Authors: Matthew Condon
During proceedings, an Opposition member called out: ‘Shades of Nazism.’ The Opposition may as well have been shouting into a well. The Bjelke-Petersen government didn’t just maintain the status quo in response to those who dared question its authority, if anything, they intensified their approach.
On April Fool’s Day, 1985, Lewis and his assistant, Inspector Greg Early, were summoned by the Premier to the Executive Building in George Street. As Lewis’s diary notes: ‘… before 16 Cabinet Ministers advised our Police were not active enough against picketers and persons annoying SEQEB workers’.
Lewis clearly took the advice on board. That month, the Premier had expressed a degree of pressure in the job to Lewis, and also underlined the closeness of their friendship. In an early morning meeting, Lewis wrote in his diary that the pair discussed ‘… security at Kingaroy home and 2 extra police; Sir Edward Lyons and TAB; disloyal Police; thankless jobs with threats to self and family; press bias; left wing unionists and politicians; average 70 hr week; not staying if you leave …’.
Not staying if you leave.
Clearly, by the autumn of 1985, the careers of the Premier and the Commissioner of Police were obliquely entwined, for good or ill.
The Perth Briefing
On Sunday 28 April, Commissioner Lewis and Sergeant First Class Clark headed to Brisbane’s Eagle Farm airport at about 3.15 p.m., boarded Ansett Flight 1029 to Sydney, before transferring to Flight 220 to Perth, arriving at 9.40 p.m. local time. Lewis checked into the Parmelia Hilton International Hotel in Mill Street, in the CBD and a short walk to the Swan River. He settled into room 834, which he considered ‘very clean and comfortable, but noisy’.
Lewis was in Perth for the annual conference involving the Australian Police College Board of Control, the National Police Research Unit Board of Control, and most importantly, the Australian Bureau of Criminal Intelligence Management Committee.
He spent the next day discussing numerous agendas with the various committees. The unexpected star turn of the short conference, however, was to be an address by Sergeant Peter Vassallo of the ABCI’s ‘Italian desk’.
For years, Vassallo had been investigating the hugely lucrative cannabis trade in Australia, with the intent of identifying the major players and the volumes of cannabis being grown and sold. The data would ultimately make its way into his top secret report, Project Alpha, which in turn would stun law enforcement authorities with not just evidence of several Italian families behind the drug trade, but the attendant murders and corruption that went along with an illicit industry of this proportion.
In Perth, Vassallo took the opportunity to fly some of his findings across every police commissioner in the country, and Australian Federal Police boss Major-General Ron Grey. He was initially insecure about presenting the material and worried about how it might be received by the state commissioners.
‘Trust me when I tell you that when this was happening to me I was shitting my pants, right?’ recalls Vassallo of the Perth briefing. ‘I had put all this [Alpha material] together in my head. I had bits and pieces of paper. I had no notes because that’s how I protected my information. The notes and the information were always there in the systems or in microfiche or whatever, because I always acted on information.
‘But there’s one thing I did that no one had done before me. Coppers go looking for crime, analysts go looking for information. Analysts work on information from sources that are verifiable or not, the admiralty system right? What do lawyers and judges work on? Evidence. My audience was going to be senior politicians, senior commissioners and the National Crime Authority, full of fucking lawyers, the joint was run by lawyers. Therefore it dawned on me that I’d have to come up with an analysis and a pictorial representation based on fact.’
Vassallo’s research revealed that a prominent Italian family had taken control of the cannabis trade in North Queensland and that there were links with them and organised crime figures interstate, particularly in Griffith in western New South Wales.
Commissioner Lewis, sitting at the briefing that day, must have put two and two together – that one of his own officers, Jim Slade, had uncovered similar intelligence through his lengthy Operation Trek, submitted to Queensland’s Bureau of Criminal Intelligence just months earlier. What Lewis did not know at that point, was that Vassallo and Slade had been confidentially trading stories, and documents. In addition, Slade had shared with Vassallo how he had been offered a bribe by colleague Alan Barnes in February.
