Authors: Matthew Condon
‘There was a house, a Queenslander, halfway down to the Valley, which was painted white – a lovely place – obviously had a lot of money spent on it, with a great big red light on the verandah. One night I drove down and there was a bloody queue of Japanese sailors in uniform.’
Back at work, Gordon asked political correspondent Peter Morley if prostitution had been legalised in Queensland since he’d been out of the state.
Morley burst into laughter. ‘No, no, Bob,’ he replied. ‘There’re no brothels in Queensland. Russ [Hinze] said there are no brothels in Queensland.’
On another day, Gordon hopped on the Queensland Newspapers bus for the quick trip from Campbell Street, Bowen Hills, into the CBD. It travelled south along St Paul’s Terrace towards the city and, in Fortitude Valley, the bus route slipped past a peculiar-shaped building at the fiveways where St Paul’s Terrace and Brunswick Street intersected. It was a stone’s throw from the former Whiskey Au Go Go nightclub, where 15 people lost their lives after the building was torched in March 1973.
‘As the bus went past what I later dubbed “Sin Triangle”, all the girls in the bus looked out the window and up …’. Gordon asked a colleague what was going on.
‘Oh, sometimes the girls up there flash their wares at everyone,’ he was told.
While Gordon had been working in Canberra, back in Brisbane the Bellinos operated an illegal game upstairs, and a brothel – the Top of the Valley – had been in full swing for some time. Still, the brazenness of prostitution stunned Gordon. ‘Two things came into my mind,’ he recalls. ‘One, obviously you know, how come this is so blatant and so tolerated? I didn’t have any moral scruples about it, it was just kind of interesting from a journalist’s point of view. But [secondly] down south, while I’d been there … there was a raid on a brothel … in Sydney, and when they checked the freehold of the title, it was owned by the local synagogue.’
The memory of that story lingered in Gordon’s mind. He returned to the office and assigned a reporter to check on the title of Sin Triangle. ‘I didn’t want to know who was renting the place, I knew it was the underworld … but I wanted to know who owned the freehold on it,’ says Gordon.
Dissatisfied with the reporter’s results, he soon tapped on the shoulder of journalist Phil Dickie, who he had known briefly from Canberra when Dickie worked on the Australian National University student newspaper,
Woroni
. (To some, ‘Woroni’ had become Dickie’s nickname around the office.) Dickie had also been a part-time copy boy at the
Canberra Times
. Gordon asked Dickie to go down and figure out where the main brothels were. At that stage the plan was to conduct company searches and publish a list of the respectable people who owned disrespectful houses.
Gordon says: ‘He [Dickie] was obviously looking for something to keep his mind off his own … troubles [the young journalist had recently separated from his wife] … all that sort of domestic stuff. It plays havoc with young men.’
Dickie literally carried out the brief to the letter. He remembered that barrister and Director of Prosecutions, Des Sturgess, had written critically of the police Licensing Branch and their activities in his forgotten report of 1985. In it, Sturgess had concentrated on the Brisbane vice scene identities who controlled prostitution and illegal gambling. In the report he didn’t identify the main players, but number-coded them.
Dickie’s first task was to identify the brothels and massage parlours. Secondly, he had to try and find out who owned the various premises. ‘I established, you know, quite easily – phone calls at that stage – that they were in fact brothels or escort agencies offering sex,’ he says. ‘And then I sort of worked through the rigmarole of the council, the Titles Office and the Corporate Affairs Office, which wasn’t sort of nationalised at that stage … I quickly started to get the sense that there was something in this [story].’
Experienced crime reporter Ken Blanch, who’d been on the scene since the 1950s, and had known a string of Queensland police commissioners from Bischof through to Sir Terence Lewis, remembers the mild-mannered Dickie in the office at that time.
‘Dickie came to me and said … “I’m to do a thorough investigation of Sin Triangle down the Valley – what will I do?”’ says Blanch. ‘I suggested that he go and find out who owned the buildings and start right from the ground up, and that’s what he did.
