Authors: Matthew Condon
There was significant support in Cabinet for a wider inquiry, but the government was prepared to wait for the Lewis report before deciding further.
The head of the police department’s child abuse unit, Detective Sergeant David Jefferies, told the newspaper: ‘There is definitely child pornography being made in Queensland. At this stage we don’t think it is being made in commercial volume but we have found photographs of local children in overseas pornographic magazines.’
Opposition leader Nev Warburton simply called for an independent judicial inquiry. The
Courier-Mail
editorial applauded the tribunal inquiry but wasn’t so complimentary of the government and police. ‘While it is difficult to believe that the Queensland Police Force did not know of these operations, it is more difficult to understand why they were not closed down. The apparent lack of activity has been matched by the Queensland Government. Mr Glasson and Mr Lewis have both declined to answer questions …’
On the Wednesday, Koch and Fynes-Clinton reported that the allegations of a child pornography ring had been stirred by police factions wishing to discredit Commissioner Lewis. ‘Some information accused Mr Lewis of having supplied a man [Breslin] facing charges with an official pass which allowed him 24-hour access to police headquarters; having allowed him use of police vehicles; having accompanied him as guest speaker to a “clandestine gathering of gays”; and having tried to make something sinister of a handwritten Christmas card, signed by Mr Lewis, which was found in the man’s flat in a police raid.’
The
Courier-Mail
straightened the record. The official pass was an Australian Journalists’ Association card; Breslin sometimes delivered police cars as a former employee of the Ford Motor Company; as for the gay meeting, the newspaper said it had sighted Breslin’s passport and he wasn’t in the country at the time the meeting was said to have taken place.
Lewis, with the help of media officer Ian Hatcher, issued a press release: ‘This morning, two squads of detectives … raided premises at Greenslopes and Kelvin Grove. While a certain morning newspaper may claim credit for forcing this police action, the raids were in fact the culmination of two months’ intensive investigation by the Juvenile Aid Bureau into male escort agencies and possible links with child pornography.’
Bowing to public pressure, the government approved a broader public inquiry into child pornography and child prostitution, although Premier Bjelke-Petersen, in London, was not so sure. He told reporters a full inquiry was ‘not a foregone conclusion’.
‘I’m not usually in favour of inquiries,’ the Premier said. ‘What do these inquiries do? Get on with the job and intensify police activity.’
On Saturday 15 December, the
Courier-Mail
reported on a Lewis television appearance the night before. Lewis had denied that police should have acted sooner on the allegations against constable David Moore, who was awaiting charges by summons in relation to two alleged cases of indecently dealing with boys aged 15 and 16.
Defending himself on Channel Seven’s
Today Tonight
program, Lewis said, ‘You have got to know the full story before you can make a judgement like that. It’s not quite as simple to deal with anybody without adequate evidence.’ He claimed nobody from the media or police force had ever complained to him about the gentlemen concerned, and what’s more, he found it rather surprising that everyone claimed they knew everything, but nobody ever spoke about it before.
Despite the barrage – both internally from his own Minister and Premier, and externally from the media – Lewis continued on, seemingly unruffled. The next day, he was in his office at headquarters by 11 a.m. ‘Saw Insp. Early and viewed Channel Nine programme, very fair presentation of interview and comments.’
The following week, Cabinet appointed Brisbane barrister Des Sturgess as the new Director of Prosecutions and approved his appointment as Queen’s Counsel. Attorney-General Nev Harper said Sturgess’s ‘first official duty’ would be to inquire into child pornography and prostitution in Queensland.
The Opposition labelled it a ‘cynical token of an inquiry’.
Des Sturgess remembers that he was ‘unencumbered by procedure’ when he began investigating child sex abuse and prostitution for his much-anticipated report. ‘The Moore, Hurrey and Breslin thing had gotten the government interested,’ he says. ‘I received considerable assistance from the Juvenile Aid Bureau. It wasn’t a formal inquiry in a sense. People just came to see me. People telephoned and I had letters from prisoners. I went out to the gaols. I went to Sydney to see the gay mardi gras. I went to Long Bay prison and interviewed prisoners.’
He says he received little help from Queensland’s Licensing Branch. ‘The branch was shot through with corruption at that stage,’ Sturgess says. ‘I became aware of this and had been aware of it for some time. I didn’t get the cooperation I expected from the Licensing Branch. Stuff was held back and not given to me. Information was held back.’
A Secret Meeting with the Minister
Police Minister Bill Glasson had been thumped by the controversy over former police senior constable Dave Moore, and the whole issue had pitted him against Commissioner Terry Lewis.
Lewis had expressed his concerns about Glasson’s loyalty to the force and had denied any impropriety in relation to the affair, but Glasson was not convinced of Lewis’s claims that he had not heard of allegations against Moore prior to 1984. He convened a top secret meeting with someone who might shed some light on the whole mess – Constable Mike Garrahy, the young JAB officer who had come across victims of Bill Hurrey and Dave Moore as far back as 1982.
Glasson’s press secretary, Robert Stewart, recalled: ‘During the latter part of 1984, allegations concerning then police officer Dave Moore started to surface. I recall there being a number of statements made by the Commissioner to the Minister that such allegations were unfounded.’ Determined to get to the bottom of the issue, Stewart arranged to interview Garrahy in the presence of his Minister.
The interview was held on Wednesday 19 December in Glasson’s ministerial office. Garrahy was nervous. When he was offered a cup of coffee he asked for it white, with two sugars. He requested permission to smoke during the interview, then proceeded to unload the background of the sordid saga. Off the bat, he alleged that a file on the case forwarded to the Crown Law Office was ‘incomplete’.
Stewart: If you could just explain to the Minister what you told me over the phone the other day about your meeting with [police officer] Kerry, Kerry Kelly.
