Authors: Matthew Condon
‘I mean Joh wasn’t a bloody crook no matter what they might say about Joh. But one big deal was … Sir Leslie Thiess repaired his tractors or something. Well strike a light, if that’s corruption I’ll walk from here to Bourke backwards. I mean, mates do that for each other. The other one was that somebody came in and gave him … $100,000 or something? And Joh gave it to somebody to take up and to put into the funds of the National Party up at Spring Hill.
‘If he’d wanted to be, he could have been a very, very rich man in those days. But I never heard one person say that Joh was getting a quid.’
Journalist Phil Dickie saw, in those early weeks, the emergence of Fitzgerald as a master tactician. ‘I think he was conscious that there’d been a string of inquiries … [where] there was some interesting stories and scuttlebutt coming out of them but not a lot of anything else. He didn’t necessarily feel bound by the conventional wisdoms about how to do things. For that reason I think … he was very clever. And I think … all of his stuff was fairly carefully thought out. He seemed to get off to a totally slow start, an unproductive start … [but he] let these buggers set themselves up and, you know, it worked beautifully.’
Dickie says from the outset Fitzgerald was interested in the big picture. ‘He didn’t lose sight of the main game,’ Dickie reflects. ‘Like the main game … is not to get a pile of convictions at the end … [but] to look at the society and its functioning and say we could do this a lot better.’
A Build-up of Conscience
Harry Reginald Burgess, 44, was within months of celebrating 25 silver years in the Queensland Police Force when he resigned on Friday 28 August 1987. He had taken one of Commissioner Tony Fitzgerald’s indemnities. He was set to talk.
One of the first things he did on secretly taking the indemnity was to ring his old flame, the brothel madam Anne Marie Tilley, de facto wife to Hector Hapeta. Tilley met up with Burgess at a designated rendezvous point and sat with Burgess in his car. ‘I got down there. He was shaking in the car,’ says Tilley. ‘He told me he loved me. I said, “Come on son, get over it … you haven’t called me down here for this great, romantic thing.”
‘He goes, “No. I’ll tell you what I’ve done. I’ve rolled.”
‘I said, “I don’t think I should talk to you anymore.”
‘[Burgess said,] “They don’t know I’m doing this so I want you to get as much together as you can and take off, run away.”
‘Then he … told me what he’d done, who he’d been speaking to, what cars they had.
‘I believed him. I went home.
‘Hector says, “What’s wrong?”
‘I said, “It’s fucked, it’s gone, it’s finished.”
‘He goes, “No, no, no, no, no.”
‘I said, “That’s it.”
‘He started to sweat. He sat in his chair. He said, “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me?”
‘I said, “No, I’m not kidding you.”
‘“Just like that?”
‘I said, “It’s finished.”’
Burgess stepped into the witness box on 31 August 1987. He came to the commission hearings alone, clutching a brown leather briefcase, and made no verbal contact with anybody before being called to take the stand. A security guard armed with a revolver sat one metre from the inquiry’s new star witness.
Burgess duly sang, though some of the notes were indistinct. Still, he was the first connection between the police and Queensland’s criminal underworld. In addition, he dropped former Licensing Branch officer Jack Reginald Herbert into the thick of it.
Burgess’s revelations were sensational. He said he had accepted bribes of $500 cash a month from Assistant Commissioner (Crime) Graeme Parker between 1982 and 1985, and another $500 monthly payment from former Licensing Branch inspector Noel Dwyer. Herbert, he told the commission, gave him about $200 every six weeks.
He also admitted to having – along with other officers who he named – free sex with prostitutes while serving in the Licensing Branch from 1979 to 1985. Burgess also claimed he’d attended meetings with Geraldo Bellino and Vic Conte at the various homes of Jack Herbert where illegal gambling was discussed, and that he himself had visited Herbert at his home once in 1984. He told the inquiry he had come forward ‘mostly as the result of a built-up conscience’.