‘They were all shit scared as soon as he appeared on the scene and he knew who owned the buildings that the brothels were operating in – it happens to be illegal to allow your premises to be used as a brothel – and he had them on toast. They had to tell him that they knew what was going on there. Better to tell him than the coppers.
‘He was lucky they didn’t do him in, you know, very lucky. He was a very foolhardy young man.’
The editor of the
Courier-Mail
, David Smith, warned both Dickie and Gordon that if the story had ‘holes’ in it, they’d both be posted to Oodnadatta, the remote outpost in outback South Australia.
Front Page
The week before Dickie’s story was published, Commissioner Lewis and his wife Hazel enjoyed a brief break down on their beloved Gold Coast. On Sunday 4 January, the couple was given an aerial tour from Hope Island to Burleigh Heads aboard the Westpac Surf Lifesaving Association’s surf patrol helicopter. A few days later they dined in the exclusive Margot’s Restaurant – only opened for a couple of weeks – in the Gold Coast International Hotel, and deemed the meal ‘excellent’.
There were the annual drinks with developer Eddie Kornhauser and a Magic Millions dinner at the Conrad International Hotel. There was also a luncheon with Queensland’s Chief Justice, Sir Dormer (Bob) Andrews and his wife Lady Andrews. During his leave Lewis read
The Racing Game
by Marvin B. Scott, an analysis of the world of horse racing and those who work in the industry, and
The Complete Yes Minister,
the scripts based on the popular BBC television sitcom about the interaction between elected officials and the public service.
Dickie’s painstaking front-page scoop was published on Monday 12 January 1987. It featured a small headshot of Des Sturgess, QC, and carried no by-line. The story opened: ‘One year after the Sturgess Report lifted the lid on prostitution in Queensland, Brisbane’s sex industry is thriving. In the metropolitan area alone, 21 clearly identifiable brothels are operating, well above the official police claim of the past three years that only 14 brothels are operating under the guise of massage parlours in Brisbane.
‘When the confusing multitude of escort agencies is taken into account, some estimates put the number of prostitution outlets in Brisbane as high as 60.’
Dickie identified two distinct groups in control of the trade. The biggest group was that run by a man named Hector Hapeta, 44. His principal associate was his 31-year-old de facto, Anne Marie Tilley, Ann Marie Hall or Mary Hall. The second group had six brothels and controlled the World By Night strip club. It was also linked to the illegal casino at 142 Wickham Street. This other consortium, wrote Dickie, was linked to Geraldo Bellino, Vic Conte, Allan Holloway and Geoff Crocker.
The article continued: ‘Sources within the industry described competition between the two groups as surprisingly harmonious but said independent operations and those trying to set up were sometimes subject to “action”.’
Dickie quoted Sturgess’s report, saying that police had sufficient powers to charge any property owners who knowingly allowed their premises to be used for the purposes of prostitution. ‘No owner of any of these premises who had seen it in recent times could be unaware of the purposes for which it is being used,’ Sturgess said. ‘But … the main offenders have, for years, enjoyed immunity from prosecution.’
Dickie asked the police department if any of the main players had been charged with prostitution, gaming or illegal liquor offences since the Sturgess Report had been released. The police media section said the release of such information would be a violation of privacy.
Chief-of-staff Bob Gordon says the Queensland Newspapers office was pretty nervous, as was editor David Smith. ‘They probably didn’t have as much confidence in me as they probably should have; I was the new bloke … and of course they would have been getting heavy stuff from the Board.’
Deputy Premier and Police Minister Bill Gunn thundered the next day that there were no prostitutes in Brisbane massage parlours, full stop. He said there were only ‘13 or 14’ massage parlours operating right across Queensland, compared to around 200 in Victoria. Gunn said the claim [in the Sturgess Report] that organised crime was behind Brisbane’s brothels was ‘only one man’s opinion’.
