Authors: Matthew Condon
‘Over the years several people have mentioned to me that I was being groomed to become Commissioner but I used to brush off any suggestion to that effect because I had seen officers be built up to anticipating promotion and to not get it.’
Birds and Drugs
Undercover operative Jim Slade was entering the heart of darkness when it came to the criminal underworld. He was discovering rampant drug and wildlife smuggling in his investigations in Far North Queensland, and murders on the fringe of the industry. It was a very similar story to that being revealed on a national scale by his friend and confidant, Peter Vassallo, down in the Australian Bureau of Criminal Intelligence (ABCI) in Canberra.
Slade was also speaking to a colleague he trusted in the Brisbane Bureau of Criminal Intelligence (BCI). At one stage the friend asked if the situation was really as bad as it was beginning to look. ‘I predict that it’s going to be the frontier, the future frontier,’ Slade told him.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Well, illegal immigrants, and you know … drugs.’
Slade remembered his time in Far North Queensland when he had reported directly to former assistant commissioner Tony Murphy. His boss had expressed disbelief at the magnitude of the drugs and wildlife smuggling operations. Murphy had told Slade ‘the economics are not there’.
‘What do you think about that [now]?’ the colleague asked Slade.
‘Well, I completely disagree.’
‘How do you reckon it works?’
Slade had just spent a month on a petrol barge in the Gulf of Carpentaria, and had worked as a prawn spotter on trawlers. ‘I’d been through there and bloody talked to people, completely undercover and no one knew, you know, what I was doing,’ Slade remembers. ‘I was just gathering intelligence, and what I found out – and it made so much bloody sense – is that all the boats would come out of the Gulf of Tonkin [off the coast of North Vietnam and southern China] and down, and what they would do is they would fill up with fuel, they would fill their freezers, or what freezers those shonky boats had.
‘They’d come down to Australia, and … clean out all of … their tanks. What was happening was that prawns, they came in boxes … probably ten kilogram boxes, you know, maybe a bit less.’
The fishermen worked out that there was more money in heroin than prawns. They could pick up a kilo of heroin in Asia for a couple of hundred dollars, then on-sell it in Australia. The worth of the drugs on Australian streets was many hundreds of thousands of dollars. The fishermen were happy, and so were the dealers.
Slade also discovered that dealers could score a kilogram of heroin in exchange for about 300 native Australian birds. Slade recalled that Murphy had been incredulous upon hearing this news. He didn’t believe Slade’s intelligence. ‘Well hey, excuse me, you know, that’s complete bullshit, because those 300 birds, some of them could be worth up to $1000 each,’ Slade recalls responding. ‘Maybe not to … the end user, and it’s the same with the heroin. You know, by the time it’s cut, a kilo of heroin becomes five kilos becomes, you know, half a million bucks.’
Slade’s colleague in the BCI headquarters that day was equally as stunned. ‘Have you got anything that you can back this up with?’ he asked Slade.
‘Yes, I have,’ Slade replied. ‘In a couple of weeks I can give you an analysis report, which you’ll be able to use to really get things going.’
In a short period of time Slade’s information brought together representatives from the Victorian and New South Wales Police, Customs and Immigration. Alan Barnes was put in charge of Operation Trek. And soon, Graeme Parker would head up the BCI.
Slade recalls: ‘I got up and gave this presentation to the group, and the group said, “Let’s think about this, this is really worthwhile.” So, within a very short period of time, all those organisations had a representative to work under Barnes at the BCI.
‘Operation Trek started; at the time I was in charge of the field operations, collecting intelligence. We collected all this information, and brought it back to this group in the BCI. Now, I don’t know what happened, but we got a lot of information on Bellino, a lot of information on drugs, how the crops were being grown and harvested, all this interchange of money and people between Griffith and … all this sort of bloody thing.’
Slade was breaking new ground with Operation Trek, but its revelations were not greeted with enthusiasm by some of his superiors.
The Trial of Peter James Walsh
Almost a year to the day after his frenzied attack on his neighbour and teacher in the northside suburb of Kedron, Peter James Walsh, now 18, stood trial for attempted murder.
