Authors: Matthew Condon
Fitzgerald warned the media not to be used as an ‘unwitting tool’ in such a scenario. It was also revealed that Deputy Premier Bill Gunn had met secretly and privately with Fitzgerald to avoid any chance of listening devices.
The Bagman Takes Flight
After Chris Masters had connected Jack Herbert to Gerry Bellino and Vic Conte via the Jordan Terrace property he’d purchased from them, Herbert wasted no time in offloading the house for a loss to a business friend. He claimed he received a message through the grapevine from Lewis: ‘The message was that I leave the country,’ he said in his memoir.
Two weeks before the inquiry began substantive hearings, Herbert and his wife Peggy went to Hamilton Island in North Queensland for a break. Coincidentally, his old friend, Sydney businessman and yachtsman Jack Rooklyn, was also staying on the island.
‘So what are your plans?’ Rooklyn asked Herbert.
He told his old boss he wasn’t going to leave Queensland. ‘He thought I was making a mistake,’ Herbert later wrote. ‘I decided that it was time to get out of Australia after all.’
Herbert flew to the United Kingdom via Honolulu. Feeling lonely, he soon sent for Peggy, who flew first-class to London just as the Fitzgerald Inquiry began its historic hearings.
Back in Brisbane, former assistant commissioner Tony Murphy arranged to come into police headquarters in the city and view a sensitive file that was filled with ghosts. For some reason, Murphy urgently needed to see the ‘Brifman suicide file’. (Lewis says he allowed Murphy to see the paperwork, and that it didn’t strike him as an unusual request.)
Shirley Margaret Brifman, prostitute and madam, had been dead for 15 years. She had blown the whistle on corrupt police and in lengthy records of interview with police, had revealed her close friendship with Murphy. Her corpse was discovered by her children in their witness protection flat in Clayfield, Brisbane, only weeks before she was to appear in court as chief witness against Murphy in his perjury trial stemming from evidence he gave at the National Hotel inquiry in the early 1960s. No coronial inquest was ever held into Brifman’s death.
So why, as the Fitzgerald Inquiry was being set up, did Murphy need to head into the city and see Brifman’s old file?
‘Well … I wrote it in my diary apparently that Murphy came in and asked if he could look at the file,’ says Lewis. ‘I thought it’d be so he’d be going before the inquiry. And he’d want to refresh his bloody memory or whatever it was.
‘I don’t think I’d ever read the file. Never, ever.’
The First Witness
After some preliminary hearings that stuttered through early June, Commissioner Tony Fitzgerald’s commission of inquiry began in earnest at about 10.15 a.m. on Monday 27 July, in Courtroom 29 on the fourth floor of the District Court in George Street. It was a typically mild winter’s Brisbane day. Commissioner Lewis, in a regular suit and striped tie, arrived at the courts trailing a phalanx of staff from the police media relations unit. It was a crowded courtroom.
Sydney Morning Herald
journalist Evan Whitton observed: ‘The carpet is burnt orange; the high walls are in a striated dark brown wood. Mr Fitzgerald sits at a high-backed orange chair at a bench above those named in the terms of reference and the hordes of lawyers who must be looking forward to gainful employ.’
Journalists were forced to observe from the public gallery – ‘a loft above the well of the court’, as Whitton described it – due to the large numbers of legal representatives in the court proper.
Commissioner Fitzgerald informed the commission that the terms of reference had been extended back to ten years.
Gary Crooke, QC, the senior counsel assisting the inquiry, opened proceedings on an ominous note. ‘Mr Commissioner,’ he said, ‘we are embarking upon a task of considerable magnitude.’ He then called his first witness, Sir Terence Lewis, to the stand. After Lewis was sworn in, Crooke asked: ‘Sir Terence, could you favour the commission, if you would, by perhaps dealing with a potted history of the Queensland Police Force? Where do we see its beginnings?’
‘Certainly,’ Lewis said with his impeccable, old-school manners. ‘Mr Commissioner, may I refer to notes?’
‘By all means,’ Fitzgerald responded.
