Authors: Matthew Condon
Meanwhile, Stopford settled into Amity Point and got involved with the newly formed social club in the village. They got together on Friday nights. It was so popular that Stopford soon convinced the club to hold a Sunday session as well. He formed some new friendships and soon sought, and got, custody of his son. Jay joined the local kindergarten and Stopford got a job working as bar manager for the social club. It seemed his worries were over. ‘Back in those days it was God’s country,’ says Stopford. ‘We moved to the old post office in Birch Street [at Amity], and we were very happy there.’
Shortly after coming out of prison Stopford had met Peter Cassuben, a local ABC reporter, and they had started talking about Brisbane’s illegal gambling and prostitution scene. Cassuben had taped some of their conversations, which Stopford saw as some form of potential insurance, if anything ever went wrong. ‘I gave him a bit of information about the vice scene, but his main thing at the time was more on the drugs thing,’ he says. ‘It was only when he realised, as I waffled through contacts … that this was a bit bigger than him …’
Later, Cassuben pointed his Sydney colleague Chris Masters to the tapes. Given what Masters was researching, he wanted to speak with Stopford also. ‘Peter said Chris [Masters] was on a journey, an investigation into some of the stuff that I’d spoken about and thought was relevant, and he’d like to speak to me,’ recalls Stopford. ‘I wasn’t aware of how big it was.’
The Powell Letter
Nigel Powell, the former Licensing Branch officer, had been a little rudderless since he’d resigned from the Queensland Police Force and left behind those long nights trawling through Fortitude Valley and piecing together the mosaic that was Brisbane crime and corruption. He’d tried repeatedly to bring the branch’s attention to the wheeling and dealing of men like Hector Hapeta and others, and had received good information from informants on the streets. He was still confused, however, by the complete indifference displayed by his superiors.
‘I still had the attitude that I wanted to do something about Tilley and Hapeta,’ Powell later said. Upon reading Dickie’s piece in the
Courier-Mail
that January, he decided to approach the newspaper. At the time he was living alone in a small cottage in Prospect Terrace, Highgate Hill. He was studying Arts full-time at the University of Queensland and just making ends meet. He sat down and typed a 12-page missive. His experience with the Queensland Police Force since 1979 all came down to this
j’accuse
.
Powell wrote that in the first half of 1980 it had become apparent to Sergeant Ron Lewis of the Licensing Branch that Hapeta and Tilley owned and ran the Top of the Valley massage parlour and some escort agencies, and were pulling in about $250,000 a year.
In the letter, Powell explained how at one point he suggested to his boss, Noel Dwyer, that he resign or be falsely sacked from the police force so he could penetrate an SP bookie outfit. Dwyer later told Powell he could not proceed as ‘it would upset too many important people both upstairs and in politics’. (Dwyer later denied ever saying that.)
Powell went on to talk about strip clubs like the World By Night that operated without a liquor licence. ‘Why did we not conduct a raid on the premises every night they were found operating?’ Powell virtually asked himself in the letter.
He went on to say he had grave suspicions about his colleague, Sergeant Harry Burgess. There were also police on the Gold Coast that he had heard from sources were corrupt.
Powell conceded that he had no hard evidence of corruption, but said there was ‘too much circumstantial evidence for any other reasoning’. He said there appeared to have been for years ‘apparent favouritism’ shown by police to the Bellino/Conte consortium and the Hapeta/Tilley group.
‘This is not just Police inaction or ineptness,’ he concluded. ‘The Bellino name has been mentioned on a number of occasions in connection with illegal gaming on the floor of parliament. Indeed, the Premier himself has seen fit to open a marble mine at Chillagoe in which the Bellino family are open partners. I cannot believe that he would not have been aware of the name and its repute.’
Powell ended the document by pointing out that police and politics had to be ‘as separate as possible’. He added: ‘The extent of corruption, vice and organised crime is directly proportional to the degree of police and political involvement.’ He couldn’t have known how prescient that observation was.
After dropping off his letter to the offices of the
Courier-Mail
at Queensland Newspapers in Bowen Hills, Powell contacted an old colleague from his days as a police prosecutor, the lawyer and civil libertarian Terry O’Gorman. They met in O’Gorman’s office in the city. ‘I knew if I was going to get on board with this I had to have back-up,’ says Powell. ‘I had a good feeling he [O’Gorman] was trustworthy. We had an appointment late one night. He asked me if I knew
Four Corners
was in town.’
O’Gorman and Powell discussed cooperating with the media on the story. Powell says O’Gorman recommended he speak with the ABC team as the show was powerful and had a national presence. Chris Masters, too, was well respected across the country.
‘So I said, yes, I would like to talk to
Four Corners
,’ recalls Powell.
Confluence
Masters, who had returned to Queensland in January, was not just sniffing about Brisbane but was also following up some of the intelligence contained in officer Jim Slade’s Operation Trek report on the drug trade in Far North Queensland. Masters took
Four Corners
to Cairns
,
then dropped into Rockhampton. They had someone they needed to talk to in Yeppoon – the former Sheriff of Mareeba, Ross Dickson. Having maintained his silence for a few years Dickson now felt safe enough to talk to the media. ‘He had a small fish restaurant on the coast … with the unforgettable name, “Sea Food and Eat It”,’ Masters later wrote.
‘Ross Dickson was aproned and busy. Our conversation dived and plunged between the wrapping, the salting and the cash register. He was a great yarner. He knew the inner workings of the Queensland Police Force well and was prepared to give up some of its secrets.’
Masters had been on the road at this point with producer Shaun Hoyt. When they returned to Brisbane after speaking with Dickson, they were joined by
Four Corners
researcher and qualified lawyer Debbie Whitmont. Masters knew that it was better that he not work alone on the story, given its growing scale. Not only could the workload be shared, but he knew it was sensible to have a witness by your side should anything untoward happen. He learned, in the course of his investigation, that ‘some of the police I was up against were prepared to arrest and charge me with a mythical offence’.
