Authors: Matthew Condon
Other brothels in the empire to that point included the big house on the steep slope at Sankey Street, Highgate Hill, a house in Duke Street, Kangaroo Point, Club 29 on Sandgate Road at Albion, Caesar’s Bathhouse in Wellington Road in East Brisbane, another old Queenslander at 81 Sylvan Road, Toowong, and Bubbles Bath House beneath the illegal casino at 142 Wickham Street.
‘The reason that I say I was working for a syndicate was that all of the houses that I worked for … were linked by two-way radio and every house had a list of other houses which the manageress could ring to get assistance with staff,’ said James.
Eventually, James became a trusted member of the group. Every Wednesday at 10 a.m. she attended a meeting in an office under Bubbles Bath House in the Valley. At that meeting the money from the brothel network was counted and the books balanced. She said Geoff and Julie Crocker did the books for the massage parlours. Others covered the escort agencies, strip clubs and gambling houses. She claimed that every fortnight, on average, Gerry and Tony Bellino would drop by during the meeting.
‘You had to gain entrance to the office from the side street,’ James remembered. ‘There is no internal access from Bubbles Bath House on the floor above. There is one fairly large room which had lounge suites in it. This big room would also contain bits and pieces such as filing cabinets up one end and some gym equipment. The office where the meeting took place also had in it a large board with keys on it. These were the spare keys to all the parlours and other businesses which were run by the syndicate.’
James estimated that the syndicate was taking in – across its various interests – about $100,000 per week. She said about 20 per cent of that went to corrupt police. ‘I knew this from conversations that I had with Geoff and Julie Crocker and Gerry Bellino … nobody told me, however, to whom the monies were paid or when,’ James said. ‘I saw evidence of payments myself in that it was obvious to me that the owners were never prosecuted for prostitution offences. In fact, the receptionists [who] were booked for keeping offences had been paid $500 for taking the booking and also had their fines paid for them.’
She said police were constant visitors to the syndicate’s brothels. ‘During routine visits by police, it was commonplace to give them food and drink,’ she remembered. ‘We had fridges upstairs and downstairs and there was always food available for the clients. I don’t recall that the girls got booked there very often at all . . . I was never booked while I was with the syndicate.
‘I do not recall any searches by the police for drugs. I recall occasions when the police would come in and see a girl was stoned on drugs. In those cases, they would simply order the person in charge of the house to send her home.’
Meanwhile, across the river in the Police Club, Commissioner Terry Lewis was telling leading businessmen, senior police, hoteliers and journalists that Queensland had one of the ‘highest crime clean-up rates in the world’. Lewis put the state figure at 51 per cent. ‘We are fortunate in this state in having the support of a very large proportion of the public,’ Lewis crowed. ‘This has certainly made our job easier – and assisted the clear-up rate.’
A proud Commissioner Lewis said the local academy was turning out ‘some of the finest police officers in Australia’. He added: ‘While I am on record as saying that we are understaffed and could well use an additional 450 officers immediately, our relatively small handful of 4600 police officers – spread throughout this vast state – is doing a magnificent job.
‘I have read most of the annual reports of police forces around the world, and the only ones I could find with a slightly better clear-up rate [than that of Queensland] were a couple of small ones in England.’
A Curious Case in Dunmore Terrace
Peter Gallagher was a no-nonsense style of copper. He joined the Queensland force in 1964, starting out in radio communications, then worked out of Roma Street headquarters. After a couple of stints in Ipswich and then Charters Towers in the far north, Gallagher was brought back to Brisbane. He worked on the drunks wagon for a while before joining Commissioner Frank Bischof’s notorious Bodgie Squad, tasked with keeping the city’s recalcitrant youth on the straight and narrow. ‘We used to ride the last buses at night, the last trains, looking for trouble,’ remembers Gallagher.
He was soon working for the Burglary Squad which, in turn, evolved into the Consorting Squad. He would later do a stint on the Gold Coast before being promoted to sergeant 2/c at the CIB in Brisbane. ‘I used to get a lot of shoplifters because I knew the security officers at David Jones, Myer, McDonnell & East,’ he remembers. ‘So they used to ring [me] because they knew that I would bloody-well go prosecute the bastards.’