Garrahy: Right, I was in contact with Kerry Kelly and Kerry told me that the file that was sent from the Police Department to the Crown Law office was incomplete. It wasn’t the full file that had been put in.
Stewart: Now that file went from him [Kelly] to the Commissioner’s office …
Garrahy: To the Commissioner’s office to the Crown Law office.
Stewart: So no one else would have access to it.
Garrahy: Not that I know of.
Stewart: [It] went to the Commissioner’s office and any interference to the file must have happened in the Commissioner’s office?
Garrahy: Well I’d say so. Anyway, what happened was Kerry told me that he was called down to see the person who was doing the adjudication on the file at the Crown Law office and there were gaps in the file that had been sent down by the Police Department and that he subsequently produced all the missing pieces of the original file that he had and handed them over.
Stewart: In other words, he had a duplicate file with him?
Garrahy: Yeah, yeah, and filled in all the gaps.
Stewart: Do you know, from what he told you, were they sensitive sections that were missing?
Garrahy: Apparently so, yes, he wasn’t game to say very much because like a lot of the fellows at the minute, you know, they’re all fairly worried and they’re playing this very close to their chest ’cause word’s out if anyone talks, well, that’s going to be the end of us.
Stewart: If we approached or … ah … had somebody approach Kerry do you think he’d be prepared to give us the full story?
Garrahy: No, he won’t.
Stewart: He won’t?
Garrahy: No, I’ve already tried.
Stewart: So, they’re actually scared for their own future and their career?
Garrahy: That’s right.
The young constable revealed how his original report on Hurrey and Moore from late 1982 had vanished into the system and had only reappeared since the arrest of Hurrey. He said he had no idea what had happened to the report in the ‘missing’ years. Garrahy told Stewart that after he had submitted his report to Inspector Frank Rynne the report had been taken to police headquarters by Rynne. When Rynne returned Garrahy was given a verbal instruction to concentrate on Hurrey instead.
Garrahy said he knew little of Moore and had never really mixed with the young constable.
Stewart: You didn’t have any association with or working association with Breslin at all?
Garrahy: No. No, the only, my only association with Breslin was when we followed him a couple of times.
Stewart: And you had suspicions then?
Garrahy: Oh yeah. What happened was, um …
Glasson: Was Breslin under direct surveillance by instruction?
Garrahy: No. No, what happened was we received some confidential information that Breslin had allegedly got a police officer full of grog at the Police Club and taken him down to his unit down at the Gardens [in Alice Street] and had sexually assaulted him and this copper was too ashamed to report it and we started, for other reasons, we started to think, well there’s got to be some tie up here, and we followed, I think we followed Breslin twice and the third time I got sprung and he turned round and he said to me, ah g’day, how are you? Because I’d seen him in the club a couple of times and said g’day to him. I said, oh not bad, I’ve had a few I said, I’m going to go down and catch a cab and go home. He said, oh why don’t you come down to my place for drinks and I said, no I’ve had too much and I’ve got to go to work in the morning. And that’s the only conversation I ever had with Breslin.
Glasson: Now why … what astounds me is there seems to be this incumbent fear, what reason is that there? Your jeopardy of your whole future career, is that what you’re concerned about?
Garrahy: Not only that … ah … there are stories that we’ve been told about and whether they’re true or not we’ll never know, about things that have happened in the department over the last few years and even if some of them are true they … the boys all feel that they’re just too much of a risk.
Stewart: That’s a risk to their careers?
Garrahy: And their personal safety.
Focus returned to Garrahy’s explosive confidential report on Hurrey and Moore in 1982. Garrahy revealed that a couple of weeks after he’d submitted it, he learned that Moore had been tipped off about its contents. Word had got back to Garrahy that a detective inspector had filled Moore in on the guts of the report and warned him to lay off and stay away from Hurrey or else there’d be trouble.
Cheesed off, Kelly and Garrahy put in a request to put surveillance on Hurrey and Moore. Garrahy claimed he had then received an instruction to lay off Moore and concentrate on Hurrey.
Stewart: So, someone going along your lines, someone in the Commissioner’s office, be it [then] assistant commissioner [Tony] Murphy, knew of your concern at that time?
Garrahy: That’s right.
Stewart: And do you think that the Commissioner himself would have been made aware of it?
Garrahy: He would have had to have known.
Stewart: Why do you say that?
Garrahy: Because I can remember we all said at the time it’s going to be a bombshell when it goes off and none of us wanted to pinch Moore because he’s a … well … another constable. That’s why we said that if we got enough evidence to pinch Moore we’d have to get a couple of inspectors from Internal Investigations to do it.
The constable said he couldn’t comprehend that nothing had been done about the allegations against Moore and Hurrey, and he agreed there was an internal cover-up to protect Moore.
Because of work stress following the Hurrey and Moore investigation, Garrahy said he had a nervous breakdown and requested a transfer to Tara, on the Darling Downs, 300 kilometres west of Brisbane.
That night, Commissioner Lewis and his wife Hazel joined businessman Kevin Driscoll and his wife Thelma for cocktails. According to Lewis’s diary, ‘he [Driscoll] said one of Hon. Glasson’s staff said they were going to “chop my head off”.’
Lewis had faced tougher threats than that. He wound down the year in his usual punctilious fashion. He worked right up to Christmas Day. On the day itself he had the Lewis clan over for lunch, but still managed to read the October edition of
Police Chief
magazine. On Boxing Day he received a call from the Premier who told him a man in Zurich was telling him ‘he is on East German “hit” list’. Lewis began two weeks of official leave on 31 December and didn’t manage to get down to his usual holiday haunt, the Gold Coast, until 7 January 1985. A short time later, Don ‘Shady’ Lane rang Lewis to let him know that Glasson was ‘knocking me behind my back’.