Authors: Matthew Condon
The officer nominated three casinos in Fortitude Valley ‘within walking distance of the Valley Area Office Police Headquarters’, another in South Brisbane and one each in Cairns and Townsville that operated ‘unhindered’. Hooper read the letter aloud:
Despite the [Brisbane]
Sunday Mail
having published the actual addresses of these casinos why is the only Police presence at some a red Falcon sedan (attached to the CIB Consorting Squad), driven by the same notorious, grossly overweight Detective Sergeant?
Why is it that this officer … and his sidekick a Detective Senior Constable, also of ample proportions, drink, gamble and disappear into back rooms of these premises with management but not take any action to close same?
Why do the same Consorting Squad duo plus many other detectives and indeed members of the Queensland National Party drink and socialize at the following Bellino controlled premises – premises which sell alcohol well after 3 am despite having no liquor licence to trade to 3 am?
Hooper, courtesy of the anonymous author, named the World By Night strip club at Petrie Bight, Pharoah’s nightclub in Adelaide Street, the Hollywood Disco in Elizabeth Street and the Cockatoo Bar in Ann Street, Fortitude Valley.
There were a few final questions from the whistleblower: ‘Why is it when Jeri [sic] Bellino was recently confined to bed for a series of examinations at Auchenflower’s Wesley Hospital that two National Party ministers as well as the ever vigilant Consorting Squad duo call on him to cheer him up?’
The officer wasn’t done with the Bellino family and the inference that some members of the National Party were on friendly terms with an alleged vice king. ‘A final parting question,’ he wrote, ‘that only a body outside of Queensland, such as a Federal Senate Select Committee of Inquiry can answer truthfully, is: Did the National Party Queensland State Director receive a $50,000 cash donation at his Spring Hill office on the morning of Thursday Sept. 8th, and was this donation from the Bellino family?’
The officer concluded his letter: ‘I regret that I cannot authorize the publication of my name and address; I have a family to support and we would all like to live a little longer.’
Hooper deemed that if such an inquiry was held, it would open a Pandora’s box that would ‘bring the government down’.
The impact of Hooper’s damning allegations was close to nil. After his speech, parliamentarians greeted distinguished chamber visitor Dr S. Langi Kavaliku, Minister for Education, Works and Civil Aviation, Disaster Relief and Rehabilitation in the Government of Tonga.
That day, Commissioner Lewis recorded in his diary that he had a meeting with Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen and Police Minister Bill Glasson where they discussed a range of topics, including ‘loyalty of most Police’.
The following week, Lewis’s usual peripatetic schedule saw him fly to Canberra for the day on a conference, take in an early round of Yuletide parties, dine with his assistant Greg Early and Michael Gambaro at the famous restaurateur’s seafood eatery in Caxton Street, and visit as usual his old friend and advisor ‘Top Level’ Ted Lyons in his offices in Queen Street, the city.
Life didn’t just get back to normal; it had never been interrupted in the first place.
Interlopers
As Royal Commissioner Frank Costigan, QC, began delivering his interim reports following years of investigating the Painters and Dockers Union, tax evasion schemes and other related criminal activities, debate arose over the establishment of a crime-fighting body on a national scale. Former prime minister Malcolm Fraser was behind the idea, as was his successor Bob Hawke. The idea was to have the National Crime Authority (NCA) up and running by late 1984, when Costigan would have handed down his final reports. Costigan’s findings, along with those of Justice Stewart and his own commission of inquiry into Terrance Clark and the Mr Asia drug syndicate, highlighted the need for a more sophisticated approach to tackling organised crime.
In September 1983 Federal Cabinet agreed to convene a joint Attorneys-General and Police Ministers’ Conference to discuss the establishment of the NCA and how it would work. From the outset, the Queensland government resisted the idea and foreshadowed not cooperating with any Federal crime body.
