Jacks and Jokers (58 page)

Here were the explosive revelations of Sir Thomas Hiley, the former Deputy Premier and Queensland Treasurer under Frank Nicklin. Hiley, once a fancy dresser with a dandy’s cane and a flower in his lapel, had decided to speak out in his retirement that he was comfortably acquitting in Noosa Heads, north of Brisbane on the Sunshine Coast.

THE WILD MEN OF BRISBANE, the headline said. EXCLUSIVE: The Hiley File.

In part one of a three-part investigation, journalist and veteran crime reporter Ken ‘Digger’ Blanch explained that Hiley had finally decided to shine some light into Queensland’s shadowy police and political corners as a public service.

Hiley said: ‘… the public should be reminded of incidents that have occurred here in the last 40 years so that they may appreciate the chances of the same things being repeated on the much-expanded state of today.’

Part one dealt with the deep-seated corruption of Frank Bischof, former police commissioner, who had died in late 1979.

Under another headline on page 21 – THE CASE OF THE CORRUPT COMMISSIONER – Hiley laid out the misdeeds of Bischof in office, especially his extortion of SP bookmakers and his fraudulent behaviour at the racetrack, where he was a compulsive and exorbitant gambler.

As Blanch began: ‘Sir Thomas Hiley, former Queensland Treasurer and Deputy Premier, has no trouble recalling his worst mistake in public office. It was, he says, the day he voted for Frank Bischof to become Queensland’s Police Commissioner.’

It was only later that Sir Thomas discovered Bischof was bent ‘beyond belief’. He told Blanch that he thought the example set by Bischof might still be ‘white-anting some levels of the police force’.

Hiley went on to tell the story of the meeting with Premier Frank Nicklin, Minister responsible for Police, Alex Dewar, and himself at Parliament House in the 1960s, where Bischof’s corruption was outlined by Hiley. Bischof pledged to reform himself.

Hiley said in the article: ‘I have shown how a Police Commissioner was tempted by graft of the order of $400,000 a year. The present assemblage of opportunity could run to millions of dollars annually.

‘Some successor to Mr Hinze or Police Commissioner Lewis might find such a temptation irresistible.’

The scoop was a profound one for Ken Blanch, who knew Bischof and the Rat Pack well during the 1950s and 1960s. ‘I was up there at Noosa and spent several days with Hiley,’ Blanch recalls. ‘He told me the Bischof story. You know a lot of people don’t believe it but I think he was probably telling me the truth.’

He recalls:

People defended Bischof after this became public. Bischof had died by then, of course. They said … it’s picking on a dead man who couldn’t defend himself. They also argued there was no evidence of Bischof having had a lot of money when he died. Well that would be because of his bloody lifestyle, he used to bet on anything.

There were always certain coppers who would tell you the big fellow was bent but I never saw any evidence and without evidence you can’t do anything. I had a number of prostitutes contact me and told me they were being stood over for money by Glen Hallahan after the brothels closed [in the late 1950s]. But there again nobody would take any action on the word of a prostitute, that was why they came to the media.

I don’t know what I can tell you about Murphy without getting myself killed.

The front-page picture story beneath the Hiley exposé was headlined LOOK, IT’S JOH COOL.

The report documented Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen opening the new Corkscrew rollercoaster at entrepreneur Keith Williams’ Sea World Theme Park on the Gold Coast. Bjelke-Petersen could be seen stoically gripping the safety rail in the first carriage of the rollercoaster, his stony face unmoved during the ride. Beside him is his pilot, Miss Beryl Young.

He later said: ‘It was very good, pretty fantastic.’

He also paid tribute to Keith Williams as a ‘man who made things happen … You have achieved a tremendous amount in your short life,’ the Premier lauded the businessman.

