Authors: Matthew Condon
‘A friend of mine had driven past and seen a “For Sale” sign on it,’ Herbert later wrote in his memoir,
The Bagman
. ‘At the time Bellino and Conte owed me $20,000. They had fallen behind in their payments for protection. I was confident they would come up with the money eventually.
‘All the same, when the chance came to buy the house I saw it as a good opportunity to get the $20,000 back … Conte and Bellino wanted $160,000 for the house so I offered them $140,000 and told them I’d give them $40,000 on the side and $100,000 on the contract.
‘I asked them to deduct another $20,000, which was the amount they owed me, but they said they were in financial difficulties and needed all the cash they could get from the house.’
Herbert, ever The Bagman, was not thrilled with the arrangement but he wanted the house. ‘The agent was completely innocent and didn’t know what was going on,’ Herbert recalled. ‘When she showed me around the house I pointed out a few faults – cracks here, there and everywhere – and offered $100,000.
‘She said the offer was a bit low and she didn’t think the vendors would accept. But later she rang to say they’d accepted $100,000, which surprised her but didn’t surprise me, as I was going to slip them the extra $40,000.’
So Jack and Peggy got a fine inner-city home for a bargain, and The Bagman continued to take in about $17,000 a month from the Bellino syndicate to continue to protect illegal games, parlours and nightclubs. At the same time, Herbert was raking in about $23,000 a month from the Hapeta/Tilley enterprises. That was just shy of half a million dollars per annum from the two groups.
On moving into the house, Herbert installed some of his perennial necessities. In the large lounge room not far from the fireplace, he built a long bar where he could socialise with friends and do business. Behind the bar, close to floor level, he had a convenient cavity for bundles of illicit cash. He created another upstairs in one of the bathrooms.
Out the back of the house, he had a large hot tub put in, along with mirrors on a neighbouring wall. Jack liked to party, and here he could rest his weary bones in a warm, bubbling spa at the end of a long day. For the impoverished bobby from London, he had finally made it.
By this stage, Herbert believed The Joke was invulnerable. ‘We had the Commissioner of Police on our side,’ Herbert alleged in his memoir. ‘We had a minister, Don Lane, who told us everything that happened in Cabinet. We had an assistant commissioner and someone in the Bureau of Criminal Intelligence. We believed no one could touch us.’
And the funny and extremely likeable Herbert had a clutch of good friends that who trusted. ‘I had a lot of time for Jack, actually,’ says one close friend. ‘He came from nothing, make no bones about it. He was a top bloke. I’d trust him with anything. He was a rogue, sure. He had a great saying – everybody’s corruptible, it’s just the price. It’s so true. It really is very true.’ Everyone in the Herbert circle knew one thing – nothing mattered to Jack Herbert more than his family. ‘He was the best family man I’d ever seen.’
But business was business. Police would come and go from Herbert’s various houses and apartments over the years. ‘He wasn’t fussed with Lewis. He had to get along with him,’ the friend says. ‘Hazel [Lewis] had the best memory of anyone I have ever seen in my life. She could meet you this year at a Christmas party, and come back in a year’s time and take up the conversation. I’ve never seen anything like it.
‘I saw Lewis there [at Herbert’s place] quite regularly. He was there more than once. More than twice. A lot more. [Lewis would] come over and run stuff by Jack.
‘It was like an open door. Jack was a great party animal, he’d have them all there for parties and drinks. He’d have the head of the Drug Squad there. [He’d have] Tony Murphy. Murphy was there all the time. He was alright. Nice enough bloke. I never had any dealings with them business-wise, but socially he was a nice guy.’
While Herbert never explicitly outlined the machinery and function that constituted The Joke, he offered enough to trusted friends for a picture to emerge. ‘He gave me bits and pieces, never the whole thing, never,’ the friend says. ‘You picked up bits and pieces and put two and two together and you certainly knew what was going on.
‘There was a guy who was recruited into The Joke. We had a problem with our body corporate and the builder of the block of units lived there. Jack did his block. This guy rang the police and they sent a copper around. Jack recruited him while he was there interviewing him. It was like
Dad’s Army
, it really was.
