Authors: Matthew Condon
It had been a rough year for Lewis – the Bikie Bandits scandal, the extraordinary trial of Peter James Walsh, and the furore over Senior Constable David Moore. Each of those spot fires involved some suggestion of police cover-ups. Interstate, the Australian Bureau of Criminal Intelligence was starting to have its doubts about the Queensland Police Force and its proactive desire to keep any national investigating bodies outside state borders.
Lewis, in his own inimitable way, had weathered all storms. To his mind it was time to remake his nest at 12 Garfield Drive, Bardon. With his wife Hazel, the couple had a grand plan to remove the old Queenslander that sat on this prime parcel of real estate and build something that would last – a place befitting the status of the Commissioner. There was nothing safer as an investment, too, than good old-fashioned bricks and mortar.
Terry and Hazel would only have the best for the house in which they would grow old together. It would be designed by Queensland’s most famous architect, the mastermind behind the Queensland Cultural Centre, the Queensland Art Gallery, the Queensland Performing Arts Centre, stage one of the new Queen Street Mall, the State Library of Queensland and the Queensland Museum.
In his diary for Friday 11 January 1985 Lewis had a single entry: ‘Robin Gibson called re plans for new house.’
The Ranks of the Medically Unfit
The troublesome Rebel Cop, Ross Dickson, was on Christmas holidays with his family in the first week of January 1985 when he was served with 14 departmental charges involving 168 instances of ‘knowingly furnishing false reports whilst stationed at Mareeba’.
Syd ‘Sippy’ Atkinson, Acting Commissioner while Commissioner Lewis was on recreational leave, issued a press release stating ‘the charges are not trivial and technical such as typing omissions and errors, as some people would have the public believe’.
The force was out to destroy Ross Dickson, despite Atkinson’s assurances otherwise: ‘Vindictiveness associated with the investigation and charging of Sergeant Dickson is strongly denied by the police administration.
‘During the hearing of these charges, it will be alleged that as a result of these false reports by Sergeant Dickson certain juveniles and other persons are recorded in departmental records as having made confessions to certain crimes, whereas in fact not only did those persons not confess to those crimes, but the crimes were never committed.’
The case Atkinson was referring to involved two young women who had recently gone on a break-and-enter spree across Far North Queensland. Dickson arrested them and took them in for questioning. ‘Those girls did hundreds and hundreds of burglaries up and down the coast,’ Dickson remembers. ‘We charged them. One was a criminal and the other one was a rich bitch, only a kid really, [she] came from a really well-to-do family. She denied everything; she was a real smartarse. We had enough on her to put on about ten or 20 break-and-enters, the other one was copping hundreds.’
Dickson used a time-worn strategy. He told the ‘rich’ girl that her friend was putting it all on her. They wired the friend and sent her into the cell with her partner in crime. ‘Over the course of hours and hours, we got her to talk about all the jobs they’d done – the break-and-enters.’ Dickson suggested her solicitor drop into the police station before court. ‘He heard the tapes. He made her plead guilty. We had so much on her,’ Dickson says.
Dickson waited to be interviewed by his superiors over the incident. He was never approached. ‘[Then] they turned up and laid all these charges on me,’ he says. It was a tried and true method, used for decades within the Queensland Police Force against outspoken officers. If you couldn’t get an officer to keep quiet, you could bring them down over minor transgressions of police rules, especially when it came to keeping paperwork updated, or an official diary in order. More often than not, busy detectives would get behind on their paperwork.
Atkinson said a ‘legally constituted inquiry’ would be held as soon as possible in North Queensland. ‘If proved, the punishment could be dismissal from the Police Force of Sergeant Dickson,’ the release stated. ‘He was suspended from duty because of the seriousness of the charges.’
Dickson protested to the press about the ‘manipulated and concocted charges’ against him. He said the minute he spoke out on the police department’s reluctance to tackle organised crime he became a ‘marked man’. He also lashed out vociferously at both the police department and the government. Shockingly, he claimed he could name two state politicians who were involved in organised crime.
