Jacks and Jokers (32 page)

Marlin handcuffed Collins. ‘I found that his wrists were so immense that I could secure the handcuffs only on the first notch and no further,’ Marlin recalled in his statement.

Brian George Collins, 35, itinerant nightclub bouncer, was charged with the use of obscene language, assaulting Marlin and Sidey and resisting arrest. Marlin was treated for deep bruising of the right groin and thigh, bruising to the left eye and a lacerated left hand.

At the Cleveland police station later, Collins said he had powerful friends in the police force and any charges against him wouldn’t stand up. Marlin alleges Collins said he was prepared to let the whole thing go if the charges were dropped. In exchange, Collins’ police friends wouldn’t go hard on Marlin and Sidey.

Marlin’s superiors, however, were soon to hear a different and more disturbing version of events.

An aggrieved Brian ‘Snowy’ Collins of 251 Grassdale Road, Gumdale, a short drive from Cleveland, penned a single-page letter to Alec Jeppesen, head of the Licensing Branch, in his bunched handwriting. He also posted a copy to Commisioner Terry Lewis and Minister for Police, Ron Camm. Collins wanted to explain what had really happened.

Snowy wrote that he was leaving the Cleveland Sands Hotel on that night when Constable Marlin shouted out to him: ‘Get here, you.’

‘There were a few words said then for no reasons at all he [Marlin] hit me five times in the face,’ wrote Collins. ‘I then retaliated, knocking him to the ground. Then the second License member … got out of the back of their car and with this other man named Peter set upon me.’

After some scuffling he said Marlin and Sidey drew their guns. ‘They attacked me with their guns and boots,’ Collins said. ‘During the melee three shots were fired. Why they suddenly set upon me I do not now [sic]. I gave them no reason whatsoever. I trust you will look into this …’

Who was telling the truth? If Marlin’s version was accurate, why would Collins, almost formally, immediately point out that he was connected with Murphy, Glancy and Barnes? If Collins was right, had Marlin targeted him knowing he was a Murphy informant, and assaulted Collins as a show of strength to Murphy?

Unfortunately for Marlin, the story leaked to the press. A brief piece was published, without a byline, on page one of the
Courier-Mail
on Thursday 16 November. POLICE PISTOL WHIP CLAIM, the newspaper said.

‘The Police Department is investigating a complaint that a man was “pistol whipped” by detectives last month,’ the report read. ‘The incident allegedly happened at the Cleveland Sands Hotel. The man was said to have been in a fight with three detectives from the Licensing Branch. The “pistol whipping” allegedly happened when he appeared to be winning.

‘A Police Department spokesman said a formal complaint had been passed to the Commissioner [Mr. Lewis].’

Curiously, the newspaper story intimated that the fight had been triggered by an incident between Snowy Collins and an off-duty policeman the night before. ‘The policeman is said to have lost the fight and to have returned the following night with two other police,’ the report continued.

Commissioner Lewis made no reference to the incident in his diaries immediately after the event. If it didn’t make the diary, it didn’t necessarily concern the Commissioner.

Then the matter was raised in parliament.

Raymond ‘Joe’ Kruger, the ALP member for Murrumba, north of Brisbane city, asked the Premier in question time, if the victim of the police attack had suffered a broken nose, a fractured cheek and other injuries?

He further asked if charges were laid on Collins, if there were witnesses to the incident, and if there were other reports that ‘the two policemen involved were guilty of intimidation against women staff members during previous visits to the hotel?’ What action was being taken by the Commissioner of Police?

The Premier answered: ‘The allegation mentioned is presently being investigated by members of the Police Internal Investigations Section under the direction of the Deputy Commissioner of Police. In the circumstances, it would be improper for me to comment at this stage.’

For Lewis, now that the Cleveland Sands matter had been aired in parliament, everything changed. As it did for Marlin. Without doubt he faced at the very least potential disciplinary charges. He had also antagonised Tony Murphy by brawling with one of his informants – Snowy Collins.

Just two days after Kruger asked his Questions on Notice, the Premier’s press secretary, Allen Callaghan, phoned Lewis bright and early at 7 a.m. to talk about various matters including ‘information given to Premier from Mr Goleby’, and also about ‘P.C.Const. Marlin, code name Fisher’.

