Authors: Matthew Condon
‘It has gone on for two years too long. The duty of the Minister and the Commissioner is not to avoid embarrassment for the police department and the government. On the contrary, their duty is to act to enforce the law.’
The witch-hunt began.
After Goss’s scathing assessments that day, Lewis, along with his deputy Syd Atkinson, approached Detective Sergeant John O’Gorman, Police Union Spokesman. Lewis wrote in his diary that O’Gorman denied ‘contacting Mr Goss, MLA’ with information on Moore.
That day, Constable Dave Moore was working on the police department’s annual Christmas float for Brisbane’s yuletide street festival. He got a phone call from a journalist asking him if he was aware of all the allegations that Goss was putting out in parliament.
Soon after, Lewis saw David Moore ‘regarding resignation’.
The Danger of a Job Well Done
It was a difficult time to submit a controversial report. Jim Slade and his partner Ian Jamieson had finally completed their field work for Operation Trek and compiled their findings. The journey had been an epic one. ‘We had worked in four-wheel-drives, planes, boats,’ remembers Slade. ‘We went from Cairns to Karumba, we covered Cape York Peninsula and also the Torres Strait. Our job was to create a network of intelligence gatherers, and we had discussed this with our senior officer, Inspector Col Thompson.
‘We received assistance from the North Queensland CIB – Roy Wall in Atherton, Ross Dickson in Mareeba and Paul Priest in Cairns. We formulated a report that was dated 21 November 1984, which was forwarded to the Bureau of Criminal Intelligence. The report was compiled in Brisbane.’
Slade sent a copy of the report and tape-recorded interviews with an informant to Peter Vassallo at the Australian Bureau of Criminal Intelligence (ABCI), ‘Italian desk’, Canberra. He remembers the period of the mid-1980s where activity in the drug trade became more widespread. ‘The Bellinos really started changing their interest from gaming and prostitution to drugs. A lot of the work that I did was to identify competition. Everything was good until the Bellinos came in, and then violence started to really erupt.
‘When Vassallo started puddling around in the dirty water … it wasn’t until I put the report in relation to the Bellinos that my whole life changed. I just wish something had been done about it. There was enough evidence in the report to spend the money to do a proper investigation. I’m not saying there was enough there to arrest anyone, but there was definitely enough evidence there to support a decent push in regard to what was going on up there.’
Slade’s work was already having a curious impact. When he and Jamieson were in Cairns for work they invariably stayed at the Inn the Pink Motel in Sheridan Street, North Cairns. It was known as a hotel for travelling police on business. Incredibly, it was also the lodgings that the Bellino family used to put up visitors and business associates.
They stopped using the motel when Slade submitted his report. ‘I had tape recordings, piles and piles of documents, eyewitness accounts. When I put the report in, they commissioned this bloody senior officer, insignificant bastard of a bloke … instead of finding more evidence … they visited everyone and threatened them and bloody squashed it … I can see his face … he was one of these ineffectual officers, drinks all day, arrests someone, produces no evidence and wonders why they’re not successful in court.’
Informants were physically threatened. Evidence went missing. Slade’s report was privately lampooned and labelled ‘embellished’ by some senior police. The report was on its way to being buried.
However, law enforcement agencies outside of Queensland were exceedingly interested in the work of Slade and Jamieson, especially the Australian Federal Police and the ABCI. Vassallo remained an important sounding board for Slade – his Queensland mate’s report was dovetailing with his own analysis. He had included the name Bellino in his confidential Alpha report. This was a family that had been familiar to corrupt police for many years. They controlled the syndicate in Brisbane – that network of illegal gambling and vice that formed a vital part of The Joke. If the Bellinos were exposed, so too would be an equally intricate network of police corruption. And if that happened, the kickbacks stopped.
Slade had always been regarded highly by the force’s senior administration, but that was about to change. Soon, Slade was going to need every friend he could get. ‘[A draft report of Operation Trek] was given to Alan Barnes,’ remembers Slade. ‘Within a fortnight, that whole group was sacked, a guy was chosen to write the report, and that report was then done in a week and was submitted and nothing ever happened from Operation Trek,’ Slade says.
