Jacks and Jokers (57 page)

Hicks did indeed resign in late June. It had been an extraordinarily tumultuous career, his honesty ruffling the feathers of Hallahan in the late 1960s, the great quest for truth and transparency under the visionary Ray Whitrod, then the return to dark days for Hicks under Commissioner Lewis.

He had suffered meticulous and elaborate plans to bring him down personally and professionally, involving gossip, allegations of sexual impropriety with a prostitute and allegations he was crooked and protected SP bookmakers.

The exact day of his departure did not rate a mention in Commissioner Lewis’s diary.

A House on the Hill

Near the end of July, Constable Nigel Powell of the Licensing Branch was told to go home and pack a bag. There was a job on and he’d be heading outside of Brisbane.

At his Jindalee house, Powell was telephoned again by the office. Pack a bigger bag, they said. You might be away for a while.

‘They never used to tell us much, but we knew that Nev Ross and Harry Burgess were away. They were somewhere undercover in North Queensland.

‘We were all laughing and joking at the idea of Harry Burgess undercover. He was hopeless undercover. We worked out that we were going to Cairns and that it had something to do with the Bellinos.’

It was Saturday 24 July. The team met at the airport and boarded the police plane. ‘In the police plane, as you got up the stairs, was a seat facing the door,’ remembers Powell. ‘It was actually two seats, but the arm rest had been taken out so it became one seat. That was reserved for the Police Minister, Russ Hinze.’

As the plane took off it started heading south. The younger officers on board were confused. The plane was actually flying first to the Gold Coast to pick up the boss, Syd Atkinson.

‘He got on board and as we were taxiing on the runway it was like he was going to explode,’ says Powell.

‘So, do you know where you’re going?’ demanded Atkinson of the team. ‘Has anybody told anybody where you’re going?

‘There’s a game up there [in Cairns]. It’s run by guys from Brisbane. We’re going to bust some tables.’

Powell wondered about the raging Atkinson and the plan. He didn’t think it was good. He didn’t think that was the way the Licensing Branch did things. It was too aggressive.

The police plane arrived in Cairns and a meeting was held at the airport. Present was a local superintendent they called ‘One Ball’ McCall, on account of his peculiarly high voice, as well as Nev Ross and Harry Burgess. The two Licensing Branch officers told the team they’d been in the illegal casino they were about to raid – it was in a building called Traveltown on Lake Street, in the Cairns CBD – and they’d seen the layout. To Powell, the whole operation was a disaster in the making.

Atkinson again ‘went mental’ and laid down the law about smashing this illegal game.

‘We got there with a warrant,’ Powell recalls. ‘It was upstairs in a shopping centre. They had a roulette wheel in there and some tables. We pinched everybody. There were people from Brisbane that we knew in there. Allan Holloway who ran the World by Night club for the Bellinos in Brisbane. Geoff Crocker and his wife Julie.’

Crocker and Holloway had in fact set up the casino as a sort of joint venture and the first initiative in what they’d hoped would become a financially rewarding collaboration. Holloway came up with the idea of moving out of Brisbane and expanding in Queensland’s regional centres. Crocker had always wanted to go to Cairns.

Crocker and his wife rented, then bought a house in Cairns, and set up the Traveltown casino. ‘We had a carpenter in there working for us and I decided that Cairns was where I wanted to be and where I was going to stay, so I got the escort agency going and it never went real good but it was alright,’ remembered Crocker.

Holloway contacted Vic Conte in Brisbane about the gambling equipment for the illegal game.

Crocker said: ‘Holloway come back to Brisbane and seen Vic Conte and arranged for us to buy gear … cards, chips, cloths, all that sort of thing. A couple of days later it arrived up there on air freight and we picked it up. I think Vic even lent us some dealers. We opened up Traveltown and it took a little while but it started going very good.’

A few months later they noticed large numbers of young men trying to get into the casino to play and they grew suspicious. Were they undercover cops? They scaled back the business.