Lewis proceeded to give a lengthy account of the force’s history. It was a position Lewis was comfortable with. He enjoyed the detail of history and his countless memos and diary entries over the years betrayed a man who was at ease the more he was surrounded by accumulated data. He kept every slip of paper. He notated the most minor of incidents. The keeping of records was an integral part of his daily existence. It was he, too, who had instigated the Queensland Police Museum. He could have talked for hours on the history of the force.
As Evan Whitton noted of Lewis’s history lesson: ‘Mr Fitzgerald chewed absently on his spectacles through this tedious dissertation and did not trouble to ask Sir Terence how he reconciled his demand for more troops with his assertion that the Queensland force appeared already to be the most efficient in the Western world – that the clear-up rate (of alleged offenders arrested) was a little better than 50 per cent against, say, New South Wale’s 23.95 per cent, and Scotland Yard’s 17 per cent.’
But Lewis was soon drawn to more contemporaneous, and contentious, matters. In his evidence, he told the inquiry that Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen and five police ministers had instructed that prostitution be ‘tolerated’. Lewis said the direction of government and various ministers was that SP betting should be constantly monitored as it deprived the government of revenue, but that prostitution and massage parlours – while needing attention – were not a high priority if they were being conducted ‘in a tolerable manner’.
Lewis was further questioned about chains of command – who would be in control of monitoring prostitution and illegal casinos? Was there anything formal in place in relation to police accepting gifts?
After lunch, Lewis reiterated the unwritten policy on prostitution that had been passed on to him verbally via ministers Tom Newbery, Ron Camm, Russ Hinze, Bill Glasson and Bill Gunn: ‘… uniformly the policy as to prostitution has been put on the basis that prostitution was to be contained and controlled rather than that there be any major resource allocation to its elimination,’ Lewis told a packed Courtroom 29.
He cited a report dated 23 May 1974, that listed for the first time all the massage parlours in Brisbane, compiled by Inspector Osborne for senior officer Norm Gulbransen. He said the report was received by Gulbransen on 3 June 1974 and filed away. (Incredibly, Lewis was trying to not only lay blame on the Whitrod administration for the prolificacy of massage parlours, but indicated there had been a precedent in police doing nothing about prostitution.)
Lewis claimed that he had received instructions, from both the Premier and the Minister, to take action to endeavour to close all massage parlours through the state and where possible to prosecute the proprietors and owners of the buildings if they didn’t close.
Crooke asked Lewis if this initiative came before or after the screening of ‘The Moonlight State’ on 11 May. ‘It might sound funny but I don’t remember, but I assume it was after,’ Lewis said. ‘I’m nearly certain it would be after.’
Lewis’s revelations were always going to be a sensation, given it was the first real day of evidence before the commission of inquiry. Still, for the Commissioner of Police to lay blame for the sin of prostitution, and its attendant vices, at the feet of not only the righteous Lutheran, Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, but five of his National Party ministers as well, was a political bombshell.
Opposition Leader Nev Warburton wasted no time in condemning the government. ‘The first day of the Fitzgerald investigation has shown the National Party Government to be a righteous fraud,’ he trumpeted. ‘No doubt many ministers will tonight be sticking pins in their Bill Gunn dolls.’
Lewis was back in the stand the next day.
Bob Mulholland, for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, ran through a number of press stories over the years relating to brothels and prostitution in Brisbane. He quoted former police minister Tom Newbery in a story in 1979 detailing a clamp-down on massage parlours. Another story in the
Courier-Mail
, on 9 August 1979, reported that seven massage parlours had been closed following successful police raids.
A newspaper report on 24 April 1983 proclaimed: ALL OUT WAR ON VICE. It said police minister Bill Glasson had ordered the closure of all illegal gambling casinos, massage parlours and brothels in Brisbane in an attempt to clear up police corruption. Then on 13 January 1987, Police Minister Bill Gunn was famously quoted as saying there was no evidence of prostitution in Brisbane.
Mulholland also discussed the Lucas inquiry in 1977 and the Sturgess Report of 1985. ‘And again part of that inquiry by Mr Sturgess involved the operation of prostitution, did it not?’ Mulholland asked Lewis.
