Authors: Matthew Condon
The amended volume was finally published in late 1984. The Campbell passages were deleted.
While there were two Campbells cited in the newly revised index, Walter Campbell was not one of them.
Laurie Muller says the publicity probably did them and the book a favour. The second print run of the book was bigger than the first. ‘I’d taken on the job of publisher at UQP as apolitical as you can get,’ he says. ‘After the monstering of Ross Fitzgerald’s book, I decided to get proactive. Let’s get stuck into them. I’m just about sure my phone was tapped then for close to a year.’
Queensland had become a state where, if historical fact between the covers of a book was unpalatable to the regime, it was summarily removed.
The Little Man’s Friend
On Sunday 4 March 1984 it was business as usual in the Inala household of colourful MP, Kev Hooper. Hooper’s wife, Terri (he gave her the unusual nickname of ‘Knackers’), had prepared a Sunday roast, and Hooper’s brother John (he called him ‘Jackie’) and his wife Helen had popped over for dinner.
During the meal, Hooper complained of feeling unwell. His face was ruddier than usual, and his neck was swollen. ‘What do you think it is, Knackers?’ he asked his wife.
‘You look like you have the mumps. You should see your doctor.’
Hooper said he’d already done that, and was booked in to hospital later in the week for a biopsy. Brother John promised to pick him up and take him. The brothers spoke by telephone during the week before the appointment. Kev asked his brother if he had a suitable ‘port’ or carry bag he could take to the hospital. John borrowed one off their sister Marie.
Early in the week Hooper stopped to have a chat with a journalist in the corridor outside the Press Room in Parliament House. ‘You know, I’m not well, but I’ve just got to go in for this simple operation,’ Hooper supposedly said. ‘All it is, is a blockage in a vein and they just have to bypass that. Anyway, it will all be over in a few days.’
On Wednesday 7 March, Hooper met
Sunday Mail
journalist Ric Allen at the Breakfast Creek Hotel. Allen had beer. Hooper drank soda water. The two men discussed the stories they’d done together over the years, from the Lorelle Saunders saga to ‘Teddy Lyons and his problem with drink-driving’.
The next day, John Hooper picked up his brother and they headed into the city. ‘You know, Jackie,’ Kev said thoughtfully. ‘Apart from the gash on my bum and the odd hangover, I have never really been sick in my life. I have never had a headache.’
The brothers arrived at the entrance to the Prince Charles Hospital in Chermside, just north of the city. ‘I opened the boot to get his port and he said he wanted to carry it himself,’ says John. ‘When he bent over to pick up the port he was purple. As we walked through the front door I realised why he wanted to carry the port. All the wardsmen were saying, “Good day, Kev”. They would have been members of the Miscellaneous Workers’ Union.’
At the hospital reception, Hooper was asked to fill out the usual admission forms. One asked him to nominate his ‘religion’. ‘I’ll put none,’ Kev said.
‘Hedge your bet,’ John said. ‘Just to be on the safe side, put Roman Catholic.’
Hooper went to his room and John returned to see him later that evening. ‘He was sitting up in bed in his new pyjamas and dressing gown,’ John remembers. ‘He told me he was thirsty and asked me to get him a soft drink. I got him two cans of lemonade. We had a natter and he said he was having his biopsy early the following morning.’
They discussed what the doctors might find. ‘If there is anything sinister there I wouldn’t want to linger,’ Big Kev, as he was known, confided in his brother.
‘At this stage it’s only a biopsy,’ John said. ‘We can cross that bridge when we come to it.’ The two men shook hands. ‘Mate, you’ll be okay,’ John assured him. ‘I’ll see you after the biopsy tomorrow.’
The next morning, John and his wife were urgently summonsed to the Prince Charles. There they met Terri.
‘Kev’s gone,’ she said.