If his diaries are anything to go by, Lewis remained unfazed by the Vassallo presentation. Late on that first night of the conference, he shared a quiet drink with Tasmanian Police Commissioner Max Robinson until midnight. The next day he attended a meeting of senior officers of the Australian Police Ministers’ Council, and had late afternoon drinks with Victorian Commissioner Mick Miller and his counterpart in New South Wales, John Avery.
Lewis was back on a plane for Brisbane the following morning, but had to return to Perth a month later, this time with his Police Minister Bill Glasson for a national police ministers meeting.
Vassallo gave the same briefing to the ministers. ‘Well, Glasson is at the meeting and the bottom line is it’s exactly the same briefing, there’s not a word added extra,’ says Vassallo. ‘He just took it all in very professionally, he thanked me very much; I met them all.’
Glasson got back to Brisbane and was clearly disturbed by Vassallo’s revelations, particularly in relation to Queensland. Vassallo received some inside intelligence that Glasson wanted to see some action. How could this, after the Moore fiasco, have happened on his watch without him knowing anything about it?
‘And immediately Glasson came back [to Brisbane] he started to agitate, he said this is not right,’ recalls Vassallo. ‘This is when Jimmy Slade rang me up because Jimmy is still … at this stage he hadn’t been attacked. But it was after that they figured out that Jimmy and I went to the course together [in Manly, Sydney]. Jimmy and I … he was passing information to me, we were talking. They probably started surveillance on him. And they would have looked at the [phone] numbers that he was ringing and of course the ABCI number was the one … and then there’s my extension.’
Vassallo was right behind Jim Slade but he knew, in the world of corrupt police, how these things could go bad. ‘Jim did the right thing, he knew he had to do the right thing and he knew he had a problem since September of 1984 when I met him,’ recalls Vassallo. ‘And he simply saw me as a lifeline because I was outside of the state.
‘He quickly realised that I had the same opinions as he did. You know, the only way organised crime can survive is if good men do nothing, okay? I said to Jimmy my target will not be the Bellinos, my target will be the people protecting the Bellinos. Until we neutralise them we can’t attack the Bellinos. So hence why, at all times, I didn’t see the government as the enemy, I actually saw the police as the enemy because they were the obvious enemy.’
The way Vassallo viewed it, corrupt police had now approached Slade, and by that action they had become ‘overt’. They were aware Slade was leaking intelligence to Vassallo. That put them both in danger. ‘Suddenly I was thought to be a threat because Jim was supplying information to me. They could control Jim, but they couldn’t control me and I had a fucking audience that was unbelievable, okay?’ says Vassallo. ‘And once they became aware of these things, that gave me a certain amount of pull, so I could use it strategically.’
As for Slade, he knew precisely why the National Crime Authority could not get a foothold in Queensland, and why they were always repelled at the border. The Joke was by now so extensive that there was little in government or in the police force that it didn’t touch.
‘Murphy and Lewis wouldn’t allow [the NCA in Queensland],’ recalls Slade. ‘Queensland was the only state in Australia where nothing was happening in relation to external agencies. Peter Vassallo knew there was something wrong. It was my meeting with Peter, where he took some of my stuff to the commissioner’s meeting in Perth, where the shit really hit the fucking fan.
‘I was hauled over the coals by [Inspector in charge of the Licensing Branch] Graeme Parker. “What the fuck are you doing giving bloody documents away?”’
Only later would Slade discover that the bulk of his reports and sensitive documents were all bundled together and kept in Parker’s safe. ‘They weren’t going anywhere at all,’ reflects Slade.
High Fliers
Despite these dark and potentially deadly machinations operating below the surface, Commissioner Terry Lewis took to his appointment diary with aplomb, his life a dance through the light of celebrity and power, as afforded by his position.