They’d spent $50,000 refurbishing it. Clients could enjoy blackjack, Manila, ‘Unders and Overs’, baccarat and ‘Crown and Anchor’.

What they’d found, eventually, was that the Cairns locals treated it like a nightclub and just preferred to sit around and drink and socialise. The joint was losing money hand over fist courtesy of the complimentary liquor consumption. Importantly, they weren’t paying police protection to run the game.

The raid took place just after 8.30 p.m. ‘It was pretty early in the evening,’ Julie Crocker later recalled. ‘When I say early, it was early because there was hardly anybody there. I was behind the bar and the next thing all these police come in, plainclothes police … and just said, “Don’t anybody move”, and they started taking down names and took everybody down to the watchhouse.’

She recognised at least one of the officers from Brisbane – Harry Burgess. ‘I can remember Harry because at one stage I was behind the bar when everybody was coming in and I looked up and I think I smiled at him and he sort of just walked away like he didn’t want to know me, so I just didn’t worry about it,’ she said.

Crocker couldn’t understand why the raid had taken place so early in the evening. Everyone was charged and processed, including Holloway and the Crockers. All pleaded guilty and were released on bail.

On the Sunday, the officers spent the day inspecting licensed premises and were off duty by 4 p.m. En masse, the crew then headed to a popular Cairns nightclub called the House on the Hill, a palatial club in an historic building quite literally just out of town and sitting on a hill. It was run by the Bellinos.

‘We went in there just as they were closing,’ Powell recalls. ‘There was half a dozen of us. They were shutting the doors but somebody said we were from the Licensing Branch and we were off duty.

‘The next thing out comes Vince Bellino. “No, no, no! Start up the fires again!” he said. We were looked after. We had steaks and drinks. Then we went back to the Railway Hotel where we were staying.’

The team headed back to Brisbane on the police plane the next day. For years Powell mulled over the purpose of the farcical raid.

‘They [Crocker and Holloway] hadn’t got permission [for the Traveltown casino],’ Powell says. ‘They’d exceeded their brief. The Licensing Branch was there to tell them that that wasn’t on. It’s the only explanation I can come up with.’

Bandits on Trial

Almost a year after their terrifying rampage through the streets of Brisbane, the two so-called ‘Bikie Bandits’ – Alfred Thompson and Steve Kossaris – went to trial in the Supreme Court before Justice Connolly. Both men faced a combined 26 charges for a string of armed robberies throughout the city.

During the two-week trial, Justice Connolly received a death threat. The
Sunday Sun
newspaper revealed that a man had approached a court security officer and warned him that Justice Connolly would be killed with a shotgun.

Counsel for Thompson and Kossaris moved that the trial be stopped. The jury was frightened, they said.

Justice Connolly would have none of it. ‘Do you think the administration of criminal law should come to an end just because somebody makes a threat?’ Justice Connolly asked. ‘Because some little hoon wanders in and makes some wild statement about releasing the judge from this vale to tears with a shotgun, are you suggesting that the trial cannot proceed? It is ridiculous.’

During the trial it was alleged that Thompson was the primary gunman in the armed robberies that had ‘sent shockwaves through the entire Queensland banking system’ and had induced terror in innocent civilians. Kossaris drove the getaway motorcycle.

The proceeds from the robberies amounted to almost $100,000 for Thompson and $37,000 for Kossaris. Virtually all of the money was spent by both men on heroin.

During the trial, there were extraordinary allegations that police had provided the defendants with heroin prior to their interrogation and the preparation of their formal statements, supposedly dictated by police.

Police said the statements of Thompson and Kossaris were made voluntarily. Justice Connolly dismissed the police evidence and rejected the statements.

Then clinical pharmacologist Dr P.J. Ravenscroft was called. Following the analysis of blood samples, he was decisive – the defendents had heroin in their systems during the time they were incarcerated in the Brisbane watchhouse following their early morning arrests.

Justice Connolly told the court: ‘It is, in my opinion, beyond question that both prisoners were injected with heroin between midday and midnight on November 19th [1981].