John could not comprehend that his beloved brother had died as the result of such a simple procedure as a biopsy. ‘I was taken down to the operating theatre on my own where I was met by a very young doctor who took me to Kevin,’ John recalls. ‘He was lying on a bed. He had been cleaned up and looked like he was sleeping. I was very upset and kissed his forehead.’
John asked the doctor what had happened, and was told the tumour on Hooper’s right carotid artery was bigger than expected. The bleeding couldn’t be stopped.
‘Are you telling me he bled to death?’ John asked, incredulous.
The doctor further advised that Hooper had been suffering Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.
News had already started to get out. John says Peter Beattie telephoned to offer his condolences to the family. Naturally it made page one of the
Daily Telegraph
: HOOPER DEAD.
‘Grand old rascal, fighter for the underdog, master of parliamentary wit, and working class family man whose castle was a Housing Commission house at Inala – Queensland, and State Parliament in particular, will never be the same without Kev Hooper,’ the
Courier-Mail
reported. ‘Those he tirelessly attacked and exposed will breathe a sigh of relief at his sudden death – he would have been extremely disappointed if they did not.’
Hooper was described across the board as a ‘scallywag’. His funeral was held at St Mark’s Catholic Church in Inala. Father Frank O’Dea, of the parish, said of Big Kev: ‘He will be remembered as the cricketer who played on the footpath with the kids of Inala. He was a tough politician and a gentle family man. He was intoxicated with people.’
Insubordination
Tension had been building for months between Detective Sergeant Ross Dickson, the Sheriff of Mareeba, in Far North Queensland, and his superiors over numerous work-related issues. Dickson was overworked and his CIB was understaffed. Having written numerous memos to his superiors in an effort to resolve matters, Dickson hit a wall. All his pleas had been ignored.
The situation finally boiled over in mid-March 1984. Dickson’s boss, District Officer W.J. [Bill] Bergin, had two run-ins with Dickson that necessitated him lodging a confidential report to his Regional Superintendent. Dickson was cited for insubordination on both counts. Bergin did not plan to take the matter further, he simply wanted it on record.
The first run-in involved Bergin attempting to arrange assistance for an officer from the Atherton CIB in apprehending a possible drug dealer. A forestry worker had been threatened by the dealer, accusing him of harvesting his cannabis plantation. The dealer ordered the crop be delivered back to him at a specific time and place. Detective Sergeant R.J. Wall, according to Bergin, sought help in apprehending the dealer.
Bergin wrote: ‘At about 6.30 p.m. … I attended my office at Mareeba for the purpose of supplying arms and ammunition to the C.I. Branch personnel from Mareeba to take with them to Atherton … Detective Sergeant Dickson arrived at my office and told me that he was also going to Atherton. This would have been on overtime.’
Bergin said: ‘Ross, there is no need for you to go as there are already enough police going along.’
Dickson allegedly replied: ‘Look, boss, I’m a detective and have been for 14 years. You don’t know anything about detective work, it’s out of your field, you don’t know what you are talking about.’
Dickson said he had spoken to ‘Wallie’ who wanted him present on the scene.
‘You’re not going,’ Bergin repeated.
‘I’m in charge of the C.I. Branch and I will do as I please,’ Dickson supposedly said. ‘You don’t know how to run anything. If I want to go there I will.’
‘Get out of my office,’ Bergin told him.
In the end, Bergin allowed Dickson to head off to Atherton. ‘I’m sorry about before, boss,’ Dickson allegedly remarked, ‘I just get het-up at times.’
The other matter involved Dickson wanting to go out on the scene of an incident involving a women threatening to kill her husband. Bergin ordered him to stay in Mareeba.
‘You’re fucking wrong and it will be on your shoulders,’ Dickson supposedly told him.
Dickson was ordered to Brisbane to undertake a mental health examination with the chief medical officer. ‘They were trying to get me for being mentally ill,’ he recalls.
Solicitor Pat Nolan organised for him to see a specific doctor. alleging that the chief medical officer at the time was ‘Lewis’s man’.