Lewis was clearly perturbed by the revelations about his old boss, mentor and father figure, Frank Bischof. On that Saturday he went into the office and stayed there until 3.15 p.m. He received a call from rouseabout journalist Brian ‘The Eagle’ Bolton regarding the damning article on ‘the late F.E. Bischof’. Lewis also phoned his old newspaper mate Ron Richards about the Ken Blanch scoop. Richards was the newly appointed Managing Director of the
Daily Sun
/
Sunday Sun
, direct competitors to the
Courier-Mail
and the
Sunday Mail
.

The next day Lewis, with wife, Hazel, and son John Paul, headed across the river to Davies Park, home to the Souths Rugby League Club, than back to Lang Park for the local competition’s Grand Final.

The Lewises lunched with former Senator and head of Queensland Rugby League, Ron McAuliffe and then watched the big game. Wynnum Manly defeated Souths 17–3.

Lewis’s diary noted that he ‘visited Souths dressing room’ and later had ‘drinks with Ron’.

Still, the death of Bauer and then the public flaying of Bischof as a profoundly corrupt public official, must have given Commissioner Lewis pause for thought.

Wrath

If Kingsley Fancourt, one of the whistleblowers on the
Nationwide
television exposé in early 1982, thought his life would resume as per normal after the show went to air, he was sorely mistaken.

The other whistleblower, Bob Campbell, had fled with his family to remote southern Tasmania. Fancourt went back to his property on the gemfields outside Anakie in western Queensland.

Since he’d resigned from the police force in 1976, Fancourt was convinced his name had been blacklisted by both police and government. His suspicions were heightened when he applied for several mining leases outside Anakie. He pegged the lease areas and submitted his applications for the leases, through his solicitor Dale Smith.

Fancourt was swiftly informed that his applications had been unsuccessful. He received a short, personal letter from Mines, Energy and Police Minister Ron Camm that his applications were ‘not in the interests of the public’. The leases were granted to another miner. ‘They were taken off me,’ says Fancourt.

Fancourt was advised by his local mining warden to appeal and the leases would revert to him. At a cost of about $2000 per lease to make the applications to appeal, he backed away. ‘It broke me financially,’ says Fancourt.

Following his star turn on
Nationwide
, Fancourt found himself under attack on several fronts. He had a small gold lease in Monto, about 500 kilometres north-west of Brisbane. ‘I was behind on my rent and I got a phone call to say that all my gear at the mine was being repossessed and auctioned,’ says Fancourt. ‘Usually when you’re behind they just send you dirty letters for two or three years and then everything’s fine. But they repossessed everything. I had a 28-ton excavator and a loader and the plant itself. That cost me over $400,000.

‘This is how the bastards get to you without pointing a gun and pulling a trigger.’

Gravely, there were four attempts on Fancourt’s life after the corruption show aired on national television. On three occasions the wheel nuts on his car were loosened. Twice the wheels flew off when Fancourt was travelling at high speed but he was not injured. The brake lines on one of his trucks were also severed.

In the end, the pressure took a terrible toll on his wife Val and their four children.

The marriage disintegrated.

The Candidate

Towards the end of 1982, ALP chief of staff and mover and shaker Malcolm McMillan received a surprising phone call in his office in the city. At the other end of the line was Assistant Commissioner [Crime], Tony Murphy.

McMillan had encountered Murphy when he had been in charge of the Longreach district, 1176 kilometres north-west of Brisbane, banished there by then Commissioner Ray Whitrod in the early 1970s. McMillan had been visiting the town with MP Tom Burns, when Murphy had shown up at their motel late one night, offering his low opinion of Whitrod and Police Minister Max Hodges.

‘He … just oozed self-confidence,’ says McMillan. ‘And he oozed guile. He … was regarded by his contemporaries in the police force as a brilliant detective in the CIB, but had an extraordinary way of engaging.’

In 1982 McMillan says ‘ … suddenly out of the blue he called me in my office and said, “Could we have a drink?” When you’re in [political] Opposition you talk to everybody.’ Information was gold.

