Authors: Matthew Condon
Atkinson conceded that Moore had a good ‘working relationship’ with the Commissioner. ‘In fact, I can recall a couple of occasions when the Commissioner appeared on television with Moore,’ Atkinson added. ‘Because of this, Moore had easy access to the Commissioner’s office and on occasions would appear with the Commissioner at various public relations functions. I am not aware if Moore was on a first-name basis with the Commissioner.’
A former close associate of Moore says: ‘Moore had a friend who was in the radio industry and because he was associated with [radio station] 4BC, Moore was introduced to Breslin. He [Breslin] pretended to Moore that he was the government medical officer – a guy called Dr Forde. That was apparently Breslin’s modus operandi, his pattern. That was his thing – impersonating police officers. Saying he was the general manager of Ford [Motor Company], saying he was a police officer, high up in government and all this stuff.’
A fortnight after receiving the late call, Inspector Pitman produced a report on the incident and forwarded it to Internal Investigations ‘for information and favour of consideration’. The next day, Tuesday 25 January, a copy of the report was sent to the Commissioner’s office.
Although Lewis was still officially on annual leave, he was back in Brisbane and coming in and out of the office. On that day he arrived at headquarters around 1.50 p.m., having been out to Marist College, Ashgrove, to enrol his youngest child, John Paul, and have an interview with the headmaster.
He saw Acting Commissioner Atkinson and later had drinks with senior officers, their staff and Police Minister Bill Glasson at headquarters. As for the Pitman report, it made its way to Atkinson’s desk by early February and was marked ‘(1) Seen, (2) File Away’.
Hunting Hapeta
The diligent Licensing Branch undercover officer Nigel Powell, formerly of West Midlands police in the United Kingdom, took to his second tour of duty in the Licensing Branch with gusto. He had arrived out of nowhere in 1979 and, to his surprise, was almost immediately transferred to the Licensing Branch. The rangy, bespectacled Powell made every effort to fit in, but found it difficult to understand how the branch actually worked. The place was steeped in secrets, with hidden connections and loyalties, and Powell wasn’t privy to the branch’s complex infrastructure. Everyone was suspicious of each other.
Despite this, Powell ploughed forward. A tall man, he became a part of the police basketball team. He was also an accomplished long-distance runner, and joined the police athletics squad, winning a national title.
After briefly returning to the UK in the early 1980s, he was back in Brisbane and Licensing by 1981, and slipped straight into his undercover role. Powell observed that in just a few short years the local massage parlour and escort scene had boomed in his absence. Parlours rashed the city, and escort services were doing a roaring trade. One name kept coming up repeatedly during his police work – Hector Hapeta.
The physically huge Hapeta, convicted criminal and one-time pet food proprietor, had come north from Sydney in 1978 with his de facto wife Anne Marie Tilley in search of a better life in the sun. (Rumour had it that Hapeta had in fact fallen foul of Sydney crime identity Abe Saffron, and had gone to Queensland to wait for the dust to settle.) Within weeks of hitting the ground in Brisbane – and in particular the shady lanes of Fortitude Valley – the pair had established the beginnings of what would become a monstrous vice empire.
The couple lived in a small, decrepit Queenslander at 27 Hill Street, Spring Hill, on the doorstep of the Valley and perched on one of the steep streets that arch east off Gregory Terrace. It was hardly the domicile of the city’s leading dealers in prostitution. Then again, Hapeta and Tilley were constantly on the move, he mixing with business partners such as Geoff Crocker, drinking and eating late into the night, catching up with the town’s gambling kings – the Bellinos – and trying to broker new business with men like the criminal Roland Short who, since his heyday with swingers clubs like the Matador, was trying to make a fist of it on the Gold Coast. Anne Marie kept busy running their burgeoning number of parlours, drinking in night clubs into the early hours, keeping up to date with the books and in particular the systemic protection payments going back to the Licensing Branch.