‘I’m not going to say who controls all the girls and gambling in this State,’ Dickson told the Rockhampton
Morning Bulletin
. ‘Every person who investigates major crimes says that major crime cannot flourish without senior police officers and politicians being involved. These officers tell you quite openly when you are doing jobs with the big-time drug dealers and the smugglers and every other sort of vice: “Pull your head in or you’re gone.”’
Two days later, on 8 January, Atkinson sent a confidential memo to Police Minister Bill Glasson: ‘I recommend that the Judge appointed to make the [Dickson] investigation under the Police Rules be Judge [Eric] Pratt, QC, of the District Court.’
However, just days before Dickson’s hearing, the former Sheriff of Mareeba was examined by doctors and deemed medically unfit to continue as a police officer.
‘They were doing a real number on my wife,’ Dickson remembers. ‘I’d go to work in Townsville and they’d ring her up and say: “Tell him to pull his head in”, “He’s going to die”, “He won’t come home from the shift”, “He’s dead, we’ll get him tonight.”
‘They came out to the house and turned the power off when she was home alone, pregnant with a little baby.
‘On New Year’s Eve 1984, they made some really determined threats to her. She told me about it and I thought, this is it, we’ve done enough … there was no point in getting bloody killed over it.’
One examining doctor concluded that Dickson suffered from stress anxiety and paranoia. Another diagnosed that he suffered from angioedema – the often rapid swelling of the throat and tongue – and severe bouts of itchiness. It necessitated that he carry ampoules of adrenalin for self-injection.
His lawyers at Gilshenan and Luton wrote to Commissioner Lewis saying they’d appreciate it if he could expedite Dickson’s application as soon as possible. ‘Our further strong advice to our client is that in the future as a police officer or not, it is our opinion that it is in his best interests not to engage in public statements or debate on matters concerning the Queensland Police Force,’ the lawyers wrote.
‘Pat Nolan, the solicitor, let them know about all my tapes, he hinted to them that I had a lot more tapes than what I did have,’ says Dickson. ‘Normally it takes six to nine months to go out medically unfit. From the time I put the report in, it took 19 days,’ Dickson recalls.
A statement was issued saying that he would not ‘hereafter issue any statement to the media or to any politician concerning matters pertaining to the Queensland Police Force or my service therein’.
Dickson’s application to the Medical Board featured often in Lewis’s police diary, and it wasn’t just him and Police Minister Glasson who were interested in the Dickson case. On Thursday 7 February, Lewis recorded: ‘… Premier phoned re … D/S Dickson appln’.
The problem that had been Ross Dickson quietly retired from the force. He had joined the ranks of the medically unfit, as so many agitators, whistleblowers and truth-tellers had before him. As for the inquiry into his departmental charges, Judge Pratt adjourned it ‘indefinitely’.
Lewis remembers: ‘I charged him [Dickson] departmentally with 154 charges, and I had to sign the charges for those sort of things – the furnishing of false reports and so on and so forth – and the rotten little bastard got the union onto it … and they got a couple of doctors or something on side … anyhow, he went out medically unfit.
‘He got his … payout … and bought a bloody fish shop or something up at Hervey Bay or somewhere.’
Dickson later said: ‘I loved my 21 years with the police force … but I don’t miss it … I still haven’t been told the reasons behind my transfer.’
Gallagher in the Cesspool
Since that early morning in January 1984, when teenager Ricky Garrison had fronted up to police claiming he had been sexually assaulted in a unit in Auchenflower, police officer Peter Gallagher had entered a twilight zone of sexual deviancy in Brisbane. Gallagher, who took the original complaint, and who was on the team that raided the unit, owned by Paul John Breslin, was wading deeper into the cesspool.
Gallagher was uncovering some disturbing stories based on information supplied by an informant in the gay community. The informant had told Gallagher about Senior Constable David Moore, and he knew the ins and outs of paedophilia networks in the city, of child prostitution and the production of child pornography. ‘He spilled a lot of beans,’ Gallagher remembers. ‘This fellow told me that he would organise for me to get a job on. They used to go to Indooroopilly, pick up the kids, take them to this address in Indooroopilly, give them $200 for a session and put them out in the street. So in those days, you know, $200 – Christ, that was a lot of money at the time.’
