Jacks and Jokers (35 page)

Yet Brisbane citizens still came out in regular numbers to face Commissioner Lewis’s legions of troops and the handiwork of the Special Branch. On Saturday 10 March 1979, a group of 200 women demonstrated on behalf of International Women’s Day. They were progressing in an orderly fashion along Adelaide Street in the city, towards City Hall, when the now clichéd direction from the traffic superintendent present was issued – you are taking part in an unlawful procession. There were more than 200 police rostered on to curtail the march that day.

Very quickly the women were virtually surrounded by police. One of the women was Janelle Hurst. On duty that day was her boyfriend, Constable Michael Egan, 21. He wasn’t aware she was even marching.

Hurst was questioned by a member of the Special Branch and became upset and agitated. When Egan saw his partner arguing with the undercover officer he threw his police cap in the air and moved in.

‘At that time I couldn’t stomach any more of what was happening,’ he later said. Egan took hold of his girlfriend and told the Special Branch officer to ‘leave her alone’. He then walked her a short distance from the melee and calmed her down before he himself was taken hold of by a senior policeman and a policewoman.

They moved Egan past the brass lions and the statue of George V towards the entrance to the old City Hall building.

‘Would you come inside, please?’ the senior officer asked him. ‘I want to talk to you.’

Egan refused. ‘If you want to talk to me you can talk to me here,’ he replied.

Both officers then marched Egan back to police headquarters in Makerston Street. A short distance away his girlfriend followed. The moment he threw his cap towards the sky his career was over. He resigned that day.

Later, he said: ‘I found it difficult to understand why in other States demonstrations were contained by a very small number of police compared to Queensland. And the record of violence in other States was nothing compared to Queensland. There appeared to be unnecessary violence.’

Egan said police were in fact provoking the violence.

Deputy Commissioner Vern MacDonald told the press that the police he had spoken to about the incident were ‘annoyed’ by Egan’s actions. Commissioner Lewis reassured everybody that the situation was an isolated case.

Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen said it was obvious that Mr Egan didn’t want to be a policeman. He hinted that Egan and his girlfriend might have cooked up the whole stage-play for publicity.

A Deadly Tip-off to The Eagle

Since returning from exile in Longreach, and taking charge of the Consorting Squad and the Bureau of Criminal Intelligence courtesy of his friend Commissioner Lewis, Tony Murphy wielded his power with aplomb. In fact, he and his men were verging on reckless.

An intelligent man, Murphy had enough sense to recognise this. Word was out that his attempts to wrest control of SP betting and the massage parlours off the Licensing Branch had reached the Premier’s office, and the reaction was not favourable.

Word had also got around earlier in 1978 that Murphy actually held active financial membership with the Australian Labor Party. If true, it was career suicide, so Murphy was forced to write and sign a formal statement, witnessed by a Justice of the Peace, denying any involvement. ‘I am NOT a financial member of the Australian Labor Party,’ he said in the statement.

He went on to admit that he had been a financial member of the ALP in the later 1950s and early 1960s, and again from 1973 to 1975. ‘Resulting from grave injustice done to me by Commissioner Whitrod, I again joined the Labor party while I was stationed in Toowoomba,’ he explained of this more recent membership.

Murphy went on to illustrate his stellar career. ‘The insinuations levelled at me are in my confirmed opinion designed to injure me in my career,’ he concluded. ‘I have very firm opinions of who is responsible for making these spurious accusations against me.’

It was a tenuous time for Murphy. So Murphy did what Murphy always did. He offered some scoops to the press that would hopefully divert both public and private attention from his brawl with Licensing, and show yet again what a superlative police officer he was.

The body of Harry ‘Pommie’ Lewis had been found at Herons Creek near Port Macquarie, on the mid-north coast of New South Wales, on 15 March 1979. Just as Doug Wilson had told Queensland police in his taped interview the year before, Pommie Lewis had been shot in the back of the head.