‘Jack never involved anybody who was a friend, ever, in any of his evidence, books, ever, he never incriminated anyone.’
Herbert also started developing more elaborate ways to earn corrupt money, devising an ingenious system of laundering cash through the very SP bookmakers that were paying him protection money. Herbert would give the bookmakers cash sums in exchange for a winner’s cheque. The bookie would then class the amount as a losing bet for taxation purposes. In a similar vein, Herbert would buy winning TAB tickets for the valid amount with a 10 per cent commission on top. In the mid-1980s Herbert successfully laundered over $200,000 using this system.
The wall cavities in the house on Jordan Terrace were soon stuffed to the gills with cash.
Mrs X
On Monday 30 December, Commissioner Lewis’s day was largely taken up with press interviews in advance of the official announcement of his knighthood. At home in Garfield Drive early that evening, a
Courier-Mail
journalist and photographer interviewed Lewis and took a photograph of him and the soon-to-be Lady Hazel.
Lewis joked about how, given he was born on 29 February, he may have been the youngest Knight ever. ‘I only get a birthday every four years, so I’m about 15 I guess,’ he said. ‘As far as I know, I am the first Queensland Police Commissioner in the force’s 121 years to get this honour.
‘I have no hesitation whatsoever in accepting the knighthood. I believe I have done a good job.’
He said he worked on average about 70 hours a week, and had stabilised the force during his tenure. Lewis added that the force’s clean-up rate of 52 per cent was one of the best in Australia. ‘I have got away from the desk,’ he stated. ‘I am the first bloke in 121 years to visit every police station in the State at least once.’
The following day, according to Lewis’s diary, ‘phone calls started at 5am re Knighthood’. He did more media interviews and noted: ‘Received huge number telephone calls, telegrams and telex messages.’
On his last day in the office before his annual vacation pilgrimage to the Gold Coast, Police Minister Bill Glasson phoned him ‘re report on Callaghan investigation’. The Callaghan affair was a potential time bomb for the Bjelke-Petersen government, and it was in the full glare of the media given that Christmas and New Year were traditionally known as the ‘silly season’, when serious news stories were typically thin on the ground.
On Saturday 4 January, Lewis and his wife headed down to Surfers Paradise and a unit at Panorama Towers, a holiday high-rise that backed on to a canal. He joined fellow knight Sir Edward Lyons for drinks on Tuesday 7 January, then had dinner with friends John and Betty Meskell. The following evening he again met with Lyons as well as Jack and Peggy Herbert for drinks until 9 p.m.
A story on page three of the
Courier-Mail
that day would not have escaped Lewis’s attention. The Auditor-General’s report into the Queensland Film Corporation had been leaked to journalist Tony Koch. He reported that the auditor had discovered ‘two apparent breaches’ of the Film Industry Development Act. ‘The fraud squad has been called in following an inspection of the accounts by the Auditor-General’s Department.’
The Auditor-General, Vince Doyle, had earlier demanded from the Queensland Film Corporation the appropriate paperwork relating to the money transfers. Allen Callaghan had replied with a memo, stating the Queensland Day Committee was ‘inter-departmental’, set up by State Cabinet and controlled by the Premier’s Department. Callaghan reminded the Auditor-General that Cabinet had asked all government departments to assist the committee ‘with manpower and resources’. The memo added: ‘This has been done in a variety of ways with Cabinet’s full knowledge and concurrence.’
Two days later Koch reported on another memo from Callaghan to the Auditor-General, this time dated 2 September. Callaghan accused the auditor of being ‘zealous’, and pointed out that most auditors ‘paid department permanent heads the courtesy of discussing their final report before completion’.
It was a measure of the seriousness of the situation that the heavy-hitting National Party president, Sir Robert Sparkes, was then wheeled out to placate an increasingly sceptical Queensland community. ‘The public can be reassured that there will be no cover-up,’ Sparkes told the
Sunday Mail
. ‘Even if they are the most senior public servants in Queensland, they will still face the appropriate action.’ The government insisted on not identifying Judith Callaghan, and by referring to her as ‘Mrs X’, although it had been the worst kept secret around town for many months.