McMillan recalls he and Murphy met at a hotel in the Brisbane CBD: ‘During that conversation where it was only he and I there, he said to me that he held a silent ALP membership in Toowoomba. That’s a member where you’re on the books but you never go to meetings and you never sort of talk about it.’

McMillan says Murphy then surprised him further. ‘He said he’d like to run for state parliament at the next election in 1983 and, in particular, against Rosemary Kyburz in her seat of Salisbury,’ McMillan says.

Murphy, following a year that punished his reputation, was toying with the idea of resigning from the force. He had always known he would never make Police Commissioner – his past and his reputation for speaking his mind probably precluded him from the top job and over time he accepted his lot.

By calling McMillan with his extraordinary proposal, he may have been planning ahead for future employment. But why the ALP, given his staunch loyalty to Bjelke-Petersen’s regime during his time as a senior officer?

The Joke already had an ear in parliament in Don ‘Shady’ Lane. Was the consortium thinking ahead, hedging its bets, and looking at securing a friend in the Labor Party as well, should they ever take power?

‘What do you think my … chances would be?’ Murphy asked McMillan.

The political operative was frank. ‘Virtually none,’ he told Murphy.

Ultimately, the successful ALP candidate for the seat Murphy had his eye on at the 1983 state election was a lawyer by the name of Wayne Keith Goss.

Slade Gathers Some Dirt

A year after entrenching himself in the Far North Queensland drug rings, Detective Jim Slade was becoming something of an expert on the illicit drug trade. During most of September, Slade had criss-crossed the Far North gathering intelligence. He logged 27 hours of flying time in both light aircraft and helicopters. He logged a further 16 hours in police vessels and private launches around Aurukun, False Pera Head, Lockhart River and the Bloomfield River.

He also spoke to many dozens of people and concluded that Far North Queensland was being used ‘extensively for the landing of illegal immigrants and importation of illegal drugs’.

The next month he furnished a report for the sitting Royal Commission of Inquiry into Drug Trafficking, presided over by Justice Donald Stewart of New South Wales. The inquiry, hot on the heels of the Williams Royal Commission, was sparked by the murders of Douglas and Isabel Wilson, and was charged with investigating Terry Clark’s so-called Mr Asia drug trafficking syndicate.

In a covering letter to Slade’s report, dated 13 October, his boss Tony Murphy affirmed that the information ‘would be of vital interest’ to Justice Stewart. It was an irony that he would recommend intelligence to the commission, given that it was Murphy’s actions in leaking confidential material on the Wilsons to Brisbane journalist Brian Bolton in 1979 that had most probably resulted in their murders.

Murphy had given evidence to the commission three months earlier. As he pointed out in the covering letter: ‘I also made certain recommendations to His Honour suggesting ways of introducing a more effective enforcement in the area.’

It was typical of Murphy to counter any criticism of his work – namely the Wilson leak – with direct, forthright, even imposing assistance to the Stewart commission. He had always attacked when he felt threatened.

Slade had some pertinent observations for the commission of inquiry. He recommended the formation of an ‘intelligence cell’ based in Cairns.

‘This could be made up of members of the Queensland Police Bureau of Criminal Intelligence and Customs Intelligence,’ Slade wrote. ‘This squad would monitor fauna and flora in and out of North Queensland area, illegal drug importation and the movement of local marihuana. This squad would then have the responsibility of farming this information to the areas when it would have the most effect.’

Slade warned that the vast majority of people he’d spoken to in Far North Queensland had never been approached by authorities in terms of the illegal movements of planes and boats. He suggested cultivating a ‘network of intelligence gatherers’ comprised of responsible members of the community – teachers, nurses, station owners and mission personnel.

He also recommended a complete revision of the current coastal surveillance methods. Slade noted that the amount of intelligence he had gathered from the field was ‘staggering’.

Confiding in the Pom

By the end of 1982, the prostitute Katherine James was attempting to set up her own massage parlour – Xanadu – in Stanley Street at the Gabba.