After Pommie’s remains were formally identified, police needed to speak to Terry Clark. (He was tipped off and went underground in Adelaide.) Meanwhile, in Brisbane, the discovery of the body prompted Murphy and other police to seriously reconsider the material given to them by the Wilsons in their record of interview. To date, Queensland investigators had taken much of it with a pinch of salt. Now there was a skeleton with the rear of its skull blown off.

Tony Murphy claimed that five days after the body of Lewis was found, two New South Wales detectives flew to Brisbane as a part of their murder investigation.

Murphy told Commissioner Lewis in a confidential memorandum: ‘… these New South Wales Police were furnished at my direction with all possible information then available, to the Queensland C.I. Branch, which was material to the possible involvement of CLARKE [sic] and his associates in the murder of [Pommie] LEWIS.

‘The New South Wales Police (Detectives WILLIAMS and NUNAN) were supplied with a copy of the transcript of the interview had in Brisbane with the … Wilsons.’

On 23 March, Tony Murphy issued a confidential internal memorandum. ‘Forwarded for favour of information,’ it read. ‘It does appear a reasonable hypothesis under the circumstances, that the body found in the bush near Port Macquarie, may be that of the person Harry LEWIS, mentioned in the attached tape transcript.

‘A well-considered press release to the
Sunday Sun
has been made, with a view to eliciting possible assistance from the public …’

The recipient of Murphy’s largesse was his mate Brian ‘The Eagle’ Bolton, the crack police and crime reporter. Bolton had the exclusive that Queensland police were on the scent of a multi-million-dollar international heroin importation racket. Namely, the Mr Asia syndicate run by psychopath New Zealander Terry Clark, the man who had posed as the Premier at the Gazebo Hotel in Brisbane city the year before, and who had been nabbed by police along with two of his drug mules, the heroin addicts Douglas and Isabel Wilson.

Murphy, as head of the Bureau of Criminal Intelligence, had been given the tapes of the extraordinary interviews with the Wilsons, and now it was time to get some kudos.

As Murphy explained to Commissioner Lewis: ‘Having regard to the tape reference to the alleged murder by CLARKE [sic] of LEWIS whilst driving from Brisbane to Sydney … and after a conference with Detective Senior Constable Pickering and also Detective Sergeant Churchill of the Drug Squad, I released such data to Mr. Brian BOLTON, Sunday Sun, as I considered may elicit assistance from the public of Queensland and the New South Wales North Coast in connection with the Port Macquarie murder.’

Murphy was at pains to explain to Commissioner Lewis that he made sure the material given to Bolton was handled carefully, and that Bolton was never made aware of the origin and actual specific substance of the tapes.

Bolton’s article appeared in the
Sunday Sun
on 25 March 1979.

‘A man whose handless skeleton has been found in a lonely bush grave was tortured and murdered by a mobster on the orders of an international drug running syndicate,’ the article stated. ‘This is the theory police from two states are working on following the discovery of the grave near Port Macquarie.

‘Queensland police have told New South Wales detectives they believe the body is that of a Queensland-based drug courier who disappeared on a drug-carrying mission between Brisbane and Sydney a year ago.’

Bolton’s scoop certainly placed Queensland police at the front and centre of this remarkable story. It hinted that Queensland police were also investigating ‘drug drops off Noosa beach and other Queensland localities and drug caches hidden in derelict ships around the South Pacific.’

Bolton also reported that police claimed they had ‘secret tape-recorded evidence which linked the murder to a massive international drug-running syndicate. Police stressed the tapes were genuine recordings of conversations between syndicate leaders,’ Bolton ended his story. ‘They did not want to disclose how they obtained them for security reasons.’

A photograph of Tony Murphy was featured with the article.

Cliff Crawford was on a job when the
Sunday Sun
and Bolton’s report hit the newsstands. (A version of Bolton’s story was picked up by Sydney’s
Daily Telegraph
the next day.) ‘I’ll never forget that morning,’ he remembers. ‘We pulled into a service station. I saw the headlines and I thought – shit, this is the Wilsons.’

He immediately rang Syd Churchill of the Drug Squad. ‘What’s going on?’ Crawford asked.