Bob Gibbs, the Labor member for Wolston, couldn’t understand the National Party’s reluctance to joining the fight against organised crime. He took Queensland Minister for Justice and Attorney-General Neville Harper to task over the issue. ‘A number of weeks ago without any consultation with the Federal Government and very little consultation with his departmental officers … he [Harper] made one of the most ridiculous attacks that I have ever heard on the proposed establishment by the Federal Government of a national crimes authority in Australia,’ Gibbs told the House.
‘The authority is an absolute must if there is to be a combined effort by the State and the Commonwealth to combat organised crime, particularly the activities of organised drug rings in this nation. The Minister [Harper] said that he would not support it and that the Queensland Government would not support it.’
Gibbs informed the House that any investigation carried out in Queensland by the NCA could only be executed with the consent of, and in consultation with, the State Attorney-General. Gibbs added that he was ‘amazed’ at the government’s lack of support for the initiative, given that prior to the recent state election it spruiked how it would take a hard line against drug peddlers. ‘Yet, when the government has the opportunity to join with the other state governments and with the other Attorneys-General to discuss the guidelines for the National Crime Authority, it rejects the proposal out of hand,’ Gibbs went on.
‘I wonder why? Is it, as some of my colleagues have implied in this Assembly previously, that there is some sort of link between the National Party and organised crime in this state?’
Falls the Shadow
Lewis was always a busy Commissioner, rarely pinned behind his desk and constantly on the move, visiting remote police stations throughout Queensland, briefing his minister, taking on board operational matters, and fitting in a dizzying calendar of social events that ranged across charities, businesses, government and community events.
In November 1983, he continued to work at full throttle. According to his diaries, on Monday 14 November, for example, he got a phone call from the head of Queensland Rugby League, Ron McAuliffe, ‘re: money to keep M[al] Meninga in Qld as Souths Club has gone broke’. Later that evening he telephoned the Premier in relation to ‘3 queries by him’. They included: ‘… Painters and Dockers involvement in Drugs; Comalco or Capalaba branches of Westpac loaning money for drugs, & Drug Squad cooperating with Costigan Royal Commissioner’. The following day he squeezed in a lunch with local kung-fu school director and businessman, Malcolm Sue.
On Wednesday 16 November, Lewis had lunch with ‘Hon. [Don] Lane’ and discussed ‘Police Union, Police Minister, Summ. Offences Act’. The following morning the Commissioner ‘phoned Wayne Goss re meeting snr. officers’, then he headed down to the headquarters of the
Sunday Sun
newspaper in Brunswick Street, Fortitude Valley, for a ‘luncheon with Ron Richards, 6 staff and 4 other guests including Premier’. On Monday 21 November, he had lunch with his former assistant commissioner Tony Murphy.
A week later, Lewis recorded: ‘With Snr. Officers saw W.K. Goss, D.J. Hamill and P. Comben, ALP members for Salisbury, Ipswich and Windsor re liaison generally.’ The following day in State Parliament, the young Goss, opposition police spokesman, acknowledged the meeting with the Commissioner of Police – on the eve of Lewis’s seventh year anniversary in the top job – and used the moment to fire a shot across the bow of the government.
I am pleased to have had an opportunity to meet with the Police Commissioner [Mr Lewis] and his senior officers and also separately with the Police Union Executive. I am confident that contact with such men will ensure that I am better equipped to carry out my role as Opposition spokesman.
However, I sound a note of warning and warn the police force to guard against further attempts by the Premier to manoeuvre the police into a partisan political position for his own dubious political motives. For it is both the community and the image of the police force which suffer when the Premier gives illegal and improper directions to the police force, whether they be to prevent citizens from exercising basic rights of free speech and assembly, or whether they involve vexatious and spiteful investigations against his political opponents.
Goss also saw fit to quote T.S. Eliot’s famous poem, ‘The Hollow Men’. ‘There is a yawning gap between what this Government says and what it does, between the flowing promises and the actuality, between the expensive public relations brochures and the truth,’ said Goss.
