Jacks and Jokers (48 page)

‘My whole life has been closely connected with horse racing,’ she would later declare. ‘I’ve grown up with it and I know a lot of trainers, jockeys, owners and officials connected with racing. I believe I am very well known in Brisbane racing.’

Mona Lewis also claimed she had a close relationship with Brisbane trainer Pat Duff and Michael Pelling, a jockey apprenticed to Duff. She said they gave her excellent racing tips. And on many occasions she took those tips and had a little flutter on behalf of her son. She was remarkably successful.

‘On many occasions I have placed bets for my son Terry,’ she would say years later. ‘Usually this would be at my suggestion where I had received a tip or friends or relatives had a horse running.

‘I don’t think I could say when I first started this but it would certainly go back some years. I think it would at least go back to when Tom Newbery [the former police minister, and Lewis’s first on becoming commissioner in November 1976] was alive because I used to bet for him as well.

‘Because of my close connection with racing and the people involved in it I have had a very good period of picking winners and I think the horses I backed for Terry or Mr Newbery mostly won or ran a place though, of course, that was not always so.’

She would ring her son and he would ‘send over money’ to her, or she’d pay and mother and son would ‘settle up’ later. The bets were usually for $50 – either on the nose or $25 each way.

Curiously, Jack ‘the Bagman’ Herbert would later tell investigators that Commissioner Lewis had little interest in the track. ‘I just know he wasn’t a betting man,’ Herbert said. ‘I’m not a betting man and I dislike being in the company of anybody on a Saturday afternoon that could only talk races and then when it’s over they talk about what they should have done and what they are going to bet next week. And he was the same.’

While her son rarely ventured out to the track – except on official visits – Mona went at every opportunity she could, taking brilliant tips from Duff and Pelling and notching up a winning percentage that must have been the envy of every punter. Her tipster Mike Pelling was an outstanding jockey. He prided himself on his honesty and integrity in a game that had its fair share of shadows. He would go on to win the Doomben 10,000 (on Unequalled and again on Laurie’s Lottery), the QTC Derby (Mr. Cromwell), the VRC Dalgety Stakes (also Mr. Cromwell) and a host of other races that elevated him to the very elite of Queensland jockeys.

He remembers Mona Lewis as a little old lady who obsessively frequented the track. ‘Mona was at the races every day and she’d dress herself up,’ remembers Pelling. ‘She was a lonely old lady. She ingratiated herself into racing – as if she was part of the race world – because she was the Police Commissioner’s mother. Because she was Lewis’s mother you had to be respectful. She was riding the coat tails of her son. That’s human nature.

‘She’d be clapping away if you rode a winner. She didn’t do anybody any harm. The place she was living in, the conditions she was living in, were disgraceful. It was a boarding house type of thing, a place cut into four flats at Hamilton.

‘If Mona Lewis had $50 in her pocket she would have thought she was a millionaire.’

As for giving racing tips to Mona Lewis, Pelling remains matter-of-fact. ‘Pat Duff wasn’t a punter, he was not a gambler,’ Pelling says. ‘I didn’t gamble. I never met Terry Lewis. And not once did I ever tip her [Mona] a horse in my life.’

Jack and Jack

Jack Herbert had only worked for Sydney businessman Jack Rooklyn for a handful of months in the 1970s before joining Tony Robinson and his in-line machine venture. He was doing nicely with the machines and also taking money from the illegal gambling joints run by the likes of Geraldo Bellino and Luciano Scognamiglio. But Jack Herbert loved money, and in February 1981, when Rooklyn paid him a visit, he could almost smell the dollar notes coming his way.

‘Tony Robinson and Jack Rooklyn appeared to be friendly but really they were great rivals,’ Herbert would write in his memoir. ‘Robinson’s in-line business was prospering at Jack Rooklyn’s expense. Rooklyn realised that a lot of this was down to me.

‘One morning Jack Rooklyn visited our office above the amusement arcade in Albert Street [in the Brisbane CBD]. Robinson and Rooklyn were sitting at my desk while I was busy answering the telephone. The air was full of cigar smoke.’