Gallagher’s reputation for hard work was so fierce that younger officers would call in sick if they were rostered on with him. ‘They knew that we’d bloody work eight hours,’ he says.
On Thursday 19 January 1984, Gallagher arrived at work just prior to 6 a.m. to find a distressed young Indigenous man sitting in the foyer of police headquarters. The boy had a complaint he wanted to make. ‘Ricky Garrison was his name,’ recalls Gallagher. ‘I said, “What’s your go?” And he said, “Oh, I was picked up by a bastard named Breslin [in the early hours of 19 January] … and they took me to this place in Auchenflower …”
‘My ears pricked up because I knew [Paul John] Breslin was an impersonator of police and also a … harbourer of police. A lot of the deadbeats used to go down there and get grog at his place when he lived down near the Botanic Gardens [in Alice Street, the CBD].
‘I said to this kid, “How did you get down here?” He said they let him go and he got a taxi … and I said, “Can you take me out to this place?” and he said, “Yeah, yeah … I’ll take you out.”’
In his statement Garrison alleged that he had been picked up the night before near the Victoria Bridge and taken to the salubrious Coronation Towers at 24 Dunmore Terrace, Auchenflower. Paul Breslin, the Ford Motor Company executive and friend to several Queensland police, courtesy of his Police Club membership, had purchased unit 24 off the plan, although he still had the unit in Alice Street. The Coronation Towers unit, in the early 1980s, was occupied by his mother, Margaret Rose Breslin, known to everyone as Peg.
Gallagher and a team of police headed for unit 24 along with Ricky Garrison. By this time it was mid-morning. ‘I went to the body corporate, the manager, to get a plan of the unit so I knew when the fellows that I took with me went in, I could say you go there, you go there, you go there and do this,’ says Gallagher. ‘And you wouldn’t believe it, [according to the manager] the bloody unit was owned by [Commissioner] Terry Lewis.’ (The manager was mistaken. Lewis had once owned unit 22B, an investment property in the other tower from Breslin’s unit, and had sold it years before the Garrison incident.)
The police proceeded to unit 24. ‘We knocked on the door and there was no answer and there were three deadlocks and an ordinary lock on it,’ says Gallagher. ‘I walked over to this manager and I said, “Who’s the bloke in there?”
‘“Oh,” he said, “that’s Breslin”, and his car was … Garrison pointed his car out … in the garage underneath. As I was coming back I happened to look up at the unit and I saw some bloke looking out through the curtains. So this is nice, three deadlocks and a bloody ordinary lock … Christ, what do I do now?’
Former Special Branch operative Barry Krosch was also on the raid. ‘This Aboriginal boy walked in and said he had been kidnapped while he was walking across one of the [cross river] bridges,’ he says. ‘I think he said he was drugged and then sexually molested in a unit. This boy actually showed us the unit … I think he left a mark of some sort on it when he left or escaped.
‘About six detectives attended. We knocked on the door and there was no response. The senior officer [I think] was an old-school detective, Senior Sergeant Gordon Duncan, also known as ‘Burri’ Duncan. Burri telephoned a locksmith mate of his. The fellow arrived and opened the door. The allegation was so serious you could do that … in law, it’s called “fresh pursuit”.’
The police stormed the unit and eventually discovered Breslin in the bedroom. ‘Anyway, we raced in and Breslin is in bed, he’s pretending he’s in bed, and he’s got … these airline masks, that they give overseas people, on and he’s [saying] … “Oh, what’s wrong? What’s wrong?”’ says Gallagher.
‘I went into his room and he had some Vaseline type of stuff there. I said, “You got the market cornered for this stuff? Who else was in here?”
‘He said nobody, so I had a look … I took possession of this lounge where the kid was and [the] scientific fellows found sperm on it and the kid’s shirt, they found sperm on it. And they’d masturbated on his face and all this type of shit.’
Krosch recalls: ‘We searched the unit. I found a photo album containing pics of [Constable] Dave Moore in various states of undress. In one, he wore his police cap. In another, he had his police baton stuck between his legs a la penis. I also clearly remember picking that photo album off a book case. I clearly remember two pics … especially one of Moore on his back … in the nude … with the baton stuck between his legs.’