‘Yes, he touched on that in it,’ the Police Commissioner replied.
‘You say he touched upon it – it was an important part of his inquiry, was it not?’
‘I assume so,’ Lewis said. ‘I haven’t read the report.’
It was not a wise answer from Lewis, and it would come back to haunt him. Why had the Commissioner of Police failed to read the report of one of the most important investigations of the previous decade? In that report, Sturgess had questioned why those who owned and ran the city’s brothels and illegal gambling joints had not been prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
Commissioner Fitzgerald, however, kept the friction to a minimum in the early stages. ‘… there should not be any basis for a suggestion that Sir Terence is being accorded some special privilege,’ Fitzgerald told the packed courtroom. ‘He is not, but he has come here in the first instance … to provide a necessary basis for dealing with more detailed matters as the commission progresses, and I think there has to be good faith on all sides. He is available and he will be brought back if he is required.’
Mulholland asked Lewis about the three Bellino brothers, Hector Hapeta and Vic Conte. ‘Mr Commissioner, to the best of my knowledge, I have never met any one of them, neither have I had anything to do with any of them,’ Lewis responded coolly.
Throughout that first week, the commission wrestled with the argument of the containment of prostitution. Where had this notion come from? And what, by definition, did containment actually mean?
Deputy Commissioner Ron Redmond was called to give evidence on the topic. He said massage parlours weren’t prosecuted because that was consistent with the state government’s containment policy on prostitution. He said he had overheard Police Minister Gunn tell Lewis that prostitution served a ‘useful purpose’.
‘I do not dissent from the containment policy because it seems realistic,’ Redmond said. ‘Police have to have knowledge of lurid acts or evidence of touching of private parts … It is my belief police have to get to the brink of committing the [sexual] act to get evidence. I believe no officer should have to do this.’
The following Monday, Commissioner Lewis was recalled and further examined. Lewis said in a statement: ‘In 1978, consideration was given to a transfer for widening the responsibility for the policing of massage parlours. On 7 April 1978 in a discussion I had with the Premier, and later Mr [Ron] Camm, I was advised that policing of massage parlours should be left to the Licensing Branch, and on 2 October 1978, Mr Camm telephoned me and informed me that the Premier had mentioned that the Assistant Commissioner, Crime, was not to be placed over the Licensing Branch.’
This was, of course, harking back to the time when former top cop Tony Murphy was trying to bring the Licensing Branch under his control during the beginning of the great purge of the branch under Alec Jeppesen.
Lewis spent a total of six hours in the witness box. Tony Fitzgerald said to the courtroom: ‘We want to find the truth, but we don’t want to spend our lives doing it.’
As drama, the first week of the inquiry did not disappoint. As one
Sunday Mail
columnist wrote: ‘Oh-oh! The Fitzgerald Inquiry, described last week as the “most important thing to happen in Queensland in 100 years”, has already, in the space of one short week, given a jolly good shake to the foundations of government in this state.’
What the inaugural week also proved, was that it was absolutely inevitable that the hand of the inquiry would, at some point, be reaching back into the dark past of the Queensland Police Force.
Bulwarking
As the inquiry found its feet there were typewriters across the city clacking in overdrive as various parties prepared lengthy statements in advance of what might emerge in evidence before Commissioner Tony Fitzgerald.
Over at 32 Naretha Street, Carindale, not far from the Belmont Hills Reserve, south-east of the CBD, former assistant commissioner Tony Murphy – now splitting his time between the mainland and Amity Point – prepared a large document that touched on some of the more contentious moments in the history of the Queensland Police Force stretching back to the 1960s.
Murphy was spending less and less time at his flower farm on North Stradbroke Island, and had started an insurance-related investigation business – Queensland Retired Police Investigations. His multifaceted treatise not only aimed at underlining his innocence in all matters corrupt, but at skewering the enemies he’d attracted in his career. Another apparent thematic purpose in his writings was to display to the commission of inquiry that he had, in fact, actively fought the good fight against the illegal casino operators mentioned in the terms of reference.