After he was examined, Dickson was asked if he wanted the results. ‘This bloke [the doctor], he was paranoid, he wouldn’t tell me in his office, we went out onto the street. He said, “You’re the sanest man I’ve ever met, and I’ll be putting that in my report.” But he was very concerned that his office was bugged, you know?’
Then, on 5 April, Dickson alleged he had been given an extraordinary verbal direction by Bergin. Dickson and the CIB were told to lay off investigating drugs and serious sex offences. Dickson was gobsmacked. So much so that he wrote one of his lengthy missives to Commissioner Terry Lewis himself.
Dated 9 April, Dickson’s letter informed the Commissioner that he had been instructed that his office ‘was not to pursue the investigation of serious sex offences in relation to numerous children by four men, only one of whom has to date been interviewed’.
He had been further instructed that other children and suspects involved in the case were not to be interviewed and he would have to proceed to court with information already obtained. Dickson described Inspector Bergin as ‘unreasonable and inexperienced’.
‘Inspector Bergin has also told me that he is keeping a special file on me and when he has enough evidence I will be charged with insubordination towards him,’ wrote Dickson. ‘Inspector Bergin also told me that I was the subject of a special file being held by the Police Department and that all my overtime was being investigated.’
He informed the Commissioner that he had been told he was being investigated even further by two Queensland parliamentarians over his excessive overtime – a claim Dickson didn’t believe.
Mr Lewis, you as head of the Police Department I feel have no idea what is happening here and some other police districts because you are not being told.
I have tried my best to do my job and the results speak for themselves but if you want this situation to continue and it is done with your approval then I tell you now that whoever is responsible for wrecking the working performance of good Police Officers has won, as I just cannot cope with the constant threats and pressure the Police Department is placing on us NOT to do our job and because we are doing it to be constantly suspected and accused whilst those men who choose to be lazy and never do any work are never subjected to anything to make them work and live the life of Reilly at our expense.
Dickson complained that Bergin was harassing him.
I feel that a deliberate attempt is being made to curb the activities of this section because we are too active and someone wants us to be slowed down for some unknown reason that we can only guess at. If no decision is made to change anything from this section then I would respectfully request written directions that I am not to persue [sic] investigations along the lines that I have already been directed …
Again I personally request you [sic] assistance in this matter as I am at a loss to know what to do from here on.
A week later, Dickson wrote a sharp rebuke to Bergin, saying that if he hadn’t instructed the office not to investigate drug matters, then two local drug dealers – the subject of constant complaints from the public – would have been already charged with serious drug offences.
Bergin wrote back: ‘I do not want any further comment verbally or otherwise about my direction in this connection.’
Dickson now says he believes Bergin was acting on instruction from Brisbane to try and cut down on expenses.
‘Was there police involvement in the drug trade? I didn’t see it that way, no, not then,’ he says. ‘They were trying to knock us back for overtime. Bill was a decent bloke. Bill just did whatever they told him to do. I really think he was trying to limit expenses.’
But the saga was about to turn nasty.
The Italian
Down in Canberra, on the fourth floor of the unremarkable National Mutual Building on London Circuit that surrounds City Hill in Civic, an officious, bespectacled sergeant was sifting through reams of statistics on his desk at the Australian Bureau of Criminal Intelligence (ABCI).
Peter Vassallo, a trained engineer before he joined the New South Wales Police and was then seconded to the ABCI, had come to crime fighting relatively late. He had been living in Sydney’s eastern suburbs and working successfully as an engineer when he learned of a drug problem at his daughter’s high school. Incensed, Vassallo approached local police and asked them what they planned to do about it. They were indifferent. So, he warned them – if you do nothing, then I’ll join the force myself and exact justice.
And that’s precisely what he did.
Vassallo was in his early thirties when he went through the academy and qualified as a police officer. At the ABCI, however, he was tasked with collecting data on illegal marihuana production and sale in Australia in the wake of the Stewart Royal Commission into the Mr Asia syndicate, headed by heroin dealer Terrance Clark.