(In the
Courier-Mail
’s
classified advertisements published at the back of the newspaper that day, as Gunn was assuring the public that there were no prostitutes in the state’s massage parlours, were a handful of ads for local brothels. They included Geoff Crocker’s notorious Pinky’s over at 625 Main Street, Kangaroo Point, and Hapeta and Tilley’s Top of the Valley. Both included in their ad that staff were required.)
On the morning Dickie’s story hit the streets, Lewis was at his desk in headquarters by 6.20 a.m. He attended to numerous meetings and phone calls and at the end of the day saw Assistant Commissioner Don Braithwaite ‘re plans for Personnel Section for 1987’.
There was no mention at all of the front-page story on the city’s vice lords and the inaction of Licensing Branch police. There was nothing in his diaries on Tuesday or Wednesday, when he met with the Police History Committee, including his old mate, criminologist Dr Paul Wilson. Only on Thursday 15 January did the prostitution issue come onto the radar of the Commissioner. ‘Phoned Hon. Gunn re media articles on prostitution.’
And that, it appeared, was the end of that.
Except that over in Highgate Hill in the city’s inner-south, the former Licensing Branch undercover agent and police prosecutor, Nigel Powell, had also read the Dickie report in the
Courier-Mail
, and he recognised it as a small window into his own former life.
Powell had resigned from the police force, after being constantly harassed and labelled a ‘dog’, and then later blamed for leaking information to the press. The idea of corruption in the force and lack of police attention to the major vice players continued to eat away at Powell. Dickie’s report fired him up.
Powell knew all the main players. He knew who was connected to whom, and he had his suspicions about a number of senior police he believed corrupt, particularly Harry Burgess. So Powell sat down at a typewriter and outlined what he knew about Brisbane’s vice scene. He wanted to get it into the hands of the journalist who wrote the anonymous story in the newspaper.
Lewis says the Dickie article did not cause any great concern. ‘We knew and everybody knew about the gambling joints,’ Lewis says. ‘There was never an official complaint about anything improper that happened there. You couldn’t pinch them. To pinch them you had to get an agent in [the premises on] one or two occasions to show that you were running it, and after the game getting a cut of the winnings. Then you could apply for a warrant and go in and pinch them. Then they’d be fined $100.
‘It didn’t exercise my mind greatly, people playing games, the prostitution. And SP betting had always gone on. My interests were murder, rapes, armed robberies, road deaths.
‘There’s more prostitution now,’ Lewis observes.
The Good Father
By early 1987 the former petty criminal, John Stopford, had settled happily on North Stradbroke Island and was starting a new life. The orphan had had enough of the mainland. He’d worked in the vice game, started his own escort service, blown all the money he made on high times, then become addicted to heroin.
He had a vast knowledge of the Brisbane vice scene, having first dipped his toe in its pool way back in the 1970s, when he took a job at the huge brothel, the Polynesian Playground. He’d been in and out of prison, and nearly lost his son, Jay, when his wife took the boy to Western Australia while he was briefly incarcerated. His wife had found someone else in the West, and it outwardly appeared that Stopford was set to return to society with nothing.
He did, however, have a mate who was living with a girlfriend at Sunnybank in the city’s south, and in turn her parents had a caravan permanently sited at Amity Point. The parents agreed to let Stopford live in the caravan. He had no money but he took to village life. He even came across local flower farmer, former assistant commissioner of police, Tony Murphy. At the time Stopford thought that was a good thing. It made him feel more secure, that Murphy lived just around the corner. ‘He wouldn’t want anything happening in his front yard,’ Stopford says of the former detective.
Stopford had heard all of the rumours of police corruption in the Queensland Police Force. But it was just that – rumour. ‘I heard the odd thing,’ he recalls. ‘But at first I didn’t believe it. At the time, it was just gossip. But as I ventured through … I surmised that this was possible. That it was a little bit bigger than Harry Burgess.
‘I remember thinking at the time, if I’ve got my placings right, that is, how Ray Whitrod – the [allegations] he was bringing up – could well and truly be fair dinkum. I remember thinking about that myself. Whitrod got absolutely poleaxed.’