‘And do you know what? I’m sure that there would be inspectors and people retired now in Victoria that would have that report, because they were absolutely pissed off that Operation Trek had so much money spent on it, it was a model of how cooperation should bloody exist, and yet … the report was squashed and re-written. Barnes was the officer in charge of the intelligence analysis.’
But it made absolutely no sense to Vassallo – given what he was learning month after month from Slade – that there was no intelligence coming out of Queensland. ‘As soon as I went back to the bureau [after the analyst’s course] I did a few checks based on what Jimmy had to say, and of course there was nothing there,’ Vassallo recalls. ‘Which caused a bit of consternation, how could this be correct? And then it suddenly dawned on me [that] Slade was also talking about corruption and that he was having problems getting documents to us. You know, this is at a time when I’m … solidifying my connections with people interstate I haven’t met yet, and our professional connection is over the phone.’
Vassallo was beginning to wonder, too, about the Queensland police representatives who worked for the ABCI. Could there be a spy in the ranks? Or someone deliberately blocking the exchange of data between the Canberra office and the Sunshine State?
Suddenly, nobody knew who they could trust.
Implosion
Back in Brisbane, the Moore saga continued to gather heat. In the midst of the mayhem, Police Minister Bill Glasson received a telephone call from a television station asking for his reaction to the resignation of Moore. Glasson claimed he knew nothing about it. He later said he felt ‘such a fool’ that Lewis had not kept him informed. Lewis’s diary for Friday 23 November, however, includes the notation that he ‘phoned Hon. Glasson re acceptance of resignation by S/C D. Moore’.
That night, Moore was served notice that his resignation had been finalised. According to a close friend, Moore felt ‘this great burden had lifted’ when he resigned. ‘He went home and went out for dinner that night … he was emotionally a wreck … he got back home about 11 p.m.,’ the friend says. ‘About ten minutes later there was a knock on the door and there was an inspector of police and a junior police officer. He had a letter signed by Lewis, and Moore’s resignation was effective immediately, and he was there to retrieve Moore’s uniform. He felt so betrayed. The knives were out.
‘Lewis never said one word to him. He never spoke to him … He [Moore] had devoted his cause to him [Lewis] and what he represented, he was his boss, he showed him loyalty in the sense that he did his job and he did it well.’
Lewis says he was shocked by the Moore saga and denies allegations that he had been ‘protecting’ Moore during those years.
Despite the incident inflicting enormous damage to the credibility of the government and Lewis’s police force, there would be more collateral damage. Glasson was furious that he had been made to look foolish over the Moore resignation. And Lewis wasn’t happy with Glasson’s support of the force, or more specifically, his perceived lack of support during the scandal.
Former police minister Russ Hinze had earned Commissioner Lewis’s ire in the early 1980s and been removed. Now it was Glasson’s turn. In Lewis’s diary for 23 November, the Commissioner intimated for the first time his displeasure with his Minister. ‘Premier phoned re progress on investigation,’ Lewis wrote, ‘told him I am disappointed over lack of support re S/C Moore matter in House.’
Lewis then got on the telephone to Glasson. ‘… expressed my displeasure at lack of support in refuting false statements by Mr Goss MLA, re Moore matter’.
As was his custom, Lewis batted off criticism from outside the department over the Moore incident, and began building a narrative that the whole thing just may have been a political conspiracy.
He had another face-to-face meeting with Glasson about various matters, the Moore scandal the top priority, on Monday 26 November. He wrote in his diary that he talked to Glasson about ‘D/C [Deputy Commissioner] Atkinson phoning re confidence in Admin by Minister and Government; no known comp[laints] by a parent or child whilst Moore was in Pub. Rel.; Goss’s personal attack to try to influence coming decisions re … Dickson; report of 4 pages re … D. Moore as requested by Doug Stewart on Hon Glasson’s behalf on 22.11.84; Breslin’s criminal history …’
By the next day, Glasson seemed to have digested the peril of crossing swords with Commissioner Lewis. He rose in the House and offered a spirited defence of the government, the police force, even Dave Moore, and en route tried to blame the whole sordid affair on Wayne Goss and the Opposition. ‘Not only has he [Goss] orchestrated this character assassination against this former officer, but also, at the same time, he has smeared the overall good name of our Queensland Police Force.’