He lunched on the Gold Coast with a number of high fliers, including Minister Russ Hinze, Sir James Ramsay and Sir Edward Williams, where the Commissioner was called upon to offer a toast to the health and future of horse racing. Lewis also continued his convivial Friday afternoon drinks with Sir Edward Lyons in his office in Queen Street. In his ninth year as Commissioner, their tete-a-tetes over a few tumblers of Scotch had become almost solely political. As Lewis records in his diary: ‘Saw Sir Edward Lyons and discussed Rothwells; Channel Nine; TAB Chairman; Carbine Club luncheon; apt. of next Governor; no early elections; redistribution; Expo leadership; Justices for Supreme Court and Sol[icitor]-Gen[eral] from outside.’
Lewis was now so much a part of the National Party fabric that it must have appeared natural to him to be in discussion about senior judicial appointments and election strategies. He also displayed his usual punctilious courtesy when it came to getting in touch with people who might be worth cultivating for the future. Following local council elections, Commissioner Lewis went out of his way to personally telephone the newly appointed mayors and deputy mayors of numerous shires.
On a quick trip to the Gold Coast, Lewis contacted Sea World employee Peter Doggett ‘re pass for John’, presumably his son John Paul Lewis. During the same trip, he managed to squeeze in a meeting with high-powered real estate agent Max Christmas ‘re Japanese investing and visiting Queensland, but fear of crime’. Later, he went to drinks at Sir Edward Lyons’ Gold Coast pad and joined guests such as Sir Thomas Covacevich and Justice Dormer (Bob) Andrews.
Back in Brisbane the following week, Lewis was invited to Government House on Fernberg Road to dine with the Duke and Duchess of Kent, Sir James and Lady Ramsay, Sir Richard Buckley and other notaries. As he strutted the stage, concerns were developing within Treasury that the financial management of the Police Department had devolved into a farce. The department was bleeding money through over-spending and a constant demand for staff and resources.
Treasury had had enough. A senior public servant in the Police Department said the spending was profligate and there was very little official accounting performed. ‘I remember one day we got an absolute blast from Leo Hielscher [then Deputy Under Treasurer of Queensland] about the spending and lack of accountability,’ he said. ‘We were up until midnight trying to prepare an explanation in response to that, to get some sort of document together before the Cabinet meeting the following Monday. We put in all sorts of things to explain where the money had gone.’
Under each of his police ministers, Commissioner Lewis had, year after year, petitioned for a greater budget and more officers. It was an annual feature of his tenure. Yet it was clear to Treasury that there had been little fiscal scrutiny of the Police Department, and that the budget was out of control. Lewis had been in the top job for nine years, yet it appeared few in government were looking closely at the department’s books.
Slade’s Dark Night
At 11 p.m. on Friday 7 June, after both of the revealing conferences in Perth, Senior Sergeant Alan Barnes phoned Jim Slade at home and asked to meet. Slade agreed but his wife Chris wasn’t keen.
Slade rang his boss Col Thompson to inform him of the call. The Slades then waited for Barnes to arrive but close to midnight the phone rang again. It was the police operator at the Beenleigh station telling Slade someone called Barnes was on the line for him.
Slade told the operator to tell Barnes he would meet him at the shopping-centre car park on the corner of Browns Plains Road and Chambers Flat Road. He knew there was bushland nearby where he could observe if it really was Barnes who wanted to meet. ‘I was concerned for my safety and my family’s safety,’ Slade said.
Arming himself for the rendezvous, he told his wife: ‘Ring Col Thompson and tell him, you know, where I’ve gone and if I’m not back within half an hour, three-quarters of an hour, ring him again and, you know, do something about where we’ve gone to.’
Barnes was there on his own. Slade recalls: ‘I met with him and saw that he had been drinking very, very heavily and I saw that he was of no threat to me and my family in the state that he was in … Alan and I had a general conversation about the police force … I decided I would ask him to come back home to talk about the matter there; firstly, to alleviate my wife’s concern about where I was and, secondly, so Col Thompson would know that he didn’t have two dead police officers on his staff.’
At the Slades’ home, the pair sat in the lounge room and talked. It was around 12.30 a.m.
Barnes eventually got around to the purpose of the meeting: ‘Why did you go … why did you tell Col Thompson about the money I gave you?’