Authors: Matthew Condon
Lewis says their investment property at 29 Garfield Drive was sold to finance the rebuilding of the house at number 12. He also secured a loan to pay for the new house, which he says cost about $450,000.
The big white house was the only display of extravagance for Lewis, in a lifetime of frugality and penny-pinching. He was a man of practical and inexpensive clothes and shoes, he drove no fancy cars, he consumed offal and cheap cuts of meat, and he and Hazel had a strict minimal limit on Christmas presents and birthday gifts.
Any socialising was largely done through Lewis’s official capacity as Police Commissioner. After endless hours of official openings, functions and formal dinners, home had become a refuge. Now it was to be a grand home, seen for miles clinging to the ridge on Garfield Drive, with views all the way north to the Glasshouse Mountains.
Former Police Union president Ron Edington says he remembers the construction of the new house in Bardon. ‘What happened, when they were building that bloody place up there opposite bloody Government House, Hazel would go around paying everyone from a bloody shoe box. She used to go around and hand the money out … you know. I don’t know where it was all coming from …’
Sichter Goes to Trial
More than five years after the brutal shotgun deaths of Far North Queensland drug growers William (Paul) and Grayvyda Clarke, the man accused of their deaths – Terrence John Sichter – finally went to trial in July 1986. There had been a mistrial recorded three months earlier in Cairns, the judge declaring that certain evidence tendered was not relevant and prejudicial. This time, the case moved to the Supreme Court in Brisbane. Sichter had pleaded not guilty.
For years rumours had circulated about who really murdered the Clarkes, and they all pointed towards the New South Wales-based Mafia. Detective Jim Slade, in the course of his undercover Operation Trek investigations, had allegedly been told the killings were carried out by either Rocco Francesco Medici, 47, or his brother-in-law Guiseppe Loui Furina, 41, both Calabrians who resided in Melbourne’s western suburbs.
The two men were in regular contact with growers like Clarke, and had been in Far North Queensland around the time of the murders on 24 May 1981. Medici organised the money, while Furina looked after the transportation of the Indian hemp into New South Wales and Victoria. Both men, in turn, were murdered, their bodies discovered bound in chains in the Murrumbidgee River south of Griffith, New South Wales, on 5 May 1984. They had been tortured prior to death.
The evidence against Sichter amounted to a variety of statements from criminals who indicated that Sichter had confessed to the murders while in prison, after his initial arrest.
At the trial, overseen by Justice Kelly, Sichter was represented by the legendary lawyer Col Bennett, the former ALP member for Kurilpa who had triggered the notorious National Hotel inquiry in 1963, and personally represented some of the biggest figures in Queensland criminal history, including the late prostitute and brothel madam Shirley Brifman.
The Crown alleged that Sichter, who was working on a property at Gatton in the Lockyer Valley prior to the murders, had driven north to Cairns in May 1981 to destroy Clarke because he had supposedly ripped him off in a drug deal.
Witness Barry Kenneth Fyfe, who was working with Sichter on a property owned by Clarke near the Pascoe River, in the vicinity of Idlewild Station near Portland Roads, North Queensland, said Sichter had bogged a supply truck and Fyfe said Clarke would be after him for it.
‘One word out of him and I’ll blow him away,’ Sichter had allegedly said in response to Fyfe.
Fyfe said he was just joking.
‘I’ll still blow him away,’ Sichter allegedly replied.
Fyfe lived on a property owned by his brother Donald, also on the Pascoe River, six kilometres from the Pascoe River Bridge. According to the ABCI’s confidential Alpha Report, Barry Fyfe and an associate, Sylvester Perrett, were interviewed by detectives in late 1982 over drug matters. Both talked about the Clarke murders and volunteered suspects. Perrett claimed Robert ‘Dave’ Berrick was responsible (impossible, given Berrick was in Sydney at the time of the slayings). Fyfe nominated Terrence Sichter.
When Detective Sergeant Ross Beer took the stand he told the court he had been present when the charred bodies of the Clarkes were removed from the farmhouse in Pinnacle Road, Julatten, and was also in attendance when the remains were X-rayed at Mareeba Hospital. The bodies were riddled with hundreds of shotgun pellets.
