Jacks and Jokers (36 page)

‘At that time we were shifting office from Ampol House to the new police headquarters,’ Wilby says. ‘We were instructed to take everything out of our lockers and keep it at home for the night. Brian Marlin was there when I was cleaning my locker out. I had two old pistols I’d found in different raids at West End and a little bottle of marihuana seeds. Marlin was the only one to see what I had in my locker.’

The next morning, just on daybreak, police and a special operations unit raided Wilby’s house in Ferny Hills, north-west of the CBD. Wilby and his wife and three primary school-age children were inside.

‘They sent a fellow who knew me as well as could be, a real decent fellow,’ says Wilby. ‘There was a carload of special operations fellows parked just up the road. The officer said to me, “There’s not going to be any trouble?” They wanted to search the house and said they had information we had drugs.

‘I was taken back [to headquarters] and interviewed. They did not search my place. I said the only bastard who knew I had [the guns and marihuana seeds] there was Brian Marlin. The officer who came to the door later warned me – be careful, the top brass are after you.’

Wilby was charged departmentally with failing to furnish reports on the stuff he had in his locker.

On that same day, Licensing officer Peter Dautel started his car and the engine burst into flames.

The elaborate attempt to bring down Jeppesen and his men was not only fierce and broad-ranging, but it was verging on the potentially deadly.

Lewis confirms that the plan was to dismantle the Jeppesen crew: ‘The idea was to scatter them, and we did. The moiety thing – they wouldn’t cooperate with investigators. The pressure was put on them to get out of the bloody job. I got [Ron] Redmond to do that.’

Approval Withdrawn

Bob Campbell of the Gabba CIB was happily ensconced in the new academic year out at the University of Queensland where he was studying third-year sociology and history when his future plans for a life beyond the Queensland Police Force took a hit.

On 2 April 1979, he was informed that the police approval for his degree had been withdrawn forthwith. He no longer had eight hours free per week to engage in his studies, and ‘may continue the course in his own time and at his expense’.

The reason alluded to was Campbell’s having reported ‘on two separate occasions his intention of terminating service with the Queensland Police Force on the completion of this course of study’.

Campbell, incensed, fired off a letter from his modest Queenslander in Julia Street, Wavell Heights, to the new Police Minister Ron Camm.

I cannot understand why this particular point of time was used to cancel my concession. I was recently advised that my name had been linked with ex-Constable EGAN [the cause célèbre of the street-march protest just weeks before]. I have never met this person nor contributed to adverse publicity against the Force, however I was never asked to explain my position.

The Police Department seems to display a sympathetic approach to Officers who become alcoholics or are just lazy but cannot find the time to allow people like myself who are interested in improving ourselves to attend lectures and examinations … The vindictive nature of the campaign against me suggests that I am not dealing with responsible, mature, rational men.

Campbell again asked for permission to speak with the press and to bring publicity to his plight ‘to protect myself and more importantly my family’. He concluded: ‘I undertake to keep away from any radical groups and avoid publicity if this victimization is discontinued but I will not hesitate to protect myself from these cowardly, malicious people. Thanking you for your time.’

If he wasn’t a target before, Senior Constable Bob Campbell certainly was one now. Nevertheless, he would soon grow from a splinter to a thorn in the side of the police department and in particular Commissioner Terry Lewis.

In either an act of suicide or a show of extraordinary resilience, Campbell would soon be lobbing some hand grenades in a counter-attack of ingenious venom that would start as nothing more than a schoolboy-style prank and evolve into a scandal that would, once again, engulf the Queensland Police Force and make it to the feet of the Premier.

Dust to Dust

At around 9 p.m. on the night of Tuesday 17 April 1979, demolition expert George Deen was kicking back watching some television with his family at home in Oxley, 11 kilometres south-west of the CBD, when he noticed a particular newsflash.

The breaking news declared that Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen and his government planned to demolish the 93-year-old Bellevue Hotel on the corner of George and Alice streets in the city.