Powell informed his superiors in the Licensing Branch of his suspicions about Hapeta but was repeatedly told to direct his attentions elsewhere. It made no sense to Powell: ‘It became increasingly apparent to me that the perception in the office that Hapeta had nothing to do with the running of prostitution did not match with the information that I was receiving from people on the street. I observed that Hector Hapeta was never prosecuted for keeping premises … although he controlled most of the prostitution establishments then in operation throughout Brisbane. Even after I commenced passing on information about Hapeta, I did not see any attempt to obtain evidence against Hapeta in order to have him prosecuted for keeping.’
Powell continued, undeterred. On 26 April 1983 he gathered an information sheet on Hapeta based on intelligence from his informants. It said Hapeta had financed a massage parlour at 608 Wickham Street, Fortitude Valley, and that he was also in receipt of protection payments from a number of escort agencies. Powell handed the sheet directly to Inspector Graeme Parker, in charge of the Licensing Branch.
A week later Powell had more information that he gave to his superior. It provided further details of protection payments and a warning that Hapeta was looking at setting up an illegal liquor outlet ‘similar to World By Night’ – an unlicensed Bellino/Conte pub and strip club in the city that did a roaring late-night trade.
‘During this period I discussed Hapeta with Inspector Parker,’ Powell said. ‘I told him that I would like to spend some time undercover to find out to what extent Hapeta was involved in various enterprises. Parker told me that his information was that Hapeta was not involved.
‘I made a second attempt during this period to be allowed to investigate Hapeta and Tilley. Parker repeated to me that his information was that Hapeta was not involved and that I was not to worry about him.’
Powell told Parker of a distressing development. His informant was able to recite, word for word, phrase for phrase, conversations he’d had with other Licensing Branch officers, including Parker himself. Someone was leaking information.
As Powell’s informant was leaving Brisbane, the dutiful officer wanted to get on record as much as she knew, and arranged for her to speak with Detective Senior Sergeant Allen Bulger of the Licensing Branch. In due course, Bulger took a statement from her at the Woolloongabba police station. During the interview the informant repeated what Powell had outlined in his reports – that Hapeta was dispatching protection payments, and owned at least three parlours: Top of the Valley, Fantasia and Touch of Class – and had interests in sex shops.
Powell’s diligence in the field was bringing him dangerously close to uncovering the web of corruption that filtered up through the Licensing Branch to the very top of the police force and the desk of Commissioner Lewis himself. He didn’t know it yet, but Powell’s days in Licensing were numbered.
Laundry
In the early 1980s, Commissioner Lewis wasn’t the only one playing the property market. Jack Herbert – the English-born former Licensing Branch policeman, in-line machine salesman and now chief bagman for corrupt police – was buying and selling with aplomb, everything from inner-city apartments to industrial warehouses. The cunning Herbert, maestro of The Joke and recipient of hundreds of thousands of dollars of protection money from growing sources, used real estate transactions to wash his illegal monies.
By 1983, according to Herbert, bribes received from prostitution and illegal gambling totalled around $45,250 per month. He alleged Lewis was taking in $6500 a month, while Herbert himself was pocketing $9679. Something had to be done about the accumulation of black cash. ‘Most of the deals involved some sort of scam,’ Herbert said in his memoir,
The Bagman
.
Herbert had been dabbling in property since 1970 when he bought his first house at 105 Kirkland Avenue, Coorparoo. This was followed in 1974 by unit 27 at The Dunes, on the Esplanade at Surfers Paradise. In 1976 the Herberts picked up another house and an adjoining block of land at 69 Atlantic Drive, Loganholme, before purchasing the unit he and his family would move into at 49 Laidlaw Parade, East Brisbane.
In the early 1980s they bought houses in Dutton Park and Daisy Hill and in February 1982 purchased two blocks in an industrial estate at 22 Devlan Street, Mansfield, south of the CBD, off a friend who was managing the properties. A ‘bodgy’ contract was drawn up and Herbert signed. The friend referred to the land as the ‘Black and White Estate’ because ‘so many people were using it to launder illegal money’.
Herbert also bought unit 2 of the Southbank Apartments at 10 Lower River Terrace, South Brisbane, which had splendid views of the Captain Cook Bridge and the Brisbane CBD. Herbert told the estate agent he was in the pinball machine business and had a lot of money he didn’t want to be taxed on. He asked if he could use some black money for the purchase. He wasn’t knocked back.
