15, and induced her to abort the child.

In the false statement, Roberts says that on the very first day Hicks started work at the Nambour CIB in the late 1950s, Hicks called him aside and asked him for the names and addresses of local SP bookies.

‘I showed little interest and attempted to change the subject,’ Roberts was supposed to have said. ‘He then said something along these lines, “Come on Merv, you have been here a long time. You know them all. We can arrange with them and organise something on a fifty/fifty basis.” ’

Roberts declined to sign the statement, though his signature did turn up on the bottom of the two-sheet statement on an attached slip of plain paper and not police stationery. It was allegedly witnessed by T.M. Lewis.

It was a dirty game, Rat Pack-style.

Plenty of Kills

While Basil Hicks might have been seen as a potential threat that needed to be dealt with, Licensing Branch chief Alec Jeppesen’s surreptitious accumulation of evidence of police corruption was starting to gain weight. He, too, was becoming a rising distraction.

Jeppesen’s findings revealed the city’s illegal casinos and massage parlours were primarily run by the Bellino family, and were centred largely in Fortitude Valley. There were other operators of significance – Roland Short’s clubs and brothels, and the parlours of Geoff Crocker and Allan Holloway.

In addition, rumours were circulating that police, particularly CIB members under the leadership of Superintendent Tony Murphy, were out of control and running rampant in the massage parlours. Out of the blue, the Licensing Branch was suddenly hitting a number of hurdles in its dealings with prostitutes. The former workable system was that prostitutes were ‘written up’, then reported for prostitution offences via a summons.

Suddenly, prostitutes and madams were refusing to answer questions and producing legal counsel. Solicitors T.J. Mellifont and Co., represented many of the women and produced a form letter, addressed to the Commissioner of Police, which ended: ‘… she will not answer any questions relating to any matter concerning any offence alleged against her, nor will she voluntarily accompany any Police Officer to any Police Station’.

It stated if ‘she’ were to be charged, she would have to be ‘arrested and forthwith taken to the nearest watchhouse and formally charged’. Some parlours also installed security gates, barring police entry.

In addition to this, CIB officers were seen drunk and in the presence of known prostitutes in local nightclubs, and others were located in the actual health studios, demanding free sex.

A feared senior officer, drunk in a club, was also overheard to say it wouldn’t be long before the CIB took over the control of parlours from Licensing, and that a graft network similar to that in Sydney would be installed.

Someone was deliberately sabotaging and frustrating Jeppesen.

A Call from Across Town

Federal Narcotics Agent John Shobbrook was sitting in his office in Eagle Street in the city when the phone rang. To his surprise, it was Superintendent Tony Murphy of the Queensland Police on the other end of the line.

Shobbrook had heard of, but never met, Murphy. ‘He said he had an informant who had some very substantial information about heroin coming into Queensland and could I come up and see him?’ Shobbrook recalls.

Douglas John Shobbrook had been born in Brisbane and adopted out to truck driver Alfred Shobbrook – he worked for carriers W. Love and Sons, ‘Love Will Move It!’ – and his wife Sadie who lived at Kangaroo Point. It was a strict Catholic household.

After a variety of jobs as a youth he noticed an advertisement in the
Courier-Mail
for vacant positions with the Customs Prevention Section within the Department of Customs and Excise and secured a job working out of the navy’s shore facility the HMAS
Moreton
on the Brisbane River in New Farm. Shobbrook acquitted himself well for a few years but soon needed more of a challenge.

In early 1971 the Federal Bureau of Narcotics opened a Brisbane office in the old but splendid Coronation House at 133 Edward Street. Initially it had just three staff – Acting Chief Narcotics Agent Vince Dainer, Narcotics Agent Brian Bennett and a secretary, Janette Hollands.

The following year Shobbrook applied for a job as a full-time narc and was successful. He moved to Sydney and began his training. In 1974 he married Jan – of the Brisbane office – and after engaging in several serious drug investigations over the years the couple returned to Brisbane in early 1978 on the death of Alf.

By this time the Brisbane office had moved around the corner to more salubrious digs in Eagle Street. Shobbrook was soon promoted to Supervising Narcotics Agent.

When the famous Tony Murphy of the CIB called him that day, Shobbrook, out of courtesy, walked up past City Hall to police headquarters in North Quay.

‘When I got there, he [Murphy] said: “Mr Shobbrook, I’ve got this informant, and this is a Narcotics Bureau matter and not a state matter … the only problem is my informant is going to want a few thousand dollars for the information. If you come up with an envelope with a few thousand dollars, give it to me and I’ll give it to the informant.” ’

Shobbrook said he was stunned. ‘How stupid did he think I was? I told Canberra and they laughed their heads off.’

It might have been funny at the time, but Murphy’s little scheme and the character of the man stayed with Shobbrook.

Within months the names Murphy and Hallahan would come across his desk in a very different and darker context.

Jeppesen Smells a Rat

From the outset, Brian Marlin was demonstrably supportive of his boss Jeppesen. He was eager to please, sometimes a little too eager. The young constable, on hearing of a plot by Tony Murphy and the CIB to take control of the policing of the massage parlours across the city from the Licensing boys, wanted to take it to the highest level.

He insisted Jeppesen and he go to his friend John Goleby, the member for Redlands, and even the Premier himself. Jeppesen didn’t think Marlin had the evidence of a CIB takeover and initially stayed out of it.

Lewis got wind of the shenanigans.

How could junior police secure a secret audience with the Premier without his knowledge? Lewis learned there was unrest building between Licensing and the CIB over control of the massage parlours. Murphy was flexing his muscle and his opponents saw it as an opportunity to destabilise
him and his power base. The power play over the parlours was, however, a ruse.