Since the bizarre stabbing in the winter of 1983 after a night out with school friends in Fortitude Valley, Walsh had been staying with his parents at a friend’s house at Burleigh Heads on the Gold Coast. He was kept away from his victim, Stephanie Ryan, a teacher, who had known him since he was a child. The Walshes in Fifth Avenue, and Ryan in Sixth Avenue, shared a back fence.
Walsh’s father, Pappy, had employed the services of friend and leading barrister Des Sturgess, assisted by Pat Nolan. ‘Pappy was about the same age as me, [and] as young fellas we’d see something of each other,’ recalls Sturgess of Brisbane’s convivial legal past. ‘From time to time he joined me or somebody else who I was having a drink with, things like that. I don’t recall ever receiving a brief from him except for the brief from his son.’
Sturgess says Walsh Junior’s behaviour leading to the charges was spectacularly out of character. ‘He was still a schoolboy,’ says Sturgess. ‘He wasn’t any sort of ruffian; he was well brought up. They were very staunch Catholics, and you know, he was filled with Christianity I suppose, a pupil at Nudgee. He loved his football.
‘Pappy gave evidence and said he was one of the lads that gave him the least trouble from any of the others. [But] this night he went absolutely berserk. You’ve never seen anything like the inside of that house, there was blood smeared everywhere.’
During the trial there was a sudden, and extraordinary, development. A man called Paul John Breslin appeared out of nowhere to assist the defence. Breslin, until only recently, had been an ambitious and respected senior executive for the Ford Motor Company, and had socialised with senior police, including Commissioner Lewis. Then in January 1984 he had been charged with sexually assaulting a minor, and a raid on his Auchenflower apartment had uncovered explicit photographs of police officer David Moore.
While he was awaiting a court appearance on the assault charges, he somehow scored a position with the Family Court and its security division, and was making claims that senior political figures had asked him to take on the job. It all simply added more pieces to the puzzle that was Breslin.
‘What happened was, we were right in the middle of the trial and he [Breslin] rang me up,’ says Sturgess. ‘He was a court orderly then at the Family Court, and he said he had important information to give me. I went post haste … to see him with Pat Nolan, my instructing solicitor, and Breslin gave us a story.
‘There’d been some trouble in the Family Court. I think a Family Court judge had been killed down south, murdered, and Breslin’s story was … he didn’t usually do this orderly work, you see, but the Commonwealth Attorney-General [Senator Gareth Evans] had asked him, because of this act of terrorism down south, to act as orderly in the court.’
In early July, Pearl Watson, the wife of Family Court judge, Justice Ray Watson, had been killed when a bomb tore through the family’s home in harbourside Greenwich, Sydney. The assassination was one of a long line of threats and murders involving the Family Court dating back to 1980, when Justice David Opas was shot dead at point blank range at his home in Sydney’s eastern suburbs.
In March 1984 Justice Richard Gee’s home had also been targeted by a bomb. He escaped with injuries. A month later, Parramatta’s Family Law Court building had been damaged when sticks of gelignite were hurled at the front entrance. There were no injuries. Police believed at the time the incidents were all linked to a single child custody case.
Breslin’s story, therefore, appeared plausible. His unlikely appearance as a credible witness, halfway through the trial, was a boon for Walsh’s case. Breslin told Sturgess that he had, by chance, been drinking at Bonaparte’s Hotel the year before on the very same night that Peter James Walsh and his friends were out celebrating their football victories and chanting the school song.
Sturgess recalls: ‘Breslin said he was down there that night at the hotel and he saw drinks being spiked … so Pat and I went away and sort of … we thought we’d really struck a treasure … Pat went out to see him on the Saturday morning and got some more particulars, and also got particulars from a policeman friend of his … which revealed that he had a very chequered history. I remember I spoke to the policeman involved and he said, “Oh Christ, you’re not going to rely on him, are you?”’
Breslin, the man who would be publicised as the new Brisbane Sheraton’s first guest, and who was concurrently awaiting his own trial for the alleged sexual assault of a minor in his flat in Coronation Towers, Auchenflower, was suddenly putting up his hand in defence of Peter Walsh.