Glasson found it regrettable that at the Australia versus West Indies cricket test that had just concluded at the Gabba (the Windies won by a comfortable eight wickets), officers on duty at the ground were jeered and taunted with the crowd chanting Dave Moore’s name. He firmly blamed Goss.
‘To put it bluntly, not only does Mr Goss now have the general public ridiculing members of the police force going about their everyday duty,’ Glasson fulminated, ‘but also, he has totally ruined the life of a young man … without presenting one iota of legally acceptable evidence.’
He continued:
He has forced this young man, with a family of three and a wife expecting another child, to resign from the police force – so far, through nothing more than innuendo.
To allow Mr Goss the opportunity to clear himself of these most serious charges that I have laid against him, I request, here and now, that he present his evidence to the appropriate authorities or to this Chamber – which I hope and trust will stand up in a court. If he does not, or cannot, do that, he stands condemned by every member in this House for what he has quite obviously done to this young man.
Personally, I must be guided by reports from the Police Commissioner [Mr Lewis], who has top Internal Investigations section detectives working on the case. As late as this morning, Mr Lewis advised me that the police had been unable to substantiate even one of Mr Goss’s allegations to the point of sustaining a criminal charge against this young man.
Glasson refuted Goss’s accusations that Moore had featured in compromising photographs found at Breslin’s unit in Alice Street, in the city, and later at his apartment in Dunmore Terrace, Auchenflower. ‘Last Wednesday afternoon, I spent a little over half an hour looking through what I could only describe as the disgusting products of very sick minds,’ Glasson went on. ‘At my request, the Police Department provided all the photographs in its possession seized in raids on two premises … photographs which Mr Goss and other members of the Opposition … insinuated involved this former officer in a compromising position. However, I found not one shred of evidence of any involvement by any police officer …’
According to a source close to Dave Moore, the cache of photographs shown to the Minister had contained pornographic pictures unrelated to Moore, and ones that may have been planted in order to lend more gravitas to the case against Bill Hurrey and Paul Breslin. ‘There were never child pornography photographs. There were never photographs of Moore with children. There were never photos of Bill Hurrey with children. There was never anything like that whatsoever. That became the media frenzy,’ the source says.
‘What they did with Bill Glasson at the time was, they had paraded, mixed the photographs up with other photographs that were not even associated with the Bill Hurrey thing. When they showed them to Glasson … they put Moore’s photograph in there with the SEQEB worker, and there were other photographs of males engaging in sex … not children engaging in sex … but overaged people. And Glasson made the statement, I’ve seen the photographs and they’d make you vomit.’
There was a suspicion, too, that some of the pictures provided to shock Minister Glasson had come from the extensive files of Clarence Osborne, still held in the Juvenile Aid Bureau’s strong room.
Despite Lewis’s misgivings about how Glasson handled the crisis, Premier Bjelke-Petersen stood by his Police Minister. Sir Joh told the
Courier-Mail
that Lewis had kept Glasson informed of the general issues but there ‘could be one or two things’ Mr Glasson had not been told.
‘It has been disclosed that complaints were first made about the officer two years ago but no action was taken,’ the newspaper reported. ‘Sir Joh said yesterday he wanted the police to follow their investigation through normal legal processes.’ He added, ‘I’m very satisfied that Terry Lewis and the police boys are doing all they can.’
The Premier supported Glasson and said it was not unusual for Commissioner Lewis to talk to him directly about police matters. ‘I discuss different issues from time to time with Mr Lewis. It’s a process that goes on right down the years,’ Sir Joh said. ‘Different things come up and I’ve got to know the background. It doesn’t always result in anything.