Goss then castigated the government for ignoring the 1977 Lucas Report, describing it as a ‘discarded rag doll that is occasionally thrown around when some new outrage surfaces’. Lucas had recommended that police records of interview be tape recorded to avoid the possibility of police verballing.
Furthermore, Goss declared that there was a ‘shadow’ between ‘the laws that this government is prepared to pass to regulate the freedoms of its citizens and the absence of regulation when it comes to powerful interests’.
In a colourful but stinging address, he quoted the words of American actor James Cagney as befitting the Bjelke-Petersen regime’s mentality: ‘Steal a buck and they put you in gaol, steal a million and they call you sir!’
Goss was just 32. He was the new member for Salisbury. A lawyer and civil libertarian, he had an intellectual brio that seemed a natural progression from the larrikinism of Kev Hooper. And he lost no opportunity to remind Bjelke-Petersen that the Premier’s regime belonged to a lost era. It did not sit comfortably in modern Queensland.
‘I am of a generation of Queenslanders whose adult life has never known any system of government other than the present unresponsive and shambling machine,’ Goss said. ‘Too long a period of arrogant and unresponsive rule can numb the mind and deaden the heart. We must work hard to overcome this.’
I’ll Tell You What to Say
Commissioner Terry Lewis was criss-crossing town in late 1983 during the usual hectic Christmas Party season. His appointments diary was a blizzard of lunches, dinners and cocktail parties. On Monday 12 December he had a lunch aboard the MV
Mantaray
as a guest of solicitors Power and Power, then it was over to Parliament House for one of the big ones of the year – the Police Minister’s Christmas function. There, Lewis met Minister Bill Glasson’s new press secretary Robert Stewart.
Stewart would later recall the moment. ‘Being new to the position, I made a point of introducing myself to the various people present at this function and at some point found myself in the company of the Police Commissioner, his assistant Greg Early and as I recall, the Commissioner’s driver,’ Stewart said.
‘During my discussions with the Commissioner, I recall him saying words to the effect “that insofar as statements by the Minister regarding police matters are concerned, I’ll tell you what to say”.’
Stewart was taken aback.
‘While I was aware that some matters had to be checked with the Commissioner’s office, I gained what I viewed as a clear impression to have everything checked with the Commissioner’s office before the Minister issued a statement,’ he said.
‘In my mind the comments made by the Commissioner were presumptuous and I indicated to him in quite clear terms that I would only be guided by the Minister. My recollection is that I told him words to the effect that I would check facts and figures with him, but what the Minister said was strictly a matter for the Minister.’
Stewart was naturally suspicious of Lewis, and the two would cross paths in the future. As for the Commissioner, Glasson’s Christmas drinks only held him until 6 p.m.
As his diary recorded: ‘… with D/C Atkinson to TAB Bldg, Albion re The Totalisator Administration Board of Queensland Cocktail Party …’
Bubbles
The prostitute Katherine James had learned a hard and expensive lesson when she tried to set up her own massage parlour outside the strict jurisdictions of the Brisbane vice scene in late 1982. By that stage, brothels, escorts and illegal gambling were in the control of two groups – the Hector Hapeta and Anne Marie Tilley consortium, and ‘the Syndicate’ run by the Bellinos and Vic Conte.
James thought that her independent enterprise, Xanadu, in Stanley Street, Woolloongabba, had been given the nod by corrupt Queensland police, so she went ahead with costly renovations. The brothel happened to be a short distance from a rival Hapeta/Tilley establishment.
Within weeks Xanadu was receiving so much police attention that it was impossible to conduct any sort of business. It was dead in the water before it had even started. James had messed with The Joke and its tangled relationship with the city’s vice figures. She never went out on her own again.
After the Xanadu experiment failed, she briefly went overseas before returning to Brisbane. She knew if you couldn’t beat them, you joined them, so she started work with the syndicate. ‘I approached Geoff Crocker [who ran the escort agencies and brothels for the group] … and asked for a job,’ she recalled years later. ‘He employed me … for the next 18 months . . . I did work for all of the houses which were in the syndicate.’