The issue of the beautiful but tired three-storey Bellevue, a hotel that had hosted world-famous celebrities and international sporting teams for decades, and had heard its fair share of political skulduggery, being across the street from Parliament House and a regular watering hole and home away from home for country MLAs, had been debated for weeks.

Bjelke-Petersen wanted to obliterate the eyesore and replace it with new additions to what was called the ‘parliamentary precinct’. The National Trust, however, had been campaigning strongly for its restoration and had growing public support.

When the hotel first opened for business in 1886, the
Brisbane Courier
was lavish in its praise. It deemed the hotel ‘striking’ and ‘imposing’.

‘A better location for a first-class house could not have been chosen, on two other corners of the streets being Parliament House and the Queensland Club and on the third the south-western corner of the Botanic Gardens,’ it wrote. It described the ground-floor dining room as ‘one of the handsomest rooms in the colony, well lighted and ventilated, and splendidly furnished’. It additionally praised the hotel’s use of polished pine and cedar doors.

Despite the National Trust’s campaigning, Premier Bjelke-Petersen described the Bellevue as ‘a heap of rubbish’ and state Government cabinet members approved its demolition ‘subject to further discussion’.

Earlier that Tuesday, state Cabinet had ticked off in principle the $35 million ‘parliamentary precinct’ project. They made no decisions on the fate of the Bellevue, though it was understood that the majority of government ministers from the Premier down believed the building had to go.

Bjelke-Petersen argued that a secret report revealed the hotel’s restoration would cost in excess of $2 million. Demolition would cost $40,000.

George Deen of the Deen Brothers, scenting an opportunity with the Bellevue following the newsflash, immediately phoned Parliament House. He told the security guard manning the phone, ‘We’ll bloody do it’ – as in, the Deen Brothers would happily demolish the Bellevue Hotel for the Premier. He left his number.

Shortly after, George Deen received a call at home. It was Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen. They discussed the secret demolition of the old hotel. It would happen at midnight in three days’ time – Friday 20 April.

Also on that Tuesday, Bjelke-Petersen had had a wide-ranging telephone discussion with his Police Commissioner about a permit issued for a street march in Toowoomba, the police at Kingaroy, and Sir David Muir’s appointment as Queensland Ombudsman. The Bellevue Hotel was not mentioned.

The next day the government moved swiftly and approved the demolition of the hotel. It was front-page news in the
Courier-Mail
on Thursday 19 April. DOWN IT COMES, the headline read. ‘A Sunken Garden in its Place.’

The report said: ‘However, in a compromise move to lessen public condemnation of the step, the coalition instructed architects to plan a new building with a Belle Vue [sic] style façade.’

Premier Bjelke-Petersen was quoted as saying: ‘The Belle Vue [sic] is not an historic entity but a series of additions to an ill-desgined building. We have set out to protect the real heritage. I support this as my parents were pioneers. We have done what we believe is fair and right for Queenslanders.’

The press and public were made to believe the building would be demolished in a month’s time. On that Thursday, however, Lewis recorded in his diary: ‘Harold Young phoned re: Premier’s direction that Belle Vue be demolished this weekend.’

Down at the corner of George and Alice streets, union officials patrolled outside the old hotel in an attempt to halt any impending demolition. South East Queensland Electricity Board workers had already begun lifting the footpaths in preparation for disconnecting electricity to the building.

Later that day, at the Gaythorne RSL, Lewis was one of the judges of the Lions Youth of the Year awards, along with Sir David Longland.

Come Friday, Lewis received a call in his office from a Detective R. Carter [possibly Bob Carter] ‘re: Premier’s comments on Belle Vue’. That night, hours before the Deen Brothers, with police guard, moved their heavy equipment (six large vehicles and two smaller ones) to the Bellevue Hotel site under cover of darkness, Lewis and his wife, Hazel, enjoyed a farewell dinner for American consulate official Richard C. Dunbar at his home in Alton Terrace, The Gap.