Burgess went into detail about his contact with the Hapeta/Tilley consortium, saying he knew as early as 1981 that the pair was involved in prostitution, including a brothel at the Top of the Valley and a handful of escort agencies. He told the inquiry that in 1981 an unsuccessful raid had been mounted against the consortium. Tilley had been tipped off by someone in the branch. At this stage both Parker and Dwyer were in charge of Licensing.
Burgess admitted that he had a ‘trusting relationship’ with Tilley.
As for Hapeta, Burgess had interviewed him at the branch office. Hapeta denied living off the earnings of Tilley.
‘A few days later I was in Inspector Dwyer’s office and he told me it was alright in relation to the breaches on Hapeta and not to proceed,’ Burgess said in evidence. ‘He [Dwyer] handed me $1000 in $50 bills – just folded over money … around that time he gave me the responsibility of Tilley’s agencies. He told me I was to do the work on them, to look after them.’
Burgess stated that Tilley had told him that Hebert was collecting protection money off her. Herbert’s business, he understood, was ‘whatever premises were of interest to Hapeta or to Bellino and Conte’.
Burgess said he last heard from Herbert when the inquiry was announced. ‘He rang me at Wynnum CIB to say hooray …’ Burgess continued. ‘He said he was going away. The conversation was along the lines of “I’m taking a holiday and going away”.
‘I said “a long way away” and he said, “Yes, I’m going to see Mummy.” That indicated to me he was leaving the country and going back to England.’
Burgess was back before the commission the following day. He told a stunned courtroom that two crime groups involved with Brisbane’s massage parlours and escort agencies were ‘conservatively pulling in around $500,000 each a month, and that one of the groups had been paying police around $10,000 a month for protection’.
Burgess identified the groups as the Hapeta/Tilley consortium, and another consisting of Geraldo Bellino, Vic Conte, Geoffrey Crocker and Allan Holloway. He was asked about the initial bribe from Noel Dwyer back in 1981 by Bob Mulholland, QC, who appeared for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. ‘After the first payment from Mr Dwyer, you were the person placed in charge of Hapeta?’ Mulholland queried.
‘Placed in charge is the wrong term,’ Burgess answered. ‘I was his liaison officer.’
Graeme Parker denied any wrongdoing. ‘There’s no truth in it at all,’ he said in response to Burgess’s testimony. ‘I’m flabbergasted with what’s happened. The next move will be up to the solicitors.’
Similarly, Noel Dwyer was incensed. ‘If it wasn’t so serious it would be laughable,’ he said. ‘I strenuously deny it … I think I did a good job with the facilities I had.’
Tilley Bolts
As for Anne Marie Tilley, brothel madam, who had found Queensland so welcoming and so conducive to business way back in 1978 when she and partner Hector opened their first parlour – the Top Hat – she made a snap decision.
‘I just packed a bag and drove,’ Tilley says. ‘I had the Celica and traded it in for an old station wagon. I took off. I didn’t want to be pulled in to have to answer questions. I was the same old Sydney girl – “I won’t dob.”
‘Hec said I’m not going to answer that because it might “incinerate” me. We went over “incriminate” 100,000 times.’
While Hapeta stayed put in Brisbane, Tilley headed for her old stomping ground of Sydney. She had recently been going through her fourth IVF treatment. A few weeks after taking flight, she found out she was pregnant.
‘I went and saw some criminals down in Sydney,’ recalls Tilley. ‘I went and got a little flat up near Randwick. I had very little cash. I just survived. Did a couple of other things while I was away to make money.’
Tilley went into labour as she was negotiating the sale of a small parlour she owned in the city’s notorious vice strip of Kings Cross. The money from the sale kept her going. Her baby was born in the Royal Hospital for Women in inner-suburban Paddington. It was where Tilley had also been born.
‘I got out of there just in time, too,’ she says of her stay in hospital. ‘Another crim I know in Sydney, he came up there with his wife to see me. He said: “We think it’s the cops, they’re very straight cops. Have you done that little [blood screening] test on her heel yet?”
‘Yes. I was out.’