Robinson briefly left the office. ‘As soon as the door closed, Rooklyn took the cigar out of his mouth,’ said Herbert. ‘He spoke quickly and to the point. He asked me if I’d leave Robinson and work for him. He said he’d pay me more than I was getting from Robinson. At that moment the door opened and Rooklyn changed the subject.’

The deal was done, and Herbert took his considerable talents for organisation and identifying the sources and receipt of corrupt monies, over to Rooklyn of the Bally Corporation.

He had established his credentials with Rooklyn through the detrimental poker machine report the year before.

‘By now I was amassing large amounts of black money and laundering it through my racing contacts,’ Herbert said. ‘With this new-found wealth I bought two factories and two home units. One of them was a penthouse in Surfers Paradise.’

He claims he kept on paying Commissioner Lewis $2000 a month.

Slade Travels North

Tony Murphy, in charge of the Far Northern Region, had settled into Cairns and was getting the lay of the land. There were some familiar faces in town. The Bellinos had a nightclub, the House on the Hill, not far from the CBD. And Geoff Crocker, who ran a number of escort services in Brisbane, was also doing a similar brisk trade in this outpost of his empire. But Murphy needed some expert help and he summoned Jim Slade.

‘I was called up to Cairns and Tony Murphy said, “Look, we’ve got this massive area up here and no one’s policing it, I want to see what sort of intelligence you can get out of it”,’ he said.

It was precisely the sort of work Slade relished, and he threw himself into it. ‘I had this most incredible friend, Barry Petersen, a most highly decorated soldier in the Australian Army,’ recalls Slade. ‘He ran undercover for the Australian Army all through the Vietnam days … an incredible guy.’

Petersen in fact was awarded 13 medals for tours of Borneo, Malaysia and Vietnam, including the Military Cross. He led the mountain tribespeople of Vietnam against the Vietcong, kidnapping and killing Vietcong agents. His guerrilla unit became known as the ‘Tiger Men’. As it turned out, Petersen was extremely helpful to Slade.

‘I used to go up to Barry Petersen and say, “I’m doing an operation, I need a helicopter, I need fuel and I need four Gerry cans at this map reference and operate out of there for three lots of three hours”,’ Slade says. ‘Barry would have it there, I’d have an Army helicopter, all the Army supplies I wanted. I got on really well with Barry.’

Slade also delineated that the local drug scene had ‘gone up a level’. ‘By the early 1980s the Bellinos really started changing their interest from gaming and prostitution to drugs,’ he says. ‘A lot of the work that I did was to identify competition.

‘Everything was good until the Bellinos came in and then violence started to really erupt.’

Slade had a huge, and extremely dangerous, job ahead of him.

The Chairman Takes His Seat

There was debate, and a lot of it. Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen was adamant that his good friend and confidant, Sir Edward Lyons, be made the new Chairman of the TAB.

The Liberals in the Coalition were against it. Just as they levelled criticism at the Bjelke-Petersen Foundation when it was established in 1979, they now viewed Lyons’ prospective elevation to the top job as nothing short of nepotism. Indeed, Lyons himself had bragged in late 1980 that he would be the next chairman of the TAB. Seven Liberal ministers refused to sign the Executive Council minute ratifying Lyons’ appointment.

It didn’t matter. In early May 1981, Governor Sir James Ramsay gave his nod of approval to the appointment. The job came with a $48,000 per year salary.

In parliament on 6 May, Lindsay Hartwig, the independent member for Callide who had been controversially expelled from the National Party earlier in the year over his criticisms of Party president Sir Robert Sparkes, asked a string of questions of Russ Hinze, Minister for Local Government, Main Roads and Police.

What was Sir Edward Lyons’ correct age? What was the term of appointment of the new TAB Chairman? Would the compulsion of retiring at the age of 70 years as applied to hospital, electricity and other boards be enforced? And did the Minister agree with a statement made in a newspaper on the weekend of 2 May [1981] by Sir Robert Sparkes that the position of Chairman of the TAB was one of insignificance?