Meanwhile, public pressure had forced Justice Minister Neville Harper to do a backflip and order a coronial inquest into the death of state government auditor Hank Coblens, whose body had been found in his car at Victoria Point in the middle of his audit into the Queensland Day Committee. The news of Coblens’ suicide took a week to hit the papers.
An article in the Brisbane
Telegraph
was headlined: SUICIDE BAFFLES POLICE. ‘Detectives said a high-powered military rifle Coblens bought from a city gun shop on the day of his death was found beside his body.
‘Cleveland police are trying to ascertain what he meant by the hand-written note, and in their inquiries they interviewed several senior Government figures.’
Harper initially saw no need for an inquest given that police had ruled the death a suicide, but in response to public and political pressure, he changed his mind. He said that although he agreed with the Coroner that there were no suspicious circumstances surrounding the death, an inquest needed to be held to allay the concerns of Coblens’ family and the community at large.
Courier-Mail
journalist Tony Koch reported that ‘Government sources said investigations [into the Judith Callaghan fraud charges] were being hampered by the absence of some files concerning the Queensland Day Committee.’
The inquest was set down for March 1986, but prior to the formal hearings the press speculated about a mysterious ‘missing briefcase’ in relation to the case. In the Brisbane
Telegraph
, journalist Lane Calcutt wrote that a relative of the now notorious Mrs X [Judith Callaghan] ‘questioned the whereabouts of a “brown leather” briefcase, which the relative claims contains vital files of the Queensland Day Committee.
‘The relative said the briefcase and files were handed to an Auditor-General’s Department officer [Coblens] who had investigated the committee. The relative claimed Mrs X had been told that the Auditor-General was not to be “embarrassed” over the affair.’ Understandably, the relative wanted to know: What happened to the briefcase?
Lewis was back from holidays and in his office on Saturday 25 January, and was immediately phoned by journalists in relation to the ‘Mrs X’ investigation. He may have wished he was still on leave. Amid this turmoil, however, Lewis noted in his diary on Friday 31 January: ‘Hon. Glasson phoned re moving him from Police and Hon. [Bill] Gunn becoming our Minister.’
Then, on Tuesday 4 February, two major events occurred. Firstly, Lewis was summoned to the Executive Building and the office of Bill Gunn, the new Police Minister and Lewis’s fifth since he became commissioner in late 1976. William Angus Manson Gunn, then 64, was from a large family that had its seat in Laidley, west of Brisbane. In 1972 he was elected to state parliament as the member for Somerset which encompassed the Lockyer Valley. He had been seen for years as the successor to Bjelke-Petersen.
When the Premier offered Gunn the police portfolio, he didn’t want it. He knew he was inheriting a ‘can of worms’. He had also heard, for years, that there was corruption in the force, but he had no proof. Gunn’s secretary Gwen Butler had previously worked for former Police Minister Max Hodges, the man who had brought in Whitrod to put a broom through the force in the 1970s. She warned Gunn of corruption in the ranks. Clearly, Bjelke-Petersen was also aware. His brief to Gunn was to clean up the force – a request that echoed back in time to 1970, when a fresh-faced Premier tasked Ray Whitrod with the same job.
Gunn’s appointment posed a difficulty for Lewis. They had no relationship; Gunn was a straight-shooter and could not be sweet-talked. According to Lewis’s diary on 4 February, they discussed ‘crime income; illegal gambling; SP betting; prostitution (massage parlours serve useful purpose he believes); need for 500 more police; my using part of 11th floor …’.
Lewis is adamant Gunn made the comment about massage parlours in the presence of himself, Don Braithwaite and Ron Redmond.
‘… Gunn did say, when he became Minister, and we asked him … that prostitution serves a useful purpose. That’s what he said. And whether you agree with it or not it does protect … most of the decent women in the community,’ says Lewis. ‘You could enforce all the law if you liked, but there’d be hardly anybody out of gaol. Like keep to the left on the footpath. You could go on and on …’