Sturgess was in a quandary. ‘I got a telephone call from Des Breen, he was a barrister, and he’d acted for Breslin in some of his travails, and he gave me information, all of which was to Breslin’s detriment,’ says Sturgess. ‘We thought long and hard about calling him [as a witness]. I myself was against calling him.
‘I said, “Listen Pat, I think Pappy better make the decision on this one.” So we put it all before Pappy, told him all about Breslin, about what Breslin was saying and sticking to his guns about.’
A source says Peter James Walsh had never heard of Breslin. ‘Halfway through the trial, that’s when everyone heard of Breslin,’ the source says. ‘There was a conversation as to whether he should be used, it was sort of like, you know, it was a risk but it had to happen. Someone had to get up and say that [about the drinks being spiked]. This guy came forward.’
A meeting was held between Pappy Walsh and Pat Nolan. It was agreed that Breslin would be called. ‘Peter [Junior] had no say in the decision,’ the source says. ‘Everything was out of [his] hands.’
Paul John Breslin has a different recollection. ‘I remember Des Sturgess approaching me with a barrister … he was acting for the Walsh family,’ he says. ‘I was a security manager for the Commonwealth of Australia at the Federal Family Court. It used to be in Adelaide Street, I think. And he appeared a couple of times and I helped him … I think Pat Nolan … I think he might have seen me working in the court, too … being security I’d be wearing a name badge.
‘They knew I ran … that I was President of the Queensland Prisoners Aid Society, I think it was called, [who] had a halfway house at Wooloowin, a property owned by the Main Roads Department, which we leased for $1 a year. We took people, when they were released, and gave them a place to stay so they could find accommodation. They could stay from memory for one or two months. They were pretty closely supervised, as you can imagine.
‘I was asked … I didn’t know Peter Walsh from a bar of soap.’
While acquaintances of Breslin noted that he was a person who often enjoyed being the centre of attention, and that he had a habit of ‘big-noting’ himself by alleging he had friends in high places, these characteristics didn’t explain why he would engage in a high-profile trial and volunteer crucial evidence about the night of Walsh’s attack and the hours leading up to the alleged offence. Given his own legal problems at the time, why would he step up to help a complete stranger, and voluntarily place himself at the epicentre of the trial’s landscape?
Angus Dodds, the Crown psychiatrist, was the main witness at the trial. He examined young Peter Walsh shortly after his arrest and he thought there was more to it than just aggression. It was a risky manoeuvre. If Breslin’s past was brought into proceedings, it could be fatal to the Walsh case. ‘I had my fingers crossed through all this. I thought a lot of it would slip out in cross-examination, but it didn’t,’ says Sturgess.
Sturgess denies that he contacted Breslin first. ‘That’s a lie. He contacted us. I remember that distinctly. We couldn’t believe our good fortune when we first heard of it,’ says Sturgess. ‘I wouldn’t attempt to give any explanation as to why he did what he did. Personally, I wish he had kept the hell out of it. I can understand Pappy Walsh’s view. He was crazed with worry … All I knew was that he [Breslin] could be dynamite if I called him, he could blow the case out of the water.’
There were further curious anomalies during the trial. On Thursday 12 July, Drug Squad Detective Frederick George Maynard gave evidence that hallucinogenic drugs were not available in Brisbane at the time of the Walsh incident. Maynard said cannabis and heroin were prevalent, but not LSD and similar drugs. He confirmed that they were rarely dissolved in drinks. ‘There was no LSD in Brisbane last year,’ Maynard told the court. ‘I think it became a fact of life that a lot of drug users would not use LSD. They became frightened of it.’
This did not marry with the defence’s mounting argument that Walsh consumed spiked drinks in Bonaparte’s on the night in question. However, the following day, Maynard was abruptly recalled to the witness box. This time he admitted that the drug squad had purchased large quantities of LSD in Bonaparte’s in early July 1983, just weeks before the Walsh incident occurred. It was a complete about-face, and went a long way to corroborating Breslin’s allegations.