Beer said he had travelled down to Brisbane and interviewed Sichter at the Inala police station, west of the CBD, on 18 December 1981. Sichter told him he had been in Brisbane when the Clarkes were killed. Sichter allegedly told Beer that in 1980 he had grown a marihuana crop and sold 18 kilograms of the drug to Clarke. He also said to Beer that some Italian men had ripped off a crop from a local grower at the time.
At the end of the first week of the trial, the Crown produced witness Matthew Kevin Ferris, 25, a motor mechanic from Sydney, who said he had lived in Cairns for several months in 1985. Ferris said he was arrested in September of that year on charges of possession and selling a dangerous drug, and was gaoled for 18 months. He told the court he was in the Cairns watch-house for a week and shared a cell with Sichter. He claims the pair talked about the death of the Clarkes.
‘He [Sichter] said to me, “Yes, I got them”, or “I fixed them”, or something like that,’ Ferris told the court. Ferris then admitted he told police about Sichter’s comments.
The defence called Gatton farmer Colin Schafferius, of East Egypt Road, who owned a property next door to Sichter’s. Schafferius said he worked on Sichter’s property in Gatton on the weekend of 23 and 24 May 1981 – when the Clarkes were murdered – and saw him on several occasions.
Sichter had employed Schafferius to use a small bulldozer to repair the banks of a dam, and paid for the work on Monday 25 May. Sichter was given a receipt for the job. It appeared proof that Sichter was in Gatton, and not 1794 kilometres away in Julatten when the murders were committed.
Although they took nearly 24 hours to reach a verdict, the jury ultimately found Sichter not guilty of the murders of William (Paul) and Grayvyda Clarke. He walked out of court on Saturday 2 August a free man, and claimed the whole thing had been a “police set-up”.
‘We will have to start from scratch,’ Sichter said. His wife Janet added: ‘We want to go home now and see our kids.’
Just three years later, Sichter left Gatton and set up camp at Chilli Beach, not far from his old stomping ground of the Portland Roads, on Cape York Peninsula. Sichter had grown marihuana for the Calabrians, escaped a double murder conviction and avowed that he was out of the drug scene and would make a go of his farm in Gatton.
On the night of Saturday 10 June 1989, Sichter was found dead of a single bullet wound to the head at his camp by his then girlfriend, Maria Camp. Acquaintance Robert ‘Dave’ Berrick says: ‘He was off his face. He was playing Russian roulette. It was poetic justice.’
Masters
Investigative journalist Chris Masters had had an intense few months, researching the Italian Mafia and its Australian links for a
Four Corners
television report called ‘The Family Business’.
The bespectacled Masters, whose face seems to carry the semi-squint of someone whose gaze is trained endlessly at the sun, was born in Grafton in northern New South Wales and finished his schooling in Sydney before joining the ABC. He is part of a brilliant and creative family. His mother, Olga, was an acclaimed novelist and short story writer, as well as having worked as a ‘stringer’ for small-town newspapers. His brother, Roy, is one of the country’s best sports journalists.
Masters joined the prestigious team at
Four Corners
in 1983. His 1985 report ‘French Connections’, about the sinking of Greenpeace’s
Rainbow Warrior
vessel in New Zealand, won him the Gold Walkley award.
As for ‘The Family Business’, it probed the links between the Italian Mafia and Australia, and in particular the disappearance of Griffith local Donald Mackay in 1977 and the death of a man linked to an Australian Mafia family who was assassinated while on holidays in Italy.
The story screened on 23 June 1986. Masters’ source for the story was Peter Vassallo of the Australian Bureau of Criminal Intelligence in Canberra. Vassallo had been impressed by Masters and, in a quiet way, the Mafia story was a test. It proved Masters could be trusted. ‘Chris didn’t realise when I set him up with this story … that it was a test for him that would lead him down a particular path and he’d get used to me,’ says Vassallo. ‘Because I knew the relationship had to be there. Jim [Slade] was always at arm’s length, we only communicated by phone, we didn’t see each other right? And often we spoke in code when we did speak.’