The informant said children were picked up from around Indooroopilly Shoppingtown or the nearby railway station, taken to the address of a senior airline executive, photographed, and the pictures were flown interstate.
Gallagher executed a warrant on the executive’s safe at work but found nothing. ‘My informant said there are photos in his safe … so I took a warrant out and like a fool I told a bloody couple of people down there, and when I got there the safe was … not a thing,’ says Gallagher.
Gallagher was still posting to himself the photographs seized from Breslin’s Auchenflower apartment, depicting lewd shots of Constable Moore. There was nobody Gallagher felt he could trust. Alarmingly, too, the whole affair was becoming increasingly political.
After Gallagher was hauled in to speak with Police Minister Bill Glasson, he was then summoned by the Deputy Police Commissioner. ‘I went over and saw [Syd] Atkinson,’ says Gallagher. ‘I’d worked with Syd and … had a lot of respect for Syd because Syd was a good detective in his day. I said, “Syd you know what’s happened with bloody Moore? You’d better do something. You’ll have to do something about it.”
‘“Oh, she’ll be right Pete, she’ll be right”, he says [to me].’
One of the primary concerns over the scandal was how confidential facts were being leaked to the Opposition. Gallagher was next asked to be interviewed by Judge Eric Pratt, the chairman of the Police Complaints Tribunal. ‘They questioned me for a while and asked me questions and … did you leak?
‘“No, no, no,” I told them. I said, “If I’d have known that this was going to happen I would have bloody leaked.”
‘As I was leaving Pratt’s office he says, “I’ll probably see you again.”
‘I said, “I’m sure we will.”’
In the middle of all this, Gallagher took annual leave. When he reported back for duty at the city CIB, they told him he no longer worked for the branch. He was transferred to uniform duties at Beenleigh, the ‘punishment’ station for troublesome officers, south of the CBD.
‘They weren’t sure how much more I knew,’ says Gallagher. ‘While we were waiting for the [Breslin] trial, I was sent over to Woolloongabba for a while on night wireless. When I got there … there was a phone call for me. They said, “Oh, we’ve got so and so [my informant] locked up here and he wants to get in touch with you.”
‘I went over and sure enough it was this bloke. I said, “What are you doing in here, in the watch-house?”
‘He said, “Well, I don’t know.”
‘They came knocking at his door, a couple of uniform fellows, and they grabbed him and locked him up.’
Gallagher rushed over to the communications room to check the job card for the arrest. There was none.
He Can Offer No Information
It was the last thing Commissioner Lewis needed during a hectic festive season, but a small debate had bubbled to the surface within the police department regarding the managing of massage parlours and brothels. This had been a point of discussion with police since the first bordellos had emerged in wooden Queenslanders over in South Brisbane, nestled among the fish factories and pubs, in the first quarter of the twentieth century. But in modern Brisbane the scene had exploded, and some officers were getting worried; the recent scandal over male brothels in the city had put the vice industry under the spotlight.
Detective Inspector Col Thompson of the Bureau of Criminal Intelligence (BCI) wrote a memo expressing his concerns. The two-page document was headed: ‘Prostitution – associates and criminal activities: A subject for intelligence gathering by the Bureau of Criminal Intelligence.’
In the report, Thompson drew attention to the noticeable lack of intelligence gathering by the BCI in relation to the activities of prostitutes and their associates. He had been under the impression that such matters were to be left entirely to the Licensing Branch but claimed that copies of the daily running sheet, which only listed the names of people who had been spoken to or arrested, was the only information he ever received.
Thompson conceded that occasionally information on drugs and standover methods and assaults on working girls filtered in, and that he had also heard that a ‘very well known southern criminal’ was attempting to take over the entire massage parlour scene on the Gold Coast prior to the official opening of the new casino at Broadbeach.