The day after that – Friday 24 November – Brian Marlin entered the Commissioner’s office at around 1.15 p.m. During the meeting he unloaded on Lewis about Licensing Branch chief Alec Jeppesen saying that the whole crew were rotten and corrupt.

Marlin had jumped camps.

Whether Tony Murphy had promised to sort out the Snowy Collins matter if Marlin came on side, or indeed if he had been threatened with violence or warned his career was over, Marlin turned utterly and completely. His information for Commissioner Lewis was almost a confession, an unburdening, and it was everything the likes of Lewis and Murphy wanted to hear against this surviving Whitrod faction headed by Jeppesen.

As Lewis noted in his diary: ‘… saw P.C. Const. Marlin who said that Insp. Jeppesen and Det Sgt Dautel give Hon [Max] Hodges information which he passes on to K. Hooper, MLA … Jeppesen and Insp. B. Hicks meet twice a week in McDonnell & East under steps; Jeppesen has latest electronic devices; knows who visits my office; has staff disappeared into private life and not thought to be on official work; Jeppesen, Dautel and Det Sgt Lumsden taking “moeity” money for own use; Marlin and P.C. Const Newman approached to join group; Jeppesen hates Murphy and me; Jeppesen instructs some staff to “brick” suspected S.P.’s; has staff watching Robertson and Pickering and Consorters; Branch is “crumbling” because of attitude of Jeppesen to staff; etc.’

Three days later Marlin was back with the Commissioner with even juicier news. He told Lewis that Jeppesen and another officer were feeding John Goleby information that ‘Murphy, Herbert, Freier, Leadbetter, Bellino were involved in drugs and gem racket’. Lewis wrote: ‘[Marlin] … said it was a conspiracy to get rid of Murphy and embarrass the Administration.’

On Tuesday 28 November, Lewis ‘saw Jack Herbert re moieties generally’. He had also received a call from Sydney businessman Jack Rooklyn enquiring if massage parlours were being legalised. ‘… I assured him they are not.’

The conversion of Brian Marlin was complete. The information he divulged to Lewis, true, false or otherwise, would trigger the last great assault on Jeppesen and his crew.

The broom was set to go through the Licensing Branch, and with force.

Elvis Has Left the Building

The flamboyant private investigator John Wayne Ryan was feeling the financial pinch in 1978, not the least because the Rat Pack had had him in their sights for some time and did enough to make his life difficult.

He was a tough man of the streets who had only been ‘dropped’ once in his career – not by another person, but by a tear-gas pen that had detonated in his face when he was showing friends his latest gadget imported from Germany.

He had had a hugely successful private security business with lucrative contracts in excess of $1 million, when a false charge of bribing a public official was mounted against him. By the time the case was thrown out of court, his business had all but evaporated.

Ryan was a danger because, by his very nature, he was a watcher. He looked and absorbed everything. Also, he had walked the line between an upright life and the underworld since the early 1960s. While he would never cross the line and step into the dark, he knew a lot and had seen a lot.

A year earlier, he had witnessed at 142 Wickham Street what happened when you fell foul of The Joke. A fighter himself – he preferred to be known as a ‘hunter’ – he still remembered the extreme violence he had witnessed when Constable Brian Marlin had bashed Tony the Yugoslav at the door of Bellino’s illegal casino. He concluded, rightly, that Marlin was a very dangerous man.

Personally, though, Ryan’s life was looking up. After a failed marriage, he had met his new girlfriend, Catharina, earlier in 1978 and saw a future for both of them. But he needed to make money.

He had spent more than a decade working variously as a bouncer and security consultant for nightclubs. He had worked for big-name performing artists. He knew the scene inside out. He also performed himself, for fun. He did Elvis impersonation shows. He called his act ‘Forever Elvis’. (The King had died on 16 August 1977.) Ryan was also, at one point, a stunt man and a television extra. He had recently seen the Brisith comedian Dick Emery perform a show at the National Hotel. Why not try to turn a quid as an entertainer?