‘I don’t know,’ said Churchill. ‘It’s been leaked.’

‘They’ll be dead,’ Crawford remarked.

It didn’t take long for Terry Clark to put two and two together. The Wilsons had sold him out in Brisbane the previous year, when the three of them had cruised up to Queensland to escape the Sydney winter.

On 27 March – two days after the Bolton scoop was published – New South Wales police officers, Detective Sergeant John McGregor and Detective Senior Constable Terry Dawson, interviewed Doug Wilson at his home in Rose Bay, Sydney.

Two days after that, Terry Clark paid the Wilsons a visit.

Doug Wilson rang Detective Dawson to let him know about Clark. The police thought Clark was in New Zealand. Wilson informed them otherwise.

‘He was here last night,’ Wilson said of Clark. ‘He knows I’ve spoken to Churchill in Brisbane and he knows you’ve been here. He told Isabel and I that we would end up like Harry Lewis.’

The Madness of Marlin

Alec Jeppesen and his men in the Licensing Branch were seemingly dying a death of a thousand cuts if the drawn-out moeity investigation was anything to go by. Tony Murphy’s new best boy in the branch, Brian Marlin, had wreaked havoc on the unit for six months, following the Cleveland Sands Hotel incident and his recruitment as a mole for Murphy.

On 18 March 1979, Marlin turned the heat up even further. Some of the allegations he provided to Murphy were outrageous and infantile. In a secret report compiled by Marlin, no members of Jeppesen’s crew were spared a touch up.

Marlin alleged, for example, that on a trip to Kingaroy, the home turf of Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen, Licensing Branch officer Bruce Wilby and a convicted criminal, John Joseph Burrows, supposedly picked up a hitchhiker and ‘assaulted and robbed him of wallet and money, a .22 rifle and marihuana’.

Jeppesen, Marlin continued, had on another date secured photographs of a brothel madam and a prominent Brisbane solicitor ‘in acts of sex’ and had used the pictures for blackmail purposes. Another allegation informed Murphy: ‘Extensive bugging of telephones and planting of listening devices practised by Jeppesen, Wilby, Dunn, Dautel to obtain information re: S.P. and also in endeavour to disparage present police administration.

‘These electronic devices obtained from West Germany, by close associate of Dunn named “Rolf” who is principal of E. & M. Television Services, Capalaba.’

And another: ‘Same equipment used by Dawtell [sic] and Policewoman Scott of Licensing Branch at Jeppesen’s direction to obtain photographs of young Licensing detectives flagrante delicto with nude poolside parties with massage parlour employees of Madam – Kerry Kent. These photos later used by Jeppesen and Dawtell [sic] to force compliance by young police with unlawful directives of Jeppesen.’

And yet another: ‘Jeppesen in possession of a number of tapes which purport to be of Jeppesen interviewing police informants concerning unlawful police activities by C.I.B. and senior police in toleration of unlawful betting and gaming. Voices speaking on tapes with Jeppesen recognised by Const. Marlin as the voices of Dawtell [sic] and other licensing police obviously reading from prepared script.’

Marlin also had some gossip from the pub. He reported: ‘Jeppesen when intoxicated made frequent boast of having amassed in four years the sum of $24,000 in the Police Credit Union from monies paid by the department to Jeppesen as Reward monies for informants.’

Marlin’s personal letter to the Premier just a couple of months earlier and his compilation of increasingly bizarre claims against Jeppeson and his workmates at the Licensing Branch being fed to Tony Murphy provided the kerosene to the fire that was steadily being built against the branch and its head.

That many of the allegations beggared belief was immaterial. It was important to keep the slander at full bore until the desired objective was achieved. The attack by paper was also followed up with muscle. Murphy investigated Jeppesen’s background, and the family pet – a corgi dog – was shot dead. A car seen leaving the vicinity after the gunshot was matched to Marlin’s.

In addition, Detective Bruce Wilby’s home in Brisbane was raided by police on the suspicion that he had a kilogram of heroin stashed inside.