Gallagher says there appeared to be immediate heat on him over the Garrison investigation. ‘The harassment started,’ he says. ‘They kept saying to me – I think there were five inspectors – called me over for an interview because of taking this lounge suite. And I said well, you know, it was lawful, the thing was found on it. I said I didn’t act unlawfully at all … anyway, we got the lounge suite back to him and … I took out a summons for him, for Breslin.’
Krosch adds: ‘I know that photo album was shown to the Commissioner of Police the next day.’ (Lewis’s Commissioner’s diaries, however, place him on the Gold Coast on annual leave. He would not return to the office until Thursday 26 January.)
It wasn’t until Friday 9 March that Lewis recorded in his diary he’d been telephoned by Welfare Services Minister Geoff Muntz ‘re raid on Paul Breslin on 19.1.84 re Drugs’. Breslin had in fact been charged with administering Garrison with stupefying drugs on or around 19 January.
It wouldn’t be until the end of the year that the public had any inkling about the Breslin and Moore scandal.
Breslin says the allegations against him were a fabrication. ‘I was collateral damage,’ he claims.
In Strictest Confidence
In early February 1984, Kevin ‘Buckets’ Hooper, the member for Archerfield, was hitting his straps during the first sittings for the year in state parliament, railing at police corruption and the vice dens in Fortitude Valley.
He was also taking his characteristic pot shots at the National Party. Nobody was safe from a Hooper arrow. While discussing the Police Act Amendment Bill, Hooper told parliament that the Police Ministry was too important to be merely tacked onto a long list of other ministerial responsibilities. He said it should be dealt with singularly, and by a senior minister who was ‘underworked’. ‘The Deputy Premier and Minister Assisting the Treasurer [Bill Gunn] comes to mind,’ Hooper quipped.
Hooper again blasted Police Minister Glasson and Commissioner Lewis’s department by stating that ‘some of the dens in Fortitude Valley’ – the illegal games and massage parlours that ‘didn’t exist’ – were not raided frequently enough.
‘I will stick my neck out by telling the Minister about one high-ranking police officer who visits some of these places regularly,’ Hooper went on. ‘He drinks beer there and even plays some of the gambling games. I refer to Detective Sergeant Ross Beer of the Consorting Squad … If he frequents a place and drinks with the proprietor, he must know what is going on. The Minister should immediately get Commissioner Lewis to ask Detective Sergeant Beer what he is doing on licensed premises without making an arrest.’
Two days later, Police Minister Glasson chastised Hooper in parliament, calling his attack on Beer and other police ‘cowardly’. ‘Does Mr Hooper expect detectives to find criminals attending church on Sunday?’ asked Glasson. ‘Obviously, in this line of work, Consorting detectives must visit places where criminals congregate. To imply that they are abusing their role as police officers by doing so is again a malicious slander. Detective Sergeant Beer is a fine and efficient officer.’
Beer told the
Telegraph
newspaper that Hooper’s informants had ‘given him a bum steer’. ‘I deny all of these allegations, and can only assume Mr Hooper and his informant have me mixed up with some other person. I am not a punter except for one or two bets a year on the Melbourne Cup or a big race. As for gambling, I can’t even play 500 or euchre, so I would have no hope of mastering complex gambling games.’
Commissioner Lewis recorded in his diary that he got a call from Judge Eric Pratt about Hooper’s comment ‘re D/S Beer’.
Was there anything that could stop the irascible Kevin Hooper?
His electorate office in Inala, south-west of the Brisbane CBD, had become over the years a virtual confessional for disaffected police, prostitutes, street spivs and people on the fringe of the underworld. They all beat a path to his door, the working man’s friend, who regularly offered his ear.
His desk was invariably covered in an assortment of paperwork, Spirax notebooks and ruled Queensland Legislative Assembly stationery, all covered in his large, unwieldy handwriting, the tableaux flecked with question marks. Who ran prostitution and gambling in Brisbane? Was this apparently wealthy suburban businessman the city’s leading drug dealer? How did drugs get into Queensland? And how could certain people escape prosecution in the full glare of police attention?