In the end, Herbert said he washed about $270,000 through the property market. He claimed he never discussed money with Commissioner Terry Lewis. ‘He wasn’t a gambling man,’ said Herbert. ‘He didn’t bet on the horses or the trots or the greyhounds. Strange as it sounds, we split more than a million dollars between us and never discussed what we were doing with it. That’s how it was with Terry. We had been doing business since the 1960s but I never asked how he disposed of his share.’
Herbert was accumulating so much cash he quite literally didn’t know what to do with it. He stashed it around his home. He created secret cavities in walls. He had cemented bundles of it inside besser bricks. Jack Herbert couldn’t spend his money fast enough.
And it was exactly how he liked it.
Framed
By early 1983, Queensland’s first female detective, Lorelle Saunders, had been languishing in prison for more than eight months on a range of serious offences, including attempted murder. Saunders had come to prominence under the commissionership of Ray Whitrod, and had been a powerful voice for the rights of female police officers. It was this kind of behaviour that had got under the skin of Commissioner Lewis, and even more so the former assistant commissioner, Tony Murphy. But perhaps her biggest transgression had been her involvement, in the late 1970s, in what became known as the Katherine James affair, when photographs allegedly surfaced of the prostitute James in a physical relationship with the high-ranking police officer and Whitrod acolyte Basil Hicks. The pictures claiming to depict Hicks, a dedicated family man, having sex with a prostitute didn’t even need to exist. Just the word they did was enough to tarnish Hicks’s reputation.
A staunch Catholic, Hicks wanted to get to the bottom of the damning allegations against him. He believed that behind the scenes police were using false photographs as some sort of bargaining chip with the prostitute James. In an attempt to expose the set-up, he headed out to Boggo Road Gaol with Lorelle Saunders, who interviewed James.
When Murphy discovered Saunders had accompanied Hicks, he was apoplectic. Saunders believes that she became the target of a vicious campaign by corrupt police to destroy her career. As an alleged member of the so-called Committee of Eight who had supported Whitrod, Saunders had made several attempts to expose corruption in the force. She had raised the ire of the Rat Pack and had come to understand that revenge was likely, though she could not in her wildest dreams have imagined the form it would take.
On 29 April 1982, Saunders was arrested. An article had appeared in the newspaper, penned by Murphy’s old mate crime reporter Brian Bolton, claiming that a senior policewoman had plotted to murder a fellow police officer. The article revealed that detectives had uncovered a plan by a criminal and the policewoman to ambush the officer, murder him and dump his body in bushland outside Brisbane.
‘There were headlines in the [
Sunday
]
Sun
alleging very serious matters were being investigated against a female officer,’ Saunders recalled. ‘This was the first knowledge I had of any such investigation. I subsequently contacted my solicitor.’
Commissioner Lewis made no mention of this extraordinarily grave story in his diaries, but he did note on 28 April that he phoned ‘Sir Robert Sparkes re P/W L. Saunders’.
In prison, Saunders was assaulted by both fellow prisoners and warders, and was put in solitary confinement. The charges against her were that she had attempted to procure criminal Douglas Mervyn Dodd to steal money; that on unknown dates she attempted to procure Dodd to conspire with another to kill Saunders’ former lover, Superintendent Allan Lobegeiger; and that on 7 March she stole a .357 Magnum Smith and Wesson revolver, a .22 Smith and Wesson revolver, a .44 Magnum Smith and Wesson revolver, an Armalite semi-automatic rifle and a quantity of ammunition, the property of Roy Alfred Coomer. Saunders was additionally charged with attempting to pervert the course of justice, stemming from a tape recording, allegedly found at her home.
Dodd (who had once been Saunders’ informant) told police that Saunders had asked him to steal the weapons owned by Roy Coomer, with whom she was in a relationship. Dodd also said Saunders had asked him to procure somebody to kill Lobegeiger. Dodd said he had an incriminating recording of a conversation with Saunders, which he had recorded over the top of music he already had on the tape. When the alleged conversation with Saunders ended, the previously taped music resumed.