Pie in the Sky
It had been more than a year since Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen had confidently announced his plans for the construction of the world’s tallest building – just down at the corner of Edward and Ann streets – that would put Brisbane on par with some of the planet’s great cosmopolitan cities.
But the Goliath of a project kept hitting obstacles. The contentious site – home to the Capital Hotel, once the splendid Canberra Temperance Hotel – was not yielding to Joh Bjelke-Petersen nor the project developer John Minuzzo. Tenants in the Capital were a sticking point.
One of them, chiropractor Dr David Reason, had launched several actions in the Queensland Supreme Court against Minuzzo’s company, Mainsel Investments Pty Ltd. The actions came after a court order earlier in the year after Mainsel gave undertakings not to interfere in Dr Reason’s premises. He had a lease that extended to October 1987. Mainsel also agreed not to make undue noise or interfere with access to Dr Reason’s rooms. They also had to restore to working order toilets, fire alarms and a lift.
Dr Reason’s actions stemmed from the undertakings not being met. He was asking that Minuzzo be jailed for contempt. As director of Mainsel, the action contended, Minuzzo had ‘caused, permitted or procured’ the company to breach the earlier undertakings ordered in the Supreme Court.
Dr Reason also sought an injunction against the demolition of the Capital Hotel. (Incredibly, according to one source, Bjelke-Petersen personally approached Dr Reason to convince him to give up his lease in the building.) The case was heard before Mr Justice Dowsett.
Minuzzo, it turned out, had gone overseas on business despite the court hearings. ‘I really think Mr Minuzzo should make some attempts to come back,’ Justice Dowsett told the court.
‘We will try, your honour,’ said Minuzzo’s lawyer, Richard Chesterman, QC.
As the case dragged on, Justice Dowsett began to lose patience over Minuzzo’s continued non-attendance. The judge described the property developer’s actions as ‘a great discourtesy to the court’.
A few hundred metres south along George Street, the ALP member for Wolston, Bob Gibbs, was also criticising Minuzzo, this man who had the ear of the Premier. ‘I wish to raise a matter that is of concern to all Queenslanders,’ Gibbs told the House. ‘I refer specifically to the continual habit of the Premier of this state to associate with people of dubious character.’
Gibbs cited an article about Minuzzo’s past in the
Times on Sunday
. He also reminded the chamber of various deals Minuzzo had been involved with in Victoria in the 1970s and 1980s, much as Nev Warburton had done the previous year. ‘He now faces the very real possibility of being charged with the serious offence of contempt of court over the premises that he is leasing to a Mr David Reason, who refuses to leave the premises,’ reiterated Gibbs. ‘This is another clear case of shonky business operators coming to Brisbane. They seem to have the incredible ability to be able to obtain the listening ear of the Premier of this state.
‘I say very clearly in this House today that members of the public have indicated that they are not in favour of this development. The state government should immediately cancel any negotiations that it has with Mr Minuzzo.’
Justice Dowsett fined Mainsel Investments $125,000 for failing to comply with various undertakings in relation to the site for the world’s tallest building, and ordered that the company be restrained from further demolition of the building that might affect the running of Dr Reason’s business until his lease expired at the end of October.
‘The defendant [Mainsel] acted in a high-handed and irresponsible way which bespoke a complete disregard of the court, the undertaking given to the court and Mr Reason’s rights,’ said Justice Dowsett. ‘I have no doubt that [Mainsel’s] motivation in its conduct has been a desire to press on with the development …’
When Minuzzo finally returned from overseas, his legal counsel apologised to the court. Justice Dowsett told the court he would have gaoled Minuzzo in the matter of contempt if he had not received that apology, and gave him a 14-day suspended gaol sentence.
Still, the project was alive, and it was confirmed not long after that a Korean company, Youchang Constructions, were in the final stages of negotiating financing for the ambitious project. Minuzzo told the press that excavations for the tower would probably commence in October.
There may have been much hullaballoo about the controversial building in court and in parliament, but one person was conspicuous in his lack of contribution to the debate – the project’s early champion, Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen.
The Blonde Behind the Screen