Hinze replied: ‘I understand that Sir Edward Lyons is 66 years of age. However, his age is not relevant to the appointment that has been made of Sir Edward as TAB Chairman under the current Act.

‘The term of the new board commences on 30 June 1981. Members of such board will continue to hold office until an appointment of members is made under the
Racing and Betting Act 1980–1981
.

‘If Sir Robert Sparkes was correctly quoted, I am sure that he was referring to relative significance. The position of chairman is important to me and, I am sure, to the racing industry. I am also sure that Sir Edward Lyons will fill the position with distinction.’

The topic was irresistible to the member for Archerfield, Kev Hooper.

He told parliament: ‘With the problems of identity that seem to have arisen in relation to the birth certificate of Sir Edward Lyons, named as the new head of the Totalisator Administration Board, perhaps the Premier, as one of the initiators of his appointment, may be able to clear up the present confusion.

‘I now ask the Premier: Is the Sir Edward Lyons named as chairman of the TAB the same person who acted as master of ceremonies at the wedding reception for one of his daughters? Is this Sir Edward Lyons also the same Edward Houghton Lyons who is remembered far from fondly by his old classmates at Nudgee College in the late 1920s as “Mossy” because of his apparent dislike of soap and water?’

While the last question may have amused the House, the Premier was far from pleased.

‘Sir Edward Lyons is a very good personal friend of mine, a very fine man, and a man whom the honourable member could, with credit to himself, take as an example.’

Lewis says he too was a close friend to Lyons, and that friendship was mutually beneficial: ‘Ted Lyons used to get in touch with me and I’d go down and see him and he was very, very friendly with Joh. So you picked up a bit of information as to who was doing what around the ridges, politically. Not that you needed it.

‘But I remember Lyons getting in touch with me once saying he had a problem up in Cairns that they couldn’t get a permit to do something, and you’d ring up and it’d be done. Nothing untoward.’

Lewis fondly remembers heading down to Lyons’ office in the T&G building on the corner of Queen and Albert streets and having a chinwag.

‘Yeah, he was an easy fellow to talk to,’ Lewis says. ‘I had to go down to the T&G building and have a couple of scotches with him after work. He sort of kept in touch with me and invited me to go down and have a drink and of course I’m always happy to go down and just listen to him ramble on about who he knew and what he knew.’

Just five days later, on Monday 11 May, Lewis saw Lyons and he discussed, according to his diary: ‘Kt’ [Knighthoods].

Considering Sir Edward already had one, the discussion may have been about a similar accolade for Terry Lewis of 12 Garfield Drive, Bardon.

Shot Dead in Their Bed

It didn’t take long for the North Queensland locals to give William Paul Clarke, a former Sydney leatherworker who had settled on a property off Pinnacle Road in the tiny hamlet of Julatten, a nickname. They dubbed him ‘Sarky’ because of his sarcastic nature.

Despite this character trait, it wasn’t hard to miss Clarke, 36, and his Latvian wife, Grayvyda Maria Clarke. Both were unemployed, yet they were often seen buying equipment for their 93-hectare property with rolls of cash.

Julatten, between Mareeba and Mossman, had a general store and a school to service the neighbouring farming community, and was famed for its natural beauty, its birdlife and, by the 1970s, its close proximity to thousands of hectares of illicit marihuana crops.

Sarky, a devotee of antique cars, many of which he sheltered in a shed on his property, was one of the region’s major growers. It was said he had a part-interest in another property – a cattle station at remote Portland Roads on Cape York, a former strategic base for United States servicemen during World War II right on the coast, where he grew huge quantities of marihuana in the wild sub-tropical jungles of the region. The crops were then transported by trawler. Clarke supposedly compressed the weed into blocks with a machine normally used to make concrete building blocks, then sealed them in steel drums with false tops, ready for exporting to the south. The A-frame farmhouse on Pinnacle Road was, it was believed, a sorting house for these massive quantities of dope.

On the night of Sunday 24 May 1981, the Clarkes went to bed as usual. They had been to a nearby horse fair that afternoon. Later, neighbours claimed to have heard the roar of a motorcycle echoing through the hills in the middle of the night.