‘The fact that they were injected with heroin while in custody is, of course, a matter for concern, but it by no means follows that I should accept the view that the police are responsible for such a monstrous act as is charged against them.

‘I make no finding adverse to the police officers in relation to the heroin, but I repeat what I said earlier, that it is a matter of concern that persons in the watchhouse, or indeed anywhere in custody, could have access to dangerous drugs. No doubt the authorities will give some thought to this situation.’

Both Thompson and Kassaris were ultimately convicted of the offences. The jury took just 20 minutes to find them guilty. Justice Connolly said that despite the fact nobody was injured as a result of the robberies, the weapons used were loaded at the time of the offences. Thompson was jailed for 10 years. Kossaris got eight years.

Immediately after the trial, two senior public servants lodged a complaint about what would come to be known as the Brisbane Watchhouse Heroin Affair to the relatively new Police Complaints Tribunal, presided over by Justice Bill Carter.

‘We had dealt with other cases, quite minor stuff,’ recalls Carter. ‘There is no doubt that this was, I think I can say correctly, the most important case from a public point of view that we had to deal with.

‘After the conviction of Thompson and Kassaris, the public defender took the bit between the teeth and made the complaint to the tribunal.

‘We had to do our own investigation. I got Frank Clare [of the Crown Law Office] and Tom Pointing [of the police internal investigations section] to do the investigation. It was unprecedented as far as we knew.’

Bill Carter’s report would be done before Christmas. And there would be little cheer contained in it for the likes of Commissioner Lewis, Police Minister Russ Hinze and the Bjelke-Petersen government.

Ghosts

Commissioner Terry Lewis had a frenetic August and September in 1982 leading up to the Commonwealth Games being staged in Brisbane. Not only were 46 Commonwealth countries and territories competing, but the Duke of Edinburgh was to open the games on 30 September, and Queen Elizabeth would perform the closing honours on 9 October.

It had been almost 30 years since Lewis first saw the Queen in person. As a young constable he had stood at the corner of Albert and Turbot streets on 17 March 1954, to see the Royal couple passing through the city to the cheers and applause of the people of Brisbane. This time around, his circumstances were completely different.

Still, some ghosts from the same era would appear before Lewis began a whirl of Royal functions, cocktail parties and other Games-related ceremonies where he would rub shoulders with the nation’s elite, including Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser.

The first spectre from the past was the sudden death of former caretaker Commissioner Norwin [Norm] Bauer, the man who had taken Rat Packer Glen Hallahan under his wing when they worked together in western Queensland in the 1950s. Bauer had filled in briefly as Police Commissioner following the bizarre exit of the manifestly corrupt Frank ‘Big Fella’ Bischof.

Lewis recorded in his diary on Saturday 28 August: ‘… Noel McIntyre phoned re death of Bauer.’

Bauer had apparently been selling raffle tickets in Queen Street when he dropped dead on the spot of a massive heart attack. The funeral service for Bauer was held in St Paul’s Anglican Church in East Brisbane. Lewis attended with his sidekick, Inspector Greg Early.

Shortly after the ceremony, Lewis headed across the river to Parliament House where he had a meeting with Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen, Llew Edwards, Angus Innes, Bill Hewitt and others. They discussed, according to Lewis’s diary: ‘… Crawford Productions, changing ministers, Supreme Court Justices, Max Hodges, arrest over phone threats, majority verdicts for juries, Costigan, Q.C., Labor supporter …’

On that same day, ‘Hon. Hinze phoned re bullet-proof vest ordered for him’. The large Police Minister might have been worried about external threats, but maybe he should have been looking at assassins closer to home.

On Monday 13 September, Lewis had another meeting with the Premier and discussed, as his diary recorded, ‘not wanting Hon. Hinze’.

The second ghost appeared on the front page of the
Courier-Mail
on Saturday 18 September 1982. Across the top the newspaper was crowing an exclusive.