The Bellevue, by this stage, had been surrounded by a barbed-wire fence to separate the Deens from a growing number of protestors. By the time word of the demolition spread across Brisbane, reported on various radio stations, hundreds of protestors had gathered at the corner of George and Alice streets. They shouted ‘Save the Bellevue’ and waved various placards.

Four Liberal Party MPs – Rosemary Kyburz, her husband Rob Akers, Terry Gygar and Angus Innes – joined the picket.

Down at the Park Royal Hotel in Alice Street and facing the Botanical Gardens, popular Brisbane radio personality Wayne ‘Waynee Poo’ Roberts was finishing up his act with band Wickety Wak when someone rushed to the stage.

‘Hey Poo,’ they said. ‘They’re just about to demolish the Bellevue!’

Roberts announced the travesty to the audience and led them out of the hotel and up the hill to the Bellevue site, still dressed garishly in his stage outfit. On arrival, Roberts hopped onto one of the approaching Deen Brothers trucks and gave the driver ‘a gobful’.

‘Then a hand grabbed me around the neck and pulled me down from the truck,’ Roberts recalls. ‘It was a red-headed copper with freckles and he said, “You’re under arrest”.

‘I was shoved into the back of a paddy wagon. I was in my show performing gear – probably a pair of tangerine pants and a bolero-type shirt. I remember shouting through the bars of the wagon to my wife Annette – “Get our solicitor!” And she shouted back, “We don’t have one!” ’

Rosemary Kyburz, on witnessing the destruction, said: ‘This is just too much for the Liberal Party to tolerate.’

The demolition proved to be a difficult job for the Deens. Walls refused to come down, and because of the haste to level the building, the Deens struck other hurdles. ‘Right in the middle of the hotel was an electrical substation,’ George Deen reportedly said. ‘Because of the secrecy and everything else, it was still live. We couldn’t get it disconnected. So we worked all the way around it. Luckily it was beneath a stairwell, so when we finished the job and cleaned it all up, the stairwell was left standing. We knocked it all down around it.’

The job took six days to complete.

‘People were angry,’ George said. ‘We had bomb threats on our house. We had police living in our house. Police there 24 hours. Checking around our house. Checking our mail.’

The Bellevue, Deen later rationalised, was riddled with West Indian termite. ‘But Joh just wanted it gone,’ he said. ‘Of course there was opposition from the Liberal Party and everybody else … Joh just wanted to trample everybody and he did it.’

On the Saturday, with the Bellevue in ruins, Commissioner Terry Lewis and his wife, Hazel, headed to the domestic airport at 6 a.m. to catch a flight to Sydney, then on to Adelaide and Perth for a conference and other official police business. They had a suite in the Sheraton Hotel waiting for them.

In Brisbane, though, locals woke to an act of government described by the
Courier-Mail
as one of ‘shame’ and the latest in several ‘hillbilly authoritarian actions that have made this State a national laughing stock’.

Bjelke-Petersen brushed off the wrath of fellow MPs and a confused and bemused public. ‘These people with their green bans, their black bans, anything under the sun, must be feeling pretty sheepish,’ he defiantly said.

He was also questioned about the tendering process for the demolition contract, organised hastily on the telephone with George Deen just days before. ‘I don’t know when the tenders were called,’ the Premier said. ‘It’s a matter of checking with the Works Department. Anyway, I’m not concerned with that. That’s immaterial.’

Deputy Premier Dr Llew Edwards seemed equally as puzzled by the fiasco. ‘I wasn’t aware of the decision for contractors to begin work … and I am concerned that, to my knowledge, the Liberal Party was not given adequate information before demolition began.’

A Works Department source told a reporter the decision to demolish so quickly came from a ‘higher authority’, but would not confirm or deny that that authority was in fact Bjelke-Petersen.

It was a minor nuisance to the Premier. He would not discuss the tendering process for the job but added that ‘all normal procedures had been complied with’. He congratulated the Deen Brothers on a job well done.