It was, in fact, a little more serious than that. Masters later learned that there had been a plan hatched to set him up with an underage boy. (They similarly tried the ‘gay’ card on journalist Phil Dickie. ‘Of course I fucking go to the gay bars in the city – where do you want to get the information … I talked to the taxi drivers, too. If someone calls me gay it doesn’t matter to me. I know I’m not, the people it matters to know I’m not … But yeah, they tried …’)
The
Four Corners
team settled into the Tower Mill Hotel on Wickham Terrace, up the hill from police headquarters in Makerston Street. The iconic hotel had been the flashpoint for tensions between Queensland police and protestors rallying against the arrival of the South African Springboks rugby team 16 years earlier. At the time, a younger Terry Lewis had been on the ground in front of the hotel, manning the barricades. The hotel would now be home to the
Four Corners
investigative team for months.
Terry O’Gorman soon put Masters and Powell together. ‘Nigel was gold because he was the credible witness who could be believed,’ says Masters. ‘He was prepared to speak.’
Masters and his colleagues got down to work. ‘There were witnesses to find and interview,’ Masters later reflected. ‘There were newspaper files to search. Land title and company searches would help prove the ownership of the brothels and illegal casinos.’
Masters paid a visit to the ABC’s local film library, and came across the story by Allan Hall of
Nationwide
just five years earlier. He watched the admissions of former police officers Bob Campbell and Kingsley Fancourt. He noted that the only major reaction to the program had been a flurry of writs. One of these was in relation to police officer Neal Freier, who had been acquitted of corruption charges with Jack Herbert in the mid-1970s and been adversely mentioned by Bob Campbell during the program. On 5 September 1984, the ABC had sent Freier a letter admitting they had defamed him, offering an apology and paying $30,000 in damages. ‘We now unreservedly accept that at no time had you been involved in corrupt practices either on your own account or for any other Senior Police Officer,’ wrote ABC General Manager for Queensland, Charles Grahame, to Freier.
Following the program being aired Bob Campbell had fled the State, in fear for the life of his family, while Kingsley Fancourt was also threatened following the interview. ‘There was a sobering lesson in all this,’ Masters later wrote, reflecting on the implications of people getting caught in the crossfire of any media investigation. ‘Not just for myself but for any potential whistleblower. In the days ahead I would telephone a succession of retired, battered policemen. I can remember well their words: “Forget it. Go away. You will only make it worse. Today’s news is tomorrow’s wrappings. The public don’t care anyway.”’
Threats from the Top
On Thursday 12 February 1987, Commissioner Lewis, in the course of a typically busy day, mentioned in his diary that apparently a team from the television current affairs program,
Four Corners
, were out and about ‘muck-raking’.
Chris Masters hadn’t been in Brisbane town that long and already he’d caught the eye of the Commissioner of Police. As Masters would later write in a memoir,
Inside Story
: ‘There was no chance of keeping our work secret. We were approaching too many people. Someone was going to alert the opposition. Before long, it was clear they were watching us closely. We would talk with a policeman and the policeman would be immediately interviewed by superiors who wanted to know what we were up to. I got a bit nervous when I realised how close they were watching.’
Peter Vassallo, head of the Italian desk at the Australian Bureau of Criminal Intelligence (ABCI) in Canberra, had also attracted Lewis’s attention. On 23 February Vassallo was interrogated by his own people for several hours over an allegation of impropriety against him, made by Commissioner Lewis. Vassallo was facing the loss of his job.
He says Commissioner Lewis had allegedly told his superiors at the ABCI that he had handed a Queensland BCI document to journalist Chris Masters, and that the author of that document – the Operation Trek report – was Jim Slade.
Vassallo says he was asked if he had ever travelled anywhere with Masters. He answered in the affirmative. He says he told his boss, director Robin Chalker, that his role on that day in Brisbane was to facilitate the meeting between Slade and Masters. Slade was Masters’ informant, he told them.
(Robin Chalker says he has no recollection of the interrogation of Peter Vassallo, ‘I can’t remember the incident. That’s not to say it didn’t happen.’)
Vassallo, technically a New South Wales police officer but on secondment to the ABCI, was referred to the state’s integrity unit and was interviewed in Sydney. ‘Until Chris Masters’ story went to air, and from the time that Lewis made the open allegation against me, I suddenly realised that these blokes were now starting to panic,’ Vassallo recalls. ‘I said to Chris, I said to Jimmy, I said, “Cover your backs – they’re coming for me, they’ve had a go at you, but I now think they’ve realised that there’s more to come.” And … I said to Chris, “Look, you know, you need some protection, mate.”’
Vassallo heard from other sources that if he continued doing what he was doing, he would end up ‘with a bullet in him’. He assumed that word of the after-dark activities of the
Four Corners
crew – their filming of nightclubs in Fortitude Valley, for example – had been passed back to the upper levels of the Queensland Police Force. ‘It had nothing to do with the cops; you’re now focusing on the crooks,’ he says. ‘What’s happening is the crooks are now complaining to the people they’re paying … they’re demanding their protection.’
A Trip to the Zoo
Amity Point bar manager, John Stopford, saw no real harm in meeting with Sydney investigative journalist Chris Masters. He knew that Masters’
Four Corners
program was looking at the drug scene, and since kicking heroin himself, drugs had become something of a ‘soapbox issue’ for him. Why not have a yarn with a journalist?
What Stopford didn’t know at that point was that the Queensland police still had their eye on him. Police had approached one of Stopford’s neighbours on the beach at Amity and said they’d been ordered to come down hard on Stopford because he was a ‘known drug dealer’.