Masters was in Canberra after the story was broadcast, and met with Vassallo outside the offices of the ABC. Vassallo said he had another story for the investigative journalist.
What did it concern? Masters queried.
‘Queensland,’ Vassallo said.
Masters was sceptical. He knew many of his colleagues had ploughed the same field before: Allan Hall had done stuff; Andrew Olle; Kerry O’Brien had had a go. ‘I felt too many people had already been there,’ Masters reflects. It had been done to death.
‘Not like this it hasn’t,’ Vassallo replied.
Most importantly, there was a man Masters needed to meet. Jim Slade of the Queensland police had a story to tell.
Soon after, Vassallo flew to Brisbane with Masters, and they met Slade in a pub. ‘He [Slade] looked more like a farmer than a cop,’ says Masters. ‘I remember when we got out of the car – we must have been going to have a counter lunch in a pub – Jim took his gun out and locked it in the boot of his car.
‘I met his wife Christine also. I felt for her, for them both. I remember being struck by their predicament. It wasn’t until I spoke to Jim that I found the moral energy to chase it. Jim’s predicament made me angry.’
It was Saturday 27 September 1986. Jim Slade recalls: ‘I said to Masters, I’d be part of anything that he wanted. But I said there was no way I’d get my photograph taken, stuff like that. We thought it was probably our best move, to do this.
‘What I wanted was for him to have something that he’d be able to pin something on. I wanted to give him at least a statutory declaration.’
It was a beginning for Masters. Slade would talk about the bribes he had been offered from his superior in the Bureau of Criminal Intelligence, Senior Sergeant Alan Barnes, and how the money had allegedly come from Brisbane identity ‘Uncle Gerry’ Geraldo Bellino. He would explain to Masters the ins and outs of his exhaustive Operation Trek, and the Queensland police hierarchy’s lack of interest in its findings.
Slade felt he had betrayed Barnes by talking about the bribes, but equally couldn’t live any longer with the stress of the situation. Now he was prepared to tell all to Masters.
Masters gave Slade his word that their initial conversation was ‘off the record’, and that for the time being he would remain a ‘secret, unattributable source’.
Masters would go on to write in a memoir: ‘I could tell from the start this was a good story. The scent of institutionalised corruption gave it scale. The cri de coeur of the Slades gave it passion. I was angry at the notion that honesty could be so cunningly press-ganged into a career with the other side.’
(Bagman Jack Herbert would later admit to his biographer Tom Gilling that his ultimate downfall and the collapse of The Joke all went back ‘to Slade’.)
Masters returned to Sydney later that day. He wrote in his diary: ‘Fly back. Go to bed. Hear the phone. Dad tells me my mother died at 11.30.’
Naturally, Masters was depressed over his mother’s death, as were all of Olga’s children. She was a life force, and it was impossible to believe she was no longer there.
Masters would pick up the Queensland story in the New Year.
Sin Triangle
By late 1986, two things in Queensland remained a constant. The first was that Bjelke-Petersen would be Premier for another three years – his government increased its majority at the state election, held on 1 November, and the result handed him a seventh consecutive term, and the eleventh for the National Party since 1957.
The second was that the vice scene was bigger and more lucrative than ever, infecting cities and towns across the state, and especially in Brisbane and on the Gold Coast.
Around this time, the chief-of-staff of the
Courier-Mail
, Bob Gordon, was living with his parents in the Brisbane suburb of Wavell Heights, having recently returned to Queensland from Canberra. Gordon, a nuggetty former rugby player, and married with children, had accepted the position at the newspaper, but still hadn’t finalised the full move from the Australian capital, where he’d worked for years on the
Canberra Times
. He felt he was an imposition on his parents, so he asked them if he could take up temporary residence at their holiday house at Broadbeach on the Gold Coast. Gordon decided he would commute for the time being.
A newspaperman through and through, Gordon’s position meant he wouldn’t leave work before around 8.30 p.m., when the first edition had been put to bed. This meant he was often driving through Fortitude Valley to get on to the Story Bridge in the evenings. He soon noticed hookers on all corners of the Valley.