So when he took Catharina to the Bellino-owned nightclub, Pinocchio’s, in Queen Street, the city, later in the year, it was so that she could see him on stage. During the show, Ryan saw a familiar face push through the crowd and take a seat beside Catharina while he was performing his act.

‘Marlin was mental – a dangerous, dangerous man,’ says Ryan.

Marlin turned to Catharina. ‘I love your eyes,’ he supposedly said. ‘You’re with somebody, aren’t you? John Ryan?’

‘Yeah,’ she said.

Marlin paused. ‘He’s not going to be around much longer,’ he said.

When Ryan found out about the conversation he thought long and hard about his future in Brisbane.

‘I’m going to go,’ he told Catharina. ‘Do you want to come with me? You need to leave.’

Ryan was confident that they wouldn’t be able to physically harm him. But they could hurt Catharina.

‘That was it,’ remembers Ryan. ‘We left.’

A Tired and Nervous Eagle

A month after the notorious Cleveland Sands Hotel incident involving Constable Brian Marlin, a fatigued Brian ‘The Eagle’ Bolton, gun crime reporter for the
Sunday Sun
newspaper, wandered into the Albion Health Studio at 281 Sandgate Road, Albion, in the shadow of the grey concrete TAB building.

It was 2.20 a.m. on a Monday in late November. There he met massage attendant Kathryn Lynch. He told her his name was Brian. He asked for a massage and handed her ten dollars. ‘He then undressed for a shower [and] as he was undressing he asked me if the boys in blue had been in,’ Lynch later said. ‘I replied that they don’t work on a Sunday, so he went and showered.

‘He came back to the room and told me he writes for the
Courier-Mail
. He told me that he was very nervous and asked me to pamper him very softly.

‘I told him not to worry and he mentioned that a couple of detectives from [the] Licensing Branch were in big trouble over the incident at Cleveland Sands a little while ago.’

Bolton proceeded to tell Kathryn what he knew of the incident. ‘He said [Constables] Sidey and Marlin entered the hotel looking for a guy,’ she recounted. ‘They picked the wrong guy and falsely accused him of a crime; this guy apparently turned on Sidey and Marlin and won the fight.

‘I don’t remember if he said that Sidey and Marlin came back that night or the following night with this guy posing as a policeman. Anyway he [Collins] said that Marlin and Sidey pistol-whipped him [the guy wrongly accused].

‘A lot of people were supposed to have put this guy up to go to the [news]paper. He said he would be very surprised if … Sidey and Marlin didn’t get the bullet from the police force.’

Bolton paused with his story and asked what other services Kathryn could provide. She said – sex.

‘So he gave me $30 – he was very impotent and ended up having hand relief,’ she said. ‘I asked if he had been drinking and he said he was very nervous about the police coming in.’

Bolton was agitated. He kept talking about Marlin, the ‘southern cop’. He told Kathryn ‘the incident is a lot deeper than what went down [at] the Cleveland Sands’.

‘He said a policeman threw a cup of coffee over a client one night at a studio [he didn’t mention what studio] … this client was one of [former Police Minister] Ron Camm’s best mates,’ she said. ‘He told me not to mention this to anybody.

‘I told him that I don’t see anybody to mention it to anyone.’

The Purge Begins

In Police Commissioner Terry Lewis’s office at police headquarters on 20 December 1978, Inspector Alec Jeppesen, head of the Licensing Branch, was interrogated over the so-called moeity scandal, the bulk of the charges fuelled by Constable Brian Marlin, formerly confidant of Jeppesen and suddenly an agent for Tony Murphy and Lewis.

Present were Assistant Commissioner Brian Hayes, Superintendent Syd ‘Sippy’ Atkinson, barrister Shane Herbert, solicitor Mark O’Brien and Jeppesen.

‘For the record will you please record the time as 10.38 a.m. and those present …,’ Hayes began.

Jeppesen wanted clarification that the investigation into him was being conducted under the provisions of Police Rules.

‘Yes,’ Hayes confirmed. ‘It is being conducted in accordance with the Police Rules, but I also wish to advise you that should any matter of a criminal nature be elicited, you will be given all courtesy and cautioned at the appropriate time.’ And then: ‘For the record Inspector, what is your full name.’